Questions and Answers

Q: Master, I’m trying to understand something a little further. You said to me the other night that everything’s based on the pull of the master in meditation.

M: The pull of the Father.

Q: When we aren’t able to meditate as much as we’d like to, or we don’t feel the pull as strongly as we’d like to, is it our karmas that are blocking it, or is the Lord withholding that grace until certain karmas are over?

M: Well, brother, we cannot analyze these things at all. If you start analyzing that today I’m not feeling the pull – karma has come in my way so I won’t sit in meditation – you will never sit in meditation. We have no business analyzing these things at all. If his grace were not there, there would not have been any marking at all. It is his grace that he has marked us, his grace that has brought us on the path, so now we have to do our job, do our duty. We cannot analyze these things, thinking that I have to wait for my pull today to sit in meditation.

Q: I’m not trying to get out of meditation, but the feeling of the pull – is it always the same, no matter how heavy the karma? Is the pull always there and always the same?

M: You see, the pull is not always the same. Sometimes it is less, sometimes more, but we have to train our mind to sit in meditation every day, irrespective of whether the pull is there or not. Sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, we have to sit in meditation. The soldier has to go out on parade every morning. Sometimes he is very happy to do it, and sometimes he doesn’t want to do it, but he has to. That’s part of the discipline he has to go through. So we don’t have to do everything happily. Sometimes we have to do our meditation even by force – we have to force our mind to sit, we have to fight with our mind.

Q: I’m aware of the fight at this level, but I’m really scared when I look at where I am today and how long it’s taken me to get even here in fifteen or sixteen years. I don’t have a chance, by the time I die, to go to the eye centre. You said the other day that if our mind was always pointed in one direction, that even after we die, where else would it go?

M: Naturally. Meditation means that we are training our mind to go inward and upward. We are creating a tendency in the mind to go inward and upward, withdrawing it from outside and bringing it back to the eye centre. To create that tendency in the mind is the purpose of meditation.

Q: I know you say we shouldn’t expect results, but what part do results play?

M: Results come and go. Often you may not even see anything within, but you feel so happy, so contented, so at peace within yourself. You feel the effect of meditation within yourself – you feel detached from everything.

Q: And that is enough at the time of death to take us up?

M: That is more than enough. Because your tendency is not towards the creation now.
_{As transcribed from a Question and Answer session with Maharaj Charan Singh}

The gate of Paradise is opened at dawn; and it is then that His beauty is revealed to His lovers.
_{Farid al-Din ‘Attar, Ilahi-Nama, translated by John A. Boyle}

This constant feeling of loneliness and missing something is in reality the hidden unquenched thirst and craving of the soul for its Lord. It will always persist as long as the soul does not return to its ancient original home and meet its Lord. This feeling has been purposefully put into the heart of man.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light}

Now just keep repeating the Lord’s name.
When you repeat his name constantly
  No sins will stay with you.
Even if you have millions of sins
  It won’t take a second for the Lord’s name
  To burn them away…
Kal has no access to that place.
_{Tukaram: Ceaseless Song of Devotion}