Diamonds in the Dust

In the following discourse during Dasara, Bhagavan Shri Sathya Sai Baba explains that we should not identify ourselves with the body but the atma as that confers bliss, peace, and light.

Compassion toward all creatures is the greatest virtue; willful injury to any creature is the worst vice. Have full faith in this. Spread love and joy through compassion and be full of joy and peace yourself. You do not have joy and peace now mainly because your vision is warped and wobbl­ing. The vision is now directed toward the faults and failings of others, never toward one’s own faults and failings. The ears, too, delight when stories of the failures and foibles of others are related. No attempt is made to examine the failures and foibles of oneself. Really speaking, the inquiry and investigation have to begin with oneself. For, what we see in others is the reflection of our own selves, our own prejudices and preferences.

Besides, when your attention is focused on faults and failures, vices and wrongs, the mind, too, becomes infected with their pollution and it starts relishing only experi­ences that smack of such tastes. Hence, the lives of such people lose the peace and joy that are the heritage of the wise and the wary.

Let us take the example of the snake. It has two characteristics: (1) It never moves straight. Its path is always crooked. (2) It strikes at all that comes in its way. Man, too, is snaky, for he exhibits these two characteristics in a marked manner. He shares another characteristic, too, of the snake, namely, poison.

Poison is called in Sanskrit, visha. A kindred word is visha‑ya, which means the sensory objects that poison the mind of man with lust, anger, greed, craving, pride, and hate. The snake’s poison is the cause of why it is destroyed wherever seen. Man’s slavery to vishaya is the cause of his downfall. But the situation is not without some hope. The serpent can be tamed and its poison fangs removed when music from the nagaswaram [conical double-reed aerophone] pipe is played and when it is fascinated by that sweet melody. The poison that vishaya exerts on the human mind can also be eliminated and counter­manded, when man is fascinated by the sweet melodies of namasmarana, or sankirtan–that is to say, by the repetitive chanting of the meaningful names of the Lord. The poison in both can thus be sublimated into pure nectar.

What happens to man when namasmarana withdraws his mind from the sensory tangles is the acquisition of a new balance, of a blissful equanimity called samachitta. Nature is in constant flux; nothing remains the same, even for a few seconds. The sweet dish that is cooked now becomes stale and stinking a few hours hence and is ruin­ed so much that it acts as a danger to health when consumed. Other types of change happen in other fields, other things, and beings.

Man not only expects these changes, he prepares himself to face them. In fact, in many cases he is unhappy if the change does not happen! If things remain the same, it is certain to cause deep disappoint­ment. A newborn babe must grow in weight, in movement of limbs, in the intake of food, and the output of energy through activity. Or else parents become anxious and run from doctor to doctor. The same thing happens when the child does not walk or talk, weep or laugh.

In a normal baby, there exists real sama­chitta, for there is no desire (except the instinctive desire for food, drink, and mater­nal protection) to agitate it. The babe is the inheritor of immortality; so it is un­affected by anxiety that haunts the adult. The word sama‑chitta is, in common parlance, taken to mean sheer equanimity­—an unshaken balance when confronted by success or failure, loss or gain, pleasure or pain. But, `sama’ has another and more significant meaning, namely, Brahmam, the Universal Eternal Absolute Principle. Sama­chitta, therefore, in its philosophical sense, means a consciousness established in the Absolute Brahmam, and as a conse­quence, above and beyond the storms and stillness’s of the world of duality. This constant consciousness of the Reality is the fruit of yajna or sacrifice, the Vedic symbol of tyaga (renunciation), as mentioned in the statement, na medhaya, na prajaya, dhanena, tyagenaike amrtattwam anasuh, not by the intellect, nor by progeny, nor by wealth, but only by renunciation can immortality be attained. Yajna means tyaga.

It is to emphasize this great axiom that during Dasara every year, the Vedic Yajna is performed. The thousands who attend the festival can share the knowledge and the inspiration that the Yajna provides.

