The One Message of Saints

Saints have come to the world in every age. Whatever their country or religion may have been, their message has always been one and the same: to know God and to seek release from the cycle of births and deaths. Their teaching were never the meant to found new religions, creeds and sects. Creeds and sects breed passions which invariably lead to quarrels and conflicts, while the essence of the teachings of all saints is love and harmony among the people of the world.

While a saint is alive, we listen to his worlds, but we do not heed them. As soon as he leaves the world, we turn to rites and rituals and thus completely forget his real teachings. We begain once again to reduce his lofty teachings and the truth of his experience into creeds and sects, thereby sowing the seeds of discord and dissension. We do this, actually, for selfish reasons and justify it in the name of national honour or the prestige of traditional religion. What greater injustice could we do to these great saviours then to misinterpret and narrow down their teachings and freeze them into creeds and sects that are based upon partial or incorrect versions of their teachings? If we were to search for and study carefully the purely spiritual content of their messages with an unbiased mind, we would find that all such Masters bring the same message from the home of the lord.

All saints tell us that nothing that we see in this world has come into begin of itself. There must be some Creator; this Creator is the one Lord, the one God of us all. We remember him with love and devotion by thousends of names. He is the supereme object of our search and our spiritual yearning.

Our soul is of the essence of the Lord. We are a drop of that vast ocean of divinity, a ray of that mighty sun. As Tulsi Sahib says:

The Lord dwells in the fourth realm;

The soul is a particle of that all-knowing One.

Kabir Sahib also says:

O Kabir, the soul is a particle of God;

Though it is in the body, it is never destroyed.

Sililarly, Goswami Tulsidas says:

The soul is imperishable, being a particle of God,

Of that absolute truth, consciousness and bliss.

Guru Nanak says, “The soul is in God and God is in the soul.” To illustrate how this is possible, take the example of a banyan tree. How spacious and sprawling is this tree, but how very small is its seed! If somebody were to tell us that there lies latent in this tiny seed a mighry tree, we would not easily belive it; but when we plant the seed and nature it, the small sapling that sprouts from the seed grows in the course of time into a mighty tree. Only then do we realize that this little seed had the huge tree within itself and that the tree has in it that tiny seed and many others like it. Thus, Guru Nanak tells us that when we carry out research within ourselves in accordance with the teachings of the saints, we will discover that the soul is within the Lord and the Lord is within the soul.