Is God Unfair?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  Absolutely! Saints used to be warriors. Vishwamitra, Parshuram, etc. There are so many Rishis in Shrimad Bhagvatam who were warriors. Guru Gobindji raised this slogan, 'Sant sipahi bano' (a saint should become warrior).
In fact only a saint should be a warrior. If someone whose heart is clean becomes a warrior, then good will happen for everyone. If an angry, greedy, arrogant person becomes a warrior, then he will just mess up.
Mahatma Gandhi is also in that category, he was a saint as well as a warrior.

In each one of us there is a saint and a soldier, wake them up, it is time. There is an opportunity in India, in 2014, to be a sant sipahi (saint who is a soldier). Wake up the lion asleep in you. India has fallen, in every way it has fallen. In the world of spirituality also, strange things are being heard. Too much degradation. So, the politics of this country should be cleaned up first. You should stand up for that. Look, if we hire a guard at home, we only give a duty of 8 hours to the guard, isn’t it?
In a day, there are 3 guards. Their duty changes in 8 hours, because they get tired after 8 hours! So, when at home, we change guards every 8 hours, how will it work if we keep the same guard for 10 years!
If you drag a tired person and insist him to guard, is it injustice or not. It is against the labor laws (laughter). A change is required. Time and again, a change is required.

See, we are not of any one party, we belong to everyone. A supreme court’s justice is not for any one party, it is for everyone, isn’t it? The country’s president is for everyone. Similarly, we are for everyone. So we can say, change is needed. And getting the change is in your hands.

Okay, if a change is needed, should we just get any new person?
If you give a broom to someone to clean, they should be told that first the verandah needs to be cleaned, then the house needs to be cleaned from inside. If a broom has been given, and you say, 'Clean the verandah now', and immediately say, 'Clean up inside also now', neither the verandah nor the inside of the house will be clean.
Also, always see which hand is holding the broom. See that it doesn’t so happen that the person you want to change comes back in another form. Be alert on this. Give strength to the country, work for the strength. I am not talking of any one person, but a change is needed. Tell the person on duty that if they are little tired, take a little rest! If you keep working without any rest, scam upon scam will go on. So we should be aware. Everyone should work for a change.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  You know, people who abuse, either they have been victims or they are ignorant. If they are ignorant, it is not their fault. They have never been educated. You have to have pity for them, compassion for them. And if they are victims themselves, then they inturn become culprits, then also they need compassion. They never got a chance to know about themselves, they never got a chance to control their emotions. They were not taught how to control their tendencies, or how to get out of the bad habits that they had cultivated. This guidance was missing.
When you see from this angle, you will find that inside every culprit there is a victim crying for help. And when you recognize the victim inside the culprit, your anger, hatred, and frustration will simply drop. You don’t have to do anything, it will just disappear.

So this is why I say, see the situation from a broader perspective. And forgive for your own sake, not for their sake. When you forgive, what happens? At least your mind gets free from that past, from that trauma, and you move forward.
And help others, there are so many other people who are getting into that trap. See what you can do to help them. This is what we should do. See the past as destiny, the future as freewill and in the present be dynamic, be active. Do the best you can to the world around you.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: 

There were no televisions in those days, the humans had to train their minds in such a way. We don’t know how much time he must have taken, meditating to enable him to see things. But it is possible. We all have this power. If the heart is clean and the mind is silent, then if we sit and focus on something, it’s happenings keep occurring to us. It’s also called intuition, or intuitive awareness.
How many of you have experienced this? (Many hands go up)
It increases with meditation.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  Neither money is bad nor are you. Don’t treat anything or anyone as bad – not money and not oneself. If you want to be greedy, be greedy for seva (service). If you treat it as bad, then you will be stuck. Nothing is bad.
Why do you blame? In our country, money is treated as Lakshmi (goddess of wealth), Lakshmi certainly isn’t bad.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  Of course! We all share the same air, the same sun. We are all on the same planet Earth! You can never stop the air from flowing from India to the Gulf, and sometimes from the Gulf to India. It is not possible!
Mohammad Paigambar, the Prophet Mohammad, himself said that he gets a cool breeze from India. And that has been the story for centuries! There has always been harmony in India.

