Dalai Lama on Close Feelings

We develop close feelings easily—at home, at the job, and at our places of worship.  We feel strong kinship often with strangers.  Yes, by all means, we feel love.  But do we feel compassion?  Not necessarily.

Dalai Lama explains, “With usual love, as long as the other person appears to you as beautiful or good, love remains, but as soon as she appears to you as less beautiful or good, your love completely changes.  Even though someone appears to you as a dear friend and you love her very much, the next morning the situation may completely change.  Even though she is the same person, she feels more like an enemy.  Instead of feeling compassion and love, you now feel hostility.  With genuine love and compassion, another person’s appearance or behavior has no effect on your attitude.”

When I declared my undying love I truly meant it. For awhile the object of my affection felt the same way about me, until he suddenly loved somebody else more and married her.  In shock, I struggled to accept my partner’s change of heart. I tried to act in a compassionate and understanding way.  I could not.

According to His Holiness, “Real compassion comes from seeing the other’s suffering.  You feel a sense of responsibility and you want to do something for him.   There are three types of compassion.  The first is a spontaneous wish for other sentient beings to be free of suffering.  You find their suffering unbearable and you wish to relive them of it.  The second is not just a wish for their well-being, but a real sense of responsibility, a commitment to relieve their suffering and remove them from their undesirable circumstances.  This type of compassion is reinforced by the realization that all sentient beings are impermanent, but because they grasp at the permanence of their identity, they experience confusion and suffering.”

Slowly, by focusing on my spiritual practice, I did begin to see my own selfishness in the matter, holding on to someone who wanted to be free.  I also saw how I was being inconsiderate.  I began to take responsibility for my own life. Soon I realized I was not alone. There are so many others suffering similar rejection. 

“A genuine sense of responsibility generates a spontaneous sense of responsibility to work for the benefit of others, encouraging us to take this responsibility upon ourselves,” the Living Buddha teaches.

 I helped myself by helping others who were in more pain than me. Before long I felt freer than I ever had. In forgiving the man I had so desperately loved, and praying for his happiness, I had healed myself. I had moved into another level of compassion.

“This kind of compassion,” His Holiness says, “is reinforced by the wisdom that although all sentient beings have an interdependent nature and no inherent individual existence, they still grasp at the existence of individual nature.  Compassion accompanied by such an insight is the highest level of compassion.”

Who Is Sai Baba? Concluding Part 3

Due to all the villagers that couldn’t wait to come and see the baby, Sri Pedda Venkappa Raju requested that non-vegetarian foods be prepared for a celebratory lunch.  He wanted the mixed community to be happy and fully enjoy the foods they liked.  Mother Eswaramma prepared a variety of non-vegetarian foods but when she went to serve the guests all the meat dishes were turned into vegetarian dishes! The guests were in awe of an event they could not understand.  They, of course, did not realize who this baby was. As it later came to be revealed, Sathya would never tolerate the raising of animals for butchering and eating.  To him, an animal was a precious being to be loved and allowed to live out its own destiny. 

The ladies of the village could not get enough of the charming baby.  They visited the Raju household every chance they got.  Even the men collected at the home to play with him.  He delighted everyone including other children.

One pious woman, Subbamma, the wife of the village head, Lakshminarayana Rao, adored baby Sathya.  She was childless and Sathya would run to her the minute he heard her voice.  This gave Subbamma great comfort and joy. Before long it became obvious that the child had adopted her as his foster mother. She was childless no more as little Sathya’s many playmates would gather at her house and partake of the sweets and savories she served them.  But she herself would feed Sathya with her own hand.  On a particular day when she was serving him her pakoras (fried savories) she also offered him some water.  She said, “Open your mouth, Sathya, I will pour water.  When he opened his mouth, Subbamma could see the entire universe inside in all its cosmic splendor.  At the site of this, she fell into ecstasy and she bowed at his feet, clinging to them and washing them with tears of joy.  Subbamma knew now that her Sathya was no ordinary child. She realized that he was the Lord God Incarnate and she fell into ecstasy.  Her bliss lasted for many days.

Indeed, the villagers observed that their new resident was a rare child.  He only wanted to make others happy; he never asked for anything; and he was content with whatever he was given.  However, he would never eat non-vegetarian food; so in order not to disrupt his immediate family, Sathya decided to take his meals at his paternal grandfather’s house because Kondama Raju believed in the Divinity of his grandson and non-vegetarian food was never served to him.

