1980s was the decade of my spiritual search and contemplation. During this period, I read a number of good books, came across a number of good organisations and met a number of good persons. One such occasion was visiting the Sadhu Vaswani Mission at Pune and meeting its head Dada J P Vaswani. It was in the mid-eighties and I was still learning to interact with holy persons in a meaningful manner. The first interaction obviously used to be in the form of a greeting and in case of holy persons, it was quite customary to touch their feet. When I was to meet Dr Vaswani, I went with the same frame of mind and touched his feet when I met him. By look and body language, Dada looked very humble but I was taken aback when in response to touching his feet, he touched my feet. I was quite embarrassed at this action of his, but then he explained its significance to me. He said that as children of God or as part of the same supreme soul, what was the difference between him and me. As a result, we all need to salute each other with equal reverence. This was exactly the reason why he touched the feet of those who touched his feet. While the explanation may look simple, it was not easy to comprehend its depth at that point of time. Even if one could comprehend it, to practice the same is very difficult.
I quite often contemplate on this incident and the more I do, the more reverence I develop for Dadaji. It also helps me in reducing the sense of duality in me, which is the cause of all our troubles. We have become so used to plurality that we either suffer with a sense of superiority or inferiority. As a result, the joy of living gets lost and we become part of a rat race to overtake others. This creates further aberrations in our living and the whole life is lost without marching towards its true goal.
The message of this small incident is very great. All of us need to know our true identity and if we succeed in doing so, all hierarchies in our mind will disappear. We shall then see no hierarchy in the creations of God and will duly see the beautiful variety in them. The negative tendencies like superiority, inferiority, jealousy, hatred, anger, etc., will gradually disappear and we will be able to live a life of perfect joy heading towards its true goal.
