Sri Sathya Sai Baba

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A WORD TO THE READER

“I am the Sai Baba of Shirdi come again; then, I was mostly engaged in preparing the meal; now I have come to feed you all with the strengthening, purifying repast,” says Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. 

He announced thus, in his fourteenth year, while casting away his school books and addressing the first gathering of devotees in 1940. 

Ever since, Baba has been consoling, correcting, and curing, with His Compassion and All-conquering Prema (love), an ever- increasing band of physical and spiritual sufferers and establishing the New Sai Era of Peace and Joy. As part of His Mission of Dharma Sthapana, Baba started in February, 1956 a monthly magazine to which He gave the significant name, Sanathana Sarathi. 

Evidently, He meant to declare Himself more clearly through that title, the fact that He is both Sanathana (Ancient) and Sarathi (the Charioteer of all physically-embodied beings). He announced that the Sanathana Sarathi is engaged in a campaign against falsehood of all types and varieties, and also against the Spirit of Selfishness. 

This series of dialogues with Baba, published in the magazine originally in Telugu, unravels the mysteries of spiritual Truth and lovingly removes the mist that hides the vision of aspirants. Perused with care and faith, these dialogues are bound to clarify, reinforce and convince. May the perusal lead you nearer and nearer the goal.

N. Kasturi, M.A., B.L. 
Editor, Sanathana Sarathi 
New Year 1985 

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Dear Readers, 

Yes, it is SANDEHA NIVARINI. 

We will shortly be commencing this series of dialogues with Swami, which resolves all possible doubts in the mind of a spiritual aspirant.

Love

Swami Krishnananda

Spiritual ecstasy is the subject of the five chapters delineating the Rasa-Lila of Krishna in the tenth Book of the Bhagavata. Here devotion reaches a pitch to the point of breaking and collapsing as the individual is melting down into the blissful menstruum of the sea of God. 

Devotion of this kind, known as Ragatmika-Bhakti, or the devotion of ecstasy, as different from Gauna-Bhakti, or formalistic and disciplined form of devotion, commences with a kind of agitation of the soul within, a stimulation it feels in itself, not through the intellect, mind and senses, but verily as it is in itself, when the devotee attempts firstly to cry for God in a state of bereavement from Him; 

Secondly becomes temporarily unconscious through exhaustion caused by the intensity of longing; 

Thirdly enters into a rapturous impulsion to imitate God, His features and actions, and dances in the spirit of a possession, as if that which one imitates has actually entered the person so imitating. 

The best actors in a dramatic performance are those who virtually become the very part they are playing and lose their personal identity. 

The Gopis were in this penultimate state of actual union with God, which, further on, led them to a state of tearing down all the empirical shackles of personality-consciousness and external relation in a verily maddening reach of giddy heights where it is not merely the devotee that runs after God, but God Himself running to the devotee, God wanting man much more than man wants God. 

It is not enough if the devotee wants God; the highest devotion is where God loves the devotee and behaves as if He is a very servant of the one who loves Him. The lives of the saints who lived such a life of God-possession are examples practically to be seen in the history of religious thought and practice.