The following talk was given by Yaani Drucker to an audience of Sai Baba devotees who had gathered at the Vancouver Sai Baba Centre on December 3^rd 2000 for the usual  Sunday morning satsang.  It has been edited, but only for the purpose of reproducing it in this Newsletter.

EXPECT MIRACLES

I would like to speak to you of my process of awakening to the truth of who I am.  It is the only thing that matters to me.  I know that awakening to the truth is also your only true focus and so I want to share with you some possibilities, some totally new ways of seeing, that may significantly save you large chunks of time.  In recent years, during my many trips to Sai Baba’s ashram, I found myself totally absorbed in studying, reading and re-reading A Course in Miracles.  I could not put it down.  Waiting to go in for darshan, at darshan, later in my room, I found myself eagerly drinking in the pages.  Sai Baba has told Connie Shaw that A Course in Miracles is the advaita (the highest spiritual non-dualistic teachings) for the West.  Its study brought Sai Baba’s teachings to life for me in a totally new and profoundly deeper way.

One of my favourite Sai Baba teachings is “There is no freewill.”  What does this mean?  Am I powerless, merely a puppet on a string?  That concept never appealed to me, nor did it feel like the whole picture, and it doesn’t gel with Sai Baba’s instruction to repeat: I am God, I am God, I am no different from God.  I am the infinite supreme, the one reality.  In His 1996 Christmas Message Sai Baba said “There is no one greater than you.  The whole universe is within you.  Everything is within your power.”  Am I powerless or all-powerful?  I wanted to know the truth, and I knew that I had the right to know.

In my determination to understand, I found myself going back to the beginning.  Sai Baba says, “I separated myself from myself that I might love myself.”  At times Sai Baba can be heard sweetly repeating a mantra from the Isha Upanishad: “Poornamidam, Poornamada, Poornat, Poornamudachate, Poornasya, Poornamadaya, Poornamava Vashishyate” which means “From the fullness comes the full and the fullness remains ever full, and that which is created is ever full.”  Sai Baba, who encompasses ALL being, extends as is His God nature, and in that ever full expansion, He created you.  He created you with the full power of divinity, with no need to learn anything.  He created you exactly like Himself.  You were created eternally peaceful, eternally joyful and eternally creating, just like Sai Baba.  God cannot create less than Himself, therefore it is impossible for you to be less than Sai Baba.

While it is true that Sai Baba created you, at the same time, you are seamlessly one with Him.  That oneness simply means Sai Baba has an all-consuming love for you, His creation, and you have an equally exquisite love for Him.  In that never-ending love you and He are eternally one.  That is pure Advaita, pure non-dualism.  In a moment I think it will become clear where I'm headed with the distinction that Sai Baba created you and yet you could not create Sai Baba.  For now, let us look at this small example.  You give birth to your children.  They have children, just like you did, but the process is not reciprocal.  They cannot give birth to you.  You cannot be father to your father.

Sai Baba’s name means divine Mother - Father.  He cannot be a parent without children.  Sai Baba’s creations are creations of love and light.  They are eternal, and when my will is in alignment with His, then so are my creations eternal love and light.  So, do I see only creations of love and light in the world, since the world is merely a projection of my mind?  No, to be perfectly honest with you, I see and experience sickness, suffering and death all around me, and I find it heart-wrenchingly intolerable.  You may wish to protest and say that there is so much good in the world, and Sai Baba teaches us to see only good.  Yes, I agree with you, there is plenty of good, and that good is the love and light of creating with Sai Baba.  It is real.  All the lives of exemplary character and deep love for God and fellowman throughout the ages are real, and contribute to the well-being of all.  Every loving thought is real.  Every act of kindness, however small, is real.  All noble deeds replete with sacredness and purity are portals to awakening. 

