“Do not take a service from anyone without paying for it� - Baba

[Guest guest]

 

The conduct and preachings of Baba in the context of the society in which he lived, indicate that he made reason and faith inter-dependent on each other i.e. faith cannot sustain without the highest reasoning and no one can evolve with mere reasoning, without faith in some force much more powerful than him. It does not matter by what name it is called i.e. God, Allah, Brahman, Nature, spirit or soul.

 

For example, let us examine a simple saying of Baba like “do not take a service from anyone without paying for itâ€, when he had gone up the roof of Radha Krishna Mayi at Shirdi. From the point of view of spiritualism or religion this is forbidden as creative of a negative Karma called Runa (indebtedness). Speaking from a rational point of view one can always ask as to how a society can sustain itself happily and progressively, if some people work without getting paid and others enjoy at the cost of those who work. It is such a situation, played on a larger canvas that had brought about revolution in France and Russia, where the French Emperor and Czar had not paid the peasants for hundreds of years for their labour.

 

A critical study of Shri Sai Satcharitra would indicate that Baba had always tried to bring about a happy and creative amalgamation of faith with reason. When he asked the devotees following different faiths to accept humanitarian concepts of some other religions, was he not pulling reason over faith? No doubt he was trying to bring about a perfect social cohesion but what about faith in one’s religion? On the other hand, when he had told his devotees that to follow the Sadguru or the Master will bring about spiritual evolution in them, was he not asking them to stop reasoning and surrender to blind faith?

 

The greatness of Shri Sai and the ever increasing relevance of his approach in the context of today’s world, remains due to the simple way in which Baba brought about a happy synthesis between reason and faith in his devotees. This led to a healthy togetherness among different groups living in Shirdi. If this experiment is tried in the much wider context of our world, then there can be a better tomorrow for the ever-warring, ever-jealous, human groups existing in a state of perpetual anxiety and confusion. Whatever be the prescription of any religion, the fact remains that one will have faith in God only when he has faith in Man (as a part of God) and one will have faith in Man if he has true faith in God. It is God who created man and gave him the knowledge that God exists, and man used his highest reasoning called faith to perpetrate His existence in his thought process. This interdependence of reason and

faith, as amply demonstrated by Shri Sainath Maharaj in his conduct and precepts, is the only way to evolve human society.