The offering of food to Baba

Mohanji is a spiritual Master whose awakening was graced by Sai Baba of Shirdi. He guides many on the path and works tirelessly to spread his teachings. Mohanji talks about the important practice of offering food to Baba, to our deities and ancestors.

Lord Krishna says, “If you give me a flower or a leaf, I’ll be happy. But please remember, that belongs to me, anyway.”

All the materials that we use, all the things that we have, they are all temporary and are not ours. We are probably a custodian of something for some time, but we can’t really own anything. I was thinking about it many, many years ago: What can I offer to Baba?

Then I decided I will offer food every day. Then I thought, yes, I will offer food, I still do, I do that every day. But food doesn’t belong to me. This food has come to me from somewhere. Somebody tilled the land, somebody packed it, somebody brought it home, somebody cooked it, and somebody delivered it on my table. So basically, this is the work of many people. We are lucky to have that food on our table. So that belongs to Baba anyway, because I surrender everything to Baba, that is Baba’s. “What is here is yours,” I mean, I offer what is His already to Himself. That’s not good enough, and then I thought I’ll offer the body, but the body is also not mine, so how will I offer something which is not mine? I have taken this body made out of five elements. In a particular composition, they become a body and get a personality called Mohanji. That body is temporary. I don’t know how long I will have this body. When I leave the body, my body will disintegrate. So, whatever is matter goes to Earth, whatever is water will become water, the fire element will go back to the fire, the air will go back to the air, space will be going back to space. So basically, it’s disintegration.

Then about Mind, Intellect and Ego – that belongs to the ether, because you can’t touch them. They are processors; they process things. Mind processes emotions, intellect processes information, ego processes personality matters such as positions and possessions, whatever you call as “ours”, ownership, that’s the ego’s job.

These processors are not mine; they belong to the ether that goes. What about the soul? The soul belongs to Supreme Consciousness. That’s also not mine. The soul goes back to Supreme Consciousness unless it’s coming back in another body. We hop from one body to another. We keep hopping and with the same pattern, same emotion, same kind of desires, we come back again and again. Imagine that’s all extinct, that’s all finished. Then the soul will revert itself back to Supreme Consciousness, that’s also not mine.

So what can you actually offer Baba? Eternal gratitude. Thank you. Surrender. That’s a connection to Consciousness with awareness, with full awareness, with a clear awareness that nothing belongs to me, none of these things are mine. What it seems to be is a combination of so many things, and this is driven by inclinations and tendencies, in all of us. Tendencies and inclinations from childhood remain till we die. We can’t blame anybody for our inclinations; we are that. We are unique beings, unique creations with inclinations, patterns, tendencies. Then we keep expressing them, is it something good or something bad? We do not know. It’s all good, all bad. Everything IS, just IS.

So, we cannot say that this is good; this is bad. We are a bundle of inclinations and a bundle of desires which are connected to inclinations. We have a desire, which is connected to our tendencies and inclinations. This is what we are – vasanas. Vasanas are the provocation for something. If we don’t have vasana for something, an inclination for something, we do not pursue that thing. This is what we are. 

So what do we offer Baba? Basically, we can offer Baba nothing, because everything belongs to Him. You understand Him as Supreme Consciousness. We are also Supreme Consciousness, and if you understand and accept that we are Supreme Consciousness, then we are one with Baba, and we cannot have separation. So, every day – irrespective of Saturday or Sunday or weekends or holidays – what we consume, we offer to our Kul Devtas; if you have family deities, offer to them, Nag Devtas – for the sake of continuity, protection and longevity, knowledge. Then Gurus – like Sai Baba, offer them; then favourite deities, offer them. Also, ancestors, you offer them because if you have taken a body, you belong to the lineage, your lineage from your father’s side and mother’s side. They brought you, so you are not standalone. You are not separated from it. You are one with it. We should offer food before we consume. I always do that myself and recommend the same. When we offer food to the deities and the Masters, and the people whom you respect, people in a sense like all the energies that you respect, automatically, purification happens in your mind and in the food. Whatever energies which created the food, we do not know what sort of energies have worked together to create the food. That doesn’t matter. But when you offer, when you are sincerely offering everything that you consume, to Baba, to Masters, then automatically the food becomes pure and becomes like prasad, like celestial food. Like food which is purified further again from the washing, cleaning, etc. but apart from that, energetic purification.

So, I always recommend energetically purifying the food by offering to them whatever you consume. Naturally, you will also consume good food because what you want, normally what everybody wants – is good food, quality food, tasty food – that same food is given to or offered to Baba. That is also surrendering, a kind of surrender and gratitude.

