26. These supreme devotees who have nothing to call their own do not pray for any personal advantage even from Me, the Infinite and the Absolute Being, and the grantor of heavenly enjoyment and liberation. Why will they then seek small perishable worldly advantages?
One cannot attain God if one has even a trace of desire. Subtle is the way of dharma. If one is trying to thread a needle, one will not succeed if the thread has even a slight fibre sticking out.
27. Seeing that all things, moving and unmoving, are ensouled by Me, you must salute them every moment with sincere feeling. This indeed is real worship to Me.True worship of the Supreme Spirit is true knowledge of IT – jnana. What is jnana (knowledge)? It is to know one’s own self, dissolving the mind in it. It is to know the pure Atman, which alone is our real nature.
Knowledge is discriminative understanding of WHAT IS. Sri Sathya Sai defines it thus: Advaita Darsanam Jnanam – Knowledge is realization of Non-dualism.
The means for attaining it are the scripture, tapas, tradition, reasoning and experience. It consists in the understanding that the Brahman – the Supreme Spirit alone had been before the universe came into being, is what exists in the middle and will continue to be when the universe including Time dissolves itself into IT. The Brahman alone is the Reality and the Truth.
28. The true meaning of all that man does by mind, speech, cognition and actions is only adoration of Me. Without this kind of worship of Me, man will not be able to rid himself of the noose of Yama, which consists in the great infatuation of looking upon the body as the spirit.
Supreme consciousness is ongoing action or creation, consciously done with an awareness and sublime intention to experience the Self. This is “being at the spiritual game”. This is to say that one is to dedicate one’s whole soul, whole mind and whole body to the process of creating self in the image and likeness of God. This is the process of self-realization or salvation or in whatever way it is called. This is a moment-to-moment conscious action in pursuit of the sole – soul goal.
Sri Suka said:
29. Though his sons knew all the above teachings in a way, he made his sermon in order that the world at large might understand this doctrine. After this, Rishabha, the friend of all, desired to teach and demonstrate to the world the dharma of the paramahamsas characterized by repose in the Self, renunciation of actions, devotion,
knowledge and dispassion. He, therefore, installed in succession to him as the ruler of the country, his eldest son Bharata, who was himself the embodiment of sattva and who was devoted to the servants of the Lord, and dependent on them in all matters. Then Rishabha left his residence, taking with him nothing but the body. He was henceforth like one inebriated, completely nude, and having dishevelled hair.
Withdrawing into his heart the sacrificial fires like the Ahavamya maintained by him, he took to the life of a sannyasin and wandered away from his country, the Brahmavarta. A sannyasin is the renouncer of the world or the ascetic. At this stage of life, he gives up all connections with family and all rights and duties. He renounces the world. He spends the rest of his life as a man of God. He owns no property, lives by begging and changes his name so that others do not know his family connections. He wanders about and teaches spiritual truths to whosoever seek them.
30. In the midst of men he appeared from time to time as a senseless man, blind man, dumb man, a ghoul or a drunkard. In repulsive attires, he was found to remain silent, not answering even any one’s questions.
31. He travelled through towns, villages, military cantonments, cow-pens, cowherd settlements, travellers’ shelters, mountains, forests and hermitages. All along the way, as an elephant in rut is pestered by flies, evil men persecuted him by threatening, beating, urinating on him, spitting on him, throwing stones, cow-dung and dust at him, and insulting and abusing him. Being firmly established in the knowledge of the real and the unreal, and in the conviction that one was nothing but the Universal Spirit, he had no identification with the body, which, for men in ignorance, is the most real entity, but was, for him, unreal. So none of these persecutions disturbed him, and he traveled all
over the world alone, his mind merged in the Atman.
One cannot have the knowledge of the Brahman as long as there is the slightest trace of worldliness. One is to keep one’s mind aloof from the objects of sight, hearing, touch and other things of worldly nature. Only then, does one realize the Brahman as one’s own innermost consciousness. As the all-pervading Spirit, the Brahman exists in all beings. IT is the beingness of all that exists. IT alone is.
