Sathya Sai Baba

For more than half a century, a short man, with voluminous hair and a saffron-colored robe, stepped onto a stage in India and began his discourses, almost always, with the same five words.

He did not say "ladies and gentlemen". He did not say "my devotees". He did not say "brothers".

He said:

"Embodiments of the Divine Atma."

This was how he addressed any audience, in any place, before any person. Not as a compliment nor as a formal courtesy. As a statement of fact.

Before saying anything at all, he had already said the most important thing: you are an embodiment of the Divine. All the rest of the discourse was only an unfolding.

What the Atma is#

Before going on, we need to stop at this word. It will appear dozens of times from here on, and without it nothing Sai Baba said makes sense.

Atma — or ātman, in Sanskrit — is usually translated as "soul", and that translation is the source of almost every misunderstanding.

The Atma is not your soul in the sense of something that belongs to you. It is the opposite of that.

Indian thought carefully separates certain layers of what we call "I". There is the body, which is born and dies. There is the mind, with its thoughts and memories. There is the ego, which goes by your name, has your profession and your grievances. And there is, beneath all of this, that which observes all these layers without being any of them.

This observer is the Atma.

Try it now. You have a body, but you can observe it — so you are not it. You have thoughts, and you can perceive them arising and passing — so you are not them. You have a history, a name, a personality, and you can speak about all of it in the third person — so you are none of it.

Someone is left, observing. And that someone has no name, no age, no biography.

The Bhagavad Gita describes this observer in verses that are among the best known in the spiritual literature of the world:

"This is never born, nor does It die. It is not that, not having been, It again comes into being. This is unborn, eternal, changeless, ever-Itself. It is not killed when the body is killed."

— Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 20.

Notice what is being said: the Atma does not evolve, does not improve, does not learn and is not corrupted. It cannot, because it is already complete. What is born, suffers, learns and improves is everything that has accumulated on top of it.

And here comes the statement that made Indian thought what it is.

The Atma is not only perfect. It is identical to the Absolute. What exists at the bottom of you is not a creature of God, a part of God or a reflection of God. It is God, with no intermediary and no difference.

The Upanishads, texts that precede the Christian era by centuries, condense this into four very short sentences, which the tradition calls mahavakyas, the great sayings:

• Prajnanam Brahma — "Consciousness is Brahman". (Aitareya Upanishad)
• Aham Brahmasmi — "I am Brahman". (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.10)
• Tat Tvam Asi — "Thou art That". (Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7)
• Ayam Atma Brahma — "This Atma is Brahman". (Mandukya Upanishad)

Brahman, here, is the Absolute, Being without form and without limit — what we called God.

Four sentences saying, from four angles, one single thing: what you are, at bottom, is what God is.

A necessary caution for the Spiritist reader#

If you come from the Spiritist Doctrine, this is where you need to slow down, because the word "soul" will betray you.

In Spiritism, the spirit is an individual being, created simple and ignorant, that travels a journey of learning and purification over many incarnations. It evolves. This evolution is the axis of the whole Doctrine.

The Atma is not that. The Atma does not evolve, because there is nowhere to go. It already is the Absolute.

At first sight, the two views seem incompatible — and, for now, that is how we will leave them. This tension has an appointed place in this book, and we will get there. Until then, read Sai Baba on his own terms: when he says Atma, he is not saying spirit.

The boy from Puttaparthi#

Sathyanarayana Raju was born on November 23, 1926, in Puttaparthi, a small, poor village in the south of India, in what is today the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Nothing in the village suggested what was to come. There was no important temple, no priestly lineage, no renowned school. There were crops, dust, and a number of inhabitants who would fit into a large classroom.

Keep this detail in mind, because it repeats itself: Louisville was not a spiritual center, Los Angeles much less, and Puttaparthi even less. The revelations we are examining in this book did not choose capitals.

1940: the declaration#

In May 1940, at thirteen, the boy declared something that turned his family's life upside down: he said he was the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi, an Indian master who had died in 1918, eight years before his own birth.

On October 20 of the same year, still thirteen, he left school and his parents' home, and announced his mission in these terms: to bring about the spiritual regeneration of humanity by demonstrating and teaching the highest principles of Truth, Right Conduct, Peace, Love and Nonviolence.

A thirteen-year-old adolescent, in a village that nobody knew, announcing that he had come to reorganize the world spiritually.

He would spend the next seventy years doing exactly that, and would die on April 24, 2011, in the same place where he was born.

What he built#

It is common, when speaking of spiritual masters, to stay with words alone. Here that will not do.

Around Puttaparthi grew Prasanthi Nilayam, the "Abode of Supreme Peace", which went from ashram to a complex with hospitals, a university and infrastructure of its own.

And what was built there has a feature that deserves attention, because it is rare: it was free.

High-complexity hospitals, with heart and brain surgery, charging no one anything, without distinction of religion, caste or income. Institutions of higher education without tuition. And a drinking-water project bringing piped water to hundreds of villages in one of the driest regions of India.

The organization that bears his name is present in more than a hundred countries.

The phrase that sustained all of this was simple: service to man is service to God.

