To profess a faith is easy. To live by the professed faith is difficult. To prattle is easy, practice is much more difficult.

What is expected of the spiritual seeker is not merely doing, but doing rightly, wisely and incessantly.

The Upanishads give the clarion call: “Arise! Awake! And stop not till the Goal is reached.” At no stage should the seeker slacken his efforts. He should be doing sadhana all the time.

Till when? Well, till the Goal is reached. When will it be reached? God only knows. It may be reached in six days or six million births. This is where the virtue of patience comes in.

A spiritual seeker is expected to have that infinite patience of the bird which started to empty the ocean, drop by drop, with its beak.

You must have viveka. Viveka is spiritual wisdom. It is the wisdom which asserts that the Spirit alone is real and that matter is unreal. It is the knowledge that lasting bliss can be had only in God and not in the transient things of this world.

It is the right understanding which leads you to the conviction that life in this world, this phenomenal existence, is fraught with endless misery, that this world is a valley of tears, a temple of misery.

It is the power of discrimination which enables you to understand, to grasp, the full import of Sri Krishna’s unequivocal, unqualified and emphatic declaration in the Bhagavad Gita that this world is “impermanent and a place of unhappiness”.

Only when you have viveka, will your spiritual life have a comparatively smooth run. Only then will your progress be safe and steady. If you proceed in your sadhana without the backing of viveka, you may trip, or you may get confused and break.

Not only should you have viveka, but it should be lasting. You cannot afford to lose it, even for a second. You see, when the seeker launches on his spiritual journey, it is like entering a path in darkness. A torch is necessary. Viveka provides the torch. Sadhana or spiritual practice is the actual walking.

N Ananthanarayan