32. By nature, he was endowed with very handsome and well-proportionate hands, legs, chest, arms, shoulders, neck and face. His face always had shone with a natural smile. His eyes were long and red like a lotus petal, having pupils that assuaged the grief of men. The parts of the face like the ears, eyes, cheeks, neck and nose were all
well-proportioned and symmetrical. The veiled smile on his lips had always attracted the interest of women. This handsome form of his now presented the appearance of a ghoul with dishevelled hair, dirty and unwashed, owing to lack of body consciousness.
The signs of God-vision are that a man who has seen God behaves sometimes like a child, sometimes like a ghoul, sometimes like an inert thing and sometimes like a mad man. There are other signs, too. One is intense joy. There is no hesitancy in him. He is like the ocean; the waves and sounds are on the surface; below are profound depths.
When one finds that the very mention of God’s name brings tears to one’s eyes and makes one’s hair stand on end, then it is known for certain that one has freed oneself from attachment to lust and greed, and attained God.
33. Rishabha realized from the persecutions of ignorant people that society was hostile to the practice of yoga. To retaliate against the persecutors would be still worse. So he gave up the habit of moving about and adopted what is called ajagaravritti, the way of life of a python which remains at a spot without going for food anywhere. He lay himself in one place, took whatever food he had there, performed the functions of excretion and stretched himself there rolling in the faucal matter, and got himself covered with it.
Pure love of a devotee has two characteristics. So intense is one’s love of God that one becomes unconscious of outer things. One forgets the world. The second is that one has no feeling of “my-ness” toward the body. One wholly gets rid of the feeling that the body is his. Chaitanya, like Rishabha, experienced this kind of love.
34. His excreta, however, were so fragrant that the atmosphere up to ten yojanas was filled with its sweet smell.
Experienced practitioners of Yoga engage in meditative practices all through their life resulting in their attainment. It is often that whatever is excreted of their bodies fills the atmosphere with fragrance. It is also that, often, their bodies do not begin to decay until long after they are clinically dead.
35. Similarly, he followed also the ways of cow, deer and even of crow – walking, sitting, eating, drinking and excreting like all those creatures.
36. Bhagavan Rishabha then practised various forms of yogic discipline, experienced the unbroken bliss of the Spirit, and attained to the sense of oneness with the all-pervading Being. In the course of it, various yogic powers like movement in the sky with the speed of mind, power of disappearance, entry into another body, clairaudience, etc came to him automatically without his striving. But he rejected them all.
The yoga enables the seeker to realize the identity of his particular being with the whole world of nature (Prakrti) just as he realizes his identity with his physical body. He can have as much control over the world, as over his body. The extraordinary powers resulting from such a control are not supernatural, but natural. He has to distinguish himself from every aspect of Prakrti, realize his separateness from it, then enter it and be one with it, without at the same time losing his discriminatory power attained, and then controls its movements from within. The first requirement is a kind of detachment from Prakrti, which results in its control.
As the final realization of such discriminatory oneness with the evolutes of Prakrti arises, at every stage, some extraordinary powers are attained. The achievement of siddhis or psychic powers such as becoming infinitesimally small (anima), becoming infinitely large (mahima), becoming infinitesimally light (laghima), becoming
infinitesimally heavy (gurutvam), the power of touching anything at any distance (prapti), obtaining anything desired (prakamya), lordship over everything (isitva) and control over everything (vasitva) is dependent upon four factors – time, place, action and means. Among these, action or effort holds the key to all endeavors. All achievements are possible through the practice of pranayama.
At the end of the ultimate samadhi, the cognition of the seeker (yogi) is always truth. It is direct intuition of anything in the world like the intuition of the existence of one’s body. How much of the cosmos can be known depends on the perfection of the samadhi. But one can obtain other powers (siddhis) by following other methods of
concentration, at different levels.