Love and the Sapling of Joy

There can be no joy in a dry, barren heart. Divine Love alone can make a dry heart fit for the sprouting of the sapling of joy. Divine Love is free from self-interest. That love alone is sacred and divine which is based on complete obliviousness to one's self and is solely concerned with the yearning for God. Only when such a precious diamond of love is shining in your heart, you will have sacred and divine thoughts. 

In ancient days, sages lived in the forests amidst wild animals and performed penance. How were they able to live in peace amongst these animals? Because they were filled with divine love, they extended that love to the wild beasts also. They had no lethal weapons with them, only the weapon of love, which transformed even the nature of the wild animals. Therefore fill your hearts with love.

Baba (thought for the day)

It was an amazing experience to sit in his Darshan and to get aware of that joy, there was a time it felt like nothing but universal love and joy, flowing joy and it was growing and growing. At that time when I left for once the ashram, mostly to look for some beautiful sari or to get a coconut drink, at time they had not yet coconuts in the ashram itself. Outside of the ashram we had to face another type of life and usually I didn't like it. But feeling that joy I was looking outside of the ashram and felt that these people were richer than the West, because any amount of money cannot get us to that joy and inner fulfillment which was present during Darshan.

I would have liked to stay there in his presence and for that I had not the money, I couldn't just let go of everything and stay there, but some others could.

I went back and worked again for some months to be able to go back to the ashram for a half a year and that was repeated for some years.

Most of all I had to get answers, because there had been a lot of insights I didn't understand and it seemed instead of getting closer I always got further away. In the beginning the insights were positive, after I began with TM it had turned into the opposite and after a while it was nothing but negative. It said that I began to waste my time and I didn't know how to understand it. Actually, the negative insights were scary.

In writing and looking at Baba's words whatever comes up in my mind is how I begin to see it in my own life, it happens by itself and it was still difficult to understand the negative insights, but since I began to write about it, no matter what obstacles are there, it is how after all and after a while we notice that it begins to make sense.

 It means the joy was there and also the opposite.

Usually we had interviews with a country group and most of times I had to translate.

Once I had to translate for a lady who was permanent in the ashram and I had to tell her only bad stuff and I had troubles to translate it and it seemed more I felt uncomfortable to do it, more he insisted in me repeating it and during that interview I saw my own shadow in the air.

Afterwards I had to listen to her non-stop.

I didn't like that type of spiritual wake-up on that level and she began to feel like a bother and finally I didn't want to go back to my country to get the visa, somehow it felt like I had enough of it, my family was anyhow not in my country, my parents had moved to Spain and coming back I had usually the feeling, 'what am I doing here?'

With TM I felt good and integrated and after that got lost, it was like nothing left.

Whatever had been there before was gone and it was not possible to get rooted just like that again. It was agony from feeling good and integrated and okay to feeling totally uprooted and nowhere home anymore. What had happened to my life?

I had left already before, but the biggest blow I got with TM, because we worked for them and we were meditation teachers and that was gone after I went to Baba, so I came back and it felt like everything what I had done before was gone, I didn't know where to begin again.

Before I lived for some years in Paris and we had already reduced our possessions to nothing as I had been with the Hare Krishnas.

But it was all in the purpose to get an answer and to be able to understand he higher self, because it had been in my dream. The result of that higher self in my dream felt good and it had integrating power and everything was okay, only I had to find answers, because it was not possible to understand it and why it was in my dream.

Even though I had been focused on the watcher for some time and waited for the higher self to be there, to be able to know it, it has to be confirmed and that took time. I wanted to know how I was able to act out of the higher self and not with my mind, and after it had been there, it was in a sense clear, it was motivating, it was love, it was beauty and white light, that was all clear beyond doubt, but it didn't tell me – I am the watcher, it is what you have been waiting for, I am that one, that part was missing.

It was there, but it was not understood on the level of the intellect. It was all what I wanted, but it didn't tell my how to understand it right and most of all it felt confusing that it seemed that important and we didn't know anything about it. I began to face the reality that we live in the age of ignorance and that we just don't know anything about our own real self.

So in the beginning with Baba there was only joy and I didn't wanted to leave anymore, because there was no joy in coming back.

In another interview I had to translate for a woman who didn't know enough English and she spoke French and she came from Geneva, but when talking to her he asked some strange questions. Baba asked her, who that girl was and what our relationship was and to whom I belonged. Poor girl has no-where to go and doesn't belong to anybody, that is how it must have felt and she began to mother me. It felt real strange, because I didn't realize how lost I really felt every time when I went back in my country and my parents had left for Spain. It began already at the airport, there was nobody there. The first thing I usually did, I went to the phone and called my sister and usually I went to her, and I took the bus to Spain as soon as possible to be some time with the parents in Spain, but it was not possible to talk with them about Baba.

We were talking about not important stuff like growing grass and cutting trees, because gardening was their hobby and I just was there and wondered what I did there, there was just no place else to go, but it was always strange somehow, and to feel the tension in the air between them was not great. My mother got in a habit to talk about things she was bothered or unhappy about it with others and behind his back, with him she always put on the same smiling face and it felt like a mask to me and if not, they had a hard time together. But even with all her effort to get along, it felt like still an awful and stagnated life situation and it turned usually into suffering with the parents. In the dream it was as attachment.

