Spirituality Is a Pleasure, Not a Pressure
Dr. Kailash Kumar, lecturer in English at Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Prashanti Nilayam, retired from the Indian Army in the mid-1980s before joining the college faculty. He has coauthored the book Sai Baba: Source of Light, Love and Bliss. Dr. Kumar has been a devotee of Swami ‘s for 22 years. Here are excerpts from a talk that he gave to a group of Americans at Prashanti Nilayam on September 22.
Swami says that the end of education is character, not a degree. You must have heard Swami’s quote that “education is for life, not for a living.” “Living” means going and getting a job. “Life” means the way to live your life.
Aristotle says, “Character is that which removes moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids. A man’s character depends on what he does or what he doesn’t do.” There is a beautiful quote from Reverend Dr. Edgar Tilton: “You cannot dream yourself into character. You cannot decide at night that tomorrow morning I’m going to get up with a fine character. You must hammer and forge yourself one. Wishful thinking will not take you far on the way to self-mastery. Determination to build definite characteristics into life is needed. And this must be followed up with persistent striving. Character is an output of persistent striving towards moral excellence.” So, it’s a very important aspect of our Institute’s educational system.
Recently, when Swami called one of the groups (of college students) inside (for an interview), He asked, “What is knowledge?” They said, “Swami, knowledge is to know.” He said, “No, knowledge is to know and act. Knowing itself is not knowledge. Knowing and acting is knowledge.” When you know and act in accordance with that knowledge, it becomes skill. Here, Swami has again mentioned in an interview that skill is not just doing anything you want with excellence but doing only those things that are good. If a thief is good at his job you can’t call him skillful. Only if the person does those things that are taking him towards good, helping him and taking others towards good, is he using skill. So, knowledge and skill must be understood.
Another saying of Swami’s is that the end of knowledge is love. One subject we should do a lot of thinking about and really strive to understand is love. Swami says that only love for God is true love. The example He gives is that all of humanity is a tree. It has a trunk, it has branches, it has leaves, it has flowers, it has fruit. You cannot spend your energy in watering the leaves. You cannot spend your energy in watering the flowers or the fruits or the branches, or even the trunk. You should water the roots. Once you water the roots, all the others will get the required water. The root of the tree of life is God. So, when you give your love to God, everyone will receive the love proportionately because you are watering the roots of that tree rather than the various parts of the tree. How simple it is. Once you love God, you love your children. Once you love God, you love your husband, your wife. Once you love God, you love everyone because He said, “One who is a true lover of God is a true lover of humanity.” Love is the equivalent of God. Swami also says, “Start the day with love; fill the day with love; spend the day with love; end the day with love. That is the way to God.” You don’t have to love for any particular amount of time and then say, ”That’s enough of this, let me switch it off and try something else.” Love is part of your being, because at the core of every one of us, love exists. So, it is most important that We understand what love is.
Yesterday someone asked me, “All right, I understood what love is, but how do I learn how to love?” I would like to quote a beautiful saying of St. Francis of Assisi: “We learn to walk by walking. We learn to run by running. We learn to love by loving.” It’s so simple. You start loving. How do you swim in water? You don’t keep sitting on the side of the pool and wondering how to swim. What would I do with my hands? What would I do with my legs? You learn swimming by swimming. Therefore, you learn loving by loving.
Now for faith. A first-year boy (equivalent to a college freshman) told me, “Sir, I want to give you a definition of faith: Forsaking all, I trust Him. That is faith.” I think it couldn’t be put more simply. Swami reveals the importance of faith in one of His quotes: “Where there is faith, there is love.” Love is dependent upon faith. If a wife doesn’t have faith in her husband, there cannot be love between them. If a mother doesn’t have faith in her child, there cannot be love between them. If a person doesn’t trust his friend, if he doesn’t have faith in the friend, there cannot be love between them. “Wherever there is faith, there is love. Wherever there is love, there is peace.” Which one of us is not looking for peace? We are all looking for peace. So, it comes from love. And wherever there is peace, there is truth. Truth cannot be experienced unless one is peaceful. So, the quote is, “Where there is faith, there is love. Where there is love, there is peace. Where there is peace, there is truth. Where there is truth, there is bliss. And where there is bliss, there is God.” Bliss is not different from God. So, to get to God, the first step, the most important step, is faith. You cannot have love for God unless you have faith in Him.
