Part VI

You have lost your dearest son⁶

Quite recently you have lost your dearest son. I, too, have lost my dearest sister two months ago, and last year I lost my dearest brother. So you and I are sailing in the same boat.

We have to know our capacity and God’s Capacity. As He is infinite in everything, His Love for us is also infinite. We love our dear ones according to our limited capacity, but God loves our dear ones with His infinite Love. God gave you a piece of candy in the form of a most promising son. You were very, very, very happy. As He gives the candy, even so, He has the right to take it away. If He takes something away from us after He has given it to us, it is not because He is displeased with us in any way, but because He wants to give us something more beautiful, more precious and more significant.

God is preparing us to widen our hearts to become one with others’ sufferings, the sufferings of the world. Otherwise, it is all theoretical. When we hear that someone has died, our mind is shocked. Our heart may suffer to some extent, or even to a great extent. But our heart does not swim in the sea of tears. Our heart does not bleed. But when we have personal experiences, when we become victim to heartbreaking experiences, our heart expands unimaginably, either consciously or unconsciously.

We have to know to whom our child actually belongs. We brought the child into this earth-planet. Naturally, we can claim the child. Then who is going to claim us? Who is going to claim our forefathers? Only one Person can rightly and justifiably claim our forefathers, our fathers and our children, and that Person is God Himself.

One who is actually the Owner can have his ownership back whenever He wants to. The Owner can hire me, and He has hired many other workers as well. Suppose the owner of a bank has made somebody the manager, and the manager sees that among the workers he has a very promising worker. If the owner of the bank wants that most promising worker at another branch of the bank, who can stop him? Nobody. The present bank manager may feel it is a tremendous loss, but it is not the loss of the owner. The owner needed that particular worker to work somewhere else. Now, the present manager feels extremely sad that he has lost a very important worker, but we have to surrender willingly or unwillingly to the Owner. And if we do surrender cheerfully, then the Owner will be highly pleased with us and He will make us into His choice instrument for His manifestation on earth.

The body of your son is no longer with us, but the spirit is here, there, everywhere. If we enter into the spiritual life, then we see that God loves each and every human being infinitely more than we can ever love them. What is more, He loves them infinitely more than we can ever imagine. Now, you, as the father of your son, and your wife, as the mother of her son, have tremendous love for your dearest son. But Who has given this love to you both to start with? We must feel that the real Possessor has taken His possession back, to use His possession in an infinitely better way.

We all know that whoever loves a person most, rightly deserves him. God definitely loves your dear son infinitely more than both of you can ever love him. But by taking our dearest ones from us, God in a way is helping us to become not only impersonal, but also universal.

Thirty years ago, I went to my dentist. He was telling me, “Ghose, I have a client whom I like very much. Yesterday he lost his brother. He and his brother were extremely, extremely close to each other. They could not stay separated even for a fleeting hour. Therefore, I wanted to console him. To my greatest surprise, he illumined me. He said to me, ‘True, my brother and I were almost inseparable, but I know there is Someone who loves my brother infinitely more than I do. And I also know that He has taken my brother to Him, and nobody else can dare to do it. He who loves my brother infinitely more than I do, will He not keep my brother happy, happier, happiest and safe, safer, safest? He definitely will. My brother definitely will be happy because Someone loves my brother infinitely more than I do. Therefore, he has gone to Him. So I am now not heartbroken. My life also will end at God’s choice Hour. Let me be happy in God’s Happiness.’” So the dentist was illumined and I, too, was illumined then and there.

You are a Reverend. You have lost one son, but you have many, many followers and admirers. God wants you to have all of them as your sons. As a matter of fact, God is telling you, “I am taking from you only one, but in return I am giving you many, many, many more children. Please take responsibility for all the children of Mine that you encounter on earth who come for your sermons.”

Now I wish to tell you, Reverend, how you and your wife can console yourselves and even get inner joy from your outer loss. Please keep around yourselves as many pictures as possible of your beloved son at different times of his life. Please write down your sweetest memories of your beloved son. Then, from time to time, read those memories and become the sweetness, beauty, reality and divinity of your son’s life. While you are trying to grow into the memories, feel that your son is not only with you and in you, but for you.

There are two ways for you to commune with your son in the inner world: with your heart’s cries and soul’s smiles. Through prayers, we develop our heart’s cries. Through meditations, we develop our soul’s smiles. Either of these two can be applicable to commune with your beloved son or to derive joy from merely thinking of him. One way is to cry and bind your beloved son. The other way is to smile and feel that he is simply having a new journey. It is like a son going to a university. He was brought up in a village. Now he has gone to a distant town to take a higher course. The mother can cry because she will not see her son as before. Again, the father can be happy that his son is going far away. He will be a great scholar, and the family will be glorified by him.

So we should feel that our dearest one has outwardly left us to perform a special mission at another place. Then, if we are wise, if we are in our soul, we will tell him, “Go forward! You are paving the way. From Heaven, when we brought you down to this earth-planet, we paved the way for you. Now you are paving the way for us from earth to enter into Heaven.”

When we bring dear ones into the world, we pave the way for them. When the dear ones leave, we should feel that they are going ahead of us to pave the way and show us that we can become true members of the universal family, instead of remaining a member of one single family.

First the parents show the way to the child. Then the children can show the way to the parents. The parents do not feel miserable at that time. They say to themselves, “We gave him what we had and what we are. Now he is giving us what he has and what he is.”

Life and death are like two rooms. Going from life to death is like going from one room to the other. Life is our living-room and death is our bedroom. In our living-room, we have to work and be active and show ourselves. In our bedroom, we take rest, we sleep. There we do not have to show our existence to anybody; we are only for ourselves.

Life is Eternity’s Road. Each human being is a traveller on Eternity’s Road. Death is a series of stopovers before the traveller reaches his Immortality’s Shore.