Two brothers, one a bachelor, the other married, owned a farm whose fertile soil yielded an abundance of grain. Half the grain went to one brother and half to the other.

All went well at first. Then, every now and then, the bachelor one began to wake with a start from his sleep at night and think: “This simply isn’t fair. My brother has a wife and five kids and he gets half the produce of the land. Now I have no one except myself to support. So is it fair that my poor brother, whose needs are obviously greater than mine, should receive exactly as much as I do?”

With that he would get out of bed, steal over to his brother’s place and pour a sack of grain into his brother’s granary.

The married one too began to get these nightly attacks. Every once in a while he would wake from his sleep and say to himself: “This isn’t fair. My brother isn’t married and he gets half the produce of the farm. Here I am with a wife and five kids, so I have all the security I need for old age. But who will care for my poor brother when he gets old? He needs to save much more for the future than he does at present, so his needs are obviously greater than mine.”

Then he would get out of bed and pour a sack of grain into his brother’s granary.

One day they got out of bed at the same time and ran into each other, each with a sack of grain on his back!

Many years later, after their death, the story leaked out. So when the townsfolk wanted to build a temple they chose the spot at which the two brothers ran into each other, for they could not think of any place in the town that was holier than that one.

Most of us are selfish to some extent — to a lesser or a higher degree. Very few of us are capable of thinking and acting selflessly.

“Learn a lesson from the birds. They feed those who cannot fly far…they help and serve each other with no thought of reward.” — Atharva Veda

“There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first…when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.” — Paramahamsa Yogananda 

The important religious distinction is not between those who worship and those who do not worship, but between those who love and those who don’t.