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Go Within
The following talk was given by
David Jevons in September 1998 to an audience of Sai Baba devotees
who had gathered together for the annual Autumn Portishead Sai
Baba Centre meeting, which was held in a hall just outside
Bristol, in England. It has been edited, but only for the purpose
of reproducing it in this Newsletter.
Yesterday, when I was mentally
preparing myself for today's talk, the thought occurred to me that
so much has been said about peace in the many functions held by
the Sai Organisation this year that it would be extremely
difficult for me to find something fresh to say. Moreover I felt
sure that the other speakers today would all make the same points
about peace that I would want to make and so much that I would say
would probably be superfluous. Then my inner voice spoke to me
very clearly and said that the title of my talk to you today
should be 'Go Within' and so that is what you are going to get!
Of course I should not be surprised at this sort of thing
happening because this process of choosing the subject for a talk
has taken place many times before.
I recently did a wonderful
interview with Anil Kumar, who is Sai Baba's main interpreter. As
some of you might know, my wife and I produce the Ramala Centre
Newsletter and in our next issue, which comes out in about two
weeks time, you can read a transcript of the interview with Anil
Kumar. One of the questions that I asked Anil was "What is the
greatest manifestation that you have ever seen Swami do?" Without
hesitation he replied "Speak through me". He then went on to say
"You know, when Swami first called on me to speak he asked me,
without any prior warning, to get up and to speak inside the
Poornachandra Hall in front of a large audience and I just had to
talk. However once I realised that Swami was going to do that, I
got clever and began to prepare my speeches in advance. I
prepared a speech about wisdom but, of course, Swami then asked me
to talk about devotion. When I prepared a speech about devotion,
Swami then asked me to talk about Dharma. So it soon became very
apparent to me that Swami was teaching me to rely on the force of
God within me and this, in truth, is what I do with all my talks."
The process is exactly the same for me.
As I stand here before you now, I
really have nothing prepared. I just invite Swami to think, act
and speak through me, which, of course, is the birthright of
everyone in this room. I will warn you, though, that in the
beginning this process does involve a slight test of nerves,
because you have to trust the process and to recognise that you
are not the doer or the speaker. However I can assure you that
after a few such talks you overcome your fears and begin to trust
the system and it really is amazing how it does work. As I heard
the first speaker today talking about going within and the next
speaker following on in much the same vein I saw very clearly that
the great Organiser in the sky had organised all the speeches to
flow one into the other and that my task this afternoon was simply
to pull together all the threads in the final presentation. Hopefully
by the time that I have finished you will have grasped the
importance of going within.
What do I actually mean when I
say, "Go within"? What is it that we are seeking when we go
within? I remember that when I was in Puttaparthi, about five
years ago, Sai Baba came out to look at some construction work
that was going on at the back of the mandir some time after he had
finished his formal darshan. After the inspection was over he
came back into the men's side of the mandir and looked at the few
people who were sitting there. Sai Baba was only about ten feet
away from me. He just stood there for what seemed like an
eternity but which, in reality, was probably only for two or three
minutes, and he looked at us ever so gently and lovingly, rocking
slowly from foot to foot. Then he raised both his hands and gave
us one of his special two-handed blessings, with both his hands
describing the familiar circular pattern in the air. As he looked
at me I experienced true ecstasy, not the ecstasy of orgasm but
the ecstasy of spirit. I realised afterwards that it was probably
the greatest bliss that I had ever experienced. But why was I
experiencing such bliss? It was because I was totally focused on
the Lord. I was not conscious of my body; I was not distracted by
my mind or senses. I was totally at peace with myself and was
totally focused on the Lord. I was one with my divine spirit deep
within my own being. I was just I.
