Realization is the Aim of Yoga
You are men or women 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.
Many have pleasure as the goal. However, they seek for pleasure only through the senses. But true bliss is found only in the Self, the Spirit. This is the one individuality, the one bliss that never changes, which is eternally perfect. 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 these saints whom the world reveres? God was no mere doctrine for them. Did they believe because their grandparents 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, those who see the One Unity; in the midst of death, those who see that One Life; in the midst of the ever-changing, those who see That which never changes in their own soul — unto them belongs eternal peace.
— Swami Vivekananda
(From Pathways To Joy)