Grandfather Raju understood that the child would never hurt animals and disliked any kind of violence.  In fact, Sathya would run and save chickens from being butchered whenever he could. He petted dogs and consoled them whenever they were abused.  His days were filled with loving service to the members of his family and the village society he lived in.  When it came time for him to enter school, he walked to Bukkha Patnam—about eight kilometers away— returned home to prepare food for his grandfather who he enjoyed cooking for, and then went back to school again. Later, Sathya was sent to the village of Uravakonda to live with his brother who was a teacher.  The parents thought Sathya was old enough for further studies.

But on March 8, 1940, when he was 14, Sathya was stung by a scorpion.  Suddenly, he lost consciousness for several hours.  When he regained consciousness, he exhibited strange behavior which continued for the next few days.  He alternated between laughing and weeping, speaking eloquently then falling silent. He began to sing verses in Sanskrit, a language of which he had no prior knowledge. Doctors believed his actions were caused by hysteria.   His parents didn’t know what to think. They brought Sathya back to Puttaparthi. But his family and others noticed that the scorpion sting had changed him. He seemed removed from them, as if in deep meditation.  More and more he withdrew into himself and ignored those around him.  Where had the vivacious, charming Sathya gone? There were whispers that he had become possessed by a Muslim ghost.

In fact, in his most recent past life Sathya had been Sai Baba of Shirdi, a Muslim God man, who had devotees who were Hindus as well as Muslims. Shirdi Sai Baba had left his body eight years before Sathya’s birth.  Perhaps none in Puttaparthi knew this. But many of those who had prophesized the birth of Sathya Sai Baba, including Nostradamus and the Prophet Mohammed, did predict the descent of the Lord God on earth at this point in time. And, respectively, they described his physical attributes and the work he would do.

After the scorpion sting, Sathya’s parents thought that he might have gone mad, or was possessed by a demon.  Various “remedies” were employed, one such being the burning of his skull with a branding-iron like tool by an exorcist in Kadiri. But Sathya was unmoved. He withstood the pain with patience and no complaint. 

On May 23, 1940 he came out of his inward state and gathered the people around him.  Back to his charming, outgoing self, he began materializing objects out to the delight of all who sat in front of him. Seeing his son behaving like a magician, Sathya’s father became infuriated and demanded, “Who do you think you are?  If you don’t answer, I shall hit you! Come out with it—are you possessed, a lunatic, an incarnation, a deity or a devil? Who are you?” 

Sathya replied calmly, “Do you not know who I am? I am Sai Baba. I descended because the Venkavadhoota (the family saint of the Raju family) prayed for my descent.” The Lord’s reply was firm and deliberate. The ring of truth in it was unmistakable. He kept on muttering to himself throughout that day, talking about his code of conduct and his lineage—“Apastamba Sutra, Bharadwaja Gotra,”

Meantime, Sri Pedda Venkappa Raju did not accept his son’s story.  He felt that the boy was still possessed by the spirit of the Muslim saint who, it had been deduced, was none other than Sai Baba of Shirdi. So the distraught father took action.  He believed that a Muslim priest’s intercession could cure Sathya so he found such a priest in Penukonda, a village several kilometers away from Puttaparthi.  Sri Pedda Venkappa Raju took Sathya there and requested the Muslim priest to exorcise his son.  The priest, who happened to be a Government official, declared Sathya a “lunatic”.

 “Lunacy it is, but whose?” Sathya demanded waving is hands in the air and producing sacred ash (vibhuti) which he scattered all over the room.  Back in Puttaparthi Sathya still maintained that he was Sai Baba. On the following Thursday, the 30th of May 1940, Sathya’s exasperated father asked his son to give some proof of his claim and Sathya consented. It being a Thursday, Guruvaram, the day for worshipping the guru, Sathya asked that jasmine flowers be gathered and piled up for ritual prayers (puja). When this was done, he asked for the flowers to be placed in his opened, empty hands. He then scattered the fragrant small white flowers casually, and they began to form the shape of the Telugu letters representing “SAI BABA”. The power of this written name moved everybody, including his father, and they were convinced that he was who he said he was, Sai Baba—Mother-Father God. In fact Sri Sathya Sai Baba is a Triple Avatar—Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, and Prema Sai Baba, the latter still to be born.

