Right Understanding To Help Others

Author(s): Dada Bhagwan
Publisher: Mahavideh Foundation

Page 21

Right Understanding to Help Others
Right Understanding to Help Others
waiting to take his revenge. People who take revenge do not do so just for the sake of it; they are avenging themselves for the pain they were subjected to in the past. This is revenge in operation.
Service to Parents Is Service of God
The first and foremost service worth doing is one for your parents.
If you take care of your parents, you will not lose your peace of mind. Nowadays, people do not serve their parents with a true heart. When a man turns twenty-five or so, he gets married and acquires a 'guru' (wife). As soon as the guru appears, she wants to move away from his parents into a new home. Have you seen such gurus? As soon as he acquires a guru, he changes. The 'guru' will tell him that he has no idea what his mother is like. At first he may not listen, but after being told this several times over, he changes his opinion about his own mother and starts following his wife.
Seeing God in Parents and Serving Them
Serving one's parents is one's moral duty (dharma; religion), regardless of what that relationship may be. The more a person practices this, the happier he will be. Serving the elderly will give you happiness. If you give happiness to your parents, you too will receive happiness. Those who make their parents happy will never be unhappy.
I met a man I once knew in a spiritual community (ashram) and asked him what he was doing there. He told me that he had been living there for the past ten years. I told him that his parents were seriously ill and were living in extreme poverty. He told me that he could not do anything because helping his parents would mean forsaking his dharma (religion). How can you call this a dharma? Dharma is to embrace your parents and your family. Your worldly interaction should be ideal. How can the worldly interaction that forsakes one's relationship with his parents and his duty (dharma) be called a dharma (religion)? Do you have parents?
Questioner: I have a mother.
Dadashri: From now on, take good care of her. You will not get the benefit of such an opportunity again. If a man tells me that he is very unhappy, I would tell him to take good care of his parents so that worldly miseries do not affect him. He may not become wealthy, but at least he will not have to suffer any pain (dukh). Then later, he is free to practice religion.
I, too, served my mother, I was twenty years old and was able to take care of her. The only service I did for my father was to carry his body on my shoulders at his funeral. It was then that I came to the realization that I must have had so many fathers in the past lives! Goodness! There must have been so many such fathers in my previous lives. What can we do about that? The least a person can do is take care of the one before him. Those who are not here are gone, but as long as your parents are living
If a person serves his parents with a pure heart, he will never experience loss of peace; that is how this world is. This world is not such that you can ignore it. When a man does not take care of his parents, people will blame him and not the parents. I tell people that the parents are not receiving good care because they themselves did not care for their own parents. So this understanding is wrong. From now on if they were to start afresh and behave as good children or parents should, it would be good.
That is what I am encouraging in each and every home. The children are changing for the better and so are the parents.
In doing service for the elderly, our Vignan (science of Absolutism of Dada) will blossom. How can one serve an idol? Do the legs of an idol ache? Service should be done for one's guardians, the elderly, or for one's guru.