But what about the rest?  What about the wars, the violence, the rape, the murder, the starvation, the anger, the greed, the other endless horrors, any and all words and acts of separation, even a minor irritation or a slight frown?   Can I look on all those demonstrations of separation and see only good?  Maybe I could simply turn my back on them and thereby manage to see only good.  But isn’t that a form of denial?  Suppose that since every form of separation is not from God, it is nothing.  Then I would not see it as good or bad, I would simply recognise it as unreal.  I will expand on this idea in a moment.  For now, let me just say that my study of A Course in Miracles has revealed to me that any act of separation, be it in thought, word or deed, is a product of freewill, a product of my will not being in alignment with God’s will.  It is me acting in defiance of the truth of who I know myself to be.  It is me trying to prove to myself that I am separate from God.  What purpose could separation possibly serve?

Remember that I pointed out earlier that God created me and that I could not create my Creator.  The frank and naked truth is that I refused to accept that, although I am a creator, I was created.  I had an authority problem, a problem of wanting autonomy.  Following the thought that I wanted to be self-created, I set out to be different from how I was created.  To accomplish this I had to use free will so I could act differently from how God creates.  Thus I invented an opposite to love, even though love can have no opposite.  I came up with fear and hate and convinced myself that they were real.  I had to come up with an opposite to that which is eternal, so I made up time and death, and convinced myself of their reality, though only what is eternal can be real.  I had to come up with an opposite to light, so I made up darkness and evil.  I wanted an opposite to oneness, so I made up separation.  As long as separation is my experience, it must be that I am choosing ego as my father rather than Sai Baba.  This explains why Sai Baba says that you can only choose for God or for ego.  In choosing ego we choose freewill, and in choosing God we choose the Divine Will, our true will.  In my willingness to expose my authority problem, that I could not create God, the whole platform of maya-illusion crumbles.  It is no longer an inexplicable mystery.  I made an ego so that I could be the creator of my father.  It is really absurd when seen clearly.  And it is impossible!  Therefore, I could not succeed.  Only God and God’s will are real.  Hallelujah!

Though I could not succeed, I am still all-powerful, as I was created.  So, whenever I think unloving thoughts or fear-based thoughts I am contributing to suffering, separation and death, and thereby I am strengthening maya’s hold on me.  The unreal is real only for as long as you believe in it and for as long as your thoughts, words, and deeds are not in alignment with the holiness that you really are, you do believe in it.  There are those who call themselves Advaitins, non-dualists, who say that they are God, and that it doesn’t matter what they do since nothing they do can change who they are.  Ultimately they are correct, but unless your thoughts, words and deeds are in alignment with the divine will, you’ve managed to get yourself stuck in one of the slipperiest of the ego’s snares. You end up making time rather than collapsing it, until you see what you are doing and change your mind.

When I am at the ashram and Sai Baba speaks to anyone, or chooses anyone for interview, or expresses His Divine love in any way to anyone, my heart leaps for joy.  That continues to be a wonderful surprise, over and over again, because it is a direct confirmation of my oneness with everyone.  Now that has not always been the case.  I used to get quite jealous when Sai Baba spoke to anyone, or when He invited someone in for an interview, especially if they received numerous interviews, while I was being ignored.  In my determination to be whole, I dared to look at jealousy and to see it truly for what it is.  In exposing it, it became the nothingness that it always was.  Now it no longer catches me.  Your thoughts can be pure.  It gives so much joy.  Jesus said  “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”  We were created perfect, therefore to be perfect is natural.  What is difficult is to be imperfect.

Once my husband, Al Drucker, commented to Sai Baba that the spiritual path is so difficult.   Sai Baba, reaching for a handkerchief and closing his hand over it, said sweetly “The spiritual path is easy.  What is difficult is holding on to and making that which is unreal real for you.  What is easy is letting go and allowing that which is real to be real now.”  He opened His hand and let the handkerchief waft to the floor.

There are no neutral thoughts.  My mind is all-powerful.  When I think loving thoughts, I am thinking with God, and those thoughts contribute to the welfare of all of Humanity, because we are all one.  Those are real thoughts. Those thoughts weaken maya’s hold and move me towards waking up.  That is why Sai Baba constantly urges us to watch our thoughts, words, and deeds.  That is why Sai Baba encourages seva.  When you help anyone, you help everyone.  That is why Sai Baba tells us to constantly repeat His name.

