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One Must Be Intensely Earnest To See God

Truly spiritual men alone can communicate the spiritual force to a word. The power of such a word will depend on the amount of the force communicated. A more spiritual man can communicate more force than one less spiritual. The incarnations are the highest manifestations of God through man. They are the repositories of immense spiritual force. They can communicate so much force to a word that the receiver, only hearing or repeating it once, realizes the form of God symbolized by it. Such great teachers are few and far between. The words received from other teachers are far less potent. In such cases, the receiver as a rule has to repeat them often before the realization comes.

‘The initial potency of the word can be increased by the receiver by repeating and meditating on it with earnestness and faith. The potency must be sufficient to bring about the realization and one has to practice hard and long to work it out. One’s task becomes easy or difficult as the initial potency is great or small.

‘When communicating the force to a word, the teacher feels that spiritual force is going out of him.   

‘Earnestness and faith are the things needful. They are, as it were, the water to nourish the seed of the spiritual potency of the word. Without them, the receiver will repeat and meditate on the word his whole life without effect.'

‘One must be intensely earnest to see God. Not one in a million really longs to see Him. Suppose there is a thief in a room and somehow he comes to know that there is a mass of gold in the next room. It is night. There is only a very thin partition between the rooms. What will the condition of that thief be? He will not be able to sleep at all. His brain will be actively thinking of some means to get at the gold. He will think of nothing else.

Do you believe that a man really wants to see God and does not go mad, like the thief, in his struggles to reach Him? He is the mine of infinite bliss; to reach Him ought to be the one end and aim of life. The joys of this world are nothing compared with the joy of God-vision. Do you believe that a man sincerely longs for God-vision and yet can attend to the affairs of the world? Men go mad after money, after name, after fame. Where is the man who goes mad after God? How much anxious you are when your son is ill! Be at least half so anxious to see your ishta-devata. Then if you do not see Him, come to me and I shall show Him to you.

Source - January 1904 Prabuddha Bharata Magazine – excerpts from article titled Master and Disciple