Swami teaches... Part 1. Divinity is in everyone

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Light and Love Swami teaches... Part 1 Divinity Is in Everyone If you dare seek Swami's Truth, come, surrender unto Swami. Do not allow your faith to falter. Do not become a slave to others, no, not even to God. Test, examine, experience, and then, when you find God, demand as of right. But before you get that right, you should appear for the examination and pass. It is Swami's sankalpa (resolve) that you progress in spiritual development. However, if you wish to know Swami, you have at first to know who you really are. Look into yourselves. Without understanding who you really are, how you can seek to understand Swami? When your vision is concentrated on the external, how can you understand the inner being? Narada who moves always by and with the Lord feels that God is beyond his understanding; Balarama who came as His own brother could not fathom His personality.

The Lord is Premaswarupam (Divine Love personified).The earthly father or mother will show Love only so long as you obey them; start going against their wishes and they will go to the extent of even disowning you. The Lord will never disown, for He is your very core, your very basic Reality. You derive from Him the fruit of your labor, of your dhyanam, japam and puja; faith will grow into devotion and thyaga (sacrifice). The Lord is sweetness, you are sugar; He is fire, you are fuel; He has no heart; every heart where He is installed is His. You may find a human without anger, without truth or without peace, but you cannot find anyone in the world devoid of Love. It is present equally in all human beings as the one effulgent Divine quality. This Love may be expressed in different ways, but its nature is the same. Human is thus an aspect of the Cosmic Consciousness. Unfortunately, however, because human directs love towards worldly objects, human is unable to recognize own Divinity. Person's mind gets polluted because of association with the external world. As a result: even love gets tainted and person's mind becomes incapable of cherishing the beauteous form of the Lord. Only when person directs selfless Love towards God will he/her be able to experience the Divine within him/herself.

 

Firm faith is essential for realizing the Self. Faith is the basis of self-confidence, without which nothing can be achieved. The word manava (human) itself means one who has faith. Love is the means through which faith is strengthened. On the disturbed surface of the pond, the reflection of the Moon is wavy. But on a clear surface, the Moon's reflection is clear and steady. Likewise, in the lake of a human's life, if it is confused and fickle, love also gets distorted.

When the mind is pure, unselfish, and unwavering, the Divine appears in all His purity and fullness. To achieve this state through sincere devotion what consists in offering all your thoughts and actions to God and yearning for His grace. Bhakti has described as the state of non-separation from God. True devotion should not be subject to changes in time, place, and circumstance. Love for the Divine should be present in any situation. The legend tells that Ambarisha (pious king of the Ikshvaku dynasty) performed a yaga, but at the crucial moment, the animal intended for the sacrifice escaped. Now the priests ordained that to make amends for this sinful neglect, a human being had to be offered as substitute to the Gods. The King promised 1000 cows in exchange for a son, but which father will send a son to death, even when 1000 cows are given in exchange? There were also other conditions: the King's messengers should not ask any one for the son; they should not commit the sin of equating 1000 cows as equal to human being; the father too should not break the sad offer to the son; the offer to immolate himself must come unasked from the son, without any prompting or persuasion; it is only such a son that will be accepted by the Gods. Now, Sunashepha heard the news by himself and approaching his father, he said he would go, and gladly too. For, what greater good fortune can a mortal expect than ascending to heaven through the sacrificial flame? Sunashepha persuaded his father that his wish to proceed to the yajna and offer himself was legitimate and approvable, and he left for the capital. On the way, he went to his maternal uncle, sage Vishwamithra, who tried to keep away the boy from the sacrifice. “This is all just foolish superstition; can anyone substitute a man for a cow?" Vishwamithra asked. Sunashepha replied that all people are cattle, for until viveka and vairagya (discrimination and detachment) dawn, they are but animals. Well, the Lord is not a rock or a stone; His Heart melted at the plight of the boy. Indra (the Lord of the devas i.e. celestials) appeared in the sacrificial fire and departed showering blessings on his head. It was Indhra who had carried away the original cow and elaborated all this plot, to bring Sunashepha and his greatness to light and to bless him. The other example, exactly opposite. Ravana and Hiranyaksha were experts in japayajna (Vedhic ritual of sacrifice with pious repetition of sacred mantras) but they never surrendered their ego to God. They did not pluck the weeds of sensory impulses from the fields of their hearts and so they harvested a crop of thorns. It is not the grandeur of the yaga (ceremonial sacrifice) or the pomp of puja (ritual worship) that pleases the Lord; it is the yearning of the heart; not the sum of all the miles covered by you in pilgrimage or the cost of all the articles you have given in charity. You need not even pray aloud. He will Himself emerge when you yearn for Him.

The one Namaskaram (respectful obeisance) you do, do it with devotion. That is enough. You do not do even that; you do it so callously, so indifferently, so automatically. When you fold both your hands and bring them together, feel that you are offering at the Feet all the actions of the five Karmendhriyas (organs of action) and the five Jnanendhriyas (organs of perception) as indicated by the ten fingers. Again, the purpose of Namaskaram is to touch the Feet (sparshan) of the Lord. The negative pole, Mayashakthi (power of illusion), and the positive pole Mahashakthi (Supreme Divine power) have to meet in order to produce a spiritual current that will flow through you. /Nowadays devotion is confined to the brief spell spent in the puja room (shrine) or in a temple. During this period, devotion appears to swell within you and you feel you are at peace. However, once outside, the peace is lost and anger takes its place/.

