God Fulfils Himself
Sri V. R. Krishna Iyer was a distinguished senior judge in the Supreme Court of India. He began his career as a brilliant lawyer and was a Minister for Law, Home, Prisons and Social Welfare, Irrigation and Power in the Kerala State Government. Eventually he became a Judge of the Kerala High Court and later joined the Central Law Commission before accepting Judgeship of the Supreme Court. He was well-known for his passion for legal aid to the poor and pioneered judicial activism in India. He was conferred the Padma Vibhushan in 1999. Born in 1905, he completed his earthly sojourn in 2004 at the ripe age of 99.
God fulfils Himself in many ways, and one way, inscrutable to the infidel but understandable to the sensible, which has tradition and evidence in support is incarnation, not always of plenary and often of partial divinity. Does God exist? Call Him by any name, from Walt Whitman to Charles Darwin the divine presence has been undeniable. “I say to mankind,” wrote Whitman in the preface to Leaves of Grass, “be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God—I hear and behold God in every object yet understand God not in the least.” And Charles Darwin, who shook Christianity by his ‘The Descent of Man,’ did assert: “Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight… I feel compelled to look for a First Cause… and I deserve to be called a Theist.”
The greatest scientist of our century, Albert Einstein, did believe in God, not in a God who bought and sold rewards and punishments but in a “presence… revealed in the incomprehensible universe.” It is astonishing that even Marx and Engels did not deny God but did not permit the gods to be agents for exploitation of men. Marx did protest against “all deities of heaven or earth who do not recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself.” ‘Aham Brahmasmi [I am the infinite Reality]’ is the emphatic and pervasive realization of the self within each man as the universal Self—the sublime basis of advaita [non-dualism].
Engels has, in his Socialism, Utopian, and Scientific, clarified that Marx and he had only emphasized that “in the materialist conception of history the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life.” He asserts—and this is important—“More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If, therefore, somebody twists this into the statement that economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract, and absurd phrase.” Marx, Engels, and Lenin argue for sublime feeling, humanist thought, and in this world that is the theatre of action, equal opportunity for everyone to unfold his full potential.
The central theme of the human-divine is the core of the Bhagavad Gita [the Divine Song] and of Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s affirmation of Man and satwic [pure] action in this world, filled with love or prem, not of other worldly assets in after-life and non-activity in this life. Service with love is the rational humanism in God’s mandate. Spiritual realization is not material negation but living the pure life charged with fellow feeling, in a holistic sense of identity and non-duality of all things in Creation as manifestation of that Supreme Power that is also the Absolute Unmanifest.
The living awareness of oneness is the root and fruit of cosmic consciousness. Once this higher supra-mentalism—in Sri Aurobindo’s diction—becomes integral to one’s being, the laws of nature are at one’s command and miracles are thereafter natural, not impossible. Science rises to super-science, matter rises to consciousness, and a harmony, coherence, and total coordination between spirit and other forms of existence emerges. You truly become an Avatar, an incarnation of the divine. Then you are a Paramahamsa [enlightened One], a Bhagavan. Among them we may cite Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ramana Maharshi, and that radiant light of love Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba.
Swami Vivekananda blended materialism and spiritualism into a radical wholeness. Many other lofty names throng but illustratively here I mention that cyclonic sadhu [mendicant] whose vibrant voice called bigots to true goodness and atheists to godliness: “First, feel from the heart… Do you feel? Do you feel that millions and millions of the descendants of gods and of sages have become next-door neighbors to brutes? Do you feel that millions are starving today, and millions have been starving for ages? Do you feel that ignorance has come over the land as a dark cloud? Has it gone into your blood, coursing through your veins, becoming constant with your heartbeats? Has it made you almost mad? Are you seized with that one idea of the misery of ruin, and have you forgotten all about your name, your fame, your wives, your children, your property, even your own bodies? Have you done that?”
Illustratively, again, is Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali exposing the hypocrisy of holiness forgetting humanness: “Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bounds of creation; he is bound with us all forever. Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.”
