Moksha is the highest value.
One should do the duties of his station of life without any
self-seeking. This is practicing dharma with indifference to sin or merit,
riches or poverty, pleasure or pain.
Nishkama Dharma alone can break the cycle of life and death
and supersede merit and sin, and lead to salvation in the absolute.
Both pain and pleasure are transitory, one following the
other in a casual cycle driven by persisting desire. Of the two – happiness gained
by effort driven by desire and happiness gained by forsaking desire – the latter
is preferable because it frees man from cycle of pleasure and pain.
– Mahabharata
On the topic
A Vedanta student should practise discrimination, renunciation, and control of the senses; and she or he should have a burning desire for liberation.
Instead of meditating on sense-objects which leads to total destruction, one should meditate on the Self within for liberation. The intellect should control the sense organs with the help of the mind; then the sense organs will not lead a person astray.
And when one completely withdraws one senses from the
sense-objects, even as a tortoise its limbs, then one’s wisdom is steady. From
an abstemious embodied being, sense-objects fall off, but not the relish for
them; but even the relish of the man of steady wisdom ceases when that supreme
Being is realised. The turbulent senses, O son of Kunti, forcibly lead astray
the mind of even the struggling wise person. Controlling all these senses, the
self-controlled one should sit meditating on Me, the Lord. Verily, his wisdom
is steady, whose senses are under control. Whichever of the wandering senses
the mind follows, that one carries away his wisdom as the wind a ship on the sea. (Gita)
– Mahabharata
On the topic
A Vedanta student should practise discrimination, renunciation, and control of the senses; and she or he should have a burning desire for liberation.
It is all a question of the mind. Bondage and liberation are
of the mind alone. The mind will take the color you dye it with.
Instead of meditating on sense-objects which leads to total destruction, one should meditate on the Self within for liberation. The intellect should control the sense organs with the help of the mind; then the sense organs will not lead a person astray.
While discussing how a person attains liberation through
devotion, Sri Ramakrishna said: ‘The cockroach becomes motionless by constantly
meditating on the kumira worm; it loses the power to move. At last it is
transformed into a kumira. Similarly, by constantly meditating on God the
bhakta loses his ego; he realizes that God is he and he is God. When the
cockroach becomes the kumira everything is achieved.