In plain words
To let go of base feelings in one's feelings is renunciation; that itself is yoga; it is not leaving property and wife and going off to the forest: this is the way of Satya, the word of Sai.
People think renunciation means giving up property, giving up wife, giving up children and going off to the forest. That is a great mistake. We must drive bad feelings out of our feelings. So you must not think of tapas in any other way. Tapas is nothing but this: that you act with these deeds of Manas, speech and body made one.
Next, the seventh flower, the flower of dhyāna. Today all kinds of dhyāna are springing up. In truth, all the dhyāna we practise today goes against our culture of Bhārata. Truly, if we take dhyāna to be this, sitting merely in padmāsana and making the kuṇḍalinī power flow from the mūlādhāra cakra up to the sahasrāra, that is not dhyāna. Dhyāna means to have faith in divinity in every action; that is true dhyāna. What does that mean? To try to keep God, who dwells within all, the inner Ātma of all, the all-pervading, standing off to one side with a narrow feeling. This is only a narrow dhyāna. If you do business in the market, the market itself is God to you. In our culture of Bhārata we regard it as divinity and bow to our chief work, to Prakṛti. That is why we must bow before we carry out any work. We must come to see face to face the God whose very form is karma. That is why the Upaniṣads teach ‘Tasmai namaḥ karmaṇe’: first of all, I bow to the karma I am doing.
Embodiments of the divine Ātma!
In daily life we show such divinity plainly. Look! The man who plays the tabla first bows to the tabla before he plays it, and then plays the tabla. The one who plays the harmonium makes a salutation to the harmonium. A dancer, the woman who dances, first salutes her ankle bells and then ties them on her feet. In the same way, when a driver drives a lorry, an inert thing, he too first salutes the steering wheel and then takes hold of it. We need not go that far. When we are walking somewhere and our foot touches someone, we at once salute that person. What does this mean? In all of these we bow only out of the faith that God is in all beings and in all things. To see the whole world as the Virāṭ form and carry out the actions of our duty: that is the right dhyāna. Hold it so in your mind that your feeling is ever fixed on this too. Think of the whole world as held within your own feeling.
Kṛṣṇa showed Arjuna the Virāṭ form. If we enquire well into its inner meaning, we will understand that the whole world is Īśvara. What did Arjuna see in Śrī Kṛṣṇa? In the one Kṛṣṇa he saw the oceans, the mountains, all living creatures, all beings, everything: all in Kṛṣṇa alone. So, since all is in Īśvara alone, this whole universe is full of Kṛṣṇa. We must think of it as full of Īśvara and strive to do dhyāna on it. If instead you bind Kṛṣṇa in your heart, thinking, ‘Kṛṣṇa is mine’, that is not the right meaning of parā-bhakti. We must think, ‘I am Kṛṣṇa's; I am the one who is in Kṛṣṇa.’ Thinking, ‘I am Yours’, makes for Śaraṇāgati. The people of Dvārakā: ‘Kṛṣṇa is ours, and it was through Kṛṣṇa of our Yādava clan alone that the Pāṇḍavas won their victory.’ Because they thought, ‘Our Kṛṣṇa, our Yādava’, the pestle of ruin appeared in the Yādava clan. This only keeps swelling attachment as well. But the gopīs of the cowherd clan did not think that way. ‘Kṛṣṇa! We are Yours,’ they said. That is why, in the Bhāgavatam, the gopīs are the ones who gave themselves to Kṛṣṇa. The people of Dvārakā are the ones who said, ‘Kṛṣṇa is ours.’ In the same way: I am Yours; I dwell in You alone. All around me there is God alone. I grow under God's control: we must believe in this feeling and make the universal form grow in us. This is the right quality for dhyāna.
Next, Satya. What does this Satya mean? Does saying what was seen just as it was seen, what was heard just as it was heard, what was done just as it was done, become Satya? No, no. That is worldly Satya. Satya is what does not change in all three times.