Now I relate this incident simply
to illustrate that when you focus totally on God, on the aspect of
God within you, that is the time when you experience true bliss
and, of course, you don't have to go all the way to India and see
Sai Baba in order to achieve this. You have to learn to focus on
what I call the omnipresent God, which is the aspect of God that
is within you, your divine spirit or atma. Sai Baba says, "You
are in me, but a little part of me is in you." So you have to
train yourselves to go within, to look within, to seek the God
within you, the part of your being that is never born and so never
dies. My wife, Ann, is particularly sensitive to Swami's hand
blessings. She feels that they transform every atom of her body
and she regularly feels the kundalini energy rising up her spine
as he gives his blessings. That is the power of an avatar's
darshan. It transforms everybody and everything. As you may well
know, Sai Baba loves to tease and to joke with his devotees. Someone
once asked Swami in an interview what he was actually doing when
he moved his hands in the familiar blessing pattern. Sai Baba
replied "Well, when I move my right hand like this, I'm uplifting
the whole consciousness of the world, and when I move my left hand
like this, I'm keeping Indian Airlines flying!" What a delicious
sense of humour he has.
Nevertheless, even if we know
that we have to go within, what is it that prevents us from
getting in touch with that aspect of God within us, our eternal
spirit? What is it that prevents us from being at one with peace,
love, truth, right-conduct and non-violence, what is it that
blocks this experience of bliss? As some of you may know, Ann and
I now live in British Columbia in Canada, close to the American
border. In fact we often go across the border into the USA to
shop and to sightsee. About three weeks ago Ann and I crossed the
border into Washington State to go to a lovely little town called
Linden. Linden has a strong Dutch heritage. There's a real
windmill in the main street of Linden, which has been converted
into a hotel and Dutch names are to be found everywhere. We went
to visit the county fair that was on there, a big agricultural
show. In the main arena there was a stage on which various
cultural events took place each day of the fair. Now it just so
happened that when I was there a hypnotist was putting on his
show. I am usually not very interested in hypnotism, because
there is something in me that doesn't want to surrender my mind to
anyone, but something made me stay and watch this demonstration.
The hypnotist took about twenty
people up on to the stage and then weeded out a few of them who
apparently weren't susceptible to his form of hypnotism. He then
began his demonstration. After assuring them that he wasn't going
to do anything harmful or degrading to them he put them all to
sleep through some hypnotic technique. He then demonstrated that
he had total control over them by making them do things that they
normally wouldn't do. For example, he told them under hypnosis
that he was going to walk around in front of them but that he had
a large tear in his trousers and that when he bent over you could
see his bottom. Then he woke them up and began walking around in
front of them on the stage. Whenever he bent over the women
subjects covered their faces in embarrassment and the men subjects
laughed and pointed at him. Of course his trousers weren't split.
It was all in their minds. Then he did another demonstration. He
put them to sleep again and held in his hands a wad of paper
napkins. He told his subjects that he had a wad of $100 bills in
his hand and that provided they could hide the bills in their
clothes they could have as many as they liked! He walked around
his subjects, both men and women, handing out paper napkins and
they were stuffing these napkins into their clothes like there was
no forever. They couldn't believe their luck! Finally, holding a
plastic bag full of bottle tops, he said to one man "Look, I've
got a bag full of silver quarters here and you can have them,
provided you stuff them down the front of your trousers." We
watched the gentleman in question do this with alacrity. Then the
hypnotist said "Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that they've
been in the deep freeze all morning and ??". Would you believe
it, the gentleman began hopping up and down as though he had a
block of ice between his legs! Now what is the purpose of telling
this story? What does it all prove? It shows how much we are
controlled by our subconscious minds. If a hypnotist can put
these thoughts into these people's minds and in a few seconds can
make them believe that they are real, how much more do we
programme our subconscious minds with our everyday thoughts and
experiences.
Some of you will have heard of
ISAP - The Inner Self Awareness Programme - that has been
developed here in the UK. This wonderful course deals very
thoroughly with the whole business of the conscious and the
subconscious mind and of how we unconsciously respond to old
patterns, old beliefs and old understandings. From the moment
that we are born, we start conditioning ourselves. What we are
our taught by our parents, by our teachers, by society as a whole,
by all our experiences of life, all goes into our subconscious
mind and creates an 'identity' which blocks the understanding of
the spirit with which we incarnated. Do you know that a young
child doesn't know its colour or race or what that means in
society until an adult points out that fact to the child? A child
is more in touch with its spirit than an adult because there are
fewer conditioning experiences blocking its divine connection. As
we become adults, so we lose that connectedness with our inner
self, the aspect of God within us. Above all we lose our sense of
oneness, of connectedness to everyone and to everything. The
symbol of ISAP is the shutter that covers the lens of the camera.
