Divine Discourse
ADWESHTAA Sarva Bhoothanam (with no ill-will against living being), Sarva Bhootha hitherathah (always engaged in promoting the well being of all beings), Samah shathrou cha mithrecha (considering foe and friend alike) - jewels like these contained in the Geetha, are, as known to all, pointers to the need for Universal Love. The Geetha offers plenty such, to help the worldly to swim across the sea of sorrow. In the Geetha the Lord lays down the ideal, "Do all acts for Me; become Mine; be devoted to Me, giving up all other attachments." By declaring that man shall not bear ill-will towards the entire world of living beings, the Geetha is positing a lesson with invaluable inner meaning:, that in all beings and even things, there is moving and revolving, as an active illumining Principle, the Divine, appropriately called as Atma. The Vedhic assertions, Ishavasyamidham Sarvam (All this is enveloped in God), SarvaBhootha antharatma (The inner core of all Beings is He), Vasudhevah sarvamidham (All this is God, Vasudheva)- firmly establish this profound Truth. It is a wrong against God, this Omnipresent Divine, to hate living beings, to injure them; that is to say, it is as bad as hating and injuring oneself - the reason being that the injurer is as much a living being with God as his core, as the injured. Potharaju, the classic
Thelugu Poet, had realised this truth; so he writes in the Bhagavatha:"Grant me, O Lord, So ready to reward rigorous self-control ! Grant me, O Lord, The adoration of Thy Lotus Feet The comradeship of those who adoreThy Lotus Feet And give me compassion, Deep, vast, unlimited, Towards all beings in all the worlds.
29 July 1969
-DIVYA SPARSHA-
Aum Sri Sai Ram
te President's Desk...
Bhagawan says when a child comes to the world, he first recognises his mother. The mother shows who the father is. The father leads the child to the preceptor or Guru. The Guru shows the way to God. Students of Sri Sathya Sai Bal Vikas are blessed and they have in Bhagawan their mother, father, Guru and God.
The compassionate Lord has spent every minute of His earthly sojourn in giving His Message to Humanity.
In the nine years of Bal Vikas, this Divine and Universal message is instilled into the depths of the heart of every Bal Vikas Student After completing Bal Vikas, the students, rather alumni, may take various paths of life. They may walk out from the portals of the Bal Vikas and the organisation but Bal Vikas will never walk out of his life. Because Bal Vikas embodies the message of the Master which will help him through rain and shine, through dark and light, through the thick and thin of life. Bal Vikas embodies the Divine Promise that "Once I have taken someone in my fold, he may forsake me, But I shall never forsake him." The Master will continue to guide, protect and give strength through His words and His message. All we need to do is to clear the dust of doubt, the cobwebs of attachment and ego and seek within. For deep inside every Bal Vikas Child, the Lord lives on through His Message. Let us hold on to the feet of our Sadguru. Let our lives reflect His message. Let us feel His presence and get strength to face life through His words. Let us be agents of change for a better world by holding on to and living by the Mantra of our Guru's Message.
I offer this edition of Divya Sparsha at the Lotus Feet of our Sadguru, Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, on this auspicious occasion of Guru Poornima.
Dr. Satya Swarup Pattnaik State President, SSSSO, Odisha
1. Swami's Maha Mantras
His Love Touching Our Hearts Gently
2. Yearning for Swami's Grace
3. The Invisible Umbilical Cord
Ms Yeswariya Pandey
Sri Jeevan Jyoti Sahoo
Dr. Jyoti Prakash Dash
Sri Ishan Jena
5.
