Thank you for your loving and affectionate letter dated the 16th December received here yesterday by the kind courtesy of our brother. I am happy to note that by the Grace of my Beloved Master, your visit to Madras this time was felt by you to have been so fruitful and beneficial. I also think that constant remembrance is becoming established, for which I tender my thanks once again to my Great Master. It is all His work, and those who receive His Grace in such abundant measure are blessed beyond words. The heart alone can speak to Him in the language of silence, which is his language-the 'lingua divina'-as it can appropriately be called!! Master once wrote to me that when we are conscious of loving Him, then it is still a lesser level of love! He was always giving me such delightful shocks! His ideal of the perfect love is where the one who loves does not even know that he/she loves at all. Love must, it appears to me, drown in love-or something like that-so that all the knowledge of lover, beloved and love itself all disappear from one's consciousness. By His Blessing all this will surely come to be established in the lives of those who are truly devoted to the Master, and love Him with such a love as shall become the very spiritual flame to consume them, and take them to Him! The divine beauty of such a love is that, as you have yourself experienced, there is no need to seek Him anywhere, because He is right there in the place that is rightfully and eternally His-the heart of the lover-provided we are willing to take Him in! The secret, which is really no secret, is that all that it needs to become Him is to permit Him a permanent residence in what is, after all, His own home. But instead of that, we make the heart a caravanserai, as the Master has so simply put it in his writings. If we are able to do this, and offer up our heart, emptied of all that has crept into it, then there is no question of our ever being alone again in the eternal existence that now becomes ours by the very fact of His having occupied the heart so tenderly, lovingly and trustfully offered up to Him. This is the aspect of surrender that is the most enchanting, the most delightful, and the most fruitful, as it brings Him into His home and thus transforms our self into the Self which He eternally is!! There may, in the beginning, be some sort of helplessness as you say you have felt, but that is because of the impact of cultural factors introducing a certain subconscious fear into the heart of the lover. Love overcomes all, if it is allowed to have its way! We should not have blind love, but love must make us blind! Why? Because now He is in us and there is, therefore, no further need for us to look for ourselves, or speak for ourselves, or think for ourselves or, in fact, do anything for ourselves. We act as He acts. His action becomes our action. His thoughts become our thoughts. His words become our words. This is what is fit to be called Divinisation. This is the Real to be derived from a search for Reality-as Master so beautifully wrote it! "Take away the 'ity' from Reality, and what remains is the Real," said Master. And what is this 'ity'? In one short sentence, we can say that this 'ity' is everything that is not Him. This pinpoints the need for excluding from our lives all that is not of Him, or for Him, or from Him. So simple, isn't it? And yet how we complicate it and complexify it out of all contact with reality, so that we have now come to such a state where we have lost all knowledge of it. What a shame and a tragedy for the human condition that it should have fallen so low that even the very idea of love has been lost and it has been dragged to the marketplace as if it were a commercial thing to be bought and sold! This is the tragedy of tragedies. The thing to do to reach Him, who is our Master as well as our destination-our Original Home-is to learn what is love, and how to love, very much as a retarded child has to be patiently taught to speak at the age of fifteen or even twenty! And to teach us this secret of secrets, He comes in a human form voluntarily taken up so that we can have a form-cum-substance which we can learn to love, and thus begin our journey back home to Him who is there to lead us back to Himself-and this is made so easy because of His sacrifice in leaving His eternity, His sublimity, His tranquillity only for our sake. This is the sacrifice that He makes for us. What is required of us? Are we expected to make any sacrifice? I can boldly assert that there is not even one single sacrifice that we are expected to make, at any stage. It is our worldly attachment to persons, places and things (nouns, as I call them, grammatically speaking!) which makes us think that there are sacrifices to be made, when all that we have to do is to accept His Heart and give Him ours fully without any reservations. When this is done, the two become one and what is called divinisation has become a fact. Of whose existence? It is really a meaningless question when the questioner has become merged with that which was the object of the search. I may say that now the question and answer have lost their individual identities because they have become one, and so now there is neither question nor answer! Beautiful, isn't it? Excerpt from The Spider's Web, Volume 1, pp. 296-299 |
