Break bonds

The media maven Arianna Huffington (she's really a Mogul) is also a self-help guru with 11 books to her credit. In Call of the Soul, she explores what she calls the Fourth or the most neglected and the least understood of humanity's instincts: it's a drive that compels us to go beyond survival, beyond sexuality, and beyond status and power to find spiritual fulfilment and meaning in our lives.

We know more about what we share with apes than what we share with angels, Huffington writes. That is because for years, biologists and psychologists have been focusing on the other three instincts. These drives, which evoke Eros, Epicurus and Magus respectively, link us to the past; whereas the Fourth Instinct, which feeds into our primeval potential, connects us to our future.

Each individual, therefore, has a responsibility to rise above our 'baby bawlings and mewlings' and connect with the good, compassionate side of ours, otherwise known as the soul, she adds.

Arianna Huffington's altruistic aria resonates remarkably well with what Sri Sathguru Swami Gnananda Sarasvathi advocates in a little sermon aptly titled, You can't remain in the kindergarten all your life: you must go higher, isn't it?

Once a householder in the royal family of Travancore, Sri Sathguru received an inner call for renunciation and took Vidwat Sanyas inthe 1970s. Since then, she has been preaching the path of Saranagati, as taught in the Bhagavad Gita, as being the most appropriate means for spiritual ascent of humans in the present age. Surrender and become free.