The Quest for Health

Dream or Reality? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Dream or Reality?

Many of us seem to be sick in one or two or all three levels of our existence: the spiritual, mental/emotional, and the physical. Any imbalance in our life filters down through the mental and emotional level to the physical body. But the healing process starts at the top, and true spiritual healing ends suffering at all levels.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we inhabit two worlds at the same time – the outer and the inner, the visible and the invisible, the dream and the reality. How did we get into this situation? We have been ‘out’ in the dream since the beginning of creation. Maharaj Sawan Singh said:

Ever since the world was created we have been here. Millions of ages, of dissolutions and grand dissolutions, have rolled by, but we have not been able to find the way back to our Home. If we had found the way, we would not have been here now.¹

We have been experiencing life at all levels in the creation on the wheel of birth and rebirth, in any number of the 8.4 million species of life.

A Sanskrit saying goes, “God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals and thinks in man.”² We are concerned here with God who thinks in man – with the human being who can think. The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”³ The Lord is within each one of us. But is anyone in this world really happy as this divinity in disguise?

With all our advancements and all the objects created to make life easier, do we have more happiness? With all our advances in the medical field is sickness gone? We may live a little longer but our quality of life has diminished. As some sicknesses end, new ailments pop up. All the toys that we work so hard for – do they really bring us happiness? Maybe some short-term pleasure, but nothing lasting. We work two jobs, or both parents work to make ends meet, to have more cars, a bigger house, more opportunities for our children. With this constant activity, children hardly know their parents and parents know little of their children. With all this so-called progress, where have our family values gone?

Values give us a foundation for living, something to hold us up – ideals and goals, love and affection. But how can young people develop values living in conditions of immorality, crime, drugs, and alcohol? One large city in the United States has an illegitimacy rate of eighty-five percent. What do we learn and absorb from TV, videos, and movies? What do our children learn? Do they learn values, traditions, good conduct, love and devotion from their parents, or other so-called values from information sources such as TV, movies, computers and I-phones?

The saints tell us that this place is not our true home and happiness here is an illusion. Short-term happiness seems real, but how long does it last? The pleasure and smell of a new car is usually gone in thirty days. All the things that we work so hard for bring us short-term happiness. Visit our hospitals and nursing homes – is there more pleasure or pain? Is anyone not subject to sickness and old age? How about our prisons and slums? Are there more people living in the streets now than fifty years ago? Is our level of safety lower? And what of greed and politicians?

We need help here, we need a guide. In our short lives we have many guides or teachers, starting with our parents and schoolteachers, then physical, mental, emotional and spiritual teachers. We leave these teachers at some point and take on new ones at all levels. Some questions have been answered and some have not. Growth has depended on our capacity to understand. What if we found – or were found by – a teacher who could answer all of our spiritual and mental questions, which in turn could bring us balance and happiness on all levels?

He has found us. The living perfect Master has found us, and from him we receive Nam, the gift of liberation, the end of our suffering and the ‘wheel of 84.’ The mystic Inayat Khan said, “When the cry of the disciple has reached a certain pitch, the teacher comes to answer it.”⁴ According to his secretary, Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, Maharaj Sawan Singh stated:

To get initiation is not easy. The gift of initiation is the reward of good deeds accumulated over a number of lives and is, in fact, the benefit reaped by one for keeping the company of saints and devotees in previous lives. He remarked that Dharam Das’s relation with Kabir Sahib had existed during eight previous lives.⁵

Is this human spiritual teacher more than a normal man? Guru Nanak Ji said, “The saints can give salvation to billions with an iota of the power they have attained through meditation; that is, they can take everyone with the power they have acquired through the practice of Nam, but such are not the orders of the Lord.”⁶ There are teachers at some levels of achievement who utilize their powers to give their disciples inner spiritual experiences, but the disciples do not have the power to sustain these. Soami Ji Maharaj said that anything done in a hurry is an act of Kal, the negative power of mind. The inner path taught by the living, perfect teacher is a slow path, but the Master is in complete charge of our lives, always aware of everything we think and do. Ours is a slowly developing relationship of love and devotion.

Do you remember the story from the earthquake in Haiti a few years ago? A mother and son were working in their shop when the earthquake hit. She was rescued and taken for help. Afterwards she went to different rescue centres looking for her son. She finally went back to their own building to search for him, and she thought she heard her son calling to her. Rescue workers arrived shortly, she showed them where she thought he was, and they started digging. Day after day they removed stone and steel. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine days, and finally on the tenth day they saw an arm moving. They dug more and there was her son – dehydrated, weak and hungry, but alive. They asked him what sustained him over those many days and he said, “I knew my mother would never give up on me.” And why this story? Our friend, the Master, our inner guide, never, never gives up on us. He helps us and guides us all the way to our true home.

Above the eyes or below the eyes: which is our goal, which do we want to have as our home? Above and below the eyes – these are the two worlds we live in simultaneously, but not always consciously or harmoniously. The outer and the inner, the visible and the invisible, the dream and the reality. Where do we place our time and energy, our thoughts and attention?

Simran, the gift of repetition from the Master, helps us live in and purify our inner world. Living in the physical world, we create negative habits – we continuously see and do unpleasant things, and as these habits deepen our lives can slip into chaos. Just as we become better in the company of positive people and thoughts, conversely we are affected by the company of people with negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are the world’s most communicable disease. But simran is the means to help us cure this negativity. Then, as our inner world becomes more clean and orderly we will start to see our outer world becoming more clean and orderly as well.

So how about considering our goals – the outer or the inner, the visible or the invisible, the dream or the reality? We could focus on one long-term goal like submitting to the process of going to our true home, going inside, and meeting our inner Master. Short-term goals could be to do our two and a half hours of meditation every day, to do more simran during the day, to attend weekly satsang and read Sant Mat books, and to be with friends who have the same objective. And maybe to talk less, sleep less, and eat less.

Focusing on goals is important, because even though life can be pretty much the same for all of us, it’s how we each react to it that can create peace or problems. Our job is to try to stay centred. That is where the Lord resides – in the centre. No more room for why this or why that; everything just is. It is all his will. All we have to do is follow the discipline of both the long- and short-term goals. He will do the rest.

If the law of attraction, that what we think we attract, is relevant to everything in our existence, wouldn’t the logical direction for us be to dwell not on our weaknesses but rather on those things that take us toward the Master? Rumi said:

God has planted in your heart the desire to search for him. Do not look at your weaknesses but focus on the search. Every seeker is worthy of the search. Strive to redouble your efforts so that your soul may escape from the material prison.⁷

We have to try to be more aware and not react to the situations life brings to us. We can learn to be proactive by watching the mind, becoming the observer. Our thoughts are not us; we are that which observes the thoughts. Saint Francis of Assisi said, “What we are looking for is what is looking.”⁸ Complaining as well as fault-finding and reacting strengthens our ego’s sense of boundary and separateness, on which its survival depends. We are constantly redefining who we are with thoughts, but it just doesn’t work. Thinking and analyzing will not get us to the Master.

Less thinking and analyzing opens the door for us to open and unfold. To re-learn what we have forgotten. Non-reaction is not weakness, but strength. The inner Master hears our every thought and word. He sees our every action. We are the puppets and he is pulling the strings. No matter what we have done in the past – expanding our ego, judging, being angry, not forgiving – and no matter what we haven’t done – our meditation – today is a new day. Rumi said, “Come, come, come again to the one who loves to forgive.”⁹ That is our Master.

Instead of collecting more knowledge, opinions, ‘I’m right’ pictures of ourselves, and useless comparisons with others, it’s time to focus on the most powerful tool the Master has given us, simran.

The present Master has spoken of the importance of focus. We may talk of focusing on the vows, on being good people, on watching the mind or our faults, but the most important focus is the focus in and on our meditation. We are still incomplete – complete means that we have fully realized our true self, who we really are. We are incomplete because of our distractions – and they are ours – forms of energy from the mind. Our desires, our distractions are what have kept us here, trapped in the lower three worlds. And what do these distractions keep us from? Our way home, the tenth door, the only way out of this land of duality, distraction and incompletion.

When we judge ourselves and others, when we can’t forgive ourselves and others, it means that we are still stuck in the dream. And all this creates resistance to his love, his flow, his grace. Allowing it all to happen without reacting – just accepting – is reality. His will.

As we experience negative emotions and react to them, we stay stuck in the dream. When we allow and feel the positive emotions, we are in his love, in his grace, in his hands. We start to feel his presence. The dream has become real because the mind has made it so. Still, even this is all his will. And finally it is his will to have us leave the dream, to allow it to happen, to embrace reality. To accept his will in the good and the bad, within this dream of duality.

As we continue to utilize the gift of the Master’s grace, we slowly, slowly bring ourselves, with his help, into the present moment. By doing so we start to overcome the imbalance of identifying with our self or ego, of loving and believing in ‘I, me, my and mine.’ By the practice of simran (repetition) and meditation we eventually come to understand that we are not this body or this mind with its sense of past and future. We are the soul, part and parcel of the lord.

We will someday come to the realization that every person we meet is also part of the Lord. With that realization, that awareness, how can we view others as different, as bad, as our enemies? That realization is born out of the love and the compassion shown to us by all perfect Masters. It is an awareness of a deep bond between ourselves and every other creature. It is an allowing of the continual flow of his grace, his love, his will. This final step on the path is just a process of letting go – of judgments, opinions, desires, of holding on to everything. Letting go of the last part of the dream. Rumi sums it up by saying that our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it.

Finally, because of our misery the Lord sends to us a perfect living Master who shows us the formula or the way back to our original home. He tells us that the most important action we can take and desire we can have is to do our meditation. As Hazur Maharaj Ji often would say: The answer to all your questions is to attend to your meditation. But yet, many of us struggle to do what we promised him. We fail. Mark Twain said, “There are a thousand excuses for failure, but never a good reason.”¹⁰

Of all of the goals we may have our meditation is the most important. Without meditation it is very difficult to go inside. And we should understand that this inner path we follow is a slow path. But ‘slow’ is a relative term; in the big picture, our going home with our inner Master is very quick compared to the amount of time we have been away from the Lord. It is but a tiny dot on the long calendar of our existence. We see only a small part of the picture, and so it seems that we remain stuck and that progress is very slow.

It is all about our doing the daily two and a half hours of meditation we promised our Master we would do. We all have good intentions, especially when we are as fortunate as we are to come to Dera and sit at the feet of the Master. But we also know that hell is paved with good intentions. We need self-discipline. The writer Elbert Hubbard said, “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.”¹¹

Do we think that people who sit for meditation every day always feel like sitting? All our plans, hopes and dreams will not work without self-discipline. The big goal is to go inside. The small goals are to do those things that help create the environment for us to sit and go in. The present Master has said that the Master wouldn’t have given us Nam if he didn’t think we could do it. We just have to ask him for help.

As we put in more effort he will reward us with more love and grace. We may fall but there is no room for quitting. He is always helping us. The poet Longfellow wrote:

Those heights by great men, won and kept,
Were not achieved by sudden flight.
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.¹²

The time for excuses is past. Tomorrow morning is a new opportunity to sit for our Master. An opportunity to please him.

A letter from Maharaj Sawan Singh states:

The father is always with you. You live, move and have your being in him. He is always helping you in every kind of task that you perform. The nearer you come to him, the more fully you will feel his presence and realize his help. As love for him increases in you, you will get a deeper and deeper realization of his radiant form within yourself.¹³

In closing, every day we must:

Ask our Master for help.
Thank him for everything he gives us.
Do our very best to do our daily two and a half hours of meditation.

He allowed us this human body. He allowed us Nam. He allowed us to be his puppets.

He allows us to sit with him each morning. He allows us to be aware of his presence.

And finally… he allows us to follow him to our true home, Sach Khand.

Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, Vol. I, 4^th ed., p.20
Andy Zubko, Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom – A Collection of 10,000 Inspirational Quotations, p.193
Treasury of Spiritual Wisdom, p.193
Greg Bogart, In the Company of Sages: The Journey of the Spiritual Seeker, p.i
Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, Vol. I, 4^th ed., p.19
Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, Vol. III, 3^rd ed., p.48
Rumi, Masnavi V: 1733–5
Tania Kotsos, The Adventure of I: A Journey to the Center of Your Reality, p.33
Path of Love (internal magazine publ. RSSB Hong Kong), July – September 1999
Brian Tracey, No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline, p.1
www.goodreads.com
No excuses!, p.10
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, letter 2

Our Heart with His - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Our Heart with His

In one of his poems, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi writes:

If you could get rid of yourself just once,
The secret of secrets would open to you.
The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe,
Would appear on the mirror of your heart.¹

Rumi says here the same thing that all true saints and mystics have said throughout the ages. He says that if we can just get beyond ourselves, if we can just forget about ourselves completely, then the secret of secrets will open up to us. Then the face of the unknown, the face of God, will appear to us and then we’ll experience the reality of his presence in our lives.

Hazur Maharaj Ji often used to tell us that the spiritual path involves losing oneself and becoming another being. In The Master Answers he says:

You will get the feeling that you are nothing, when you merge in the love of the Master. … You will just forget what you are. When you absolutely blend yourself into the love of another person, then you forget what you are. Then you know that you are nothing … Similarly, we have to forget by meditation that we are anything and know that everything is the Master.²

And basically this is the goal of following the spiritual path. We’re trying to lose ourselves, and we’re trying to realize and know that everything is the Father.

So the question is: how do we do this? All of the saints and mystics tell us that we can only do it through the practice of meditation, and we can only do it under the guidance and with the grace and support of a perfect living master, a God-realized soul. This is not something we can do by our own efforts alone. Hazur used to say that if we could do it on our own, we would have already done it by now.

The mystics explain that every particle of this creation is saturated with God’s creative energy. That energy is what gives life to this creation. Every soul is a drop of the ocean of his divine love. We’re all a part of something much greater than ourselves. We’re all a part of God, but most of us don’t realize this truth and, for the most part, we feel as if we’re alone in this creation. We feel as if we’re separate from God and separate from each other.

Hazur once said that in our present condition, our soul has lost touch with the one that it loves. Most of us have forgotten our divine heritage and we’re just wandering around in this creation, lost in confusion and delusion. Baba Ji once said that we’re like ships lost at sea here.

But the saints and masters come here to give us an anchor to hold on to. They remind us of our true source and our divine heritage. They tell us that being in the human form we have the potential and the opportunity to think about God, to search for God, and to find God. And they give us the guidance and the support that we need to do this. They tell us that this is the real purpose and value of the human form.

Guru Ram Das describes the value of the human form when he writes:

The human body is a great ocean,
which is fully filled with diamonds,
emeralds, rubies and gems.
He who has supreme good luck
recorded on his brow,
excavates and mines them out
under the Guru’s instruction.³

When he compares the human body to a great ocean fully filled with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and gems, he’s referring to the fact that God’s creative energy, the Word or the Shabd, is within the human body. And he’s telling us that when we have the great good fortune, the supreme good luck, to meet a Master and follow his instructions, then we have the potential to discover this treasure within ourselves.

