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Posted on: June 12, 2016

Guru Poornima Special Offering
(Daily Episode)

Part - 4

In 2006, eager to start a service which will help everyone to connect with Bhagawan's teachings on a daily basis, Radio Sai began 'Sai Inspires'. All who subscribed to this service, received an email from us which had a concise message of Baba accompanied with His image. This daily offering was received well, and soon the subscriptions grew. Today nearly 100,000 people from all corners of the world wait for this message to help them tide over their day with peace and ease. The power inherent in these discourse capsules is indeed tremendous. How much we benefit from it and how best we harness this energy depends purely on how seriously we ruminate over these words and how sincerely we put our learning into action. To help us in this noble and elevating exercise, Prof. G. Venkataraman has taken time out to elaborate on these messages. His reflections will not only give us a deeper understanding into what the Lord is communicating to us but also give us tips to translate them into our daily practical life with more ease.

The best way to value the Master is to master His values. As we prepare to celebrate Guru Poornima (July 19), when we pay our respects and obeisance to the Divine Master, let us work to offer Him the tribute that the Lord loves the most from us - to make our lives His message, to make His love and wisdom shine in us. To aid us in this endeavour we have this series where Prof. Venkataraman for the next 26 days from June 9, 2016 shares his insights on select Sai Inspires messages. We hope this will help us to understand His teachings better and bolster our determination to walk on the sacred path.

Sai Inspires Message

PEACE CANNOT CO-EXIST WITH SELFISHNESS!

It is only when the individual is prepared to sacrifice his selfish desires and toil for the welfare of society, that the nation will prosper. Then only will the world have peace. That is why the Vedas proclaim that man can have peace only when he renounces selfish desires. The Vedas express disapproval of persons who accumulate wealth and who are ever immersed in activities that can add to their physical comfort. The man who gives, receives even while he gives, more than what he gives.

REFLECTIONS

This quote is a very important one for the simple reason that almost 99% of people all over the world would hardly connect world peace with removal of selfishness. If you don’t accept that, you just have to look back at the famous Cold War period that lasted from about 1946 to 1991, that is to say, almost from the time World War II ended to the time when the huge erstwhile Soviet Union collapsed almost overnight and vanished into the dustbin of history. It was a period of tense eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between America on the one hand and Soviet Union on the other, each with about ten thousand deadly nuclear weapons, each with an explosive power somewhere between 50 to 100 Hiroshima-type atom bombs. It used to be said then the each of these two Super Powers could individually wipe out the whole of planet earth many times over.

It was an exceedingly tense period, especially since both Super Powers could shoot missiles that could travel across the planet in about 30 minutes. In other words, if nuclear war had broken out, it would all have been over in less than one hour, with hardly any real victor but lots of people simply wiped out, and 90% of the survivors exposed to deadly radiation and what not. Young people of today would hardly have any idea of what kind tension humanity went through. And let me tell you from personal experience that in the early sixties when we had the so-called Cuban crisis, no one knew what was going to happen. If ever the world was on the brink of disaster, that was it. Luckily, the Cuban crisis got resolved thanks to two wise leaders, President Kennedy on the American side and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev of USSR. However, I shall not go into all that. My main reason for bringing all that history to your notice was to draw attention to the so-called MAD principle on which peace was based by experts on both sides.

I guess most of you might not have heard about this MAD principle and so let me say a few words about it. Let me start with what MAD really meant; it was an acronym standing for Mutually Assured Destruction. In practical terms, the two sides maintained a tense peace by silently telling each other: “Listen! Don’t you dare any funny stuff! We have hundreds of missiles each equipped with many deadly bombs; and they can reach you in between 20 to 30 minutes. We can launch from land and from sea, all over the place. So, though you may hit us badly, you too would get the same treatment!” This was the way the generals on the two sides warned each other. The politicians then took the soft approach and said, “Look, we really cannot take things that far. So let us maintain some kind of peace, without going that far.”

