SAI SERVICE NEWSLETTER - 15

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SAI SERVICE Newsletter – 15

Issue July 18, 2002

 

[shri Shirdi Sai Baba's Messages, Life events, Articles are available

in / ]

 

Baba helped to release His devotees who were convicted and imprisoned

by the court. Read full story in the above weblink. During last week

the following topics were posted:

 

July 12 Baba rescued his devotees during Russian Japanese War.

July 13 Worship Baba as God in all

July 14 The significance of Sri Ganapati

July 15 Our Eternal Values.

July 16 Sri Ramana Maharishi answers (Part-1)

July 17 Sri Ramana Maharishi answers (Part-2)

 

This Thursday's Message:

 

Baba gave M.B. Rege (ex-Judge of the Indore High Court) a hint.

Religious books are generally regarded as very important sadhanas for

the beginner. On Guru Poornima day, the devotees usually got to Baba,

and place a book in his hands, so that they might get back with

Ashirvda and that they might study it with profit and benefit.

 

On one Guru Poornima Day, all had taken books. Rege was there. He had

not taken any book. Then Baba looking at him and said, `These people

want to find God, that is Brahma in these books. There is however

Bhramh, that is, worldly confusion or delusion in these books. Your

are all right. Do not read books. But keep me in your heart, that is

enough'.

 

 

a. Baba's Talk with Devotees

 

Sadu Bhayya (Sadashiv Dundiraj) who was at Harda on 15-2-1915 was

walking with some friends at 4 pm. Suddenly Baba appeared to be

coming from the opposite direction and he passed his hand into Sadu

Bhayya's and leaving a toothpick in the latter's hand and disappeared.

 

A sceptic Friend: What is that has happened now?

 

Sadu Bhayya: One thing is certain. When we were coming on, I had no

toothpick in hand. Now I have got a toothpick here. Baba has given me

this.

 

 

Sceptic Friend: Why not write to Shirdi and verify? Sadhu Bhayya

wrote to Shama and on Shama's invitation went to Shirdi and narrated

all facts in Baba's presence.

 

Baba: Sadu, go and tell this to Bade Baba. Sadhu Bhayya went and

narrated it before Bade Baba, Dr. Pillai and others. Bade Baba very

much excited began to think and came weeping to Baba.

 

Bade Baba: What Baba, you have been giving me large sums of money but

money only; but to Sadhu Bhayya you have given Sakshatkar.

So saying he wept.

 

Baba: What is to be done? Each gets what he chooses.

 

Bade Baba who had plenty of money and paid income tax on them

subsequently lost all fortune and died.

 

b. Divine Dews from our God

 

 If a man utters My name with love, I shall fulfill all his wishes,=

 

increase his devotion. (SSS Ch.III)

 

 It is my special characteristic to free any person, who surrenders=

 

completely to me, and who worships Me faithfully, and who remembers

Me, and meditates on Me constantly. (SSS Ch.III)

 

 First give bread to the hungry and then eat yourself (SSS Ch.IX)

 

 However, oppressed and troubled one may be, as soon as he steps in=

 

the Masjid, he is on the pathway to happiness. (SSS Ch.XIII)

 

 This Nishtha (firm faith) is one paise of Dakshana, Saburi (

patience or perseverance) is another paisa. (SSS Ch.XVIII & XIX)

 

c. WEEKLY ARTICLE:

 

BABA'S DIVINITY

 

But prejudices and sentiments die hard. Even the great Adi

Sankaracharya ordered a Harijan, who came near him at Kasi, to go

away. The Harijan then requested the Acharya to explain whether his

objection was to one earthly body approaching another or whether he

wanted the Atman in the one to go away from the Atman in the other.

The Acharya perceiving that a great jnani in the form of that Harijan

had come to rebuke his prejudices, declared that even a Harijan with

jnana was his revered sadguru. Sai Baba never considered any caste or

species as capable of polluting him even by touch. Finding a poor

Harijan ready to leave Shirdi, Baba put his arm round his neck and

tried to stop him at Shirdi. Differences of caste can have no place

in the heart of one, whose atmic realisation was evident by his

morning dhyana on the basis of "An al haq" and "maim Allah hum"

which are the equivalents of "aham Brahmaasmi"

 

Baba was regularly demolishing the idea of difference in all other

matters also which fettered the advance of his sadhaka devotees. "It

is a popular fallacy that we are different from each other and that

our properties are separate. This is an error. You are I. I am you.

Knock down this teli's wall. then, we see each other clearly face to

face (i.e., as being the same Atman)". "Inquire into all the

scripyures; and see if the Atman is one or many." It is the sad irony

of fate that of a Baba, who spoke thus and lived thus, some people

still anxiously explore the parentage to discover his caste.