The saints explain that the reason we don’t experience the inner light and sound of God’s divine energy in our present condition is that our mind is always distracted, our attention is always divided. We’re constantly thinking about the outside world and reacting to the events of the world and trying to make the world into what we think it should be.

And this constant activity of the mind keeps our attention preoccupied. In Dawn of Light, Maharaj Sawan Singh explains that everything in this physical creation is “illusory and transitory, changing and changeable, dispersing and distressing.”⁴ And yet this illusory and transitory physical creation is all we ever think about. It takes up all our attention, time and energy.

The saints tell us that our constant thoughts about the outside world act as a veil or a blinding screen between the soul and God. Albert Einstein once said, “Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open.”⁵ And the saints and mystics tell us the same thing. They explain that we can only reason with our intellect; reason is limited and differs from one person to the next. And we can only understand according to our own personal experiences, which are subjective, and again, different for different people. So each one of us sees the world through a very narrow and subjective lens. And yet we take our very limited view to be reality.

The American author Joan Didion published a book called We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. And this is what we do. We create stories about the world, according to our limited and subjective understanding, and then we take those stories to be real. Those stories become our identity. They give us a certain level of comfort in this world. They give us the illusion that we know more than we actually do. And they give us the illusion that we have more control than we really have. And we find it very difficult to accept or to understand and even to listen to anything that doesn’t fit into our story – our limited version of reality. Basically, we close our hearts and we close our minds to anyone or anything that doesn’t meet our expectations.

Baba Ji has said a number of times that part of his job as the Master is to confuse us and to get us to go beyond our comfort zones. And all the saints tell us that we have to get to a point on the spiritual path where we start to question what we think we know. We have to get to a point where we start to question our own limited concepts and ideas and opinions. Hazur used to say that we need someone to shake us by the roots. We need someone to shake us out of our habitual ways of thinking about life.

Rumi writes about this challenge in one of his poems:

Some actions which seem cruel
Are from a deep friendship.
Some demolitions
Are actually renovations.⁶

He also seems to be saying that sometimes our illusions – the stories we tell ourselves – have to be demolished before we can really hear and benefit from what the masters are trying to teach us. We have to get to a point where we realize how little we actually know and how limited our perspective is, before we can be truly receptive to the grace and the guidance of the master.

The saints assure us that God is always with us. He never leaves us. He’s closer to us than we can possibly imagine. We’re all actually a part of him and he’s a part of us. But the noise and confusion of our limited concepts and judgments and opinions block God from our view. As Einstein said, we have to break free from the prison of our own ideas. And the mystics come here to help us do this. They help us demolish the prison walls brick by brick and they give us something much more real and everlasting and true to hold on to. They help us to open our hearts and they help us to see what exists beyond the prison walls.

Baba Ji has often said that we need to learn to make the mind completely still. We need to learn to sit in the silence and be attentive. We need to learn to listen. If we can do this, then we will become aware of the secret of secrets, as Rumi said. Then we’ll become aware of the light and sound of God’s divine energy within ourselves. And then we’ll understand who we really are and who God is. This is what meditation is all about and this is the challenge that each one of us faces individually on this path. This is what the mystics refer to as our real work in life.

In one of his poems, the seventeenth-century saint Niloba writes about this process:

When the heart lives for meditation,
a peace sets in – a tranquility.
Being with mystics leads to
devotion to God, to knowing God.
Happiness in this world and liberation from it,
both are found in their company.⁷

He says being with mystics leads to devotion to God, to knowing God. And when we practise their teachings and dedicate ourselves to meditation – when our heart lives for meditation – a peace sets in, a tranquility sets in.

Baba Ji has said many times that meditation is our life-support system on this path, and all of the mystics talk about the importance of learning to still the mind and open our hearts and turn our attention toward God.

About the practice of meditation, Meister Eckhart writes:

Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude. Wherever we go or with whomsoever we may be, we must learn to find God there.⁸

He tells us that we don’t have to run away from the world in order to find God.

Hazur used to say that even if we try to run away, there’s nowhere to run. We have no choice but to go through our karmas in this world and we have no choice but to face the ups and downs of life, which we have created ourselves. But we can do all this while keeping our mind still and our attention constantly turned toward God. We can learn to find God and realize his presence wherever we are and with whomsoever we may be.

The sixteenth-century mystic Eknath talks about stillness:

Whether the body be
motionless in meditation
or moving in the thick of life,
let the mind stay in the middle,
forever still, pure and free –
this is a yogi, says Eknath.⁹

He says learning to keep our mind “in the middle, forever still, pure and free,” whether we are sitting in meditation or moving in the thick of life, is what makes a yogi, or a true practitioner of meditation.

Learning to keep the mind still helps to free us from the prison of our own thoughts and ideas and interpretations. It helps us to go through life without always reacting to what’s happening around us and without always trying to make the world into what we think it should be, according to our limited concepts. It helps us to eliminate our ego and open our hearts, and it frees us to turn our attention towards God.

Most of us who have been following this path for a while know that this isn’t an easy thing to do. Hazur used to tell us that the mind deceives us so convincingly that we don’t even realize we are being deceived. And he used to tell us that it can take a lifetime or more to control the mind. It only happens by following the Master’s instructions. It only happens by attending to our meditation every day and it only happens by his grace.

All the saints tell us that we should just do our best on this path every day, and then we need to let go. Great Master explained that we should always do our best, according to our limited lights, and then we should let go – then we should trust in the Lord. We need to realize that he knows much more than we do.

Hazur often used to tell us that we shouldn’t be in a hurry on this path, we shouldn’t go to extremes, and we shouldn’t try to force the results according to our will and our idea of what progress should look like. He often reminded us that the effort is in our hands, but the results are not in our hands. In The Master Answers he says, “We always have to do our best under all circumstances, and then naturally only that will happen as he wants it to happen.”¹⁰

In Spiritual Perspectives, he says:

We have to surrender ourselves to the Master. It means that we have to take our ego out of us and blend our whole heart with his heart…¹¹

And he explains:

Getting release from the clutches of the mind is real surrender, and we can do that only by meditation. We cannot do that by the intellect, by austerities, by running away from situations or by strong willpower. It happens only by meditation. … By devoting time to meditation … we are just training ourselves to surrender. All effort is being made to surrender. Whatever time we are giving to meditation, we are putting in effort to surrender. We are trying to surrender to the Father, and that is the only real surrender.¹²

So he explains that through the practice of meditation we’re trying to let go and surrender, we are trying to break free from the prison of our limited concepts. We’re trying to lose ourselves and blend our whole heart with his heart.

But again, this isn’t an easy thing to do. The mystics often remind us that everything of value that we do in life requires time and effort. And learning to let go and trust the master is no different. Many of us have spent lifetimes and lifetimes following the dictates of the mind, and it isn’t necessarily easy for us to change this habit. Hazur used to say, “It isn’t like going to a tea party at your Auntie’s house.”

It does take time and effort to achieve our goal on this path. But there’s really no better way for us to spend our lives. Most of us spend many years working hard to get an education, working hard to earn a living, or working hard to develop a talent we might have. So why not spend many years working hard to realize God’s presence in our lives? Why not spend many years learning to blend our whole heart with his heart?

It may not be easy, but it’s worth the effort. The effort itself brings happiness. As we follow the path, we find that there’s joy in the effort. Even when we fail, we’re happy to be trying to do what the master asks us to do and we’re happy to be on the path. Most of us in this room can’t imagine what our lives would be like without the path and without the master. And most of us wouldn’t even want to try to imagine it.

In summary, the spiritual path involves letting go and losing ourselves and blending our whole heart with his heart. It involves forgetting that we are anything, and knowing that everything is the Father.

The Maharashtrian saint Samarth Ramdas wrote: “The Lord is absolutely close to you … search and find this truth. The association between you and the Lord is unbreakable.”¹³ This is our real work in life and this is what makes living in this creation worthwhile.

In Spiritual Perspectives, Volume III, Hazur says:

Any moment when we think about the Father, when we think about the Master, when we think about the Lord, that is a blessed moment. That makes it worth living in this creation. All other moments are useless.¹⁴

Rumi writes about the enormity of our blessing:

See that caravan of camels loaded up with sugar?
His eyes contain that much sweetness.
But don’t look into his eyes
Unless you are ready to lose all sight of your own.¹⁵

Crazy as We Are: Selected Rubais from Divan-i-kebir of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, tr. Nevit Oguz Ergin, p.4
Maharaj Charan Singh, The Master Answers, #498
Guru Ram Das in Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Volume II, p.145
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, #64
Albert Einstein quoted in Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, http://www.notable-quotes.com/e/einstein_albert_ii.html
The Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks, p.68
Many Voices, One Song, p.273
Treasury of spiritual wisdom: A collection of 10,000 inspirational quotations, p.441.
Many Voices, One Song, p.9
The Master Answers, #404
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #277
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #279
Samarth Ramdas in Isaac Ezekiel, Sarmad: Martyr to Love Divine, p.151
Spiritual Perspectives,Vol. III, p.84
Rumi: In the Arms of the Beloved, tr. Jonathan Star, p.39

Nothing Else Matters - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Nothing Else Matters

This discourse is about the idea that nothing else matters. It’s a theme that we see throughout the writings, satsangs and questions and answers of the Masters. They are giving us a spiritual perspective from the highest level of consciousness, and this opens our eyes to a whole new world of spirituality – a world that we could never know on our own. And for those who want to live in that spiritual reality, the Masters are very clear about what matters and what doesn’t matter.

Compared to the Masters, our vision is very limited, but there are a few things that we can know from simple observation. For example, we know that we are human beings, we know that we were born and we know that we will die, and that right now we are somewhere in between – for many of us here, probably closer to the end. What we don’t know is what happened before we were born, if anything, and what will happen after we die, if anything. Many people believe that there was nothing before we were born and there will be nothing after our death. This is because we identify with the body.

But the saints tell us something very different. They tell us that we are not this body; we are the consciousness that resides in the body, and we can experience this difference through our meditation. They say we have lived countless lifetimes in the bodies of many different species. But this period of time in the human form is very special because only humans have the opportunity to attain union with the Lord, which means that after millions of lifetimes of suffering we can finally achieve liberation. In fact this is the sole purpose of human life.

All saints stress that this highest state of attainment, God-realization, is obtained only through a true Master. And it's only through the Lord's grace that we are fortunate enough to come across a true Master and receive initiation from him in this life.

The soul has never been interested in anything in this world. It has only one desire, and through initiation by a true Master its only desire – to return to its true home – is about to be become a reality. So from the point of view of the soul nothing else matters.

The responsibility for returning the soul to its home has been given to the Master, and he will see that it gets done. But in this process we also have a responsibility, a part to play, so it is essential that we understand what is required from us. This is why Baba Ji asks us to think carefully about what our objective is in this life, so that our decision to follow this path – or to keep following it – is a conscious decision.

Yogi Berra, a great American baseball player, coach and manager, said, “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”¹ The clearer we are about our objective, the more committed we will be to seek the ways and means to achieve it. This type of reflection is rare, but without it how can we make decisions about what really matters, and what doesn’t matter? How can we make the very deep commitment that is required to travel on the path? This is no small commitment – the spiritual journey within the human body extends all the way from this material plane to the highest plane of pure spirit.

The journey begins at the toes of the feet and ends at the top of head. The first part of the journey, to the eye center, is what we must cover in this life. It consists of concentrating the mind and making the attention stay at the eye center. This is a process in which the attention currents are withdrawn from the entire lower portion of the body and focused completely in the eye center. It is here that the inner path begins, and when we arrive at this point a great transformation takes place: the light that we will see is so blissful and the melody that we will hear is so enchanting that the balance of our attention that weighed heavily toward the world now shifts from the outside to the inside.

Think of a balancing scale. The weight on one side represents how much of our attention we put into the world through all of our desires and attachments. And on the other side, the weight represents the amount of interest we have for our spiritual practice. In the beginning the scale weighs heavily to the worldly side. Our thoughts and our loves are in the world. But through our meditation, by coming to satsang, by doing seva and by living the Sant Mat way of life, little by little, as we get some concentration our interest begins to shift. We experience some peace and bliss and happiness in our meditation even before we have any progress, and that gives us a detached outlook on everything in the world.

At some point in our lives the inner eye will open and we will enter within, whether it’s during our lifetime or as we near the end – and we will meet our Master there. It is here that our perspective will take a gigantic shift. When Hafiz went inside and saw his Master this is what he had to say:

I have little interest in that holy stone or in the arch thereof. For me, my Master's forehead is the Ka'aba shrine, and his eyebrows are the sacred arch. Within the length and breadth of these is my world confined. For the rest I have no care. Whether the world survives or perishes, whether the ship of the world sails on or flounders, whether the fortunes of the world wax or wane, I remain wedded to Thee, I prize Thee alone. I am enamored of thy alluring face. I am intoxicated by thy resplendent beauty.²

When devotees meet their Master within they lose interest in everything else. For them the Master becomes everything – nothing else matters. To reach this state we must go through the same process in our meditation that one goes through at the time of death, when all the soul currents are withdrawn from the lower part of body and brought to the eye center. This is referred to as dying while living. This is the object of our meditation and it is this state that is exalted by all saints and mystics. Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

By withdrawing our consciousness to the third eye and listening to the Music of the Sound Current, the Audible Life Stream, our mind and soul together rise out of the tomb of this body and become free from it. By the grace of the Master, we cut asunder our attachments with the world and forget its troubles and miseries. Daily, through the practice of meditation, we die. We die to live, to enjoy the eternal bliss and peace of our True Home, and live forever.³

So this act of dying before our death, or reaching the eye center before the clock runs out, becomes our objective. And the only means to achieve this objective is through our meditation. Since we don't know when this life will come to an end, we need to approach this goal with a sense of urgency, and the understanding that nothing else matters makes us more focused on this goal.

Think about a person who is deep under water and is trying to get to the surface. He only has a limited amount of oxygen in his lungs and if he doesn't get to the surface before the air runs out he drowns. The air in his lungs is the time we have left in this life, and his effort to get to the surface is our meditation – working to bring our attention to the eye center. If he gets to the surface he will finally be able to breathe. He will find life. He will live.

He understands that nothing else matters except getting to surface. If he uses his precious oxygen for anything else he may be jeopardizing his chances of getting to the surface. As the German philosopher Goethe points out:

Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.⁴

So this understanding that nothing else matters makes us question all the things in this world that take our attention. It is the mind's love of the world that is keeping us back. Our attachments, our desires, our thoughts and our loves are all firmly in the world, and they keep us from rising up.

We should ask ourselves if anything in this world has ever brought us happiness. There is a very insightful line in Ecclesiastes, which was attributed to King Solomon about 1,000 years before Christ. He says:

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.⁵

Another word for “vanity” is meaningless, and “under the sun” means in this world. So he is saying that everything we do in this world is meaningless. We have been running after all these things for so long, and we have never found what we are looking for. It is just like grasping for the wind. And when we open our hand, there's nothing there.