4. Mantra Mulam Guru Vakyam
Ms Ceetol Chowdhury
Editorial Board
Smt.PrabhatiDash
Dr.PriyambadaMohanty
Smt.EvaParida
Smt.BijaylaxmiSatpathy
Ms Niharika Kanungo
Smt. Manisa Debata
Prof.K.K.Padhi SriSmrutiRanjanJena
Designing Team Advisory Committee
Ms Sai Gayatri Sahoo
Ms Sai Smruti Sahoo
Dr. Sathya Swaroop Patnaik
Sj. Amiya Ranjan Kanungo
Sj. Sushant Mohanty
Sri Shibaji Ranasingh
ନକଟକ ଯାଇ ପଚାରେଲ "How are you?" େସ କହେଲ, "Swami, the doctors say I am about to die." ଭଗବାନ ତା ଭସନା କର କହେଲ "Did I not tell you to stop smoking? Did I not warn you that it is injurious to health? "ବ କ ଜଣକ କହେଲ, "yes Swami, but I thought it should be from the date of landing." ସାମୀ ତା କଡ଼ା ସରେର କହେଲ, " My instruction should be carried out immediately and without delay. ଏହାପେର କରଣାମୟ ପଭ କହେଲ, "Don't worry, you will recover." ଭଗବାନ ତା ଦବ ହସ
Puttaparthi University
"Master, go on, and I will follow thee To the last breath, in truth and loyalty."
କହନ, "Obey the divine command implicitly without questioning. That is the sign of true devotion."
ଅ ତ। (୧୩)
ଲାଗବ ବଶ। (୧୪)
“Come to me one step & I will extend my hundred steps towards you.”
His Love Touching Our Hearts Gently
Ms Yeswariya Pandey Khariar Road, Nuapada
shed stillness of dawn, where whispers reside, Sri Sathya Sai Baba's love descends, a gentle, guiding tide. With a tender touch, He heals every scar and wound, A radiant beacon, shining bright, like a celestial star profound.
His serene presence envelops us in a calming embrace, In His divine aura, we find our sacred space. Every heart, a temple, filled with His boundless grace, In His loving gaze, our worries and fears vanish without a trace.
Soft as the breeze, His whispers of wisdom come, Guiding us gently, putting our souls at ease, like a sweet, sweet hum. A touch so gentle, yet powerful and true, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, forever does renew.
In moments of doubt, when shadows loom near, His love shines forth, dispelling all fear, banishing every tear. With hands outstretched, He gathers us close, In His eternal love, we find solace, our hearts made whole.
His love, a melody, pure and divine, Touching our hearts, a celestial sign, intertwining our lives with His vine. With each gentle touch, we grow, refine, and thrive, In His boundless love, we eternally shine, like stars in the sky.
Through life's every trial, His love is our guiding light, In His gentle embrace, we safely abide, through the darkest of nights. With a heart full of grace, He leads us above, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, the epitome of love, a boundless, endless sea.
In the tapestry of life, His threads of love intertwine, Each moment a gift, with His love so divine, a treasure so fine. Our hearts are uplifted, our spirits redeemed, In His gentle touch, we find our truth revealed, our souls made whole, our hearts freed."
Swami's Maha Mantras
Sri Jeevan Jyoti Sahoo Daspalla, Nayagarh
, all, this was His way
A message of unity, for all to sway
Truth, non-violence, and righteousness, He had this to say
The path to inner peace, come what may
Selfless service, a key to unlock
The doors of the heart, and let love rock
Compassion, kindness, and forgiveness too
Essential lessons, for me and you
The five human values, He did always stress
Truth, righteousness, peace, love, and non-violence, we must address
Inward journey, the ultimate goal
To realize the divine, and make the soul whole
His teachings still guide, His love still shines
A beam of hope, for all of humankind
Sathya Sai Baba's legacy lives on
Inspiring hearts until the end is done"
Yearning for Swami's Grace
Dr. Jyoti Prakash Dash Bhubaneswar
With the Yearning for Life, With the Thirst for Darshan, With the Hunger for Pada Namaskar, I was sitting there, longing.
When will the wait be over? When will the Lord of Lords appear? The pin-drop silence Awaited Swami's arrival, His sight brought a deluge of Love. His orange robe brought Prashanti inside the weary heart.
