THOUGHTS ON THE
FLORIDA DISASTER
By Swami Yogananda
Nature's calamities are occasioned by the sum total of the multitudinous wrong human thoughts. Every event in Nature is the outcome of the thoughts of creation. We are all indissolubly linked together and bound up in a common fate. Our thoughts help to bond or to liberate the world at large. We are hungry, and we find all the forces of Nature, the earth, the sun, wind and water —working together to yield our food. The more spiritually civilized we grow the more we will control Nature. The servant of Nature rebels when the Master of the house of civilization sleeps.
That is why such a disaster as has recently happened in Florida deserves our universal sympathy. As a World Race, we are all responsible for it. Let us show our practical sympathy by responding to the call of President Coolidge and contributing according to our capacity to the American Red Cross Fund for Florida relief. We ought to help our brothers and sisters in distress as we ourselves would welcome such help if placed in similar circumstances. Thomas a Kempis once said, pointing to a condemned criminal, "There, but for the grace of God, goes myself." That is true from a limited standpoint, but from the universal standpoint, we may well say of every man, "There goes myself." We are not the creatures, but the creators, of this universe. Our thoughts and deeds have contributed throughout the ages to the making of tidal waves, of forest fires, of volcanic upheavals, no less than they have flowered forth in spiritual giants, in innocent children and in the soft petals of the flowers.