Once he announced that he was Sai Baba, he persisted in saying that he was on the earth to transform the wicked and to usher in a Golden Age.  He explained that he had come in answer to the prayers of saints and sages. Finally, the young Sathya went off to live alone and apart from his family to whom he declared he no longer belonged.  Now, he said, he belonged to everyone and he began his work of uplifting the world.  His paternal grandfather and one of his early school teachers were among his first devotees. 

The population then was allegedly less than 100 residents. Now, it is in the thousands.  People from all over the world have made it their permanent home because they want to be in the atmosphere of Divinity. 

THE KNIFE

SUNDAY IS FUN DAY (Special)

A friend needed some help in Sri Lanka.  So I went.  While there I bought myself a snappy little black-handled knife.  It was terrific for peeling fruits and veggies.  I brought it home to Puttaparthi India without having it snatched up by Customs.  It’s a gem of a kitchen tool I bragged to myself and what a shopper I am…. I paid only 45 Indian rupees for it.

I was home just a month and still pleased with my island purchase.  Suddenly the thundering drums outside my veranda spoke to me.  Oh!  It was the last day of Ganapati Festival in our neighborhood and it was time to celebrate. I raced out of the house barefoot and followed the rhythmic, mesmerizing drums to the huge Ganesha idol, an elephant-headed boy—son of Shiva—who in this case had several arms and was in the pose of a dancer.

According to Puttaparthi Sathya Sai Baba, the Ganapati idol represents our own divine intelligence which removes the obstacles in our path, those blockages that prevent us from reaching our God Selves.

But today as I jogged across the road and sped to the spot where the idol stood, my thoughts were firmly on the ground.  Native drums are primal.  The loud and fast booming appealed to the wild she wolf within.  As I danced, hiding behind the crowd, lest I be judged a weirdo, my entire being felt acrobatic. In my mind, I cart wheeled on the green grass of hills; and I floated like a thoroughbred horse over hurdles on the track to the winners’ circle.  An amazing joy flooded my being. I pictured a peaceful world; I imagined that the accelerating beats of the drum, the fast stepping and leaping of  the dancing boys, the tossing of colors like powdered rainbows was a boon from the heavens.

Indeed it was! After years in the spiritual trenches of our remote ashram town I was definitely in an ecstatic state, the longed-for Sat Chit Ananda!

The Guru teaches us to let go of desires, to treat everyone and everything as passing clouds, to divest ourselves of tinsel and trash, to seek the permanent reality, to move purposefully toward Liberation itself.

As I leap in the air and spin and stomp I am like a whirling dervish, one with the Creator.  Yes! Yes!  Yes!  I am free of myself, my ego, all the mortal ties that bind; not even Death can stab me.

Ah, such is the magic of Ganapati Festival! I had stripped off all my attachments like ragged clothes.

On the way home, I notice my sparkling yellow sari is now splashed with magenta dust; but I can’t stop smiling.  I am certain my feet are no longer touching the ground.  How can I be so lucky, I muse, so blessed?  The cat curled up on the porch chair doesn’t respond.

At least an hour goes by in this elevated condition.  Then human hunger strikes.  It’s 8:03 p.m. I look at the clock like a time traveler just returned from a journey to the moon.  I decide to have an apple.  I use the sweet little back knife.  I peel the skin off carefully so as not to waste.  I slice each piece attentively then place it on my tongue like a Holy Communion wafer.  What a day, I sigh.  Soon sleep comes,  kisses me on the cheek, and I succumb.

In the morning I am thrilled to be alive, so content to be in my lingering state of euphoria.  Health, wealth, reputation, these are not in my thoughts.  I am far above the mundane.  I am contemplating the Sat Guru’s words, his teaching that before Enlightenment we must pass through the fire of “The Three Zeros”.

 Seekers will undergo the loss of health, the loss of wealth, and the loss of reputation.  However, after the examination we are transformed. We are even stronger in our faith. I certainly had lost those three things and I suffered greatly; yet I remained full of hope and gratitude. For me, the hardest thing to lose was my reputation.  I clung to it like a crutch. But then I let go and let God take care of my enemies. 

