Swami teaches... The fundamental human values, Dharma, purity of heart

[Guest guest]

Sai Ram Light and Love

Swami teaches... 12 - 13 December, 2005

The Fundamental Human Values, Dharma, Purity of Heart

Swami asks to describe Him as a Teacher of Truth, as Sathyam (Truth),

Shivam (Goodness) and Sundaram (Beauty). Humans reality too is Sathyam, Shivam

and Sundaram. The effect of truth on the mind is goodness; the joy that flows

from goodness is the genuine Beauty that artists love. The three are really one

and indivisible. Experience this Truth; this Truth as Goodness and this Goodness

as Beauty. That gives the highest Bliss. Let not lesser ones distract you. Go,

straight on the royal road that leads to self-realisation, and don't stray into

the bye-lanes of counterfeit bliss. This does not mean that you have to give

up kith and kin and foot it all alone. The community in which you find yourself

is the arena where you can win the victory, the gymnasium where you develop the

skill to win. The spiritual journey lies through compassion, sympathy, mutual

help, and service, and these are fostered by society and are to be used for

society.

If you love another person, you will not covet lordship over him; you will

not covet his/her property; you will have no envy when he/she prospers, no joy

when he/she suffers. Love is the strongest antidote for greed. Love persuades

you to consider the distress of the other, whenever you are overcome by it. You

are drawn to those who have equal ground for grief. You become engrossed in the

sorrow of others and so forget your own.

Love is eternal. You are the embodiment of Love. You are the embodiment of

Peace. You are theembodiment of Truth. You are the embodiment of God. It is

only when this supreme truth is realised, and our life is based on it, that our

love can make our life meaningful and enable us to comprehend the world. Your

studies, your conduct, your actions, all that you see, hear and think - all

these should be regarded as offerings to the Divine. This is the true meaning

of taking refuge in the Divine. All that is seen, heard or experienced should

be considered as intimations of the Divine.

God is Truth, Goodness and Beauty, but only those who have had experience of

Him can assert so andconvince. You may have a pot full of amritha, but unless

you place a drop on your tongue, how can you assert about its fragrance and

sweetness? Through Swami's devotees a transformation has to be brought about in

the minds of people; so devotees responsibility is very great.

How to obtain skill for that? All advices are in Swami's Teaching. When the

heart is pure, the Lord resides therein and guides a devotee. Human's purity is

manifesting when human relations are based on heart to heart and love to love.

(Love today is based on desire for a return benefit. It is filled with fear and

anxiety. Thus love is motivated. When love is based on a desire for transient

and perishable objects, life will be futile).

At first the guides are for the devotee's own enlightenment through Dharma,

fundamental human values, purity of heart and other ancient ever young

spiritual truths. Obtaining such Divine qualities devotee can spread them to

the other minds through examples, knowledge and his/her unvisible sacred

vibrations.

 

One of the very first principles for devotee's straight living is: Practise

silence. For the Voice of God can be heard in the region of your heart only when

the tongue is stilled and the storm is stilled, and the waves are calm. Conserve

sound, since it is the treasure of the element Akasha (space), an emanation from

God Himself. Silence is the speech of the spiritual seeker.

The second sign is cleanliness: not outer cleanliness alone, but, even

more, inner. In reality, the outer cleanliness is but the reflection of the

inner achievement. There is a strange glow on the face of a guileless person.

The third sign is that the true devotee will have a reverent attitude to the

duty he/she is bound with. He/she will carry out every task as if it is an act

of worship by which the Lord will be pleased.

 

Swami compiles nine steps in the pilgrimage of devotee towards the Lord

along the path of dedication and surrender. It is for devotee's own

transformation and only after that devotee can to seed Swami's Cosmic Truth in

the minds of people.

(1) Developing a desire to listen to the glory and grandeur of the handiwork

of God and ofthe various awe-inspiring manifestations of Divinity. This is the

starting point. It is by hearingabout the Lord again and again, that we can

transform ourselves into divinity.

(2) Singing to oneself about the Lord, in praise of His magnificence and

manifold exploits.

(3) Dwelling on the Lord in the mind, revelling in the contemplation of His

Beauty Majesty and Compassion.

(4) Entering upon the worship of the Lord, by concentrating on honouring the

feet or foot-prints.

(5) This develops into a total propitiation of the Lord, and systematic

ritualistic worship, in which the aspirant gets inner satisfaction and

inspiration.