Breaths held for the precious moment, The Lord who came in response to Prahlad’s fervent prayers, The Lord who saved Draupadi from torment, The Lord who protected Pandavas, The Lord who defended sages with Sri Ram's bow.
And there, the most beautiful hair, The lovely red robe appeared. Swami, my Lord...
How patiently You tolerated me, My mistakes were many, but Your blessings, infinite.
For many years I was ignorant of You, For many years I searched for You, For many years I waited.
Now, I have found my lovely God in You, My sweet Sai Maa, resplendent with Love.
The boons of good deeds materialized, He showered eternal grace with a sweet smile. I yearned for more, He was seated deep within, He stole my heart, rendered me speechless.
Joyful tears, my offering, Enveloped in His charm and Grace, A new Life began. He sings melodies through me, Guides through His Divine will and dreams, Bore my burdens when I listened to His messages.
The boons of good deeds materialized, He showered eternal grace with a sweet smile. I yearned for more, He was seated deep within, He stole my heart, rendered me speechless.
Joyful tears, my offering, Enveloped in His charm and Grace, A new Life began. He sings melodies through me, Guides through His Divine will and dreams, Bor
The Invisible Umbilical Cord
Sri Ishan Jena SSSIHL
Imagine you are sitting and praying to God and you suddenly see the Divine form walking towards you, going around, showering bountiful blessings. The scene gets imprinted in the very living consciousness of every devotee’s mind. The flowing ochre robe, the halo of light around the hair crowning the Lord’s human form, the slight all-knowing smile, and those ever observant and all-seeing eyes communicating His umpteen wordless messages and reprimands meant for you. One look at it and you know He has read through your whole being and there is nothing of you that is hidden from Him.
Blessed are those who have had the prarabdha of witnessing this scene through their human eyes. There have been devotees who have been more blessed though, from getting the Divine padanamaskaram of the velvety lotus feet (how soft it looks from afar!), who knows from how many eons that soul would have been waiting for that single contact with the Divine form which was granted to them in this birth. Then there have been more fortunate devotees who have got interviews from Bhagwan and were in continuous bonhomie with the Lord.
But then came a time when the Divinity, defining the course of this avatar, decided to take Maha Samadhi. You might ask, but what did that do? Let’s see, to a very large extent humans, as a species, are primarily attracted by and respond to visual stimuli. The lack of physical darshan has plagued a whole generation like mine which grew up with visuals and glimpses of Swami during our childhood; before we could consciously comprehend the true Divinity of the form, we found ourselves sitting in the Kulwant Hall in Bhagawan’s Sannidhi. But then we as humans also have this other significant faculty known as hearing, which from the advent of time has been the aide through which even the Vedas have been handed down to us from ancient ages. This from time immemorial has been a method of learning and propagating the teachings of Divinity to all people.
Here I come in, a simple Bal Vikas student who after completing his Group 1 to PreSevadal was floating in the vast nebula of life. If you have ever completed the whole Bal Vikas curriculum or been in any of his educational institutions of the SSSIHL and tell me that, thoughts like “Why did I get chosen to be here?” or “Am I really that important to Him that He got me into His fold?”, have not crossed your mind, then I will have to say that this is a safe space and you can tell the truth.
Because these questions used to hit me many a time and fortunately, I have discovered I wasn’t alone with these thoughts.
There is a real-life story associated with how one of us got these specific thoughts cleared most elaborately.
There used to be a PhD research scholar in the early 2000s. These exact questions had cropped up in his mind. Yet, he did not dare to approach Bhagawan and ask Him along these lines, thinking about the reaction he might get out of Swami and his peers. But he did personally ask many a teacher of his, who repeatedly told him that, no, you are special and that’s why you are here.
Sadly, the mortal mind being a monkey mind, this boy never got satisfied with the answers. A couple of years went by. But the all-knowing Bhagawan playing out his Divine leela, one day it so happened that this boy came to know of a very renowned and trusted psychiatrist in Bangalore who specialised in age regression. This young man wanted in his very core to solve the mystery of his link to the Divine Master once and for all.
