Spirituality - the Solution to all Problems
The world is burning in a materialistic hell. At any moment we could be blown over the precipice by a nuclear bomb. Our so-called, "civilisation," is on the brink of mass destruction. Who is responsible for this desperate state of affairs? The time has come for us to stop flinging the blame at each other like a pack of cowards, take a long, honest look at ourselves, stand up and take responsibility for the fate of our planet. Just because no-one else shows any sign of doing so, is that an excuse for us not to do so? Will that really enable us to look into the mirror and say we are doing our best, when actually we are standing aside, letting countless innocent children get abused, butchered or starve?
We need to acknowledge the root cause of the problem instead of focusing on some imperfection in someone else to divert the responsibility from ourselves. A journalist once asked Bhagavan what the greatest danger facing the world is now. Bhagavan replied that it is not cancer, nor AIDS, nor nuclear bombs; it is a lack of love. We, indeed, feel no love! In the 1990s, there was a civil war in Bosnia. Did we not see on television how countless people were getting murdered, raped and chased out of their homes into the mine-laced forest? And what did we do about it? We switched off the television, immediately forgetting what we had seen, yawned and shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, thus condemning untold numbers of our fellow human beings to yet more torture, humiliation and death, while the politicians talked. How can we have such hearts of stone? How can we just watch on television with our feet up, without batting an eyelid, without feeling a pain in our hearts as people just like our sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and grandchildren are filmed, being abused, in the direst of dire straits? We think we have acted selflessly towards a friend or family-member this week, but we do not lift a finger for the sake of someone we do not know who really needs our help. Why is this? Because we do not know him or her personally. So when we helped our friend or family-member earlier, it was because we knew him, because that person belonged to us, as it were, so the cause was, in truth, selfishness. Have we ever done anything selfless? How can we not cringe in shame?
Why do we continue to run after the wrong answers to the problem? We think that technological progress will transform our lives into a paradise. We put so much attention into inventing new medicines to live longer, when what actually happens is that we stop living now, become slaves of technology, victims of our own weakness and drag on, stuffed full of regrets and fear of death. What we need is not more life, but the wisdom, discipline and fearlessness to live what we already have properly. That comes from spirituality.
Technological progress certainly does not appear to help those who need it most. We have become so clever at growing phenomenal amounts of food that mountains of it in Europe and North America are left to rot, while people in Africa are starving to death. It is not lack of technology that is the problem, it is hearts of stone.
Unless it is guided by spirituality, there is no reason to think that technological progress will improve society. Fifty thousand years ago, we were brutes running about naked in the jungle, chasing other tribes about to smash their brains in with sticks and stones. Fifty thousand years later, we have the veneer of civilisation from technological advancement painted onto our faces, but still we go running after other tribes, trying to blow them into oblivion in order to gather up all the goodies for ourselves. Fifty thousand years of technological progress only seems to have transformed us from naked brutes into brutes with shirts and ties. It is true that technological progress increases the potential for doing good. However, as pointed out by Swami Vivekananda, "as the potential for good is increased in arithmetical progression, the potential for evil is necessarily increased in geometrical progression". When the advancement and use of technology are not guided by the wisdom and love that come from spirituality, man's diabolic nature has all too little to stop it from bubbling to the surface and manifesting itself in new, and every time more powerful forms of diabolism.
Political solutions also do not work for long, even if the politicians do make an honest and sincere effort. The best that can happen is that we stumble from precipice to precipice. We may take the example of the twentieth century. We stumbled into the First World War, in which many millions were shot, frozen in the snow or rotted in the trenches. It was to be the war to end all wars, and the League of Nations was set up to ensure this. However, Italy immediately turned fascist, and a few years later, the Nazis were voted into power in Germany, plunging us into a second war to end all wars. After many more millions were burnt, blown up and irradiated, the United Nations were set up, but after just two years, the Cold War started, so we were on the brink of nuclear devastation for the next forty years. The communists, their secret police and gulag camps were finally broken up, so attention shifted to the Muslims. We had the Gulf War, and now we have seen the rise of global terrorism and are teetering on the precipice of nuclear devastation once again. So much for political diplomacy.
Politics simply cannot solve the problem of evil. The world is like a pot half full of salt and half of pepper. The salt is good and the pepper evil. If there be a concentration of evil in a certain place, the politician gives the pot a shake, but that just means that the pepper will reappear in a different place and fall on someone else's nose. In the phenomenal world, every grain of good is automatically counter-balanced by a grain of evil. If I have one rupee, that is one rupee you do not have. If a cat catches a rat, the cat says, "how good," the rat says, "how evil".
