The Culture of Spirituality
To save our own freedom, we have to tolerate the freedom
of others. And to save our own spirituality, we have to
overlook the misuse of freedom by others.
I was born in a village in Uttar Pradesh, where, at an early age, I witnessed an incident so upsetting that I have never been able to get it out of my mind. Even today I have a vivid memory of it.
Outside my village there was a mango tree, which was laden with fruit. One day I saw a village boy throwing stones at the tree till mangoes rained down on him. What shocked me was that the boy was giving the mango tree stones, while the tree was giving him fruit in return.
I did not react to this incident, but I learned a positive lesson from it. I felt at that moment that I was in the school of nature, which was teaching me this: ‘If someone throws stones at you, even then you should give him fruits in return.’ This would epitomise the highest of values in life. Moreover, this is the greatest way to further one’s intellectual and spiritual development.
In the present world, someone or the other is bound to ‘throw stones’ at you. If you react, you will get nothing but anger in return. But if you curb any reaction on your part, you will have demonstrated certain very great things – the spirit of tolerance, the spirit of forgiveness and the capacity to maintain your positivity even in negative situations.
Later on in life, I discovered that in this world of problems, this is the only way to maintain one’s spirituality. This is the only way of living by which you can satisfactorily develop your personality.
This was the first lesson of my life. This lesson told me what spiritual culture was, how one could maintain one’s mental balance sufficiently to develop a spiritual personality. In my childhood, I understood this lesson unconsciously, but in my later life, this lesson became rooted in my conscious mind. Now it has become second nature to me. Having a nature like this has proved invaluable.
I can say that I am an even-tempered person who is not easily provoked or who allows his thinking to become negative. I live with a hate-free mind in the complete sense of the word. Having such a personality is my greatest asset, and perhaps the credit goes to the village boy who made me learn this lesson through a shocking experience.
We all love freedom. Everyone wants to live with total freedom. But this freedom culture creates a very serious problem. That is, when I exercise my freedom, say, by swinging my arms, it is very likely that I hit another person’s nose. The freedom of one person can be a problem for another. Such a situation is an integral part of our lives. No one has the power to eliminate this problem.
When we react to a negative experience and start fighting with another person, we are not merely fighting with a person, but are rather infringing upon with his freedom, which is part of nature and not part of that person. Because we cannot abolish freedom, the result will be that we will be fighting all the time. Thus, we will live in frustration and negativity, and that being so, we will lose our greatest assets – spirituality and positive thinking.
To save our own freedom, we have to tolerate the freedom of others. And to save our own spirituality, we have to overlook the misuse of freedom by others. We have to ignore others’ undesirable behaviour in order to ensure that our own personality development will proceed along the right lines.
This is the wise way of living in this world. It is the way of patience. It is, in the last analysis, the realistic approach to life. We must simply accept things as they are.
