Sri Sathya Sai Speaks

YOUR task as swayam sevaks (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, practise love, strengthen 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 canalise that love, so that it may irrigate the heart, which will otherwise go dry. The volunteers privileged to work a% the Prasanthi Nilayam have to set the ideal for similar workers all over the world. For, here, service emanates from 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 in widening the horizon of your compassion. This Will necessarily promote the sum of human happiness. Religion is 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. Swayam means self; sevak means servant. You have been serving your own selves all these days.

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 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 some one 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 to have a radio, if you are unaware of its working and of the ways of benefitting by it. Of what benefit is it to have a body, if you do not seek to know how best to utilise it? Learn from the saints and sages who have realised 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, fight and wrong. These are earthly measures, by which the temporary is weighed and judged. He has no form, no limbs, no dualities, no preferences, no prejudices, no predilections. To say that He is Sathyaswaruupa, (having the characteristic of Truth), Jnanaswaruupa (having full wisdom) and Anandhaswaruupa (full of Bliss) is also not correct. For, He has no Swaruupa or Swabhava (individual form or individual nature); He is Sathya; He is Jnana; He is Anandha. 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 Sathya, Jnana and Anandha, 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 (Akasa). 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.