The shutter, made up of differing segments (past experiences),
covers the lens (spirit). So what we have to do is to open the
shutter, to put aside our conditioning of this life, to reveal the
force of God that moves within us. It is not something that is
deliberately hidden from us. It is our birthright. It is what we
are; eternal, infinite, spiritual beings. All the great spiritual
teachers have taught 'Look within, for there is the Kingdom of God.'
Now Sai Baba is a great mould
crusher. One of the reasons that he has come on Earth is to help
us to break the mould of who or what we think we are. I,
personally, had a very difficult relationship with Swami for the
first four or five years after hearing about him because the
esoteric tradition that he represented appeared to conflict with
mine. As the saying goes, he really rattled my cage. It was
because of this that my wife had to drag me out to India,
protesting strongly, to go to see Sai Baba. I really didn't want
to go and see any Indian guru, let alone one who was said to be
God on Earth. There was a part of me that said, "I just don't
need this. I've worked out a very good understanding of the
nature of God and the purpose of life and I don't need anyone
playing around with it!" Well, of course, you go out to see Sai
Baba, you stand in his transforming energy and you feel the power
of his unconditional love. Even though he totally ignored me,
thus giving me the time and the space to work through all my
doubts and fears, he was still working on me. I like to use the
analogy of a time-release capsule. Sai Baba planted a
time-release capsule of knowledge and wisdom within me, which over
the months and years after my visit slowly released spiritual
understandings within me, which enabled me to grasp the vital
essence of his divine message. His teachings were soon echoing
inside my head. There is only one God and that God is omnipresent.
You are God; you are no different from God. Love all, serve all.
The reason why you incarnate on the Earth is to transmute your
karma. Everything that happens to you is of your own creation. There
is no such thing as evil. The purpose of life is to seek and get
liberation. Such concepts were strange to me before I came in
contact with Sai Baba. I was brought up in the Christian belief
that Man is on Earth and God is in Heaven, that Man was born out
of sin and that God had to send His only son down in order to
communicate with Man and to save him from himself. But Sai Baba
was saying the very opposite to this, that God is within me, that
I am no different from God and, as such, that I am a perfect
eternal being that knows neither birth nor death.
Over the fifteen or so years that
I have been in contact with Sai Baba I have gradually drawn closer
and closer to him. My wife and I have been privileged to have
many interviews with him and we have begun to form a close
relationship with him. Nevertheless, both we and many other
devotees of long standing have lately been going through a very
difficult period because Sai Baba has been ignoring us on the
physical level in a definite attempt to wean us off his physical
form. Over the years we've grown very comfortable with and
accustomed to his form. I'm always joking that my wife is a
founder member of the MTF club, which is the Must Touch Flesh
club! Whenever she gets near Swami, poor man, she wants to hold
his hand, to massage his feet, to mother him, to get very close to
him. As a reserved Englishman I sit back and watch this whole
process with some amusement. However she has developed a very
close relationship with Swami. He looks at all her photographs,
he listens to all her stories, he answers all her questions about
family matters. They have a wonderful rapport and yet, over the
past two or three years, there's been a distancing, a drawing
back, a withdrawal of physical contact by Sai Baba.
We recently went down to a
retreat in Grants Pass in Oregon, in the USA, where we met Jack
and Louise Hawley, who wrote 'Dharmic Management', and Joy and
Raye Thomas, who have written many books about Sai Baba and have
even lived full time in his ashram. At the retreat they both
talked about the same subject - the difficulty they're
experiencing as Sai Baba withdraws his physical contact from them.
Now Jack Hawley spends several months of the year in India with
Swami, he's been inside Swami's private house on many occasions,
but Swami hasn't talked to him in a year and a half. In fact, he's
ignored him. Jack was relating as to how difficult he found this
at first, as to how he went though all sorts of feelings of
rejection, feelings that he wasn't good enough, that he'd done
something wrong. Suddenly, however, he began to realise that this
process was a gift from Swami, since it was forcing him to contact
the Sai Baba within rather than the Sai Baba without. Joy Thomas
spoke in much the same vein. She had to suffer an apparent
rejection by Sai Baba in front of a large crowd at darshan. Her
group was called in for an interview. They all went up to the
veranda to go inside, but Swami let the whole group in except her!
