"Know all people as thy brethren and treat them as such."

I would like to say a few words on the idea of brotherhood, not to educate you or give you a lecture, but because I find that wrong understanding of this idea of brotherhood has broken up potential associations.

The first idea is that a brotherhood is a small group in a bigger humanity. This is not what Master intended. A group is a group. It is not a group of brothers and sisters. It need not be a group of brothers and sisters. Because if we think like that, then we are isolating ourselves from the rest of humanity, and in some way, excluding the rest of humanity from coming to us.

It is like, if you shut yourself in a room and close the door, you are not only locking yourself in but you are locking everybody else out. You don't have two doors - one for locking others out and one for locking yourself in. Just one door is enough. So similarly, we have these mental doors, you know that we are Sahaj Margis, or we are Rotarians, or we are Catholics, and in trying to preserve a group identity for ourselves, we create the other, who is not us.

That is the first dangerous idea that we have, that we are group of brothers and sisters. I think what my Master wanted was that all of humanity should be brothers and sisters, not a group - even there we cannot be a group. That is why he was always talking of Universal Love and things like that.

We should have no idea that we are distinct from anybody else, or that our group is distinct from anything else. In fact, we should have no idea at all. So that is number one. The second dangerous idea is that within a group, there should always be harmony, in the sense that you seem to mean it. That is, everybody agreeing with everybody else. Such a life would be a very tame and tedious affair. There should be no mutual recrimination, no annoyance, no anger, but certainly, there should be freedom to differ. Everything in nature works that way. You have what you call your solar system. A sun with a number of planets rotating around it. The sun has its own independent motion. It rotates on its own axis, and it is wandering through space within the galaxy. And even though the planets are moving as a family round it, they all have their independence; they all rotate around their own axis; they all rotate around the sun.

So what is it that is important? That even though you may be moving on your own, with total freedom to do so, yet you maintain this cohesiveness of a system. So within that system, we must have total freedom to act as we choose, to behave as we choose, to differ from each other. The only essentiality being that the group's identity, or structure, or cohesiveness of being individuals would be lost.

Now, please don't think that we should deliberately create differences among ourselves. We should try to be harmonious. But it is like the harmony of music where you have 27 instruments clashing away in different parts of the hall - some pipes, some cymbals, some strings, some wind instruments. But the whole thing being guided by a central person - a personality - to produce what you call music, what you call harmony, symphony - so many things. A delight to the soul! The important thing to understand is that each one functions according to its nature. A flute cannot be a violin, nor a cymbal become a pair of tinkling bells. But the important idea is, they work according to the man, we call the conductor. He conducts the music. The individual musicians play according to his instructions.

My submission is that here also, all that is necessary is for us to be ourselves. Learn what we have to do and do it properly under His guidance, and we will find that the interaction of all of us produces a grand harmony and a grand music. And that is what we are trying to achieve in a society like ours. So, do your thing under his guidance and the others, let them follow him and do what he says. And then all that we have been talking about and lecturing about - a harmonious existence, a togetherness, a oneness will become a reality. Not because we are one, in the sense that we are all the same, or we have the same opinion, or we perform similarly, but He, the Master is able to blend together so many individual geniuses, capacities, into a grand harmonic theme.

Nature is beautiful for two reasons. There's a blending of diverse units of existence into a grand and harmonious picture of existence, and there is a total freedom for the individual units, to express their existence in many, many divergent ways. Chillies, in cooking, must be chillies, not tomatoes. Tomatoes cannot be potatoes.

So it is the Master's business to blend a number of diverse units into a harmony. That is His work. When we, as members of the unit, or members of the group, insist that individuals of the group should be this, and this, and this, we are in a sense committing the mistake of trying to take upon ourselves the work of the Master. The abhyasi's business is to do his work in obedience to the Master. To preserve the group identity and to make it grow, and to ultimately embrace the Universe is the Master's job. Let us leave it to Him.

