From Transformation to Happiness
This is an edited version of a talk given by at the Sri Sathya Sai Center of Metropolitan New York in March 2022. A lawyer from Costa Rica, he is the producer of the radio program, “Sathya Sai Baba: Love in Action’, which broadcast 360 programs from 2007 to 2014. He has written over 1000 articles for various media on the Avatar and His message. Jose Cabezas has held various positions in the Sathya Sai Organization of Central America and the Caribbean.
We have to understand that with the teachings of Sai Baba, the material plane takes on a higher spiritual value because Swami has an impressive characteristic: He is not the Avatar [Incarnation] who only teaches us to connect to the heavens and the kind of life that will come to us according to the result of our actions, or with our own inner being. He also teaches us to enrich life wherever we are. In short, His teachings connect us with the heavens, with the earth, and with ourselves.
Sai has all the answers that we may seek. When we listen to His speeches or His teachings in auditoriums where there are young and old, rich and poor, intellectuals and illiterate, men and women, not one person leaves without the conviction that that the message was for him or her.
For about 15 years, my office was in front of one of the largest churches in the center of the capital of my country, Costa Rica. I used to go there frequently to take a break. Day by day I saw people getting into the church with the sole reason of asking the Lord for a favor. This seemed normal to me until I met Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. Little by little I became consumed with His teachings and learned that spirituality must be a constant way of life and not only a way to ask for help, which is not bad at all, but it is not the way to find that happiness that everyone needs and seeks and believes as the reason for living.
Truth and Service
Baba tells us one of the most unquestionable truths, “If you look at me, I look at you.” Looking at Him is nothing other than living as He teaches us, complying with His principles, seeing life as He teaches us to see, based on practicing service to others because serving others is serving God. Hands that serve are holier than lips that pray, He told us. That truth is something very new that no one had said so emphatically before.
Truth is God. One day I tried to find the seed of it and found that what Sai Baba wanted to tell us is not what we understand as truth. Baba says that what we can appreciate about objects is clouded by our materialism and by the meaning we give to things. He says that if we walk through a dark place and see a hose on the floor, it could appear to us as a snake. The senses deceive us. Instead, God is what He is.
Truth is God because the truth is what never changes. When we say, “I am,” we are also the essence and reality. If God is reality and essence and we are also reality and essence, understanding His most popular teaching, “You and I are one” tells us that we are part of Him. There is one difference, though: we haven’t realized it, He did and hence affirmed it.
Let us focus on the concept of truth and the activity of seva or self-less service. The first places in us the clear and precise concept of God and who we are. The second complements us with other living and non-living beings in an absolute sense of unity⎯we are all one. We are one with creation. The more we focus, contemplate, and meditate on this truth, the more will be our interest to live in tune with that truth and more will be our passion to serve.
It is only then that we are flooded with a sensation or an experience that the Divine force is in us and at the same time we are in it. We can experience this by letting ourselves be led by the hand of our Lord Sai Baba. It is the beginning of a new life. But we will not achieve it if we only approach Him to ask and ask and ask. If we look at Baba, He looks at us. But looking at Him is beyond seeing. It is connecting with Him, which happens only by fulfilling His teachings, the prime one being ‘Love All, Serve All.’ Let us remember that He told us He does not need anything and that He is served by serving others. It is analogous to what Jesus said⎯that He was helped when we gave clothes and food to the helpless, and that every time we did so, we were doing it to Him.
Finding Baba when in need
Many of us found Him during very difficult moments in our lives, financial, health, family, or social. Many of our problems are God’s way of attracting us to Him and the longer we take to get closer, the more we delay their solution because Baba is always the solution. If we take one step toward Him, He takes ten toward us. He fulfilled that promise to all of us who tried. Moreover, He said, “Bring me your recurring desires from your mind whenever they arise, your confusion, your fear, your longing, your anxiety, your inability to love the world, your hesitation to serve, your jealousy, all the shortcomings of your spiritual discipline.”
I came to Sai Baba because I was going through a very difficult material situation.
I had built a commercial company in my country back in the early ‘90s, and in a few years it collapsed. In the midst of the anguish, I felt very scared. In addition [I was] ashamed to ask God for material help⎯somehow, I felt, due to my religious beliefs, that materialism led us to sin. When I saw the Cross of Christ, I felt that it was almost my duty to crucify myself on it to follow our Lord Jesus Christ. Sai Baba taught me that what I had to crucify is my ego.
When I began to delve into Baba’s teachings, I quickly realized that all that polytheism that I thought was the religion of India was not such and that the Western understanding was wrong. After all, what Hinduism presents us with as so many millions of gods, and what they call the “Hindu pantheon”, is nothing more than the multifaceted representation of God.
Within the representations of God, I soon found Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and of abundance. I also realized that Lakshmi has her place amongst the many deities at Prasanthi Nilayam. I was thus enabled to think that God is also prosperity, and that if you access God you access that attribute.
Is our financial life an important factor for our happiness? According to David Myers, Professor of Psychology at Hope College, Michigan, in 1970 1 in 4 American college students said it was essential that they do well financially. In 2004, it was 3 out of 4. It could well be 4 out of 4 by now.
