The Dharmic Challenge – Putting Sathya Sai Baba’s Teachings into Practice

Compiled & Edited by Judy Warner

Excerpts shared for educational and spiritual purposes with reverence to the author. This is a non-profit project dedicated to selfless service.

THE MOTHER'S STORY

Sandra Levy

What then is the meaning of spirituality? It is not the reading of scriptures or the performance of rituals. It is to live up to the truth one has learnt.

I realize now that nothing in my life has been such a challenge in terms of dharma (which in my limited understanding means both right conduct and being true to one's own innate nature) as parenting.

Certainly, it has been an experience for which I was totally unprepared in many ways and for which I stubbornly resisted any advice.

Although this was partly ego -the need to prove myself as a modern mother -and partly social conditioning, there was also a spiritual motive underlying it. At least, the path I found myself on was very much like a spiritual path. I had to discard all my expectations, hopes, and wishes, accept reality, set my own ego aside, and bravely go into the unknown, learning the disciplines and skills required as l went along.

To understand why I made such heavy weather of it all, you should know that before this I was not a very down-to-earth person. I loved reading and drawing, was basically a dreamer, and had, since my postwar London childhood, many unanswered questions about the meaning of life. By the time I was in my 20s, I was lucky enough to find a husband who was on the same spiritual quest (but who was, mercifully, much more practical and sensible than I was) and who introduced me to the philosophy classes he was attending. I was delighted with these classes, which embraced the hidden and ageless wisdom of all religions and the arts. We learned how to meditate, heard about self-realization and what an avatar was, although I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever meet one.

So when it came to having my first child, I was full of wonderful idealistic ideas about children and motherhood, best expressed by that beautiful poem in The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, which inspired so many of my generation:

Your children are not your children.

They are the children of life's longing for itself.

And they come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts ... You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

Which you cannot visit, even in your dreams.

The actual experience of being a mother and coping with my first child thrust me into everyday life and surprised me with turbulent feelings I thought I'd dealt with in childhood. Here is a poem I wrote soon after Andrew was born:

Another creature was born when my son arrived.

He was a stranger to me; she was even stranger.

Did things I never did, heard sounds no one else did Awoke, psychic, before the first cry; discovered

The inner horror as well as the out-reaching tenderness. Spat shrieks of flash-hate, then buried the resulting guilt. My son grows healthier each day;

How will this creature grow?

I still believed in the words of The Prophet, but now I knew what the resistance was. For the next several years, my task became to blend my spiritual ideals with the daily realities, heavy responsibilities, and passionate personal attachments of being a parent.

I tried very hard to be a fair and reasonable mother, as well as a loving one; to have no favourites, respect my children's privacy, and encourage them without pushing them. And sometimes I failed and yelled at and nagged them. As they got older, they would give me their own unerring observations about my efforts: "Mum, we know you're a liberated parent, but you're still an old-fashioned mum underneath it all!"

When I first· heard about Baba, years later, I was thrilled to know He existed and started eagerly to read everything about him. Everyone has something they especially treasure about Baba, and the unique thing for me was that He expressed in His teachings, and, as I discovered later, in His every action, both intense love and detachment. He said glorious universal things, such as: ''There is only one religion, the religion of Love," and poignant, compassionate, personal things, such as "Bring me the depths of your mind, no matter how cruelly ravaged by doubt and disappointment. I know what to do with them; I am your Mother." He understood. He was not a remote, moralizing guru. He actually acknowledged and contained both of those opposite human qualities I'd been grappling with for so long.

The first group interview I attended, in 1984, held a powerful dharmic lesson for all of us. One of our group members had actually died during the pilgrimage, a lovely young woman who had leukemia and who had come with her mother and doctor hoping for a healing. How we had all prayed for Lorraine! We· were hoping for a miracle, and we felt sure that such a young woman, with a young baby and husband waiting for her return, deserved to be healed. But it was not the miracle we had prayed for. Lorraine was healed spiritually but not physically. Baba was so kind to her mother in that interview, kind but firm. Lorraine was with Him now, He said, but her ashes could be buried in the holy Chitravatri river, and He gave the mother a beautiful nine­stone ring to protect and console her. And so I learned that when you pray, you don't try to impose your will on God: you pray for the best and highest outcome and surrender all your hopes and fears to the One who sees the whole picture. That intense, human love is very close to willfulness sometimes.

During another interview, in 1989, Baba gave us another lesson on motherhood. A young widow with two teenage sons to raise asked for His blessing. Baba picked up a photo of one of them and said, "Yes, naughty boy. I will help, but you must do your duty. Sometimes you love too much. You must love, but not too much love. Body temperature normal at 98 degrees - at 99 degrees, fever. Eyes see with light, but too much light damages the retina. Life is a limited company." More insights, guidance about controlling our mother love.

