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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
parents did not have my horoscope cast. Firstly, it is their inability to pay for the services of the priests. The venerable dealers in godly commodities would not be avcrse to include the animals in their clientele if these were able to buy the benefit. We animals are not ashamed of this inability. It is not poverty. It is richnessspiritual richness. We are not bound by the desire to accumulate carthly gooils.
If man really wants to be spiritually free, he must break the chain of property. One enters this world naked, and goes out cqually divested of everything. The body is cquipped with physical limbs and mental facultics for acquiring whatever is necessary to make life materially comfortable, morally noble, emotionally full and intellectually free. It is sheer perversity to devote these equipments to the forging of the golden chains of property.
The first acquisition of property represents the fall of man from Grace; it is the original sin of Christianity. Life becomes a bondage, as Hinduism preaches it to be, only in a society based upon private property, governed by the principle of ownership, subjected to the system of exploitation of man by man. The Hindu ideal of unattachment to worldly goods is realised only in animal life. It is realised there, because it is not an ideal, but the natural mode of living. Naturally, we are not inclined to accumulate worldly goods. We
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