It is Love that Pays

Nothing else is necessary but these love, sincerity and patience. What is life but growths, i.e. expansion, i.e. love? Therefore all love is life, it is the only law of life; all selfishness is death, and this is true here or hereafter. It is life to do well; it is death not to do well to others. Ninety percent of human brutes you see are dead.

Are ghosts- for none lives, my boys, but he who loves? Feel, my children, feel; fee; for the poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden; feel till the heart stops and the brain reels till the heart stops and the brain reels and you think you will go mad- then pour the soul out at the feet of the lord, and then well come power, help, and indomitable energy ...Be not afraid, my children. Look not up in that attitude of fear towards that infinite starry vault as if it would you crush you. Wait! In a few hours more, the whole of it will be under your feet. ait, money does not pay, nor name; fame does not pay, nor learning. It is love that pays; it is the character that cleaves its way through adamantine walls of difficulties.

Those who are men and yet have no feeling in the heart for man, well, are such to be counted as men at all?

Duty is seldom sweet. it is only when love greases its wheels that is runs smoothly; it is a continuous friction otherwise. How else could parents do their
duties their children, husbands to their wives, and vice versa? Do we not meet with cases of friction every day in our lives? Duty is sweet only through love, and love shines in freedom alone. Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the sense, to anger. to jealousies and a hundred other pretty things that must occur every day in human life? in all these little rough nesses that we meet with in life, the highest expression of freedom is to forbear. Women, slaves to their own irritable, jealous tempers, Are apt to their blame their husbands, and assert their own “freedom”, as they think, not knowing that thereby they only prove that they are slaves. So it is with husbands who eternally find fault with their wives.

Love never fails, my son; today or tomorrow or ages after, truth will conquer. Love shall win the victory. Do you love your fellow –men? Where should you go to seek for god - are not all the poor, the miserable, the weak gods? Why not worship them first? Why go to dig a well on the shores of Ganga? Believe in the omnipotent power of love. Who cares for these tinsel puffs of name? I never keep watch of what the newspapers are saying. Have you loved? You are omnipotent. Are you perfectly unselfish? If so, you are irresistible. It is character that pays everywhere. It is the lord who protects his children in the depths of the sea.

The individual’s life is in the life of the whole, the individual’s happiness is in the happiness of the whole; apart from the whole the individual’s existence is inconceivable – this is an eternal truth and is the bed-rock on which the universe is built. To more slowly towards the infinite whole, bearing a constant feeling of intense sympathy and sameness with it. Being happy with its happiness and being distressed in its affliction, is the individual’s sole duty. Not only is it his duty, but in its transgression is his death, while compliance with this great truth leads to life immortal.

If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt
after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine......

Source:- “Personality Development” written by Swami Vivekanad Ji.