Ravi S. Iyer: Spiritual

Today I reread an extract of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba's letter to John Hislop as my associated blog post, https://ravisiyer.blogspot.com/2021/03/sathya-sai-letter-to-john-hislop-on.html , had a few views in past 24 hours. Given the japam-dhyanam efforts that I am engaged in over many months of the past year, I am fascinated to see how simply Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba explains the deep and great mystery of existence to Hislop and also tells him how to achieve realization of his self and this deep and great mystery. Of course, through this letter to Hislop, Bhagavan is also explaining it to all who are interested in such matters. Let me share the associated text from https://saisarathi.com/thought-of-the-month/who-am-i-3/ : [Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba:] “My Dear! You will find it deep within yourself. Think it many times, ponder it. It tells you about your true nature; it gives you hope. It gives you new life. It points the way. It proves to you that God is within you and

As over the past few months I have been reading a lot (and putting up some posts too) about history of South India and some other parts of India (like Shirdi) over the past centuries, it has been fascinating for me to see how the great religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and, relatively newer entrants of Christianity and Islam spread through various parts of India, and went through growth and, in some cases, decline phases. As this topic is super-sensitive in India (over 99% of its 1.4 billion people are followers of some religion or the other with no-religion people being only 0.25% of the population, as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_India ), I don't want to get into details of what I have learned about this. Further I want to repeat below what I usually say in such posts to avoid misunderstanding/misinterpretation.  I would like to say that I believe in Shirdi Sai Baba's teaching of "Sabka Maalik Ek" (the Lord/owner/master of all is ONE) and wh

When author of post or comment is not mentioned, it should be assumed that it is me (Ravi S. Iyer). To save time, I am usually not providing my FB post links but only contents. I am also not hyperlinking links. So readers may have to copy-paste links from this post onto a browser link box and then browse to that link. ==========================================  IMHO, one of the great contributions of Sathya Sai Avatar to humanity at large is his promotion of unity of faiths. [Associated Facebook post:  https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/pfbid0K6hMSbYuXmLjVYNb52XERC4Emsa25rNAUMPQHpts9chpj9HmBk67ywsBRavD1v9Kl shares a post with Sathya Sai quote, "The great teachers belong to mankind. It is wrong to believe that Jesus belongs only to the Christians and the Christmas is a holy festival for the West only. To accept one of them as one's own and discard the rest as belonging to others, is a sign of pettiness. Christ, Rama, Krishna - they are for all men everywhere." ..