Inseparable oneness knows no curiosity

There was a very, very great spiritual Master. He had hundreds of disciples, but out of these hundreds, naturally everyone could not be his selected or his chosen disciple. So he made a selection, an inner selection. In that selection he chose only fifty disciples whom he considered to be his very close disciples. These fifty disciples used to come to him very often, and he would give them special attention, affection and concern.

Now one day he invited an elderly couple to his house. This couple had been with the Master for about twenty years. The husband was sixty years old and the wife was fifty-eight. Both of them were very close to the Master. For twenty years they had served him, and hundreds and hundreds of times the Master had lavished affection on them. They had served the Master in many, many ways.

Now on that day, when this particular couple came to the Master, the Master said to the wife, "I have something private to tell you, so you come along." He said to the husband, "You please stay here. Let me say something to her in private."

So the husband, poor husband, sat there. The Master and the wife moved a short distance away, and the Master spoke to the wife in secret and said, "Don't tell this to anybody."

He spoke to the disciple only for a couple of minutes and then he said, "Let us stand here and meditate."

The Master and the disciple meditated but the husband did not see what was going on because they were not within his range of vision. When the Master and the disciple came back to the husband, the Master blessed the husband and said, "Now you can go home."

On the way home, the husband was impatient with the desire to know what the Master had said to his wife, but the wife said, "No, it is a top secret. It is impossible; I cannot tell you. Master has told me not to tell it to anybody, so I can't tell you or anybody else."

The husband's ego came forward and he said, "What? Master has always told us that we are one, one, one. Always he takes all his disciples, husbands and wives, as one unit. Now how can it be? If we are really one, how can the Master separate us? What kind of secret is this that I can't hear?"

So he felt miserable, simply miserable, but what could he do? The wife obeyed the Master. She did not tell the secret.

Two days later, the husband and wife again came to the Master, and the Master said to the husband, "Today you come with me. Let her sit alone. I have something most private to tell you. It is a top secret."

So the Master took the husband into a corner. The wife couldn't see a thing from where she sat. The Master said something very soulful for a couple of minutes to the husband and then said, "Let us meditate for a few minutes." They meditated, and then the Master and the husband went back to the wife.

The Master said, "You may go home."

Now on their way home, the husband was very excited and wanted to tell his wife that the Master had told him something very significant and absolutely confidential.

"Oh, you thought that the Master tells secrets only to you and not to me. Look, today I have a secret."

The wife said, "All right, but for God's sake I don't want to hear it. Your secret is for you. It is not for me. I want Master's wish to be fulfilled. He took you away from me to tell you some secret and I have no right to pry into it. So you please keep the secret for yourself."

The husband was so upset. "What? You don't want to hear my secret? That means that you feel your secret is more important than the secret that I have received from the Master."

He was again very sad. 'Oh God! I was so eager to learn her secret and she didn't tell me. Now I am offering my secret which Master has asked me not to tell. I want to tell her that I also have some real secret, but she doesn't even want to hear it. In every way she is snubbing me.'

Then at night he had a dream. In the dream he saw somebody telling him that his wife was superior to him in spirituality, and he thought that perhaps it was true. So he went to the Master the following day and he said, "How is it that you have made my wife more spiritual than I? Both of us came together, and look: when you told her something I felt miserable that I was excluded. To some extent my ego came forward and I became jealous. In every way I feel that she has surpassed me in spirituality. Oh God, what am I going to do now?"

Then he said to the Master, "Master, now help me and save me. I really don't understand how she can be more spiritual than I am. Both of us came together, but now, from her love and devotion towards you, I feel that she is listening to you more than I am and she is making me feel that I am inferior. So tell me how she has become more devoted and more sincere. How has she come to be so close to you?"

The Master said, "You have already given the answer. She has become close to me because she has become really devoted to me. She is sincere to me and she tries to listen to me in everything."

Then the disciple said, "You told us, Master, that we are one. Marriage means union, and now if we are really one, how is it that she doesn't want to listen to me and she listens to you?"

The Master said, "Look here. Marriage really means union, oneness. Again, union means love. Love is union. Now with marriage, the union that is established between two souls lasts only for one year or two years, twenty years or sixty years; then that union is gone. But the union that is established with spiritual love never dies. So with the Master the union that you disciples establish is the union of true love. Here there is no question of an outer union. There is only the inner union which is based on divine love. So that is why the love between the Master and the disciple lasts forever. This love is real union, and union is love for eternity. That is why the seeker, the aspirant, knows that the eternal relationship is one that he or she can have only with the Master.

"But the transitory relationship, the temporary relationship, he or she can have with a human being. The husband will have the wife for fleeting years; the wife will have a connection with the husband for fleeting years, but with the Master the wife will have an eternal connection, an eternal relationship. The husband will have the same eternal relationship with the Master. That is why the sincere, dedicated disciples feel that the Master is dearest, because the Master brings the message of eternal love, eternal progress and eternal union; and this union is always nourishing and fulfilling."

From:Sri Chinmoy,Love realised, surrender fulfilled, oneness manifested, Chinmoy Publishing Company, New York, 1971
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/lr