Four-Fifths and One-Fifth
What does Sai Baba mean by saying that the search for truth is four-fifths self-inquiry and one-fifth meditation? What does God’s light mean? And what is meant by “not doing anything” about your faults and weaknesses when you discover them?
The response to these questions will be what Baba Himself explains in various dis-courses. You yourself can turn up these same answers, if you watch for them.
Self-inquiry is vital to your attempt to get what you want—the truth about yourself. A good point for starting self-inquiry is to ask how much you are awake and how much asleep. You may awaken in the morning half-drowsy. But you must fully wake up to the world around you and to your status in that world to behave effectively.
Have you noticed that in doing some task, day-dreaming or thought-fantasy gets mixed with your concentration, so you miss something essential, and as a consequence errors creep in? Almost everyone has this experience and thus understands the need to wake up before making a move or an effort.
It is the same in spiritual life. An inquiry or a doubt must arise as to whether or not you are cognizing and experiencing yourself and the world in a way that fully accounts for the actual situation. From this self–inquiry, there follows the perception of the need to question yourself and the world more closely. The Buddha, all by himself, relying totally on himself, made this inquiry and finally, while seated quietly under a tree, saw the truth of himself and the world as it actually is. Baba says that this cool, direct path of knowledge is exceedingly difficult.
The meaning of self-inquiry, then, is to make an intentional and volitional effort to settle the doubt that you may still be, more or less, dreaming and therefore not seeing things as they really are. When the questioning and observing yourself and the world get under way, you soon realize that the world, the perceived, is not wholly independent of the perceiver. Therefore, an absolutely essential aspect of self-inquiry is to expose and reject faulty and incomplete views about yourself, no matter how strongly entrenched they are in your experience and how much they meet with approval. Whatever cannot stand up under intense scrutiny is rejected, and the inquiry continues. For example, the lifelong belief that the body and you are one and the same is, at best, an incomplete idea and inquiry must continue past that idea.
In a very concentrated mode, this self-inquiry is represented by the “Who am I?” question of Ramana Maharshi (he lived into this century, as you know). Baba says that by itself this intense self-inquiry is not enough. The successful way includes some meditation.
Then there is the devotional way of searching for the truth about yourself and the world. Either by means of intelligence applied to the problem or because someone you believe tells you, you adopt the viewpoint that duality is relative and that the ultimate reality of both yourself and the world is the omnipresent divine principle. When you take this path, self-inquiry means looking through every phenomenon appearing as yourself or as the world and conceiving God as the essential reality thereof.
All of the above is what Swami is talking about when He says that inquiry is four-fifths of searching for the actuality of yourself and the world.
In this search, you may decide to rely wholly upon your own intelligence and your own experience and to learn through trial and error—a process that is certainly valid. There are many self-made persons in the spiritual world. But it is common knowledge that in many fields of endeavor, if you can find a master in one of those fields and become his student, you will reach the goal more quickly. From this fact arises the need for a guru—one who is master in his field and who is willing to guide you so you may reach the goal without undue delay and avoid mistakes.
The problem with gurus, according to Baba, is that nowadays, competent gurus cannot be found. Today, the only competent guru is God Himself. Baba says that if the true seeker prays to God for guidance, God Himself will appear as guru. Those of us who believe that Sathya Sai Baba is no other than the omnipresent Divine Lord hold on to His teachings with great tenacity. An important part of our daily self-inquiry is to ask ourselves if we are, in fact, putting Swami’s instruction into daily practice with faith and enthusiasm.
As you study yourself, faults and bad habits come into view. Swami says that dwelling on your “bad side” is a positive hindrance to discarding the unreal and to revealing the basic unchanging reality. It is not that you should live complacently with your faulty nature, your imperfect personality, but it is that once the truth comes into view, untruth must yield. Swami asks, “Where does darkness go?” It does not go any place. Where there is light, there is no darkness. Swami, the Lord, is Himself light and love.
Within the field of that divine light, your bad qualities—creatures of darkness—cannot persist and thrive. By taking the omnipresent God as the focus of your mind, emotions, and behavior, you have Him in you, beside you, with you, every moment of your life. Hold on to His light. Dwell in His light. Let the darkness of the past and the shadows of the present fall away. That is the answer you will find Swami giving to the second part of the question. If you watch for this answer as you read Swami’s discourses, you will find that He does give it again and again.
~John Hislop
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, Oct./Nov. 1980
