Soul Sustenance

God And I – The Task We Share (Part 2) 

Service of others is something which we have been taught right from the time when we were small children. At that time our parents used to take us to the temple and teach us to put a few rupees from our pocket money into the temple money box. Do you remember the time when your mother gave you five rupees to donate to the school fund for the blind or for the deaf? Also sometimes your father bought you a bag full of coins to give each day to the nearby store which was collecting funds for little children with polio or those who were orphans. All this was taught to us when we were small. But, as we grew up, and became busy in our studies and grew into adults, these good giving habits were forgotten. We thought this was not something very important and we have the rest of our lives to do the same. Do you know that in our previous births, in traditional India, we all have donated lots of money and ornaments (jewelry) in temples in the name of God? This used to be a fixed tradition and a part of our worship. The traditional India in which remembrance of God started, saw kings and queens belonging to different states performing punya karma like donation. This was done to please God and also to make one’s own good destiny. That was the old India. And we are talking about a few thousands of years from now. 

The India now and the world in general today have forgotten those old traditions because we became materialistic. As we all know, the remembrance of God today through different types of worship and the reading of religious books or shastras is no longer as popular as it used to be, especially now in the modern world. These traditions were followed by our ancestors who were not people different from us but it was us, in our previous births. 

(To be continued tomorrow …)