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| Sombari Baba |
(from "Deva Bhumi - the abode of Gods in India"):
Once a devotee reached the Padampuri ashram in the evening. He had a horse on which he could have gone to the ashram, yet he was very respectful and so decided to leave the horse at home and walk all the way to the ashram for darshan. By the time he arrived at the ashram, he had been walking the entire day and was very tired and hungry. He was a well-to-do man and had a habit of drinking three or four sers of milk every day. When he arrived, Sombari Baba asked a devotee if there was any milk in the ashram; there was about one ser left. Baba instructed him to give it to the visitor who had just arrived. The visitor gratefully accepted the milk and went to the river to rest and drink the milk.
As it happened, the other devotees had been served chai and sweets but had not been given any milk that day. On seeing this incident, a man who was sitting by the dhuni in the lower part of the ashram thought to himself, “I thought that at the ashram everyone is treated equally. Then how come we were served chai with no milk, while this rich man gets all the milk?”
Immediately Baba’s voice boomed out: “So, how many cows do you have at home, and how much milk do you drink every day?” The man replied: “Baba, I do not have any cows and do not drink milk every day.”
Baba went on to explain: “The man who had just been given milk is rich; he has four cows at home. He does not drink chai at all and is used to drinking three of four sers of milk every single day. He has a horse, yet he walked all the way to the ashram and did not eat anything along the way. He was given milk to take care of his bodily needs; your body is okay with chai, but his body needs milk. Does that seem like a problem to you?”
For mahatmas, everyone is the same; they do not differentiate between one person and another. However, people are different: some are healthy while others are sick, some are rich while others are poor, some are happy while others are miserable, some are intelligent while others are not, some are interested in the world while others are interested in renunciation. All of them are created by God and behave according to their nature, so they cannot be blamed for what they are. From the point of view of the soul, everyone is alike, including animals, but from the point of view of practical life, each one is different, so each person needs to be treated differently according to his or her nature and needs. It would be foolish to treat everyone in the same way when their nature is completely different. Baba taught this important lesson to the devotees present there that day, in his normal style of speaking less and instead demonstrating how to be.
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