Sai Baba the Master

December 9, 2005

Samadhi or death?

Mrs. M.W.Pradhan records her experience:- “The night after Baba’s

departure, I saw his body in a dying condition in my dream and said, ‘Baba

is dying’. Baba replied, ‘People do not talk of saints as dying, but as

taking samadhi’. His body was still. People were mourning. I felt sad. I

woke up at 12.30 midnight. In the morning, we got from Anna Chinchinikar, a

post-card that Baba passed away at 3.00 p.m., on holy Dassera, 15.10.1918”.

True. In the spiritual lore of Hindus (and of Moslems) saints are not

spoken of as dead, but are said to take samadhi. But what is the

difference? “Did not Baba die?” you may ask. Did not Jesus Christ die? Yes,

but he again rose from the dead, and thereby his ‘death’ was in fact a

triumph over death. And that is real taking of samadhi and so did Baba take

it.

The most prominent feature of Baba’s spiritual perfection is that even

when he was in his body he was not really in his body, nor was he his body

in the sense in which we are our bodies. “He who thinks that Baba is at

Shirdi has totally failed to see Baba”, “Iam with you wherever you be.” “ I

am not at Shirdi only but in all creatures.” Thus again and again Baba

declared and proved how he was the black dog, sudra, the bhil, the

photograph, the various sadhus, fakirs, saints, and the various deities.

When visitors came from distant places, Baba would recount their whole

history to the minutest details of their mental states, feelings and

thoughts as though they were his own. Thus, if the separation of body and

soul alone be the essence of death, we have to admit that Baba never lived,

even when he moved amidst us and acted! If we also add that absence of

awareness and the power to speak, act, appear and move about are the real

attributes of death, then Sai Baba was alive but in a quite different way

from us. And he is so even now, as is amply proved by the experiences of

innumerable devotees.

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