Can you now see the deeper significance of Sai Baba’s teaching that there is no free will?  Anything that comes from free will is not real.  Therefore there is no free will.  It is not that we are powerless.  It is simply that when we don’t choose for the Divine will we are mis-appropriating our unlimited power and are using it to make something out of nothing.  All that we’ve really managed to do is to convince ourselves of the reality of that which is not real, and of the unreality of that which is real, so that sickness, lack, suffering and death are our experience, and eternal peace, love and joy are not our constant state.  What a feat!  We’ve managed to turn everything inside out, upside down and backward!  What an insanity!  To the extent that my experience and the experience of everyone around me is less than exquisite peace and eternal delight, it must be that I believe that what I see is real.  The good news is that it is impossible to alter the truth.  There is no free will.  Sai Baba loves us too much.  If there were such a thing as free will, we’d probably have used it to self-destruct a long time ago!

But there’s more good news.  Since all the effects of freewill are unreal, they can be undone instantly, simply by removing our belief in them.  All sickness, lack, suffering (karma) and death have nothing to do with Sai Baba.  We are responsible for them.  But that doesn’t make us bad, so we don’t have to feel guilty.  If we can step into self-responsibility without guilt, then Sai Baba can show us that what we have accomplished through our use of freewill is, indeed, nothing.  Then we have broken the code and Sai Baba can undo our mis-creations instantly.

That is a miracle!  A miracle simply undoes what never was.  But any lack of willingness to step into self-responsibility for the unreal attests to the fact that we still think that the unreal is real!  You may think to yourself that this or that is too horrible for words, that you wouldn’t do that.  So then you think that it is horrible instead of unreal.  In the past I have shared in depth a rape experience that I had and how I came to the point of recognising its unreality. (If you wish for more understanding about this, then please refer to an article in the September 2000 issue of the Ramala Newsletter entitled “What is Real and what is Unreal”.)  All suffering is self-inflicted and we can choose to stop it whenever we want simply by seeing that we are doing it to ourselves.  Sai Baba has the power to end all suffering for all of Humanity, but you don't see Him waving His hand and making it go away.  We have to do our part.  We have to take personal responsibility.  Everything that happens in your world is exactly as you want it, because it serves your purpose.  There is nothing opposing your will.  Sai Baba can only undo your mis-creations when you no longer want them, and you no longer want them when you no longer want the purpose that they serve.  Sai Baba will not overstep our choice for freewill.

The idea that Sai Baba is the only doer has been much misunderstood. When we are one with our source, we create with Him, but separate from Him, creating is impossible.  Nothing is happening.  All doing without Sai Baba is ineffectual.  He created you wholly without pain, without suffering of any kind.  It is when you deny Him that you bring pain and suffering into your mind, because of the power that He gave it.  It is not his doing but yours that made all the wars, all the nightmares.  Only when you choose your oneness with Him can real doing take place through you.  We tend to think that all that is real and all that is unreal are Sai Baba’s doing, but He knows nothing of unreality.  It makes no sense to Him.  He is the only doer, because He is the source of all that is real and only that which is real.

Sai Baba created a perfect world, a real world, with peace and plenty for all and He has come to show us how to have that as our direct experience again.  He has given me glimpses of that real world, and it is glorious beyond description.  Everything here pales before the majesty of that splendour.  But we must step into personal responsibility for the state of the world today and not blame Sai Baba.  We should not ask what Sai Baba can do for us, but rather what we can do to help Him bring about the Golden Age.  Sai Baba’s 75^th birthday signifies a monumental turning point in his mission.  We each have our assignments, our roles to play.  It is the destiny of our planet to go through a quantum leap in consciousness in the very near future.  Sai Baba says that even old people will see world peace.  How can we help this to happen?  We must take a mighty leap forward in our own consciousness.