He closed the door with Joy still outside and she had to walk
back to her place in front of thousands of people. That is a very,
very difficult test to face but, again, it forced Joy to go within.
The reason why Sai Baba did it, or so Joy said, was because he
had been appearing to her regularly in her dreams, telling her
things. She wanted to know if her dreams were genuine, if what he
was saying was accurate. This was Sai Baba's way of telling her
to believe her own experience. He was saying "I come to you
within, listen to what I'm saying."
When we were last in Puttaparthi
we met Phyllis Krystal the authoress of several books about Sai
Baba including 'Sai Baba: The Ultimate Experience' and 'Cutting
the Ties that Bind'. Sai Baba set the stage for her lesson during
the first visit that she and her husband made to the ashram in
1973. During their farewell interview Phyllis asked Sai Baba when
he would like her and her husband to return. He looked intently
at her and, pointing at himself, he then said "First you must
remember that you don't need to come back to see this little
body." After a significant pause he then said to her "Find me in
your own heart." Then, after another pause, as Phyllis accepted
and understood his message, he continued "But you will return to
be re-energised." Many years later he emphasised this message
again in a very dramatic way, one that many people could observe.
On the day that she was to leave for home, after previously
assuring her on several occasions that he would see her before she
left, he had still not called her in for the promised interview. Darshan
came and went but as he walked back to his quarters after bhajans
Sai Baba abruptly stopped in front of her and said in a loud
voice, for all to hear, "Go inside, right now" and turning to a
friend of Phyllis who was sitting next to her he said "And you too."
They were both puzzled at first, thinking that he meant for them
to go into the interview room, but then he added "Do", indicating
to Phyllis that she should take padanamaskara. As she stood up to
do this Sai Baba placed his hand on her head and pushed it down
towards his feet inviting her to kiss them. This ended her 'interview',
as Sai Baba then carried on walking back to his quarters in the
Poornachandra Hall. He would not appear again until Phyllis was
on her way home but she knew exactly what he meant because of his
comments on that first visit many years earlier. We must detach
ourselves even from his physical form and should strive to be
connected to our own inner God-self. We have to establish this
link with the God within us. We can't always be going to see him;
we can't always be relying on his physical form for our mental and
spiritual sustenance. We can't always be travelling to India to
see him, to get answers to all of our questions.
So we all have to start relying
on the inner God, on that still, quiet voice within. It just isn't
physically possible for the whole world to go and see and talk to
Sai Baba. We have to rely on the aspect of God within us, our
atma or divine spirit. This inner being is who we really are,
which is an actual part of God, and, as such, is one with God, is
imbued with the qualities of God: Truth, Love, Peace,
Right-conduct and Non-violence. When we tap into this being we
can know the answer to any question that we ask. Sai Baba says
that if you sit down and meditate and attune to the spirit within
you the answer will always come within twenty minutes. The answer
will always come. Now I know that it's difficult, in the world in
which we live today, where daily we are faced with dramas and
disasters and scenes of human suffering, to believe that the world
is working perfectly, that everything that manifests is a part of
God's Plan. Recognise, though, that what we are actually seeing
is Humanity at its lowest ebb, the end of Kali Yuga, where it
appears that the world has gone mad, where human values appear to
be reversed, where bad is regarded as good and good is regarded as
bad, where the world focuses its attention on the bad rather than
on the good. Look at what is happening in the world today where
all that the world's press appears to be interested in is the
sexual peccadilloes of the president of the USA. Do we see the
press making any effort to report on the people who are trying to
transform and uplift human society? Is there anything positive
ever written about Sai Baba, for example? Is there anything
positive ever written about the daily sacrifice and service of
people of goodwill who work unceasingly for the upliftment of
human society.
