The Way of the Wise

God is the source of all love; love God, love the world as the vesture of God, no more, no less. Through love, you can merge in the ocean of love. Love cures pettiness, hate, and grief. Love loosens bonds; it saves man from the torment of birth and death. Love binds all hearts in a soft silken symphony. Seen through the eyes of love, all beings are beautiful, all deeds are dedicated, all thoughts are innocent. The world is one vast kin.

Man is born in society; he is bred in society; he is shaped well or ill by the subtle influence of society. He, in his turn, as a member of society, influences the people who contact him. His life is turned or twisted by the standards, modes, and behavior patterns of the society into which he is born through the effects of his accumulated karma. The deha and the desa (body and the country) are inextricably intertwined. The body is one encasement; the country is another for the spirit of man. Use society for your uplift; try to shape society so that it will help in the uplift of individuals and not turn them away from God.

Learn the Skill of Achieving Inner Peace

Everyone craves security, peace, joy, and happiness. But most believe that these can be extracted from nature around. The result is, he wastes his years in eating and drinking, playing and resting, earning and spending. Man moves from cradle to grave, and again from cradle to grave, ad nauseam, drifting along, knowing neither the place from where he started his journey nor the place to which his steps are leading him through the ages. Man has won unique qualities of head and heart through a series of effort-filled lives as members of inferior species; that victory is now reduced to ashes, by this supine sloth.

You must have the skill to swim across the waves of joy and grief, of pain and profit. You must be a master of the art of being fully at ease, perfectly calm, and unaffected, whatever may happen to the body or senses or mind; they are all inert when they are not urged by the inner I, which is intelligence, awareness. Learn the skill of achieving and maintaining inner peace, the art of being ever aware of the atma as the inner reality, and then you can safely gyrate in the world, as fast as you care.

Man is ill; but, he is resorting to remedies that cannot cure. Diagnose yourself; discover the root cause; apply the proper remedy: that is the way of the wise. Do not run after quacks or pseudo-panaceas. Sow the seeds of Prema, after preparing the soil of your heart, removing the weeds. Let them grow, watered by faith, and yield the blossoms, of sahana (fortitude); later, you are assured of the fruit: Santi. This is the task; this is the duty: this has to be the vow.

Forms of worship, phraseology of adoration, or the style of address may vary; but all religions are directed towards the same consummation. The same bloodstream circulates in all the limbs of the body. The same divine stream activates the entire universe. Visualize that supreme architect, that incomprehensible designer, that unseen Lifegiver. This is spoken of as the realization of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Do not get entangled in the business of living; do not forget in your struggle for survival and success, the God that made life possible.

Life is Worth Only a Casual Perusal

Life is a newspaper; read it in a casual manner, headlines, a few columns that catch your fancy, and throw it aside. Do not make it more important than that. Tomorrow, it is 'waste paper.' So too, life is worth only a casual perusal; do not lay it aside for a second perusal. One birth is enough; let the death coming to you be the last.

If you pay attention to the individual, differences thrust themselves on you. Fix your attention on the Samahsti (the collective); then points of identity will be more apparent; concentrate on the outer labels—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Parsi, Buddhist—then, you will develop pride, contempt, or hatred! But if you concentrate on the struggle that man undergoes to raise himself from the flesh to reach the level of divinity—then, you find all labels insignificant. Then, it is all love, cooperation, mutual encouragement, and appreciation.

Go into the inner meanings, the deeper significances of religious symbols, rites, and ceremonies. The outer forms and formalities are in accordance with the needs of place, time, and person. Some among you relish one sweet dish more than another, others do not agree that your favorite is the tastiest. But, whatever the dish, they are all sweetened by the same substance, sugar; similarly, all things and beings are sweetened by the same principle, God.

Let Supreme Joy Be Your Lasting Possession

Those who carp and criticize and ask questions like, "If there is God, where is He?" "How does He look?" have not proceeded beyond the first letters of the alphabet of spiritual enquiry. It is only when the entire alphabet is mastered that you can read words; then, you can proceed to sentences, paragraphs, and books. Unless you know the I, how can you know the 'I' of all I's—the 'I' that makes every I experience its 'I'-ness? The smog of ignorance hides from you this 'I' behind the I's. It is called Maya in Hindu philosophy. It is compared to an enchantress, a danseuse, a wily woman who entices away your intelligence by her dance, a Nartaki. This Nartaki can be immobilized by kirtan (singing the glory of God, with full faith in His grace). Note that kirtan is but Nartaki transposed; wisdom is ignorance overcome. Kirtan will keep the vision clear and direct it on the sublime and the supreme.

You are all caskets of divine love; share it, spread it. Express that love in acts of service, words of sympathy, thoughts of compassion. Just as when you awake from sleep, you know that the dream which you had was a matter of minutes, though the chain of events dreamed spanned many years, this life will appear a transient affair when you awake into jnana after this brief 'dream of life.' Be always full of joy so that when death calls, you can quit with a light laugh, and not whimper in grief. I bless that you may so shape your lives and activities that this supreme joy will be your lasting possession.

Kampala, 7-7-1968.