"God's love is the love of a thousand mothers", are words that Swami (Sri Sathya Sai Baba) oft repeated. To us Swami and God are synonymous. Swami's love for His creation is fathomless. Whether we realize it or not, we are all recipients of His love, but do we return that love?
Swami has said that when a child is born, Swami gives the child His gift of love. When the child grows up. He expects the child to return to Him this gift of love that He had given him at birth. The moot point is how exactly to do so. How do we go about returning His love? Two of His Mahavakyas (great sayings) give a clue to how this could be done. They are, first, 'Service to Man is Service to God' and, second, "You Please Man You Please God'. That is the great secret.
The first step is to develop love for God in our hearts, let it intensify and then let us spread it to all beings, human or otherwise. Love in action is sewa (selfless service). Thus the intense love in our hearts then needs to find expression and what could be better than doing seva ie selfless service to all. A shining example is the action of the great Saint Eknath, who was carrying Ganga water from Varanasi to Rameswaram for the ritual pouring of Ganga water on the Shivalinga. He came across a dying donkey which was thirsty. Eknath poured the Ganga water to slake its thirst. When questioned by astounded devotees, Eknath replied that Shiva is life itself.
Thus the intense feeling of love for the Lord motivates acts of selfless service. But the acts of kindness should not stop at that. It should keep on moving. When you act with love and kindness, the recipient wants to return that gift of love. That way the love would remain confined between two people. So suggest to the recipient that instead of returning the gift of love, 'Keep It Rolling' i.e do an act of kindness and love to another person. The gift of love will then keep on snowballing and spreading.
In this way love will develop, intensify, find expression in acts of love and kindness and keep spreading. What could be a better way to repay Swami for all the love that He has gifted to us? "You please Man, You Please God, is the direction that He has given to us to follow. This is what we hope to achieve through our compilation of this book. The various anecdotes will inspire, evoke and bring out the human values latent in all of us to motivate us to translate into action Swami's message of selfless love and make ourselves worthy of being called His devotees, devotees of our beloved Sathya Sai Baba.
This book has been compiled with a view to supplementing other endeavours to present different facets of our dear Lord, which are like flowers of a garland. The thread that holds them all together is Love.
The compilation of this book has been an enormous task. The difficult but rewarding effort of going through a large number of publications and selecting the most touching experiences, was accomplished by Smt Kamakshi Ramachandran, with secretarial assistance by Sri G V Rama Rao. They laboured for two and a half years with love and total dedication to make this book possible. Subsequently a further 25 anecdotes were added by another member of the Chaitanya Jyoti team. A number of these anecdotes are personal narrations and have not been published hitherto. In some cases names have been withheld at the request of the narrator. The final secretarial touches in the preparation of this book, was provided by Sri A Jagan Mohan Rao, a tireless and devoted member of the team. Care has been taken to select experiences, which are not well known or not published before, but inspiring and touching. Because of limitations of space and for the sake of economy and affordability, many experiences had to be left out, to our regret. Perhaps we may one day bring out a sequel and include these.
Readers may note that although this book pertains to Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, He has been variously called or referred to as Sai, Sathya, Sathya Sai, Sathya Sai Baba, Mother Sai, Bhagawan, Bhagawan Baba, Baba and Swami by different authors of anecdotes. In the titles of the anecdotes of this book, the term "Lord" has been used to denote the above names for the sake of consistency. It is also hoped that people would stop using the phrase "God fearing" and replace it by the more appropriate "God loving".
This compilation is lovingly and humbly offered at the Lotus Feet of our beloved Mother Sai.
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