I roll out of bed eager for my coffee.  Slowly, I begin to realize I’m limping.  My back is aching and feels like it was kicked by an elephant. Was it you, Ganesha? My muscles are stiff and my feet are shuffling over the tiles.  In the kitchen I remember the high-jump athlete I was just yesterday, offering Arathi to the many-limbed idol.

I put on the water and wait for it to boil.  I hobble to the counter to get the little black handled knife, my 45 rupee bargain, just right for sliding into the jam jar, just right for cutting the butter, perfect for slicing toast in half.  It’s not where it’s supposed to be—in the knife holder.  It’s not in the utensil drawer.  I search the sink, the cupboards, and the refrigerator.  I definitely search the trash.  I repeat the whole process again. Hum, I come up with nothing. There are spiritual messages in every action the disciple takes.

How could the knife disappear?  Sweet, little black-handled knives do not walk out of the house on their own.  My heart races.    It had to be me who lost it, after all, I live alone.  Or do I?

Aha! I look at my Guru’s picture above the vessels and shout for him to help me find the precious knife.  Yes.  Now it has become a prized possession, a coveted tool, a nasty, rapidly growing ATTACHMENT.  This is not nice, but it’s true, over a lost knife I am now berating my very own image of God. Guruji’s eyes just glare back at me.

Drummers of Ganesh Festival. Photo by Terry Reis Kennedy

Then I turn my anger onto myself.  I scold my body for feeling so lame.  I scold my mind for following my Ego.  Yesterday I was “liberated,” but less than 24 hours later I am The Fool, stuck like glue to a cheap, shiny knife.

Days have passed.  I’m quieter.  I’m not quite eating humble pie, but the pride’s been squeezed out of me. I’m powerless, propped up in my bed with a hot water bottle between my stiff, aching back and the soft, accommodating pillows.  The drummers have gone back to their cities and villages; all of Puttaparthi’s Ganeshas have been submerged in the waters.  And the knife, hiding somewhere in the house like a lizard, is most probably howling with laughter. 

Meanwhile, Ganapati, son of The Destroyer of Desires, has taught me an important lesson.  There is a fourth zero.  In order to merge with Supreme Consciousness, it is necessary to chop away attachments that still cling.

The dazzling knife had to go. But who took it away?  Only God knows.

THE SECRETARY

One of the earliest memories I have begins when I am three.  I am sitting at the shiny mahogany desk in our living room at 7 Church Place, in Bellows Falls, Vermont.  My mother used to call the desk, “the secretary.”  At that time, being so young, I did not know the meaning of that word. Nevertheless, I intuited that it was a place where I could sit in peace, scribbling the stories I loved to create.  How I knew that it was a writing place at a time when I had not even learned to print, is for me a kind of proof that we carry past-life tendencies with us.  No one in my family ever wrote anything at the secretary at all.  It was just a piece of furniture where things, rarely used, were stored.   But it was my sacred place.  I was there that like a little yogini, I could dissociate from my body, and become one with the words I chose for my stories.  For me, In the beginning was the Word—really!

My mother and my father and a black, bob-tailed cat named Midnight and I lived upstairs over my born-in-Poland grandmother.  She was my mother’s mother and I called her Babcha.  Her ground-floor apartment in the dark brown duplex which she owned, and according to her vast oral repertoire of stories, she had purchased at 50 cents per week, was actually my second favorite place to be; for it was spiritual in a different sense.  It renewed me and gently eased me back into the world of samsara.  You see, one part of my life was Heaven, another part was Hell.  One part of my life took place beyond my mind; another part was glued to it.

  

 Our house, even though Babcha owned it, belonged to all of us.  She constantly reminded us of this. And I personally felt that I belonged to and was a part of every room and closet and of every under-the-eaves crawl space in the attic.  From as early as I can remember, I have felt connected to the energy around me.  In retrospect, I learned much more by osmosis than I did from books, perhaps.

