A Call to the Youth – Shri Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari

So the message I have to give is nothing very important, nothing very earth shaking, you know, nothing very profound, nothing very philosophical. It is the same call in the Vedas you see, “Uttishtatha, jaagratha, praapyavaraan nibodhata.” [Awake, Arise, having approached the Chosen One, realise your goal.] Youth must awake. Youth must realise that it is the root of society – roots – and that unless each root is nourished properly, one part of the tree will go; and that tree is our life – total life, including all of creation. Therefore the Gita also speaks of “urdhvamoolam madashaakham ashvattham praahuravyayam” – our tree is an inverted ashvattha holy fig tree. Roots are there above and the branches are here below. No use watering this. The nourishment must come from above. What is above and what is below? Above means the higher world, the higher thoughts, teachings which we have lost, forgotten, deliberately set aside. Go back to that.

(Talk given by Chariji Maharaj: Youth: A Time of Promise and for Effort, ‘Throwing off the Shackles of the Past’, Volume II, p. 243)

Chariji Maharaj, the Master of Sahaj Marg, has quoted this call of the Vedas many times. Even Swami Vivekananda has used this famous quotation, which originally is from the Kathopanishad text. This call is not just for the youth but it is for all of us. In order for one to pursue anything in life, it is necessary to be both arisen and also awake. Having said that, what is the next thing to do? It is to “Rest not, Stop not, till the goal is achieved”.

Now, what is the goal? The goal is nothing but self-perfection, inner excellence, manifesting the self within, there are so many ways of looking at the one and the same goal. The current president of Shri Ram Chandra Mission (SRCM) Shri Kamlesh D Patel has demystified the various definitions of goal by saying that the very purpose of existence is to simply excel in whatever one does. And then he said that this excellence of perfection is oriented towards the inner self, inner perfection. It is for us to listen to these clarion calls and act accordingly.