What we need is not a material solution, but a spiritual one, for it is only the spiritual one that is lasting. The emperor of the Roman Empire at the time of Christ's crucifixion is now just a name in a history book, relevant to the life of no-one. Jesus, however, is still an inspiration to hundreds of millions of people the world over, and, although His message may have been corrupted, His life-story clearly reveals the wisdom and love aspired to by the pure in heart that worship Him even today. The name of Rama, who walked the Earth so long ago in the mists of time that nobody remembers exactly when, is now repeated every day untold billions of times, His life serving as a cornerstone of the society of the most spiritual land in the world and the perfect model for the devotee aspiring to undiluted Truth.
For the individual, of course, transcendence of the salt and pepper pot of the material world and attainment to the Absolute Knowledge and Bliss of the unchanging Brahman behind is the ultimate destiny of life. When many people are achieving this goal, it shows that the structure of society is healthy. If no sages are produced, and there is not even a wisdom culture giving any semblance of effective guidance, it shows that society is failing. Having a society with many highly educated people in it is not the same as one with sages, because education is not geared to creating a society in which everyone tries to help each other, but one in which each individual is trained to compete for himself in the dog-eat-dog world of cut-throat capitalism. Why do people go to university? To help the world or get more money and power so that they can fill their own stomachs more effectively? Judging by the general lack of diligence among students in the West and the amount of time and money they spend in bars, high ideals of self-discovery are revealed to be no more than empty words. In the absence of an accessible, fully-fledged wisdom culture, intellectualism and cunning in the market-place tend to take its place as the highest ideal, resulting in a situation like that in the modern West, where society has degenerated into a materialistic frenzy of greed and selfishness, ruled by animal passions. We are failing our children! Is this good enough?
When many souls are realising their true nature as Brahman, the world and rest of humankind are automatically cared for better. Practising spirituality does not mean you go and sit, meditating, in a mountain cave all your life, while the rest of humanity is burning in a pit of immorality and delusion. It may have been possible in previous ages, when the world was more peaceful and spiritual, but that is certainly not the case now. When you become more spiritual, you see everyone as Brahman, your very self, struggling for liberation from the sufferings of the material world and realisation of their true, divine nature. When you see someone suffering, you feel their pain, you want to help them to realise Truth as you feel that if they have not realised Truth, you yourself have not realised Truth. You help people out of pure, unqualified love, not out of selfish personal interest, helping only in cases in which you think you can get something in return. That is not love, it is business. Materialistic people choose their occupation according to what they want just for themselves. Spiritual people sacrifice their own wants for the greater good; their occupation is chosen according to what the world needs, and they work constantly and tirelessly with one-pointed concentration on the goal. Don't want anything for yourself, don't want enlightenment even, only want to experience pure love for all to achieve Absolute Selflessness, for you will see that that is the most rewarding and the very highest form of life.
There are different levels of help that we can give. The lowest kind of help is material help. If someone is dying of starvation, obviously, some material help is needed urgently, but in normal cases, donating some food to a poor family every month will, admittedly ensure they never starve, but it is only a short-term solution, as they will develop a dependency on you and it is not obvious how they will improve their lot in a meaningful way. Even saving a life is only an incomplete, short-term solution. You save the life of someone with nothing, and then what will they do? Drag on in the same old animal life for a few years, then die again. In the context of Eternity, this achieves nothing for the person whose life you have saved. Saving someone's life is not giving them life, it is only giving them existence. This is not enough! What we want to do is not just help people, but help them to help themselves. Intellectual help is a much higher form of help than material help, as it allows people to become independent, developing their creativity, and it has a longer-term effect. We also need more qualifications to give intellectual help. Only someone educated to Phd level in mathematics himself can teach mathematics Phds. If anyone else tries to do this, they will only make a mess. However, just because you are intellectual and rich does not mean you are now happy. The reaction of a rich, intellectual person to a robbery, insult or death in the family is not necessarily going to be any different from anyone else's reaction. An intellectual is not a sage.
