Baba, by Arnold Schulman

[Guest guest]

Baba

New York born screenplay writer Arnold Schulman describes in his book 'Baba',

his first meeting with Sai Baba in the late 1960’s.

Baba was on a thin mattress supported by a simple frame and four wooden legs,

which served both as a studio couch during the day and his bed at night. He was

leaning against a few small pillows propped against the wall. Before he looked

up to note the writer's arrival he continued to go through his mail, looking at

each letter, still unopened and in its envelope, until a thought formed in his

head, then he put it on top of the stack of letters on the couch to the left of

him before reaching to take another letter from the stack on the couch to the

right of him. After a minute or two he looked up and smiled at the writer.

"Come in," he said. "Come in."

The writer stepped into the room and bowed slightly, both palms together on his

chest just under his chin.

"So," Baba said. He paused to look directly into the writer's eyes. "So, you have seen enough."

"Too much. I don't understand anything I've seen."

Baba laughed.

"Appearance is not different from emptiness," Baba said struggling for the words

in English."Yet within emptiness there is no appearance."

The writer felt he should smile or nod or indicate in some way that he

understood what Baba had said, but he did not understand and he resisted the

temptation to pretend that he did.

Baba nodded. "Life is only the memory of a dream," he said. "It comes from no

visible rain. It falls into no recognizable sea. Some day, not for a while yet,

you will understand how meaningless it is to spend your whole life trying to

accumulate material things. I have no land, no property of my own where I can

grow my own food. Everything is registered in the name of someone else, but

just as those people in the village who have no land wait until the pond dries

up so they can scratch the land with a plow and quickly grow something before

the pond fills up again, I grow my food which is joy or love. To you the words

have different meanings, but to me both words are the same. But I have to do it

quickly, quickly in the hearts of those who come to see me, quickly before they

leave."

He looked up again into the writer's eyes.

"The kind of belief in me I ask of people is more, much more than most people

think is faith or love," Baba said.

"That's why many people who come just to see the miracles stop loving me the

minute I stop entertaining them and giving them presents. No. What I ask you to

do is give me everything. Not fruits or flowers or money or land, but you, all

of you with nothing held back. Your mind. Your heart. Your soul... " He stopped

and paused, then nodded to himself. "But those are just words."

They were silent for a time.

The writer stood behind the couch and waited. There was nothing he could say. A

kind of warmth and closeness he had never known before was spreading through

his consciousness and it frightened him. He felt in danger of being smothered

by it, but it wasn't just the intensity of the feeling that disturbed him. It

was the sudden realization that this feeling of love—he thought it was love—was

different from any other kind of love he had felt or heard about or read of

before. It may have been this inability to define what he felt that caused him

suddenly to panic. In less than a minute he had become a displaced person,

emotionally, isolated in the dark unknown, and to cope with this puzzling

anxiety the only defense he could find was to turn it off.

Baba watched him for a time with intensity.

"You cannot run away from me," Baba said. "As I told you, no one can come to

Puttaparthi, however accidental it might seem, without my calling him. I bring

only those people here who are ready to see me, and nobody else, nobody, can

find his way here. When I say 'ready' there are different levels of readiness,

you understand."

Baba laughed. "You wonder why I called you here instead of millions of other

people because you don't like the way you feel for me. Isn't it? And it makes

you worry why I called you."

The writer laughed, his tension broken, and Baba laughed with him.

"It worries me," the writer said. "When you ask me to give myself to you

completely. I can't do that. I spent too long getting control of my life to

just blindly become somebody's slave, even if you're God, or not God, just a

man with superhuman powers of yoga. I don't trust anybody that much."

"Do you trust yourself?" Baba asked.

The writer smiled, "Not much."

"I know your past and I know your future so I know why you suffer and how you

can escape suffering and when you finally will."

"When I die?" The writer was being half-facetious.

"Yes, I know," Baba said. "In all your past lives too, you were always afraid of death."

"I'm not afraid of death."

"That's all you are afraid of," Baba said. "You think death is something bad,

but death is neither bad nor good. Death is death."

