Four Steps

Dr John Hislop was very devoted to Bhagavan Baba. Following is a text of his speech to the gathering on Baba’s birthday in 1973 

Beloved Lord Sri Sathya Sai and my brothers and sisters in devotion to God! In all parts of the world, great men are honored by public celebrations of their birthdays. Certainly it is also our wish to pay honor to Bhagavan on His birthday, yet that is only partially the significance of this gathering. This is not merely a public meeting; it is a family gathering of Sai devotees with the common bond between us is of love and devotion to Him. Thus, far deeper than the public birthday, the birth of Sri Sathya Sai is an event of tremendous personal significance to each of us.

At some time or other in our life, we find in our experience that all tastes turn to ashes, and we are thereupon seized by the craving to penetrate appearance and discover the underlying truth about life and about ourselves; a desperate thirst arises to find God, to drink deeply of that nectar and never let Him go.

Somehow or other, now, in this 20th century, such a craving and thirst tend to open the somewhat stiff doors of our dry hearts. What happens then is most extraordinary and amazing. At that moment, our Divine father, now taken to himself the name and form of Sri Sathya Sai, enters the open door into our life and is thereby born to our consciousness.   That for us is His real birthday.

It is as though in a barren and arid desert, there issues forth a great spring of pure and sweet water. The desert sands come to life; there is a verdant oasis; and it is heaven itself to the worn and exhausted. In like fashion for this traveler in the barren desert of 20th century culture, the joy, the delight, the happiness, and the gratitude felt upon finding the Divine Lord, Sri Sathya Sai, can only be measured by similar delight and gratitude to Him that lives in the hearts of each of you, His devotees gathered here in this great hall.

Having found the Lord and having briefly tasted the bliss of His divine presence, how are we to capture Him, He who is the eternal spring of love and hold Him in our hearts for ever and ever?

Swami tells us that He is ever there, wherever we are and is never absent. He tells us that it is His divine desire to be seated on His throne in our heart. He tells us that for each step that we take towards Him, there are ten steps that He will take toward us.

The First Step

In fact the entire content of Baba’s teaching deals with that first step toward Him as well as with the steps that follow, until at last we are face to face with Him. It is then that we are able to realize through His grace that we are not separate and individual sons and daughters of God, but, on the contrary, are of His own nature; in truth there is no separation and no duality.

Sri Sathya Sai is guru and He alone is able to clear away the inner darkness of ignorance and reveal the truth that we crave and thirst for so desperately. There is no other guru than Him; all others are but teachers; they are outside our skin and they are limited in their wisdom, power, and love.

What fools we be, faced with this Divine guru, the supreme good fortune of countless lifetimes; if we do not turn every ounce of energy, vitality, and intelligence, to the understanding and practice of the guru’s teaching! What fools we be if we do not make the the winning of God’s grace the living vital goal of our life!

Because of His compassion and love for us His children, Sri Sathya Sai tells us quite clearly how we may win His grace. The steps that lead to Him are described in His teachings.

The very first step that we take toward the Divine, it seems to me, is that of dharma, which is righteous action, one’s own proper duty. We may ask how is it that allegiance to dharma and the practice of dharma come to be the bases and strength of one’s life? Dharma, surely, has its foundation in love for God. If one loves God it is only natural to try to please Him; and Baba tells us that dharma, pleases Him. And, if one but calms his mind for the moment how can he help but love God?

God is Divine mother and father. He is the constant and ever‑faithful friend and companion. He is guru. To Him we pray. He is the innermost voice that prompts and encourages. He is the beloved. And out side the heart, He is manifest as Sri Sathya Sai, Mahadeva [a name for Shiva], sweet and blissful deva [god]. Yes, if we can calm the mind for a moment, love for God is surely there.

Thus our life becomes dharma, and with this dharma, Swami assures us that, without doubt, His grace is there with us. It is this love of God for us that is essential in spiritual life, for, God is guru and it is only His grace that removes the inner darkness that keeps us bound to ignorance.

Dharma

As fully illustrated in the worldly careers of Lord Rama and Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai, dharma is divine action and it brings divine results. Arising as it does from the love of God, and bringing with it the grace of God, dharma is not only the first step, but, it can also be the final step, because it purifies the heart.