For me it was still the same, home and not at home, both together and strange. It felt kind of nostalgic to be with them and I tried to find the reason what went wrong and why I didn't feel really home or why I didn't feel home before anymore and in Spain also not.

It seemed somehow impossible to get to the root of the problem, it was too far gone and later it was present that she was too old. It had been avoided by my mother all her life. It said only after her death in the inner view that it was due to attachment and pride.

That is how I got aware that she had lived in denial and avoided to look at certain things happening in the neighborhood due to attachment and pride and her attitude was constantly avoiding it. It was not possible to talk to her, it was not possible to get a proper answer and she had in not time turned my life upside down to the extent that I began to look for 'truth' as I called it or better what was wrong and I didn't get the answer with the parents, it was not possible, I got the answer only after their death.

After that time with the parents in Spain I went back to a friend's place, I knew her from the TM-time and she had a small room she didn't use and I could have it for the time being in Zurich, working some months, before I went back to Baba. It means that I felt actually nowhere home but in India.

After that interview when he asked to whom I belonged, I began to talk about it, before I didn't talk much at all; I was focused on meditation and inner view.

It was only a few weeks after the interview we went with Baba to the mountains during the hot Indian summer and there some devotees lived together in a house on the lake and I began to talk about the interview and the strange questions he had asked and there was a guy I talked to and he was American and he said that I belonged to him, because he had asked Baba for a wife and he knew now that I was that wife he had asked for.

And of course, as I had a family-deficiency mind-hole, I had been let down by my family with the problems I had with a so called teenager-friend who had become the opposite and who let us all feel it and the family turned against it, because my mother couldn't take it.

It was my mother who lived in denial; those problems with the family are still going on today.

I didn't know about 'husband' at all, but I went ahead and thought it would get there later on, because I would have liked to belong to someone and I got pregnant and because of that reason and because we went back to the ashram, it was not possible to live in the ashram as family together without being married, out of that reason we married.

As long as we had been with Baba it felt like easy going and still in the right direction, but after some time and after the child was born it changed.

The devotee I had to translate for and Baba had asked her to whom I belonged, was two years later during that same time in Geneva and she came back when we all had left for the mountains already. She had her own room in Prasanthi and that is what I also would have liked to have at that time. She usually followed Baba in the mountains with several taxis and she took all her stuff with her, what I didn't know at that time. From my side I tried to reduce the luggage to one suitcase, what was possible. I had even tried to fit it in a backpack, what was not possible, it was just too small. I couldn't carry everything on my back, but suitcase was possible and I felt totally comfortable with that, I even liked it to get rid of luggage.

When she came back to the ashram, usually there are lots of people and the houses were filled with people, but at that time, the house she lived in was practically empty and she had lots of painters from the village going in and out, because she painted and repainted her room, because she felt probably never really at home. I guess to pay all those taxis she changed a big amount of money in the bank and someone watched it. She was followed by some villagers and she was hit on the head and she died of it later in the hospital.

I went into shock when listening to that. In the mean time I had a small child and still the feeling something was wrong, we were still travelling around with Baba following him.

One day it tried to tell to that - at the time so called husband of mine - that it doesn't look like it will work that way and that I was what he had thought I was – the wife Baba gave him, whatever the reason, in fact, he got in such a rage, he hit with a metal pot on my head I don't know how many times. It was the same year the other devotee was killed, only some time later, only I survived it and there was nowhere to go, but that was association in my head of the relationship between us, we were both nowhere home and she was killed by someone hitting on her head and it happened nearly to me as well.

With a small baby I was dependent on him and we were in India and my family I couldn't even talk to. Years later I tried to tell them and wrote a letter and I never got an answer.

I had difficulties to realize what had become out of my mother and I couldn't take it, I was constantly in conflict with her afterwards. She went on in denial and her standard answer, so she didn't had to face her own self. She always just answered, what do you have, there is nothing, and that was due to her attachment and pride, what I didn't understand and nobody was able to face it as it really had been. It was difficult to face the family on that level as nobody wanted to see it or was able to see it, it was difficult to realize how we had been let down by them. While she tried to live in a superficial harmony telling always, what do you have, there is nothing, we were let down and that unreal beauty of life overshadowed it, like everything was okay, if we just didn't look at it or avoided it or said things like time will heal it and it was not real, it was just very superficial, but she was like decided to prove that it works that way, even if she hadn't a chance really that it ever would be real. Problems were seen as not okay and a good citizen had no problems, it was all superficial and mind only.

Baba made me aware of it in the dream only before he left the body.

There is that much resistance in that family to see it as it is or as it had been, it is not possible to talk to anybody about it. As we get aware of it in the inner view with Baba, there also no need to talk about it anymore.

That is what comes up when thinking about that joy mentioned in the words of Baba.

