What is Bhagawan’s clarion call to the spiritual aspirants who read about the great characters of the Upanishads? Let us hear from Him and march on, inspired and enthused.
Practice gives you the golden harvest of blissful experience. If you spend all your time erecting the fence, when are you going to raise the crop? When you spend all your time reading about agriculture and the excellent crops that can be got by using high-yielding strains of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, etc., but do not plough, sow, spray, dig or pull out the weeds, how can the granary be full? Reading, reciting, listening – these are not enough; practice is what is needed. If you are told Nachiketa did this or Svetaketu said that, of what avail is it? Unless you adopt them as your ideals, exemplars and guides, these scriptural texts will remain fairy tales! Understand their steadfastness and faith, their sense of values, and their uprightness. And yearn to acquire them. Then only can we have another Nachiketa and another Svetaketu. Or else, in the entire course of human history, there will be only one Nachiketa and one Svetaketu!
-Divine Discourse, Apr 22, 1967.