So Soami Ji Maharaj advises:

Now you have this human body,
do something for yourself.
Don't toil vainly in this world –
it is only a passing dream.
Both body and home are unreal;
why exhaust yourself over an illusion?⁶

If we want to be successful, if we want to achieve our objective before the clock runs out – and we are in a race against time – we cannot treat this path as a hobby. It cannot be only a part of our life. It has to become our whole life. It has to be the focus of everything we do. Everything we do has to be done in relation to the path and our practice.

We have heard that meditation is a twenty-four-hour affair. What does that mean? It means that every moment we are living with the remembrance of our Master, our only friend. It means that he is our constant companion, that we are thinking about him. We are doing simran or hearing the sound. That we are obeying him and living according to his principles. That we are always doing what he wants us to do – what is pleasing to him. That every decision we make and every choice we make is done from the point of view as to whether it will help us in our meditation. Will it bring me closer to my Master? Will it please him? Will it serve him?

We have to go through each day and earn a living and do our duty to those to whom we are responsible. We have to take care of our bodies, our homes and so many other things. But while we are doing all these things we are remembering him. We should remember that all these things have been given to us by him. He has written the story of our lives and it is for us to play our part well. To do our dharma. To do everything the best we can, especially our meditation, which requires our full concentration.

Concentration is defined as the act of giving one’s attention to a single object or activity, to the exclusion of all else. When we have deep concentration on something, everything else seems to disappear from our awareness. The mind is constantly thinking in words, and all these thoughts keep us from concentrating at the eye center, so the Master has given us simran. The purpose of simran is to replace all other thoughts that may come into the mind, so that it can retreat to its place of origin behind the eyes. This will only happen if the simran is constant and uninterrupted.

Simran is the means of remembering the Master, and of communing with him. Simran is acknowledging his presence with us. It is speaking to him in the language he wants to hear. It is our prayer to him. It is asking for his help and relying on it. And simran will bring us closer and closer to him.

So to keep our mind in simran without allowing other thoughts to intrude is our real work. But it is difficult. It’s a struggle – many think it’s impossible. And some may find it so hard that they just give up, which is unfortunate.

You’ve heard the expression that we need to pick our battles. Of all the battles one can choose to engage in, this is the one that’s most worthy of our effort. This is the one that the Master wants us to fight, and when we really try he is very pleased with us. If we really want to please the Master this is the place to start. It will require confidence, resolve and strength of will in order to succeed. But he is always right behind us, encouraging us and telling us in so many ways that we can do it.

He also helps us in so many ways. For example, our lives are filled with problems, responsibilities and worries that burden our minds, but the Master tells us that if we are attending to our spiritual work he will take care of all those things. We can let go and unload all of our burdens and worries, and they become his problems. If we have faith in him we can empty our minds and engage ourselves in the repetition of the five precious names. Tulsi Sahib said:

From your attention discard all that is other
so He may be seated there.⁷

The object of simran is to bring us within the magnetic orbit of the Shabd, so that we can hear the sound and it can begin to pull us upwards. And it is the Shabd that will eventually lift us above mind and maya and take us back to our source.

As it says in the Adi Granth: shabad guroo surat dhun chelaa.⁸ The Word is the guru, and the soul attuned to the Word is the disciple. The true form of the Master is the Shabd and the true form of the disciple is the soul. This path is Surat Shabd Yoga, which means uniting the soul with the Shabd. And what is it that truly binds us together? It is only love in its highest and purest form, because God is love and the soul is a particle of him.

It is the Master who shows us how to love. He teaches us how to love. He fills us with his love and – miracle of miracles, the greatest of all miracles – we become lovers of the Lord. This is all his grace and this is why we are here. It's the only reason we are here.

Mirdad makes this same point:

Love is the Law of God.
You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live.
No other lesson is required of Man.
And what is it to love but for the lover to absorb forever the beloved
so that the twain be one?⁹

In conclusion, when we finally enter within and meet the radiant form of the Master there, we are so filled with love and we become so engrossed in his beauty that the mind loses interest in everything else. For the lover nothing else exists. There is a desire to lose our identity so that we are not separate from him – we want to remove anything and everything that stands between us and him. We realize that only the Satguru is deserving of our love and nothing else matters.

Ken McFarland, I Don't See it that Way: It Looks a Little Different from Up Here, p.81
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, 2^nd ed., p.287
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, 7^th ed., pp.110–111
Living Meditation, p.43
The Bible (New King James Version), Ecclesiastes 1:14
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II, p.193
Ibid., p.140
Adi Granth, M1, p.943
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.62

Remembering - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Remembering

Helen Keller was left completely deaf and blind by an illness that struck when she was nineteen months old, yet she became a world famous author, activist and lecturer. In 1924 she ‘listened’ to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with her hand, placing it on the speaker of a radio that was broadcasting the music. She later wrote a letter of thanks to the New York Symphony Orchestra:

What was my amazement to discover that I could feel … all the instruments and voices together burst forth, an ocean of heavenly vibration … As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marvelled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others – and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine. … Let me thank you warmly for all the delight which your beautiful music has brought to my household and to me.¹

What Helen acheived is astounding – a seemingly impossible quest to experience life fully. And who can imagine the depth and range of our capacity to experience life? Only the true teachers know our true potential, and they alone come to help us realize it.

Helen’s access to a world of music and light began with her teacher Annie Sullivan, who saw the potential hidden within this untamed child who was struggling and scratching just to survive in her prison of darkness and silence and isolation. Annie saw Helen’s potential to leave the prison, to explore and experience the world outside herself, to love and be loved – to become a true human being.

Annie Sullivan was able to do the seemingly impossible, yet the first step was simply to make a connection with this wild, furious little person who lived in a world alone. It was touch that turned the key. Annie initiated the journey with the touch of her hand on Helen’s. With this first simple touch, Helen’s awakening began.

The journey these two took together is a mystery: a teacher, a student and the alchemy of love. This life is all mystery – we really know nothing, we understand nothing. And yet, Helen Keller remembered something. And we too remember something. The poet William Wordsworth writes:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere it’s setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.²

What is this home – this God – that we’ve all but forgotten? Soami Ji Maharaj tells the tale:

In the beginning there was only One, then there were two, and then three, then many, then thousands and lakhs, and finally there were countless beings. Now he who finds a perfect Sat Guru, who is one with the One and is the form of that One, will succeed through his grace in extricating himself from the illusion of the many and reach his Real Home.³

Soami Ji’s words somehow ring true: somewhere within our being we remember Oneness, we remember wholeness. But how do we get there from here? How do we remember, how do we rediscover the Real? It begins and ends with grace, and grace takes form in the living Master, whose very being makes us remember that something. The Creator steps down from the formless into form, as the Master, who gives us his hand, walks with us, teaches us, and leads us within to his sound and light form – and then even onwards, to the formless, boundless One.

Again, all mystery. In Legacy of Love we read:

The true living Master is such a great mystery, the mind can scarcely comprehend it. If, for one’s entire life, one were to contemplate this key to God’s plan of redemption, one would be fortunate to penetrate even the surface of this mystery. How can God take an unsuspecting human being and transform him into a saint? How can a mortal being be infused with the power to connect other human beings to the Shabd, that power which sustains the creation? How can a person be empowered to take others back to the Father’s home from which they came aeons and aeons ago?⁴

We first meet that Mystery, the Master, right out here in the dark, dense, frightening world of matter. In this shadow world, the mind and senses direct our every action and tell us the Great Lie, that we are separate from everyone else, that we are alone, and it’s ‘every man for himself’ – that love is impossible.

But then we see that being. We don’t know who he is, we don’t know what he is, but there is something about him. We’ve never met anyone like him, yet he is more vast, more radiant, more present, more sweet than anyone or anything we’ve ever seen.

We want to be with him, with that beauty. That’s all we know. The Master has awakened our memory of that something we’ve forgotten. And then he says, just as Tulsi Sahib says to his beloved disciple Taqi:

Listen, O Taqi, keep your gaze fixed on your Master
who has offered you his hand.
Leave it not through negligence, if you long to see
the splendour of your Beloved.
His grace will lead you to his very presence,
without any fear or danger on the way.⁵

The Master tells each one of us: Take my hand, don’t let me out of your sight, follow me within yourself to the core of your being, where you will meet your Beloved face to face.

We say: I don’t know if what you say is true, but you are the highest authority I’ve ever come across, so I will try to do what you tell me to do.

And he says: Good enough, just begin, and begin again, and never stop beginnning. So we begin the journey. And Maharaj Sawan Singh tells us it is an inner quest:

Man is a wonderful creation. He not only carries his past history with him; but the whole creation, visible and invisible, and the Creator of all are within him, and he has been gifted with the capacity to see all that lies in him and to be one with his Creator.

The search is to be made within one’s self and it costs nothing. The whole thing lies behind the veil of the mind. When the mind has been made motionless, that which lies behind the veil becomes visible.⁶

Elsewhere the Great Master says, “You live, move and have your being in him.”⁷ It is as if we are swimming in God, yet all the time we’re feeling lost and wondering where he is. But Great Master has just said he is in us and we are in him. We are like countless bubbles in the ocean of the One. What’s inside the bubble is the same as what’s outside the bubble – it’s just a thin membrane of mind that makes us think we are not the ocean. It’s just this thin membrane of mind that makes us feel alone and cut off from love. The bubble is all we know.

When the mind becomes motionless, the bubble dissolves, the veil disappears. And the Master gives his initiates a part to play in making the mind motionless. He gives the gift of a practice – a practice for remembering the one we’ve forgotten. Tulsi says, “Keep your gaze fixed on your Master if you long to see the Beloved.” Keeping our gaze fixed on the Master is the practice of remembering, the practice of simran. We repeat the five unique names he has given us to remember him and remember him and remember him. Sheikh Abu Said said:

The true saint lives in the midst of other people.
He rises in the morning, eats and sleeps when needed.
He buys and sells in the marketplace just like everyone else.
He marries, has children, and meets with his friends.
Yet never for an instant does he forget God.⁸

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Ji, “What do you remember about your Master?” He said, “I am only remembering my Master.”

Our sacred part to play is this remembering. Simran – the Sanskrit root means both to repeat and to remember. What we repeat, we remember, and what we remember we repeat… and love grows. Hazur says:

The path of God-realization is both easy and simple. By repetition we have to withdraw our body consciousness from the nine portals to the eye focus; by contemplation on the form of the Master we have to make it motionless there; and by listening to the Divine Music that constantly resounds there, we have to reach the place whence it emanates. Simran is the first and the most essential step. Unless its course, which is both long and tedious, is completed, we can hardly gain the other two states. Therefore, we have to practise simran so assiduously that even while talking, it should continue to roll on its course. The five Holy Names must spin ceaselessly around their axis. Sitting, standing, walking, eating, awake or asleep, the repetition must go on.⁹

Ceaselessly. Ceaselessly. How does ceaseless ever happen? We repeat and remember him, repeat and remember. Then we forget. Then we begin again to repeat and remember with the five names. But these names we’ve been given to repeat are not just any names, any words. They are infused with his love, his power, his magnetism to pull our attention to him at the eye focus. Great Master tells the real nature of simran:

What is this Repetition? This repetition is the Lord himself. He is also the reciter. This recitation is nectar personified.

He himself makes us repeat,
And he does the repetition himself.
He himself is the nectar, he is the dear one,
And he himself is the taste of the nectar.¹⁰

He says that the Lord himself is the simran. So this must mean that every time we step our mind into simran we are stepping into his stream of love, on the way to the river of Shabd, and fianlly to the Ocean of love. So we just keep stepping our attention back into him, until one day there is no thought – just the stillness in which we can receive him.

Rumi talks about the heart of this process:

The gold you carry
is in a thousand pieces. …
Your mind
is sleeping a hundred dreams
each colored by a separate desire.

Should you desire to be as bright
as Damascus and Samarqand
let Love
collect your scattered selves
and turn you into a place of delights

When you have collected
your gold
and from every falsehood
separated every ounce
then only it may become worthy
of receiving the seal of the Emperor. ¹¹

Our attention is our gold; it is our treasure to spend on him. Our attention is the only thing we can give him, and it is the only thing he asks us to give.

But all these precious bits of attention are stuck to the earth. Maharaj Ji gave a graphic picture of the situation:

We human beings are like maggots. We are born in dirt, we live in dirt, we love dirt, we eat dirt, we die in dirt and then again we are reborn in dirt. Everything we see in this physical creation is dirt – it is transient and will perish – and yet we are attached to it.¹²

At this point much of our attention is covered in dirt, but when we collect it in simran and place it at his feet within, it will shine. Hazur told a disciple how to do this:

Q: Could you explain to me about doing simran with love and devotion? To me these are just words, and I don’t understand what they mean.

A: Put your whole mind in these words; you will automatically feel the love and devotion. Let no other thought come in your mind. Let the whole of yourself, the whole of your mind, be in the simran. Love comes automatically.¹³

So simple. So not easy. That’s why Tulsi tells Taqi, “Arduous is the way to the destination of love.” It is arduous, because our attention is the one thing we don’t want to give him. It’s just the nature of the mind. It doesn’t want to go still and die.

But Maharaj Ji has told us, “Let the whole of yourself, the whole of your mind, be in the simran. Love comes automatically.” So we simply have to practise and practise and practise bringing our attention to him, in the simran, through the simran. Love will come, he says.

Practise makes perfect. The more we practise anything, with attention, the more our experience of it expands. How this transformation happens is yet again a mystery, but it happens. The world-renowned pianist Van Cliburn practised the scales endlessly, until one day he was free to fly effortlessly on the notes of the great composers. Children practise riding a bike endlessly, riding and falling off, until one day they suddenly can ride the bike.

Hazur Maharaj Ji said, “Meditation creates love, it generates love, it strengthens love.” We might say that he performs this alchemy: we practise and he makes perfect. We circle and circle around the axis of simran, we get on that bike again and again and again, and fall off again and again and again, but he turns our repetition into mastery and one day we ride the bike with no hands. One day we won’t even need the bike to fly. With our tiny bit of discipline, he brings us freedom.

It may seem slow, this collecting tiny increments of attention and laying them at his feet. And it is arduous. But so what? What is our objective? Arduous is a tiny sacrifice to make for the gift of perfect love.

And so we practise singing the one song he likes to hear, until our song is perfected – until the simran dies out in stillness. And in the silence we begin to listen to his song of love, the Shabd. Maharaj Jagat Singh, said:

Contact the living Master and attune yourself to the Voice of the Lord within, which calls you day and night. This is the message of the Saints.¹⁴

Silence and stillness is the pivot to the world within, to the Shabd. Baba Ji has said that we have to be still in order to experience the depth and intensity of love. And he often quotes the Bible: “Be still and know that I am God.”¹⁵

Now this practice of stilling the mind and awakening to love is a long and winding road; the heart sometimes feels chilly, the longing feels faint. We fail and fail to collect the gold of our attention and offer it at his feet:

One moment you are all I know, Friend.
Next moment eat, drink and be merry …
O Friend, how will this scatteredness that is me
Find its way to you?¹⁶

But it appears the game is rigged. There seems to be a method to the madness. Rumi encourages us:

Remember,
it is by failures that lovers
stay aware of how they’re loved.
Failure is the key to the kingdom within.¹⁷

It is through all our failed efforts to do simran, dhyan and bhajan that we begin to discover who is doing it all. Who has put us here, whose plan it is that we experience the pain of living as strangers in a strange land, and who it is who wakes us from the dream and makes us remember him and want to go home with him.