Someone actually tried to start a
'good news' newspaper in England a few years ago, a newspaper that
would report only good news, not bad news, but it folded within a
few months. There is a part of us that doesn't want to hear good
news, that doesn't want to focus on the higher aspects of life
because it is attracted to the lower. Rather like watching a soap
opera on the television, we watch the drama of life and we believe
it to be real, not just a drama, and we become fixated with it.
Sai Baba teaches that life is a game and all that we have to do
is play it. We must never get sucked into believing that the game
is anything more than a game, that the drama of life is real,
especially since the drama is going to intensify beyond our
wildest dreams in the next few years. We are approaching a
critical time in the evolutionary process of this Earth. What is
going to unfold only Sai Baba knows, but it is apparent that big
evolutionary changes are coming. The seeds that Humanity has sown
will soon bear fruit. Sai Baba will not be drawn on this point
but he does say that Humanity will suffer 'irritations'. It
behoves us to prepare for such 'irritations' and the best way to
do this is by establishing a close link with the divine aspect of
God that is within us - our atma or spirit. In this way we will
be guided to be where we are meant to be, to do what we are meant
to do and to say what we are meant to say.
Several years ago we published in
the Ramala Centre Newsletter the story about a dream, which my
daughter, Diana, had experienced. In this dream she met Sai Baba
conversed with him and had an out of the body experience with him.
He took her up above the Earth, to a position where she could see
past, present and future, and showed her that all the suffering in
the world was just karmic settlement and, as such, was all a part
of God's plan for Humanity. He went on to tell her that there is
no such thing as evil, that the world is perfect in every respect,
if only because God created it. God is present within every human
being, so how can we judge anyone. If we judge them, then, we are
judging God! What is the source within us that makes the
judgements? It is most certainly not the God within us, because
God would not judge God. So it can only be the persona that we
have created from our earthly experiences, from the times when we
were separate from God. Sai Baba warns us not to judge this world
or the actions of the people in it if only because of what happens
every time we make a judgement. Sai Baba says that every time you
judge someone, you take on some of their karma, you take a little
bit of karma off them and put it on yours. So every time that you
think badly of someone, every time you say negative things about
someone, you are actually doing them a favour, because you are
lightening their karmic burden but, alas, increasing yours! Keep
that thought in mind the very next time that you judge someone.
Sai Baba says that the more you judge, the less you love and the
whole purpose of life is to love and to serve one another.
So we have to understand that
everything that manifests in the world is all part of a great
cosmic drama, a drama that was written aeons of time ago, if not
before time. All that we can do is observe, react and draw
lessons from that drama. I recently went to a seer in Bombay, who
reads from some palm leaf scrolls called The Book of Brighu. Now
these scrolls were written thousands of years ago and yet this
gentleman was able to read the scrolls and not only tell me events
about my life both past, present and future but also about past
and future lives. Whether or not he is accurate remains to be
seen but if he is, then, it is apparent that much of life is
preordained or predestined and that all we can do is respond to
it. Sai Baba says that what you meet in life is destiny, but how
you meet it is self-effort. So we observe and take part in the
drama but what is important is the place from which we view that
drama. Sai Baba says that the colour of the glasses that we wear
colours all that we see. In other words, if we wear red lenses in
our glasses, then, everything that we see is red. If we look with
the eyes of love, then, all that we see is love. If we look with
the eyes of spirit, then, all that we see is spirit. If we look
with negativity then all that we will see is negativity. If we
look with positivity then all that we will see is positivity. That
is why it is so important to go within. It determines the reality
of what we see and, therefore, how we react to it and how we react
to it determines our actions and, therefore, our karma.
God, Infinite Spirit, call Him
what you may, is orchestrating this drama. He is the author. We
are just the actors in His drama. Because He has written it, we
have to trust that it is perfect. We have to trust the author. We
have to trust the part or the role in the drama that has been
assigned to us. We have to realise that since we are infinite,
eternal beings, we are never born and so we can never die. Every
death, every act of suffering, is not an act of random fate, of
blind chance. It is an act of destiny. Therefore there is no
such thing as a tragedy. As Sai Baba says, "Everything is perfect.