Another definition that Swami has given of faith explains the difference between science and spirituality. In science, you have experience first and then faith. You perform an experiment, and you say, “All right, this works. This can work, so I have faith in this.” But in spirituality, you have faith first, and then you get experience—not experience first and then faith. That is a worldly matter. That is science. Swami has said, “Science is split of love; spirituality, spirit of love.” Faith is not blind faith. Swami has defined faith: “Faith is not belief without reason, but trust without reservation.” Once you surrender yourself to God, you trust Him without reservation. Whatever He does, whenever He does it, it will be perfect. All He’s teaching you is to trust Him unconditionally.
Faith is important for surrendering. I meet many people who tell me that they have surrendered, as if it were something to be deposited with God and they’ve done it. Surrender is not like that. Surrender is a dynamic thing. You keep on doing it moment to moment, all the time. When you say you have surrendered, there are two things that must follow. One is trust. Once you have surrendered, you must trust that whatever He does is good for you. If you fall sick, that must be good for you. If you’re having some financial problems, that must be good for you. Only if you trust Him unconditionally can you say that you have surrendered. So please remember to never use the word surrender by itself; surrender, trust, and accept. We surrender, but we do not trust. We surrender, but we do not accept. Swami says that you must trust God in all circumstances, and you must accept whatever He gives you. So please remember surrender, trust, and accept. Your surrender is complete if every time you think of surrender, you know you trust God and you accept whatever He gives you, without any rancor, without any feeling of “Oh, why me of all the people?”
Now lastly, something very beautiful happened in one of the interviews Swami gave to the students. He asked them, “What is the biggest of all?” So, they were all scratching their heads, and somebody was saying this, and somebody was saying that. Swami said, “The biggest of all is space. It pervades everything; it is beyond everything. It is the biggest of all. Then what is the best of all?” One would think, “Oh, it must be God; it must be love.” Swami said, “The best of all is character.” Man may lose everything else. If he has character, he will always win, eventually. “What is the easiest,” Swami asked? And then He answered Himself, “Preaching is the easiest.” Next Swami said, “What is the most difficult? Practicing.” And then, “What is the greatest?” Again, one would wonder, what is the greatest? He said, “To know oneself is the greatest. There is nothing beyond that.”
About knowing oneself—you are a drop of the ocean. You have the same saltish taste the ocean has. You have the same wetness the ocean has. The only difference is in quantity. You are a drop, and that is the ocean. You are a drop of consciousness, and Swami is consciousness in all and everything. But in quality you are the same.
His love and your love are exactly the same. There is no difference. We need to understand that. Recently, in one of His talks Swami said, “Oh, you don’t understand that you’re a spark of God. Have you ever seen God worried? Have you even seen God sad? Why should you be worried; why should you be sad? It is because you haven’t realized that you are a spark of God.” Your mind is coming between you and God and making you separate from Him. You do not think you are part of God. Have you ever seen Swami worried? I have never seen that in the ten years since I’ve been living at His lotus feet. Have you ever seen Him sad? I’ve never seen Him sad. Then why should you be sad if you’re part of Him, if your quality is the same? Then why shouldn’t you be blissful all the time, just like He is? Just like all passing clouds, you get worries; they pass on. You get difficulties, they pass on. But your bliss, your faith in God, and your steadiness are with you always. Then you must realize that you are part of Him. The problem is we consider ourselves a part of the world and we suffer unnecessarily. It is so easy to give that up; it is so easy to become part of what God is.
There’s a beautiful quotation from Saint Augustine: “Faith is to believe what we do not see, and a reward of faith is to see what we believe.” If you believe that God is present here, if you have faith in that, then your faith will bring God to your presence one day. It’s only faith that can take you to that point. One day you will see what you believe in because of your faith. That is the importance of faith.
Swami says spirituality should be a pleasure, not a pressure. Most of us feel that when you’re in the spiritual field, you must be absolutely stiff, look at the tip of your nose, and not talk to anybody. It’s not so. Spirituality is a pleasure. If a person is full of love, if a person is full of ananda (bliss), and if he’s giving it to all others, then he’s spiritual. Whenever you want an example, just look at Swami.
~Stephanie Cappitelli
Manhattan, New York, USA