This day is the samapti of the Yajna. Sama means, as I just now said, Brahmam. So, sama‑apti means the attainment of Sama or Brahmam, which is the summum bonum of the ritual. The realization of this Brahmic Reality is the birthright of all men. But though born with the right and the responsibility as the Amrta‑putra (the child of immortality), man denies himself the victory, courts defeat, and prides himself as an Anarta‑putra, the child of the illusory, the delusion. The realization that is his due is not an unattainable achievement; it is a simple conquest, so simple that people never attempt it!

The assertive ego that urges him to iden­tify himself with the body and the instru­ment with which it is equipped, the motives with which those instruments work, and the reactions that those motives breed has to be mastered by the Real Self, a wave of the great Ocean of Cosmic Consciousness, that is all. Man declares himself as aham and takes pride in his aham–kara or aham-­consciousness. But he is not aware of the inner meaning of the word Aham! Aham is just a verbal symbol for what he really is. A is the sound that represents the Omnipresent Godhead, named also as Vishnu. In the Gita it is asserted, Aksharanam Akarosmi, among the letters I am a. Ham means energy, power, force, shakti.

So, when one points to himself as aham, he is unconsciously announcing that he is the hardened energy of the Omnipresent Uni­versal Absolute Brahmam called also Vishnu.

Besides, the Lord says in the Gita, maya krtham idam sarvam. I have made all this out of myself! When all is He, you and all jivas (individualized beings) are He. How then can we demarcate some as bad and relish the stories concerning them and list their faults and failings?

The question may be raised, “The good and the bad are so obvious, how can we deny it or ignore it?” They are obvious only so long as the individual is not fully established in the truth that God is All (Vasudevassarvamidam). Until that mo­ment, the body dominates thought, desires haunt the mind, ego rules the intellect; so dualities lord over man. When like the boy Prahlada, one is sunk and saturated in God­-consciousness, there can be no feeling of gain or loss, pleasure or pain. He is immersed in the Word and is unconcerned about its meaning that is manifested in all its variety in the objective world. The one Word seems to have many meanings, as a result of ignorance. It is the Word, the Para‑shakti (the Supreme Principle) that gives value and validity to every one of the meanings.

Another idea called ekagrata (one‑poin­tedness), too, now must be elucidated. Sa­dhaks often bewail that they do not earn one‑pointedness. They mean, by that term, that they are not able to concentrate their attention long on a flame, light, picture, or idol. The eye concentrates on something seen; the nose on some fragrance; the ear on some melody. But the mind concentrates on the One, the Ekam, the Brahmam­ that is described as ekam nithyam vimalam achalam sarvadhee sakshibhootham (the One, the Eternal, the Pure, the Inflexible, the Witness). Ekagrata, therefore, denotes the concentration of the inner vision on Brahmam. The intellect, the ego, the sens­es–these should sub-serve this great purpose and help in attaining the ideal. They should be vigilant that they do not divert the vision or deviate it from the Brahmam.

However, it has to be admitted that such sadhana is now very rare; very few fix their inner vision on the Universal and the Eternal; nor do they listen to its majesty and mystery. The tragedy that has fallen upon mankind is just this: the mind of man has strayed away from its moorings and is being tossed about on the waves of doubt and diversity. Brahmam is One, unchang­ing and everlasting. A mind filled with the yearning for Brahmam will see the One in all, it will remain unaffected by the smiles and sneers of fortune. But man’s mind has been tempted into strange paths that can lead him only to fear and frustration. Man condem­ns the world and calls it a seat of wickedness and war.

The faults lie not in the world, but in himself. He has war in him and so he sees war; he is inherently wicked and so he observes wickedness all around him. A brilli­ant lamp cannot remove the darkness that a blind man has always around him. For those who have eyes to see, it is brilliant with the light around them. The darkness the blind man swears by is in him, not outside him. So, too, the man who is at peace with himself will discern peace all around him. Nature is beauty, truth, and peace. Man sees it as ugly, false, and violent—that is all.

It is strange but true: immortality lies enshrined in the mortal; there are diamonds in dirt and dust; wisdom dwells in this man­sion of muscles; the atma illumines this tabernacle of the jiva. Man does not look into himself; he is poor though under his feet there lies buried treasures. Heir to inexhaustible bliss, he runs after momentary pseudo‑pleasures! He gets as reward only distress, disappointment, and defeat. He spends all his allotted years in this wasteful adventure, and even at the last moment of life he is beset with sorrow and fear. He has no peace when he leaves his body, for he has lost the chance of winning peace through its instrumentality.

