5. Smt. C. Sudha

Revered Sir and dear brothers and sisters,

Namasthe,

“All is the play of His love. Do not feel surprised if I say love and hatred are the same. Love is only positive thinking and hatred is negative thinking. It is very strange that people do not like to remember God who is so merciful and kind. All his actions are greatly beneficial to us. People think that remembering God is an unprofitable business although, I say it is more profitable than the biggest factory in the world”.

By the above sentences of the Master it is understood that love is positive thinking.

But why are we asked to take up this love? To prevent a ritualistic approach to sadhana. If we are concerned only with our sadhana our attention will be always self-centered: expecting the results, comparing, competing, struggling with our notions not only during meditation but also at times when we are not actively meditating. All these only breed hatred, which pulls us away from reality. If we notice when we try to give importance to lower tendencies of mind they tend to leave us with a feeling of repulsion and grossness and gets more strengthened. Instead if we naturally keep our attention on divine we realize after some time that we came out of that weakness.

When it is said, “Love is the inner awakening to Reality”. Whom should we love? If we look at the sentences of the Master “Love Him who loves all”. “Seek the Being who is seeking you”. It will be clearly understood that God already loves us in true sense.

It is only the love and grace of God that provided opportunities for man to turn his attention towards God. And if that opportunity is firmly grasped with real intension a man will be guided to right path from there.

The following sentences of Master “Allegorically I may say that he was the only object of my love. As a matter of fact I was not a lover of freedom or any such thing but only of Him and Him alone”.

“I was so mad with love for Him that I had lost my power of vision for all things…”

Stress the importance of love in the path of spirituality.

The method suggested in PAM for developing love for Master is constant remembrance. Constant remembrance when practiced assiduously results in checking the distracting thoughts and develops deep attachment with Him and we start developing true love for Him. To the extent we developed love to that extent our selfish interest is lessened. Love removes the impediments and impurities on the path. When we love Master we do the sadhana more assiduously the way He wants us to do. Because when we love we have to obey Him.

“If we believe and remember this that for all the service rendered by me to people the return that comes to me is peace, then the only method for you is to remain restless”. Master in the above sentences stresses the need to maintain the restlessness.

When the feeling of love intensifies restlessness emerges giving way to helplessness. Just because we started loving Him just now we cannot jump to Him from the place where we are. We have to start introspection, understand our position and start from there. We only have to remain silent in that restlessness, trying to know our lapses, trying to depend on Him for His Grace to over come the lapses. It will be really amazing to learn how tolerant He is to love us in spite of all our lapses and thus we learn all virtues from Him – Like tolerance, patience, sharing, service, sacrifice, because “as you think so you become”.

Only when our lowliness is established we will be in a position to empathize with others and participate in the task of the Master. Sincerity develops in doing Universal prayer that - “All the men and women in this world are our brethren and true love, devotion and faith for the Master is developing in all”. Feeling of Fraternity in true sense develops.

When we know that thoughts have life and they affect cosmos it is our duty to take right steps to correct our selves, be alert to the thoughts, stop the casual thinking, and be in thought of the Master so that we will be doing good to ourselves as well as contributing to the betterment of the environment.

In the words of Rev Sri K.C. Narayana garu in one of His articles: “To serve means to love, to obey means to love, to sacrifice means to love. Without these three characteristics there is no point in talking about love. Love demands all these three. Surrender is very difficult to practice without learning the principles of love, devotion, faith and obedience”.