The Sai Teachings

Guidance for the Spiritual Aspirant

People develop in themselves an abounding variety of selfish habits and attitudes, causing themselves great discontent. The impulse for this comes from the power complex, the greed for accumulating authority, domination and power! The greed for things can never be eternal and full, and in fact, it is impossible for anyone to satiate their desires fully. A person might feel elated to become the master of all arts, owner of all wealth, possessor of all knowledge, or repository of all the scriptures, but from whom did the person acquire all these? You may think you earned all this through your own efforts and toil.
The source from which all authority, talent, energy and power originate is the Lord of all. Ignoring Lord’s omnipotence, deluding oneself that the little greatness acquired is supreme, is indeed selfishness, conceit and pride. A genuine aspirant can be recognized by the characteristics of truth, kindness, love, patience, forbearance and gratefulness. Wherever these reside, ego cannot subsist; it has no place. Therefore seek to develop these.

The Sai Teachings

The Goal of Life

Joy is your birthright; peace is your innermost nature. The Lord is your staff and support. Do not discard it; do not be led away from the path of faith by stories invented by malice and circulated by spite. Take up the name of God; it could be any one of His innumerable ones that appeals to you the most, and also chose the form appropriate to that name, and then start repeating it from now on - that is the royal road to ensure Joy and Peace.

That will train you in the feeling of brotherhood and remove enmity towards fellowmen. When you sow seeds in the field, they can be eaten away by ants or washed off by rains or picked on by birds or destroyed by pests, still some seeds stave off all these and grow as strong and sturdy seedlings. Similarly, you must do everything to uphold the privilege of this birth and strive to return to the Lord.

The Sai Teachings

Real human progress

In today’s novel civilization, emergence of discordant notes has silenced the call of the Divine from within. People are eager to make their lives a merry-go-round but it is turning into a painful tangle of troubles. They are not discovering the cause of the contradiction and are wasting their years in empty ephemeral pomp and pretence.

Real progress means raising the level of moral life and brightening daily lives with goodness and godliness. Life must be an incessant process of repair and reconstruction, of discarding evil and developing goodness. Paddy grains must discard the husk to become consumable rice. Cotton must be reformed as yarn to become wearable cloth. Even gold nuggets have to undergo the crucible and get rid of alloys.

So too, all of you must purify your instincts, impulses, passions, emotions and desires. Only then you can progress in good thoughts, deeds and words. Your intrinsic value is directly proportional to the level of transformation you achieve.

The Sai Teachings

A spiritual aspirant must…

Every aspirant who seeks the Eternal through the path of devotion should strive to keep away from the turmoil, cruelties, and falsehoods of this world and practice truth, righteousness, love, and peace. This is indeed the path of devotion. Those who seek union with God and those who seek the welfare of the world should discard as worthless both praise and blame, appreciation and derision, prosperity and adversity.

They should courageously keep steady faith in their own innate reality and dedicate themselves to spiritual uplift. No one, not even a great spiritual personality or Avatar, can ever escape criticism and blame. Learn from their lives. Great souls hold on to truth and live by them. Those who indulge in criticism or blame will realise their greatness in time.

As aspirants, stay away from ignorant people and desist in discussing your beliefs and convictions with them. Become immersed in holy books and be in the company of the Lord’s devotees.

The Sai Teachings

The Spiritual Journey

The farmer ignores food and sleep, and focusses on ploughing, levelling, scattering seeds, watering, weeding, guarding and fostering crops. He knows that the harvest he brings home is critical for his family’s subsistence and if he fritters away the precious season in idle pursuits, his family will be confronted with hunger and ill-health. So he prioritises all his attention on farming alone and defers all other pursuits. He bears all difficulties and deprivations, and toils day and night, watches over the crops and garners the grain. As a result, he happily spends the months ahead, in peace and joy with his family.

All students and spiritual seekers must learn this lesson from the farmer. Youth is the prime season for mental culture. Use these years intensively and intelligently for your progress irrespective of difficulties and overcome every obstacle. Silence the clamour of your senses, and control hunger and thirst; the urge to sleep and relax also be curbed until spiritual harvest is obtained.

The Sai Teachings

Righteousness

These days virtue is becoming rare at all levels - in the individual, family, society and community, and also in all fields of life - economic, political and even 'spiritual’. Life must be spent in accumulating and safeguarding virtue, not riches.

Listen and ruminate over the stories of the great moral heroes of the past, so that their ideals may be imprinted on your hearts. There is also a decline in discipline, which is the soil on which virtue grows. Each one must be respected, whatever be their status, economic condition or spiritual development; else there will be no peace and happiness in life. This respect can be aroused only by the conviction that the same Real Self (Soul) that is in you is playing the role of the other person. See that Divinity (Soul) in others; feel that they too have hunger, thirst, yearning and desires as you have, develop sympathy and the anxiety to serve and be useful to everyone.

The Sai Teachings

The Importance of Service

Today, we are confronted everywhere by statistics parading quantities and reports in glowing terms. Do not bother about adding to the number or achieving a target. I value quality, not quantity. Genuine and intensive devoted service offered in a few spots or villages is more fruitful than superficial service offered to a large number. Convince yourselves that life cannot continue long without others serving you and you serving others. Every relationship - be it master-servant, ruler-ruled, guru-disciple, employer-employee, or parents-children and so on - is bound by mutual service.

Everyone is a servitor. The farmer and labourer whom you serve, produce by their toil your food and clothing as their service to you. Remember that the body, with its senses-mind-brain complex has been awarded to you to be used for helping the helpless. 

Service is the highest of paths of Devotion which wins the Grace of God. Service promotes mental purity, diminishes egoism and enables one to experience, through empathetic understanding, the unity of mankind.

The Sai Teachings

The Purpose of Life

To a superficial observer, life appears to revolve around eating and drinking, working, and sleeping. But verily life has a much deeper significance. Life is a sacrifice. Every little act is an offering to the Lord. If your days are spent in deeds performed in this spirit of surrender, your sleep would be a total immersion in the Divine Consciousness! 

Most people commit the great fault of identifying themselves with the body and accumulate a variety of things for its upkeep and comfort. When the body becomes weak and decrepit with age, they still attempt to bolster it by one means or the other. How long can death be postponed? When Lord of Death’s warrant comes, everyone must depart. Position, pride, and power - all vanish before death. Remember, you are not this body! It is your vehicle to serve all. Realising this, strive day and night, with purity in body, mind and spirit, to realise the Higher Self.

The Sai Teachings

What must we achieve in this life…

The human being is a composite of man, beast and God, and in the inevitable struggle among the three for ascendency, you must ensure that God wins, suppressing the merely human and the lowly beast. Man must know the Universe as basically Divine. You and the Universe are one; all are subsumed in the same unique entity.

The cosmic vision can be acquired either by watching the Universe or one's own inner Cosmos. One has only to discover oneself. In the citadel of the body, there is the lotus temple of the heart, with subtle “space” within. In it are contained heaven and earth, fire and air, sun and moon, stars and planets - all that is in the visible world and all that sustains it, and all into which it submerges.

Instead of rotating round the earth in the higher realms of space and planning to land on the moon or Mars, if only one plans and prepares to travel into one’s own inner realm, what sublime joy and peace can be attained!