Baba stood up and reverentially folded his hands to the gathering. Resuming his seat he continued:
“”I want you all to patiently hear what I have to say, declare and what I have decided. Before I make clear my Fiery Life, I will explain to you the stand of a devotee that I have adopted today.
For an ordinary devotee, there exists attachment of every kind. Ignorance being the predominating factor, desires and duality persist; and due to this ignorance, virtue and sin, good and bad gain meaning. Worries, doubts, upsets and miseries are the products of this ignorance. Birth and death, which to a Dnyani [Knower] are superfluous, have meaning in ignorance. Therefore, for a devotee, good, bad and all forms of duality exist until Dnyan comes.
And so today I am taking the stand of an ordinary devotee who seeks forgiveness of God for his mistakes.
After this explanation, Baba asked Don to read on his behalf the following statement in English (translations of it were ready and were read aloud by Dr. Deshmukh in Marathi and Keshav Nigam in Hindi):
“”In a few moments I am going to repent to God and ask His forgiveness for my sins and also for the sins of everyone connected with me.
Because I shall include myself in this repentance and prayer, it is important for you to know that I shall, for the time being, take my stand as an ordinary devotee — as one whose devotion and longing for Union with God are weakened and corrupted again and again by evil thoughts, evil feelings, evil words and evil deeds.
I know that only God exists, and in the same way I also know that good and evil are merely aspects or manifestations of God Himself.
For the ordinary man and even the ordinary devotee, this knowledge of the true nature of good and evil is only the fruit of faith or reason. It is therefore theoretical and not real knowledge, and it does not free him from the law of karma — the law that is based on God's Will, the law that pervades throughout eternity.
The Dnyani, however, because he knows the Truth by actual experience, is utterly free from these bindings, and he therefore knows that, as a Dnyani, he is exempt from the law of karma. Since he knows the nature of good and evil, he also knows that no one is to be blamed for anything he thinks or feels or says or does.
