The following conversation between a devotee and Sai Baba took place in
Prasanthi Nilayam many years ago and was first published in an early issue of
the Sanathana Sarathi :
Devotee: Swami! The world is very cruel to me.
Swami : That is its nature. The purpose of the world is frustration; it
has to engender need. When the need is strong enough, the individual seeks
fulfilment.
Devotee: And fails!
Swami : Only when he seeks fulfilment without! Within him, he can get it.
The within is accessible always; it is ever responsible. There is pain only so
long as attachment for outer forms remains. Ultimate relief from pain can come
only with the loss of ego, the neutralisation of that which reacts to something
as pain and something else as pleasure, whose memory, whose conditioning, helps
to recognise the dualities of joy and grief.
Devotee: But the world, Swami?
Swami : The world is pain. Expect nothing from the world but that. I
willed the totality of your conditioned existence to be pain, in order to draw
you to me.
Devotee: Which I can, at best, only hope to attain.
Swami : God asks for neither hope nor despair. They are subject to
relativity. Universal Being is beyond both hope and despair, both certainty and
doubt. It knows no lingering in its conclusions. It is ever flowing, in all
directions, and in none of them.
Devotee: What then shall be my direction?
Swami : Take what works today for today. What works tomorrow for
tomorrow. One day at a time, each day for itself, each moment for itself,
without a past, without memory, without conclusions.
Devotee: Conclusions?
Swami : Yes. Conclusions bind; they press on the mind. The newborn baby
is not confined to conclusions. All conclusions enslave. Most men are slaves to
the conclusions into which they have fallen.
Devotee: Does that mean I have to give up my practice of concentration?
Swami: The question that bothers you is one of fixity. You tried to fix
your thought and attention on a word and later on a form, but you discovered
that nothing lasts, that everything has to change. But I tell you; awareness
can remain, even when form subsides, even when the word melts away..
Devotee: I find it difficult to hold my attention on form or word.
Swami : Because when you try to meditate, the very trial invites the
success-failure conflict onto the scene. You say to yourself, it is good to
meditate on this and not that, or to meditate on that is wrong or foolish..
Practise choicelessness; no objective, no intention. Be yourself. Choose no
particular form, for all are equally His. Choose no particular word or sound,
for all are His.
Devotee: I am often tossed between contradictory beliefs.
Swami : Contradictions are inevitable. It is the very nature of this
world and of the mind. But you can choose, either to be buffeted endlessly by
the apparent contradictions or to remain in the calm centre of the cyclone.
This is the problem of all problems, the problem of peripheral or central being.
Devotee: The circumference or the centre, the rim or the hub of the wheel?
Swami : Yes. The hub is calm, steady, unmoved. But the mind will be drawn
along the spokes, the objective desires, to revolve over mud and stone, sand
and thorns. It will not believe that it can get bliss from the centre, rather
than from the circumference, without undergoing a rough journey over turbulent
terrain.
Devotee: Ultimately, it means the conquest of the mind?
Swami: Learn to let all the conflicts spawned by the mind play themselves
out, and cancel each other out. Be the witness to the holocaust. The ultimate
solution to the conflict is not decision or even choice, but passive being.
Dare to remain inconclusive. See the endless quandaries of the mind as a divine
leela, God's sport, as the natural function of the bundle of desires called
mind. Do not believe in mind; do not rally to its assertions and appetites.
Watch the mind from a distance; do not get involved in its tumblings and
turnings. Then everything becomes insignificant. When everything recedes into
meaninglessness, you are in the hub, in equanimity.
Devotee: Swami, you are the hub, the spokes and the rim.
Swami : Do not be concerned with who I am! Concern yourself with who you
are and how you can be ever aware of that truth. Do not be a willing captive of
the endless stratagems of the mind. Abstain from all that draws you into its
web. I will lead you, if you rely on me. The alternatives of the world will not
bring you happiness, for the mind, which revels in alternatives, is but a
will-of-the-wisp, flitting before your vision. I do not judge you for what is
never yours, really. Your imperfection is no obstacle for me.