So, gratitude, surrender, and purification, they are all synonymous, they come together. That makes you consume food which is suitable for your system; you become purified. This is why whatever you consume; I always recommend that you offer it to Baba before you consume, and also if you consume immediately, maybe your stomach is not prepared to digest it easily. Still, if you are offering it, you have time. By that time your system is ready for the food. What you consume is what is offered, it is prasad, it’s celestial, sacred food and that sacred food will make your internal inside sacred. This is what I always recommend. 

Always offer to Baba before you consume. 

Know more about Mohanji at Mohanji.org.

Transcribed by Nada Rakovic

Proofread by Vidya Mohite

The Consequences of Disobeying Sai Baba

Mohanji is a spiritual Master whose awakening was graced by Sai Baba of Shirdi. He guides many on the path and works tirelessly to spread His teachings. Mohanji reminds us that Sai Baba’s words are the pure expression of Supreme Consciousness, and talks about the consequences of disobeying Him.

A Master who operate from Pure Consciousness (when I say ‘Master’, that means a person who has already dissolved his mind or somebody who has gone beyond the nirvichaar samaadhi – that means the no-thought state), when such a Master  gives a command or when he suggests something, it’s from pure Consciousness, because there is no vested interest, there’s no agenda. And we have so many examples of that in Sai Satcharita. Various devotees have written separately as well about Baba telling something, and when they did not follow that, dire consequences happened. This is for sure, because Baba is talking from Pure Consciousness: “Yes, do it” ,”No, don’t do it.” That’s coming from clear, clear Consciousness, so the words are with absolute clarity. It’s not from the mind. Mind can give distorted views. That’s what we see in the world today, the things which we read are all opinions.

Most of the things given in the newspaper and in the media – they are all opinions – and they don’t have lasting value. But those that come from clear Consciousness have lasting value, they have permanence. So when a Master like Sai Baba instructs something and it is not followed, the loss is to ourselves. If we don’t follow, it’s our loss. Several times I have observed that various Masters have given absolute clarity to people, that have even been reasons to avert wars and bloodshed and so many different things, even things which will affect a society or a country. But what happens is that the human mind comes into play, we start analysing – “Oh, the Master said this! Why did He say that? What is the reason?“

Analysis has no value here. What comes from Pure Consciousness cannot be analysed, and when we analyse, we do not even understand!  That is why when a person had an upset stomach, Baba gave him peanuts. Peanuts are not good for that state, but he got cured. That’s exactly coming from the Consciousness. And the command, the intention, the purity of intention, the strength of intention – that brings forth a change in the person, at a physical level, emotional level, intellectual level, spiritual level, any level, there is a change.

So if we have really understood Baba, we should assimilate what He has been telling. And there are so many examples in our life; when we open the Satcharita and read, we can get some information. Sometimes, or mostly, Baba shows the page to read. If you just open the page, the right page will come. And when you read it, then you get an answer. And that answer should be executed with faith.

Here, there are two things. One – the analysis often takes the faith away. If you have deep faith, that automatically opens or clears the blockages. Many times, we have severe blockages inside. We do not trust well. We do not trust ourselves, we do not trust the Master, and sometimes we do not trust the suggestions also. Then the Master is not responsible. His job is done. He told you what to do. And if you did not do it, the Master is not responsible anymore. It’s like a physician prescribing a medicine for a cure. And if you did not trust the physician, nor the medicine, nor yourself, you may not consume it,  and the disease stays, the ailment stays.

Just like that, in our life we should first and foremost, have faith in ourselves. Clear faith in ourselves. So that your awareness opens up, and with that opened awareness, you connect to a Master. And when you assimilate the information, you will always be guided well – the path will be clear, destination will be clear, journey will be clear. This is how it works.

Why then are we connecting to a Master, to Sai Baba ? The very, very basic reason is  our opportunity for an increased awareness, which takes suffering away.

Suffering is a misunderstanding, suffering means we are resisting something in life. Suffering is that we did not understand, or we did not accept an event or an experience. But pain will be there, because we have a body. The body will have all its ups and downs, its ageing and all the factors connected to any body. But suffering – suffering is our choice, it’s our state.

Pain without suffering is a state, it is a sign of a state of higher elevation. Baba had pain. Once somebody threw a stone at Baba. He had an injury, blood was coming. Then people said, “Oh, Baba, you’re injured!” He said, “Injury is here, pain is not here, pain is there!” (pointing to God)  That means He did not even connect to His body – somebody threw a stone, and they will pay the price for it.

So if somebody abuses us, we don’t have to worry – they will pay the price. The people who abuse us will pay the price. Somebody praises us, again, it is their pleasure. We don’t have anything to do with it. So we will reach a level of equilibrium where nothing can touch us. We are stable, in a way.

If people come to see you, you’re happy. If people do not come to see you, you’re still happy. That means our dependency level in this world becomes so low and so reduced, that our stability can never be affected. Otherwise our dependency, our expectation, our need and desire, all these things will pile up and then we become a burden to ourselves. Like we may walk, very tired and there’ll be no lightness.