Thus, he made an appointment and the session started, but little did he know that by the end of it all what was to come out would be but an evolved soul rekindled with all the special Divine memories and happenings that it had forgotten in the dusty dump of this birth. The psychiatrist led him back lifetimes spanning not thousands of years but yugas, the first stop of which was to be the Treta yuga, during the time of Bhagawan Vishnu’s Vamana Avatar, when he served as a close aide and disciple of the Lord. He saw in that birth the Lord promising him of always keeping him near Him in all the avatars that were to come in the human realm. He was then transported to the Ramayana times, where he saw himself serving Lord Rama as a confidant and a valiant soldier in the war of Lanka fighting the mighty Ravana to retrieve Mother Sita. Then he jumped to the Dwapara Yuga where he saw himself making chariots for Bhagawan Shree Krishna, serving as an aide in the Mahabharata war. Moving on, he was brought back to the Kaliyuga when in Shirdi Sai Baba’s time he was a renowned vegetable seller in Shirdi from whom Baba used to procure supplies during feasts and festivals, in the days when Baba used to cook Himself. Then he was brought back to his present life. This experience moved him.
When he came back to Prashanthi Nilayam, he went to the daily evening darshan. Bhajans were going on in full swing and the ever-loving God was gliding through the mass of devotees towards this boy.
Swami approached and with his ever-smiling gentleness, asked the boy, now you know why you are here? He broke down and mumbled; Yes, Swami. Bhagawan went on to say you don’t know all the difficulties I had to endure to get you to me this time, so you better be confirmed that whoever I want to be there near me are the ones sitting here.
Swami says that due to our multiple births we may forget Him, but God will never forget us. He emphasises that the only thing permanent is the relationship of our soul with Him. Everything else is Mithya, not in a sense of general lie, but in a sense that everything else that we associate ourselves with are temporary. In this birth we may have a family and we might be attached to them, but who knows, in the next birth we may have a entirely different family. What happens then? Is the attachment that our body had in the previous birth a lie? No, but we have to know that it is temporary and only when we realise that the only permanent thing is our relationship with the Lord and that we have started the process of taking births so as to gain knowledge and that our final destination after getting all the knowledge is again merging with Him, then only will we be able to fulfil our destiny and get ourselves out of this cycle and become one with Him.
Swami has given three Guru Vakyas for all His students to survive in this world; He has emphasised that you do not have to give up on the so-called worldly happiness or normal life, if you understand and follow these three rules: Don’t forget God; second, Don’t fear Death; and third, Don’t believe in the world.
These rules should be the guiding beacons of a Sai student’s life. Never forget God, as He is your eternal companion and maker and you have to go back to Him. Never fear death; death is the only truth and constant when a soul takes birth in a human body, the only truth set that day is that, one day death has to come. So never fear it, as in death, only this body ceases to exist but the soul continues on its journey.
Lastly, never believe in this world as all the associations and reality that you have gathered until now is relevant because you have forgotten about your past lives. The day you will remember everything, all of the things you now have will become a lie. The family of this birth may be different. Even the gender in this birth may be different. So, the world you are now seeing is real as of now but in your whole cosmic journey, it is not so.
Here, Bhagawan mentions another incident of a very dear devotee of the Shirdi Avatar. In this life, the devotee once visited Swami after getting to know Him through some connection. In this birth the devotee had become a dacoit, having completely forgotten his bond with the Divine. When he visited Parthi for darshan, Swami called him to the interview room and He instructed him go out and complete a trivial act. He followed the orders. When he came back, Swami blessed him and showed him his previous birth and family. The devotee had an out-of-the-world experience and realised that everything had changed in this birth, and then and there he decided to give up this life of lies, but Swami being the Divine guide and Mother, consoled him and told him that the activity that He told him to do was the fulfilment of his last remaining desire and that he did not have to take any more births and that is why Bhagawan had brought him there to grant him Moksha. After this divine intervention, he gave up the world and went on penance becoming a Sadhu till he breathed his last.
