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Raising Man to God

Q: You mean that you are presently raising the consciousness of mankind to a godlike condition to enable them to command their own destiny?

Baba: Exactly. They would become shareholders of My sankalpa shakti (divine power, universal energy). I have to work through them, rouse thein-dwelling God in them and evolve them to a higher reality in order to enable them to master the natural law andforces. If I cure everything instantly, leaving the people at their present levels of consciousness, they would soon mess up things and be at one another's throats again with the result that the same chaotic situation would develop in the world.

Suffering and misery are the inescapable acts of the cosmic drama. God does not decree these calamities but man invites them by way of retribution for his own evil deeds. This is corrective punishment which induces mankind to give up the wrong path and return to the right path so that he may experience the godlike condition of sat-chit-ananda -- that is, an existence of wisdom and bliss. All this is part of the grand synthesis in which the negatives serve to glorify the positives. Thus death glorifies immortality, ignorance glorifies wisdom, misery glorifies bliss, night glorifies dawn.

So, finally, if the Avathar brings the calamities mentioned by you to an immediate end, which I can do, and do, when there is a great need, the whole drama of creation with its karmic (universal, inescapable duty) law will collapse. Remember, these calamities occur not because of what God has made of man but really because of what man has made of man. Therefore, man has to be unmade and remade with his ego destroyed and replaced by a transcendent consciousness so that he may rise above the karmic to command.

Q: Have you succeeded in bringing about this synthesis, Swamiji, particularly with the wealthy and powerful classes?

Fusion of Rich with Poor

Baba: I have not reached all of them as a class, but to the extent that I am able to contact them individually, the results are encouraging. The wealthy and powerful, of course, present a difficult problem in the matter of transformation. They need a special approach. The poor people, on the other hand, are very cooperative. They understand, appreciate and help My plans and ideas.

Q: What is the solution to this escalating conflict between wealth and power on one side, and poverty and weakness on the other?

Baba: The transformation of both into a single cooperative brotherhood on terms of equality without competition or conflict. This can result only from truth and love. The main issue is to fuse the two classes into one single class. The problem, however, is one of bringing them together on a common base or platform. Wealthy people live isolated in a certain state or condition. The poor also are similarly isolated in another state or condition. How do we bring them together?

I do so in many subtle ways by breaking the barriers of wealth and poverty and creating a feeling of equality and oneness between the poor and the rich. In this ashram (spiritual community) you find them living and working together, even performing menial labor on terms of complete equality. Here there are no distinctions whatever, nor any special facilities for the rich. They live, eat, work, worship and sleep like the poor. All live like a community of workers to share the common austerities of the ashram.

Peace of Mind Beyond Wealth

Despite our rigorous discipline, industrialists and businessmen want to come here. Why? Because they secure peace of mind beyond physical comfort which no wealth or power on earth can purchase or provide.

Thus we open to them a wonderful new world of spiritual treasures and they must sacrifice material wants and comforts. My mission is to show them the way to peace of mind which everybody, rich and poor alike, desires. In that process of spiritual evolution, the seeker learns that this blissful state cannot be purchased for money in a shop or gifted to one by anybody but oneself. It can come only from the universal source of divinity, the in-dwelling God that embraces poor and rich alike. This concept creates a common fellowship, a brother hood of give and take between the wealthy and the poor. Those who have too much are obliged to give up their unnecessary wants, while those who have too little get their needs fulfilled.

After all, in spiritual terms, all mankind belongs to one and the same class, caste or religion. The divine principles in each and all of them derive from one and the same God. This fundamental oneness has to be made manifest to them through direct contact with spiritual realities and the persuasive expanding power of love, till they become part of the universal religion of work, worship and wisdom.

Material Wealth is Spiritual Poverty

Q: All this would be simple and welcome evangel for the poor since they lose nothing and gain everything from your philosophy, but what about the rich who have to lose all if they followed it?

Baba: That is the crux of the problem. They simply have to lose, surrender, submerge their false values if they want My grace. So long as people continue to be slaves of materialistic definitions of wealth and poverty, there can be no solution. I, therefore, try to convert their minds and hearts to spiritual values and truths.

After all, who is the richest man? One who has the largest wants and, therefore, troubles and worries? Or one who is satisfied with the barest necessities of life and, therefore, is more or less desireless and comparatively happy? Judged from this criterion of happiness, the poor are spiritually rich but the rich are spiritually poor. It is not material but spiritual satisfaction that ultimately makes life worth living.

As I have said before, life without desire brings divinity to man; and those who seek My grace must shed desire and greed. Riches provide a fatal temptation. They are the source and cause of human bondage. The desire to raise the standard of life can never be satisfied. It leads to multiplication of wants and consequent troubles and frustrations.

No Grace Without Sacrifice

The solution lies in our emphasis on the quality as against the standard of life, on high thinking and lowly living. The mind is the horse, the body the cart: to achieve mental peace, you must put the horse of high thinking before the cart of physical comfort.

Q: This is sound philosophy but how do you implement it in action?

Baba: The rich as well as the poor come to Sai Baba to seek love, peace and liberation from their problems and troubles. My prescription to them is absolute selflessness and desirelessness. To the poor, this is a natural state or condition. So My love flows to them to embrace their devotion. Thus they obtain My grace.

Monkey-Mind Bondage

The rich, on the other hand, cannot secure this grace without surrendering their materialistic outlook and selfish attachments. So it becomes obligatory for them to sacrifice material greed to receive spiritual grace. I tell them:

Ego lives by getting and forgetting,

Love lives by giving and forgiving.

In this way, I change their mental attitude. I transform their monkey-minds into loving, giving and forgiving minds.

Q: Monkey-minds, Baba -- what do you mean?

Baba: It is a kind of mentality that is used by peasants to trap and destroy monkeys. When the peasant wants to catch a monkey, he uses a big pot with a narrow mouth as a trap. Inside the pot he puts edibles which the monkey loves. The monkey finds the pot and puts its paws inside to grasp as much of the stuff as it can hold. Once it does so, it is unable to pull out its paws from the small mouthof the pot. It imagines that someone inside the pot is holding its paws, so it struggles and attempts to runaway with the pot, only to fail and get trapped. No one is holding the monkey; it has trapped itself because of its greed. If only it lets the stuff in its paws go, it will be free of bondage.

In the same way I tell rich people, man is tempted by the wealth, pleasures and desires of the world. When he gets lost in such attachment andsuffers the consequences of greed, he thinks that something is binding him down, capturing him, destroying him. The moment he gives up material wealth and desires, he will be free. I make him realize his bondage to the monkey-mind and liberate himself.
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