Sathya Sai Baba The World-Avatar Teaching and Revelations

If, at all times, you are completely immersed in the thoughts of the body
and its comforts and if you forget the aspect of Atman, that is death. It
is only when you are able to clearly recognise the connection between
birth and death, the sacred desire for securing immortality will sprout
in you. There is birth and death for the body but there is no birth or
death for the Atman, the higher self. To be able to understand this permanency
of the Atman is the real meaning of attaining immortality; you
must enquire about the process by which you can attain this immortality.
(36-110/111)
There are three reasons for man to be born. One is sin, the second is
unfulfilled desire or experience, the third is lack of knowledge or ignorance.
The feeling that he has not fulfilled a desire and his wanting to
take birth again to fulfil such a desire is one main reason. Man does
several bad things and commits a sin. He has to be reborn to experience
the consequences. Ignorance makes you seek a rebirth under
these circumstances. These three constitute the basis for your rebirth.
(36-243)
Death is but a passage from this life to the next; it is the change from
old clothes to new, as the Bhagavadgita says. But, some cynics laugh
at the comparison and ask, what about the death of new-born infants,
children, youths and middle-aged persons? Their bodies cannot by
any stretch of imagination be classified as worn-out! Well the clothes
might not be old, but the cloth out of which they were made must have
been from very old stock, so that though new clothes were prepared,
they had to be discarded soon. Again, there are some crooked men
who refuse to believe in a previous life, because they cannot recollect
the events! These people cannot recollect the events of one particular
incidents say five or then years ago though they are certain they were
alive on this day! Forgetting the events of that day does not mean that
they were not alive at all; it only means that they did not pay any special
heed to them, they had no special reason to keep it in memory.
Unconditional surrender is the main gate to enter the mansion of liberation.
It has four floors including meditation, devotion and wisdom.
Each floor rests upon the one beneath and the topmost one cannot be
reached without ascending the first three. Remember this when you
hear people arguing about the relative superiority of the yogas or labelling
themselves as “this” or “that” in the spiritual field. 24.10.63, (17-
103/104)
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