Satsang Gifts of Sri Sai Baba -That Boundless Love:

That Boundless Love:
When people talk of God, to most He is a word and nothing more.
They know how to use it for their worldly purposes, nothing what
effect it has on the hearer. Convention and current feeling invest
its use with a certain dignity and telling force, especially in oaths
and curses. But how few have felt at all or in any appreciable degree
the sacred awe, the first basis of the idea of the Holy or that far
higher feeling of all consuming all-sacrificing boundless Love!
For too many have been begotten or brought up in godless families
amidst cheerless, cramped and darkened surroundings where the
words and conduct of the parents, relations and friends are really
a stifling negation of God, conscience and the moral principle,
sometimes nominally veiled by an occasional observance of forms
of worship are reference to God. Some of these are at times candid
enough to admit and sometimes to bemoan the fact that they
could never conceive of, much less experience God in their lives.

Spiritual Rebirth, First step in God-Realisation:

The greatest service Sri Sai rendered and renders to mankind is to
save such souls from their utter darkness, to show them the
existence in himself and elsewhere, of vast power, vast knowledge,
vast goodness and self-forgetting Love which blesses him that gives
and him that receives and to make them float on waves of joy and
happiness, hither to inexperienced. Rudely shaken from or terrified
out of their prolonged stupor and indifference they just receive a few
gleams of light into their sin soiled eyes, feel a glow of gratitude, love
and other noble emotions in their chilled hearts, begin their spiritual
birth and see or feel their God in Sai, their real Savior. For the first
time, they get a rudimentary idea of Sri Sai and know God. He is the
giver of the God-idea to them and is God, in their view and it may be
their only God.

The benefit is by no means confined to this class just described.
Persons, who start life better, fall into evil ways, get tainted by wicked
company, sunk in voice and sin from drama and cinema songs and
street talk, lose their early innocence and receptivity, become
thoroughly care-hardened, sneer at purity and piety and blatantly
proclaim their imperviousness to godly influence. To such, Sai has
many times restored, in some degree, their lost innocence by making
them feel that they see God in him and in his devotees. Some cultured
and English educated persons that this writer met have confessed to
him that Baba, who has restored their faiths, is God to them, that in
their present life of holiness the foregrounds are fully occupied by
Baba, and that Rama, Krishna, Siva, Datta and Pandarinath get their
halo of glory through Baba. One lady said "Krishna no doubt appeals
to me and attracts me. But Baba who often appears and instructs me
in visions is a hundred times more powerful".

The need for a noble "Superman" that leads one to God is at its height
in the case of advanced spiritual aspirants who style him their Samartha
Sadguru and derive from him the maximum benefit that a human being
can enjoy. Realisation of the Ishta devata, perpetual enjoyment of
Heaven at His feet, attainment of Adwaitic Bliss or Nirvana Sukha can
alike be had at the guru's feet and there alone.

(to be contd...)
Source Saipadananda October 1992