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Posted on: June 22, 2016

Guru Poornima Special Offering
(Daily Episode)

Part - 14

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

MAN MUST START FROM THE WORLD, SEE GOD THERE, AND THEN ELEVATE HIMSELF

Man is the highest object in creation. Man should not be a creature of instincts like the animals, which are subject to Nature, but should become a master of Nature. He should progress from the Nara (human) to the Narayana (Divine). An intelligent human being should not regard himself as bound by Samsara (worldly attachments). It is not the world that binds man. It has neither eyes to see nor hands to grasp. Man is a prisoner of his own thoughts and desires. In his attachment to the ephemeral and the perishable, man forgets his inherent Divinity and does not realize that everything in the Universe has come from the Divine and cannot exist without the power of the Divine.

• Divine Discourse, December 25, 1987.

REFLECTION

Sai Ram. In the above Sai Quote Swami makes a most important point that we hardly ever pay attention to or even bother to notice that it exists. These days, most people take it for granted that this entire planet exists for them and them alone, and that they can do what they want, irrespective of what it does to the millions of other living species also living on the same planet, most of them for a much longer period. I mean, we hardly care that tigers in the wild are being driven almost to the point of extinction, even though they have existed for millions of years while the human species has come into existence at best one million years ago. In fact, humans as we now know, came into existence barely a hundred thousand years ago, after which they spread all over, multiplied, and now, numbering a little more than six billion, are threatening species not only on land but also in the wide oceans, and polluting the atmosphere in a way that seemed unimaginable barely fifty years ago. That is the context in which we should try to understand the quote we are discussing today.

Let us read again Swami’s opening remarks. He says:

Man is the highest object in creation. Man should not be a creature of instincts like the animals…

I hope you paid careful attention to the first words Swami says in the quote under consideration. He reminds us emphatically that though we might have come late in evolution we are in fact the most important entity created by God and placed on Planet Earth. Having biologically evolved from lower species, humans too have limbs, eyes, ears, nose, the sense of sight, hearing, smelling and so on. Like all living species, humans are born, then grow and finally die. They also are governed to a large extent by the survival instinct. But does that mean humans should also live like animals? Now mind you, the phrase living like an animal is not meant to be insulting to animals. Rather, the point being made is that life is not all about being born, eating and growing, then becoming old and finally dying. Indeed, if we look around, there is almost no place we cannot see proof of how much humans have changed the planet, that too in a few hundred years. They have dug huge tunnels through mountains and under the seas. They have built bridges across the widest of rivers, and in a few places even across short stretches of the sea. They have learnt to grow food which no animal species does, created huge cities, landed on the Moon, can talk to each other if they are on opposite sides of the earth, and so on. But in course of all this, humans are spending less and less time asking themselves a few basic questions, and they are:

• Where did all this awesome creative power come from?

• Does the Source that bestowed us such powers, have anything special for us to do while on earth?

A long time ago, people had the leisure to reflect on such basic issues but alas, these days we have more time for Facebook and Twitter rather than for examining what the purpose of life is. Since we have forgotten that, Swami Himself reminds us what it is. He says:

He should progress from the Nara (human) to the Narayana (Divine).

What Swami means is that every single human being has a Spark of the Divine within and is verily an Embodiment of God, embodied with a human form. This form is quite unlike other forms in what it can do. More than anything else, humans alone can contemplate on the purpose of life and appreciate that the blessing of life has been given for us to realize that from God we have come and to God we must journey via life. That is the reminder Swami is giving us.

OK, but do we do that? Hardly ever; instead, we give a thousand reasons about how we are tied up by family, business, politics and what not. Basically we say, “Listen, I am tied up with all these commitments. How do you expect me to meditate on God and journey towards God? What happens then to all these obligations I have?”

This is an old argument and has also been answered a long time ago. Reminding us of the answer, Swami says:

An intelligent human being should not regard himself as bound by Samsara (worldly attachments). It is not the world that binds man. It has neither eyes to see nor hands to grasp. Man is a prisoner of his own thoughts and desires.

If you listened to that carefully, you would realize that when we say the world is binding us, we are merely giving a flimsy excuse. As Swami asks, how can the world bind? Does it have hands, legs and eyes to catch us? Absolutely not! What bind us to the world are our desires. We want wealth and when we get it we do not want to let go, no matter what the circumstances. We want power, it is again the same story; we just do not want to let go, no matter what. It is we who hug the world and not the other way around. And why are we so passionately attached to objects and entities of the world? Because of various desires that arise in the Mind. And why do such desires arise in the Mind? Because the Mind suffers from the delusion that power, possessions and pelf can all give us happiness. Somehow, we think ultimate happiness lies in these things that I just mentioned and thereafter spend an entire lifetime chasing them and holding on to the pieces that come within our grasp.

But is this what God expected us to do when He created us with human form and put us on the planet? As explained earlier, definitely not. He had something else in Mind for us. OK, why then do we all uniformly forget what God has told us to do, namely to journey from Nara to Narayana? Here is the answer:

In his attachment to the ephemeral and the perishable, man forgets his inherent Divinity and does not realize that everything in the Universe has come from the Divine and cannot exist without the power of the Divine.

I hope that makes it all clear. First, man allows his mind to mislead him and then goes after the trinkets of the world, thinking they would all get him happiness. Next, even when he finds that they do not, he does not let go because of the disease of attachment. Like a lice, desires attach themselves very strongly to the Mind; and like lice which sucks blood, desire clouds latent Divinity very effectively, making humans forget that they are the embodiment of God and are expected to use life to get back to God. They use the tremendous power of God to even change the face of the Planet, go out into space and peep deep into the atom. Yet, they are unable to use that same power to do what God wants them to.

So, dear reader, when we cry out: “Swami, we Love YOU!” we should all pause for a moment and ask the following questions:

• Swami wants us to realize that God is truly within us, but what serious efforts are we making to achieve that realization?

• Swami says if we want to connect with God within, we must first peel off the many layers of ignorance that covers the Divine Core. Do we know what procedure must be employed to do the peeling off, and if we do, how much time do we devote for that spiritual scrubbing?

• Do we realize that all our so-called worldly achievements, be it in sports, the arts, or even in the world of business, politics and statecraft, all of these come via the use of special capabilities gifted by God to us individually? And that these powers are really meant to be used also for a nobler purpose?

The last point that Swami makes is not only very powerful but also highly meaningful in today’s context. Again and again, Swami exhorts us to realize our Higher Self and become one with Him. But, allowing ourselves to be trapped by a cage of desires and attachments built by the mind, we cry out from within, “WE LOVE YOU SWAMI!” without making the slightest effort to knock off the cage. We plead helplessness, which makes no sense really, since attachments come from our own minds and can never be imposed. Gandhi once declared, “No one can take away my self-respect, unless I choose to surrender it.” In the same way, says Bhagawan, man stays put crying he is in a trap, when it is he who has chosen to be trapped! And yet, he can get out of even that powerful trap of worldly desires, if there is something he desires even more. If we TRULY love God, then God’s love for us would help us smash that cage and liberate us. The question thus boils down to: “How much do we really love God? Is it sufficient enough for God to say, ‘You are dear to Me,’ and draw us to Him?” That is the issue we ought to ponder about. Think about it! Jai Sai Ram.

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Radio Sai Team