Notice that this is not philanthropy with a spiritual varnish. It is a direct consequence of the doctrine. If the person in front of you is literally an embodiment of the Divine, caring for them is not only charity. It is worship.

The five human values#

Sai Baba summed up his ethics in five words, which he called human values and considered the basic curriculum of any life:

• Sathya — Truth
• Dharma — Right conduct, righteousness
• Shanti — Peace
• Prema — Love
• Ahimsa — Nonviolence

He presented them as inseparable, and said that they hold one another up in a chain: from truth is born right conduct, from right conduct is born peace, from peace is born love, and from love is born the inability to harm.

Two of his maxims condense this to the point of fitting on a wall:

"Love all, serve all."

"Help ever, hurt never."

What he said about our divine nature#

We come to what matters to this book.

None of the sources we have examined so far was as insistent, as explicit and as repetitive as Sai Baba on one single point: you are God. Not like God, not inhabited by God, not on the way to God.

God.

I have gathered below passages from dated and published discourses, with the reference for each one, so that you can check them. The quotations are taken from the official English edition of the discourses.

Prasanthi Nilayam, Christmas 2003#

"God is omnipresent. All are the embodiments of God."

"You are God yourself. Is it not foolishness to search for yourself in the outside world?"

"Develop firm faith that you are God. Remind yourself constantly, 'I am God, I am God, I am God'. Then you will become God."

"It is a mistake to say that you have not experienced God. He is present in you."

— Sri Sathya Sai Speaks, vol. 36 (2003), ch. 21, discourse of December 25, 2003.

Prasanthi Nilayam, July 2001#

"The same Atma is present in you, Me, and everyone else."

"Ekoham Bahusyam" — I am one, I will become many.

"Easwara Sarva Bhutanam" — God is the indweller of all beings.

"Isavasyam Idam Sarvam" — the entire universe is permeated by God.

"Ekam Sath Viprah Bahudha Vadanthi" — Truth is one, but scholars refer to it by many names.

— Sri Sathya Sai Speaks, vol. 34 (2001), discourse 13, of July 5, 2001, titled I And You Are One.

Prasanthi Nilayam, July 1991#

"In every man, the all-pervading Divine is present. When one becomes aware of the Divine in him, he becomes the Divine itself."

"Man is derived from the Divine, is sustained by the Divine and has to merge in the Divine. That is the goal of man. Man is not a petty being, nor is he a weakling or a destitute. He is the most powerful being on earth."

"Enquire into the Vedic declarations: 'You are the Atma.'"

— Sri Sathya Sai Speaks, vol. 24 (1991), discourse 21, of July 26, 1991, titled Discover the God within you.

And, in so many discourses, the salutation#

"Embodiments of the Divine Atma" — in Telugu, Divyatma Swarupulara — was not an occasional phrase. It was how he opened a good part of his discourses, over decades. It appears in texts published in 1984, 1992, 1994 and throughout the whole series.

When Sai Baba said "Embodiments of the Divine Atma", he was not being kind to the audience. He was informing each person present, in five words, that what they were looking for in the world was already sitting in the chair.

Think of what it means to repeat this thousands of times, before millions of people, for more than half a century. He was not teaching a doctrine about human divinity. He was trying to get people used to hearing it.

Soham: the breath that says who you are#

There is one teaching of his that I consider the most beautiful of all, and that you can verify right now, without getting up from your chair.

In the Christmas discourse of 2003, Sai Baba explains the mantra Soham:

"God is in the form of breath in every man. 'Soham', this symbolises the process of inhalation and exhalation. 'So' means 'That' (God), 'Ham' stands for 'I' (individual). Though there are two words, namely God and individual, there is no difference between them. They are one and the same."

Breathe in. That sound is So. That. God.

Breathe out. That sound is Ham. I.

According to him, you repeat this statement some twenty-one thousand times a day, from the first instant you were born, and you will repeat it until the last. Without knowing, without choosing, without interrupting.

Your body affirms your divinity with every breath. It is you who had not yet noticed.

What Sai Baba confirms of what we have already seen#

Go back to Made of God, where we wrote that all of Creation is made of the Creator, and that we, spirits, are essentially God.

Sai Baba said this without any hedging, from the stage, for more than fifty years: "You are God yourself."

Go back to the chapter Created Perfect, where we argued that evolution is not adding what is missing, but removing what does not serve, and that the essence is already perfect.

He says: "Man is not a petty being, nor is he a weakling or a destitute. He is the most powerful being on earth." And he says that it is enough to become aware of the Divine in oneself to be the Divine itself. There is nothing to acquire. There is something to perceive.

And perceiving takes work too. Sai Baba never excused anyone from it: he asked for discipline, service, the five values lived every day — what the Indian tradition calls sadhana, spiritual practice. Only the practice does not manufacture the Atma, which does not change. It clears away what covers it.

Go back to the chapter Being, where we wrote that God Is and we Are.

He answers with Soham: That, I. Two words, no difference between them.

And go back, finally, to the question that opened this book.

What is the true nature of the human being?

Ra answered "You are". Bashar answered "You exist".

Sai Baba spent decades answering the same question, every day, before anyone even asked — and almost always with the same five words, spoken before any other:

Embodiments of the Divine Atma.