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"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.
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