If we realise that these three rules are the Divine commandments to live by, we will continue in our Divine path set for all of us and still discharge our worldly duties while being unaffected by anything. This is what Bhagawan used to emphasise as “Head in the forest, Hands in the Society”.If as His students we live by this, He will bestow upon everyone whatever we aspire for so that when the time comes to return to Him, you have no hindrance or afflictions that stand in the way of Divine re-union.
I am trying to practice these commandments of Bhagawan in my life to chart my soul towards Him, with His instructions as the Owner’s Manual for the humanly vehicle assigned to me so that at the end of the road on the horizon where the Sky extends to meet the Earth, may the Divine benevolent Master extend His Divine consciousness to meet me and may we re unite
Mantra Mulam Guru Vakyam
Ms Ceetol Chowdhury Cuttack
My humble pranams at the Lotus Feet of Sai Baba.
The first spiritual touch to my heart –I am blessed and fortunate enough to have been born in a family where Sri Satya Sai Bhajan, puja and Baba’s Birthday celebrations were regularly conducted. Our house was even a Bal Vikas center, so we did not have to go anywhere else. When the whole family was performing His puja, we were compelled to follow Him not by preference but by inheritance or ancestral succession. Since my childhood I have always seen His photos hanging from the walls of our house. In 1997 February, my grandfather was serious, in his last stage of cancer. Despite that, the usual pujas and bhajans were held in our house as usual. One day, we took our grandfather to our puja room to perform the aarathi. Suddenly, during the aarathi I saw some bibhuti oozing from Baba’s photo. I was astonished and overwhelmed to see such a miracle at the age of eleven. From then, my belief in Baba grew stronger. Many a time we used to see during bhajans bibhuti oozing from Baba’s photo. My faith in Baba of being merely a holy man changed to Baba as God. Since then I believed He is omniscient, pansophical and omnipotent. I have always enjoyed the camaraderie prevalent in His organization and their programmes which gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction.
Each message of His is a mantra for making our life a yantra:Baba’s message – “HELP EVER” “HURT NEVER”Sensitivity being my attribute, I always try to sympathise with people in there afflictions and distress.
Selfless karma – I have always tried to work without any selfish motives or any expectations from anyone.
Stay away from a completely materialistic world and get attached to spiritual world – Being a spiritual person I never blamed anyone for my emanations; I always perceived them as the outcome of my deeds.
I have always tried to do my work irrespective of others’ opinions about them. I try to incorporate the five values within me and try to live by Swami’s grand truths: “SATYAM is what I teach”, “DHARMAM is what I do”, “SHANTI is what I am”, “PREMA is my own self”, “AHIMSA – non -violence is my practice”.
I always do the chanting “OM SRI SAI RAM” which is my power tool. I always talk to Baba looking at His photo and get the answer which is actually within me, a practice due to which I have never been in any big trouble. If I ever face any trouble, I just pray to Swami and He is always there to pull me out of it. Once, I told Swami that I am a Bal Vikash student and I wish my children to follow His path. The very next week, it was announced that Bal Vikash classes would again be resumed in our center. I was overwhelmed with Swami’s divine actions and I understood that He is a perpetual companion of mine and of my family, and that I am a staunch follower of His. The only thing required is to have complete faith in Him and to abide by His teachings and follow His path unconditionally.
I always pray Swami that I am indebted to my parents ,my family and Bhagwan himself and I wish He gives me another chance to serve them better till I am gratified.
I shall always remain grateful to Swami for his divine gesture and keeping me and my family shielded always. I pray B jiaba to bless all and forgive all and show us always the right path.
JAI SAIRAM!
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Divya
Divya Sparsha
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