Devotee: I confess that I have not always observed the rules of conduct
of the Sathya Sai Organisation.
Swami : Your mind keeps asking for rules. But when you get the rules, you
find you cannot keep them. Rules engender rigidity, they force. They do not
bloom out of love or spread love. There is always a way of doing a thing
without the strain of a rule. See how unperturbed I am with your restlessness!
I live thus, so that I may afford a lesson for you to learn.
Devotee: I am restless, Swami, because I yearn for rest and do not get it.
Swami : It is your reaction to restlessness that is bad, not the
restlessness itself. Restlessness is only the rise and fall of a wave on the
ocean that you are. Nothing matters, so long as the depths are secure. Success
is not important: failure does not matter. The river of eternity is flowing
ever into the ocean of the Supreme Will.
Devotee: How long am I to be torn apart from that Supreme Will?
Swami : You are a fraction of that Supreme Will. That is why you are
afflicted with the hunger to seek It and to merge in It and to find fulfilment
and bliss thereby. Turning to the world for solace and sustenance to appease
that hunger has been tried by countless generations, including your own, but
the hunger is gnawing still.
Devotee: What then is the proper reaction to the attractions of the world?
Swami : Let go. Don't cling. Be still. Establish yourself in the
homelessness of the mind; physical homelessness will not earn the victory.
There are many spiritual aspirants still caught in the coils of greed, envy,
pride and power seeking. They have not escaped from their homes. They have
built prisons around themselves. I describe homelessness of the mind as mind
abiding nowhere.
Devotee: And wandering everywhere?
Swami : Do not exclude anything. Be the witness of everything. The
exclusive cannot endure. God is all. Your restlessness came from exclusion, the
pressure exerted by the excluded into the area from which it was excluded. All
is God; how can you push God out of His Domain? Your mind concludes that the
cause for the restlessness is whatever concerns it at the time. The actual
cause is not that. You limit God by your assumptions, hence the restlessness.
For you too are divine, and your reality protests against that limitation.
Devotee: Swami! Sometimes I feel so sad that I am so strange, so
different in habits from the rest of those that come to you for succour.
Swami : If your path contrasts entirely with those around you, believe
that it is my will for you. Every way is my way and ways seemingly indirect may
be the most direct for some spiritual seekers. For me there are no impossible
cases, no incorrigible cases. Practise choicelessness as hitherto prescribed.
Choicelessness is constant contentment.
Devotee: I have yet much to learn.
Swami : You wish to learn from me. Well, if you are preoccupied by the
body's needs, by the arrangements for its travelling, its accommodation and the
food it demands, time will fly. That student learns best and fastest who does
not spend his time constantly shifting from one classroom to the next. You will
learn everything worth knowing in my classroom. I will expose you to all states
of being, so that you may learn to rest in me in all of them. There are no
insurmountable obstacles to me; there are no pre-requisites for me. I am
unconditional.
Devotee: But you are absent so often and away for so long at your
headquarters.
Swami : Always, at every time, at every place, I am where you need me.
All things without are subject to the limitation of time and space, to the
material laws of Nature. My outer form is no exception! If you would perceive
my physical form, it must come within the range of your gaze, so position
yourself so that you can see it. And even then, it may not gaze at you.. But, I
am omnipresent! The limitations of the body and the outer senses do not hold
for the inner vision.
Therein, you can see me at any time and any place and receive darshan.
The outer vision is purposely insufficient, instantaneous, transitory, casual,
so that you may crave for and accomplish the inner darshan. If I have separated
you from my physical image off and on, it was only to bring you to me and to
establish my presence within you. That alone will replenish you and refresh
you, I know. None of my absences was a rejection or rebuke. So far as you are
concerned, I intended them all. And, always, I willed that you return to me.
Source: Ramala Centre Newsletter, http://www.ramalacentre.com/
newsletter03_02_03.htm
OUR LIFE IS HIS MESSAGE
Sai Ram