"What purpose does it serve?"

"Why does a person die?" Baba took a moment to reflect. He looked at his finger.

"So he won't die again. He is born so he won't be born again."

"I don't understand," the writer said.

"Life is only relatively real," Baba said. "Until death it only appears to be

real. And, after all, the only part that dies is the body, not the person who

lives in the body. When a cat or a dog dies he leaves the world the same as

before he lived in it, but a man should leave the world a better place then

when he came into it. For no other reason was he born, for no other reason does

he die."

"Are you God?" The writer heard himself say. He had not planned to go into that subject at all.

"Why do you waste your time and energy trying to explain me?" Baba said, with a

trace of irritation. "Can a fish measure the sky? If I had come as Narayana

with four arms they would have put me in a circus, charging money for people to

see me. If I had come only as a man, like every other man, who would listen to

me? So I had to come in this human form, but with no more than human powers

and..." he groped for the word, "wisdom."

"Then you are God. Is that what you are saying?"

"First you have to understand yourself. I told you that. And then you will

understand me. I'm not a man, I'm not a woman. I'm not old. I'm not young. I'm

all of these."

The writer laughed, without quite knowing why. He was embarrassed for having

asked the question and unnerved by the answer. Here was a human being, or what

looked like one, curled up on a studio couch, his legs tucked beneath him like

a teen-age girl, and there was nothing the writer could think of that would

allow him to accept the idea that this person with the Afro-hairdo and the

orange dress could actually, literally, be God.

"Some people think it's a beautiful thing," Baba said, "for the Lord to be on

the earth in human for, but if you were in my place you would not feel it's so

beautiful. I know everything that happened to everybody in the past, present,

and future, so I'm not so quick to give people the mercy they beg me for. I

know why a person has to suffer in this life and what will happen to him the

next time he is born because of that suffering this time, so I can't act the

way people want me to. They call me cold-hearted one time, soft-hearted the

next. Why don't I do this? Why don't I do that? Why don't I stop all wars

forever and get rid of all disease and suffering? What they don't know is I'm

not responsible for suffering. I don't cause suffering any more than I cause

happiness and joy. People make their own palaces and their own chains and their

own prisons."

"Can I write about that in my book?" the writer asked.

"What do you know about me?" Baba asked. "Do you believe in me the way I said

you had to believe in me?"

"Not yet."

"Then how can you write about me? You're like a child. When I give you what you

want or make you laugh, you love me, but the next minute when I'm too busy and

can't see you the minute you want me to, you want to kill me. Isn't it? You

listen to me with respect, but then in private you laugh at me. What kind of

book can you possibly write about Me?"

"That kind of book. Exactly."

"For what purpose? Publicity? I don't need publicity. I'm not your Mahesh Yogi,

don't forget, on television with the singers."

"What are you telling me? I can't write the book?"

Baba laughed. "Write it. Write your book. That's your duty, dharma. But write

the truth. Only what you saw here. Only the truth. How you laughed at me, hated

me, that's part of it; and if you want to, how you loved me, the few times you

let yourself love me."

Baba took both of his hands and rubbed them as hard as he could on the writer's

chest, massaging it vigorously as if to stimulate the writer's spiritual

circulation.

"I'm always with you," Baba said. "Even when you don't believe in me, even when

you try to forget me. Even when you laugh at me or hate me. Even when I seem to

be on the opposite side of the earth. But you need material things to remind

you, isn't it?"

He pushed up his sleeves and rotated his open palm as he closed his fingers.

When he opened them he was holding a gold ring with his picture painted on a

porcelain in the center, surrounded by sixteen stones which seemed to be

diamonds. He put the ring on the writer's finger. It fit perfectly.

The writer laughed. "How can I ever get this through customs?"

"Don't worry," Baba said. "I'll take care of it."

He touched the ring with his fingertips.

"I am in you," Baba said, "You are in me. Don't forget that. We cannot be separated."

Source: http://saionline.org/essays/baba.html

 

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