A Mirror and Comb
Prior to each festival celebrated at Prasanthi Nilayam [Sai Baba’s main ashram in India], it has become necessary to select and authorize certain individuals to serve as volunteers. The primary purpose of this procedure is to give the volunteers a chance to train themselves in the attitudes of humility, readiness, and reverence, which are so essential for a person’s own happiness, as well as for social security. I have been addressing the people selected every time so that they know what is expected of them, especially as to the motivation behind their service activities.
Among the nine steps of devotional progress, the fourth and fifth highlight the attitude of service; it is referred to as padasevanam (serving the feet of the Lord, acts offered at the feet of the Lord) and dasyam (feeling oneself as the servant of the Lord). Service is basically activity arising out of the yearning to win the grace of God. Through service alone can man attain mastery and through mastery of his senses, passions, and preferences, man can attain divinity itself.
Heads bloat only through ignorance; if the truth be known, all men will become as humble as Bhartrhari [Indian linguistic philosopher]. He was a mighty emperor who ruled from sea to sea; his decree was unquestioned; his will prevailed over vast multitudes of men. Yet, when he realized in a flash that life was but a short sojourn here below, he renounced his wealth and power and assumed the ocher robes of the wandering monk.
His courtiers and vassal princes shed genuine tears, for they loved and adored him. They lamented that he had donned the tattered robe of the penniless penitent and lived on alms. “What a precious possession you have thrown away! And what a sad bargain you have made!” they wailed. But Bhartrhari replied, “Friends, I have made a very profitable bargain. This robe is so precious that even my empire is poor payment in exchange.” That is the measure of the grandeur of the path that leads to God.
God yields grace when…
The spirit of sacrifice is the basic equipment of the volunteer. Without being inspired by a sense of sacrifice, your service will be hypocrisy, a hollow ritual. Inscribe this on your heart. Inscribe it deeply and clearly. Writing comes in four modes, each dependent upon the material on which its text is inscribed.
The first mode is writing on water; it is washed out even while the finger moves. The next is writing on sand; it is legible until the wind blows it into mere flatness. The third is inscribing on rocks; it lasts for centuries, but it, too, is corroded by the claws of time. Only an inscription on steel can withstand the wasting touch of time. Have this axiom so inscribed on your heart: “Serving others is meritorious; harming others or remaining unaffected and idle while they suffer is sin.” I am not giving you any badge to wear this time, for a badge on the shirt is a distinction you must win and not a decoration to be paraded.
God is love and can be won only through the cultivation and exercise of love. He cannot be trapped by any trick; He yields grace only when His commands are followed—commands to love all, serve all. When you love all and serve all, you are serving yourself most, yourself whom you love most! For God’s grace envelops you then, and you are strengthened beyond all previous experience. If I pin the badge on your apparel, you will unpin it soon. When you take it off your shirt, you will feel relieved that you have been released from the obligation to love and serve. You will only play a temporary role in a drama, donning the badge and doffing it.
Bend the body, mend the senses, end the mind
In this village, a young man once acted the role of an emperor in a folk drama staged on a sacred day in the temple. The curtain went down with sunrise, but he would not remove the crown from his head; he insisted that he was still an emperor. He continued to order “his subjects” about for months. He commanded his kinsmen to execute this fellow one day and that fellow the next until pretty soon he himself died of a high fever. That was insanity. But there is a sane way of continuing to act, of playing the right role.
Wear the invisible badge of a volunteer of God at all hours and in all places. Let all your days of living be a continuous offering of love, as an oil lamp exhausts itself in illumining its surroundings. Bend the body, mend the senses, and end the mind—that is the process by which you can attain the status of “the children of immortality,” which the Upanishads have reserved for man. God is the embodiment of sweetness. Attain Him by offering Him, who resides in all, the sweetness with which He has endowed you. Crush the cane in the mill of service, boil it in the cauldron of penitence; decolorize it of all sensual itch; offer the crystallized sugar of compassionate love to Him.
Man is a standing disgrace to animals
Man is the noblest of all animals, the final product of untold ages of progressive evolution, but he is not consciously striving to live up to his heritage. The beasts held a world conference to talk about the authenticity of man’s claim to be the acme of creation and the monarch of all who walk the earth. The lion presided over the deliberations.
The tiger questioned the claims of man. The leopard seconded the resolution of emphatic protest and made a devastating speech condemning man. “He is a standing disgrace to animals everywhere,” the leopard said. “Man manufactures and drinks merrily fatal poisons and is proud of his utter foolishness. He cheats his own kind and spends all his energies and resources in devising diabolical weapons to wipe out his sisters and brothers. Prodding horses and dogs to run in desperate haste, he gambles his earnings away while they gallop around the track.
He is cruel, greedy, immoral, insatiable, and unashamed and sets a bad example for the animal world. Though endowed with superior emotions and intelligence, his behavior is disgusting and demeaning,” the leopard said. “We, on the other hand,” he concluded, “do not know if and where we will get our next meal, have no sure place of rest, and have nothing to wrap round ourselves except skin, yet the least of us is a far worthier child of God than this monster called man.”
The fox rose and added, “We have a season when we mate, but man, I am ashamed to say, has broken all restraints and cares for no rules. He is a law unto himself and a disaster to the rest.” The lion rose to sum up the arguments. He agreed with the general trend of the tirade against man provoked by his undeserved claim to supremacy, but he refused to paint all with the same brush. He distinguished between men who are bestial (and worse), and men who have transcended their bestial past by proper use of the special gifts of discrimination and detachment. The latter, he said, ought to be revered by all beasts as masters, while the former deserve severe reprisals and condemnation.
Dust of envy and hate
Each of you has struggled upwards from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to man. Do not slide back to the beast; rise higher to divinity, shining with the new effulgence of love. The divine is the energy that animates—the urge that circulates the blood in your veins, that transmits knowledge and experience through the nerves, that correlates and collects for storage the impressions your senses gather and the conclusions your intelligence garners. Keep in line with the Divine by means of love, truth, and goodness.
Nowadays, there is an inevitable pair of accessories in the vanity bags of women and even in the pockets of men: a mirror and a comb. You dread that your charm is endangered when your hair is in slight disarray or when your face reveals patches of powder, so you try to correct the impression immediately.
While so concerned about this fast deteriorating personal charm, how much more concerned should you really be about the dust of envy and hate, the patches of conceit and malice that desecrate your mind and heart? Have a mirror and a comb for this purpose [to correct these faults], too—the mirror of devotion to judge whether your heart and mind are clean and bright and winsome, the comb of wisdom to control and channel the feelings and emotions scattered wildly in all directions (for wisdom earned by discrimination straightens problems, resolves knots, and smoothes tangles).
Whatever you do, wherever you are, remember that I am with you, in you. This memory will save you from conceit and error. It will make your service worthy of the people you serve.
Source: Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 7