The highest kind of help you can give is spiritual help. Only a true sage, one who has mastered life, is qualified to give that kind of help. Having mastered life does not mean that you have roamed about the world, tried out many things and read some books. It means that you have mastered your mind, can make it silent at will and thereby open the sluice-gate of your heart so that wisdom and love flow out, engulfing all in its path. Achieving this cannot be done on your own in an arbitrary way. To become a professor in mathematics, first you have to find a professor in mathematics. To become a sage, first you have to find a sage. Anything you do beforehand is just preparing the ground. Mathematics is passed from an intellect to an intellect. Wisdom is passed from a heart to a heart. To make people perfect, first you have to make yourself perfect. If you try to give genuine spiritual help when you are not a sage, you will only make a mess. When the blind lead the blind, everyone falls into the ditch. In such cases, the person teaching will make mistakes as he will be talking much of the time from the limited intellect and not from the heart. A true sage hardly even has to think to impart wisdom as it automatically flows out from his heart. When speaking from his realisation, he is also always correct, as the wisdom of Brahman, which is what is being channelled, is omniscient. Furthermore, when a sage speaks on wisdom, the words are automatically spoken with spiritual force, a kind of energy that hits the listener, making the information more likely to register. Out of every person comes some kind of energy, whether positive or negative, and this can be felt and it affects other people, especially when there is a large concentration of people with similar, extreme feelings like at a football match. The most useful kind of energy is spiritual energy, as it is the only kind of energy that will spiritualise you, raise you up from the low level of the mundane world, and only a deeply spiritual person projects enough of this to make a real difference. If you try to teach spirituality without the spiritual realisations, you will find that nobody will listen to you, or, if they do, they will eventually lose interest and float away. A university professor of philosophy and a saint could say the same things, but people that study under a philosophy professor just go to the lecture and then go home, whereas those that visit a saint follow him about everywhere, doing everything for him, and eventually become enlightened. Even simply observing a sage is an excellent spiritual education. He talks the highest philosophy, then you observe his life, which is a practical demonstration of that philosophy. The intellectual just talks wisdom, he does not practise it, or if he does, he stops when the going gets tough. This is a kind of hypocrisy.
It is everyone's destiny to become a prophet, the personification of wisdom, love and selflessness. It is the very pinnacle of the pyramid of human life. there is nothing higher that can be achieved. It is within the reach of every human being, the only true requirement is the sincere longing to do it. There was once a young man who wanted to become a sage. He heard of an old master that was capable of turning people into sages quickly, so he went to see him. When he met him, he said, "sir, I want to become a sage!" The old sage simply shut his eyes and smiled to himself. The young man, puzzled at this response, turned round and went home. The next day, he visited the old master again, but got the same response. The young man, however, very much wanted to be a sage, so back he went every day for a week. On the seventh day, he said again, "sir, I want to be a sage!" This time, the old master said, "come with me for a swim in the river". Thereupon they both walked down to the ghat. The old man jumped into the water, and the young man followed him. Then the old man grabbed the young man's head and forced it under the water, until the young man was nearly drowned. Then he pulled him to the ghat. When the young man had recovered, the old man asked him, "what did you want when you were in the water?" "A breath of air." "How much did you want a breath of air?" "More than anything in the world." "When you want to become a sage as much as you wanted a breath of air when you were in the water, you will become one in an instant."
If you sincerely want to become a sage, if you sincerely want to feel pure love, the Bliss of Brahman manifesting in your heart, if you sincerely have the longing to open yourself up to the highest wisdom flowing up from the depths of your being, if you sincerely want to attain to that pinnacle of the pyramid of life, if you feel that you have within you the makings of a world-mover, and not just a shaker of the pot, the world is in sore need of such as you now, but the first thing you must do is achieve enlightenment like Buddha of old, and that you will only be able to do in the company of enlightened seers. It is said that someone became a prophet in the middle of the barren deserts of Arabia so many hundreds of years ago. If someone could achieve that in the middle of the desert, then that is surely proof that you can do it too. What matters it if it happened so long ago, for Brahman is eternal, all-pervading, and resting within your own heart. Time is but an illusion, the time of prophets is only past when you succumb to weakness and believe it is past. Your very life is proof that Brahman exists, how can you say that you have no latent divinity to manifest? Say not that you are small, you are weak, for you are the eternal, all-pervading, omniscient, omnipotent Brahman. What is, therefore, the maximum amount of power you can channel? All the power in the universe! You are wisdom, you are love, you are bliss, how little you know your strength! All you need to do is develop the longing to do it, and together we must create an army of divinely inspired sages to deliver this barren materialistic wasteland and found a new long-lasting spiritual civilisation based on wisdom and love alone.