Travel Reference
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- Sign in Prasnthi Nilayam
'Many come for miracles, petty cures, worldly things,' Baba once
said. 'But few of you come for the gift I am here to give you: bliss.'
This seemed true, and he wasn't referring to Klaus's unfortunate
girlfriend. We Westerners were full of intellectual theories, eager
for answers to issues of predetermination versus free will, and so
on; the Indians sought blessings for businesses, marriages, babies. I
once looked at the childlike quotations from Baba painted on
tombstonelike slabs of granite planted all over the ashram grounds
and felt very sad that so few of us paid attention to his simple message
.
Start the day with love; spend the day with love; end the day with love. This
is the way to God
, read one. And another:
Love is selflessness; self is
lovelessness
. It was the very simplicity of Baba's teaching that was so
disconcerting.
Yet as the days and weeks and months passed, it was all too easy to
sink into petty concerns, all too easy to accept Baba's presence as yet
another mundane reality. Seeing him materialise
vibhuti
, rings,
lockets, rosaries, with a wave of the hand - and often so close I could
actually watch the moment when an object glittered out of thin air
- I still found myself forgetting what it was I really saw: the mastery
over laws of nature that made nonsense of contemporary physics.
I'd come to think of Baba as the tiny form in an orange robe. It was
all too easy to do, and it was a trap.
As the eminent Indian literary scholar, Vinayak Krishna Gokak,
wrote in his book
Sri Sathya Sai Baba: The Man and the Avatar
:
An avatar is always at work and always at rest. His vision is
worldwide and it embraces all the dimensions of Time. He has
an effortless command over metempsychosis,
parathahkarana
