“Master, carest thou not that we perish?” sighed the disciples of Jesus, awakening him from sleep. An angry storm was howling around and proud waves were beating into the ship. He in his divine way rebuked the wind and commanded the sea to be still and lo! there followed a calm. He swung toward them and inquired, “How is that ye have no faith? How could a ship, carrying a divine cargo, ever be drowned?”
The anecdote is pregnant with a psycho-spiritual significance. The journey of a seeking soul across the glittering waters of Matter is often beset with high winds of emotions and lashed by bold waves of temptations and disappointment. Minds that are feeble and unpossessed of the single idea of Christ-consciousness, shiver with an unmerited fear of collapse, blindly doubting the unseen care. Behold the ardent seekers who have abundantly tasted of the cup of Realization! Unflinchingly sanguine about the ultimate goodness of all things and all events that may come to pass, they firmly stand rooted in their faith and tide over the boisterous seas of life. Flesh and Matter stop their bickerings, no sooner the Christ-within cries out, “Peace, be still”; a silent calmness gradually creeps into the mind-world of the seer. The faithful never perish; seeming destruction descends only on the faithless.
What is faith? Faith is knowledge, I mean the knowledge of Divine Laws that are behind causation of things and events. Scores of apparent and superficial reasons and causes may conspire for the occurrence of a certain event, but an intelligent enquiry thru the searching eye of the inner soul will make the astounding disclosure that everything is reducible to One Divine Will.
One student remarked to me, “Ah, dear teacher, you are preaching the philosophy of fatalism.”
“Pardon me, dear student,” I said unhesitatingly, “we are not preaching the philosophy of fatalism; rather fatalism of your philosophy, if you please.”
Materialistic philosophy is very nervous about such teachings. It falsely accuses such a doctrine of taking the dominance of Free Will out of man’s activities that has spurred human progress, and claims that it hopelessly relegates everything to a blind-folded Cosmic Will.
What is the Divine Cosmic Will and what is your Free Will? What I so loudly proclaim as my individual Free Will is nothing but a ray radiating from the Cosmic Will. It is, of course, endowed with all possible freedom to pick up its own course in Space and Time,—because it is a part of the divine will which is ever-free—yet it is not without interference from other independent free-wills that also parade in the universe.
For this account Jesus said, “Love thy neighbors as thyself;” that is to say, you must have respect for the rights of your neighboring free-wills. There you are. In this interaction of free-wills, what happens? The one that functions in conformity with its divine nature or in other words in co-operation with the Parent Will, ultimately wins.
My loving mother used to say, “Good men live in God and the bad ones by themselves. Good men live the life while they live. Even when they die, in hearts of man they live. Bad men live and mark what life they live. And when they die, to the world a complete death they die.”
Free-willers, know first this Mother Will, then your free-will will be free.
A friend of mine once narrated a very interesting story to me:
Somewhere in the other side of this world, while strolling seemingly all care-free, the spirit of Napoleon happened to meet the spirit of Caesar. Unceremoniously said Napoleon’s spirit to Caesar’s, “Friend! both of us were made of the same indomitable will-force while we trod on earth. I still feel proud to think that once we wanted a thing, we had it.”
Caesar’s ghost scratched his head in doubt and pointedly replied, “Well, I am not quite sure. But about one thing I am positive. You never wanted St. Helena.”
The free will of man conquers unceasingly countries after countries, but there comes a time when the Mother Will commands a halt. The human will is free, because it is a limb of the divine will, which is free. Human will is on the other hand unfree and bound, because it belongs to the divine will. It is free in its expression and movement. But the moment it takes a tangential flight away from the center, the divine will brings it back, holding it by its neck! Let free-will freely do mischief to the world and see how long it is free to deter its own annihilation. Such free-will kills its own freedom.
However, there is no waste in the scheme of God’s nature, may it be physical or moral. Even during the catastrophic march of Napoleonic free-will, blessings of human liberty were scattered all around, altho the wings of his free will were broken by the Parent Will for his betrayal of the divine task of man. The divine law takes its own care. It works out its own way. How strangely, even in the worst mishaps of man, there lies the seed of final good. Who knows that out of the fallen glory and torments of his powerful soul, in his solitary confinement, a new radiant soul of a different type was not born in the great son of Corsica, for a still more wondrous victory in a future life? God spreads His mercy thru the lava-storm of a volcanic crater as much as He does thru the sweet breath of a saintly soul, provided we have the eyes to see the viewpoint of His cosmic necessity.
What is faith then? Faith is Knowledge in the two Laws. The one acknowledges the infinite possibility of each unit, whereas the other establishes the truth of the ultimate victory and goodness of the whole. The whole contains all units. the whole is good, true and beautiful. So is the nature of each unit, the whole is contained of. The surface complexion or external behaviour of each unit or each individual may sometimes appear incongruent, tho at bottom each is fitting and beautiful in its own place. It is just a visual deception on account of the relative vastness of the whole.
It is this way.
Holding out a snatched petal of a rose, a child shrieked, “O gardener, you say the rose is so beautiful; where is its beauty?” The gardener looked up to the child and smilingly said, “Give me that, darling, I will show you.” He went into the garden, plucked a full-bloomed rose and fingered that solitary petal into the crowd of happy petals. “Would you like to have this flower?” queried the old man. “Oh! how beautiful!” ejaculated the child.
Take off a petal of one’s life or a petal of an event out of the conglomeration of cosmic events, at random, and you will assuredly miss the beauty, goodness and truth of the whole. Link it with the scheme of the whole and see what grandeur there is in the cosmic rose.
According to the Hindu conception which has been so ably clarified by our teacher, Swami Yogananda, in his Science of Religion, the Whole, the All, the Divine, or God, is ever-conscious, ever-existent, and ever-blissful. So is the human unit. This profound faith in the unit and the whole, self and all-self, unit event and great cause, a free will and cosmic will, or in other words man and God, brings what the sage says is “nectar of immortality.”
Once a neophyte pointed out, “You are free to act; but your free acts are also free to follow their course and reap fruits accordingly.”
A learned ascetic explained to me once in a terse way:
“Move on, motion is life. But move around the point in a circle, then you will never slip and suffer.”
“What is that point,” demanded I in my ignorance.
“That point is God,” came the answer.
“Then am I a mere automaton, moving in the same path around the same God?”
“No, my boy. Extend your radius and make the circle bigger and bigger every time until it disappears into the Infinite,” explained the master.
So if we have faith enough to know that we have the power to extend the radius of our life to move in a bigger and greater circle of responsibility and duty, around the center of our God, such powers are possible to us that may move mountains and bid to the ocean “Be still.”
Author: Brahmacharee Nerode
Source: East-West Magazine, mysticalportal.net
