Duty Supreme

The poet sang:

I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty.
I woke and found that life was Duty.

Duty and Beauty are like the North Pole and the South Pole.

What is Beauty? Beauty is the oneness of the finite and the Infinite. Beauty is the expression of the Infinite through man the finite. Beauty is man's embodiment of God, the Infinite. In the material world, in the physical world, it is through Beauty that God reveals Himself.

The Beauty of the soul is Beauty unparalleled in the physical world. This Beauty inspires the outer world and fulfils the inner world. This Beauty makes us one with God's Soul, the Light Infinite. This Beauty makes us one with God's Body, the Universe. When we live in the world of aspiration, we come to realise that the transcendental Duty and the universal Beauty are the perfect expressions of one and the same Reality.

Duty. In our day today life, duty is something unpleasant, demanding and discouraging. When we are reminded of our duty, we lose all our inner, spontaneous joy. We feel miserable. We feel that we could have used our life energy for a better purpose. Only But there is another duty. We have to work. That duty we forget. In order to get our salary, we have to work. Somehow we manage to forget this. In the spiritual world also, there is a duty. This duty is to enjoy the fruit of God-Realisation. We all know it and we are extremely eager to perform this duty. But unfortunately we forget the other duty: meditation. One duty is to enjoy the fruits; the other duty is to acquire the fruits.

But we are clever enough to cry for the fruits of realisation long before we have entered into the field of meditation. No meditation, no realisation. Without meditation, God Realisation is nothing but self deception.

An aspirant has a most significant duty, and that duty is to have perfect faith in his divine possibilities. If he has faith in himself and faith in the living Guru, then he can easily perform the Supreme Duty, the duty of Self discovery, God Realisation.

---

*March 24th, 1969*
Boston University, Boston, Mass.