The goal of discipline and every type of spiritual practice is the purification of the heart. Baba tells us again and again, that the pure heart is God’s home, God’s ashram. He says that when the heart is fully purified, all truth will flash upon it in a moment.

The Second Step

Another step towards Him, according to Baba’s teaching, is the dedication of every thought, word, and deed to God. Baba again and again says that work is worship. By work is meant karma; by karma is meant action. Action is modification, volitional or habitual, and each such action brings about a reaction. Action binds us and makes us prisoners instead of free, because we must experience and be entangled by the reaction. Baba says that in this way there is no escape from samsara [world], the reason being that it is impossible to avoid acting for even breathing is action. From the mighty law of nature—action and its binding reaction—there is only one escape.

The escape from samsara is in dedication to the lotus feet of the Lord. Baba, in His divine incarnation as Sri Krishna, said: pray to Him only, think of Him only, worship Him only, and He will bear the burden of your action. Swami, as Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai says: think God, eat God, drink God, see only God, hear only God, dedicate every action to Him for He is the doer, not you.

Baba has thus declared through the ages that if action is offered to the feet of the Lord as worship of Him, knowing that He is the doer, that action is His, and the fruit of that action is His, that He will graciously liberate us from the binding wheel of samsara, the universal law of action and reaction, whose beginning cannot be traced but whose ending is in Him.

Surely this divine secret—that one can dedicate action to God as worship and be free—is the greatest and most profound of all secrets that man can unlock from the universe. What fools we be, if we fail to pay attention to this mighty truth emphasized by Baba both now and in the ages past!

The Third Step

A third step toward the Divine that is of immediate importance it seems to me, is Baba’s teaching that we must strike a great blow at the limiting concepts we hold about ourselves and about the world. The world,which includes our body, appears to hold an almost infinite variety of objects differing greatly from each other in quality and potential. We as persons consider ourselves to be (despite our vanities) essentially weak and subject to fear and the whims of fortune or destiny.

Baba tells us with emphasis again and again that these are false concepts about ourselves and the world, that the world is not what it seems to be, and we are not what we seem to be. He says that just as thread interweaves cloth, and that cloth is only composed of thread, God inter-weaves every atom of body and world, and that really, there is only God. For ourselves, Baba says that we are not just particles of God, but that we are fully God.

To illustrate the difference between the false concept we hold of ourselves and our actual reality, Baba tells a marvelous story that in turn was told to me by another devotee. There was a pregnant lioness. Coming upon a band of sheep she made a great leap so as to land amongst them, and catch one. While she was in mid‑air, her birth time arrived and due to the complicated circumstances, she died. But the cub was born and it fell to the ground amongst the sheep, who thereupon adopted the cub as one of their own. Because it did not know any better, the cub felt itself as no different from the sheep and the ways of the sheep became the ways of the lion cub.

One day, a mature lion appeared and gave his great roar. The sheep much afraid ran this way and that, and the lion cub ran just like the sheep. The mature lion seeing this was greatly astounded. He charged in the midst of the sheep, and seizing the cub, demanded to know, “You are a lion. Why are you acting like a sheep? Your nature is to roar. Now, roar.” The cub thereupon, did roar and he realized that he was indeed a lion and not a sheep.

We are the cub and Baba is the lion. The sheep is the fear‑filled body, which is the world, whereas the lion is the atma, fearless without body, never dying and never born. Within ourselves we should give a great lion’s roar and never again believe that we are the sheep (the body) but instead always know that we are the lion, the atma.

The Fourth Step

A fourth step towards the Divine, which in Baba’s teaching is of paramount importance is the repetition of a name of God. Baba says that just as a small torch will guide you safely to the other side of a dark forest, the name of God, which may seem so small, will guide the person who uses it safely through life. I have to confess to my fellow devotees that I am only at the beginning of the practice of God’s name and it would not be proper to attempt an elaboration. Pranams [salutations] to the lotus feet of the Lord.

~Dr. John Smith Hislop
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, Dec. 1973