(6) The aspirant begins to see the favourite Form of God, which he likes to

worship, in all beings and all objects, wherever he turns, and so, he develops

an attitude of Vandhana (reverence) towards nature and all life.

(7) Established in this bent of mind, he becomes the devoted servant of all,

with no sense of superiority orinferiority. That is the stage of service, which

every person calling himself a social worker, or volunteer, or sevak has to

reach. It is more fruitful than reciting the Name or counting beads, or

spending hours in meditation, though one's service will be richer and more

satisfying if done on the basis of spiritual discipline. This is a vital step,

which presages great spiritual success. Service is Divine. Humility promotes

charity and purity.

(8) This takes the seeker so near the Lord that he feels himself to be the

confidant and comrade, the companion and friend, the sharer of God's power and

mercy of God's triumphs and achievement,

(9) As can be inferred, this is the prelude to the final step of total

surrender, yielding fully to the Will of the Lord which the seeker knows

through his own purified intuition.

 

Human is an amalgam of body, mind and spirit. The senses of perception and

action, which form the components of the body, are busy contacting the

objective world. The mind - consciousness of the various levels, the faculty of

reason and the ego - examines, experiences and judges. It decides after

discrimination, which word or deed will be beneficial, favourable, fruitful and

felicitous. It attempts to separate the good from the bad, the virtuous deed

from the sinful action, the true from the false, the permanent from the

momentary. But the Spirit or the Self or the Atma is unaffected, stable and

foundational.

The feeling 'I' has to be retained until it is submerged in the 'We' and

finally in 'He' from whom it was projected at His Will.This is an arduous

process, which requires a long journey through compassion, renunciation,

rectitude, fortitude and patience. These are the five vital airs which

purposeful living needs. All these are subsumed under the word, 'dhama'

(control of senses), in the scriptures. These five are the counterparts of

Truth, Righteousness, Peace, Love and Non-violence implies more than the

correct reporting of what was seen. It involves the coordination of thought,

word and deed and the recognition of the Eternal Witness of all three.

The Witness is the Self, a sport of the Omniself. A boy may wear a brown

shirt today, he might have worn a black one yesterday. "A boy in a brown shirt"

is a true statement today; "A boy in a black shirt" was a true statement

yesterday. This level of truth is known as 'truth for all practical worldly

purposes. The coats do change; the body of a boy does change, from day today.

But the Witness, the Self, is free from change.

Dharma (right action) is the code of morals that upholds and uplifts human

and society. It is the superstructure on Truth. It serves the needs of the

time, the society and the goal and is therefore subject to modification. The

Dharma of the 'student' is different from that of the 'master of the family'

and from the Dharma of the renunciant and the monk. But, through all the stages

of life, the Truth, the unchanging Witness persists. Accept Budhi (intellect) as

the charioteer, then, the practice of Dharma will lead to success.

The fundamental human values all emanate from Dharma, based on Truth. The

enumeration of human values as five - Truth, Righteousness, Peace, Love and

Non-violence - is not fully correct. They are all facets of the foundational

humanness. They grow together; they are inter-dependent, they are not

separable. Dharma is Love in Action; Love thrives on inner peace, on the

absence of inner conflicts.

Do not treat human values as a separate curricular assignment. Then, it will

become dry and uninspiring. It must transform the way of life and should not

stop with imparting information. It must be imparted more through example and

practice rather than by books and formal teaching. If human behaviour has no

such basis, it leads to disaster. Human has dehumanised systematically by

neglect of the basic Unity. From slings to arrows, from cannon balls to bombs,

from fusion to fission, human has progressed in the art of killing and entered

the Darkest Age of history. The greed for wealth and power has overwhelmed the

creed of compassion. The law of self-aggrandizement reigns; the law of

self-abnegation has receded. When the son is acclaimed as a good fellow, the

father congratulates himself; when he is ostracised as a bad fellow, the father

condemns others for leading him astray.

The Hindus have been praying since ages for the peace and prosperity of all

the worlds. The Vedic seers prayed for the peace and happiness of all mankind,

of all animate and inanimate things. Cultivate that Universal vision. Their

conception of the Immanence of God is strong and unshakeable. The rituals,

ceremonies, vows and rites prescribed in, Hinduism, are all directed to the

promotion and well-being of all the worlds.This is the reason why Hinduism is

still alive and active. Since several centuries and millennia, yajnas (Vedhc

rite or sacrifice) have been observed in India for the welfare of the world.

