In plain words
Wherever we went, I kept to what the children needed and what they liked.
Your Ānanda is My Ānanda
Not only that. I am not saying it to exaggerate. To reveal My Prema-principle to you, to open it out and show it, I am trying to make this principle known to you. Even while so great a conference is going on, I have kept My attention on just this: what our Puttaparthi students, the Anantapur girl students, the Bangalore students and the girl students at Jaipur and Bhopal each need. How to bring Ānanda to the students, how to satisfy them, to what disciplines to train them … In this way all My thoughts run on. With the aim that all should be bright and laughing merrily, I called some fifty tailors here for the children and had clothes stitched for them day and night for two months. But for Myself I did not buy even an inch of new cloth. Even what I am wearing today, the ‘Kingdom of Sathya Sai’ students brought, and I wore it because they pressed Me. In the same way, in food and in pastimes too, I have never had the wish ‘I want that, I want this’; it does not come and it will never come. Your Ānanda is My food. To eat that food, I make plans of many kinds. When I want Ānanda, I give Ānanda to you, and through that I gain Ānanda. That is why I said, ‘My life is My message.’ This is only the nature of God; it can be nothing else.
One small example. We planted a seed. It became a big tree; it gave thousands of fruits. Yet in every single fruit the seed is present. In just the same way, from the seed called divinity have come the vast tree called the universe and, in it again, the fruit called humanness. So the seed that was planted is present again in every fruit. That is why they said, ‘Īśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvam’.
To see the divinity in everyone is itself the fulfilment of human life
To think that we will see God in some temple, in some holy place, in dhyāna, is mere delusion. Those who cannot see divinity right in the living man, how can they see it in lifeless stones? Only when we see the divinity in man with Prema does humanness take on a form that draws the heart. So only when you neither swell at good nor sink at bad, and try to recognise the divinity in the people around you, will your birth find its fulfilment for having joined the Sai Organisations. If you follow the ideals, bow to Sai's rules and try to live your life in Sai's footsteps, you will surely be blessed.
Only when there is faith in the Ātma is there the Ānanda of the Ātma
Embodiments of Prema! What we call faith is man's very life. Without faith you could not stay in the world even for a single moment. Yet today you are losing faith in God Himself, who gave you life and the world and granted you every kind of ideal and every comfort.