 

One can easily understand the desire of those who worship images or

other objects to avoid the contact of iconoclasts; and generally

Mahomedanism is identified with iconoclasticism. But of Baba, it is

well-known that he objected to the conversion of any one from his

religion to any other religion, that he bade his visitors stick not

only to their own religion but also to their usages (sampradaya)

their guru, their mantra, their observances, their scruples, their

images and objects of worship and that he actually insisted on his

devotees visiting the temples and images that they usually visited

for worship and that he presented to some a lingam and to some

padukas, coins, and pictures for worship. He told his devotees that

though formless-nirakara worship was praiseworthy, yet as a

concession to the weakness of the vast majority to whom nirakara

worship is an impossibility, any customary object might be used for

worship and meditation – including Baba's own physical form for those

who found that most suitable.

 

`Thousands have found that Baba answered in his sookshma form (as

apantaratma or as paramatma) prayers earnestly addressed to Him for

temporal and spiritual welfare. And still the question is raised: "Is

he a Hindu or Moslem?" In the words of the late Rao Bahadur S.B.

Dhumal, in reply to an European Dist. Magistrate, who raised this

question about 1910, we may well answer: "Sai Baba is neither the one

nor the other. He is above both"

 

Sai Baba repeatedly declared that he was not the eight span body –

that he was the antaratma in all creatures.

 

Ahamiatma hi Chandorkar sarva – bhootasya – sthitah!

Pipilika – mukhenadmi makshikadi – mukhena cha !!

Naa ham prakasah sarvasya yogamaya – samavritah !!!

 

These express Baba's condition – almost in his own words.

 

(Courtesy: His Holiness Pujyasri B.V. Narasimha Swamiji)

 

d. Spiritual Spectrum:

(EXTRACTS FROM PURANAS, MESSAGES FROM SATPURUSHAS)

 

Hinduism – A Brief Sketch

Swami Vivekananda

The first disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa

 

Paper on Hinduism

Read at the World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago

19th September 1893

(continuation from last week)

 

The whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation.

 

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental

constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the

images of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our

idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross.

The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth,

omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms.

But with this difference that while some people devote their whole

lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with

them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and

doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is

centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the

divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports,

the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress.

 

He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say

the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental

prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has

been realised."

 

Mark the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you,

"Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the

lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through

Him they shine." But he does not abuse anyone's idol or call its

worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life. "The

child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say

that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

 

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image,

would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed

that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not

travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower

to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism

to the highest absolutism, means so many attempts of the human soul

to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions

of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of

progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher,

gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

 

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised

it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to

force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat,

which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit

John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The

Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or

thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses,

and crescents are simply so many symbols- so many pegs to hang the

spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every

one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is

wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

 

One thing I must tell you, Idolatry in India does not mean anything

horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is

the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The

Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but

mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never

for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic

burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.

And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more

than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.

 

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a

travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various

conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is

only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the

inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions?

They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from

the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of

different natures.

 

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And

these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But

in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has

declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, "I am in every

religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou

seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and

purifying humanity, know thou that I am there." And what has been the

result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of

Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will

be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond

the pale of our caste and creed." One thing more. How, then, can the

Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in

Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

 

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole

force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in

every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the

Father, but they have seen the Son.. And he that hath seen the Son

hath seen the Father also.

 

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the

Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but

there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will

have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like the

God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of

Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be

Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total

of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in

its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place

for, every human being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far

removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of

his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in awe

of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will

have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which

will recognise divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole

scope, whose whole force, will be created in aiding humanity to

realise its own true, divine nature.

 

Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's

council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to

the purpose, was only a parlour meeting. It was reserved for America

to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every

religion.

 

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the

Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews,

the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry

out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it travelled

steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes effulgent,

till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again rising on

the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a

thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.

 

Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who

never dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out

that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's

neighbours, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of

civilisation with the flag of harmony.

 

Publisher's Note:

 

THE SOLE PURPOSE of this newsletter is to present Sai messages and

other spiritual messages to the interested devotees on Thursdays.

Feel free to forward this newsletter to your interested associates.

 

In this newsletter, wherever the sources of the articles not

mentioned, please consider these items are taken from H H Pujyasri B

V Narasimha Swamiji's books.

 

Mailing Address: Vasuki Mahal Shri Shirdi Saibaba Trust, Vasuki Mahal

Compound, Gandhi Nagar, Edayar Palayam, Coimbatore 641025, India. e-

mail to: essgee.