Miami, Sunday April 1, 2001
Beautiful Sailors of Love,
May you all receive the choicest blessings of God and gurus for your noble work. I am so happy to see so many joyful souls in our group, both in São Paolo and Brasilia, who want to sail on the Eternal Ocean of Light, and meet kindred souls and invite as many "passengers" as possible in our endless journey…
A few points I wanted to share with you all:
- For your interest, February 26, 2001 at 9:30 p.m. is the official birthday of the Ark of Love. In Vedic astrology, this would make it a little Aquarius baby, with its Moon in Pisces (conjoined with Venus) and its Ascendant in Libra. We should joyfully celebrate the birth of this baby every year with a special program.
- I am sponsoring a couple of orphanages and schools for tribal children in India. The idea came to me to organize regular correspondence between these children in India and our Ark of Love kids. They could share ideas, discover each other's culture and religion, and dream the future together. This is in line to promote tolerance, appreciation of other religions and cultures, as well as the whole idea of "Kids helping Kids".
- Along similar lines, a devotee made a very nice proposition while I was in Brasilia: she wanted to involve her own children in the work of the ARCA DO AMOR. This beautiful idea has two benefits:
1. it is a way to expose our own children to the condition of other less fortunate children, and encourage them to help and do something about this situation-in other words, to develop moral and spiritual consciousness in them in a very practical, natural way.
2. it also gives a chance for the street children to communicate with their own peers, and share with them their own wisdom, hopes and dreams, and their pain and fears. They would probably open much more than with adults, and feel more secure that no one is trying to cheat them.
Please give some thought to this.
Now I want to tell you a few stories about a very important topic: Timing.
Remain actively calm and calmly active
- Paramahamsa Yogananda
Hurry is the enemy of spiritual work. Please remember this: a sense of urgency is usually a prompting from the ego to sabotage our spiritual work. It happens in meditation, in social work, and in personal relationships. At the other extreme, inaction is also the enemy. The spiritual path lies between the two. This is why all the spiritual masters have always preached to "hasten slowly".
There is a beautiful symbol about this. Titus, the emperor of Rome, created during his reign a coin bearing the symbol of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor. The dolphin was considered as the swiftest fish, able to shift direction in a split second. The anchor on the other hand, represented delay and stubbornness. Together, they symbolized the failure that comes from rushing into something and the failure that is the result of hesitation apathy. Through the years the dolphin and anchor have been used as a family crest with the explanatory motto festina lente, "Hasten slowly." It expresses moderation between two opposing ideas. In leadership it means the middle way between acting too quickly and waiting too long.
Ramakrishna spent years meditating alone and worshipping the Divine Mother, waiting for his chosen disciples to be sent to them by God. When his first close disciples arrived, he did not tell them to launch immediately into service to the poor. He trained them for years, very patiently, on how to be calm, how to see God in each other, how to love unconditionally first. It was only many years later that his disciples started social work. Throughout their life, these disciples stayed together and helped each other and left an enormous spiritual and social legacy to the world. Today the Ramakrishna Mission is the biggest spiritual organization in the world dedicated to education, welfare, and relief-and a model for us all to study and learn from. Why? Because they invested in time to learn calmness and equanimity first.
Baba Hariharananda used to go in the 1970s to a country in South America. But he saw that the group was lacking maturity, and after 1975 he stopped all Kriya activities there. It was only in 1998—23 YEARS LATER—that he allowed Kriya to return to this country, where it is now flourishing marvelously. There is a divine timing for everything.
In order to prepare ourselves for the immense task ahead of us, my loving ones, we need to hasten slowly. I am not interested in training heroes who jump into the fire… because they may then get burned out after a short while. To jump into the fire of action is very easy to do-it makes us feel good about ourselves, it gets some immediate results, and a lot of attention. But that is not the path of yoga. We should build a strong and lasting bond of love and mutual appreciation among ourselves first. I want to recruit guardian angels who will look after the material and spiritual needs of abandoned children, as a mission for life!
Beloved, we should always remember that all our work is just the means to achieve an end. And what is the end? To love. Nothing less, nothing more. St Benedict, the founder of the Christian monastic tradition, said "Monasteries are places where people go to learn the art of loving." This is what the Ark of Love is about.
If the means interferes with the end, we should not hesitate to cut back, postpone, or redirect the means... until we feel that Love moves us again. There are unlimited resources when you do God's work. Many obstacles will appear, but in the end truth and love ALWAYS win. It is an eternal law.
So even if, before we go into action, we needed to spend one whole year to learn how to function as a harmonious spiritual family, where all our values are dictated by a deep-rooted respect, appreciation and love for God in all His many forms-that would be time well spent, believe me. Misery has existed on the surface of this planet since the first family incarnated on earth, where one brother immediately killed his brother. Waiting a few months will not make a difference in the overall balance of human misery. First we must learn how to kill the enemy in our own heart. "If we do not learn how to live together like brothers, we will perish like fools together." said Martin Luther King Jr.
I am pledging my life-long commitment to you all to always help you in attaining your divine perfection. I only desire that you all become free while living here on earth, and help Baba and the Masters to free many more of God's suffering children. So always strive to be pure, perfect, and spotless in all your thoughts, words, and actions.
I bow to you both with immense love and adoration and respect. You are the Light of this World. God bless you always in this noble mission.
Humble,
Swami Sarveshwarananda |
