Dabbling
and Diving
The
Cosmic Visitor
Jonathan
Swift wrote in his characteristic, caustic
style, "When a true genius appears in the
world, you may know him by this sign - that the
dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Vilification is the tribute that envy offers to
mystery. Ignorance breeds either humility or
obstinacy; it seldom blossoms into inquiry and
illumination, for it cannot recognise itself. It
clothes itself in pride and revels in the petty
practice of slander.
Dr. Gokak
[see also: Cities
Aflame,
for a song by Dr. Gokak and Facets
of Truth]
describes Baba as the 'Cosmic Visitor'. Baba
Himself announced in His twenty-first
year,
"No
one can comprehend My glory, whoever he may
be, whatever his method of inquiry, and
however sustained his
attempt."
No wonder He
attracted a campaign of vilification when He was
just fourteen years of age. His father
threatened to beat the alleged 'megalomania' out
of His head. Brandishing a heavy stick [see:
Serpent
Hill],
he accosted Him saying, "Are you God or a
fraud?" when Baba replied,
'I
am Sai Baba come again; worship
Me,'
the stick dropped from His father's hand.
Miracles soon convinced him that it is best to
leave his Son alone. Baba's elder brother drew
His attention to the barbs of pettiness and
prejudice aimed through rumor and scandal at the
dazzling, new phenomenon Who had arisen from a
'hamlet between the hills'. Baba wrote to
him,
"These
people have to be pitied rather than
condemned. They do not know. They have no
patience to judge aright. They are too full
of lust, anger and conceit to see clearly and
know fully, so they make all types of
allegations. If only they knew, they would
not talk or write like that... People are
endowed with a variety of characteristics and
mental attitudes, and each judges the other
according to his own level of perception,
debates and defends his point of view in
accordance with his particular degree of
enlightenment."
[See: Resume
- 1926 -1961]
Slanderers
prowl around those who stand above the common
level. Peggy Mason, editor of Two
Worlds, writes, "A great light arouses
detractors. Jesus was scorned as a wine bibber
and a consort of publicans and sinners, who had
received his healing powers through the good
offices of Belzebub." Baba, too, was scorned
while yet a boy of fourteen, as being possessed
by a spirit. His brother and parents subjected
Him to a painful process of exorcism [See:
Serpent
Hill].
The villagers of Puttaparthi spread the story
that the boy was possessed by some local sprite
which, through their efforts in that direction,
would soon set him free. Baba says that
detractors only help in separating the chaff
from the grain, and even this by itself is
sufficient reason to welcome them.
Baba is an
open book. There is nothing exotic or esoteric
about Him, nor is there any trace of abracadabra
in His teachings; His ministration has no
mysterious ceremonial or initiatory rite; He is
ever intent on giving and forgiving; He never
accepts for Himself any gift or offering or
present; if you need Him, He says, you certainly
deserve Him; He is by your side when you call,
no matter where you may be; and love is the only
currency He deals in.
Invokes
a Sense of Unity
Therefore,
institutions trying to propagate and promote
special cults, purveyors of dubious remedies and
agents of 'exclusive' roads to the Abode of God,
naturally try to keep their own flocks intact by
means of slander. Baba declares before hundreds
of thousands of people, belonging to every
caste, creed and religion, and assembled from
every part of the globe,
"There
is only one caste - the caste of
Humanity;
there is only one religion - the religion of
Love;
there is only one language - the language of
the Heart;
there is only one God, and He is
omnipresent."
This message
demolishes the walls laboriously built and
vigilantly preserved by petty, separative minds,
who readily take refuge in slander and
vilification as their first line of defence
against this
Cosmic Visitor.
Blatantly
yellow journals felt encouraged to turn their
slander towards the divine phenomenon by forces
that could not, however, disturb it in any way.
They spun spicy tales which they hoped would
distort and damage its image and fetch them
quick returns. Periodicals that were restrained
were prompted into this nefarious adventure by
those having vested interests. But Baba, being
the embodiment of Love, has only love to offer
in return for such presents. He
says,
"In
every age, in every land, these unfortunate
people drudge for their daily bread. I stand
between the heap of praise and the heap of
blame, blessing both. You recite My name in
your homes; they shout My name along the
lanes and by-lanes, and all over the
marketplace. Why do you begrudge the few
paise they earn by selling their stuff to
provide their children a little
food?"
Baba, in His
infinite compassion, advises, "Pity them, they
do not know... Pity them, for they cannot know."
When I proposed to publish the first part of His
biography, 'Sathyam
Sivam
Sundaram',
in 1954, after a six-year stay in His presence,
He at once demurred, saying,
"Readers
will not accept the book as authentic, since
they do not and cannot know My truth. They
will treat it like a fairy tale, as they do
the Arabian Nights. Wait, I have still to
make the world eager and ready for that book.
