JOIN USIf we examine our habits, we might discover that most of them are based on selfishness.
For example, I have the habit of taking coffee in the morning before I begin any work.
I have the persistent habit of wanting to please others, so I might go on a diet just because someone insinuated that I’d gained weight.
When I am working I do not want to be disturbed. This is a lifelong habit established early in my profession that in order to produce anything worthwhile I have to have complete silence. These actions have been exposed to me as tediously selfish.
My Guru, Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who left the body in 2011, continues to expose my many areas of weakness. If I am to flourish as a member of society and an instrument for change as we move from the Kali Yuga into the Golden Age I must definitely discard some of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Puttaparthi Avatar said, “There is one thing that comes into man from the outside. That thing is the ego, which is formed by attachment to outside objects. With desire for the world cut, ego automatically vanishes.”
It is difficult to cut many of the ties that bind me to the world: family, friends, position, other people’s opinions of me…. Indeed, I have detached, but I am still unnecessarily bound. Quite honestly, though, I do see there are two of me—the one that I present to myself and
the one that I present to the world.
I am working on letting go of these projections and simply being, as Sri Sathya Sai so often described it: a puppet in God’s hands.
Mother Father Sai knows how to deflate the egos of his devotees. Sometimes he builds them up so that when they fall down from their perches, they are reduced to zeros. He has pointed out that you cannot become a hero without being a zero first.
He said, “For a person, so small as to be invisible, so temporary is the expanse of the universe, to live with ego is shameful.”
“Any person with ego is a disgrace. If you expand your idea of yourself to be God, then there is no reason, no place for an ego. And if you shrink yourself to conform to your relative stature in the vast universe, there is also no place for ego. The lowest or the highest, it does not matter.
It is the middle that has pressure.”
So walking the middle path is the best way, perhaps no expectations, no demands, simply living one day at a time in humility and obedience to the Divine.
Beloved Krishna Incarnate has pointed out so lovingly, “Egoism causes a lack of inner peace. Man creates and magnifies within himself a great variety of selfish habits and attitudes. This causes him great discontent with himself. The effulgence of man’s divine nature is obscured by egoism.
Therefore, when egoism is destroyed, all troubles end—all discontent vanishes and true bliss is attained.”