The other is the attitude that thinks: ‘I myself am the master of my likes and dislikes, God need not enter such matters at all; in what I like I have no duty whatever to serve God; I have no need to believe in God.’ Yet there is another path too, the very opposite of this. ‘I pay the rent for my house; I pay my professional tax. I pay tax for water and for electricity. I pay tax for every comfort I need to live my daily life’: someone holds this view. He may think, ‘I pay taxes for physical water and electricity, for the house that is my physical dwelling, for my physical occupations’; but on the other side, when he inquires well — ‘What tax am I paying for this earth made for me to live on? What tax am I paying for the prāṇa by which I live? What tax am I paying to the sun and moon who give me light? What taxes am I paying to the One whose form is space, who has granted me every kind of sound?’ — they must ask themselves what wisdom lies in making these momentary pleasures, which lack that unfathomable foundation, their chief aim.
We must enjoy the body with God as its foundation
Scientists of any kind can divide up a substance that exists and show it, or have it done; but they cannot create what does not exist. Today, can they combine oxygen and hydrogen and make the water man needs? Can they make natural rain fall? Are they setting about creating the life-giving air man depends on and supplying it? Not only that. Can they create the sun and moon that give light to the world? They may manage, more or less, to put a few substances together and make something artificial; but to supply water to the whole world, to change the light of the sun and moon, to create the life-giving air — that is beyond anyone's power.