No matter how forgetful or rebellious we are, no matter how ignorant or arrogant we are, the Friend within shows us only mercy and compassion, grace and forgiveness. Our only job is to persist, to keep on keeping on with the practice of remembering him. And slowly, slowly we experience his love, his radiance, his song a little more and a little more. He is opening the door to our home in him. Sarmad says:

The ocean of his generosity has no shore.
The tongue is powerless to thank,
the heart too bewildered to understand.
Though my sins are many
his compassion is greater still –
I swim in the seas of disobedience
but I do not drown.¹⁸

Perhaps our meditation is nothing, finally, but thank you, thank you, thank you.

Letters of Note: Vol. 2: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, compiled by Shaun Usher, p.36
William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality, Ode 536
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Prose, #171
Legacy of Love, p.44
Tulsi Sahib, Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, 3^rd ed., p.80
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #68
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, #2
Legacy of Love, p.393
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses Vol. I, 5^th ed., p.106
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. III, p.5
Masnavi Book IV: 3288–3290, tr. Vraje Abramian
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses Vol. II, 1^st ed., p.280
Spiritual Perspectives,Vol. II, #223
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, 8^th ed., p.11
Bible, Psalm 46:10
Sheikh Abu Said, Nobody, Son of Nobody, tr. Vraje Abramian, p.7
Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion, tr. Coleman Barks, p.62
Isaac Ezekiel, Sarmad – Martyr to Love Divine, bait 251

Diamonds - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Diamonds

Diamonds. We all know that diamonds are considered the most precious of all jewels. They have a brilliance, and the expensive ones have a most desired clarity. In many countries a diamond ring has become almost a mandatory part of becoming engaged to be married – all due to what is considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns in modern history: “Diamonds are forever.” That’s the line – Diamonds are forever. It struck a chord with women, who started equating the diamond with a man’s perpetual love. It struck a chord with men, who started seeing the diamond’s value as indestructible, without an end. A diamond is forever. The love lasts. The investment lasts. Diamonds last – or so they say.

Interestingly, the diamond industry has a word for this phenomenon of great value. They call it ‘illusion.’ They define it as “a projection of value onto an object (usually a diamond) based solely on subjective psychological criteria, not any objective standard of measurement.”¹ The diamond trade runs on illusion, on perceived value.

Now you might think that diamond dealers are immune to this phenomenon, but quite the contrary. Research shows that:

When a dealer owns a diamond, it’s not just another emotionless asset that he’s invested in … When he buys a diamond, he loves that diamond. He believes his diamond is the nicest diamond he’s ever seen in that particular color and class of clarity. He has built up a lot of illusion in the stone.²

So while dealers understand the concept of a diamond’s illusion, they still “exist within the bubble and depend upon it for their livelihood.” They may recognize that a diamond has no intrinsic value and that its value depends upon the perception of the owner, the buyer, or the populace at large. They understand the concept. Yet even the dealers are caught up in the beauty, the allure, the perceived value of diamonds. They love their diamonds and will not give them up.

And so it is with us. What is a diamond? A bit of carbon, a bit of earth, a piece of this world. Saints tell us it is the perceived value we give to this creation, our attachment – in addition to our karmas – that keeps us bound to this world, this plane of consciousness. In many ways we love this world and look for love from it in return. We certainly invest in this world – not just monetarily, but with the time and attention we spend physically, emotionally, and intellectually. And we expect a return on that investment. While we may recognize the concept that everything here is illusion (maya) and has no intrinsic value, we can hardly imagine it otherwise. We’ve been caught in this bubble for so long that we are part of the consciousness that keeps this system going. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh was asked: “We are told that all things in our life are an illusion or a dream. Is that right?” He replied:

What it means is that what we see has no reality – reality in the sense that nothing will exist, nothing will remain, everything is perishable, it’s not everlasting.

That means it is not ‘forever.’ Diamonds are not forever. Hazur Maharaj Ji goes on:

Flesh is no more, so flesh is not reality. … Where are those old civilizations now? New civilizations are coming up; old ones are vanishing. What is real here? Everything is perishable, nothing is everlasting. In that sense, it is illusion.

Only he is real, whom we do not see, whom we do not know. What we see, what we are supposed to know, what we think we know has no reality at all.³

So while we are in this world, there is some reality, a perceived reality, but it doesn’t last. Nothing here lasts forever. And the saints tell us that we must rise to a higher level of consciousness if we want to perceive the One who is real, who does last forever.

Because this world is such a charade, an illusion, how foolish we are to base our lives and our reasons for acting the way we do on such an unsteady foundation. By its very nature, anything that exists in the outer world has to change. Whatever at one moment brings us great pleasure must at another time bring us equal pain – if only because of the fact that we cannot hold on to that pleasure; we cannot stop or catch any single ‘happening’ and keep on experiencing that happening, for it has already become something else, like a movie going on playing. To the extent that we try to hold on to those experiences and feelings, to the same extent we feel pain because of our inability to do so, and to the same extent we are attached to them. The Persian poet, Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil-Kheir, wrote:

The deeper your involvement here,
The harsher your pain and suffering.
Donkeys with colorful ornaments and loud bells
Are groomed for heavier loads!⁴

So, who can afford to be a donkey carrying such loads? We need to lighten our load, let our baggage slip away. Hazur wrote: “All unhappiness in life is the result of our attachment … Where there is no attachment, there is no misery.”⁵

The saints tell us it is in our interest to seek the One, the reality, because we are not happy here, caught in this ever-changing dream world. Hazur explains:

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.⁶

He hits the nail on the head. We’re not happy here. Think of that. But it’s a boon even if we think about the Father, a greater boon if we want to reach Him, a still greater boon if we try to reach Him. Hazur continues:

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.⁷

But what about the things we love about this world? What about the investment of time and attention we give people, places, and activities of this world? If we invest positive energy, shouldn’t we get a positive return? Well, we will reap a positive return from a karmic perspective, and that’s certainly better than reaping a negative return. But why expect a return at all? We do so many things to try to find our self-worth – our value – from outside forces, as if something outside and ever changing could define our intrinsic value. We are children of God, not children of this world! Yet we do so many things to try to get some satisfaction from external events and activities. And even if we get some satisfaction, it doesn’t last. So we try again, perhaps harder, and invest even more in an ever-moving target. It’s a game we cannot win, but we are in love with our diamonds – whatever they may be. This world is a very inconstant lover. It’s time to break off this relationship.

Hazur Maharaj Ji was asked, “Can we experience joy in this life?” He replied:

Where is the joy?… Where is that peace which you are trying to find in this creation? There is no peace. … The more you … try to find joy outside, the more miserable you become, the more unhappy you become. We are becoming more frustrated every day. Where is that peace which we are searching for outside? We just live in illusion and self-deception. The more we try to find peace outside, the more miserable we are becoming every day. … If there is any joy, it is within us. It cannot be outside at all.⁸

And to find that joy within, we need a teacher, a guide, a constant companion. We need a living Master who is one with the Father and knows all the intricacies of the journey, both inside and outside. Hazur said:

We always need a teacher. We are so much under the sway of the mind, of the senses, that unless there is somebody to shake us from the roots, to take us back to him, we can never reach him. We are in a deep, deep sleep. We are all dead. We need somebody to put life in us.⁹

And what is life? Shabd is the life force that is the essence of everything that is. It permeates everything and can be experienced in a transcendent state as sound and light.

Every particle in this creation is permeated with the essence of the Lord, which we call the soul, and that gives it life.¹⁰

So the saints attach us to that sound and light within, that Shabd, Nam, or Word of the Bible. They give us our meditation so that we too may experience and follow that Shabd back to the Father. Hazur again said:

And that love of Shabd and Nam within is so much higher and purer that we automatically forget worldly love, worldly faces, worldly objects. That is the nature of the mind. If you find something much more beautiful, you automatically run away from the other things to which you are attached. … So mystics, with the help of Shabd and Nam, detach us from the whole creation and permanently attach us to the Shabd, to the divine Father within.¹¹

Our meditation not only focuses and elevates our consciousness so we may reach the Father, but our meditation also detaches us from the bubble of this world with all its beauty, allurement, and burrs. Meditation could not be a greater gift – except perhaps the gift of the Master himself. As Hazur said:

Saints just come for that purpose, to set us free from the world. They do not come to solve our problems. They come to help us to rise above these problems…. Saints give us the faith to live in this world and yet not be affected by this world.¹²

But the saints are even more than teachers and guides. Because they have realized the Father, they have become one with the Father and one with the Shabd, they become a medium for us to become one with Shabd. Hazur Maharaj Ji explained:

The Master is nothing but the sound, and sound is nothing but the Master. Our real Master is Sound, the Word, the Bani, the Shabd, the Nam – give it any name.¹³

And again:

Master is the medium between the soul and the Lord, and he is concerned with the soul – to help it to develop, to reach to the level of the Father. … That Word which has created the whole creation is our own Master and that is within every one of us. … In the flesh, Master has realized that Word within, and we are connected through him to that Word.¹⁴

We are indeed blessed to have been found by a Master. We are even more blessed if we follow his instructions and do our meditation to the best of our ability, regularly and punctually every day. Meditation is our gateway. Meditation will prick the bubble of world consciousness and take us to a higher, lasting, divine consciousness. Meditation will take us to the real Master within. Hazur said:

Meditation changes our attitude on life. Meditation makes us receptive to his grace and his grace clears all the karmas. Meditation makes you a lover. It helps you to lose your identity, individuality … It helps you to merge to become another being. It makes you a real lover, to lose your own identity. If you go to the karma side, I think if by meditation we have to clear them, God knows how many ages we may need to clear our karmas by meditation. It [meditation] only makes us a lover of God and detaches us from the creation.¹⁵

Meditation makes us a lover of God and detaches us from the creation. Meditation will also make us receptive to his grace, which will eventually clear our vast residue of karmas. But the other thing that keeps us here in this creation is our attachments, and our meditation helps to detach us from those attachments, from our fascination with the allure, the illusion, of this world. We need our meditation to break the hold that the world has on us. Our meditation slowly and slowly breaks those chains. Then we will be free. Master Charan Singh wrote:

The most important thing for a satsangi to achieve is detachment from the world and attachment to Shabd … by regular attention to simran and bhajan.¹⁶

Hazur was asked: “I suppose, Maharaj Ji, that any satsangi who does his meditation daily, diligently and devotedly, for two and a half hours or more in the morning hours can reasonably expect to reach his spiritual destination?” The Master replied:

Definitely. You see, you not only make spiritual progress within, but with regularity in meditation and living the Sant Mat way of life, your whole attitude and approach to the world and worldly problems changes. The time comes when you feel you’re not attached to anybody at all. And that is the main factor in our not coming back to this creation at all, no matter how little progress we have made within. Our whole attitude and approach to life change by meditation, by living this way of life, and automatically we get detached from everything. And that detachment pulls us out of this creation.¹⁷

“Lose Your Illusion,” Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept/Oct 2014, p.16
“Lose Your Illusion,” Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept/Oct 2014, p.16
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.24
Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil-Kheir, Nobody, Son of Nobody, tr. Vraje Abramian, p.10
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter 231
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.25
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.25
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.374
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.468
Quest for Light, letter 268
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, pp.462–3
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.375
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.483
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, pp.483–4
Maharaj Charan Singh, Dera, 6 April 1981
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, letter 56
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.377

I Love You - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

I Love You

Let’s visit the topics of love and transformation, beginning with the Bird and Turtles story.

Two birds were sitting at the top a tree observing a baby turtle. The turtle struggled to climb up to a branch and then jumped off, flapping its four little feet madly and crashing to the ground. Once again, the poor turtle struggled to climb up the tree, then jumped off and crashed to the ground.

The birds watched the turtle do this a third time and a fourth time. Finally the one bird turned to the other and said, “I think we need to tell him he’s not a bird.”

What can we learn from this story? The first point is that we do not know our true nature. We try to find happiness in this world, we try to fit in, we leap into the mire of lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride. We make the same mistakes over and over.

The second point is that saints are sent by the Lord to adopt us as their own. To make us aware of our true divine nature. They tell us we are spiritual beings and take us into their spiritual family. The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, said:

At the time of initiation by the Master the soul becomes fit for being connected with the Shabd. This moment is considered as the moment of birth in the Master’s family.¹

And the final point is that the Master transforms us from the slow earthbound tortoise into a bird like himself that can soar to the highest heavens. The Master tells us, ‘Come out of this heavy turtle shell and fly. Quit crawling in the mud and filth and lift yourself to the heavens.’

The masters tell us that this turtle shell is the made of lifetimes of karmas. And this shell is fortified with ego and attachment. But if a worm can become a butterfly, why can’t a turtle become a bird? The masters adopt us and transform us within the cocoon of love and meditation. They transform us from sinners wrapped in the hard shell of ego and ignorance into soldier saints.

Initiation by a saint is the ultimate transformative moment. In a letter to a disciple, Maharaj Charan Singh said:

This initiation is not just some ceremony. The Lord has made you his own. He has chosen you for eternal liberation and wishes you to come back to him…. now it is time to show your gratitude to him by doing your bhajan and simran every day with love and devotion.

At the time of initiation the Lord has made us his own! Adopted us. How can we even comprehend what this means? We have been given the greatest gift that one can receive in this existence. We would not trade this gift for billions, for stardom or for power. The saints tell us that all these things perish. Only that which is given by the Master is permanent and stays with us after death.

So Hazur asks us to show our gratitude. “Doing your simran and bhajan” – that is gratitude. And doing it with love and devotion is gratitude.

Sant Charandas, an eighteenth-century saint, describes the Master and tells us of his power of transformation:

Call only on that Master perfect
who has attained the wondrous abode …
because He is merged in the Lord –
just as the drop that merges in the ocean
becomes the ocean itself.
The very darshan of such a one
transforms the atheist into a mystic.²

Sant Charandas tells us that the Master, just with his darshan, can transform the atheist into a mystic. In each of our lives, we come to know the Master is transforming us, that no matter how much progress we think we may or may not have made inside, we see the transformation in our everyday lives. What was our lifestyle before we met him? What was our focus before we met him? He is transforming our lives, but more importantly he is transforming our spirit.

Charandas tells us to “call only on that Master perfect”. Who else can transform us? Only one who has attained the “wondrous abode”. We need a guide who has walked the trail before us. From a giver we can receive only that which he has attained. No one can give us what they do not have.

And what is the best way to “call on” that Master? It is to attend to our meditation. The repetition of each name is a call to the Master. Shams Tabriz, a Sufi mystic writes:

The Master felt my pulse when I was already exhausted…. He told me, “The aim of the lover of God is neither to gain learning nor gather treasures of the intellect, nor to have any connection with gains and losses of this world.”³

Are we not the weak and exhausted? The Master knows we are in dire need of help so he instructs us. He tells us that we will find no success by building our treasure in this world. Not intellectual treasures or worldly treasures. He tells us to cease chasing after the false promises of new things, new fashions, new philosophies. Hazur once wrote that we should not chase after the mirage with constantly receding waters.

