Devotees and Swami

Question: Swami, I beg your pardon for asking this question. While I am afraid to pose the question, I am also very keen to know the answer from You. Since You are our most compassionate God, I have made bold to ask You this question. Swami, You talk to some devotees as soon as they come here, whereas You don’t talk to some others who have been here for a long time. How are we to reconcile these two facts?

Bhagavan: There is nothing wrong in asking any question in your search for truth. It is not good to entertain any doubts, all the more so in respect to God.

You should always believe in one thing: whatever happens to you, it is for your own good. Only God knows what, when, how, why, and to whom anything is to be done. You don’t understand this. Every action of Swami will help you. Swami may talk to some immediately and may not to some others for a long time. This is a matter of time, according to you. But Swami is beyond time and space.

I’ll give you a simple example here. Suppose a bus starts from here, and passengers start boarding it. What do you notice? The passenger who gets into the bus first goes to the front and occupies the seat by the side of the driver. The last passenger has to stand near the door. Then, when the bus stops at the terminus and the passengers start getting down from the bus, what happens? The last passenger standing near the door gets down first and the first passenger sitting near the driver gets down last. Isn’t it so? Therefore, the first becomes the last and the last the first. The same thing applies to Swami’s devotees.

Saint Markandeya put a similar question to sage Narada. “Oh Narada! How is it that so young a boy like Prahlada could see the divine manifestation at an early age whereas we who have been doing penance for hundreds of years are doing it in vain? Why should it happen like that?” Narada replied thus: “Oh Saint! Prahlada is very young in years, no doubt, but his yearning for God must have been there for several of his previous lives. This is the result of the cumulative effect of his earlier lives of prayerful yearning for God. You may think that you have been doing penance for long years. But you have done all this only during this lifetime of yours. The body of Prahlada is young, but his soul has been pining for God ever since his earlier births. You are old now in age, but your attempt has been short.”

I will give you another example. A young man wanted to break a stone with a hammer. In spite of his 20 strokes, the stone did not break. An old man passing by that side hammered the same stone twice. It broke! You may wonder how it could happen. The old man could break the stone that couldn’t be broken by the young man. Do you know why? The stone had already received as many as 20 hammer strokes from the young man. So, with the old man hammering it twice, the total came to 22 strokes. Similarly, the dawn of God-realization may look early or late from your point of view. But the reality is different.

Source: Sathyopnishad, Vol. 1