The seven flowers.....

When we love, we love and forget. We don’t expect anything when we love somebody. Well, there are two different kinds of love. There is a love on the outside, where you only expect something, but there is another kind of love. There is a love where you will do anything for this person. Just to please this person you will do anything. Even that kind of love is divided in two. Whatever is done unconditionally will always make you happy, but whatever is done with a condition will always make you unhappy. To awaken this Love, to make this Love greater and greater is not that difficult. I always say, you just need to want it. I’ll tell you a small story. Once there was a Sage, a great Saint who went to a town. He was so famous that people were very excited when he was coming, so they started preparing four weeks before, busily preparing a lot of things. Then someone said “I heard that this Swami likes to use seven flowers when he performs his prayer.” That’s a lot of flowers – a big confusion started happening. They wondered “What  flower shall we take to give to this Swami?” They didn’t know what  flower to take. So they ran to the Saint and said “Reverend Sir, we heard that while praying you use seven flowers, but there is such a variety of flowers that we don’t know what  flowers to use.” The Saint looked at them and started laughing like mad. He said “Yes, I use seven flowers to pray and I want that each one of you gives these seven flowers to me. The seven flowers are: truthfulness, love, service to people, prayer, devotion, loyalty and control of the senses. These are the seven flowers. He said “If somebody gives these to God, gives them to one’s Self, God will be pleased with that. There is no greater thing than that. This reminds me of Krishna who said in the Bhagavad Gita “When somebody offers to me just a small leaf with Love from the heart, I shall accept it.” People offer a lot of things to please God – big, big things on the outside, but everything is from Him. It is He who gives; we are just taking what is given by Him and offering it back to Him. This Love that we have inside is also Him, but it is up to us to develop it or not. It is up to us how we handle it. We can go and do service on the outside like many organisations that just buy a lot of things and give them to the poor countries. Does this mean that this is service? You can always put a hundred euros aside every month, put it into an account of some organisation somewhere and say “That’s service”. The moment the money is gone you don’t even know what is happening with it, but when you yourself go; when you yourself participate in it, it creates another joy. It is this joy that God wants you to develop. People say “Yes, but I don’t have time to go and serve”, because in the mind they think that when you talk about that kind of service you have to run to India or to Africa. Your neighbour is dying, your neighbour is hungry by your side and you are thinking of India and of Africa, but God is thinking about them. Service starts near, around you. Stop seeing the difference, clear your mind of differences and see the same Lord everywhere. Offer the flowers that I just mentioned from deep within your heart. Offer them to Him. In this way you don’t even need to sit to pray, because He will be always with you. Open up your heart and serve whenever you can. Help whenever you can.