I once had a dream in which I was talking to Arjuna, one of the principal players of that great - The Bhagavad Gita.  In it he was telling me in minute detail how the whole Mahabharata war had played out in his inner vision before it had ever started.  I exclaimed in dismay, “Oh Arjuna, does that mean that everything is pre-determined, that I have no say in what happens to me?”  “No, Yaani,” he gently explained, “When consciousness changes, destiny also changes.”  What does that mean?  I refer you to the last two lines of the Gayatri Mantra: ‘Bhargo Devasya Dhemahe, Dhe Yo-yo Na Prachodayat’ which translates as ‘Let my limited consciousness be merged with the limitless consciousness that I am in truth’.  Sai Baba embodies that limitless consciousness, and all I have to do is merge my consciousness with His.  This happens so effortlessly for me, especially when I am at the ashram.  Any ideas of being less than Sai Baba are simply not true.  Jesus said that all we need is faith and we can move mountains.  All my life all I’ve ever wanted for myself was to somehow alleviate the suffering for all of Humanity.  Now I know that it is possible.  Wouldn’t you want to be about that task if you knew it to be within your power?  A Course in Miracles says “As long as a single slave remains to walk the Earth, my salvation is not complete.”

I can choose limitless consciousness instead of limited consciousness, I can choose God consciousness instead of separate consciousness.  When I expand my consciousness I affect a change for all Humanity because the world is a projection of my mind.  How will that alter my experience of sickness?  Sickness is a defence against the truth.  If there is sickness anywhere it is only because we believe that we can be other than how we were created.  I have personally undergone a number of instant healings.  Sai Baba healed me, but I had to have no further purpose for the illness.  Of myself I can do nothing, but with God all things are possible.  Once, while staying at Sai Baba’s ashram, Prasanthi Nilayam, I had a nasty foot infection.  My foot was badly swollen, and it was almost impossible for me to walk.  One day, as I was hobbling to my room, I jokingly asked Sai Baba in my heart “What shall we do, shall we cut it off and throw it into the fire?”  Instantly, I felt a wonderful, warm healing energy on the wound.  By morning my foot was completely healed.

Another time, whilst sitting in darshan, I had a nasty cold.  I had gone through all of my Kleenex, but then it suddenly dawned on me that I had absolutely no need of that congestion.  Amazingly, almost instantly, my head cleared and that was the end of that.  When I see sickness, I don’t call it good, I call it nothing, and when I truly do that, the very statement of that truth can undo the untruth, and wholeness is restored.  Then I truly do see only good. These are little examples, but when you know that sickness is unreal, you can generalise and see that all sickness is unreal.  Unreal is unreal, no matter how severe it may seem.  There are no levels of illusion.

One day a friend of mine who had suffered all her life from congenital heart disease shared with me concerning her fear of her imminent death.  I told her that I was holding her wholeness and perfection and that when she felt ready, she could join me there.  A few days later she joyfully exclaimed to me that for the first time in her life she was experiencing a regular heartbeat.  She realised her weakened condition was impossible, since she was whole and perfect as she had been created.  We can experience miracles when we realign our will with God’s, and we can help each other because our minds are joined.  When you hold someone’s truth it becomes easier for them to find the truth in their own mind.  When you meet me in the truth that sickness is unreal, and together we can rid the planet of sickness.

Let’s look at the idea of lack.  In truth, lack is impossible.  The very idea of God is limitlessness.  Brahma means expansion.  Lack is constriction.  Therefore there can be no lack, and a shift in consciousness will permit that to be my direct experience.  There are millions of starving people in the world.  What about them?  Do we just excuse their suffering as their karma or do we justify turning our backs on them in some other way?  Or do we stand still and recognise that lack is impossible and therefore unreal, and expect abundance to replace lack for all of Humanity.  After all, I am one with all of my fellowman.  If there is lack anywhere it is my lack.  With God all things are possible, but I have to do my part.  I have to see the lack for what it is, that it is not real.  Then it can be undone, especially as more and more minds join in the common purpose of peace and plenty for all of Humanity, but it will not be a true change of minds until our deeds are in alignment with our thoughts.  We see Sai Baba constantly giving.  To give without limit is Sai Baba’s will for you, because only this can bring you the joy which is His, and which He wills to share with you.

