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 Baba
New
York born screenplay writer Arnold Schulman describes in his book
'Baba', his first meeting with Sai Baba in the late 1960’s.
Baba was on a thin mattress supported by a simple frame and four
wooden legs, which served both as a studio couch during the day
and his bed at night. He was leaning against a few small pillows
propped against the wall. Before he looked up to note the writer's
arrival he continued to go through his mail, looking at each letter,
still unopened and in its envelope, until a thought formed in
his head, then he put it on top of the stack of letters on the
couch to the left of him before reaching to take another letter
from the stack on the couch to the right of him. After a minute
or two he looked up and smiled at the writer.
"Come in,"
he said. "Come in."
The writer
stepped into the room and bowed slightly, both palms together
on his chest just under his chin.
"So," Baba
said. He paused to look directly into the writer's eyes. "So,
you have seen enough."
"Too much.
I don't understand anything I've seen."
Baba laughed.
"Appearance
is not different from emptiness," Baba said struggling for the
words in English."Yet within emptiness there is no appearance."
The writer
felt he should smile or nod or indicate in some way that he understood
what Baba had said, but he did not understand and he resisted
the temptation to pretend that he did.
Baba nodded.
"Life is only the memory of a dream," he said. "It comes from
no visible rain. It falls into no recognizable sea. Some day,
not for a while yet, you will understand how meaningless it is
to spend your whole life trying to accumulate material things.
I have no land, no property of my own where I can grow my own
food. Everything is registered in the name of someone else, but
just as those people in the village who have no land wait until
the pond dries up so they can scratch the land with a plow and
quickly grow something before the pond fills up again, I grow
my food which is joy or love. To you the words have different
meanings, but to me both words are the same. But I have to do
it quickly, quickly in the hearts of those who come to see me,
quickly before they leave."
He looked
up again into the writer's eyes.
"The kind
of belief in me I ask of people is more, much more than most people
think is faith or love," Baba said.
"That's why
many people who come just to see the miracles stop loving me the
minute I stop entertaining them and giving them presents. No.
What I ask you to do is give me everything. Not fruits or flowers
or money or land, but you, all of you with nothing
held back. Your mind. Your heart. Your soul... " He stopped and
paused, then nodded to himself. "But those are just words."
They were
silent for a time.
The writer
stood behind the couch and waited. There was nothing he could
say. A kind of warmth and closeness he had never known before
was spreading through his consciousness and it frightened him.
He felt in danger of being smothered by it, but it wasn't just
the intensity of the feeling that disturbed him. It was the sudden
realization that this feeling of love—he thought it was love—was
different from any other kind of love he had felt or heard about
or read of before. It may have been this inability to define what
he felt that caused him suddenly to panic. In less than a minute
he had become a displaced person, emotionally, isolated in the
dark unknown, and to cope with this puzzling anxiety the only
defense he could find was to turn it off.
Baba watched
him for a time with intensity.
"You cannot
run away from me," Baba said. "As I told you, no one can come
to Puttaparthi, however accidental it might seem, without my calling
him. I bring only those people here who are ready to see me, and
nobody else, nobody, can find his way here. When I say 'ready'
there are different levels of readiness, you understand."
Baba laughed.
"You wonder why I called you here instead of millions of other
people because you don't like the way you feel for me. Isn't it?
And it makes you worry why I called you."
The writer
laughed, his tension broken, and Baba laughed with him.
"It worries
me," the writer said. "When you ask me to give myself to you completely.
I can't do that. I spent too long getting control of my life to
just blindly become somebody's slave, even if you're God, or not
God, just a man with superhuman powers of yoga. I don't trust
anybody that much."
"Do you trust
yourself?" Baba asked.
The writer
smiled, "Not much."
"I know your
past and I know your future so I know why you suffer and how you
can escape suffering and when you finally will."
"When I die?"
The writer was being half-facetious.
"Yes, I know,"
Baba said. "In all your past lives too, you were always afraid
of death."
"I'm not
afraid of death."
"That's all
you are afraid of," Baba said. "You think death is something bad,
but death is neither bad nor good. Death is death."