Church Place had no churches on it, but it was a relatively serene neighborhood considering it was full of poor, working-class, second-generation families, like ours, with heaps of kids and dogs. I, on the other hand, was an only child. The lot our house was situated on was replete with trees and bushes which my recently widowed Babcha tended by herself—not that she ever got much help in that department from her husband, a sensitive and violin-playing man who wound up working at a paper mill just to be able to live in a free country and earn a decent wage.  He might have been a half-starved musician playing in a Warsaw orchestra. Instead he put away the violin, worked as many shifts as he could to support his family of two sons and a daughter.  Then he just lay down and died of alcoholism that no one has ever really admitted.  After the burial few words were spoken about Papa. I remember his after-shave colognes and his hearty laughter.  Once he took me to the chicken sheds up on Hyde Hill and told me he would chop my head off and put me in an oven and roast me, just like the chickens that I saw being butchered there.  I wet my pants in terror and all his friends laughed like crazy. The violin he had brought from Poland haunted our Church Place attic for decades—until one day it just disappeared like dust in the rain.

  From Babcha’s gardens came the fruits and vegetables we ate fresh in season and out of thick bluish preserve jars in winter.  We lived across the street from a vacant lot surrounded by mostly triplexes and a once-stately Victorian mansion that had been partitioned off into apartments.

At home, I loved roaming the basement where the huge monster furnace was, where the root cellar full of potatoes, carrots and beets hulked.  It looked like a gigantic sand box filled with smoke-scented earth.  There the root vegetables were buried, as if to trick them into believing they were still in the garden.  In fall and winter, it was my delightful job to dig them up on Babcha’s command, which was usually once a day just before supper. Wooden slatted pickle jars as tall as toddlers were full of dills and sauerkraut.  The sweet and sours lined the canned-goods shelves in recycled baby-food jars.

 My personal kingdom began in the basement and climbed all the way up into the attic. What’s more, I could come and go as I pleased throughout the house.  In Babcha’s rooms, I ate candy from her crystal bowl set on the round dining room table; I rummaged into her pantry to look for the donut-like Polish confections known as krushtyki which she kept hidden there.  I always found the hiding place, though, as Babcha probably intended, and I gorged on the powdered sugar treats. Her ice-box was full of tempting snacks as well.

In her house I could lie down on the sofa and look at her large array of healthy houseplants anytime I wanted.  Velvet, raspberry-colored gloxinia, African violets in shades of pink and white, double and single petalled as well.  There were coral geraniums, red poinsettias, and magenta cyclamen that bloomed then withered then bloomed again.  I was fascinated by them and by the tulips that Babcha forced into flower to brighten our home during the darkest blizzard days of February and March.  I literally watched the ivy grow, the fern fronds reach for the light, and the sansiveria spike tall and lethal looking, like emerald swords.  And the immense jade plant fascinated me, especially since it was said to bloom only once every nine years.  I had not yet lived long enough to see this happen.  But I believed it would.  How could I know then that when I reached nine, many of the buds within me, my potential flowers, my most delicious fruits would be ripped out of me, hurled onto the ground and eaten by wild pigs?  I couldn’t know. And I’m glad.

Babcha was my first Guru, really.  And while she was out working as a laundress, a housekeeper and a maid, and my mother was out working  as well and I was looking after my sick father, I had these wonderful contemplative times all alone in Babcha’s living room— which also functioned as a dining room when special guests visited.  Naturally, I learned to love plants and the cycles of the seasons just by staying with a grandmother who kept something in bloom all around the outside of the house, and on the inside too. The plants on the stands she had placed under the three windows that formed a bay and looked out at the back yard mesmerized me.  My horticultural studies began right then and there and ended up at Horticultural Hall in Boston just before my entire world went numb.

So, yes, there was the cool-damp promise of the basement and its peculiar scent that triggered a bit of terror in me.  The smudgy smell of the root cellar combined with the fumes the coal-burning furnace produced a deju-vu experience in me.  But it was the experience of a blind person, for I could never “see” anything.  The aroma, though, was clearly from way back in time.  Was it the torching of the teepees with our children still inside? I later wondered, or the burning bodies at Varanasi, maybe.  Even the Avatar Guru I came to see in India, and whose ashram I have lived near for many years, has never answered my queries.  “Trust my uncertainty,” He said in one of His discourses.  It’s hard for me to trust much nowadays.  It was impossible then.

And always there were chores up the stairs from Babcha’s.   Upstairs is where I spent most of my time.  It was upstairs that I first noticed that sometimes my parents and Midnight, who was one year older than me, were also enveloped in the same cellar scent that I came to associate with episodes of dread.  Decades later I would understand why.

To be continued……