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180 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
thing but practices another. He says that we are all brothers—but then brother takes brother to court to fight over property and land—struggling one against the other. To gain the bliss that comes from realizing the atma, one has to put into practice a true sense of brotherliness.
There are four qualities which characterize a human being. They are love, mercy, compassion and forebearance. Unless a person has these four qualities he can be compared to an animal. Man must develop these qualities and express them in the outer world with an attitude of service and brotherliness.
The evening was long and tiring. We had been sitting all day and my four friends felt weakened and irritable. The ride back to the hotel in the dark of night was uncomfortable. There were long silences. The one or two comments indicated a general feeling that Baba’s talk was overly simple.
But this teaching of brotherhood was far from simple—simple only in appearance. Baba was actually teaching about man’s deepest spiritual insight—the way to realize union with the universal. He was teaching about the oneness of all and the way to realize it through love—as Jesus had taught in his message of brotherhood: “Do onto others as you would have others do unto you.” The message sounds simple, but what a profound cosmic vision is captured by these few simple words. Centered in the awareness that the transient, changing universe is based upon and created by an unchanging and eternal consciousness, one realizes this to be a grand affirmation of the reality of God, and of our ability to merge in Him. Baba has perhaps best captured the essence of his teaching in the following “simple” phrase, repeated over and over for the benefit of his devotees:
There is only one caste, The caste of humanity; There is only one language, The language of the heart; There is only one religion, The religion of love;
There is only one God, And He is omnipresent.


































































































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