How Baba Sai and the Masters make us go beyond karma

Beyond karma, free will, the celestial, terrestrial and physical laws and worlds, stands one’s Master. The Holy Scriptures too acknowledge that before the Trinity of Lord Shiv, Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma, and even before the Param Brahma (the Formless Almighty) comes the Sadguru and The Qutub; The Perfect Master, as it is only through the Guru’s grace do we reach the Primordial Goddess.

Yes, the laws of karma are rigid and the cards are dealt without emotion. What one has sowed, one shall reap. The experience shall be gone through. There is no escaping this fact. And yet throughout the ages, through time, Sages, mystics, Sufis, the Holy Scriptures, all proclaim that The Master is Merciful.

Please let me make this clear, when I write about The Master, I am referring to The Perfect Master, the One who has destiny, all five elements, nature, and all of eternity and beyond the beyond in His or Her grasp. Now the present day Guru who is more of a spiritual guide but himself or herself grappling with the laws of karma.

So you have The Creator, who I call The Primordial Kali. The One who began this never ending saga of life, so called death, the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, the beyond the beyond and all that which exists in between.

Then, you have The Perfect Master, the One who is beyond Maya (the Illusion) and is One with the Creator even while in the body and obviously when beyond. There is no duality between The Perfect Master and The Creator. He/She is beyond karma and all the laws of Creation and the Cosmos. He/She is beyond flaws, limitations, weaknesses, planets, horoscopes, and eventually decides how to live and how to pass over and when to leave the body. For instance during Avatar Meher Baba’s time, five Perfect Masters brought Him down to human consciousness as the Avatar on Earth in this cycle of time. They were Sai Baba of Shirdi, Hazrat Tajuddin Baba, Hazrat Baba Jaan, Narayan Maharaj and Upasni Maharaj. Then you have The Master, somebody who takes you towards The Light and helps you to move out of darkness but need not be a Perfect Master. A co-traveler who has the ability to guide fellow travelers on the path and He/She may have His/Her own demons to deal with, flaws and limitations to work through, but is filled with selfless love and has the Divine Spark burning bright but eventually is not beyond karma and still grappling with duality. This Master is more like a dervish, a friend of God or one who is seeped into Divinity.

Lord Dattatreya, had 24 Gurus or Masters and They were the earth, the air/breeze, the sky, the fire, the sun, the pigeon, the python, the sea, the moth, the elephant, the ant, the fish, the courtesan or prostitute, the arrow-maker, a mischievous child, the moon, the honeybee, the deer, the bird of prey, the maiden, the serpent, the spider, the caterpillar and water. Each one taught Lord Dattatreya something that brought Him closer to The Light and His own realization of Godhood, but I doubt if any of them were enlightened or realized.

So when I talk about The Master, I mean, The Perfect Master.

On one hand we have the unyielding laws of cause and effect. On the other hand we have the mercy and tenderness of The Master.

How does this work?

Either you are a puppet in the hands of one’s own ramifications of free will, which we call as karma, and there is no escaping the laws of cause and effect and we have been told that even God cannot change the rules for anybody or you have The Master who is said to have the reigns of destiny of His/Her disciple and devotee and can change it as per what is required? So what is right?

Either karma rules or The Master reigns supreme. You can’t have it both the ways.

You can’t be partially pregnant. How can both coexist?

Either karma which is all about rules, regulations and laws, with no feeling who doesn’t care a damn about emotions, circumstances, intentions, repentance and evolvement of the individual and no matter how reformed or repentant one is, one has to go through laws of cause and effect. Or then there is the Perfect Master, like our Baba Sai, who can stand between us and our own karma and work things out in the best way S(H)e feels is right and appropriate for the wellbeing of the disciple and devotee.

Through experience, mine and others, I know now that both can coexist.

According to me this is how it works.

For every illness, there is a cure already existing, one just needs to have the key to unlock that door. We need to know where to look. Gravity existed long before Newton. He made us aware of it. Everything has a time and place.

There are various ways through which a Master helps us and protects us from our own Karma.

One of the most serene ways it is done through The Master’s grace is via dreams.

Let me explain. So now we have karma, which means we have to go through a similar experience, feel the pain, the anguish, the sorrow, the razor’s edge cutting through our centeredness, our composure, our dignity, our sense of belonging. The fact is to go through one’s karma is to go through the experience. Basically each of us has to undergo the experience, this is what the law of karma insists, but there is a loophole. One can go through the anguish and very often The Master helps in finishing off with one’s particular set of karmas through the dream state. Let us say we have to experience an accident. Isn’t an accident in a dream state as real as the one in the physical world? I remember waking up actually shaking and not being able to feel my body for a while as I had dreamt I was in a horrific car crash and it took me some time even after I woke up with a shudder, that it was all in the dream state. Thus, may be, who knows, I was spared a major accident in our world but as had to go through the experience, relived it in my astral or dream world.

Baba Sai’s mercy knows no bounds. Or the other day while walking on a narrow road, this man on the scooter going straight like how all civic minded motorists ought to, suddenly veered and came head on at me, till in the end realized what he was doing and he skidded the scooter to his left and fell but didn’t get hurt as he was carrying a huge bag behind him which hit the ground first. I helped the chap up and he profusely apologized saying that he had no idea why he accelerated the scooter on to us.

Minutes later I got a call from home that our Sai Baba of Shirdi’s statue had got badly burnt, with what appeared like wound marks on His feet and hands. This is another way the Master sometimes takes upon Himself the karma of His demented disciples. Similarly the dream loophole is used often by Them and very often we don’t even remember the dream but just wake up feeling very unsettled and uneasy. They are so merciful that our Masters seek no credit for the innumerable times when They have protected us from our own karma, our own stupidities and that of the world.

Karma has to be experienced and sometimes we can with the mercy of The Master experience it through our dream stage or in the astral world. There is no law that prevents one from going through Karma in the dream state. Karma necessitates to go through an experience that we have sowed the seeds and thus one has to reap what one has sowed but one can experience all the anguish, the pain, the loss and the grief in one’s sleep too via the dream state or the astral world. Thus I feel that this loop hole has come about through the love, tenderness and mercy of The Master. The Master says, ‘yes the law of cause and effect cannot be escaped but it can be bettered and worked upon for our children’.

When I was young my maternal grandmother would often tell me that, ‘You had a dream where you cried a lot, that’s good beta, instead of crying in this so called real world, Baba took care of an unpleasant experience and pain in the dream world’.

We need to open our heart, believe that our Master knows best and sigh His Name and may that sigh be our last exhale in this physical body and the first breath beyond the beyond.

Be blessed always.

JAI BABA