24. Thirty-six Gems For You
Sri Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol 2 (1961 - 62)
24
Thirty-six Gems For You
Speaking at Prasanthi Nilayam on 21 October 1961, announcement was made by Baba to the world that He has entered upon the divine mission He has come down for, as man, in this era (yuga), to revive righteousness (dharma), establish peace, and fill the whole world with love so that all may now reach the goal anxiously striven for by them in the aeons that have gone by! The following were offered by Baba as the Thirty-sixth Birthday Message:
1. Rectitude is the royal road to the seat of God.
2. One who conquers the world is a hero, but the hero of heroes is one who conquers oneself. One is mighty; one has prowess beyond compare.
3. Faith is the first step to the grace of God.
4. Truth will lead you to the Deity; untruth will lead you to the devil.
5. The aspirant must bear all circumstances with patience; that is the most beneficial path.
6. Fill every deed with the vision of the Spirit, the outlook of the Super-self.
7. To grasp the significance of the omnipresence of the Lord, believe that there is no name that is not His, no body or thing that is not His.
8. He who is steady in wisdom stands closest in the company of the Lord.
9. The real liberation is the release from bondage to inborn impulses.
10. When a person has renounced the fruit, whatever activity they engage in, that is the last stage of yoga itself (samadhi).
11. When you try something above your capacity, that is conceit.
12. When you do something less than your capacity, that is theft.
13. Full happiness consists of auspicious conversation, auspicious thoughts, auspicious deeds.
14. Recognise and accept your own faults and errors; do not attempt to unveil the faults and errors of others; this discipline helps the aspirant a great deal.
15. Cool, comforting conversation that is most congenial to the aspirant is the habit that will take the aspirant to the goal.
16. Whose property did the crow steal? Whom did the cuckoo crown? Understand this: if your tongue is sweet, your name gets honoured.
17. Achieve mastery over your tongue and achieve thereby mastery over the world.
18. He who obeys the dictates of the Lord is indeed at ease, he is a yogi; he who disobeys the dictates of the Lord is the diseased (the rogi),
19. When heart is bound to heart, heat of argument finds no place.
20. Impure food makes the mind also impure; the sun of the inner glory of righteousness (dharma) can never dawn within the impure mind.
21. If you give up contemplation of the Lord, who is the treasure of undiminishing bliss, and spend yourselves in contemplation of the means of achieving the victory of the promptings of your heart, you can never get released.
22. If you drop the weight of argument and unfold the twin wings of faith and action, you can float and fly happily in the deep blue sky of the Almighty Presence.
23. The craving for fruit will render all spiritual discipline fruitless.
24. Let the mind die, let the intellect be destroyed, let the body disintegrate. Remember, nothing can harm you, the indestructible Atma.
25. Use a little common sense and you will know that the body is not your own Self; it is liable to decline and death. That is the first step for man (nara) to become God (Narayana). The ‘I’ to which reference is made is not the body, it is the Supreme Self (Paramatma). Trying to realise this is penance (tapas).
26. Where singing the name of the Lord fills the air with its splendour and fragrance, that place indeed is Vaikunta (the abode of Vishnu).
27. While the skin of cattle is useful for making footwear, the human skin is not worth a speck of dust. Yet, those very humans can ascend to the height of dignity if only they carry out their holy tasks.
28. The world must be made the abode of love. First, cultivate love for yourself; then, fill the village where you are with love; later, spread love to the district; and thus let it cover the entire world.
29. Whatever you feel is good if done by others to you, however you feel they should honour you, do unto those others also and honour them likewise yourselves.
30. When you do not know, confess that you do not know. Pretending to know and covering up ignorance is very dangerous, especially to the spiritual aspirant.
31. The idea of Brahman is beyond the capacity of those who have no control over the agitations of the mind. The natural afflictions of the causative world will cease only when the idea of Brahman is well established in the mind. The delusion of the causative world must disappear if one must get the joy, Atmic Bliss.
32. However great a hero you might be, whatever your prowess and intellect, devoid of the grace of God you degenerate into a slave.
33. Whoever loves and serves all is loved and honoured by the Lord.
34. The birds taking shelter for the night awake and fly away to the four quarters at sunrise; so too, the wife and children, fortune and wealth - all fly away without as much as even a farewell notice. Establish yourselves firmly in this fact and make immediate efforts to achieve the eternal, the permanent, the unchanging.
35. Of what use is all the poring over tomes throughout the day and night, of what use is all the fame achieved by means of scholarship? What you have put into practice, that is the measure of your learning, your education. Without that, you are but a learned titled fool.
36. Strive for the happiness, the joy of all others as earnestly as you strive for your own; strive for the peace of the world as diligently as you strive for your own. That is true divinity, that is true humanity.
If there are two or more kings or states, there is bound to be greed, envy, jealously, hatred, and anger on one side and fear, ambition, and vengence on the other. No one can then know the joy of perfect peace. Similarly, as long as you feel the reality of the “many”, as long as you take them to be outside you, separate from you, you have fear, hatred, greed, and all the rest of the pests. When you know that the “many” is a figment superimposed on the One by your own ignorance, you become Master, and sole Monarch, and all fear vanishes. That stage is mukthi: Liberation from the thralldom of worldly life.
– Sri Sathya Sai Baba
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