“Life Is an Airplane”

Manish Sarma (in XII standard), who spoke at one of the meetings last June in the Prasanthi Mandir, compared life to an airplane. He is the son of a pilot in the Indian Airlines and is a firm devotee of Bhagavan. Manish said that just as a plane is not to be kept idle in a hangar, the airplane of life has to be used to take man to his destination. To enable a plane to fly, provision has to be made for forward thrust and upward lift.

In the case of the human being, the Divine has provided the forward propelling force of faith and the upward lift of surrender, while inevitably there is the initial drag of doubt and the downward pull of ignorance. “What we have to do,” Manish said, “is to fill this plane of ours with the fuel of love and the baggage of devotion, and follow the divine commands. We have to develop the forward propelling force of faith, which will overcome the drag of doubt; and when we surrender ourselves at Bhagavan’s lotus feet, we shall find His hand lifting us against the pull of ignorance. With this power granted by the Lord, we shall fly to unimagined realms.

Swami’s love is unfathomable. Once Swami said, “You may love God, but do you act in such a manner that God may love you?” We must do our work mindful of the fact that if we do as He commands, we shall find ourselves moving closer to Him. In the process, our love and faith in Him will become purer and firmer. The other day Swami said that God is always near us but it is we who create the distance between Him and ourselves. We can cut short this distance by implicitly obeying His commands.

It all depends upon us, whether or not we want to take the plane of atma [soul] through the runway of life and, with the help of the forward propelling force of faith and the upward lift of surrender, soar through the skies, leading us to the airport of love, where we shall find the Lord waiting for us with His arms wide open, as though saying, ‘Welcome back home, my child.’

Source: Sanathana Sarathi, Jan. 1990