“I feel so miserable without you it’s almost like having you here,” as the saying goes. We are miserable without all the people and things of this world, but when we have them, those very things make us miserable. Likewise, our intellectual concepts of which we are so proud become burdens that hold us back.

Now Charandas says to seek a perfect master. We recently heard that Baba Ji was asked about the concept of the perfect master. Baba Ji responded – and this is a parphrase – that perhaps the term should be ‘complete’ or ‘complete master’. How odd that in the dictionary one of the synonyms for complete is ‘perfect’.

What might he mean when he says a master is complete? Completed the course of simran and bhajan? Completed the journey of God-realization? Complete in his devotion to his master? Complete in his devotion to his disciples?

Sant Charandas tells us about the characteristics of the complete master:

A true saint is one who does not want to be worshipped.
He has effaced the vices of mind:
he is ever engaged in the repetition of the Lord’s Nam.
He is not separated from the Lord even for a moment;
he sees him always near.
He speaks only of the Lord and does not engage in idle gossip.
He has rid himself of falsehood, cunning, deceit and fraud.
In his heart dwell continence, truth, contentment
and forgiveness.
He has rid himself of lust, anger and greed,
as well as attachment and pride.
He has no enmity with anyone,
and lives in a state of detachment.⁴

These lines are a wonderful description of the masters and what it means to be complete. But there is something else here. A complete roadmap for the disciple, a to-do list:

Efface the vices of the mind. Turn away from its constant mis-direction.
Engage in repetition, engage in meditation.
Keep him near us in our thoughts and actions.
Get rid of falsehood, deceit and fraud.
Be continent.
Be truthful.
Be content.
Be forgiving.
Rid ourselves of lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride.
Have not enmity for anyone. Not in seva, not in family and not in life.
Be detached.

The complete master and the complete journey have been described by Sant Charandas.

Baba Ji once made the comment, in paraphrase: I am the only one who gets up in the morning and who does not get to decide whether or not to do seva. We see the Master travelling to every far off place whether there are hundreds of thousands or just hundreds. The corners of Africa, Asia, South America, the Caribbean. It seems like he does not have the ability to stay away. That love for every disciple and the duty to every disciple does not allow him to stay away.

Can a parent get up in the morning and say: “I am not going to feed my children today. I am not going to encourage them today. I am not going to love them today.”? Remember, we are his adopted children.

Yet on our end we say: “I have no time do my seva today. It is too difficult to be a good person today – or too costly. There is no time to do my meditation today.”

Let us ask ourselves: If we had just ten percent of the desire to be with him that he has to be with us, where would we be? What would we be doing each day? In his daily life he shows us the qualities we have to adopt. And he shows us the level of devotion to one’s master that is required. Great Master said:

Whenever we have a desire to express our love for someone, we should try to discover what kind of love the beloved would prefer. We should then inculcate in ourselves those qualities or actions by which the beloved is pleased … When you are able to develop those qualities that are liked by the beloved and he is satisfied that we have actually developed them, he will automatically bestow his love on you.⁵

What qualities does he prefer? Sant Charandas has given us the answer already: Kindness. Sweetness. Surrender. Forgiveness, detachment, humility, contentment. Strict adherence to the four vows. Seva and attending satsang. Meditation, meditation, meditation.

There is a bit of special advice in the Great Master’s quote. He is telling us to stop thinking about what we think a disciple should be and what we think demonstrates our love, and instead make the effort to discover the Master’s qualities and to develop those qualities. And now Hazur describes this process:

Love has the characteristic of becoming another human being. To lose your own identity, lose your own individuality, that is the characteristic of love. Love never wants the other one to become like you. Love makes us want to become like another one.⁶

Every day we see the world wanting to bring God down to our level, to bring the teachings of the saints down to our level. We see the world using spiritual teachings to justify the worst possible behavior. We want to remodel the teachings to fit the mood of modern society. We want teachings to be ‘politically correct’. The teachings of the true masters come from no culture, no race, no religion and no country. They come directly from the Lord.

So we should not try to mould the teachings to our way of life, but rather mould our way of life to the teachings. God help us if we made the Master behave like us! We have to be like him. As Hazur said, “Love makes us want to become like another one.”

The Master looks after each and every disciple as a mother looks after a sick child. Hazur said:

We are all diseased by becoming victims of the senses, so we are washed; we are cured of all these diseases and again the soul shines. That is the miracle which the mystics perform.⁷

The love the Master has for the disciple is the only imperishable love that we will find in this world. The saints tend to each disciple according to his or her needs and they provide each one with the individual miracle cure.

In everything he says, in everything he does, what is he saying, what is he telling us? It is three very simple words – I love you. Every quote in this talk and everything we have covered boils down to this simple idea. He can’t stay away, he adopts us into his spiritual family, he tends to us, he brings us here.

Saints are waterfalls of love; they are a vessel through which God’s love flows forth into this world. We jump into that pool formed by the waterfall and it becomes a stream, then a river, and then it flows into the ocean.

Now we say: I love you too, Master.
Hazur said, “If you say you love the Master without meditation, you are just deceiving yourself.”⁸
Repeat: “If you say you love the Master without meditation, you are deceiving yourself.”
A third time: “If you say you love the Master without meditation, you are deceiving yourself.”

This is a satsang in a sentence. We say we love the Master and his reply is that if we say this, but we are not attending to our meditation, we are deceiving ourselves. Now let us see how Hazur expands on this idea.

The Master is not the body, he is the Shabd within. How would you merge in that without meditation?… we have to merge in that, to become that being. How can we do it without attending to meditation? Love helps you to meditate – love forces you to meditate. If you love somebody, you always want to be with the person concerned.⁹

If we love the Master and he’s within us, we will put all our efforts toward being with the Master. He shows his ‘I love you’ by saving us, initiating us, taking care of us, guiding us. Our ‘I love you’ is our meditation – with our regularity, our full time, our concentration.

Charandas spoke about meditation:

Do the repetition with a still mind …
He who repeats Nam with focused attention
detaches himself from the body;
he merges in the Lord of truth, consciousness and bliss –
and becomes silent….¹⁰
Do not permit the mind to run out;
block its way, encircle and surround it.
Occupy it in contemplation of the Lord.
Listen carefully, there is one more way
to discipline the mind,
of which I now speak:
Repeat the Lord’s Nam, and it will tire
of its restlessness.

We have all heard the story of the tortoise and the hare. But we do not want to win this worldly race. The rabbit can have it. Few have heard the story of the tortoise and the bird, where the tortoise sits in the tree of love under the watchful eye of the bird. It sits and does its meditation. It ignores the temptations on the ground below. Its shell falls away and its wings grow. And finally it flies away.

And another poem from Sant Charandas:

I have given my all to my devotee;
behold the love that I have for him.
From being formless, I have taken on form –
A coarse body of the five elements….
A hundred times more than a father
does the mother love the son.
Inwardly she takes care of him,
while outwardly admonishing and rebuking him.
The Lord’s love
is a hundred times that of the mother.
The Master’s love
is a hundred times that of the Lord.
O Charandas, this is how Sukdev loves you
and removes your faults.¹¹

In other words – I love you.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 6^th ed., p.132
T.R. Shangari, Sant Charandas, p.92
Quoted in Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, pp.243–44.
Sant Charandas, p.94
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, 5^th ed., p.148
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #265
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #1
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #35
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #36
Sant Charandas, pp.409,133
Sant Charandas, p.124

Thankful Beyond Words - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Thankful Beyond Words

Saint Paltu writes:

There was another Paltu.
I was mistaken for him and given devotion.
Devotion was given to me by mistaking me for
another of my name.
I took the wealth meant for another and secreted it.
It was fated for another but was given to me.
I alone know it, nobody else does.
I offered to return it but it was not accepted.
This was a mistake by the great One;
what he said I did.
What he said I did O Paltu! You are a great sinner
and the Lord committed a mistake.
There was another Paltu. I was mistaken for him
and given devotion.¹

We all know that the Lord doesn’t make mistakes. Yet we also know that when we look into our hearts, as Paltu did, we feel that we are not worthy or deserving of this great good fortune that the Lord has given us. So it must not be our worthiness the Lord looks for when he selects us to be one of his own. He must be using different criteria.

For reasons we are not able to comprehend, he has chosen us as his marked souls, and our ultimate spiritual development is in his hands. It is of no use to try to figure out “why me?” It is only for us to accept his grace with gratitude and humility, and to try our best to live by his instructions and guidance.

We all have vastly different stories of how we came to the path; we all have come into this life with different circumstances. Regardless of our life story, however, we are all miraculously following this wondrous path, thankful beyond words to be under the shelter of our Master. As unlikely as it may seem, he has pulled us here. We may think that this is our doing, that we have found the Master, but the truth is the Master has found us. He planted a seed deep in our soul. He tended and nurtured it until just the right moment. Then he entered our lives. Rumi reflects on this:

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.²

It may have taken a long time for the conditions to be right – for the meeting to come about – but our connection to the Master had always been there. That first love story, that longing for love, that first awareness that we are separated from our true home, awakened something lying dormant within us.

We didn’t know it but we had been searching for the Master our entire lives. We were born with an unfulfilled yearning, with an empty place deep in our heart. The only way to fulfill that yearning is to replace it with love.

Under a beguiling picture of Hazur Maharaj Ji in the book Legacy of Love is this quote:

You don't fall in love with the Master; Master has fallen in love with us. And then, we become restless – we feel we have fallen in love with him. The pull is from within.³

One of the favorite topics of the saints is love. Hafiz tells us:

The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well.
As a matter of fact,
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all die!⁴

In a letter to a disciple in Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh describes the four signs of the Master’s mercy:

The number one sign of his being merciful to anyone is that he creates in him dissatisfaction with the worldly routine and a longing to seek the truth.⁵

Does that sound like you? When you look around at the world does everything seem right to you? Can you even make sense of the world we live in? When we take that first look at the world around us with open and clear eyes, we become aware of a profound dissatisfaction and a longing to seek something higher.

It is precisely at this point, when we are dissatisfied with the world and longing for the truth, that the second sign appears. Great Master continues: “The second sign is that he brings him in touch with a Master.” First he gives us the longing and then he gives us the comforter. Great Master then concludes:

The third sign is that the Master imparts to him the secret of the sound current. The fourth sign is that the initiate works diligently and faithfully on the sound current and starts on his spiritual journey.⁶

The key part of that last sentence is: “the initiate works diligently and faithfully on the sound current.” To work diligently and faithfully becomes our life’s work once we have been given the gift of Nam, the sound current. This work is our reason for being. There is nothing else about this life that will give us the same joy and satisfaction, the same peace and contentment, as working diligently towards this goal. And working diligently is really all we have to do. He takes that effort and turns it into something miraculous. Like the alchemist who turns lead into gold. We give him the tiniest gram of sincere effort and he turns it into something of immeasurable worth.

The Masters have told us that they will give us their love, their encouragement and their support. But we must do our share. We have a part to play. We must put in the effort.

But look at the extraordinary partnership we have entered into with him. We put in our best effort, do our meditation, live by the four vows – and in return he gives us unimaginable spiritual wealth. We don’t have to achieve any results; we shouldn’t even be concerned with results. We just sit at the same time each day, put in our best effort for the required time, and then we go about our day, guided and directed by the Sant Mat way of life he talks about.

And this partnership gets even better. We have often heard the Masters say that if we will do our meditation they will take care of everything else. Hazur writes:

Please continue with your spiritual practice with increased faith and love, and the Master will take of everything else.⁷

Does this mean that if we do our meditation Master will make sure we have perfect health, a loving family, lots of money, and no trials and tribulations in our life? It doesn’t work like that. We all have our karmas to go through. But he will give us the strength, the understanding, the equanimity and the balance to go through these worldly problems. And he will hold our hand all the while, so we can bear the ups and downs of life.

All he asks from us is our effort. Our begging, our trying, our knocking at the door is the only offering he asks from us. This is our share of the partnership. He is going to do everything for us. He is going to give us everything. But we must be receptive to his giving. We have to give him something to work with. A disciple wrote:

In the early hours as I sit in your presence
my heart sings to you.
Please accept this little offering,
and forgive all my failings.
I only have you to turn to.
Enfold my heart with your constant presence,
and fill it with the sweetness of your love.⁸

In the end this is all we hope for, this is all we long for – for him to fill our hearts with the sweetness of his love. His love is the end-all and the be-all for us. Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

There is no bhajan (spiritual practice) greater than love. There is no law higher than love and there is no goal beyond love.⁹

Love is the most powerful force there is, and love is the means by which Master draws us back to him. Saints come to create within us love and devotion for the Father and a yearning to go back to him. Love is the key that opens the door to the inner regions.

When asked to explain love, Hazur said:

Love is to be experienced. Great Master used to give a very beautiful example: if a dumb person eats candy, how will he describe it if you ask him, “What is the taste of the candy?” He will just smile. He won’t be able to say anything at all. Words can’t describe love. Love is to be experienced, love is to be gone through, and language is a very poor expression of love.¹⁰

Therein lies the objective of our practice: to make ourselves receptive to the love of the Master, so that we may experience the sweetness of the love of which he speaks.

In Science of the Soul Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji writes:

Thank you for the appreciation of the Master’s help. … The best and most appropriate way of appreciating his kindness and expressing our gratitude is to give more and more time to bhajan and simran, so that we may go in and contact Nam, and thus have a first-hand experience of everything.¹¹

This sweetness is given to us in proportion to the intensity of our love for him. It may be subtle at first. We start to seek out quiet and peaceful moments and places. We enjoy our own company and periods of solitude. Being with this sweetness of his love that we have tasted becomes the motivating force in our lives. All else becomes stale and tepid.

But Hazur Maharaj Ji now brings up the challenge:

Meditation is a great thing, but even to close ourselves in a room, to sit in one place for meditation, is to our great credit. The mind runs out; the mind doesn’t want to sit at all.¹²

He has identified the problem. The mind is a powerful force, but it runs wild. If we keep allowing that to happen, we are at the mercy of the mind, and the love and sweetness we so dearly want becomes impossible to attain. We are in an epic battle with our mind. Without the constant support and guidance of the Master we would be utterly crushed. But he has given us the weapon to win this battle. He has given us the sword of simran.

Rumi describes the intensity of this battle for our very souls:

Strive, struggle, grapple and wrestle,
None won the battle by weak-kneed submission.
Go on scratching, scraping, and cutting
The stone wall that bars your way.
Cut, hew, gash, break, shatter, demolish, smash,
Rest not for a second, till your very last breath arrives.
Even a worthless effort is better than sleeping,
For the Lord loves our effort, anxiety and struggle.
First put in full effort, then accept what He sends.
Have faith in Him and trust His will.
Not putting in effort is like sleeping among robbers.
A bird found napping is sure to be killed.
Giving up is like sleeping; sleep not on your way.
March on until you reach His gate.
When the Master has put a sword in your hands,
He has clearly expressed his wish.¹³

His wish is that we engage in this battle valiantly and wholeheartedly, using all our strength and resources. Yet he is fully aware of the magnitude of our struggle. He is supporting us and encouraging us, but he does not leave it to us to achieve results. As Rumi said: “First put in full effort, then accept what he [the Lord] sends. Have faith in him and trust his will.”