Spiritual wealth and happiness
Happiness increases at the rate of income growth to a point where it is possible to attend to basic needs and experience a sense of control over one’s life. However, once a certain level of comfort is accessed, the income of a greater amount of money continues to obey the well-known law of diminishing returns. That is, you lose your appetite to earn more money.
In 1957, the US per capita income expressed in today’s dollars was $8,700 a year. It is currently a little over $60,000. Here is the set of other indicators. The Americans now have twice the cars per person. They eat out two and a half times more. In the late 1950s, few Americans owned dishwashers, dryers, or air conditioners. Most Americans today do. On all accounts, the Americans have prospered a lot. But then, are they happier now?
They are not. The number of Americans who say they are “very happy” dropped from 35% in 1957 to 32% in 2010. The percentage must have gone down over the past decade. There are other key concerns as well. The divorce rate increased two or three times, teen suicide almost tripled, violent crime rate almost quadrupled, and depression is skyrocketing. These features of current life constitute a real negative of the materialism that characterizes our society.
Sai Baba shows us the path, which is the core point of my talk: the goal of life is not to reach material wealth first and later reach the spiritual, but the right thing to do is to reach spiritual wealth to achieve the material. To put the order in practice, Swami asks us for our transformation. Knowing Him via His life (His message), living His teachings, learning His lessons⎯these are the means to achieve transformation of our existence. It is the wake-up call that Baba gives us over and over again. Needless to say, one will face many uncertainties on the way; at such times, one should simply recall His statement⎯”Love my uncertainty.”
Let’s return to the theme of prosperity and wealth that we have been discussing. Let me now talk about Anthony de Mello, the Jesuit priest who reached a high degree of mysticism due to his residence in India and who, to the liking of some, combined Christian and Hindu beliefs with great success.
De Mello tells a fable that portrays well the concept of wealth that we want to have. A good man, living in a tent near Baghdad, suffered from many calamities arising from his poverty. One night he begged God with the greatest of strength to give him wealth and get him out of his anguish. God heard him and that same night spoke to him. He told the man to go to the city gates at dawn, and there, sitting on the floor and leaning against a wall he would find a monk. He would have to tell the monk that God Himself had sent him so that the monk would give him something that would help him make very rich and thus improve his life.
As soon as the sun appeared, our man in search of wealth took his horse and galloped toward the gates of Baghdad. There he found, like the voice had told him, a lonely and brooding monk sitting with his back against the wall. He approached him and said, “God sent me here. He told me that you would give me something that would make me rich.” The monk raised his face and with a calm look, without asking anything at all, he took an object out of the pocket of his robe and gave it to the wealth seeker. When he saw it, he was stunned⎯it was a diamond of enormous size, whose value, without doubt, would make him a millionaire. He thanked the monk, took his horse, and returned to his tent.
He went to bed but could not fall asleep. An enormous restlessness stirred his spirit. When the sun rose again in the morning, he hurried back to take the horse and return to the place where the monk was. Arriving, he approached him in a hurry. He touched his shoulder to bring him out of his meditation and when he looked at him, our friend took out the huge diamond and handed it back to him. The monk immediately asked him, “Isn’t this what you asked of me following God’s instructions that would make you rich?” The man replied, “Well, no. I now understood what I need you to give me⎯ it is the teaching to learn your detachment from your goods and fortunes.”
Here is the gist of what one learns from this fable: The diamond does not cease to have value, but enjoyment and maintenance of the peace is worth more, whether we possess great wealth or not. As Swami told us often, “Less luggage, more comfort.”
Here is what I say. Don’t confuse success with happiness. The excess of goals achieved, the array of titles/positions received, the money accumulated, must not lead to loss of peace, lack of contact with families and neighbors, and so on. No success is worth it if it makes one less human.
Sai Baba says, “Without character, what is the use of wealth, strength, and friendship? They come and go like passing clouds.”
The Shandilya Upanishad [Hindu text] reflects to us what perhaps we have never thought: that in what we do not see, or what is worse, in what we sometimes see and underestimate, there is neither more nor less than the creative force of the universe. In short, in ourselves lies the creative force for anything, even if we do not see it and do not realize that we possess it. So why doubt that we can continue this wonderful miracle of continuing to create?
Practice these teachings
In conclusion, I shall try to project a summary from Sai Baba’s teachings regarding finding happiness. He says, “The human being seeks joy in distant places and peace in silent places, but the source of joy is in his heart; the refuge of peace is within. Even if he walks on the moon, the human being must carry his fears, anxieties, prejudices, and aversions with him. Have faith in God and in the rightness of your moral life. Then you will have peace and happiness no matter what fortune throws at you.”
First: Be one with God, seeing God in everyone.
Second: See pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, loss and gain as two sides of the same coin.
Third: Limit desires. Do not succumb to them; and do not allow greed to take over.
Fourth: Practice detachment
Fifth: Value peace over everything else.
Sixth: Always adhere to the truth. That gives strength.
Seventh: Develop harmony between what is said, what is done, and what is thought.
Eighth: Practice self-control.
Ninth: Practice human values.
Tenth: Be in the company of the good (Be in satsang at all times).
Eleventh: Let’s not live in the past.
Twelfth: Communication must be with the transcendent.
Dear Sai Brothers and Sisters: I am blessed to be given this opportunity to speak with you today. Sai Ram.
~Jose Alberto Cabezas Davila
Translated from Spanish to English by Noelina Arciniegas
