Is not the form of the Sadguru enough!.............

[Guest guest]

Devotees speak volumes about their masters. They speak on the

Masters glory, personality, activities, miracles, their personal experiences,and

of other devotees and group activities etc. Particularly, when it comes toShri

Sainath Maharaj devotees speak more about dreams with relation to Him,their own

experience, which they call miracles and on their emotive interaction with Baba.

In short, they experience Him as a Personal God, who can be a Sadguru or a

deity. Some of them worship a number of Personal Gods at the same time and

therefore, find it difficult to focus on one. In any case the One Ultimate has

to be beyond all the Personal Gods. A Personal God, by whatever name, is called

Saguna (with certain qualities and powers) Sakara (a form which a human mind can

ordinarily comprehend). A finer understanding of God is Nirguna (beyond such

limited qualities and powers), Nirakara (beyond specific forms). Nirguna

Nirakara - this means seeing   or experiencing the essence of God or that

Ultimate reality or Brahma in all its creations, i.e., in the devotee himself

and in the entire manifested and non-manifested creation around him.

 

By this logic all statues or paintings, structures (like Samadhis), names,

Aartis, Mantras, Charan Padukas, etc. are symbols of God and certainly not God,

the Ultimate. Such symbols are generally worshipped and contemplated on, as it

is easy for the limited human mind to comprehend them. The question is whether

the human mind should necessarily be limited, or a path should be chosen to keep

it limited. If any path or any religion prescribes such an approach, it itself

is limited. Hinduism prescribes certain methods by which a devotee can graduate

from Sakara (limited form of) worship to Nirakara (form-less) worship. Religion

means both ritualism and spiritualism. Unless one transcends ritualism, it is

difficult to enter into the arena of spiritualism in the true sense of the term.

 

Spiritualism means to follow the true diktats of the spirit within. Generally

speaking, the spirit within means the soul, which is a part of that God, the

Ultimate who   encompasses both the seen and unseen, the living and non-living

aspects of nature and from the smallest particles to biggest stars.

Spiritualism,therefore, has necessarily to expand the spirit of the soul from

its limited body-bounden awareness to a vast cosmic awareness. If sheer

ritualism like Puja, Archana, Yagyans does not uplift the spirit of the

individual or expand his mental horizon, it certainly is not spiritualism.

 

Generally, it is due to the lack of understanding of what real spiritualism

means that most of the devotees spend their whole life doing certain rituals

without progressing. From multiple forms of God to a single form God to a

formless state of God is the real prescription for spiritualism. Multiple form

worships (i.e. of deities etc.) do not give focus on a particular form. Since

these various symbolic representations of different aspects of nature go with

various functions and powers, a person worshipping these forms gets scared to

stop such worship even when he understands that he has to graduate to a formless

state of worship. For example, Shri Ganapati is for the removal of obstructions,

Shri Durga is for protection against enemies or Shri Laxmi is for prosperity or

Shri Hanumana for courage, etc. No doubt that all the four deities are

manifestations of the Ultimate One but then on whom does the devotee

concentrate? Where then is the question of   what is called Ekagra Chitta as a

sine-qua-non for subtle experience of God. In such a situation one has to choose

one of the two ways. Either to worship the Ultimate One (Nirguna Nirakara) going

beyond the worship of these deities or to evolve through these limited forms to

the Ultimate reality through Gyana Marga (Path of Knowledge). All spiritual

practitioners in all ages, of

whichever religion, have gone through this process of leaving the forms and

contemplating on the formless state of God or in experiencing the formless state

of God through the forms. The Perfect Masters or Sadgurus always taught the same

method to their disciples at a certain stage of evolution. Those who followed

them and tried to experience the impersonal aspects of God evolved faster than

those that stuck on to the Personal aspect of God only. Thus Baba has clearly

stated in Shri Sai Satcharitra that the best way of worship is to experience Him

as a Formless, Universal existence. If not, to worship Him with a form.

Therefore, the devotee of Baba

while worshipping Him with a form, should always try to experience Him as the

formless. But then, the big question is how to be focused and be in a state of

Ekagra Chitta when too many forms are contemplated on at the same time. Is not

the form of the Sadguru enough!.