Holy Company ??

Devotee: “What is the good of Holy company?”

Master: It begets yearning for God. It begets love of God. Nothing what so ever is achieved in spiritual life without yearning. By constantly living in the company of holy men, the soul becomes restless for God. This yearning is like the state of mind of a man who has someone ill in the family. His mind is in the state of perpetual restlessness, thinking how the sick person my be cured. Or again, one should feel a yearning for God like the yearning of a man who has lost his job and is wandering from one office to another for the search of work. If he is rejected at a certain place which has no vacancy, he goes there again the next day to inquires, “Is there any vacancy today?”

There is another way:” earnestly praying to God. God is our very own. We should say to Him.: ‘O God, what is thy nature? Reveal Thyself to me. Thou must show Thyself to me; for why else hast Thou created me?’. Some Sikh devotees once said to me, ‘God is full of compassion/’ I said: ‘But why should we call Him compassionate? He is our creator. What is there to be wondered at if He is kind to us? Parents bring up their children. Do you call that an act of kindness? They must act that way.’ Therefore we should force our demands on God. He is our  Father and Mother, isn’t He? If the son demands his patrimony, and gives up drink and food in order to enforce his demands, then parents hand his share over to him three years before the legal time, Or when the child demand some pice from his mother, over and over again ,’Mother give me a couple of pice, I beg you on my knees!’, then the mother seeing his earnestness, and unable to bear it any more, tosses the money to him.

“There is another benefit from the Holy company. It helps one cultivate discrimination between the Real and unreal. God alone is Real that is to say, the Eternal Substance, and the world is unreal, that is to say, transitory. As soon as the man finds his mind wandering away to the unreal, he should apply discrimination. The moment the elephant stretches out his trunk to eat a plantain tree in a neighbor’s garden, it gets a blow from the iron goad of the driver.”