A Fateful Hour of My Life
Many Sai devotees can empathize with the anecdote below —the process of spiritual cleansing much like that of purifying gold.
One night while bhajan [devotional singing was going on as usual in the prayer hall at Prasanthi Nilayam, I happened to sit near the throne of the Lord [Sai]. But, He was not present at the moment in the form we know.
I felt suffused with a sublime happiness and peace, much like the bliss described in scriptures. It was something new, sudden, and unexpected. It lasted barely an hour. Undoubtedly it was the experience of the highest spiritual order. But it was so overwhelming that I was afraid of losing all sense of the world in which I live, and to which I was deeply attached. It was this fear of losing what I do not, in fact, possess but still imagine that I do, this fear of losing what I do not enjoy in this illusive and deceptive world of sense perception, that caused me to take a false and unhappy step at that critical juncture of my life.
What a shame! I do confess now that instead of availing myself of the great opportunity to grasp what is real, I prayed to the Lord at that fateful hour to relieve me of His grace. The reason for this fall is the existence in me of unfulfilled earthly desires and aspirations. This clearly shows how, in the absence of self-renunciation, I was not fit for the spiritual elevation I enjoyed.
After a while, Swami came to one of the apartments in the Prasanthi Nilayam colony where I stayed; and He told me about the conversation that transpired between Ravana [the Sri Lankan king who abducted Lord Rama’s wife, Sita] and his wife, Mandodari, regarding Sita when she was held in captivity at the Ashoka vatika [garden]. Ravana’s wife, knowing that her husband could metamorphose himself at will into the form of any person, asked him why he had hesitated to assume the form of Rama and fool Sita. Ravana replied that to assume the form of Rama would automatically rid Ravana of gunas or traits that were the cause for his present demonic behavior. In the absence of his gunas, Ravana’s desire for Sita would cease to exist.
Since then, I was in distress. Fate is sterner than what I thought at first. One day I complained of my distress; Baba said that if the sugarcane is not to go dry and its sugar contents are to last for some time, its juice must be extracted in time after proper crushing and then boiled until it was converted into jaggery or sugar.
He [Baba], like a goldsmith, tests our metal [mettle] and throws it back into the red hot coals of spiritual fire to sift the pure from the dross.
~Challa Appa Rao
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, Feb. 1959
