God is peace. If your heart desires to behold Him, you must approach with a mind calm and composed. When your heart settles into tranquility, the shadow of that infinite ocean of peace will naturally fall upon it. But if restlessness dwells within you, even when the winds of peace carry God's fragrance from the very body of creation, you will be unable to perceive it. If we keep our minds submerged in turmoil, we shall see only the terror of discord on all sides.
God is benevolence. He does not merely stand as a silent witness. He is woven into every atom of the world, in every moment of time, ceaselessly working for its welfare. Even when all creatures sleep in oblivion, that wakeful Being keeps His unblinking eye fixed upon the good of all, and from His tranquil majesty, He labors for the world's healing.
The marks of His benevolence are scattered everywhere. One cannot point in any direction and say, "Here alone I find the trace of His merciful hand"—for it is present in all directions. Long before mankind was created, He provided coal, water, fruits, and roots for the sustenance of the human body. He implanted within us such a hunger that from it emerged the faculties of intellect, understanding, and conscience. And through the exercise of this very intellect, as the soul labors and awakens, it yearns to rush toward the Paramatman, the source of all life. No measure of time would suffice to chronicle the marks of His benevolence.
Countless ages hence, when mankind would cook their food, drive locomotives, navigate ships, and operate great factories—for all these future needs, the compassionate Lord had, billions of years before, laid down reserves of coal in the earth. You may have read how trees from billions of years ago became coal. Those ancient trees, pressed down with tremendous force beneath water and heat, darkened into blackness and hardened into solid stone-like form. And now, billions of years later, we can quarry this solidified timber and use it effortlessly for countless purposes.
The Lord of the Universe, the great Mahadev, who established a sun and thereby created this five-elemened earth, who arranged for humanity—standing three and a half cubits tall—to come into being, and who granted mankind the right to know Him: what deity could be more benevolent than this One? He placed a pole-star in the heavens and thereby opened endless avenues for the advancement of astronomy. In the sky, on the earth, in the depths below—everywhere you can see the reach of His merciful hand. When the Himalayan peaks rose in some distant age, today we live sustained by the rivers that flow from those mountains, engaged in the world's progress. Following these rivers, countless blessed sages of old described through philosophical and sacred texts the very source of our life, and we, even now, find joy in contemplating those sacred teachings and count our lives blessed. When one reflects on this, the head bows in wonder and reverence.
In certain events, at certain moments, some people find doubt creeping into their faith in God's benevolence and goodness. An earthquake strikes—my house crumbles, my wife and children perish. I think to myself: what benevolence can there be in a God who ordains such catastrophe? What goodness resides in Him? Terrible storms and rains come, droughts follow, famine spreads, countless souls die of hunger. We call such events calamities, speak of them as misfortunes.
Yet despite appearing as evils to our eyes, these events bear unmistakably the mark of God's beneficent hand. Consider: countless ages ago, vast forests flourished upon the earth. Then they sank beneath the waters and hardened into stone coal, which we now put to endless use. If those ancient trees could speak and say, "Our drowning, our transformation into coal—this reveals God's malevolence," would you not laugh? That kerosene oil you burn—do you know its origin? Scientists have discovered that millions of years ago, creatures drowned in waters; their fat, subjected to heat and pressure, transformed into the oil we use today. If those animals could protest and say, "Our submersion proves God's cruelty," would your laughter not ring out?
You, millions of years hence, perceive God's glory in these events and rejoice to find His benevolent hand at work. In the same way, the tragedies that grieve us now—the deaths of loved ones, the sorrows that overwhelm us—perhaps in ages to come, when an enlightened humanity walks this earth, those advanced souls will perceive God's benevolence within these very calamities and sing His praise.
God is Truth itself, Knowledge itself, Infinite, and Bliss. How could it be possible that He, knowing all, seeing all, would send forth evil? And if He did send forth evil, where is our salvation? We deem death the greatest misfortune. But is death truly calamitous? Imagine a world without death. When a person reaches extreme old age, where then would they stand? Unable to eat, unable to work, yet clinging to life amid sickness and suffering—what terrible existence that would be! This is why the aged themselves pray with all their hearts that they might depart this world swiftly. Had death not existed in the world, perhaps all would cry out: how cruel is God to keep us alive through endless torment!
Have you ever truly considered what would happen if people never aged, never died, but lived on forever? Imagine: every soul laboring ceaselessly in the same place through all eternity, with no rest. They have learned all there was to learn. Then what? Even now, when we gaze upon something for a time, when we eat or use something repeatedly, we grow weary of it. To imagine using the same thing through eternity, dwelling forever on the same matters—such suffering cannot be described in words.
I have seen it before: in God's kingdom, one law operates everywhere alike. You cannot simply bind humanity to one particular law of life. If you wish to banish death, you must drive it from all the realm of living things. Now imagine—if death were to vanish from the entire kingdom of life—the same trees, the same fruits, the same creatures, all would shuffle about wizened and decrepit, yet never dying. What a terrible state! Then no fruit or food of any kind could be eaten. How would one eat? Everyone would have to be left alive!
Now you might say: is death in youth not then a misfortune? It is true—we can never fathom why a person who was doing such good work for the world should suddenly die young. Yet we must not on that account doubt God's benevolence. We must know this: when the merciful God sends death, surely it contains mercy within it. I have already said it—the same law must operate everywhere in the realm of life! Consider the example of fruit. If the rule were that there be no death in youth because it is harmful, then it would be impossible to eat unripe fruit. Yet eating unripe fruit is sometimes necessary to preserve the body. Think once what would happen if we could never eat unripe fruit.
Say you pluck an unripe papaya and eat it. Your body recovers; you are able to apply yourself well to the work of the world. You think you have done something good, and your family thinks so too. But can the papaya tree not think that ruin has befallen it? One of its unripe fruits has been taken! The papaya tree also surely has the right to weep. Just so, we have the right to weep at the death of our loved ones. Yet when that loved one, in another form but in the same eternal soul, will be present elsewhere doing work, the people there also have the right to rejoice. One's death, another's birth—this is what we call the imperishability of the soul.
Death does not mean annihilation; it is merely the transformation of energy and state. So we can understand this much: he who dies in this world is not utterly destroyed; in the other realm, that person will be reborn in another form. Just as fruits and foodstuffs enter into other creatures and change their condition, the higher beings will not do likewise, for they have gradually acquired their own individual distinctiveness.
We know that when the sun and moon disappear from one side of the earth, they rise on the other—though they experience a kind of death on the one side, on the other they are born anew. Thus God seems to show us that death is nothing else—merely passing from one place and dawning in another. If the sun and moon were to remain forever on one side, think what suffering there would be! It pleases none to dwell eternally in light, nor to dwell eternally in darkness; neither state is fit for sustaining life.