Can a shift in consciousness alter the Law of Karma?  Karma is simply my belief that I must suffer punishment as a penance for my sins.  If I act hurtfully toward you, it can only be to prove to myself that we are indeed separate.  Since I could never totally hide the truth of my deep love for you, my oneness with you, I cannot help but feel guilty when I hurt you.  This guilt binds me to the Law of Karma.  Ramana Maharshi was once asked if there were any circumstances under which the murderer might escape punishment.  He said that the murderer could if he could act without guilt.  Rest assured that I’m not advocating murder, but what I am saying is that it is our guilt for past actions that keeps us tied to karmic consequences in the present and nothing else.

Please do be ever alert to the ego’s survival tactics, especially in light of this knowledge.  Do be aware that it is impossible to act against anyone and not feel guilty.  Recognise that allied with the ego, we have worked out a scheme to help us to get around our guilt feelings.  We made other people outside of us to be the bad guys, to be the guilty ones, but the fact is that we are either all innocent or all guilty.  There is no in-between, because we are all one.  When I realise that I could never hurt you, because you are not a body, you are as God created you, I realise that I do not have the power to adversely affect your happiness, your invulnerability.  This alleviates my guilt, and permits me to be karma free instantly.

What about death, when I choose a leap in consciousness?  When I was at Prasanthi Nilayam June/July, 2000, for the celebration of Guru Poornima, the children from Maharashtra State performed a gorgeous play on the life of a 15^th century saint called Tukaram.  He was so passionately devoted to God that his every breath was suffused with his deep love for the Divine.  Because his love had so merged him with God, God Himself came down in a chariot and took him home to heaven, just as happened with Elisha and Enoch of the Bible.  In contemporary times, a saintly woman called Anna Lise is also known to have ascended.  And of course there are numerous others.  The point is that death is also a choice.  Death is a statement that something other than eternal life is possible.  It is just another lie.  Expand your consciousness to eternity and be victorious even over death!

I have shared with you that all pain and suffering is our responsibility, not God’s, as it was never God’s will for us.  In my mind I only see you as you were created, whole and perfect.  When you meet me there, maya looses its hold on you, because we are one.  Then sickness, lack, suffering and death must literally fall away, by Sai Baba’s grace.  The world is a projection of my mind, and it is saved when I realign my will with my ever-loving Source and admit that free will was a really dumb idea.

More than anything I want to leave you with the idea that I love you so very deeply, and that I love Sai Baba, my source and my sustenance, with all my heart.  Let us celebrate our most profound good fortune that our Creator is in our midst, showing us how to regain our eternal happiness.  We have lost our way.  We have felt lonely, abandoned and forsaken, but Sai Baba did not do this to us.  We did this to ourselves.  In fact, we abandoned Him, and He has been pining for us.  He longs for our holy constant communion and our longing is just as intense as His.  Let us anguish Him no longer. Let us come running into His ever-loving arms.

= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - =

“There are three things which one should keep in mind, namely -

I will not think of anything else except God.

I will not do anything else without the permission of God.

I will have my attention completely fixed on God.

It is only when you accept and put into practice these three things that the Lord will look after your welfare.  Today you are not bothering about the injunctions which God has given you but, instead, you are arguing with God and asking Him why He is not looking after your welfare and your safety.  By simply reading and repeating the text of the Bhagavad Gita, by merely thinking about the contents of the text, you are not going to get any benefit out of it.  It is only by understanding the meaning of the text, by ruminating over the meaning in your mind and by digesting it completely and by making it part and parcel of your life, that you will get the benefit out of it.”
Sri Sathya Sai Baba.