The Invisible Invitation

No One Comes to Puttaparthi Without My Willing It

The Below Wonderful Conversation between Sathya Sai Baba and a Western devotee is taken from the book “Baba” by Arnold Schulman.

“You don’t understand,” Baba said.

“I only told you ‘write a book’ because I wanted you. Understand? You. Not a book. The book is publicity. I don’t need publicity. I don’t want publicity. I want you. I want your faith. I want your love. Everybody who comes here to see me thinks they have arranged it, but I arranged it. ….”

Then later in the book….

The writer stepped into the room and bowed slightly, both palms together on his chest under his chin.

“So,” Baba said. He paused to look directly into the writer’s eyes. “So, you have seen enough.”
“Too much. I dont 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 Sathya Sai 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 Love or Joy. To you the words have different meaning, 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 for is more, much more than most people think is faith or love,” Sathya Sai 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 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 beside 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 ever felt or heard about or read of before. It may have been his 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 try to turn it off.

Baba watched him for a time with intensity.

“You cannot run away from Me,” Sathya Sai 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 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.”

“I am 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 try to hate Me. Even when I am on the opposite side of the earth….”