Human Beings and Being Human
Today we’ll use our imagination to see how the little spark of life begins. Imagine a soul cruising along at some point in time. Then bang – it’s placed inside a human foetus. Some months later a little person is born.
That happened to each one of us at some time in the recent past. The key question is: Do we realize the significance and great privilege of this event? Are we suitably grateful for this amazing gift?
Souls have been around since the beginning of this creation. That’s about four and a half billion years ago according to scientists. Some would refer to it as the Big Bang. Some time thereafter these souls were sent into the creation and have been cycling and recycling endlessly through the creation in various forms and bodies ever since. This process is known as reincarnation and the transmigration of species.
During this process of coming and going all souls have accumulated a large amount of debt in the form of stored karmas. This is because whatever is done by the soul’s current body and mind has an effect on everything else in creation. It’s a bit like Newton’s third law which says something like “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Debts incurred in this way require to be repaid, in order to maintain the long-term balance in the universe. Good is repaid with good and bad is repaid with bad.
For reasons best known to himself, the Creator has showered his grace on your soul and given you a human birth this time around. You were born with a built-in handbook that will govern your life, without compromise, from birth to death. In fact this handbook was placed alongside your soul at the time it entered the unborn child. This handbook we know as our pralabdh karmas. Some would call it their destiny. Think of it as the programs and files stored on the hard drive of your computer if you will. As the files are used up they disappear.
None of this placement of your soul is by chance. Your parents, your siblings, your pets, your friends and acquaintances are all predetermined by your karmas and the needed interactions with each other’s karmas. These pralabdh karmas are extracted from your stored or sinchit karmas according to your wishes and desires at the time of death in your previous life.
In reality you choose your parents. Now there’s food for thought!
If you make progress on this path you will come to realize that there is nothing outside of yourself that has any real long-term value. You will begin to see that living in the will of the Lord is the only way to go. Those words from the Lord’s Prayer of the Christians – ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ – will become clear and carry weight with your mind.
The karmas were recorded in heaven and have to be lived out on this earth. The place for desires will become smaller and smaller. There is great merit in dying desireless. In fact we are urged to think of and desire only our Master at the time of our death.
So far all these things mentioned above are controlled by the negative power, who in Sant Mat literature is referred to as Kal. His mandate is straightforward. He has to keep souls within his realms until they are marked by the Creator and initiated into the mysteries of the sound current by a perfect living Master. Thereafter Kal has no jurisdiction over that soul. The remainder of that soul’s journey back to the Lord is now under the control of the Master. You are marked, you are initiated, and your ticket and passport for the journey home are provided.
But you are unable to do this on your own. You require a perfect living Master, who has himself been there, to show you the way. All you have to do is follow the Guru’s instructions given to you at initiation.
If you start now, and are going to live for twenty years – assuming you’re giving one-tenth of your time to meditation – you can spend a total of at least two profitable years making rapid spiritual progress. If you procrastinate for ten years and then begin, you will halve your benefits unless you double your input. Perhaps there really is some urgency here.
The fundamental problem with this handbook mentioned earlier is that we are unable to read it. Of course, it is a virtual handbook, but if you could actually hold it in your hands and open the covers, you would find apparently blank pages from cover to cover. You are not allowed to read it. There are instructions there, however, and they will be followed subconsciously, relentlessly and meticulously until all are finished. At that time the book will close and this body will die. Your hard drive will have developed a fatal error, if you like. The new files you created, however, will be transferred automatically to the backup drive of stored karmas. With this current body dead, the soul will continue its journey and be placed appropriately into the next body.
In other words, the soul will then continue its journey burdened with an extra load of karmas that we have added to the pages of the handbook as we worked through the invisible instructions.
This human birth really is a very precious gift and we are all guilty of taking it rather lightly. It is only after many, many lives on this planet that we’re given the chance of being born with the attributes of being human.
Nature is made up of five separate elements. It is only man who has all five in his makeup. We are composed of earth, fire, water, air and ether. It is the ether element that differentiates us from every other species in creation. It is this attribute that makes us aware of ourselves as individuals and gives us the unique opportunity of understanding the concept of a supreme being.
Imagine you’re getting along with this life, page by page from your virtual handbook, when all of a sudden it is written that your soul has been doubly blessed with the meeting of a perfect living Master. He will initiate you into the path of the Saints. This too is a rarity for humans. There are now something like six or seven billion humans on this planet, yet only a very few are marked for this wonderful gift brought by the Master. I’m referring to the gift of Nam or Shabd which the Guru gives freely to his marked souls when he initiates them.
Baba Ji has told us to try to be better human beings. Let’s listen to our Master and try from now on to be better at our unique humanness.
And here’s some really good news. If you do get down to some meaningful meditation, if you are able to enter the third eye and pass into higher spiritual realms, you will be able to burn away the rest of your karmas as well.
Therefore you could, with due diligence and effort, wipe out enough to gain yourself a pass from coming back to this painful creation. This can be achieved in this very lifetime. It should be our ultimate goal. You won’t even need to contemplate being a human again!