It is just karma working itself out." In this certain knowledge,
surely, we can be more at peace both with the world and with
ourselves. Knowing that no one is born and no one dies we can
accept the world for what it is, an impermanent, ever changing
stage onto which, as Shakespeare said, we have our entrances and
our exits. Remember that the spirit is never born, never dies
and never suffers. It is eternal and infinite. It is the
observer of the drama as, indeed, is God. When we are one with
our divine spirit we are one with all knowledge, all wisdom, all
power. It is at such a time that the drama of life is seen for
what it really is, a drama!
Nevertheless, Sai Baba says that
it is a great privilege to be in incarnation on the Earth at this
time. Why is this so? It is, firstly, because we are in
incarnation on the Earth at the same time as a full avatar and,
secondly, because we have been blessed with the wisdom to
recognise him for who he is and have been able to have personal
contact with him, a privilege of which the beings on many other
planes of life are very envious. To enter into the aura of an
avatar, to be able to see, touch and talk to him, to have his
darshan, to be able to hear his teachings directly about the
reality of human existence, as we do at this time, is something
that will not happen again for a very, very long time, if at all.
So we are being offered an immense opportunity to take a gigantic
step forward, to achieve liberation and to return home to the
Source of All Life. Now just because you are living here in
England, apparently far removed from Sai Baba physically, do not
think that it is impossible to establish a relationship with him.
Sai Baba's main teaching is that there is only one God and that
God is omnipresent. He is here now, around us, above us and
within us. Sai Baba says, "I am in you and you are in me" and he
is as much here as he is in India, in fact anywhere in the World.
The stories of his omnipresence are manifold and I do not need to
repeat them here. The experience of Jack and Louise Hawley, of
Raye and Joy Thomas and of Ann and myself are all one and the same.
The inner Sai Baba is so much more accessible, so much more
omnipresent and so much more powerful than the physical form that
lives in India. So go within.
My lovely wife, Ann, who has had
such a close relationship with Sai Baba, a true affair of the
heart, is finding it very difficult to release the outer form and
to go within. Sai Baba is being very tough on her. She goes to
see him at Puttaparthi and is totally ignored. She sits there in
darshan for day after day and Swami doesn't even look at her, yet
alone speak to her. If we are blessed with an interview, it's
always on the very last day, just before we leave and as we walk
out of the interview room he always says the same thing to us. He
looks deeply into our eyes and says "Remember, I am always with
you, I am always with you". This isn't some esoteric statement. It
is a fact of life. He is reminding us of the supreme teaching,
that there is only one God and that God is omnipresent. At no
time are we separate from God.
I would like to finish by reading
an extract from one of Sai Baba's talks which, for me anyway,
encapsulates all that I have said to you this afternoon. It
defines why we are here, why the avatar is here and what our
relationship with him should be. So just sit back and listen and
imagine that Swami is speaking the words to you which, of course,
in one sense he is, through me.
"Come just one step towards me,
and I shall take a hundred steps towards you. Shed just one tear,
and I shall wipe away a hundred tears from your eyes. I bless
only thus. May your bliss grow. I have come to give you the key
of the treasure of bliss, to tell you how to tap that spring, for
you have forgotten the way to blessedness. If you waste this
chance of saving yourselves, it is just your fate. You have come
to get from me tinsel and trash, the petty little cures and
promotions, worldly joys and comforts. Very few of you desire to
get from me the thing that I've come to give you, namely,
Liberation itself. And even among those few who do, those who
stick to the path of spiritual practice and succeed will be a
handful.
This is a great chance. This
chance will not come your way again. Be aware of that. If you
cannot and do not cross this sea of grief now, taking hold of this
chance, when again can you get such a chance. Be confident that
you will be liberated. Know that you will be saved. Go and tell
all that you went to Puttaparthi and that you got there the secret
of liberation.
Many hesitate to believe that things will improve, that life will
be happy for all and full of joy and that the Golden Age will
recur. Let me assure you that this avatar, this divine body, has
not come in vain. It will succeed in averting the crisis that has
come upon Humanity".
Source: Ramala Centre Newsletter,
March 1999,
http://www.ramalacentre.com/newsletter03_99_01.htm
Visit Ramala Centre Website:
http://www.ramalacentre.com
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