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We All Have the Same Purpose

Address to the participants of the Scholarship Training Program, 15 December 2010, Chennai, India

First of all, I am delighted to see all of you here. Even before I joined my Master in Sahaj Marg forty years ago, I had no consciousness of any difference between people. For me there was only the human being. It was not a matter of intellectual conviction, or of friendliness, or politics – nothing. I suppose it is some past preparation which brought me to Babuji Maharaj, because in some way everyone who comes is already prepared to be here. I tell you this because I don't want you to make the mistake of thinking that you have come with your own thinking and with your own desire or wish. When you think like that, there is the possibility that your stay here may be short, because then you think, "I decided to come, I decide to go." You all understand? But when you know that you are here and you understand with your heart that some past preparation has brought you here – like some past karma or samskara made you Chinese, made you Russian, made you Spaniard, made you Japanese – you did not get that by accident.

The soul has decided that, for me to evolve spiritually, I have to take such and such a birth. This is the truth. It applies; it is not religious, it is not political, it is absolute truth. So then we know that there is a reason for her being a Japanese girl and for you being Chinese, for me being Indian, for her being French. But it is like the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. You can write the whole of Shakespeare, the whole Bible, the whole of everything, but it contains only twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Isn't it? Twenty-six letters of the alphabet and you can have anything in the world in English, similarly in other languages. But as far as humanity is concerned, God created only male and female (man and woman), because that is necessary to make more human beings. Our samskara makes us Chinese, Japanese, Mongol, whatever we are, but the goal of all is spirituality.

So by force of your soul's decision before you are born here, and by your acceptance, even if you think it is your rationality which has brought you here, you are here. I hope you will use the opportunity wisely, for the purpose of spiritual evolution only. I know doctors from France, from India – they go to China to learn Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and so on. I know they go to Japan to learn other things. I know they go to England to study something else. Isn't it? All for the self. I don't think, "I am Japanese. Why should I go to England?" If what I have to learn is available in England, I go there. Here the soul says, this is for the development of the spiritual life, and this is the university for that. So I come here. That is why I was born here, too. Soul has no country, no affiliation, no nationality; body has. Souls have no sex; bodies have. No gender, you know.

So we have to think of all these and use our hearts to judge why we are here, what are we going to do with being here, and how this is going to lay the foundation for my spiritual life for the future. So this is our purpose here, this is all our purpose here – nothing else. So we should learn to understand we are all brothers and sisters. Like even in a family of ten people each one is different. One brother is intellectual, one brother is an agriculture man, third boy does nothing, the girls are married in different places and go away, but family is family. Isn't it? I am from Foochow; so Foochow becomes a family. Foochow is in China, so that becomes a family. China is in this world, so that becomes a family. In the largest sense, in the most truthful sense, we are citizens of this world. You understand? And the smaller affiliation should not hinder or endanger our larger affiliation, that we are human brothers and sisters. This is the teaching of spiritual life. Then we really become brothers and sisters. We have no quarrel; we have no divisions. Our religion is as much an accident as our nationality. And we have to use why we were born here, and what way we were born here, in remembering that we all have the same purpose: to evolve spiritually.

So that is all I have to say on this occasion this morning, and I assure you that our services are yours to command. We have invited you here to help the people of your country, because I hope all of you will go back with the knowledge of what to do and with the courage to do it. And the basic necessity is the conviction that this is something we have to offer to our people. So you have to develop three things through your stay in India now: conviction, the need to share it with others, and the courage to do so.

So we bring back that humanity into that unity and we see – what do we see? Divine light. When the light is split up through a prism, you have the beautiful rainbow; all colours are separate, but they are not true. If they merge, then only the reality; and the reality is colourless, formless, same. And if I tell you this has all the colours it is difficult to believe, because the manifestation of what is in reality is seen only when it is broken up into parts, when it is no longer reality.

So philosophy says, all that is manifest is unreal, is not reality. They are all parts of reality, but not reality.