No Matter What

When our Master talks about the path, he encourages us to build our life around our meditation. He encourages us to live a spiritually focused life and to protect our meditation with the choices we make – like attending satsang, doing seva and reading the Sant Mat literature – and he says more too. Recently he has also been talking a lot about being positive in our daily dealings with the world.

He has advised us that, when we react positively to the karmas we are going through, the karma will finish and we move on, but when we react negatively, we risk setting off a new chain of actions and karmas that could cause us to have to come back to reap their results. This thought is extremely significant. Our negative reactions to what goes on in our lives can cause us to have negative results.

One way to always have a positive reaction is to keep in mind that this life we are living is unreal. It is quite literally a play put on by the Lord as a way for us to go through our destiny karmas and it provides us an opportunity to sow new seeds to be added to our store of karmas and paid off in future lives. But it is a play in which we – the actors – have some control over the next act. If we don’t want our next act to be back here in this physical creation in another body, in another family, in another job going through another bunch of negative and positive karmas, we have to choose actions and attitudes that ensure our next act is with our Master within.

These actions and attitudes have to be based in positivity. Each of the five passions, these perversions of the mind that keep us bound to this physical creation – lust, anger, greed, attachment and ego – have opposite positive ones which help us to escape from this creation because they make us more God-like. These positive attributes of the mind are chastity and continence, forgiveness and tolerance, contentment and gratitude, discrimination and detachment and humility. It behooves us to try to cultivate these opposites.

Gratitude is very important. Along with contentment, gratitude is the opposite of greed. If we are grateful for every little thing in our lives, like going for a walk and appreciating the beauty of the flowers we see around us, or viewing a missed airplane flight as an opportunity to do simran, it is hard to complain. Constant appreciation for the little things in life, even apparently negative things, brings contentment and peace and destroys greed.

And if we can remember that this life has no reality – it is like a dream that feels real when we are in it, but which is proven to be unreal when we wake up – that puts things in perspective.

When a questioner asked Maharaj Charan Singh if we are in the world or not, he answered, “At this time we are dreaming! When we wake up from this dream, then we will know that this world is perishable.”

The questioner then asked why we have to put in so much effort if we are just dreaming, to which Hazur responded:

Because it’s a dream that has no reality. You want to be one with the reality. We are miserable here, being separated from the Father. So we want to escape. If we had been happy here, we wouldn’t have thought about the Father at all. We would not want to go to him if we were happy here.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}

So we make an effort because we want to escape, we want to be one with the reality, we want to be happy. He continued:

As Christ said, blessed are they that mourn, who feel the separation from the Beloved, who are missing their Beloved. They are the fortunate ones. Having come to this creation, they miss the Creator. They are the fortunate ones, the blessed ones. The teachings are meant only for the blessed ones, for the fortunate ones.

We have come to the Master’s teachings because we feel that separation, because we are miserable in that separation. We may not have understood why we have felt so miserable despite the good in our lives, but the Master tells us that it is the soul that is miserable, and it is that misery of the soul that pushes us to find meaning in our lives, to search for the Master. In concluding Hazur says:

Those who are happy in this dream will remain part and parcel of this dream. And those who are the blessed ones will realize the travesty of this world and will want to go to their everlasting home, their permanent abode. They will feel his separation. They will miss him. They will try to get to him.

We miss the Lord, we miss our Master, and so we put in that effort. We live in the world, going through our destiny karmas, participating fully in the dream of our life, but never forgetting why we asked for initiation, never forgetting that our Master is waiting for us at the eye centre and never giving up our meditation, no matter what.

“No matter what” becomes our watchword. We do our bhajan and simran no matter what. Even if we don’t sleep the night before, we get up and sit in meditation. Even if we are sick, we sit; and if we can’t sit in our usual meditation posture, we lie in bed and do our simran and bhajan. Even if we are travelling, we sit – we can do simran in a plane a train or a bus. And if we don’t manage to do our simran and bhajan during the journey, we can sit whenever we get to our hotel. No matter what, we never let 24 hours go by without fulfilling our part of this wonderful bargain the Master offers us. We give him our two and a half hours and he gives us everything.