"What purpose
does it serve?"
"Why does
a person die?" Baba took a moment to reflect. He looked at his
finger. "So he won't die again. He is born so he won't be born
again."
"I don't
understand," the writer said.
"Life is
only relatively real," Baba said. "Until death it only appears
to be real. And, after all, the only part that dies is the body,
not the person who lives in the body. When a cat or a dog dies
he leaves the world the same as before he lived in it, but a man
should leave the world a better place then when he came into it.
For no other reason was he born, for no other reason does he die."
"Are you
God?" The writer heard himself say. He had not planned to go into
that subject at all.
"Why do you
waste your time and energy trying to explain me?" Baba said, with
a trace of irritation. "Can a fish measure the sky? If I had come
as Narayana with four arms they would have put me in a circus,
charging money for people to see me. If I had come only as a man,
like every other man, who would listen to me? So I had to come
in this human form, but with no more than human powers and..."
he groped for the word, "wisdom."
"Then you
are God. Is that what you are saying?"
"First you
have to understand yourself. I told you that. And then you will
understand me. I'm not a man, I'm not a woman. I'm not old. I'm
not young. I'm all of these."
The writer
laughed, without quite knowing why. He was embarrassed for having
asked the question and unnerved by the answer. Here was a human
being, or what looked like one, curled up on a studio couch, his
legs tucked beneath him like a teen-age girl, and there was nothing
the writer could think of that would allow him to accept the idea
that this person with the Afro-hairdo and the orange dress could
actually, literally, be God.
"Some people
think it's a beautiful thing," Baba said, "for the Lord to be
on the earth in human for, but if you were in my place you would
not feel it's so beautiful. I know everything that happened to
everybody in the past, present, and future, so I'm not so quick
to give people the mercy they beg me for. I know why a person
has to suffer in this life and what will happen to him the next
time he is born because of that suffering this time, so I can't
act the way people want me to. They call me cold-hearted one time,
soft-hearted the next. Why don't I do this? Why don't I do that?
Why don't I stop all wars forever and get rid of all disease and
suffering? What they don't know is I'm not responsible for suffering.
I don't cause suffering any more than I cause happiness and joy.
People make their own palaces and their own chains and their own
prisons."
"Can I write
about that in my book?" the writer asked.
"What do
you know about me?" Baba asked. "Do you believe in me the way
I said you had to believe in me?"
"Not yet."
"Then how
can you write about me? You're like a child. When I give you what
you want or make you laugh, you love me, but the next minute when
I'm too busy and can't see you the minute you want me to, you
want to kill me. Isn't it? You listen to me with respect, but
then in private you laugh at me. What kind of book can you possibly
write about Me?"
"That kind
of book. Exactly."
"For what
purpose? Publicity? I don't need publicity. I'm not your Mahesh
Yogi, don't forget, on television with the singers."
"What are
you telling me? I can't write the book?"
Baba laughed.
"Write it. Write your book. That's your duty, dharma. But write
the truth. Only what you saw here. Only the truth. How you laughed
at me, hated me, that's part of it; and if you want to, how you
loved me, the few times you let yourself love me."
Baba took
both of his hands and rubbed them as hard as he could on the writer's
chest, massaging it vigorously as if to stimulate the writer's
spiritual circulation.
"I'm always
with you," Baba said. "Even when you don't believe in me, even
when you try to forget me. Even when you laugh at me or hate me.
Even when I seem to be on the opposite side of the earth. But
you need material things to remind you, isn't it?"
He pushed
up his sleeves and rotated his open palm as he closed his fingers.
When he opened them he was holding a gold ring with his picture
painted on a porcelain in the center, surrounded by sixteen stones
which seemed to be diamonds. He put the ring on the writer's finger.
It fit perfectly.
The writer
laughed. "How can I ever get this through customs?"
"Don't worry,"
Baba said. "I'll take care of it."
He touched
the ring with his fingertips.
"I am in
you," Baba said, "You are in me. Don't forget that. We cannot
be separated."
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