Love, Suffering & Discipline

Love must have discipline behind it - discipline in behaviour; discipline in words that we speak; discipline in the things what we do; discipline in what we offer. You cannot love a sick child and offer it a biscuit which is going to kill it. You cannot love your wife and trouble her when she is suffering from headache or something else. You cannot love the Master and pester Him for sittings and fall at His feet in the dark and perhaps make Him fall and break a bone. Babuji was disgusted with these superficial aspects of so-called love which was selfishness parading as love for Him. It is hypocrisy of the highest order to say, "I love you," and to try to cut the throat at the same time. I have known preceptors telling their children, when Babuji was sick, to go and sit before Him. "Master cannot be sick. He is divine!" It is a shameful thing, and I was heartbroken when I heard this from the so-called senior preceptors - "Go and sit before Him. The divine cannot be sick. It is a drama for our benefit!" I have known people saying this also to their children: "We do not know how long he will live. Go and take from him what you can while he is yet alive with us." This is still prevalent today, which is an unfortunate thing.

He suffered before us, so that when we suffer, we can sort of wonder at this Guru who is a source of suffering, who is suffering incarnate. People talk of Him as love incarnate. No doubt it is true. But I look upon Him, my Master, as suffering incarnate. Because love and suffering are synonymous, too. When you love your children you suffer for them. It is the suffering which is the exhibition of your love which the public can see, which anybody can see. She suffers because she loves her son. "Why do you love your son?" Is it not crazy? "Well, I love him because he is mine. Who else will love him?" So you see, those who claim to love must also be willing to suffer; must be prepared to suffer, must accept suffering; must seek suffering. This is what one of our ten maxims says: Accept miseries as blessings.

Unless there is love between the abhyasi and the Master, there cannot be true spiritual growth. Because it is the Master's love for us which makes Him suffer with us, struggle for us, create a discipline for us, makes him capable of bearing our tantrums, our rebellion, all because of his divine love for us. And if we have that love for him, it makes that discipline acceptable, knowing that it is his love which he gives us, not his harshness, not his humanness. But it is his divine love that makes it possible, makes it available for us.

That is why, especially in the Sahaj Marg tradition, there is so much emphasis on love. It makes confidence possible. It makes faith possible. Ultimately it makes surrender possible. Because, to my mind, this progression from belief to trust, and on through to faith, and finally to surrender, is only a greater and greater appreciation in us of the love of the Master for us, by which we grow ourselves into an understanding of what love means. And to me, it has always appeared that love is a planting of a seed and allowing it the freedom to grow into a tree, and to permit it to putforth its own seeds in due course. And this is the grand unfolding of the spiritual existence. And I think this is what Babuji meant when He said, "I do not create disciples or slaves, I create Masters." It would be tragic to misunderstand Him as saying that everybody can be a Master. But everybody can be like the Master in every aspect of his functioning.

So we find that it is the love of the Master which makes him sow the seed. What is his seed and where is it sown? The seed is himself, and the plot of the land in which he sows it is our heart. And it is in our heart that this divine plant, this divine existence, must grow and become big, and ultimately flower and seed in its turn. So you see, love gives us enormous benedictions, the benediction of the divine, but it also casts a responsibility on us, that it is a treasure which we receive to distribute again to all the people in the next generation. Because that is how the divine stream must grow and branch and branch out into the eternal existence of the Infinite.

Therefore, I have always felt, you see, that discipline is only an expression of love. Without love there is no discipline. And that is why we have this very fascinating example of parents who have thrown their children to the winds, letting them run loose, you know, like dogs let off the leash. Nevertheless, they feel so guilty about it that they pamper their children, "What do you want? You can have it!' What they could not do with love, they are trying to do with bribery. I tell the children here, the younger generation, "Beware of parents who give you things too easily. Love the parent who will ask you, 'Where are you going? Why are you going? When will you come back? With whom are you going?" You must love such persons, because they love you enough to ask these questions to make sure you are safe. Because to such parents, their children are an investment in their own love.

But this, again, is a tragedy of modern society, you see, that children are not so much products of love as a casual liaisons. And the children know this. They feel it. They rebel against it. They hate it. Therefore you find, even in well-ordered societies, the children running riot, becoming hooligans, dropouts, drug addicts. It is not that they want to do these things, but they want to show their parents, "If you could have done it, we can do it one better than you." I think it is a way the children take revenge on their parents. And when it pervades a whole section of society where all the younger generation are like this, you have this rebellion between the elder generation and the younger generation. You find this especially in the American cities, you see, where the people most feared are the youth gangs. If you talk to them individually they are very nice children, but they are so disgusted with the elder generation.

So discipline, like rain, like grace, must come from above, in the sense that disciplined parents produce disciplined children. Loving parents create loving children. So this is a lesson to the parents, you see. It is the old question of invertendo. We are talking of child indiscipline, student indiscipline, youth indiscipline, when the real source of all that indiscipline is in the parents. And it is never too late because, like children can change, parents must also be willing to change. And when we recognise this, I mean, when the parents recognise this and they are willing to change, you find their children hug them and kiss them with such love as you have never known in your life.

So we have to come now to the next stage of love, you see, that love means disciplining ourselves first before we can discipline others. And that is why parents have to be disciplined before they can discipline their children. So you see, it is like, again, a river. A river cannot be a river if it did not have two banks confining the water within them. So what is discipline but giving your existence a shape and a form in which you can grow. And it is love which makes that discipline available to us because, if he did not love us, he could not care less. Only when you love someone, can you jump into a river, or jump into a pond to pull out somebody who is drowning.

Now a Guru may be capable of loving you like a mother. He must be capable of disciplining you like a father, must be capable of instructing you in spirituality, looking for your progress, guiding you up to the destination. So, that is the love of the Master for his abhyasis, for humanity, because the only difference I see between those who are abhyasis and those who are not abhyasis is a very simple difference. He loves all equally. The abhyasis are those who have voluntarily accepted His love in the form of His discipline. The others have accepted His love without His discipline.

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