Now, people will doubt your sanity; later,
they will blame you for underestimating
Me."
And exactly
this happened. The book was released in 1960. On
8th February 1962, I received a letter from
Swami Abhedananda, for long a resident of the
ashram of Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi in
Thiruvannamalai, who had recently met Baba: "In
my humble opinion, an
avatar
is only a particle of the supreme
Brahman,
descending on the earth simply to moderate the
ups and downs of humanity, and to alleviate
their imaginary woes." He then went on to charge
me with the sacrilege of underestimating Sai
Baba, saying, "He seems to me to be the perfect,
Poorna [purna: complete, full]
Brahman,
personified to end the unsettled state of the
world, to rectify human defects and to bring man
to realize his own true nature and its
bliss."
The
Superstition
Another
group of people who cannot be happy with a
divine phenomenon in their hemisphere, are the
'rationalists'. They are allergic to the very
idea of God. And here is Baba declaring that He
is God, and that every one is God, including
those who deny God. Such people adore only their
ego or their ism. They called a halt to their
logic somewhere about the forties of the present
century, before Eddington, Jeans, Freud, Jung
and Einstein highlighted the limitations of
science. Science has now humbled itself before
the inscrutability of the cosmos. "The universe
is a thought of God," says Jeans. The cell and
the atom, matter and energy, are dealing
surprise after surprise on syllogisms and
systems laboriously built by hoary pundits of
science. The once-respected faculty called
'intellect', has been discarded as a
superstition by front-line thinkers in biology,
psychology and physics.
As Paul
Brunton writes, "If any one considers all the
evidence of intention and, failing to believe
that a higher power directs all, comes only to
atheism; it is because the mind which such a
person considers as evidence, is already closed
by bias or ill-balanced by emotion, upset by
suffering or too distracted by the five senses,
or is faulty in yet some other way." Atheism is
kept alive by the tendency to rebel against
adult beliefs; it is a sign of juvenile
stubbornness. Some propagate this cult because
they have no courage to accept a stance
considered out of date, while others behave in
that manner for, being unhappy themselves, they
desire to undermine whatever happiness is
available to others.
A group of
so-called rationalists once initiated a project
with great fanfare, to 'investigate' Baba by
means of certain tests which they announced in
various periodicals. "We shall ask Baba to take
off his gown. What about his hair - it may be
fake; some say it is, so we shall have to find
out. Perhaps we would have to use metal
detectors to check if he is concealing some
things on him," they announced.
"Grotesquely
ridiculous and grossly insulting," exclaims R.K.
Karanjia, editor of Blitz, who had
himself in the past openly questioned and
criticized Sathya Sai Baba. The faithful
followers of the 'investigators' thereupon
vilified Karanjia as having been bribed, bought
out, hypnotized, converted, or otherwise
influenced by Baba!
The sallies
which such persons indulge in, remind us of the
adventures of Don Quixote and his companion
Sancho Panza. It is now well-established that
what we call 'reason' is only a state of mind,
and it is perverted and polluted by unreasonable
likes and dislikes. It can be distorted by
propaganda. It is so riddled by self-love that
one sees things only as one wishes to perceive
them. Child experiences, too, create bias
towards persons, principles and procedures. But
more than all other defects, our reason suffers
from a tendency to rationalize prejudices, in
order to salve the conscience and shield the ego
from guilt.
"Take off the
gown... pull at the hair... pass a metal
detector over the body!" No wonder the Sancho
Panzas were laughed off the stage. Many were
aware of Dr. Osis' remark that "in the
scientific community, as in every establishment,
there is inertia, conservatism and hostility
towards anything radically new." But no one
could have expected such a caricature to emerge
from this community.
Baba
says,
"How
can science, which is bound by physical laws,
investigate transcendental phenomena, for
these lie far beyond its scope and
comprehension... I have repeatedly declared
that those who want to understand Me are
welcome here. It is the spirit of
investigation that is important. Foreign
para-psychologists have come here and
examined Me in a positive and constructive
spirit. They do not write slanderous letters
or make public demands. But the very approach
of these people (the 'investigators') was
wrong. That is why I refused them. I want
people to come, see, hear, observe and
experience Me. Only then will they understand
and appreciate the
Avatar."
Diving
into Sai
Dr.