God is not a Sunday discourse or Friday namaz or temple bhajan but a constant presence within oneself that chastens life’s stream, raises the states of consciousness and divinizes, never denies, human activity here on earth and therefore guides karma or action in tune with dharma or righteous values that sustain the happy union of the whole community through a higher enlightenment beyond the grosser pleasures at the sensory levels. God indwells in man and irrelevant if imprisoned in holy books and hallowed spots.
The dynamics of divinity have spoken of spiritual values while believing in atheism. The true objection to religion and God has been the use of this ‘opiate’ as a treacherous tool of man’s systemic inhumanity to man. But once you realize that true religion, the religion of man, is science of the spirit, that matter and spirit are not antithetical, that human liberation is divine mission, and that that cosmic vision is authentic, that sees in all creation the indelible imprint of the imperishable, infinite, all-pervasive power, then religion, in its advaitic authenticity, is the most revolutionary ideology against exploitation, injustice, and inequality and for liberty, fraternity, and human dignity. The vice is not in God but in Man’s abuse of God. Ingersoll, the agnostic, held: an honest God is the noblest work of man. And Lenin pinpointed the rationale behind the laity to God, the Anti-Man.
Many empires have been built as a joint adventure of the flag and the cross; many millions of women have been denied freedom in the name of Allah. Many wars have been fought because Gods have fallen out. Many injustices have been inflicted on masses of men using scriptures as weapons. But universal religion, oneness of God, a vision of the Supreme as the divinity in every person, the affirmation of equality and fellowship, of worship of God through service of man, of compassion for the suffering as the condition of godliness, of spiritual dignity of the prince and the pauper, of the Brahmin and the bhangee [lower caste], of refusal to share our wealth with the lowly and the needy as denial of God—how can such a spiritual principle that is the strength behind world peace, common prosperity of humanity, opposition to exploitation, promotion of social justice, and love of fellowmen as basic to religion be condemned concept by the heartless? The great spiritual leaders, seers, poets, and reformers of India and elsewhere have been in the vanguard of revolutionary religious awakening acting on the theme that service of man is worship of God.
Bhagavan Baba has the powers of Super-Nature because He lives in cosmic consciousness. For Him every piece of Creation is divine. For, as has been rightly said: “The ancients have stated that God sleeps in the mineral, awakens in the vegetable, walks in the animal and thinks in Man.” (Kanthryn Breese-Whitting)
The great gospel of Bhagavan Baba is love of the living as children of God, and realization of the Self by a holistic consciousness of all things great and small. “The Lord who made us all, made and loveth us all.” The devotees of Baba hold bhajans and sing themselves unto divine ecstasy. Why? Because it is the bhakti marga [path of devotion].
Bhagavan Baba or Sri Sathya Sai Baba is a boon to our generation. Where He walks is hallowed ground; where He sits is shrine; and where His name is chanted, tuned to cosmic vibrations, is Divine presence. His doings challenge the grosser sciences, maybe, but His teachings vitalize our spiritual heritage. His message of compassion, His profound emphasis on high values, and His human-divine expression of truth elevate our emotions and refine our inner being, which we may sum up as the song of Sai. Says He: “There is no creature without Love; the lowest loves itself, at least.”
“… Sai has come in order to achieve the supreme task of uniting as one family the entire mankind, through the bond of brotherhood, of affirming and illumining the atmic reality of each being in order to reveal the divine that is the basis on which the entire cosmos rests, and of instructing all to recognize the common divine heritage that binds man to man, so that man can rid himself of the animal and rise into the divinity that is his goal”
The melody of Sai, the raga of Baba, the music of Bhagavan, surge up from the deepest and constitute, in a strange way, the science of being and the art of living. In moods contemplation, when self-awareness spreads, there is “silence more musical than any song.” Nada Brahman is the Key to the Universal Self. It is in the fitness of things that homage is paid to Baba through song and art, silence, and expression.
Sarvam Brahma Mayam
Aham Brahmasmi
Tat Twam Asi
Prajnanam Brahma.
The supreme realization in personalized incarnation is Baba. So adore Him.
Source: Golden Age 1980 (55th Birthday Offering)
