Good and Bad Actions
A Visitor: I see evil on all sides and am puzzled.
Sai: Here is this banana. The skin is useless to us, so it is regarded as bad. But if there were no skin, the inside would not be protected. Do not regard anything as bad. If a person has done evil to you and you take it as evil and retaliate, then you also have become bad. But by remaining good and not regarding others as evil, you gain the right to reform them. If there is a bad smell in the room, and if incense is lighted, the fragrance changes the smell of the room. Bad actions should be met with good deeds and good viewpoint, and the evil will be changed. The difference between good and bad is a function of time. Food when eaten is good. In time that same food undergoes a change, is excreted, and is called bad. Whereas truth remains the same and does not change with the passage of time. Therefore, the time sequence is just imagination.
Hislop: The thought arises that some persons are wholly bad, their crimes are so vicious.
Sai: No person is wholly bad, for God is in every person’s heart. A mother and son may fight in court over property, but the relationship of mother and son remains. Two people who have come to hate each other live in two houses. Each has a picture of Baba over the door. The house represents the body, and Baba’s picture represents the God resident in the soul. The body may have to be corrected in its behavior, and the best way is to attract the person with love. There is absolute good, but there is no absolute bad. Bad changes, bad is a distorted aspect of good. But it is not possible when one has the ordinary physical vision to see good and bad as one.
Only when one knows the divine spark in oneself and in others, only then one sees good and bad as the same. If one can adopt as an attitude the truth that good only is real, and that all one sees is essentially good even though distorted, one acquires a great strength if he can see the world this way. The learned might argue about the world and say that all this is illusion and despair, but they can never hope to live without loving the world. Love is not to be disregarded. The world might seem to be untruth from the material viewpoint, but the world is truth if looked at from the transcendental viewpoint.
Hislop: We are asking Swami about the ‘bad’ people. How about the poor victim of vicious action?
Sai: Everyone is good, but there are bad actions; action and reaction. In terms of the victims of bad action, everything was exactly right. We see only the present. Baba sees the past also. A four-year-old boy was attacked by robbers for the gold chain around his neck. The robbers blinded the boy so he could not identify them. The boy was crying bitterly that he could not see. The parents also were crying. They came to Baba. In the past life, the boy had been a cruel man who had blinded several people. The boy will continue to be blind, but as a man if he starts to consider, understanding that he is blind because of past dark deeds, and then sincerely repents for his bad tendencies, and makes a genuine effort to change himself, praying to God to forgive him, Baba may forgive the karma and restore the eyesight.
Hislop: How should we relate to so-called ‘bad’ people?
Sai: Keep the body separate from people who give bad food to the senses, even though all are brothers. Let souls be in God, but bodies apart.
Hislop: Often it is very difficult to choose the right action. How may one acquire the ability to make this discrimination?
Sai: Every man has the discrimination to know what right action is and what is wrong action. Wrong action develops guilt feelings. Whereas right action is free and without such fear.
Source: Conversations with Bhagavan