Karlis Osis, a director of research from the
prestigious American Society for Psychical
Research, and his friend and fellow-worker,
Dr. E. Haroldson, visited India three times, met
many people who had a long association with
Baba, journeyed thousands of miles on
fact-finding assignments, and stayed at
Prasanthi
Nilayam
for months together - seeing, hearing, studying,
observing and experiencing. Dr. Osis writes,
"The abundance of the phenomena encountered
and the magnitude of the miraculous effect, were
a complete surprise to seasoned
para-psychologists like us... I have been an
active searcher for twenty-five years and have
travelled widely, but nowhere have I found
phenomena which point as clearly and forcibly to
spiritual reality as the daily miracles of
Baba."
Baba
says,
"Those
who wish to secure pearls must dive deep to
get them. It is useless to dabble in shallow
waters and claim that the sea holds no
treasures."
Dr. Sandweiss
journeyed to
Prasanthi Nilayam
and 'dived' with the intention to prove its
barrenness, but to his own amazement, his
efforts yielded pearls aplenty. His
apprehensions about mass hypnotism, group
hysteria and uncanny influences, were quickly
laid low. Before he started on his voyage of
investigation, he had written, "The
opportunity of observing such events at first
hand and of investigating their psychological
mechanisms myself was very appealing. I felt
that observing Baba in person would give me an
idea of what might have taken place at the time
of Christ to propagate those incredible
stories." He has since written the now
well-known book, 'Sai Baba', on the last page of
which he has described the 'pearl' he secured,
thus:
"It has
been my good fortune to draw close to Him at a
time when it is still possible to become
friendly with him on a personal level, and see
the clear signs of His greatness in a close and
intimate way. Yet I feel that soon Baba will
become but an orange speck on the horizon,
surrounded by millions of eager faces. And like
the people in His village who were once blessed
to know the sweetness of His being from daily
personal contact with Him, I, too, will one day
be saddened by having to view Him only from a
distance."
Karanjia, too,
on the suggestion of both, Baba's devotees and
adversaries, finally decided like Sandweiss to
'dive'. He now recalls,
"I myself
went to Puttaparthi to put all available
criticisms straight to Baba, and to obtain His
answer... The encounter was fantastic, almost
shattering... Sathya Sai Baba revealed Himself
as a scientist of consciousness, showing mankind
the way to realize the indwelling God through
love, devotion, detachment and selflessness, to
evolve to a higher level of
enlightenment.
"The false
dichotomies created by Western thought between
man and God,
Purusha
and Purushottama, simply do not exist in the
Hindu scriptures, which propagate the mergence
of God in man and man in God as the basis of
religion. Baba personifies this philosophy...
Baba's holy mission leads us deep into the
spiritual significance of the Cosmic Drama. It
aims to first unmake the materialistic,
ego-bound man, and then to remake him in the
image and likeness of God."
Karanjia goes
on to quote the English version of a Telugu
poem, which Baba once sang as a prologue to one
of His discourses:
'I
am the Dance Master;
I am Nataraja, the Lord of Dance.
You are all my pupils.
I, alone, know the agony
Of teaching you, each step of the
Dance'.
Ruminating
over the cosmic dimensions of the agony that
this poem tries to express, Karanjia writes, "To
one who carries the burden as well as the glory
of human agony, campaigns of calumny indulged in
by a few misled people can hardly touch him."
And as simply and naturally as Christ's plea
from the cross, for forgiveness for those 'who
know not what they do,' Baba blesses the
calumniators.
To those who
are troubled by His assertion that man is
Divine, the question asked is, "As God is
omnipresent, can He not be found in man?" To
those who feel hurt by His treating the rich as
lovingly as the poor, the reply is,
"They
bring to Me their troubled hearts and sick
minds. I cure them by asking them to divert
their wealth and power to spiritual ends like
Seva."
Those who will
have Him 'perform' a miracle which suits their
taste, must first understand that He is no
'performer'. What we call a 'miracle' is, in
fact, only a concretization of His love. Baba
also explains,
"Articles
that can be worn by devotees are given by Me,
so that by wearing them the recipient can
keep contact with Me throughout his
life."
Most questions
and doubts arise only from cleverness. The
reason is used, as Aldous Huxley says, "to
create internal and external conditions
favorable to its own transfiguration by and into
the spirit." Huxley goes on to assert that,
"cleverness has given us technology and power.
Therefore, we believe, in spite of all evidence
to the contrary, that we have only to go on
being cleverer in a yet more clamorous way, to
achieve social order, international peace and
personal happiness."
In accordance
with Bhagavân's constant advice, let us
now resolve to understand ourselves by
transfiguring reason into spirit, rather than
disfiguring it into cleverness. Let us determine
to resolve our own mystery. Only then, says
Baba, can we hope to understand Him, to
understand that we are a part of Him. Then the
truth, 'My
Me is God',
will shine. Let little minds dabble; we shall
dive.
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