When we love, we should not abdicate our discrimination, our intelligence, our common sense. And the balance between right action and harm is so fine sometimes that it takes constant integrated awareness I to maintain.

Of course, you don't have to be a biological mother to mother' people - to nurture and care for them, to encourage them and comfort them when things go wrong, while respecting their individuality. Most people do this in various ways in their daily lives, and this is what my husband and I have tried to do over the past eight years in the course of taking groups to India for Baba's darshan. Each trip has presented its own unique challenges and lessons, and one of the most challenging was the time we were due to take a group to Prasanthi Nilayam on what turned out to be the second day of the Gulf War.

As the political situation built up the week before we went away, I found myself justifying our going to my mother and others: "Yes, of course we're still going. We're in touch with our travel agent all the time, and we know all the airlines are still operating. We're not traveling on an American, Israeli, or Gulf airline; that would be different." One part of me. felt sure that if Baba had called us to Him at that time, then that was the best thing for us to do. I knew I had to have faith in Baba whatever happened. But my faith was a more realistic faith by then: it was faith that whatever happened would be for the best according to everyone's karma and that Baba would give us all the strength to go through it. I must say another part of me was secretly hoping some of the group would cancel and my husband would decide to postpone the trip. To my amazement, admiration, and chagrin, not one of the 50 group members cancelled.

A few days before we left, my mother sent me a most persuasive letter telling me to think of her and my sister and my children and not go to India when war was about to break out. She was convinced the war would consume the whole East; I couldn't blame her especially as she'd had the awful experience of going through World War II as a young woman. I told her that our plane was going to fly over Russia and Turkey to avoid the war zone. But when the media reported that Iraqis were beginning to fire missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel, I was far from confident myself.

This was a challenge people all over the world were facing. Life does not stop during a political crisis; you carry on with your work as far as you are able and fulfil your promises to others.

The day before we left, the television news showed a film of tanks at Heathrow Airport, just miles from my home. I really had to face my worse •tears, which centred around the possibility of our plane being hijacked. I kept imagining we would be picked out of the passenger list by our obviously Jewish name and tortured, killed, or held hostage. Then I remembered a saying of Swami, "Follow the master (the conscience); face the devil; fight to the end; finish the game."

"Facing the devil" for me in this situation meant thinking through fears, being prepared to- accept that they might happen, and then praying for strength to get through the situation in the most dignified manner.

Once I did that, I didn't feel so stuck. I did wake up with an awful lurch in my stomach on the morning of the flight and in the taxi to Heathrow, when the news came straight through on the radio that more scuds had been fired, that the Iraqis obviously still had plenty of ammunition after the initial counterattack. I quickly turned to my fellow traveller in the taxi and started to talk about Swami, everything I knew and had experienced about him. It took our minds off our fear and stopped us from hearing any more scary news.

As it happened, there were no tanks at Heathrow (it must have been a propaganda exercise), and our flight to Bombay that day was· one of the smoothest ever.

When we asked Swami in the interview room, "What about the Gulf War Swami?," Baba tapped his chest and said, "Inner war, that's what you should be concerned about."

Another important trip was at the time of the Ayodhya shrine riots in 1992. We had all three of our grown sons with us on this trip. It was the first time they had ever been to India, and they wanted to travel around for a few weeks, then join us at Prasanthi Nilayam the week before Christmas. So we planned that they should stay in Bombay while we took. the rest of the group of 80 on to Bangalore.

We heard about the destruction of the Ayodhya shrine on the plane to Bangalore. By the time we were installed in a hotel, we began to hear about the widespread riots that had begun in several places, including Bombay. Members of our group kept saying, "Don't worry, I'm sure Baba will look after your boys." Although I was glad of our friends' support, privately I knew, both from the reality of the situation and from experience of Baba, that it was wrong to assume any such thing. And although I hoped and prayed for Baba to watch over the boys, I knew it was quite possible one or all of them could be injured or even killed. Why should my children be any different? Perhaps it was a big test for me.

While keeping a calm and cheerful front to others, my fantasies about what might happen to the boys were over the top. To make things worse, we were in a big modern hotel which had satellite television, so we could watch BBC World News every hour, and we. could see for ourselves riot police, empty streets, fires in Calcutta, Delhi, and other cities and towns all over India.

Then suddenly I said to myself, "What am I doing feeding these dark thoughts? Everyone knows the power of thought!" I realized I had a choice of getting sucked completely into my fears and communicating them to my boys, or I could consciously change those thoughts to positive ones. I remembered someone asking Baba in an interview once, “Baba, what should I do about bad thoughts?” Baba had answered, “What do you do when there is a bad smell? You replace it with a good smell. So with bad thoughts.”

