The aim of life is to avoid misery and attain Eternal Bliss. Birth in this world is inseparably connected with misery. If you wish to avoid misery, pain and sorrow, you must avoid rebirth. Knowledge of Brahman is the only means of avoiding rebirth.
Meditation and meditation alone, (no other process has been
discovered since Creation), has the power to reach up to the ultimate
God-experience.
Radiantly effulgent, you have come here upon earth to shine,
illumine all, and leave this world a thing of brightness.
Meditation is a subject of the most vital importance to
everyone who wants happiness and peace, who wants to find strength within, who
wants a truly integrated, radiant and magnetic personality. On every level of
your life, meditation brings rewards in terms of your true spiritual nature, in
terms of the spiritual experience which it bestows upon you.
- Swami Chidananda
Swami Chidaananda on Tapas
People go foolishly to extremes by not understanding what actual Tapas is, and what place it has in Yoga. Tapas literally means blazing, burning. It conveys the sense of heat, the meaning of something fiery. Tapas or fieriness, what does it mean? Fire is the most wonderful purifying agent in the world, and it illumines things.
These two implications of fire you should bear in mind. It
burns up dross and purifies, and it fills you with radiance.
So Tapasaya is actually any intense process that burns up
impurities in the nature of man and fills him with the radiance and purity of
spiritual consciousness. That is the main purpose of Tapas.
It is purification and illumination of one’s personality,
and anything done toward this end can be legitimately be called Tapas, and it
varies from individual to individual.
To remove your impurity, you many require on type of Tapas
and another person may require another kind, because the impurity indulged upon
may differ from person to person. There is, therefore, no universal form of
Tapas; but certain common forms it does take, as there are certain universal
weaknesses found common to all.