So a Master of the calibre of Sai Baba is brimming lightness, brimming light, brightness. That is because He had nothing to do with this world. He came as an expression of Supreme Consciousness and lived, and He lives on as an expression of Supreme Consciousness. This understanding should be very clear for every devotee of Baba, so that your connection with Baba will be your highest experience of this existence. Because you will know that this is your opportunity to reach the highest in this existence.

And please understand – nobody else is Sai Baba. Sai Baba is Sai Baba. Everybody is their own incarnation. Every person who is born will also die. So don’t compare one with the other, there cannot be a comparison possible. You cannot compare yourself with another, nor another with another. These are all separate incarnations.

You can connect to everybody. You should connect to everybody, equally. Never criticise, judge, or compare, for the mind will become contaminated. Instead, purify the mind through good actions, good thoughts, good words, good expressions, and then life will be a life blessed by Baba.

 

Transcribed by Nada Rakovic

Proofread by Geetha Iyer

 

 

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Real Experiences of Sai Baba Transform You

Mohanji is a Spiritual Master whose awakening was graced by Sai Baba of Shirdi. He guides many on the path and works tirelessly to spread his teachings. Mohanji talks about Sai Baba being the Supreme Consciousness and how a real experience of Baba will transform you.

You will reach a level of awareness, where you are everything, and there is nothing beyond you, all of us will reach there sooner or later, at one point in time. First and foremost, we start a journey, we try to seek something and this seeking process sometimes takes a long time. This is the usual journey of an average seeker. We are trying to seek for something, we don’t know what we are looking for, and this process happens, in the scriptures, it is defined: Tat Tvam Asi (you are that, what you are seeking for, is you). So basically, what they are saying is that it is a journey from outside to inside. You are scattered all over outside because your mind is occupied with many things outside. You are addicted and connected to various things outside including places, people, situations, positions, possessions. From there you detach and finally, you come inside, and then you realise you are not even the body. You are the state or the Consciousness that operates the body. At a certain point in time you come there, you arrive, that’s when you settle down there. Then you really understand that all your relations, positions, and possessions have no value, and they are all temporary, they are only active when you are awake, they are not active when you are sleeping. So whatever is active when you are awake and when you are sleeping, that’s the real you. That you can only find inside you, you can’t find it outside. This realisation brings you inside.

So then, there are two aspects: One is the aspect of existence, as you as an incarnation. Sai Baba said, “In that mode, I am the servant of the servant of God.” I am the servant of the servant of God means, “I put myself in the humblest possible way, I am here to serve the servants of God, I am here to serve the seekers who are seeking for truth.” That is what Baba said. But when you look inside, like Hanumanji told Ram, “I choose to be your servant, and this is the role of my life, this life. I choose to be your servant, your wish is my command, but Consciousness-wise, you and I are one. You are playing the role of Ram, I am playing the role of Hanuman, but we are the same.” Likewise, Baba said, “In this life, in my disposition, my position, I position myself as the servant of the seeker, guiding the seeker to the Lord. But the Lord and I are one, you and the Lord are also one.” The moment you realise that you are one with the Supreme Consciousness, or what is inside you – 33% of you, the soul element is exactly what you are finding everywhere – that is, the microcosm and macrocosm are one. But because of functional roles, they seem separate. They seem separate, they are not separate. So when you stop seeking for anything outside, everything reveals itself inside. In that revelation, what you understand is that we are one with the entire cosmos. The created universe and the non-created universe, the known, tangible universe and the unknowable, infinite universe, we are the same, we are one with that. Then it is a question of us dissolving and disappearing. We become one with the whole ocean; the ocean becomes us.

Baba, in that mode, has said, “I am everything.” That is the place where all of us will reach sooner or later. And as we travel inside more and more, we start understanding the silence factor inside us, completely free, totally free, non-intrusive. Actually, based on no desires, no desires for anything outside, no desires for anything inside, even for realisation. So everything settles down to complete stillness. We become stillness, total stillness, and in that stillness, there is no world outside. Whatever you see outside is yourself in various forms – a tree, a plant, an animal, a bird… anything you see, it’s you. There is nothing, nothing else. So in that mode, all you see is yourself, and you are interacting only with yourself. In that mode, you are one Consciousness with the Supreme. So Baba, when he says he is a servant of the servant of God, He is the servant of the seeker; His role is to guide people to complete liberation. And please understand, this is a collaboration. When you are walking this path, when you are established in this particular mode, various oceans, various rivers come into you and you become a larger ocean.