That about describes it; there was no real peace but just a tense situation; mercifully though, no bombs flying. Can that BP-raising situation be really called peace? Obviously not. What then would be real peace like? The answer to that lies in Swami’s quote. So, let us try to go deeper into it. We start with conflict. Have you ever seriously wondered why at all a conflict arises? The answer is simple. Conflict usually arises between two people A and B say, when one of them tries to take away what both have. Or else, it could be that both A and B do not have the desired whatever it is, say a powerful political position, but are competing fiercely for it. For example, A and B could be two women, a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law, both competing to be the prime individual in the life of the man in the middle, husband to A and son to B. This of course is an old, old story, and is known all over the world. Though the time and place might vary, the cause of conflict is the same - a kind of selfishness.

In the familiar example just cited, the conflict is confined to the family. What Swami is referring to concerns selfishness of individuals impacting the entire country. Let me give a simple but powerful example. India has a big drug industry which makes all kinds of drugs. Indeed, where generic drugs are concerned, India has a strong reputation particularly, after President Clinton gave the lead in picking India as a leading supplier of generic drugs for treating HIV positive patients in Africa. At the same time, sad to say, we also have a huge fake drug industry. What I mean is that unscrupulous operators make packaging almost identical to that in which genuine drugs are packed. The fakers buy these duplicate, look-alike packaging and fill the bottles, ampoules or whatever with just plain liquid, tablet or powder as the case may be, and sell it to small scale drug dealers, like those you find in small towns, including Puttaparthi.

Now here is my point. Take a life-saving drug. A lady is having a serious medical condition and a doctor has been called. He examines the patient and says, “I want this medicine immediately. It has to be administered at once.” The son of this lady rushes to the nearest drug store and buys the medicine. Unfortunately, the drug he buys is a fake and as a result his mother dies. The fakers may make huge profits, and believe me, they in fact do. I have read somewhere that the WHO estimates that nearly 30% of the drugs sold in the Third World are spurious. Just imagine the large scale havoc caused. The magnitude of this bogus industry is so huge, and poor countries have so little infrastructure for checking the drugs sold, that ordinary people in hundreds of thousands are subject to unwanted suffering and even death, after paying for the drugs. This is an example of how selfishness and the greed to make money by hook or crook can cause national havoc.

Let us dig a bit deeper. How come these people who make fake drugs are so heartless? In part it probably is due to the fact they were not at all exposed to values at home or in school. In fact, there is a kind of feedback loop here. When children don’t get exposed to values at home and school, can easily slip in later years, little realising how much harm he or she is doing. As the number of people who are indifferent to moral values increases, there comes a tipping point when society as a whole starts adopting an indifferent attitude. That’s when ripples turn into big waves.

Here is an example. India has a very large number of trucks, many of them owned by small and medium size trucking companies. They want to maximize profits and so the first thing they do is to use trucks that ought to have been junked a long time ago. The headlights hardly work, the brakes are not in order, the reflectors on the rear side have fallen off and so on. Next, they invariably overload the truck, that means they can easily trip over. As if this is not enough, they hire drivers who drive badly; some of them don’t even have proper licenses. It is not as if there are no rules; but practically every rule on the book can be got around by paying a bribe somewhere or the other. Turning now to the drivers, they often drink while driving which they are not supposed to, and drive in the middle of the road instead of in the lane they are supposed to, and cross the speed limit. Also, they hardly ever dip their lights when traffic comes from the other side.

I guess you are seeing where I am going. What we have here is an entire chain of selfishness, and the net result is that in some places traffic accident is the number one killer. Can you imagine that? Not cancer, TB, heart attack and so but road accidents! And why do these accidents happen? Simply because of cumulative selfishness.

So you see if people decide to get selfish, then such selfishness would start growing without limits. Further, if selfishness starts spreading like a deadly virus, then it can affect large segments of society and cause harm on a large scale. This would somewhat be similar to a body in which cancer has spread; and you know what the end result of that is. Where society is concerned, it does not quite die but becomes very sick and in the extreme case fails. To become a failed state is the worst fate for a nation. Today, there is one universally acknowledged failed state, namely Somalia, with many others on the brink of tottering.

From a spiritual point of view, God sends the human being with a body, a Mind and the soul or Atma. As Krishna has said and Swami has explained in detail, it is the duty of the body and the Mind to safely take the Atma back to God. If the Mind and body gang up and act selfishly, then it means that humans have massively failed the purpose of life. Do we want to let down God that way, especially when we constantly proclaim, “WE LOVE YOU SWAMI!”? Think about it!

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Radio Sai Team