After that, every time I found myself thinking of the boys, I would visualize them happy and safe with a cloud of peach­colored light around them.

As it happened, the boys did get safely to Prasanthi Nilayam a week before Christmas, having had many difficult and dangerous experiences, and we all had a wonderful reunion. They had managed to get to Goa where there were no riots and had spent most of the time there.

Some of the most difficult decisions we have to make are those where there is a conflict of responsibilities. In October 1993, we had just arrived with a group of 100 people in Prasanthi Nilayam when we heard that the mother of Aime, my husband, was dangerously ill in the hospital. She had been ill before we'd left London, but was still up and about and able to care for herself. This was a rapid deterioration and came as a big shock to us. I remember thinking, I wonder if we'll have to go home in the middle of the trip. But Aime had already decided: "We'll go home tomorrow morning. Let's start packing now." We packed our bags and cleared the 11at, briefed our eight capable group sub-leaders, and booked a taxi to leave after darshan.

But before we set off that morning, I decided I would feel better if I had Baba's blessing to return. I'd never asked: for special permission to have a first line position at darshan before, but I felt this was an unusual emergency. I asked the head volunteer, and she agreed. I sat there, in my best temple sari, with a letter to hand to Swami asking his blessing to go back -and He made a complete detour around me. I remember thinking ruefully, "Well, we have already made our arrangements to go.

It isn't as if we are unsure about what we should do." As it happened, our dear Meme passed away only 18 hours after we arrived at her bedside. Although in-a coma by then, she waited for us, for her sister from the United States, and for our son, who came back unexpectedly from a holiday in France. One night after the funeral when I was unable to sleep because of stress and jet lag and grief, I sat down in my meditation room and drew just one card from the box of Swami's sayings. This was the message on the card:

“I sometimes act as if I keep you at a distance; this is done only to reform you more quickly. When a stretch of road is being repaired, I go by a detour, and I do not. use that bit of road for some time. The purpose-. is to let the repair works proceed more quickly so that I may use that road again.”

–       Sathya Sai Baba

I still carry that card in my purse. An avatar does not waste time patting you on the back when He knows you've already made a dharmic decision.

When one of my sons was ill just before we were due to go on a trip, I did have an agonizing time worrying about him and trying to get him into the hospital. Of course, this was not a dependent child but a young man of 26 who was already living on the other side of London near his fiancée. Nevertheless, I was consumed with anxiety and, four days before we were due to go to India, I prayed desperately imploring Baba, "Baba, please! Do something!"

The very same night, the illness came to a crisis and my son was admitted to the hospital. What's more, because his local hospital had no free bed that evening, he was taken at no cost to a private hospital, which had many more facilities and was incidentally much nearer to my home. Never was I so convinced1 that Baba had answered a prayer in the most immediate and compassionate way. 1 knew my son was in good hands and that I would be much more useful helping Aime with the pilgrimage, and I prepared to go on the trip. But even with a dramatic sign like that, I was still-plagued with doubt and guilt, especially when one of my son's-friends declared, "I think Aime should go, but Sandra should stay behind." Much later, I realized that it wasn't even guilt that plagued me so much as fear of what others might think of me - pretty low criteria.

Synchronicity is one of Swami's most powerful teaching aids. In the same month that I finished writing this piece on parenting, my three sons moved into their own place together, which has given us all more space, physical and psychological. The house, that finally came up to all their exacting requirements (near the trains and shops, etc.) happened to have the street address of 108, and they moved in a few days after I returned from a trip to Brindavan, the highlight of which was witnessing a wonderful dance based on the 108 Names[1] performed in front of Swami by Bal Vikas children from the United Kingdom. The best scene for me was a most moving enactment of Swami telling his mother, Easwaramma, that He was no longer her son but belonged to His devotees; His mission had begun.

In spite of all the jokes I had made about pushing the overgrown offspring out of the nest, tears filled my eyes as I watched Easwaramma pleading with her son to stay, and young Swami, so calm, so loving, firmly insisting on going.

So begins a new phase in my efforts to love and let go, to love and respect the divine in my children and in everyone I meet and yet stand aside as each pursues their own mission in life. I'll be praying for some of that constant integrated awareness and for Swami to help me up again when I fall.

[1]Of all the sacred numbers, 108 is the one most immediately associated with Baba because of the ancient Hindu tradition of reciting the 108 names of God and because, with Baba's advent, a special “garland” of 108 names or attributes was composed specifically for Him.