We are not always satisfied with what we perceive as the results of our meditation. Some of us have been practising meditation for a long time. We expected – hoped – to be further along by now. Sometimes we become disappointed with ourselves. We think, maybe this is just too hard for me. I wasn’t cut out for this path. I don’t have the discipline or the love. Others can do it but I cannot.

But the Masters see it differently. They know our struggle and appreciate every ounce of effort, every round of simran, and every minute of meditation we put in. The path of Sant Mat is a life-long commitment. We need not be impatient or in a hurry. The Master is the trustee of our spiritual wealth and he guards it carefully. We just need to work diligently and faithfully on the sound current. Everything else, everything else is up to him.

If you want to pass a lovely afternoon, make a nice cup of tea, find a pleasant sunny spot and slowly go through the book Legacy of Love. Some people believe it is the most beautiful book ever published. The book is a pictorial celebration of the life and spiritual mission of Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh.

As guru, father, son – and in all the other parts he played – he was the complete and perfect example and role model. He showed us everything: how to meditate, how to live the spiritual life of Sant Mat, how to love, how to laugh, how to make the most of our lives here. He showed us how to take care of our parents, our children and other human beings. The list goes on forever.

And he made it simple for us. For forty years he gave the same basic message: Do your meditation diligently and faithfully, be steadfast on the four vows, and put in your best effort to live the Sant Mat way of life. That is it in a nutshell. When we do that, everything else rests in his loving hands.

And yet, as much as we loved spending time with Hazur Maharaj Ji and as much as we dearly love these times with Baba Ji, we must remember that falling in love with the Master is a means to an end. Everything we see on the outside, and our own bodies as well, will one day return to dust. What will endure? In Legacy of Love a few handwritten notes from Hazur Maharaj Ji reflect on this:

Man’s life does not commence in the womb and never ends in the grave.

Love is a precious treasure; it is God’s gift to sensitive and great spirits.

Congratulations! May you grow and grow to enjoy the Everlasting Life.¹⁴

The mission of the Master is to deliver us to this everlasting life – to the inner, astral regions that he speaks about, teaches us about and entices us with. He is there, waiting patiently for us, in that place which is timeless, eternal and beyond our comprehension. We are his marked souls and he has come to take us back.

Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji speaks of this mission:

With great difficulty he prevails upon his child to accompany him to his palace and see for himself, with his own eyes, what great heritage by right belongs to him.¹⁵

There is a beautiful quote from Hazur Maharaj Ji in Light on Saint John:

Christ says to his disciples …When you come to me inside, I will show you things that you have never dreamed of and that are beyond the comprehension of your mind. … your happiness will know no bounds when you meet me within yourself.¹⁶

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. III, 5^th ed., p.176
The Essential Rumi, rendered by Coleman Barks, p.106
Legacy of Love, p.79
The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, p.47
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #28
Ibid.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, p.141
Anonymous
Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, 1^st ed., #436
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, #296
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, #48
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.94
Based on lines from Jalaluddin Rumi, Masnavi, Book I: 932–1823.
Legacy of Love, p.519
Isaac Ezekiel, Saint Paltu, p.204
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, 6^th ed., pp.144, 146

Intellect and Rationality in Spiritual Practice - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Intellect and Rationality in Spiritual Practice

The subject of this satsang is the role of intellect on the spiritual path, and the rationality behind practising meditation. Probably there is nobody amongst us here who does not know that meditation according to the instruction of the masters is the core of Sant Mat – “the teachings of the saints.” As Maharaj Charan Singh says in Die to Live:

The approach of the mystics has been different in different times according to the people to whom they were explaining the teachings. But the main theme of every saint is that we should attend to our meditation.¹

Explaining the teachings is what the saints and mystics have done throughout the centuries, always appealing to different aspects of the human mind, which – especially in these times – is primarily intellectual. In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

As long as the intellect is there, it has to be satisfied. ‘Why’ and ‘how’ are kings of this age. We call it the scientific age. ‘Why’ is the first thing: Why should I do? How should I do? Because the intellect is there, we must try to satisfy the intellect, at least to some extent; otherwise, it will not let us try to meditate. Intellect is a great barrier in our way and we have to pierce this barrier with the intellect itself.²

The intellect can be an obstacle on the spiritual path, and many times it is. On the other hand, if we lack faith and devotion – if at certain times we are not able to just surrender to what Hazur Maharaj Ji and Baba Ji (Baba Gurinder Singh) told us to do – our intellect can help us to understand or remember why meditation should be a priority in our life. And with the help of our intellect we might see why we must listen to and continue to listen to, and act upon, the instructions we got during the initiation we so much longed for. As Hazur says in Die to Live, “If you satisfy your intellect with reasoning, then faith will come and practice will come, which will take you to your destination.”³

The importance of joining practice with understanding is illustrated in Chinese Buddhism by the following story:

A blind man and a cripple lived together in a family compound. There were several other people living with them and helping them out. One day, however, everyone else went out – fishing, shopping, doing the sorts of things people like to do. The blind man and the cripple were the only ones left at home. On that particular day a fire broke out in the house. The blind man couldn’t see and had no way to get out. The cripple could see, but he didn’t have any legs. What a predicament they were in! Both of them were certainly going to burn to death.

At that time a Good and Wise Advisor gave them some advice. “You two can avoid dying. You can get out of this burning house. How? Cripple, let the blind man use your eyes. Blind man, let the cripple use your legs.” They followed his advice. … The cripple climbed onto the blind man’s back and told the blind man where to walk. “Go left, go right, go straight ahead.” The blind man had legs and, although he couldn’t see, he could hear the cripple’s instructions. Thanks to the timely advice, the two managed to save themselves.⁴

And they also experienced the wisdom of the advice only when they followed it. This story illustrates how understanding supports practice, and how practice supports understanding. Even more, they are mutually beneficial to each other. And as the fifteenth-century Korean Zen Master Kihwa (1376–1433) points out:

An understanding that does not have practice is empty. And a practice that does not have understanding will be obstructed.⁵

So there are good reasons for ensuring that there is rational thinking behind our practice.

Further investigating the rationality behind meditation, however, we read a seemingly different perspective from Great Master (Maharaj Sawan Singh) in Philosophy of the Masters:

The teachings of the saints relate to the knowledge of reality, which is acquired without reading and writing.⁶

This is just a short sentence, but important for us to consider. If the teachings of the saints relate to the knowledge of reality, which is acquired without reading and writing, then where is the place for rationality in relation to meditation?

We could argue that living – in the sense of feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, considering, etc. – is also a process of acquiring knowledge without reading and writing. A process of experience, in other words. And for a moment we might conclude that Sant Mat is like life. If so, we would have a point. We familiarize ourselves with what we experience via the senses all day, and in this way we acquire knowledge without reading and writing, indeed. However, according to the saints and mystics we do not acquire knowledge of reality through this type of experience.

Baba Jaimal Singh speaks about experiencing our life as different from reality in one of his letters to his student Babu Sawan Singh Ji, later to become the Great Master:

So regard the world as false; believe firmly that the world and its relationships are like a dream. Carry on with your worldly business knowing within your heart that it is unreal.⁷

And in the Sikh scriptures we can read:

O Nanak, nothing is lasting in this world of dream. Know this world to be a dream.⁸

For those who doubt this, Hazur Maharaj Ji simply asks the rhetorical question: “How can we say anything is real when it is not permanent – here today and gone tomorrow?”⁹ Nothing we experience in this world is lasting.

In addition, the brother explained last Friday in satsang that the life we live is a dream, even though the suffering we experience is real to us. And the cause of the suffering we experience is simply that we do not see life as the dream it is.

And to what purpose this suffering? The sixth-century Master Bodhidharma (440–528), who is traditionally considered to have brought Buddhism to China, said:

Life and death are important. Don’t suffer them in vain. There’s no advantage in deceiving yourself. Even if you have mountains of jewels and as many servants as the sand along the Ganges, you see them when your eyes are open. But what about when your eyes are shut? You should realize then that everything you see is like a dream, an illusion.¹⁰

So when we ask ourselves what is the rational foundation for meditation, the teachings of the saints and mystics answer that a good starting point is to realize that our life as we normally experience it is not real. What we experience is an illusion we suffer from – and an illusion to no purpose.

Now this might be true, but it is difficult to grasp. Especially since all that we experience seems so real.

Also saying that life is a dream raises questions. For instance, if we are dreaming this life, does this mean we do not exist? To understand the rationality behind meditation, at least we should be able to understand our situation, the context in which we are meditating. So how should we understand the situation? What is meant by living in a dream, living an illusion?

We can illustrate our situation in different ways, for instance by the Zen teaching of the full moon in the water, and by the Tibetan teaching of the elephant in a dream.

In Zen Buddhism (in Chinese ‘Chan’; in Korean ‘Son’) the reality that Great Master refers to is symbolized by the full moon. There is the possibility for us to perceive the full moon directly. But in our present state we cannot directly experience reality. It is possible to see the reflection of the full moon in the water of a pond in which the water is calm like a mirror. In this image, the pond is our mind and we can only perceive the reflection of reality.

But this does not completely describe our situation.

We perceive reality via our senses, and with a restless mind. In Zen this is symbolized by the reflection of the moon in the pond, which is then projected onto a wall next to it. Zen teaches that the actual experience we have is caused by reality; but because we experience this reality via our senses with a restless mind, we only see a mere reflection of a reflection of that reality. And because of this, we also perceive only a mere reflection of a reflection of our own true nature.

Tibetan Buddhist oral teachings help us to look to our situation from a slightly different angle:

Let’s say that a Tibetan Lama is asked to elaborate on the fact that, according to the teachings, all is a dream. Yet we feel that what we experience is real, that we are real, that we exist as individuals. He might answer: We all agree that dreams exist. There is no question about the fact that this phenomenon exists. We can talk about our dreams. We all know dreams. So in that sense, dreams are part of our reality. Me saying to you that dreams do not exist would not make sense to you. But, at the same time we all agree that the elephant in the dream is not real.

Saying that the elephant in a dream is real would be crazy. Yet, without the elephant there would be no dream. The reality of the existence of a dream is only possible through the illusion of the elephant. Now, who is experiencing the elephant? It is our mind. And how does the elephant appear? By the same mind. So how do you appear? How do I appear? I am just an elephant talking in your dream. End of teaching.

In addition we also might consider that our life, as we live it, takes time. Precious time. In this context there is a nice story about a young monk named Samiddhi. The story is almost 2,500 years old and can be found in written form in the Pali sutras, the early Buddhist texts:

Thus I have heard. On one occasion Buddha was dwelling at a park with hot springs when one of his students, the Venerable Samiddhi, woke up at the first flush of dawn and went to the springs to bathe. Having bathed in the hot springs and come back out, he stood in his robe drying his limbs when a female spiritual being, a devata of stunning beauty illuminating the entire hot springs, approached him. Floating in the air she said to Samiddhi: “Why waste your time on a spiritual life? First enjoy yourself. Don’t let the time pass you by!”

Hearing what she said, Samiddhi answered, referring to the time of his death: “I do not know what the time might be. The time is hidden and cannot be seen. Hence, I live a spiritual life without first enjoying a worldly life. Don't let the time pass me by, indeed!”

But the devata did not buy that answer.

She alighted on the earth and said: “You became a monk while young, bhikkhu, a lad with black hair, endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, without having dallied with sensual pleasures. Enjoy human sensual pleasures, bhikkhu; do not abandon what is directly visible in order to pursue what takes time.”

And Samiddhi replied: "I have not abandoned what is directly visible, friend, in order to pursue what takes time. I have abandoned what takes time in order to pursue what is directly visible.”¹¹

The words of this young monk can be inspiring when we have difficulties turning from the world and focusing on our practice. Like Samiddhi, as we focus on our meditation we begin to ‘abandon what takes time’ – to abandon the world of the senses, the world in which time exists. And we do this in order to ‘pursue what is directly visible’ – in order to have the direct experience of reality. This is the highest objective of human life.

Conclusion: Awakening to reality
The approach of the mystics has been different in different times according to the people to whom they were explaining the teachings. But the main theme of every saint is that we should attend to our meditation. The rationality behind this is that we do not see reality as it is, and therefore do not see who we really are – what the true nature of our mind is. We are caught up in a dream created by our own mind which, as we all know, is not a nice dream.

Great Master explains in Spiritual Gems that even when we are not sleeping and consider ourselves to be awake, like at this very moment, that there is a state beyond this physical to which we can awaken:

Dream is real when one is dreaming. Only when he awakens or comes into the other (conscious) state and compares the two states, he calls the conscious the real, and the dream the unreal or an illusion. When the attention leaves the physical plane, enters the astral, and compares the two, only then the physical world becomes unreal, and the astral the real.¹²

So what is the way out of here? It is impossible to find this out for ourselves.

The thirteenth-century Japanese Master Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) says in his text Points to Watch in Practicing the Way:

Practioners! You must understand that the Way lies beyond thinking, discrimination, viewing, contemplation, perception and intellectualization. If the Way were contained within these mental functions, why haven’t you yet awakened, since you have always been living and playing within that domain?…

If you look at yourself, who is always influenced by such things as thinking, this will be as clear as looking into a bright mirror. The gate through which you can enter the Way can be pointed out only by a master who has attained the Dharma.¹³

Fortunately we have such a master. Without him we would be helpless. To acquire knowledge about reality without reading and writing we have to put ourselves under his influence and following his instructions.

And if the intellect doesn’t help us while we are actually doing our practice, let us remember the story of the cripple and the blind man. Understanding and practice go hand in hand. But if our understanding is too limited, we discover that just continuing the practice helps us gradually come to understand why we are doing it. Or as Baba Ji says: Just do it. Don’t analyze.

I would like to end this satang with a poem by the seventeenth-century Indian mystic Mankoji Bodhla, because this poem – to be honest – says it all, regardless of any other teaching.

Listen, O innocent devotees,
repeat your simran without a break
and all your bad deeds will be burnt.
If you can serve the guru
this age of darkness won’t harm you
and you’ll come to know liberation.
The guru –
treasure-house of knowledge,
mountain of courage –
he will ferry your boat to freedom
if you practise his simran.
He is the force of life at the core of creation.
Where he is, there is liberation.
If you practise his simran
all the gods and goddesses will be yours.
Glory to my guru – my father and mother –
who helps me quit this coming and going,
this living and dying in countless forms.
Concentrating in the innermost heart,
Bodhla has come to see his own Being.¹⁴

Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, #10
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #55
Die to Live, #27
The Surangama Sutra, Volume One; with Commentary by the Ven. Master Hsuan Hua, tr. Buddhist Text Translation Society, p.18
The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment: Korean Buddhism’s Guide to Meditation; with commentary by the Sŏn Monk Kihwa, tr. A. Charles Muller, p.86
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, 4^th ed., p.lix
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, letter 111
Adi Granth, p.1429, couplet 15
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #288
Bodhidarma, The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma, tr. Red Pine, pp.13–14
The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, tr. Bikkhu Bodhi, pp.97–98
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #106
Dōgen Zen, tr. Shohaku Okumura, p.25
Mankoji Bodhla in Many Voices, One Song: The Poet Mystics of Maharashtra, p.136

Forget Your Perfect Offering - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Forget Your Perfect Offering

Don't we sometimes feel that it's all gone a bit quiet on this path? Hasn't it become a bit banal, a bit ordinary, a bit over-familiar? A bit like a long marriage where everything's a bit routine? If that's the case, we need to take steps to restore the thrill and rediscover the excitement of our relationship with the Master. Not by means of verbal outpourings but by positive, sincere actions that will bring back that loving feeling. We should never forget, even for a minute, that this is the most wondrous, mysterious and, as yet, incomprehensible journey we will ever undertake.

