Beauty and Duty

Your task as svayamsevaks (self-servants) will be done, when you know full well the task for which you have earned this human frame, with all its potentialities and possibilities. It is to grow in love, expand that love, practice that love, strengthen that love, and finally become love and merge in the illimitable love, which is God. All your life, you must be love, with love, for love. That is to say, love expressed through service to those that draw that love from you and, by drawing, help to increase it and deepen it. Spiritual discipline is designed to channel that love, so that it may irrigate the heart, which will otherwise go dry.

The volunteers privileged to work at the Prasanthi Nilayam have to set the ideal for similar workers all over the world. For here, service emanates from a genuine understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. When that is known, every step will be right, towards righteousness. And, if there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character; if there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home; if there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation; if there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world. Righteousness consists of widening the horizon of your compassion. This will necessarily promote the sum of human happiness.

Religion is a three-fourths character. No person can claim to be religious if he merely observes the sacraments and rules, and fails to be upright and compassionate. Character alone can harden one to the blows of pain and pleasure. It alone can make man exclaim, "Death for me is a joke; birth cannot make me afraid!" This week that you have spent as volunteers here is a week of character-building of sadhana. Svayam means self; sevak means servant. You have been serving your own selves all these days.

Serve All as Embodiments of the Divine Will

Continue in this state of mind, when you go back to your villages and occupations. Do not give up your gains and run after losing concerns. Serve all as embodiments of the divine will. That will give you immense joy, a joy that no other activity can confer. The chakora bird waits with an open beak for the first drops of the very first rain that comes from the sky; it relishes no other. So too, you should yearn for the chance to console, comfort, encourage, heal, help someone looking for it. See yourself in him; feel his pain to be yours, his sorrow to be yours.

Of what profit is it to have a car if you are ignorant of the art of driving it or using it for moving about? Of what profit is it to have a radio if you are unaware of its working and of the ways of benefiting by it? Of what benefit is it to have a body if you do not seek to know how best to utilize it? Learn from the saints and sages who have realized the truth about the path you shall tread and the goal you have to attain. That goal is God. He is beyond all notions of good and bad, right and wrong. These are earthly measures, by which the temporary are weighed and judged. He has no form, no limbs, no dualities, no preferences, no prejudices, no predilections. To say that He is Satya-swarupa (having the characteristic of truth), Jnana-swarupa (having full wisdom), and Ananda-swarupa (full of bliss) is also not correct. For, He has no swarupa or swabhava (individual form or individual nature); He is Satya; He is Jnana; He is Ananda. That is the experience of those who have tasted.

There are no pots in the clay; but, in the pots, there is clay. So also, there are no characteristics in God; but, in the characteristics of Satya, Jnana, and Ananda, there is God. God is everywhere, but no spaceship can hit against Him, no space pilot can espy Him. He is too subtle for all that type of contact, subtler than ether (Akasha). So, do not lend your ears to people who swear there is no God. God is too vast, too far above the reach of reason or imagination. You can only get glimpses of the bliss derivable from the contemplation of His magnificence.

Prasanthi Nilayam, 28-10-1969