Once there was a woodcutter going daily into the forest and collecting a bundle of fuel that he sold in the village nearby for a pittance, it just sufficed to keep his wife and children alive. One morning, while he was stepping out of his hut, the wife remin­ded him that it was Yugadi (the New Year Festival) the next day; she pleaded with him to collect a heavier bundle of fuel that day, so that they could get a few more paise [cents] to give the children a morsel of sweet rice each. The man nodded assent and walked on. He succeeded in gathering an extra huge bundle, but with that heavy load on his head, he was soon exhausted. He had to deposit it on the ground before he could approach the village. This set him thinking of his plight. He had lost all his old zest for living. He called upon the Angel of death, the Mrtyudevata, to relieve him. He cried, “O Death! Have you no mercy to­ward me? Why have you forgotten me so long? How I wish I could die and escape from this daily grind!” The Angel of death took pity on him and appeared before him to fulfill his wish.

But the woodcutter suddenly receded; he cleverly changed the purpose of his appeal to the Angel. He had no wish to die, though in his despair he had called out for her help. He said, “No. No. I had no one here to lift this bundle on to my head, so I called on you to come to my aid. That was the only reason behind my prayer. Please help me to lift this burden and place it on my head; I have to reach the village soon!”

Since man is innately immortal, he recedes from the grasp of death. The will to live is very strong, much more persistent than the will to die.

It is like the story of the sun and dark­ness, this question of meeting death or vanquishing death. The Sun‑God was one day, very impressed by the 1008 names with which a devotee offered Him worship. He listened to the names, as he uttered them in steadfast faith. He was particularly alerted when he called upon Him as Andhakar-dweshi—He who is looked upon as the enemy by darkness. The Sun-God could not tolerate the existence of an enemy alive, so He called for a war unto death for this demon called Darkness. He went into all the places where Darkness hid himself, but no sooner did He spot him, the demon disappeared so that He could never come to grips with him. Finally, He concluded that Darkness was non‑existent and was only a creation of the imagination of His adorers! Before the splendor of immortality, the darkness of mortality, too, would flee in haste.

The resident in the body has no birth and therefore no death. But man is hugging the falsehood that he is the body and so is subject to death and birth. A silver cup can be reshaped by the smith into a plate, or later, into a [paan–betal–leaf]-box. But though the name, the form, and the function might change, the silver is there in all three, un­changed in substance, in spite of the births into plate and box and the deaths as cup and plate. When a man stands on the bank of a sheet of water, his shadow appears in the water. People say it is he, but Vedanta says, he is not it. When the shadow is beaten with a stick, he is not hurt, so it is not he. But when someone says it is mis­shapen, ugly, etc., he gets angry! So he is it. The shadow is both he and not he. It is neither true nor false, it is real‑unreal, it is mithya [untruth].

The eye is distinct from the objects it sees. The eye is an instrument used by the I, which is a ray of the splendor of the atma. The senses are mirrors and when the light of that ray falls on them, things and objects are reflected therein. The atma shines and all the inner organs of perception awaken to their duty of gathering knowledge and revea­ling bliss. It is their duty to function according to their nature; the result is not to be aimed at. It follows when the duty is done efficiently to the best of one’s ability and will. A knife cuts vegetable but does not eat them. It cuts a fruit but is not tempted to taste the sweetness.

Let us imagine a cup full of fruit juice. The cup is not aware of the sweetness of the juice. A straw is used to sip the juice. The juice fills the entire length of the straw, but yet the straw is a stranger to the taste. The tongue has the juice on it, but it has no knowledge of its calorific value or its com­ponents. It can only pronounce judgement on its taste; for other purposes it sent the juice into the stomach. The stomach discriminates and distributes the essentials of the juice to every part of the body, every nerve and cell, and contributes to their efficiency and strength. The cup is the body of man; it has in it the divinely sweet atma principle. The sense organs are the straws; intellect is the tongue; the ego principle is the stomach; it converts the sweetness into spirit and confers bliss, peace, and light.

Source: Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 12