We must keep asking ourselves why we came to this path and equally we must keep reminding ourselves of the answer. Otherwise it may become stale like a marriage from which the love has drained away, becoming a relationship of platitudes, where ‘Radha Soami’ just means ‘hello’, ‘Sant Mat’ is reduced to a password and ‘satsangi’ is nothing more than an internet identity.

Are we just saying the right things, the words we are expected to say to sound pious? If our relationship with the path has degenerated to this extent we need to take drastic action. We need to press the button to restore the factory settings, to remove all the clutter and debris which has built up and is obscuring our goal and sapping our intensity and zeal on the path.

Remember those early days when nothing mattered except Master and meditation? When the main focus of our attention was on them? When we didn't care what was going on in the worlds of politics and business and entertainment, etc., etc. When the distractions of the world – however subtle – showed their true colours and were seen as distractions, not attractions. When we could say in all honesty, “Master, all I want is you!” Even if we still say those words are they not belied by our actions?

Are we not like some of Christ's disciples, about whom he said: “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”¹ In other words, “You keep calling me God but you clearly don’t mean it as you don’t follow my advice. This is the very definition of paying lip service.

Christ goes on in Luke 6:47–48:

Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth them … is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.

So Christ says that by following the spiritual teachings of our Master we are building firm foundations which will not collapse when we come under pressure. He continues in the next verse:

But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.

In other words, we must practise what he preaches if we are to have a solid foundation on the path of spirituality.

Are we in fact disobedient, indifferent to the urgings of the Master to do at least two and a half hours of concentrated meditation every single day? We really need to ‘get back to the garden’ of freshness and innocence, and to blossom in his love. But fine words alone will not help: we need effort, determination and a genuine desire to re-order, re-prioritize our lives before it is dark or, as Christ said, “while it is still day.” Before we are too frail or incapacitated to fight the good fight with the mind. If we deny him – by not following his teachings to the letter – then how can we expect him to take care of us? Yes, the Lord is all-merciful but he does love our efforts, as Masters regularly tell us. Just as the mother's milk flows when her baby cries – the milk that was always there but which needed the stimulus of crying in order to flow – the mercy and grace of the Lord, which are always there, are felt to flow when we cry out in our utter helplessness and our awareness that by ourselves we can do nothing. It is all his grace.

With regard to Masters saying that the Lord loves our efforts – and our own readiness to repeat this statement – sceptics might say, “How do you know this?” Well, we have heard it from souls of such beauty and radiance, such experts in the field of spirituality, that we are inclined to believe them. Many things they have told us about meditation, about sound and light, have turned out to be true, so it is natural to believe other statements, the truth of which we may not yet have experienced. If we think about it, this is what everyone does in any scientific field of endeavour. We listen to what the experts have to say and naturally give more credence to their utterances than to those of some internet blogger who thinks his opinions are as valid as those of Albert Einstein. Who would you believe?

So we start with belief, put the theory to the test, and if our experience confirms it then we have reached the stage of knowledge. We put beliefs into practice by means of meditation; this is our laboratory in which theories are tested. If we refuse to enter the lab how will we ever attain knowledge? This is what is known as the Science of the Soul. This lab requires dedicated scientists who persevere against all odds. Time and time again people would complain to Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh that they were unable to meditate, to which he invariably replied, “Don't worry. Just do your meditation.” It may sound contradictory but what were we expecting him to say? “Don't worry. Don't bother to meditate until you feel the urge again.” I don't think so!

Would a top-class athlete say to his coach, “I want to be the champion of the world but I don't feel like training right now so can I have a few weeks off?” Through this comparison we can clearly see the absurdity of our implied request for some time off. We also want to conquer the world, but in the sense of rising above it and not being unduly affected by it. It is a long process and requires dedication and effort and love for the Lord.

This is a path for lovers not – changing just one letter – losers. It is a path for warriors not – changing just two letters – worriers. Worrying only shows our lack of faith. Everything will happen exactly as it’s meant to happen so worrying is in fact pointless. A waste of energy. If we can't meditate with love in our hearts and if we can't sit with a focused mind, then at the very least we should sit physically still. We should show up and leave the rest to Him. At those times when meditation was smooth did we actually think we were doing it? The Lord does the meditation through us.

Rather than becoming despondent if nothing seems to be happening, let's remember that the quality of meditation is not in our hands. Masters often say, “Bring me your failures.” We should not expect to submit the ‘perfect’ meditation. Sant Mat is the practice which makes perfect. Perfection is the culmination of a lifetime of effort and devotion, not the starting point. As Leonard Cohen puts it very beautifully in the song “Anthem”:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Let us at the very least make the effort to spend the recommended time of two and a half hours every day sitting in meditation. If we don't show up how can we expect the Lord to shower us with his gifts? As the National Lottery advertisement tells us, “You gotta be in it to win it!” Or as Baba Gurinder Singh said recently, “You need to buy a ticket.” The Lord requires us to be there – or rather here – in order for him to make contact with us. And yet even this is not always one hundred percent true, for “God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.”² We can sit in silence for hours and hear nothing, and then in the most unlikely situations during the day the Shabd can suddenly manifest loud and clear.

In The Hunger of the Soul, Nancy Pope Mayorga writes in a similar vein:

Then this strange phenomenon: sometimes you get up from the most frustrating session of silence to find joy welling up in you as soon as you start some activity. You sit down for meditation – nothing. You get up to work and there it is again, like someone playing a joke on you.³

Her book is truly inspiring. It consists of diary entries between 1948 and 1980 and it captures the thrill of following a spiritual path. Listen to this, written in December 1953:

An inner life at this stage, after six years of intense and honest struggle, is something like this – there will be three or four days, or a week, when God and rapture are immediately available. All you have to do is hold thought steady for an instant and relax any physical or mental tensions that might serve as obstructions, and the current of bliss surges through you and spreads out like a delicious fire to the very smallest capillary. Your mind, your spirit, stands spellbound with awe and gratitude.⁴

You are probably wondering about: “after only six years” or that's “all you have to do,” but as Hazur Maharaj Ji often pointed out, there is no seniority on the spiritual path. Quoting Christ, he would say that the last may be first and the first may be last as nobody knows where each of us is starting from. Some of us may have made great spiritual progress in previous lives, while others may have come to the path for the first time in the present life. This accounts for the fact that while some of us plod on for decades, others appear to be progressing rapidly and enjoying very vivid inner experiences.

It is, of course, irrelevant what others are experiencing, as the Master administers the karmas of each individual so that they become liberated at precisely the moment appointed by destiny, not a second sooner and not a second later. So that takes care of the ‘when’ it will happen, and the ‘whether’ it will happen has been dealt with by the oft-repeated reassurance of the Masters that they only accept their marked sheep for initiation and that, once accepted, the disciple is certain to succeed. The bottom line is that it is as inevitable as day following night that one day each of us will go inside and meet the radiant form of the Master and embark on the spiritual journey described by Soami Ji Maharaj in Sar Bachan Poetry, to which I will return later.

Meanwhile, we left Nancy a while ago standing spellbound with awe and gratitude! She continues:

And these moments are not always calculated. They sometimes sweep upon you unexpectedly in the midst of some activity, in the oddest places, between the aisles at the market, setting the table for dinner, even at the wheel of the car.⁵

It does feel like the Lord is playing a little Zen trick on us by making us question the link between cause and effect. The Word or Logos or Shabd calls to us whenever it pleases; it does not necessarily come running when we call it. We should not ignore it when it does call us; rather we should acknowledge it just as Samuel did in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 3:4–10). Before the temple lamp went out the child Samuel lay down to sleep. Then “the Lord called Samuel: and he answered, ‘Here am I.’” The chapter continues:

And [Samuel] ran unto Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou calledst me. And he said, I called not; lie down again. And he went and lay down.
And the Lord called yet again, Samuel. And Samuel arose and went to Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou didst call me. And he answered, I called not, my son; lie down again.
Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him.
And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and went to Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou didst call me. And Eli perceived that the Lord had called the child.
Therefore Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down: and it shall be, if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth. So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
And the Lord came … and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered, Speak; for thy servant heareth.

Sometimes when we visit a church or monastery where for centuries worshippers have turned their attention towards God we may feel– or rather hear – the sanctity of the place. The Sound manifests loud and clear and we can just sit down and enjoy being enveloped in it. We can mentally say, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” The reason these moments are few and far between is that even during meditation, let alone during the rest of the day, the mind, which abhors silence, chatters away randomly and incessantly. We all know people like that; they do not know how to savour the silence. Well, our mind is one of those people! So we have to consciously still the mind by means of very focused, very conscious simran, repetition of the holy names given to us at the time of initiation. They are holy – and wholly remarkable – because they open up our inner vision and make the seemingly impossible possible.

I said I would return to Soami Ji's description of the inner journey, so let's see how he describes it in Sar Bachan Poetry. As I said earlier, the path – as we are following it – can become a little bit of a routine and we can forget what lies ahead. We get up and go through the motions of meditation, we attend satsang and listen to a competent talk, and we undertake seva, thinking we are doing ‘our’ seva when the only real seva is his. If we find ourselves in any of these ruts we can turn to Sar Bachan Poetry and read Soami Ji's enthusiastic description of the inner path. Here is a short description from Bachan 20, Shabd 28:

Hold the Master's key in your hand –
turn the rosary of your mind with simran.
Tune in to the unstruck music of Shabd
and pierce through the cloud in the sky of
Trikuti.
Shoot your arrows of yearning,
listen to the thundering resonance
and go on to Lake Mansarovar.
Establish yourself at the peak of Sunn,
then listen to the melody of Shabd
and reach Sach Khand.
Swim through Alakh and Agam
to the eternal home of Radha Soami.

Go on singing the song of praise every day –
the Master's grace will be with you!

In Spiritual Gems Maharaj Sawan Singh writes simply:

Your wildest dreams or imaginings cannot picture the grandeur of what lies within. But the treasure is yours and is there for you. You can have it whenever you go there. Take it from me, and once and for all, that everything, including the Creator, is within you, and whosoever has attained it, has attained it by going inside the eye focus.⁶

Could it be any clearer than that?

In The Way of a Pilgrim, a Russian pilgrim describes the treasure obtained from constant repetition:

When about three weeks had passed I felt a pain in my heart and then a most delightful warmth, as well as consolation and peace. This … spurred me on more and more to give great care to the saying of the prayer so that all my thoughts were taken up with it and I felt a very great joy. … Sometimes my heart would feel as though it were bubbling with joy, such lightness, freedom and consolation were in it. Sometimes my eyes brimmed over with tears of thankfulness to God … Sometimes that sense of a warm gladness in my heart spread throughout my whole being and I was deeply moved as the fact of the presence of God everywhere was brought home to me. Sometimes … I was overwhelmed with bliss and now I knew the meaning of the words “The kingdom of God is within you.”⁷

Someone asked Hazur: “Maharaj Ji, can the Master sometimes grant the disciple a 'going within' … for a moment of encouragement, before the disciple has reached the stage of seeing him inside?” He replied:

Yes, sister, it happens. We have some visions just to give us faith, or to keep us straight on the path. And even sometimes after initiation, before we have reached the stage of going in at will, we have visions, we have glimpses here and there, just to keep us on the path. But through spiritual practice we have to work our way up and then realize all those things.⁸

Perhaps we wonder why, if we are genuine about our stated desire to merge back with the Lord, we are not already there with him. Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

We have to do both things. We have to live in the world but we have to meditate also. We have to keep the balance because a certain load of karma can be cleared only by facing life, not just by attending to meditation. When we become too absorbed in meditation, sometimes the Master withdraws the grace so that we work in the world also. You are not to leave your worldly work. Rather you may even be pushed to the world, to face the world.⁹

This answer really does explain a lot. I'd like to amplify this idea in a homely way with reference to a song, namely, “How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, now that they've seen Paris?” The song was penned after the First World War, amid doubts whether the American farm boys would ever be able to return to their rural way of life after experiencing the dazzling City of Light, as Paris was known a century ago. After all those thrills how would they ever be able to settle back down to a mundane existence in the American countryside? How could they live their lives doing the same old routine things as if nothing had happened, as if their eyes had not been opened to another, more alluring world?

Perhaps this is an appropriate analogy to explain why the Master withholds inner experience, for once we have gone inside to the glittering worlds of light and bliss, how could we possibly return to our old way of life as if nothing had happened to us in the City of Light? How could we continue to engage with the world and, most importantly, how could we complete our pralabdh karmas (the fate or destiny of our present life) – possibly the only thing standing between us and liberation, the liberation of our soul? As Hazur said, “a certain load of karma can be cleared only by facing life.” We are not to become recluses but to remain householders, in the world but not of it.

Do we want to keep on fooling around in this world with its crippling limitations or do we want to dwell in the light of the Shabd? Do we really want to be one with the Lord or do we just want the comfort of reading about oneness? Do we want to practise Sant Mat or do we want it to be our ‘insurance policy,’ to be used in case of some future emergency? It's make-up-our-mind time because time is short and nothing lasts forever. Don't let today be another day when we betray our principles.

That's it really! But let's finish with two quotations from Maharaj Ji to encourage us to keep hanging in there when we are struggling with the mind. The first is: “And all the time you spend struggling with the mind during the course of your meditation is itself a meditation.”¹⁰

Finally, in Quest for Light he writes: “No doubt in the beginning great and constant effort is needed, but it is nothing compared with the toil and trouble we go through to gain worldly trash. Sit most regularly in meditation as your paramount duty to the Lord, not caring whether your mind cooperates or not, but keep on trying.¹¹

King James Bible, Luke 6:46
William Cowper, nineteenth-century Christian hymn
Nancy Pope Mayorga, The Hunger of the Soul, p.26
The Hunger of the Soul, p.25
The Hunger of the Soul, p.25
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 147
Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim; And, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, ed. Reginald Michael French, Faith Annette Sand, pp.38–9
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #298
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #212
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #164
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter 173

Stay Close - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Stay Close

There is a photograph of Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh, fifth in the present line of Beas, India, spiritual Masters, standing in the desert. Around him there is nothing but white sand as far as the eye can see – rolling hills of sand with ripple patterns made by wind stretching all the way to the horizon. Hazur stands in the foreground, his hands on his hips. The sun is bright, and the wind must be blowing because his kurta is flying out to the side, and so is his beard. In all that expanse of sand, there is only one footprint that you can see, and it is right next to Hazur’s foot.

