With You, Within You
Q: Swami! I wish to settle down here, at Puttaparthi, which is my real home.
Baba: The repose of the wave is in the ocean, which is its support and sustenance. Your home is neither America nor India, neither New York nor Puttaparthi, nor any place of pilgrimage sanctified by saints. What matters is not what you do, but how, not where you are, but how you are where you are. As for this being your home, rest assured that I will protect you, no matter where you are. You cannot be separate from me; you are not separate from me.
Q: You are my guru, Swami.
Baba: I am with you and within you, here and now, there and ever. From within, I dissolve your doubts, allay your fears, and stop your anguish. Is that not your experience?
Q: I am unworthy of all this compassion.
Baba: You say so because the way of the world is to reward worthiness and deny even attention to those it judges unworthy. But I know of no such limitation or distinction. Sunshine falls on all; it disinfects all, warms all, and illumines all. I know you want a tangible sadhana [spiritual practice] suited to the equipment you now possess.
Q: I am tired of this unending round of joys and sorrows.
Baba: But you have lived with them all these years and all these lives, too. Why do you talk of certain happenings as joys and certain others as sorrows? Today’s joy may well be tomorrow’s sorrow; what is joy for you may well be another’s sorrow. Do not judge happenings as good or bad, pleasurable or painful. What right do you have to judge? Submit to the test—whether it is light or hard. Be glad, be thankful that you are tested, toughened, and cleansed. Your inner consciousness must be like the sky, where no trail is left by the flight of birds, planes, or rockets.
Q: What sadhana is best for me, Swami?
Baba: Be like the log of wood that is tossed about by waves, but be aware of your being on the lap of the ocean. Be delighted that wind and water are playing with you. Do not want it to be different. Do not want anything, be fully content.
Q: But, Swami, I must reach the shore…
Baba: It is a shoreless ocean, this ocean of bliss and grace. Give up trying to go anywhere. Arise, awake, and stop not ’till the goal is reached, they say. But there is nowhere to go—the goal is in you, realizable as soon as you arise and awake, as soon as you know you are the wave on the ocean, of the ocean.
Q: Then, I need make no effort?
Baba: You have to; it is a challenge to all men. Relinquish the search in the outer world; seek within the core of happiness. Take refuge in your own truth, in the atma [soul]. Go to the center of the cyclone, where calm prevails.
Q: But that will deprive me of you…
Baba: I am the truth, the core of your being. Bring me your deepest wounds, your unhealed scars, all that oppresses your being, and all that hinders your progress. Look upon me as with form and as formless.
Q: I adore the form and the name.
Baba: The image your mind has made is of me in this form and with this name. But this is a tiny fraction of my reality. Your problem is ‘division,’ this form as different from other forms, this name as distinct from other names. But truth is one, without a second. It admits of no partial allegiance, no part-time devotion, and no half-hearted dedication.
Q: I wish to teach the West the vision of the East.
Baba: Let all else happen as it will. Do not try to change the ways of others. People are unteachable through words. If God wills that they learn by example, they will, but at their own rate in their own time. So be an example. That is enough.
~From a New Yorker’s Notebook
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, March 1975
