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!

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