Sri Sai Baba`S:Charters And Sayings

72 TALKS ON " AT THE FEET OF THE MASTER "

taken, therefore, as expressing His opinion, as it were,
His statement of the truth, and is thus, at the present
" time, of the greatest interest to us. •

Alcyone ,then goes on to say, tc What the Master
has said to me on each of these, I shall try to tell
you," and then begins the book proper:

The first of these Qualifications is Discrimination; and
this is usually taken as the discrimination between the real
and the unreal which leads men to enter the Path.

That, you see, is what I have been saying: <( It is
this," He says, <( but it is also much more, and it is
to be practised not only at the beginning of the Path,
but at every step of it, every day until the end/'
Now that is precisely the difficulty which stands in
the way of most people—people like ourselves, who
do understand these things, who do see the glory
and the beauty of it, and intend to enter upon that
Path and to come to the Feet of the Master.
That difficulty is the necessity of dull, steady,
continuous plodding, of keeping on at the thing.
Anybody can make a great effort for a moment.
But to go on day after day doing the right thing and
not the wrong thing in all the wearisome annoying
duties of everyday life, that is the hard thing. It is
much harder to do that than to be a martyr once for
all ... You could be scraped to death with
oyster shells like Hypatia. Many of us could go
through one of those tremendous sacrifices ; but to go
on day by day living the same old life, but living it in