Learners must learn to leave the Master
When I was in Paris in 1908, I met a thinker whose writing eventually changed forever the annals of many of us associated with‘ Sai Parabrahman and his intimate devotees’. Baba wanted to groom Upasani Maharaj as a Sadguru to become his heir and continue the divine mission.
Baba fixed a four-year internship to Upasani of staying alone in contemplation at Khandoba Mandir and Sai Maharaj grooming him close behind his thoughts from the mosque. Upasani completed 44 months of internship and suddenly left Shirdi stealthily. Nobody could explain as to why he did like this as in four more months he would have attained Baba’s status. Baba also kept quiet and did not encourage any discussion about Upasani.
Baba had a game plan of communication about this aspect. At that time in France. a 38-year-old son of middle-class Jewish parents, embarked on a novel depicting the social mores of the era and become a monumental landmark in the limitless realm of creative imagination. I had met this thinker in 1908 before I left Paris.
That man was Marcel Proust, and his magnum opus in translation was titled ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Today, Proust is a literary legend. But very few have undertaken the herculean task of reading the work, hailed by Graham Greene as the creation of the ‘greatest novelist of the 20th Century’, and by Somerset Maugham as ‘the greatest fiction to date’. I got this book running to over one thousand pages through Nana Saheb Chandorkar in 1916 from a bookshop in Mumbai. We all went through this book ‘In Search of
Lost Time’ and Baba intended that we dispel all our doubts about Upasani Maharaj’s action and we realized the folly of under-estimating a Mahatma like Upasani Maharaj who had attained the highest spiritual evolution.
From this, we all went through Marcel Proust’s thoughts and now we know why Upasani Maharaj did not complete the remaining four months of internship to become a full-fledged Sadguru on par with Sai Maharaj.
Proust from his book explores the twin realms of art and spirituality and Upasani Maharaj in his elevated consciousness, had ‘incitements’ to spirituality. He never equated himself with Sai Maharaj and always considered himself as ‘nothing’ and Sai Maharaj as the ultimate Reality,
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