Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mind and all else, is Contemplation. Offering the rose at the
Lord's feet is Meditation.
- Sathya Sai Baba
One day, several months after arriving in Puttaparthi, I suddenly
felt it was time for me to leave, that I'd learned all I could in Sathya
Sai Baba's ashram, and that the path of devotion was not to be my
path. From all I now understood, God lay within, and
that
was where
one ought to start looking for any truth. The holy man's presence
seemed to stand in the way of this. Here
he
was God. I'd decided to
travel around the country, to study, to listen, to learn whatever there
was to learn from whoever was willing to teach me. But I was also
feeling the seductive pull of the material world, I must confess. My
idyll was over. On the day I made up my mind to leave, Baba told
me he would talk to me. I was shocked.
Finally I found myself walking over the compound to the door of
Baba's living quarters. I had wondered for months what was behind
it. I stood looking into a tiny and virtually bare concrete room. It
smelled nice, at least, smelled of the incense that burned in the
temple. I've never encountered that fragrance anywhere else.
Several people sat beside me; no one spoke. Baba appeared from
the compound outside, at the end of the darshan, as he must have
done every day I'd been there. He stood looking at us. He said
something about seeing God in everyone, and then, rolling up a
sleeve, waved his hand and slowly produced a huge rosary of pink
stones. It seemed to emerge from a hole in space just below his
palm, swinging in a circle until it was all there, all present in its new
dimension. I was no more than a yard from his hand. He presented
this sparkling
japamala
to an old Chinese woman, beckoning her
and her husband to follow him through a door covered by a cloth
flap.
Soon - or maybe not soon - the couple emerged in a daze, followed
by Baba, who beckoned someone else inside that other room, the
room that was always referred to as his living quarters. Muffled
grunts could be heard, and then this person would emerge as if
stunned. What was he going to say to me? I didn't want to leave
anymore.
