Master's Birthday is Our Birthday
It is a day on which we remember the Master, the person, the great
soul, the Mahapurush, the Special Personality who came for our sake
and who founded, not only the Mission, but founded, shall we say, our hearts
also, on the day He came. So it is a day on which we should remember Him with
great love, great reverence, not that we should not remember Him and love
Him on the other days. We have an ironical saying in Tamil that somebody bathes
very regularly on Diwali day you see. Once a year on Diwali day he has an
oil bath and that is enough! But we are supposed to be in constant remembrance.
If we are in constant remembrance, what is the significance of a special Master's
birthday? It is not that we don't remember the Master on other days or other
moments. We should remember Him constantly. After all, He is, or He should
be our innermost existence, that which makes us exist. So this is only a special
occasion on which there should be intensification of the act of remembrance.
That is, our longing for Him, to be united with Him, to merge with Him, should
be so intensified, that it comes to a peak on such occasions. On the other
days, it is there as a subtle stream, underlying our consciousness.
So let us not think that we can remember Him on the birthday and forget Him for the rest of the year. He is to be remembered with every moment of our life, every breath of our existence, because we understand that hitherto, i.e., before we came to His Divine feet, we were just like dolls, which were put into motion by the samskaras which bring us here, and it is the samskara which was alive, we were not alive. So we were born because of our samskaras; we exist because of our samskaras, and because of the bhog that we have to undergo we create more samskaras. So life goes on almost endlessly you see, life after life, death after death. So, we could not call that really a life.
Therefore, our life began actually, effectively in a very true sense, on the day we received our first transmission at the hands of our Master. So it is in a sense our birthday that we are celebrating. When we are here on the Master's birthday and we remember the Master in a special way on this day, it is our birthday we are remembering, it is an offering of our gratitude, our love - "Master, you made me alive on this day. I am eternally grateful to you for putting me alive, when I was just an automaton which was running around on wheels, run by an internal motor, which I called foolishly 'my heart'. You made that heart come alive, by coming into the heart and becoming the heart of my heart. You made my life come alive, by becoming the life of my life. You gave meaning to my existence, by giving me a purpose." Before that, there was no purpose. It was like a toy train going round and round on its small tracks, which has no meaning, no purpose. So our life was like that. It had lost purpose; it had lost meaning; it had lost joy.
So this birthday should not only be our birthday on which we express gratitude to the Master, "Thank you for becoming our life," but it should also be the day of our final extinction in the sense that, on this day, we should lose our personal identity and say, "Master, thank you for bringing me into existence. Today I cease to exist at your holy feet. Take me and release me from this bondage of 'I' and 'mine', and put me back into that grand, original home of which you have talked about so much and let me become part of that grand, fundamental unity of which I was part, from which I foolishly separated myself by an act of thinking that 'I am." Now I am not. Take me and put me back." So this is the purpose of Master's birthday, as I understand it.
When we celebrate our Master's birthday, we offer gratitude to Nature itself, to God Himself. "Thank you my Lord, for bringing this Soul into existence here, into this corrupt world, into this downtrodden world, misery-filled world, disease-filled world. Thank you for bringing Him here, so that He could raise us up." How could He raise us up? By giving us life!
|
