SAI SPIRITUAL SHOWERS – ISSUE 25

[Guest guest]

Young Men! Good and bad coexist. It is not possible

for anyone to separate them. When you cultivate more of goodness, the bad

in you will become absolutely insignificant. There is no need to use any

force to drive away all that is bad. When you forget bad, goodness will

develop in you in full measure. The fruits that you earn will be based on

your qualities and actions. All that you think will be reflected back to

you. Everything is the result of your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Beauty was

Being

 

 

 

 

 

The experience

was unique. It appositely happened at Prasanthi Nilayam, where the extra

ordinary, is ordinary the supernatural, natural.

It was around 7

O' Clock, on the evening of January 27, 1974. It must have been an

exhausting, exasperating day for Swami, if only He were not Swami. That

morning, He started granting audience around 9:30, and the interviews

lasted until 12:20 P.M. Since the Bhajan at the Nilayam is rounded off by

Swami whenever He is physically present there, we had an unusual spell of

80 minutes long Bhajan before He came to the Hall and ended the

session.

I wondered at His

marvellous freshness, when He came out after granting interviews for nearly

three long hours. And, I knew, in the `interviews', it is He who does all

the talking and that too, in a strained muffled voice so that others do not

hear. Moreover He knows the minds of each and every one of the interviewed,

and the majority of those minds are sure to reveal an abundance of black

spots, or, only a few bright spots in a black circle. An atmosphere which

is bound to depress most of us!

What happened in

the evening was even more astonishing. He began the interviews as early as

3 45. Again, it was a marathon session, extending to near 7 O' Clock. Thus,

on that particular day, He had talked for nearly six hours, with people

suffering from physical and mental maladies. It was not only talking; He

gave them the balm of His Benediction. What astounding energy! Enters Swami

into the Bhajan Hall, vivacious as the Ganga, and lithely ascends the Dais

to sit with a hop on the silver chair. O, What a sight! There sits Nishkama

Karma, in pristine freshness and joy, utterly untouched by strain or tedium

....Five hundred throats sing in unison: "Sundara Rupa, Sri Sai

Deva": (Lord Sai, of Charming Form)....

I feel the thrill

all through me. `Sundara Rupa!' Yes. How beautiful! How very beautiful!

Breath taking beauty; Breath-giving Beauty! The breath of the 'I' is

suspended and the breath gets near the Breath of Life itself. How am I to

describe that experience of being face to Face with Beauty? There was, it

must be stated, the Face to be looked at and a face looking at It. But, the

notion of separateness was very thin. Shedding their smallness, my eyes

were slaking their thirst avidly at the Sundara Rupa before them. They were

wide and un winking, and experiencing the immenseness of His Beauty. My

eyes did not allow my ears to listen any further to the Bhajan.

As we came out of

the Hall, I told my friends, "It does not matter if He does not grant

me the interview this time. It does not matter even if He leaves Prasanthi

Nilayam, this moment. I am filled up.†And, believe it or not, when

we woke upon the morn, to hear that Swami had left Parthi! ....It made no

change; the indelible impress and the irrepressible aroma of the Superb

Darshan were pulsating in my core.

Even now, four

months later, that Darshan continues to baffle analysis and beggar

description. The trailing cadences of the actual experience are still

sweetly resonant, within. O, It was Beauty, sui generic. It was the Beauty

of Beauty, itself.

I must say that I

have been blessed to drown my heart in the flood of Beauty many a time

before January 27, 1974, when I looked at the setting sun, or the billows

of the sea, or a mountain cliff or a moon lit scene. I have seen the beauty

of Peace on the face of Anandamayi. I have seen the beauty of Purity on the

face of the Sage of Kanchi.

Speaking of the

physical beauty of the human form, I have seen many, far more `handsome'

than Swami. But, what was it that elevated the beauty that evening, above

the holy beauty of sea and mountain of sun and moon, and placed it along

with the consumingly Divine Beauty of, say, the entrancing Idol of Kamakshi

at Kanchi, or of the Nataraj at Chidambaram, or Balaji at Tirupati? The

Beauty was identical with Truth and Goodness. It proved Keats right:

"Beauty is Truth; Truth, Beauty.†And Sappho too, who wrote,

"What is beautiful is Good.†Our own seers experienced the

coalescence of this Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, when they

proclaimed that God is Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram. It is not the beauty of

God; but, Beauty that is God. So, it is identical with Being, with the

Self. I am ever grateful that Swami did the supreme miracle that evening,

of maintaining a thin line of separateness between the seen Face and the

seeing face, so that I could taste the nectar to my fill.

It is now clear

to me, why the Shakti (the Potency) of Brahman is named Tripura sundari; I

now understand, why God is called Pra nava, 'Pra' is that which is most

primeval; `nava' is that which is newest. Pranava means that Time cannot

exhaust or extinguish Its freshness. In the words of Tagore, It is chira

nutana; eternally new.

How I wish that

the Rishi of the Saundarya Marga (the Path of Beauty), Tagore had the

Darshan on the evening of 27 January, so that we could share his thrill

through poems from a new Gitanjali, in place of this pedestrian account in

prose.

But, Swami has a

partiality for the prattle of His little ones; I know He would lovingly

accept these lines, which do not even touch the fringe of the experience He

vouchsafed to me.

—R.

Ganapati

( an extract

from theSeptember 1975 issue of Sanathana Sarathi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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