That is what happened when Akkalkot Swami attained Mahasamadhi. A part of his soul merged with the tree under which he was sitting, and a part of his soul merged with Sai Baba. When some of his followers were coming to Akkalkot to meet him, He came in a dream and said, “Come to Shirdi, I am sitting there.” And when they came to Shirdi and saw Baba, they saw Swami – unity of Consciousness. And also, Masters who are here with a similar purpose – they conglomerate, they unite, and they deliver together. This I have felt myself when I interacted with Ganeshananda Giri Babaji, Vitthal Babaji, Avadhoota Nadananda, and Devi Amma. Devi Amma lives in Bangalore. Vasudevan Swami is one of them in Vajreshwari. What I found in him is that he was old and he was bent, he can’t stand up properly and all he does is, he prays, “O Lord Krishna, I have not seen you for a long time, I am old, I can’t see well, when will I see you?” And Krishna appears, not just appears, the residue of his presence would be on the wall. This means it was not an illusion; it was a presence. Various people say they had these appearances: Jesus appeared, Krishna appeared, Buddha appeared, etc. But many of them are mental projections. How do we differentiate between a mental projection and a real apparition?

When a Master of that frequency, like Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, or Avatars of that frequency appears, you don’t remain the same anymore. Your frequency has to shift, your frequency changes to receive their frequency. That means, there will be a different level of elevation, and only then you can communicate. This communication happens only through that elevation of awareness. But if it is just a mental projection, there will be no change, you will be the same. You will still have all your anxieties, fears, anger, hatred, jealousy… all those things. But if a real apparition, if a real encounter happens, with the energy as powerful as Sai Baba or Krishna, then you will not be the same again, it will not be the same, you will not remain the same. So this can be considered as a real sign that you are actually having communion, and the result, almost always, would be silence. You will not have any initiative to tell people, “Look here, I am speaking to Krishna, I am speaking to Sai Baba,” you may not even feel like telling, because the more you interact with any being of a higher frequency, the result is inherent silence inside. And no urge to prove to anybody, there is nothing to prove to anybody. What will you prove?

Your state is not provable. In what state you are operating, you can’t tell. Your behaviour is not possible to convey anything. Many people considered the behaviour of Baba as inconsistent, some people even thought he was mad. But he was a great Master. His operating level was different. He was discussing things with subtle beings, and sometimes he used to shout, scream, beat, he used to throw tantrums. All these were communications to various frequencies, various dimensions. So, it is not easy for a normal human being to recognise and understand a Master. What will you convey? When you are established in yourself, you will lose all desires to convey something to this world outside, not only a spiritual message but as what you are, who you are, whom you are discussing with – all these are irrelevant, there is no relevance, there is nothing to convey. You will be very settled and peaceful and whether the outside world accepts you or rejects you, it doesn’t mean anything to you. Because this is a world of minds, this is a world of concepts. I always tell people, if people who are ‘minds’, accept you or reject you, don’t worry about it, let it happen. But if Masters of great stature, if they reject you, then you have something to change within, most probably the ego factor.

 

Great Masters will not reject a person of a certain level definitely, because whoever is eligible to climb up, they hold hands indiscriminately, without any agenda. They will not ask anything. Real Masters need nothing from you, they are not looking at your wallet or pocket. But as somebody said, “When I give to Baba, I am sure it reaches thousands more; when I keep it in my pocket, it may not even be useful for my people at some point in time.” So, what you give, you get more, as spiritual grace.

Grace is the money, what you spend for a Master, or for annadaan. I always recommend annadaan as a cleanser, purifier. Annadaan is Mahadaan, there is nothing better than feeding the poor. When I say poor, anybody who is hungry, it doesn’t matter if it is a human being or any being who is hungry, their need is food. If their need is food, feed them, give them whatever you have, share what you have. That makes you rich, and that’s a very noble thing to do.

Because all beings respond to love, they respond to hunger. They are all instinctual things.

In instinct, the primary instinct, the basic instinct, is survival. The basic instinct of survival manifests itself in the need for food. Most of the animals and birds travel miles in search of food because that’s basic for their survival. And seasonally, sexuality is there for the species to survive. Human beings also have it, but because human beings use intelligence and imagination more than instinct, they manipulate all these things.

We tend to manipulate. That is why we have so many Do’s and so many Don’ts etc. while most of the other species don’t have it. They don’t have it, they live more a less a plain life, and they are not in opposition or resistance at all with life. We are. And that is causing lots of agonies and pains, even wars. So a great Master, in the relevance of Baba, he came here for creating harmony between religions, between communities. He’s not a Muslim, nor a Hindu, nor a Christian, nor a Buddhist. He is just a human being. He lived a normal life as a human being, but with a high level of awareness, which could transform millions even after leaving the body.

 

Transcribed by Nada Rakovic

Proofread by Shyama Jeyaseelan

 

 

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For more information about Mohanji, please visit Mohanji.org