WHAT DOES BROTHERHOOD MEAN?
I think sometimes that in spiritual brotherhoods also we fail because we are still thinking of that brotherhood - the blood brothers, where we are always quarrelling, fighting with each other, claiming the property of the parents. This is a different type of brotherhood, where I see my Self in you. And you must similarly learn to see your Self in me. Therefore it is the Self that you love when you look at somebody else. And this Self eventually becomes not your self or my self, but THE SELF - the reflection of the Ultimate in our heart. So this is the extraordinarily moving and ennobling adventure of the spiritual life.

The human brotherhood does not mean an abstract brotherhood where we are all isolated in different jungles and we are all brothers and sisters. It cannot be. Brotherhood means ability to mix - to sit together, to talk together, to eat together, all loving each other, all confident of each other, each one seeing himself reflected in a resplendently new fashion, therefore everything beautiful. You are fresh inside, and everything outside is fresh. Clean the inside, everything outside is clean. Beautify the interior, everything outside is beautiful.

See, this is the simplest idea of Sahaj Marg that we are all men and women, and we are brothers and sisters. Because we love and adore Him who is common to all of us. We are not bound by individual love of each other. We are bound because we love Him, from whom we are all suspended like puppets on a string. And that is the beauty of Master's message: "Love Him who loves all." This brotherhood can come only when you love the Master so much that everybody you see, appears as the Master, and therefore there can be no loss of virtue, no loss of anything, everybody is perfect in themselves; not because they are perfect, but because your eyes see nothing but the perfection.

Try to understand what brotherhood really means, and how it can be achieved - only by loving Him who loves all. There is no other way. It is impossible for us to go around loving; I am sure here itself, the abhyasis cannot love each other in that perfect way. Because it is a lifetime's task to love one person; and if that one person happens to be the Master, you have achieved what you have to do. If I adore Him; if I obey Him; if I am faithful to Him; I have achieved the goal in every respect that Master wants us to achieve. I have achieved brotherhood; I have achieved mastery; I have achieved, most of all, His love.

IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BROTHERHOOD AND FRIENDSHIP?
Brotherhood is not friendship. Please don't misunderstand. There is a big difference between brotherhood and friendship. A brotherhood is an act, a relationship, arising out of common parentage. My brother and I are brothers because we share the same parents. Friendship is something we create. We can be brothers without being friends, and we are generally friends without being brothers! How many brothers can we have in the blood relationship? One, two, three…seventeen, may be twenty-six, like kuchela's children - he had twenty six children.

So let us make a very, very specific distinction between brotherhood and friendship. Brothers can never be separated. They may be different. They may have different qualities. They may have different achievements. One can be a fool, one can be highly intellectual person, one a beggar, another an administrative service officer, yet they are brothers, because the parents are one. In our samstha (organization) also, the brotherhood is not because we are one people. We don't belong to one race. We can see here so many nationalities, so many tongues. I am often tempted to refer to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The poor man, the Guru of those times, was in great trouble. So many tongues, so many languages being spoken, so much confusion.

But here, we have not the Tower of Babel, but a tower of God, where every language is spoken, and everything is adding something more to the overall culture and tradition of Sahaj Marg. Here it is a contributory confluence of so many streams of thoughts, streams of activities, streams of beliefs in one. It is like tributaries joining the river. I think it is at the end that the trouble is going to come to a system, or to a samstha, or an organisation. The distributaries become present, like at the mouth of the river, and they are taking away from the river instead of giving to the river. So here we have manifest before us the possibility of one culture developing out of a multifarious grouping of various cultures, languages and traditions, religious beliefs, not because we are friends, but because we share one father - the Master.

This is the miracle that we are attempting in Sahaj Marg and we have largely achieved too, I should say, by the Grace of the Master. Because, with this love He not only welded together two or three or five, He welded together thousands of abhyasis of different nationalities, cultures, languages, traditions, antipathies, sympathies, varying, sometimes widely varying, tendencies. Yet we achieved that miracle of forming a brotherhood out of a diversity of human beings, which we see today in a small way here, which we shall see larger in the coming days.