These yajnas are not performed to benefit an individual, a family, a sect, a

caste or those who follow a particular faith. The aim is universal and the

beneficiaries are all living beings, for such yajnas calm the elements and

propitiate the deities presiding over the earth, water, fire, wind and sky.

Among yajnas, there are two types - the outer and the inner, the outer being

a reflection of the inner. The inner yajna is the bird in the hand; the outer,

the bird in the bush. But since the sanctified vision and urge are absent

today, what is happening is the release of the bird in the hand with the

attempt to catch the bird in the bush. The value and significance of the inner

yajna have to be understood first. It involves awareness of the Divinity that

is dormant but decisive in the very centre of our Reality. Worship It,

propitiate It, please It, become It.

The ancient sages, after performing severe penances and making profound

enquiries, realised anddeclared how unique is the human birth. They have known

that there is a Supreme Purusha who is effulgentlike the Sun and who transcends

darkness. The sages drew the inference that the beginning and the end are One,

which is the Divine. They declared that this One is the seed of the Cosmos. No

seed exists without husk. Because the grain is covered by husk its parts are

not visible to us. For the cosmos, Prakrithi (Nature) is the husk. The seed of

divinity is within it (and enveloped by it).

Who is it that has created the five elements, the five life-breaths, the

five sheaths, the five external sense organs and the five internal sense

organs, which are all ceaselessly carrying on their functions according to

theirprescribed roles. The seasons in their regular cycle are teaching a good

lesson to human. Therefore Nature is the demonstrable proof for the existence

of God. Nature is not under any obligation to any human, it takes no orders

from any human, it operates according to the will of the Divine. We have to

endeavour to get at the truth about Nature. The Upanishads declared: "All this

is permeated by the Divine." That means, there is only one thing that is

immanent in the entire Universe. If the truths declared by the Upanishads are

to be understood, we have to seek the truth of everything in our daily lives.

For instance, why has Nature come into being? Nature's role is to help human,

the crowning achievement of the evolutionary process, to realise the Divinity

immanent in creation.

Human is deriving innumerable debt from Nature, and enjoying the amenities

provided by Nature in various ways. But what is the gratitude he is showing to

Nature? What gratitude is he offering to the Divine? He is forgetting the

Divine who is the provider of everything. That is the reason for his becoming a

prey to various difficulties and calamities. While human is receiving countless

gifts from Providence, he/she is offering nothing in return to Nature or God.

This shows how unnatural and heartless is the behaviour of human being. When we

are enjoined to return good for evil, how unbecoming it is to fail even to

return good for good? Human is not learning the great lessons Nature.

The artificial instruments produced by human function for a time and then

become useless. Scientists today have launched many satellites in space. Sooner

or later they cease to function and drop away. No one exactly knows how, when

and in what circumstances the planets in nature were created but they have been

going round in space ceaselessly and unfailingly for billions of years. Many of

the missiles and space instruments produced by scientists are for destructive

purposes.

What is the reason for this? The Ego is the cause. The sense of egoism and

conceit arising from it is the root cause of the destructive tendencies in

human. How long can it last? In a mere fit of sneezing, life may leave this

body. What meaning is there in regarding it as permanent? Let no one be

proud about his beauty, strength and youth. The ravages of old age are ahead

and will overwhelm him. Even while you feel puffed up by your strength and

energy as a youth, age creeps on you irrevocably. Everything is subject to

change and decay in this world. Whether it be physical objects or individuals,

all are transient and impermanent. Only your purity is permanent. Purity is the

essential nature of human.

What thanks are we expressing to God who is providing such essential

life-sustaining amenities for meaningful human existence? Can this be a virtue

in a human being? Is it a sign of a right education? Is it the mark of a

scholar? No. You must show your gratitude with humility and sincerity to

whoever has done you any good. (Reet's compilation from, Sathya Sai Speaks.

Vol. 10. "The very breath," Chapter 4 and "The dead satellite," Chapter 7;

Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 14. "The inner yajna," Chapter 32; Sathya Sai Speaks.

Vol. 17. "God knocks, asks and gives," Chapter 20 and "Be human : become human,

Chapter 31; Sathya Sai Speaks. Vol. 21. "Nature: God: Man," Chapter 19).

Namaste - Reet

Namaste - Reet