Baba places all our desires, our characteristics and our ego into the millstone and grinds it away to give us salvation.
Are humans inherently evil and is our purpose of being born to achieve eternal salvation? All religions agree that the purpose of our life is to achieve salvation. Some religions believe that our original nature is sin and some religions like hinduism believe that we perhaps may not be evil, but we are covered with the veil of maya or ignorance that makes us choose choices that are bad over the good.
All religions extol us to practice doing good things and controlling our impulses to do bad things. In this modern world, there are distractions abound, far more than what people were exposed to in medieval world. So, doing good things and choosing good things are infinitely harder than in the olden days. So, anyone who chooses good things can perhaps be feeling a sense of elation, a sense of doership and a pride of choosing good things. You chose doing yoga over browsing, good for you! You chose going to the church over going to the casino, good for you! You chose reading the scripture over watching netflix, good for you! So, slowly as we do good things and notice the choices made by others, there could a sense of pride creeping in. A sense of doer-ship and a sense of being a good person may slowly start creating a new sense of evil that we perhaps are not even aware of!
I was listening to a friend and he recalled a conversation with an elder person who warned him about “Ego” or “Ahamkara” being the most dangerous sin. As per the elder, other vices like anger, lust and jealousy are easy to spot and rectify. But, ego is like a cancer that eats away all the good things and harder to spot. There are a lot of mythological stories in hinduism where the demons despite being more devotional to gods were ultimately destroyed because of their vanity. My favorite actor, Al pacino has even a lengthy monologue in Devil’s advocate, where he talks about how vanity makes humans sinful (or something like that). I don’t think I’m going to add a link to that youtube video from here to tempt you, the reader to take you away to youtube ;)
Its true. Of all the sins, ego or vanity is the hardest to spot and rectify. It's not a bad tool for since the sense of doership is important to help us not be drifted by life with a continum of bad choices. Ego or vanity can help us be accountable, responsible and make us better. But, at what point should that be dropped and be submerged to the lord? Like, the choices we make are not made by us, but the almighty or the “guru”. As a novice, the idea of the guru or the almighty taking over all our deeds could make us irresponsible and perhaps create a sense of choosing pleasure and sensory objects. It's like going to kindergarten and elementary and realizing that tests are not needed afterall to learn something. Sure, some of the good students will still prioritize learning, but the rest of us would perhaps be spending more time on the swings than in the library. So, when we do we know that our sense of doership should be discarded?
Scriptures state that when we are ready for higher things, the guru comes over into our life. It need not always be a living guru, but the arrival of a guru signifies that our life is ready for submerging into the guru. It may happen like the flip of a switch where our sense of doership is gone or it could take years of service to the guru or perhaps lifetimes to get that doership eliminated. But, to get there we need to surrender ourselves to our guru.
How do we then surrender ourselves to our guru. When you read satcharitra, you notice that we, humans have an exaggerated sense of ourselves when things are going well. You got a promotion and you think its because of your hardwork. You get a raise and you think you deserve it because of your merit. Your stock portfolio goes up and you think you had good instincts. And then when things turn south, we suddenly feel helpless and then blame it on our karma and our fate.
Trials and tribulations are blessings of the lord to crush away our ego. The ego that has fattened over a period of time with successes has to be melted away and the vulnerability and the feebleness of our existence needs to be realized. And while we can assume that such a thing can happen even in periods of immense success, only a lucky few carry that disposition. For the rest of us, no matter how god fearing we are and how much we try to bring in God into our lives, the ego creeps in slowly and takes over.
In the first chapter of Sai Satcharitra, Saibaba is shown sitting at a millstone and letting wheat into it, the wheat is milled and grinded. So are our karmas, our guna’s and our ego crushed like that by baba. A devotee can complain that the process is painful and there could be easier ways to achieve, but baba knows the best. In chapter after chapter, baba’s actions towards his devotees demonstrate that baba is not in the process of avoiding pain for his devotees, but in the process of eliminating pain. In a true surrender fashion, we have to think of these pains as not something we accrued, but as given by the god or baba to help wean us away from the ignorance that has surmounted us. And when the timing is right, a realization dawns upon us that these are given uniquely by baba to tear down the veil and to bring us closer to him.
Can we accelerate the process? Can we avoid the process? And can we not go through the process again once we have gone through it once? The sense of doership can creep in many ways and all we can say is that let baba decide the outcome and until then, we have to grasp his feet tightly and pray for strength and patience to go through these without losing hope and if possible a smile on the face.
Omsairam!
