You are man or woman now. Do you want to keep your minds as they are now –– filled with the angers, ill-wills, jealousies, quarrels, and all the thousand and one small and selfish things that live there? Do you mean to say that you wish to keep them? According to Vedanta philosophy, you cannot; you cannot stop until you are pure and perfect. You cannot stop until you come to the life that never ends; until you become one with life itself.

Through sustained discrimination, the great souls of this world found the truth that the false individuality of the senses must go. This ego –– the less there is of it, the nearer I am to that which I really am; the Universal Spirit. The less I think of my own individual mind, the nearer I am to the Universal Mind. The less I think of my own soul, the nearer I am to the Universal Soul.

Beliefs, doctrines, or sermons do not make religion. It is the realization, the perception of God alone that is religion. What is the glory of  all  the saints whom the world worships? God was no mere doctrine for them. Did they believe because their grandfather believed it? No. It was their realization of the Infinite Spirit, higher and more real than their own bodies, minds, and everything else. We must realize it ourselves. There is no other way.

This realization is the aim of Yoga, and the supreme goal of life. Struggle for it! No temple or church can do it for you. Go to God directly. Then alone will all doubts vanish. Then alone will all crookedness be made straight. In the midst of the manifold, he who sees the One Unity; in the midst of death, he who sees that One Life; in the midst of the ever-changing, he who sees That which never changes in his own soul –– unto him belongs eternal peace.