The First Word
Religion and spirituality are for the old. That is what the young generally think. They think that spirituality is a post-retirement plan; something which must be enjoyed with the gratuity and pension that you get after retirement. This is not true. It is the fault of the youth to think in this manner. More often than not, parents guard their children from anything even remotely religious or spiritual and encourage them to first get ‘settled’ in material life before starting a spiritual life.
Sri Narasimha Swamiji points out in his masterpiece ‘Life of Sai Baba,’ that our education and cultural grooming has led to unconcealed and unwarranted abhorrence for religious and spiritual matters. They are seen as elaborations of a strait-jacketed and non-consequential thinking. The result is that the moment one sees a devotee, a place of worship or a religious text, one tends to look away much like one would do on sighting garbage. Why so much aversion?
Sri Radhakrishna Swamiji points out that contrary to popular perception, spirituality is something we need when we are in the middle of our life, not just at the end of it. It is what you need when you are in the heat of the moment, when you are juggling with alternatives, when you are at a loss what to do, when you want to take a road but are still standing perplexed at the crossroads. That is when you need spirituality. That is when you need to get a hold on yourself. That is when your life begins. And that cannot happen without contemplation, soul-searching, without putting consider to be you.
How to accomplish this? How to know what is the best course to take when one is flooded with choices? When you purchase some machinery or equipment it generally comes with a manual. This manual tells you the operating instructions and also to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. In practice, we do not go through this manual. It gathers dust till the moment we come across a problem. How nice it would have been if we had read the manual earlier! As far as our life is concerned, we can be prepared. We are blessed with manuals like Gita, Ramayana, Sai Satcharita, etc., they tell us what to do when things go wrong with our lives. They also teach us how to go about our lives in such a manner that no problems would arise.
To the question ‘What should be the object of one’s love?’, Sai Baba answers, ‘kindness towards the miserable and friendship with the good’. He goes to say that even the Gods offer their salutations ‘to the one whose main virtue is daya, kindness’. For devotees of Sai Baba, compassion is the highest virtue. It is not a passive state of mind. It is not merely wishing for the happiness of others but adopting means and engaging in acts that lead to the removal of such suffering. It is an active endeavor to free others from their suffering.
Sai Baba led a life in which there is no ‘other’ in compassion. ‘Í am Brahman, so are you’. Since all beings are manifestation of Brahma, there is an essential identity between all beings. There is no boundary separating a person from all else in the universe. So, alienation from others amounts to alienation from oneself.
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