When people were prosecuted elsewhere, this land kept its harmony throughout. The Jewish people were prosecuted elsewhere, and when they came to India, they were welcomed here. Nobody was prosecuted in this country. The Jews were not prosecuted, the Parsis were not prosecuted, Muslims were never.

Christians were here in the 1st century. One of the apostles of Jesus Christ, Thomas, came to India. He was called 'The doubting Thomas'. He came to India and he was welcomed. So this is a land where harmony in diversity has always been acknowledged. So there are many common things. I have also written a book called 'Islam and Hinduism', you may pick up the common thread, the common things between the two religions. Similarly, I have said something about Christianity and Hinduism, you can pick it up.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  I in fact, don’t want my photo to be everywhere. I tell people, but they do the same things, they bring it.
Dr. Lawrence Carter also made a portrait of me in Atlanta (laughter). A huge big portrait and put it in the hall of fame there, in the university.

I want to tell you one incident. I was once travelling in a plane and there was a politician, a minister travelling in that same plane. When we got down, the politician was trying to come out, but there were about 200 people trying to give him a garland, and he was refusing. He was running around saying, 'No, no, don’t give me a garland. I am a simple man, don’t honor me'. And the whole drama happened for about half an hour. In his refusing the garland, he made it into a big scene.
I said, 'If they brought it with so much love, you should have just taken it and moved on!' The whole thing would’ve finished in 2-3 minutes.
In Ashtavakra Gita it is said, your wanting something or refusing something, both are same.

You know, for almost 10 years we had no pamphlets, and no photo of mine was published anywhere; in magazines, newspapers, nowhere. For 10 years, we didn’t do any printing, it was all by word of mouth – if you benefit, tell your friend. And they tell their friends. So everything was happening by word of mouth. But when it became larger, people said, 'No, we have to do this'. So to give information we started letters. Then printing, and the magazines, all these things started later to keep people informed.
Those days there was no twitter, not even cell phones. The only way was through magazines or newsletters.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: 

Humanism. If religion is devoid of humanism, only violence will exist in the pretext of religion. If you don’t consider that all the people on the planet belong to you, belonging to one God, and if you think they are your enemies, they are bound to fight. This whole problem in the world today on the pretext of religion is unfortunate.

It first appears like the fight is between Muslims and Jews, or Christians and Muslims, or Muslims and Hindus; these are all appearances. If you go a little deeper, you will find people are fighting even amongst themselves. Among Muslims, among Christians, and among Hindus there is fight. So inter-religious and intra-religious fights and conflicts are happening all around the world. And the main reason is not God, or the prophet, or the philosophy, the main problem is personal egos. It is peoples' ego and narrow mindedness that is the cause, and they use religion as a pretext to bring out of all their pent up anger, frustration and stress, because nobody ever taught them how to get rid of stress and be free, and to live in the moment and be happy. Nobody taught them how to look at everybody with compassion. This teaching, this technique was missing.

Not all the people are like this. There are good people in every religion. And there are so many good people who are striving for the betterment of humanity, in all the religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism, Islam, Hinduism, everywhere there are good people. There are only a few people who create conflict; they need help. They need help rather than condemnation.
It is easy to condemn a bad guy, but that is not going to help. We need to bring the transformation of hearts and minds. That is what the role of spirituality is. Spirituality unites people of all religions and makes them experience the one truth, the one love that we are all made up of.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: 

Dharma is that which upholds you. Truth, honesty, compassion, service – these are all in one word called dharma. Duty, one's nature, virtues, values – if you want to put one word in which all of them come together, we say dharma. That which gives you comfort, that which uplifts your spirit, that which upholds your mind, body and soul complex, that is dharma.