By: Seetha Priya
There is a huge difference between spirituality and religion, though the two are often confused and seen as being one and the same. Perhaps one way in which to see the difference between the two is to borrow an analogy from the realm of entrepreneurial enterprise.
Spiritual masters are – in today’s terminology – called start-up innovators. They create something, an invention that profoundly changes the way people live and think. They are like a Swami Vivekananda, or a Ramana Bhagawan, except on an infinitely more complex and cosmic scale. They disrupt the existing order of things and enable people to achieve a new and different awareness of the world and their interactions with it, and with each other.
The message that all spiritual masters seek to convey is fundamentally the same: the only way we can hope to overcome our mortal adversaries of fear and hatred is through love and compassion. The Eleventh shloka of Vishnu Sahasranama has a reference to spiritual masters. It is as follows:-
“Ajah Sarveshwarah Siddhah Siddhihi Sarvadi Achyutaha
Vrishakapir Ameyatma Sarvayogavinisrutaha”
All would-be spiritual masters are by the grace of Lord Vishnu who is ‘Aja’ the Unborn. He is ‘Sarveshwara’ the Lord of all. He is Ever ready as ‘Siddha’ and is always the ‘Siddhi’ the fulfilled one. As ‘Achyuta’ He is firm. He is ‘Vrishakapi’ – Dharma, the Boar-incarnation, and Sun all at once. This Trinity-form is undefinable as in ‘Ameyatma’. A spiritual master is as intriguing as Lord Vishnu being ‘Sarvayogavinisruta’ – beyond the reach of all yogas.
The message of all spiritual masters is universal in its application. But soon, the spiritual master attracts a following of devotees who lay exclusive claims to the master’s teachings. They form a company with a registered trademark and have it listed on the sacramental stock exchange to compete with similar other organizations. Though they call themselves by different names, all these competing companies deal in a generic product called religion.
The original teachings of the start-up innovator – the disruptive spiritual master, in whose name the company has been founded – are soon deliberately or unconsciously are discarded or distorted by self-appointed managers, trustees, and priests. They take over the enterprise and run it to maximize their own authority over the shareholders – the members of their flock and the benefits that accrue to themselves in terms of power and prestige.
The founding principles of the spiritual master – of all-encompassing love and compassion – are replaced by sectarian rivalry, by bigotry and fanaticism, as each company, each religion, vies with others to increase its market share at the expense of its competitors.
The transcendent joy of creativity, the divine spark of inspired illumination forsaken in the stultifying tenets of dogma, and the conditioned response of ritual.
What would happen if any of the spiritual masters were to return and set right the travesties perpetrated in their names?
A Sai Mandir in Delhi suggested an answer in a skit staged by its members titled ‘Grand Inquisitor’. Sai Baba returns on the eve of his Mahasamadhi centenary to preach the gospel of ‘Shraddha and Saburi’ and to make his devotees visualize him in all animate objects. The security guards at the Samadhi Mandir arrest him as a thief who has come to steal jewels put on Baba’s idol and is brought before the Grand Inquisitor.
“Why have you come back?” the Inquisitor asks Sai Baba. “Do you know the trouble you have caused with your teaching and which we have had to set right? The common folks are not capable of sharing food with pigs, dogs, crows, and not capable of seeing you in everybody. They work in a pressure cooker world working round the clock and they neither have ‘Shraddha’ nor ‘Saburi’. They need rites, and doctrines, and the discipline of blind obedience.”
“I am afraid we will have to put you in solitary confinement as a punishment for having come here,” says the Inquisitor. Sai Baba looked at him compassionately! In the next moment, Sai Baba had mysteriously disappeared as he had appeared.
In the recent past, as more and more people are taking to Baba, Sai worship is being made more and more cumbersome by bringing therein the age-old rituals and splendors. As we know, Baba lived like a ‘Fhakir’ up to the end of his life, wore a torn ‘kafni’, slept on the floor with a brick under his head, and begged food from a few houses every day. All his life, he preached simplicity and unpretentiousness in life and living. It would, therefore, only be in the fitness of things if his path of ‘Bhakti’ is also allowed to remain simple, ‘Sahaj’, dogma-free, and without any external parade or exhibition. Huge amounts of money being spent on holding Sai-worship followed by feasting in the name of ‘Bhandara’ should be avoided and the money thus saved, be spent on the cause of the poor, the miserable and the neglected, who were so dear to Baba.
Should not the path of Sai Bhakti, be dogma-free, simple, ‘Shudhh’, without ritualistic ceremonies, so that it retains its universality of approach? Let us give it a thought!
“Offer him the throne of firm faith, decorate it, with right ‘Satvik’ emotions, and bathe him with tears of joy. He will then be pleased.
Put around his waist a girdle of devotion, ward off the evil eye with salt and lemon, etc., surrender yourself to him and thereafter, do his arati.” (Govind Raghunath Dabholkar alias Hemadpant in Sai Satcharita – Chapter 37, Ovi-39-40).
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