work to satisfy a boss you are sure undervalues you. It involves wor
rying about rent or mortgage or the children catching a fever, as well
as occasional incompatibilities with your spouse. It involves the car you
longed for as an adolescent breaking down on the highway. I am not
really painting a gloomy picture just to depress you. All I'm saying is
that it is a mixed bag. One uses the skills that one learned in the first
stage. For me it was a great joy and one I espoused consciously, re
jecting the life of the renunciate, the monk, the swami. In addition to
the joys of returning from travels and successes to my wife and chil
dren, there were tough, worrying times too. In other words, to be a
householder, though one has access to wealth and sensual pleasures,
can be very hard work.
It would be impossible to maintain the day-to-day grind of that
work without the science of duty, of dharma, imbibed in the fi rst stage
(ashrama) of our lives. For a start we would have no yardstick to com
pare our hardships and joys with those of other people, of untold past
generations. Such ancient shared traditional wisdom helps to keep us
going. We have learned human empathy. As one philosopher said in a
treatise on the metaphysical basis of morals, "Behaving morally to
ward other people requires that we respect them for themselves, in
stead of using them as a means for our enrichment or glory." Without
that guiding bank of religious (in the sense that all religions seek self
knowledge) obligation, the householder's life would quickly descend
into an inferno of greed and dissension.
Remember the other containing bank of the river of life that flows
abundantly with wealth and sensual pleasure is moksa-freedom, but
daily freedom in the form of detachment, hard-won in the teeth of life's
setbacks and disappointments. Freedom to a child often means the lib
erty to eat ice cream until he is sick or to stay up watching television
till midnight. To an adolescent, it is the rebellious urgt· to rcjt·ct t hl' in
junctions of his parents and tutors. Rebellion has its plan·; I haw dl'
scribed mysdf as a rl·lwl, but there is a form of sdf-dl·.,t rm·rivl· n·lwllinj.\
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