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Posted on April 5, 2011
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SPECIAL MUSINGS
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By Prof. G. Venkataraman
SPECIAL MUSINGS ON UGADI AND SWAMI’S HEALTH
By Prof. G. Venkataraman
Posted on
April 04, 2011 at 9.30 p.m. (IST)
At the outset, I would like to offer my humble Pranaams at
the Lotus Feet of our Dear Lord Sai.
Loving Sai Ram and greetings from Prashanti Nilayam.
Today is Ugadi, the Telugu New Year’s Day. It is also celebrated as
New Year’s Day by many other communities in India. Normally, Ugadi
is celebrated with great gusto, the morning celebrations culminating
in a Divine Discourse. For the first time, at least in my memory,
Swami was not physically present on this day to give Darshan.
Consequently, instead of the customary festivities, there was a
non-stop Bhajan program from 9 in the morning to 6.15 in the
evening. I am sure everyone in the audience was doing his or her own
recall of earlier Ugadis with Swami being present on the stage. I
shall also do a recall by quoting a piece from what Bhagawan said in
the course of His Discourse delivered on Ugadi day in 2002. Here it
is:
True Ugadi (New Year Day) is the day when man gives up
bad qualities, fills his heart with love and takes to
the path of sacrifice. Do not limit the celebration of
Ugadi to merely putting on new clothes and partaking of
delicious items. Today you may wear a new shirt, but how
long will it remain new? Tomorrow it becomes old.
Today's newspaper becomes a waste paper tomorrow. Our
life is like a newspaper. Once you have finished reading
a newspaper, you do not like to read it again and again.
You have been given this birth which is like a
newspaper, and have gone through varied experiences of
pleasure and pain. Enough is enough. You should pray,
"Oh God! You have given me this 'newspaper' and I have
gone through the experiences of this life. I don't want
to have another birth."
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Allow me now to reflect a bit on this quote. As Swami has said
during many celebrations of New Year Days, be it the New Year Day
according to the calendar we all follow or the Tamil New Year Day or
the Malayalam New Year Day [also called Vishu] or even the Chinese
New Year Day, the day is simply a time marker in the circular motion
of planet earth around the Sun. More important than the day itself
is Time. In this context, I recall a scene in the famous movie
Gone With the Wind, where the young heroine, Scarlett O’ Hara
if I remember the name correctly, walks to the entrance of a big
ranch named Thousand Oaks, I believe. And there at the entrance is
nailed a board with the words: TIME IS THE STUFF LIFE IS
MADE OF. Scarlett reads those words slowly, so as to have
them registered permanently in her mind. If you think about it,
those words are extremely significant, and indeed, you can easily
link them to the quote I just read out.
Just think. Life is the most precious gift that God gives us, and
time is the same thing as life, which also is why Swami says: ‘Time
waste is life waste’. If we waste time, we waste life and it becomes
worthless after life is gone. At least an old newspaper can be used
for wrapping up something. What can one do with a lifeless body?
Nothing, and Swami has pointed that out in so many of His
Discourses.
Let us now go to the last sentence of the quote I offered earlier.
For your convenience I repeat it again:
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You should pray, "Oh God! You have given me this
'newspaper' and I have gone through the experiences of
this life. I don't want to have another birth."
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The key
point here is that our prayers must be for not being born again. How
does one achieve liberation from repeated cycles of birth and death?
Adi Shankara gave the answer in His famous Bhaja Govindam
that Swami has referred to so many times. Lord Sri Krishna gave the
answer via the Bhagavad Gita, which, by the way, He taught only
once. As for Swami, if you thumb through the print outs of His
Discourses, you find that He has taught us that lesson not once but
zillions of times.
You
know something, Radio Sai has a 24 hours streaming channel that
offers only Discourses and nothing else. You can get it anywhere in
the world if you have a net connection or even an iphone. In fact,
we have been running this for some years now. But alas, even though
Radio Sai has been in existence for nearly ten years now, I am
amazed how many thousands of devotees are simply unaware of its
existence.
I am pained of course but not surprised. As Swami has explained we
remember something or look for something only if we attach some
importance to it in some way or the other. Often it is trivia that
we give importance to. In the process we forget that the most
important thing in our life is time itself. Do we spend any time at
all thinking about the importance of life, why it is given to us,
and how we are expected to spend it? Maybe we do not know, but then
Swami has explained precisely that so many times.
Dear readers, all of us, wherever we are, must pause and ask
ourselves some hard questions at this point of time. Whether we are
aware of it or not, from the moment He appeared on earth with a
human form, Swami has been in some manner or the other working only
for others; sometimes, it was to save or help specific individuals.
At other times, it was for the whole of humanity. That is His
nature. Here is a typical example, and I am here quoting from the
preface of the book entitled TYAGARAJA, Life and Lyrics, written by
Prof. William J. Jackson of Purdue University, who came in the
seventies to India as a Harvard scholar. One of his early stops was
Puttaparthi. He did not know anything about Swami at that time, but
that visit made him learn Telugu, become interested in music and do
his Ph.D thesis on Tyagaraja’s music all of which was in adoration
of Lord Sri Rama. About Swami, Prof. Jackson says in his preface:
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My spiritual guide, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, a great
singer who has a unique far-reaching voice and who is
the real raja of tyaga – exemplar of renunciation –
helped me find the confidence to reach for new
possibilities and the patience to work until reaching
completion.
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Allow me to say that at this juncture, we should all, each in our
own way, reach out to Swami with Heart-felt prayers and we must not
stop until those prayers are heard and responded to by Swami.
In His presence we normally say: “We love You Swami.” Now we must
say:
Swami, we not only Love You but also desperately need You.
So, Dearest Lord, please get well soon, and fill us with Bliss by
giving us Darshan once more as You used to. All
along, we took it a bit too much for granted. Now we realise how
invaluable it is and how we simply cannot do without it. In fact,
Bhagawan, the world and indeed the five elements and the Universe
itself needs You, for are You not the One who sustains them all?
Someone once said that Prayer is God’s only weakness. That statement
might sound a bit blasphemous, but, on the other hand, it expresses
the profound Truth that for the devotee, God would do
anything, only the devotee must want it desperately. Now
then is the time to make it known to Swami that He MUST
get well as quickly as possible and be back filling the whole
Universe with Joy and Bliss.
With those humble and prayerful thoughts and appeal, I seek
your permission to stop. But remember we need to pray every moment
from now on to ask Swami to get well soon, to come back, give us all
darshan and fill us with bliss, for not only you and I need
Him but so do the five elements and so does the universe itself.
Thank you and Jai Sai Ram.
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