And how was that possible? Not because we love each other, I mean, can it be possible that we can love twenty thousand or fifty thousand or in the future one hundred thousand abhyasis? Every one of us loving each other! Is it possible? Where is the time? Where is the opportunity to meet one hundred thousand people and love them? But if we really love the One, we love Him who loves all, and therefore with that love for Him who loves all, we are able to love them whom He loves. He said one half of it, "Love Him who loves all." I would like to complete, with respect to my Master, that, when we love Him who loves all, we love them whom He loves.

Now if this does not happen, if the second part of it does not happen, our love for Him is a lie. It is not possible to love the Master and not love those whom the Master loves. This is my humble submission, which is a thing you should think over. How is it possible to love the father and not his children, the other children that he has?

This is the spiritual fact that we must remember, you see, that if I have the Master in my heart, if you have the Master in your heart, I see in you the Master, and therefore love you. I don't love you as a person. I see in you that which is in me. This commonality which is binding us together into one, what I hope will be a race of the future, a mighty race, not in the form of physical strength or intellectual achievement, but with the might of the Almighty flowing through the arteries of civilization, of cultures of this world. Then we shall have this miracle that we love the Master, therefore when we see the Master in anyone, whether he is a meleccha or a Brahmin, whether he is black or white, whether it is man or woman, whether he is cultured or uncultured, brutal, anybody you see, if you see the light of the Master in him, you cannot but love him or her.

Now we see the face, we see the form, we see the passport, we see the languages, and they can be grouped together, and vainly trying to make a brotherhood on one side and find the groups separated. Why? Because we are still going by language, still going by traditions, still going by cultures, still going by passports, French group one, German group another, the Karnataka group third, Andhra group fourth….

This is a negation of everything that my Master strove to put us into. He wanted us in one, how? Sharing one feeling of brotherhood together, eating together, sleeping together, doing everything together. But we still insist on separating ourselves into what we were. As Swami Vivekananda said - a statement which I remember - you know, it has a very profound sense, he said: "It is good to be born in a religion, it is very bad to die in a religion." You can be born Hindus, you can be born Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, anything, you see. But to die a Buddhist, Muslim or a Hindu is a shame. Because it means we died as we were born. There is no brotherly love, no progress, no advancement - shame on those people!

WHAT IS UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD:
What is the norm that would exist in the spiritual world? It is neither oneness nor separateness, but the unity of all existence. It transcends this idea of oneness and separateness - or to be together and to be separate. It goes beyond it and says, when we are all one, where is the question of being separate or being together. Whether you like it or not, whether you feel it or not, we are parts of one whole. This is what Babuji means when he talks of universal brotherhood. Now, we can be brothers who never meet for the next fifty years. Yet when we meet we are as if we have never parted. The intervention period doesn't seem to make any difference to that relationship. Now, that is a commonality. Between brothers it is a commonality of interest, of heritage, that we are born of the same parents, that keeps us together.

The way of science, the way of Archeology, the way of Anthropology, the way of all the human sciences, so-called, dissect life into bits and pieces, brings us to the smallest individual unit and then, in desperation, hands us over to the doctors, the psychiatrists to put these pieces together again. And all that they can do is to cut us up into further pieces. Spirituality says, "Look inside and you will find the same thing in all of them. That is the unity which will unite all of you."

So never look at the outside, you will only see differences. Develop the spiritual vision which helps you to penetrate to the core, to the essence. That alone can unify life into one grand, unified whole. That is why my Master always said, "Everything else divides: politics divides, religion divides, culture divides, language divides, spirituality alone unites." So that is why we are here. It is not enough to say spirituality unites, we must show that it unites by becoming a brotherhood, strong enough to sustain the onslaughts of those who are not here, as a first step. The next step is to bring them into the brotherhood. Because whether they know it or not, whether you know it or not, they are part of that already. Because if my essence and that essence is the same, nothing separates us but our foolish human individual consciousness.

So you see, all these things can be possible, will be possible, if we retain the brotherhood, forgetting the friendship, forgetting the loyalties of religion, of culture, of race, of tradition, of language, nationality, even sex. How to forget? It is difficult to make a list of so many things to forget and tick them off one by one, you see. Remember Him, forget everything else.