I had to face the shadow and that had nothing to do with joy. What happened with the metal pot in the ashram was that he lived in self-aggrandizement, everything fine in the future, he saw himself as a great husband, no problem, Baba took care of his friend, the rest was denial, it was all Baba given and he said he would have a great job, he talked always about his so called friend and rich ex-boss. I only got aware of it much later that he was actually not a friend, but his ex-boss, and everything looking real because he lived in the room of his former boss, was not real anymore when we saw it in the right light.

His boss had send that guy to Baba because he had lost the job and was not able to find another job and he told him that he could ask anything he wanted from Baba. So he came with the idea to Baba that he could just ask and he would be given and in that way I had met him when he said to me that I was the wife he wanted from Baba, but when the first difficulties came up, he began to hit, he enforced his will. Afterwards, I was constantly afraid of being myself and to tell him how I felt, it means it felt like in prison for the following five years, because I couldn't be myself, it was not possible. Before we left he said things like that he could never have done that with an American and telling me that I was stupid enough to go for it.

A week before the birth of the daughter, we had interview and Baba asked him with whom he came and he said, with his wife and Baba had taken the Americans and the Swiss in the interview room, on one side were the Americans on the other the Swiss, I sat now on the side of the Americans now and at his feet and he asked three American women, 'who, who, who?'

It felt real strange to sit with that big belly a week before delivery at his feet and he asked that so called husband of mine, who his wife was. And he asked the American women present also who his wife was; she was not present.

He had been married before and divorced and she was just not present and after that hitting the time with him was very much like a prison, never like his wife, not once.

The violence got me in a prison and that kind of relationship was a nightmare.

He would have gone on like that and it felt like he would rather have killed us than to let us go, even if it was not good, he couldn't see it. It seemed about his will only.

Whatever he tried went wrong and he didn't get the job he thought he would get, his former boss was not the friend he thought he was and he didn't do TM as he said he did, it was like doomed, nothing okay in that relationship and it was still not possible to leave.

On my family side was no reaction, nothing was bad enough for my mother to react.

Looking at my struggling mother today, she struggled for an illusion to make it look different than it really was and everything what happened put her in question, so it was constantly hurting her pride whatever I did, because I put her attachment and pride in question.

Baba was in my ex's dream and told him that I had to come to him and make peace with him and we left. The airplane felt like wings caring us away and finally to come back to my country was not that bad anymore. In the beginning I loved the air, because it felt free, I got out of that prison after he had hit with the pot on my head with my ex after five years, we were together like that seven years and it took seven more years until he signed the divorce papers and that is how we realize finally that he doesn't know what he is doing. It was dangerous, because he doesn't know what he is doing. He thinks he can do anything and it will be okay, he doesn't take any self-responsibility, and destroys someone else's life and he doesn't care about it and he would be able to do the same thing again, he hasn't learnt anything from it and he didn't change his mind at all. He would be able to go into that again seeing himself in self-aggrandizement, thinking highly of himself only and all others are wrong.

I have never met a more sick state of mind, he was really like a mad monkey jumping from place to place and just telling whatever arranged his mind only and it was never Baba, it was his mind-Baba and I am actually still upset that I had to make the experience that way that life is the best teacher, I prefer the joy level.

What began with an interview and him telling that I was the wife Baba send to him ended not the same way. After that hitting pot business it was too dangerous to talk, because I was afraid of that suppressed violence and energy in the background of it and he enforced his will like that.  I usually reacted like my mother, only I didn't say, 'what do you have there is nothing', that would have been her answer. My ex took that attitude of adjusting things that is looked like he wanted it to be. My answer was always, 'Baba did it, Baba will find a way'.

In reality in me was such a rage, I couldn't even think of it, because I was scared someone would get killed if I would tell him how I really felt, so I had to constantly adjust with Baba and I said that he will find a way, until I had to go and make peace with Baba.

It was even present in the inside as a psychological amok run, that dangerous it felt after those years of suppression and confinement in a relationship I had never even said yes to, and we just got married because of the pregnancy and we were not able to live together as family in the ashram. I don't think I would have married him otherwise, because he never felt like my man or husband. India is a different society. To get into child birth without being married was kind of not okay if we lived in the ashram and as we were most of time in the ashram, that is it what mattered, it felt like my home. I hoped we would be able to be with Baba as permanent residents, as we called it. That was the aim of getting into a relationship with Baba and why it would have been great if it would have been true, when he said that he had no problems and he had enough money etc.  

That is how I experienced the shadow and we had to get aware of the insights and see Baba's words in my own life-experience and go on no matter what obstacles are there, what is Tapas, spiritual work.

It seems most of people see the Sai movement as a movement of Seva only, service to others, there is not enough self-enquiry, because in reality Baba is a teacher who is teaching highest wisdom and it is about self-realization and the question, 'who am I?'

And if we follow that, we will get the answer in the inner view, one night he was in my dream and he said, 'I am the One'.

What is on the intellectual level that difficult to understand will make sense if we see it in the inner view. Even if it is 'He' – telling us in the inner view, 'I am the One', in the inner view it is clear that this 'I' cannot be different from the other 'I' and that is why he said always, inner view, not interview – inner net, not Internet. It is about turning our attention inside to get the right answer.