Two brothers :

-




To,


All Members,



Two brothers, one a bachelor, the other married, owned a farm whose fertile soil yields an abundance of grain. Half the grain went to one brother and half to the other.


All went well at first. Then, every now and then, the married man began to wake with a start from his sleep at night and think: "This is not fair. My brother is not married and he gets half the produce of the farm. Here I am with a wife and five kids, so I have all the security I need for my old age. But who will care for my poor brother when he gets old? He needs to save much more for the future than he does at present. So his need is obviously greater than mine."


With that he would get out of bed, steal over to his brother's place and pour a sackful of grain into his brother's granary.


The bachelor too began to get these nightly attacks. Every once in a while he would wake from his sleep and say to himself: "This is simply not fair. My brother has a wife and five kids and gets half the produce of the land. Now I have no one except myself to support. So is it just that my poor brother, whose need is obviously greater than mine, should receive exactly as much as I do?" Then he would get out of bed and pour a sackful of grain into his brother's granary.


One day they got out of bed at the same time and ran into each other, each with a sack of grain on his back!


Many years later, after their death, the story leaked out. So when the townsfolk wanted to build a temple they chose the spot at which the two brothers met for they could not think of any place in the town that was holier than that one.


The important religious distinction is not between those who worship and those who do not worship but between those who love and those who do not.

Sri Ramakrishna Mission



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Call of Sri Krishna: The Gospel of Super Excellence - 6 : Swami Krishnananda

-
Image
26/11/2018 The Call of Sri Krishna: The Gospel of Super Excellence - 6. : Swami Krishnananda (Talk given on Janmashtami, Sri Krishna's birthday.) A powerful interest that dominates a man's life polarises his mind, which then acts like a magnet and continually draws out from his stored-up experiences and also from new experiences whatever is relevant and useful to the end in view. Deep interest invigorates the mind, awakens its dormant powers and is the key to super excellence, invention and discovery. Hard work is another condition of superiority. The aspirant must master the knowledge and technique pertaining to his particular job; in fact, he must be a keen and lifelong learner, ready to pick up new ideas and new ways wherever he can find them. He must cultivate the habits of thoroughness, accuracy and reliability; he must take pains to check, revise and polish his work until it acquires as perfect a finish as possible within the limits of time available. Inspirat...
Read more

The Aim of Human Existence – Post - 9 : Swami Krishnananda.

-
Image
================================================================ Wednesday, 24 Jan 2024.  05:30. Article: Philosophy: The Aim of Human Existence – Part 3/3 (Spoken at a Conference in Delhi on Sept. 21, 1980) Post-9. ================================================================ The Aim of Human Existence – Part 3/3 -1 No success in any field of life can be achieved without tapas. Tapas is the guarantee for success in any walk of life, in any direction of any activity. We have been told that creation originated with the tapas of the Creator. The Nasadiya Sukta of the Veda tells us that the Supreme Creator performed tapas when He willed this vast creation, and the whole of His creation is vibrant with various degrees and manifestations of this supreme tapas. In this sense, we may say that the whole creation is only tapas, and the activities of nature in its generality and of people in its particularity are all engendered by a force which can be best described as tapas. I for one ca...
Read more

Transitioning Consciousness from the Animal Through the Human Stage to the Divine Consummation :

-
Image
We generally characterize the major difference in psychology between animals and human beings as the result of the ability of the human being to utilize the Reason, a higher form of intelligence than the basic sense apparatus and physical mind that clearly is predominant in the animal consciousness. At the same time, we can see elements of the power of Reason in the animal kingdom, and cannot deny that most human beings utilize the sense and physical mind capacities as their primary tool for navigating their way through their lives. Sri Aurobindo points out that “…reason is only a particular and limited utilitarian and instrumental activity that proceeds from something much greater than itself, from a power that dwells in an ether more luminous, wider, illimitable.” There appears to be actually a ladder of consciousness which does not provide clearly defined separate steps between the animal and man, and which has not finished its ascent with the appearance of the reasoning f...
Read more