The Dangers of Following Paradharma

Every living creature has taken up its form and has come into the world of objects for one great purpose, which is to exhaust its existing mental impressions. The bundle of vāsanās with which an individual has arrived into a particular incarnation is called his ‘personal call of character’ (swadharma).Swadharma is not the duty which accrues to an individual because of his ‘caste’, which is ever a sheer accident of birth. In its right import, swadharma means the type of vāsanās that one discovers in one’s own mind.Not to make use of the evolutionary chances provided by life is to reject and refuse the chances provided for a vāsanā catharsis. By not exhausting the old vāsanās, one will be living under high vāsanā pressure when the existing tendencies are crowded out by the influx of new tendencies. To act against the grain of one’s own vāsanās would be acting in terms of paradharma, and that this is fraught with danger is very well-known.A boy with tendencies for art cannot be successfully trained to become a businessman or an economist, since these are contrary to his nature. If an overanxious parent in the name of love projects upon a growing child his own intentions and plans, we invariably find that the young boy will have a crushed personality.There are many seekers with overenthusiasm for spiritual development, who at the mere appearance of misery, or at the threat of sorrow, decide to run away into the jungles, ‘seeking God’. They invariably end up in a lifelong tragic disaster.They have within them sensuous vāsanās which can be satisfied only in the embrace of a family, under the roof of their own tenement. But rejecting them all, they reach the Himalayan caves and then all day through, they can neither meditate upon the Lord nor find a field for sensuous enjoyment.To act according to one’s own taste, inborn and natural, is the only known method of living in peace and joy, in success and satisfaction.

The Dangers of Following Paradharma

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