 

Many persons declare that God is present within them. This statement belittles the Divine. When one holds a flower within the palm, the flower is obviously smaller than the palm. If you say that God is within you, you suggest that you are bigger than God. The truth is, you are in the Divine and not the Divine in you. Nature is Brahman, mistaken to be Nature, on account of the delusion of Name and Form. However, Brahman is not Nature; it is only the rope, which was mistaken to be the snake. When Wisdom dawns, when Light illumines, the snake disappears and the rope alone remains.

Those who understand the nature of the Divinity can appreciate the ways of the Divine. The Lord has neither agraha (anger) nor anugraha (benevolence). The Divine resorts certain kinds of punishments to make the devotee pursue the right path and enable to lead an ideal life. Here is a story to illustrate the maxim, "No gains without pains." A gardener used to water the plants in the garden carrying a pot on his head from dawn to dusk. One day, while carrying the pot he got a headache and wanted to lay down the pot and go home. At that moment, the pot taught him a valuable lesson. The pot said: "There can be no fruit without: labor, no pleasure without pain. Learn the lesson from my own story. I was just mere dust and mud, trodden upon by people. The potter gathered that mud, turned it into clay by pressing it under his feet, and made a pot from it by whirling the clay on his wheel. And finally I was placedin a kiln for firing. Whoever came to buy me, tapped on my sides with strength to test my hardness. It was because I went through all these ordeals that I earned the privilege of dancing on the heads of people. Likewise, only if you are prepared to go through trials and difficulties will you be able to raise yourself in life." Every human is a prey to one evil quality, a kind of disease for which there is no medicine. That disease is Ahamkara (egoism). The egoism gets into a human's head and plays the devil with him. (Egoism affects not human beings alone but even birds and beasts. For instance, a dog kept in a rich man's gate barks at every passerby to exhibit its authority. It is an example of egoism in an animal. The dog wants to show that it is the guardian of the house and that no one dare enter it). If today a human does not know what own "I" signifies, human is in the same position as the dog. Human alone is a jnani (a person of wisdom) who has discovered the truth about him/herself. (One who goes on using the word "I," but does not know who he/she is, is an ajnani i.e. an ignorant person). Many people come to Swami and ask, "Swami! Show us the way." All that you have to do is to go back to the source from which you came. Where is the need for seeking the way? The Bhagavatha has declared that it is the natural destiny of every living being to go back to the place from which he/she/it came. Human must seek to know the purpose of life. With all knowledge and intelligence, human should try to rise above the level of the animal to a realization of own divinity. (A great deal of time is wasted on futile controversies. The educated boast about their scholarship. They should be more concerned about discovering their true nature and living according to it). The duality of birth and death is experienced in Prakriti (nature), which is the presiding deity of Life Principle. World attracts human and deludes. World is a combination of matter. It is the matter that attracts human. Matter is not permanent; it does not symbolize truth. How can the ephemeral objects confer on you the eternal peace? The transient objects cannot give you everlasting happiness. For ages, human has been under the delusion that physical and ephemeral objects will give happiness. True happiness results when human recognizes the underlying eternal principle of Atma in this ephemeral world. Ancients used to contemplate on God and worship Him with the total faith that He was all-pervasive.According to Bharath's ancient scriptures, gods are 3 crores in number. Who are they? Can there be so many gods? The truth is that the population of the world was 3 crores when those scriptures were written. This declaration was made considering each individual a Divine being. The declaration God has thousands of heads was made prior to this when the population of the world was in the thousands. Today the world population is more than 6 billions. Every one of them is a manifestation of divinity. Every human being is a Divine incarnation.

The Lord has shown in books, illustrations, films and pictures, as well as on the stage. Who among the writers or painters or actors has seen Him? The epics and Puranas relate only an infinitesimal fraction of His Glory; they set limits to the limitless, for words have a limit. /The Puranas and the Ithihasas (ancient legends and history) describe the Lord in manifold ways according to the vyakthi (individual) who is devoted and the Shakthi (power) that is described; but the Vedas and the Sastras do not indulge in such changing moods; they deal with fundamentals. Sometimes, in the confusion of interpretation and re-telling, people miss the road. When the blind lead the blind, both are likely to fall into the well/.

You should not think that God exists separately with a specific form. God is one, but the wise refer to Him by various names. With hands, feet, eyes, heads, mouth and ears pervading everything, He permeates the entire Universe. In fact, the entire world is present in your heart. Hence, it is said, God appears in the form of a human being. Many people recite the sloka in the Gita which says that the Lord will create a Form for Himself and come into human affairs whenever Dharma is in grave peril. You have repeated it so often that it has become meaningless jargon; it has been quoted so often and by so many that it has lost all significance. Only those that are proficient in the Sastras can recognize an Avatar and test the credentials; only they can taste the joy showered by the incarnation. Who endowed with vision of sacred knowledge, of union with God or of selfless devotion for God can have a glimpse of that Divine Effulgence. The rest only mislead by their claims of authenticity. Those who know will not speak; those who speak do not know, cannot know. (Reet's compilation from, Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 2. "Shiva sankalpa," Chapter 16; Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 5. "Recruits for my Army," Chapter 7 and "Shiva in shava," Chapter 8; Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 22. "From love: to love" Chapter 5; Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 36. "RISE ABOVE BODY CONSCIOUSNESS," Chapter 6). Namaste - Reet