Sathya Sai Baba The World-Avatar Teaching and Revelations

to participate in the ritual of living. Life is a continuous series of sacrifices
of the lower for the sake of the higher, of the tiny in favour of the
vast. Initiation, the word which has been given to this ceremony,
means the conferment of another eye. Your two eyes cannot reveal to
you the magnificence and the majesty of the realm of the spirit. They
are focused on the objective world and its transient attractions. So the
Gayatri mantra has been given to you as a third eye to reveal that inner
vision by which you may realise Brahman.
Gayatri is a treasure you must guard throughout your lives. If you have
not caught the sounds of the mantra correctly now, learn it from your
parents or from your family priest. Perhaps they may not know the Gayatri
themselves or they might have forgotten it through culpable neglect.
Then I would ask them to learn it from you.
Never give up the Gayatri; you may give up or ignore any other mantra
but you should recite the Gayatri at least a few times a day. It will protect
you from harm wherever you are - travelling, working or at home.
Westerners have investigated the vibrations produced by this mantra
and have found that when it is recited with the correct accent as laid
down in the Vedas, the atmosphere around becomes visibly illumined.
So the effulgence of Brahma will descend on you and illumine your intellect
and light your path when this mantra is chanted. Gayatri is the
mother, the force that animates all life. So do not neglect it.
Elders and priests, the custodians of this mantra, have given it the goby.
But you, as inheritors and guardians of the great culture of this
country, have a great responsibility in preserving it and demonstrating
its efficacy and worth. 20.6.77, (24-121/123)
All that is visible shines as Gayatri, for sound or speech (vak) is Gayatri
and all objects are sound, indicated by sound and subsumed in sound.
It is speech that describes them, it is speech that declares them and it
is speech that denotes them. All objects are also of the world. Nothing
can go beyond it. This world is the body of man; he cannot leap out of
his body. There is the breath that sustains him; breath is inside the
heart. And, the breath cannot move outside and beyond the heart.
The Gayatri has four feet and six categories. The categories are:
Speech, objects, world, body, breath, and heart. The man that is extolled
by this Gayatri is indeed exalted, sacred, glorious. All this objective
multiplicity is but a fraction of his body. The number and nature,
the measure and the meaning of the objects are beyond understanding;
yet all this is but a quarter of his magnificence. The other three
quarters are his effulgent immortal form.
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