Duty is God
In the car en route to Anantapur, an American who was teaching at the Sathya Sai College at Brindavan said: Swami, I feel guilty about leaving my classes.
Sai: Duty in the world carries no force or weight when God calls. God is the goal of life. When in His company, there is no duty. When He is absent on tour, etc., then duty comes into full play, because duty is God.
Hislop: When I am absent from Swami’s physical person and far away in America, I know of His actual presence by the Jasmine perfume. Someone said it was smelled by the smell sense of the subtle body, is this correct?
Sai: No. Senses are in the physical body. The subtle body does not have senses. The perfume is known by the physical senses.
Hislop: Does man have three bodies?
Sai: Yes. There is body, mind, and soul—physical body, subtle body, and causal body. On death, the physical and subtle bodies disintegrate, but the causal body remains.
Hislop: How about the five kosas, the five sheaths?
Sai: The food sheath, life sheath, and mind sheath are impermanent. The intelligence sheath and bliss sheath remain. The body is mud. Out of the mud everything grows. Only the body dies. Life and all the senses merge into mind. Mind merges into wisdom. Wisdom merges into bliss, into God. Thus are the five sheaths.
Hislop: What are the 14 lokas, the 14 worlds?
Sai: They are really thoughts. There are seven levels of thought ascending upward and seven downward.
Hislop: Swami, some people claim to travel on the astral plane by projecting their minds.
Sai: It is like dreams or visions; it is not real. However, if a vision appears in meditation, it is of something real.
Hislop: Time is set by the clock, and on the clock each minute is the same as the next. But in one’s life, time goes slowly in one experience and extremely fast in the next.
Sai: Hislop goes to sleep in Bombay. He dreams that he is born in California, and he lives through 65 years of life. Yet this entire 65 years takes only two minutes of clock time. Hislop has gone to sleep in Bombay, but the Bombay body is left behind. This is proof that Hislop is not that body. To the jnani [wise], who has wakened to wisdom, 65 years of ‘waking life’ is just a moment—like the dream to Hislop.
Hislop: What is this present moment?
Sai: God is omnipresent. That is, He is ever present. This moment is God. There is only God. Truth is the same in the past, in the present, and it will remain the same in the future. Therefore, the time sequence of past, present, future is just imagination. But ‘I’ am timeless, beyond time. ‘I’ look at past, present, future; they are not me. Of course, past, present, and future must be taken into account in daily affairs. These two aspects of time must be mixed and in operation at the same time. The perception that the time sequence is only imagination, that ‘I’ am timeless and beyond time, both should be there at the very moment that one is using the time sequence in his daily affairs.
Hislop: In terms of the unreality of time, how are we to experience past, present, and future?
Sai: They are unreal. But at the same time the atma is real. Hold to that central reality. There need be no confusion. The inward intelligence may harmonize the experience of the relative time and the permanent Self. Even now you are hearing and seeing, yet the inward intelligence co-ordinates the two.
Hislop: At this moment we seem to be as we are at this moment. When Swami looks at us with His eyes, what is it that He sees?
Sai: Man has two eyes; he sees only past and present. God has three eyes. God’s eyes are spiritual. He sees in front, behind, above, below. Like the garland pulled over the finger—finger is the present and it is in touch with past and future. God is the present. He is omnipresent. As Baba looks at people, he sees the past, the present moment, the future, and everywhere in every direction.
Source: Conversations with Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba
