The message of divine freedom

There was once a spiritual Master who was very kind, very affectionate to his disciples. He used to use his occult and spiritual power to help them in every possible way. Very often he took on himself illness from the disciples who were close to him. He knew that if he accepted the punishment which they deserved according to the cosmic law, then his disciples would remain safe. So hundreds and thousands of times he took on his own body the punishment that belonged to his disciples.

One day the Master fell down and he broke his knee while descending a staircase. He was taken to the hospital immediately. The doctors did what they could, but the pain was excruciating. The spiritual Master was given chloroform, and he had to go through some surgery.

Many disciples came to the hospital to see the Master, but the doctors did not allow them in. Only one or two selected disciples were allowed to go into his room. The Master remained in a coma for quite a long time.

Now at one point, during a brief interval when there was nobody in the Master’s room, not even a nurse, it happened that the Master disappeared. The doctors and disciples searched all over for him, but the Master was nowhere to be found.

“Where has he gone? The Master was in a coma and he had a broken knee. How could he disappear?” they all asked one another. “We don’t know,” was the invariable answer.

The Master had used his occult power to return to his own house, and when the disciples who had been at the hospital finally returned there, they were astonished to find the Master in his own bed giving sermons to some of his disciples. Three of the disciples who had been at the hospital asked the Master, “How and why did you do it? Since you have such capacity, why did you allow yourself to break your knee in the first place? Why did you allow us to take you to the hospital? And why did you disappear in this occult way?”

The Master said, “First I made an experiment with my spiritual oneness. Then I made an experiment of my human oneness. Finally I made myself one with my spiritual reality again.”

The disciples could not understand this, and they asked the Master to be more explicit.

The Master said, “I allowed my knee to be fractured because I had to save seven close disciples. Two or three of them would have been in the other world, and the rest would have committed serious blunders and immediately fallen to the level of my seventh class disciples or I would have had to ask them to leave my Centre at once, if I had not hurt my knee. In order to protect and save them, in order to fight against their ignorance, I had to break my knee and take all their karma.

“Then the natural course is to go to a doctor. With my spiritual oneness I saved them, taking their punishment on myself. And then, because of my oneness with medical science, with human knowledge, I allowed myself to be taken to the doctor. The doctors helped me according to their own capacity. I take spiritual help from within to help my disciples, and I take human help, medical help, from without to save myself.

“When I knew that I had suffered enough and the law of karma was over, then I used my spiritual power, spiritual capacity, spiritual light, spiritual reality, again. We start with spiritual oneness, then go on to human oneness, then go back to the oneness where nothing is affected, where it is all Light and Delight, and the message of divine Freedom is omnipresent.”

From:Sri Chinmoy,The ascent and descent of the disciples, Aum Press, 1973
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/add