This photograph could have been the perfect illustration to accompany one of the treatises written by medieval Sufis about the Master-disciple relationship. The Sufis had a metaphor to describe the spiritual path. They said that the spiritual path was like an unmarked route through the desert, where the sands are constantly shifting. The winds blow, and the sands move. So there’s no visible track, no path. It is a route across the desert which is discernible only to those who have travelled it many times.

The shape of the landscape in the desert is constantly changing, shifting. A hill of sand that was in one place today might be in another place tomorrow. But someone who has travelled across to the destination many times can guide a traveler across. That someone is the Master.

The Sufis used to say that from the time of the beginning of the world, 124,000 prophets had come before the Prophet Muhammad. Sharafuddin Maneri, a thirteenth-century Sufi Master from Bihar, wrote in a letter to a disciple:

Imagine what it must be like on that Road along which 124,000 prophets have travelled, and yet no trace of their journey remains! Without a guide who knows the way, it is impossible to travel along this Road.¹

No trace. No tracks. No footsteps. At least no footsteps that are visible at our level of consciousness.

So, in this analogy, what are those shifting hills and ripple patterns in sand in the desert landscape?

These are our concepts, our ideas about the spiritual path. With our ideas about spirituality we construct a landscape for the path to go through. But concepts are not reality. They are not fixed. They are not permanent.

Just to take one example, we generally say that we must rise up, we must go to higher levels of consciousness, so that we can meet and merge into the Lord who was before the beginning, who brought everything into existence, who sustains the creation moment by moment, who is the mover behind all motion, who is One beyond all duality, who is Oneness itself.

The Taoist mystics generally say that we must go down, we must go to deeper levels of consciousness, deeper and deeper until we attain and merge into the Tao which was before the beginning, which brought everything into existence, which sustains the creation moment by moment, which is the mover behind all motion, which is One beyond all duality, which is Oneness itself.

The words may be different, but the destination must be the same. So, which is it: up or down? Do we go to higher levels of consciousness or deeper levels of consciousness? If something as basic as up and down are mental constructs – just ways of thinking about the spiritual path – then I think it is safe to say that everything we think we know about the spiritual path is just a conceptual framework, a way of thinking about the path.

Everything, that is, except what we have experienced for ourselves. We may have experienced feeling happy in meditation. That’s an experience. We may have come to satsang and felt an atmosphere of peace, of stillness. That’s an experience. We may have heard Hazur’s laugh, that deep belly laugh that was so relaxed and free – and even though we might not be able to assign it any meaning, it was an experience. But all our ideas about the spiritual path that are beyond our own experience are like those sand dunes and ripple patterns in the desert blown around by the wind.

No wonder Baba Ji says he is here to confuse us. If the path is like being in a desert with a guide, the worst thing would be if we were to wander off, thinking we know the way. For example, suppose we had read a book and it said to turn right at the big sand dune, and we wanted to insist on going that way!

So he has to confuse us. Because, he says, once we are really truly confused, and we really know that we don’t understand anything, then we just give up and say, so tell me what to do – and then we do the practice that will bring realization. Then he can guide us across.

Just suppose, if you were in a desert with a guide who knew the route – a route you couldn’t see any sign of – and in that whole expanse of sand there was only one footprint that you could see, and it was right next to your guide’s foot – what would you do? I think you’d stay real close to the guide. I think you’d keep him in sight. You’d be really careful not to let him out of your sight. Maybe you’d even catch hold of a corner of his shawl and clutch it tight in your fist. Just in case a big sand storm blew up, or night was falling, you’d want to keep clutching that little fringe of the shawl to make sure you didn’t get lost.

In one way or another, you’d make sure to stay close to the guide. For us, this is our simran. Repeating simran and remembering the Master keeps us close.

Narhari Sonar has several poems that keep coming back to this theme of staying close to the mystic. Narhari was a mystic saint from Maharashtra whose poems appear in Many Voices, One Song. In one poem he writes:

A painter strokes his brush on a wall –
this is the world, nothing real here …
If you really want to achieve something real,
just repeat the name, says Narhari,
and stay close to the mystics.²

Narhari says that everything in this world is temporary. It is evanescent. All the things we work so hard for in this world are fleeting; they don’t last; in that sense they are not real, not permanent. If you want to achieve something that is real and lasting, he says, there are two things you have to do:

First: Repeat the Name. ‘Repeat’ means it is a practice, something to do over and over. Do the meditation. Do the simran and bhajan. Do it every day.
And second: Stay close to the mystics. Just stay close. And if the mystic confuses you… just hang in there and stay close.

What is this all about, this staying close to the mystic?

If we look back to the medieval Sufis, in all those books they wrote about the Master-disciple relationship, there’s one single line that I think says it all. Al-Qushayri, an eleventh- century Sufi from Nishapur, wrote: “Each wayfarer needs a Master from whom he can learn his path, one breath at a time.”³

So it’s not like: you read a book and then you understand – once and for all. And it’s not like: you get the gist of the path, ask for initiation, and you know the path. You learn your path, from the living Master, one breath at a time. He doesn’t even say that the wayfarer learns the path from the Master – no, the wayfarer learns his path from the Master. Each disciple learns his or her path from the Master, one breath at a time.

Maybe it means learning it moment by moment, from the Master’s living example – an example that might turn out to be quite different from your pre-conceived ideas. Maybe it means learning the path from some atmosphere we imbibe in his presence. In the atmosphere of the Master’s presence we breathe in a kind of stillness; from our jumbled thinking a certain clarity emerges and we remember what our real priorities are. Maybe learning our path one breath at a time from the Master simply means taking to heart what he says, following his instructions, putting them into practice moment by moment. As Soami Ji says in Sar Bachan (Prose):

Leaving everything else aside, one must implicitly obey the Satguru of his own time, and faithfully follow his instructions. This will lead him to success. This is the long and short of everything.⁴

The key phrase here is “the Satguru of his own time.” It is a living relationship with our own Master, not with the words written by some Master of the past.

As Hafiz is often quoted: “If the Master tells you to soak your prayer mat in wine, hurry up and do it for he is not unmindful of the Way.”⁵

We all seem to love this quote. We love to quote it, but – actually – if the Master tells us to do something that isn’t according to our own way of thinking, in fact we have a pretty hard time following it. So, to learn our path one breath at a time from the Master, we have to enter into what Narhari calls “The Holy Contract.” He writes:

How could one so low as I
describe one so great as you?
O treasure of mercy and grace,
one Wonder exists – it is You –
no other is so full of mercy.
Enter into the holy contract, friends,
embrace the Name within you
and know that you’ll escape
endless returns to the womb.
The method for human beings is
to see all as equal, to love, to yearn,
to meditate and to serve the Master.
When my mind concentrates in my Master,
says Narhari, my vision of God holds firm.⁶

Why do we need the holy contract with a Master? Narhari explains that it is because the Master is so far beyond our comprehension. As he says:

How could one so low as I
describe one so great as you?
O treasure of mercy and grace,
one Wonder exists – it is You –
no other is so full of mercy

We say Sant Mat is a path of God-realization. We like to say we are on a path of God- realization. But if in all honesty we don’t have a clue what or who God is, then what does it mean? We say we will meet God face to face… or we will merge into God, or realize God – but these are just words, concepts. We ourselves do not actually know what we mean. Even when we say the Master is God-realized, is one with God – this is all philosophical talk, metaphysical talk. The Sufi poet, Mahmud Shabistari said it poetically:

Holding the hem of the robes of the Master of the tavern
the Sufi is liberated from all metaphysical gibberish
and dry asceticism.⁷

It doesn’t mean literally grabbing onto the hem of his robe! But poetically, what a vivid metaphor for staying in the presence of the Master. It’s a great image – you’re hanging onto his coattails and whichever way he’s going, you’re just flying along behind him, maybe not really understanding anything, just hanging in there with him. And Shabistari says you get liberated from all metaphysical gibberish!

Instead of spending your life in empty philosophical talk, and instead of wasting away in dry asceticism, just hang on tight and follow the living Master. It think this is what Narhari calls staying close to the mystic, And, put another way, it’s also what Soami Ji calls implicitly obeying the Master of your own time.

The Sufi Master, Shafaruddin Maneri actually goes so far as to say that it is the presence of the living guide that breathes life into the spiritual path. He wrote in a letter to a disciple that all the spiritual practices of a seeker “who lacks a guide are devoid of originality and become routinized. They do not help him mature or progress.” He went further, saying that if a seeker wanted to learn about the path from books, “he becomes exactly like someone who associates with the dead – and he too becomes dead at heart.”⁸

If we want to become more conscious, more awake, more alive, we have to imbibe these qualities from one who has them. Soami Ji says everything in the universe can be classified as either chaitanya – alive, alert, awake, conscious – or jar – lifeless, inert, unconscious. He says only the Satguru is chaitanya, everyone and everything else is jar, inert. That’s all of us!

Service of the chaitanya (living or conscious) will lead to life, and service of the jar (lifeless or inert) will lead to inertness. All except the Satguru come under the classification of jar (inert). Therefore, all those who seek their own good and wish to be one with the chaitanya should devote themselves to the service of the Satguru.⁹

So Narhari says we need to enter into a contract with that one who is conscious, awake and alive:

Enter into the holy contract, friends,
embrace the Name within you
and know that you’ll escape
endless returns to the womb.

A contract has two sides. You shake hands on it, you make a pact, and each side has committed to doing something. What is our side of the contract? Narhari says, Embrace the Name within you. Embrace Nam, cherish the Shabd, give it your attention, fall in love with Nam.

Then he sums up the basic principles of spiritual life:

The method for human beings is
to see all as equal, to love, to yearn,
to meditate and to serve the Master.

What a simple way to say it, and how much is encompassed in this! He concludes the poem, saying:

When my mind concentrates in my Master,
Says Narhari, my vision of God holds firm.

We don’t know what God is. Actually, frankly, we don’t know what the Master is either. But we can see him, and we do have some experience of him. We can think of him. We can remember him. We can do the simran he has given us. We can follow his instructions. This is what Narhari calls staying close to the Master. And he says, “When my mind concentrates in my Master, my vision of God holds firm.”

In another poem, entitled, “Come Closer,” Narhari writes:

Repeating the Name and listening to the Sound –
this is the foundation of all religions.
Live in mercy, forgiveness and contentment,
and have the darshan of a Master.
Find him quickly and stay close –
this is how you come closer to God.
This human body may not come again,
so devote yourself to your Master.
Don’t immerse yourself in the world,
just keep repeating the Name of God.
Everything else will pass –
the Name alone is true.
Vithoba, Giver of Light to the Ignorant,
will lead you to freedom one day.
Understanding this, Narhari bows
with love at his Master’s feet.¹⁰

He begins by telling us that the simple practice the Master teaches us – repeating the Name and listening to the sound – is the starting point, the seed from which all the religions have grown. Just this simple teaching: repeat the Nam, listen to the sound. As Hazur used to say, we arrest the teachings, give them the shape of a religion, rites, rituals, dogma, rigid beliefs. The living Master draws us back to reality. He is, after all, the one who is chaitanya – alive, awake, conscious – and we are so ready to worship that which is dead and inert!

So then Narhari expresses the most basic, simple, essential principles of spirituality – spirituality when it’s not yet mired in ritual and dogma, before rigor mortis has set in.

Live in mercy, forgiveness and contentment,
and have the darshan of a Master.
Find him quickly and stay close –
this is how you come closer to God.

He says: find a Master, and once you have found him, stay close. And how can we go through life without losing our clarity, our purpose, our direction? He says:

Don’t immerse yourself in the world,
just keep repeating the Name of God.
Everything else will pass –
the Name alone is true.

We so easily immerse ourselves in the daily details of our lives. We plunge in, and then we find we are drowning, gasping for air as we lose track of our priorities and the purpose of our life. So Narhari says, yes, do your duty, live your life in all its complexity and challenge, but don’t immerse yourself. Don’t go under. How? Just keep repeating the Name of God, and you’ll keep your balance through the ups and downs.

Then Narhari makes an extraordinary promise. He says:

Vithoba, Giver of Light to the Ignorant,
will lead you to freedom one day.

The Giver of Light to the Ignorant. There’s the tricky part: Can we recognize ourselves as the ignorant? If we are ignorant – truly ignorant, knowing that we know nothing – then the giver of light can fill us with his light.

There’s a story that when Socrates was a young man, he thought he know a lot. When he was a little older, he thought he knew a little. By the time he was an old man, he was finally able to say, “I know nothing.”

How long will it take for us to reach that point, to be able to say in all honesty, “I know nothing?” If we really know nothing, we can cross that desert of shifting sands just by staying close to our guide. If we are really ignorant the Giver of Light can fill us with his light and lead us to freedom. Narhari, concludes the poem with:

Understanding this, Narhari bows
with love at his Master’s feet.

Maneri, The Hundred Letters, tr. P. Jackson, p.26
Narhari in Many Voices, One Song, p.166
al-Qushayri, “The Testament to Disciples,” in The Teachings of Sufism, tr. Carl Ernst, p.152
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan (Prose), Bachan 116, 5^th ed., p.100
Hafiz, Deewan-e-Hafiz, p.29
Narhari in Many Voices, One Song, p.202
Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism, 1:165; citing Gulshan-i Raz, 54
The Hundred Letters, p.36
Sar Bachan (Prose), Bachan 48, 5^th ed., p.82
Narhari in Many Voices, One Song, p.263

Meditation is Medicine - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Meditation is Medicine

The answer is meditation – so what’s the question?

Well, it’s just about every question we could ask the Master! What it all boils down to is this one thing: meditation. We can cut it any which way we want, we can angle our questions from this way or that. But the answer is always meditation.

When we get back from Dera and we are asked, So what did Master say, what was the big message, what were the headlines of the visit? – we will say, He said we should do our meditation! And they will say, Oh yes, of course meditation – we all know that – but what else was said, was there anything different, anything really interesting?

We seem to not want to hear this single message that the Masters have always given. We like things to be complex – to be ‘interesting,’ to stimulate our mind – when what we really need to do is subdue the mind, take control of our senses, get control of our lives and fulfil our potential – to become one with Him. So the answer to all our problems is plain and simple: we should do our meditation.

As Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said, “Meditation (bhajan) is the panacea for all ills.”¹ The word ‘panacea’ means a universal remedy that cures all illnesses. Put plainly: meditation is the universal cure for the universal illness we all suffer from. No matter who we are, whatever colour or creed, whether male or female, rich or poor, we all are suffering in this physical creation.

The Maharashtrian mystic Eknath says:

The Name of God – the one pure medicine
for every disease of the mind, heart and body.
First it ends our suffering,
then sweetness and freedom
come to bow before the patient.
Nothing else is needed, says Eknath –
just keep the name of
Ram rolling on your tongue,
enjoy a diet of pure deeds
and give yourself to the master doctor.²

So let’s try to understand what we are suffering from. Our illness, the biggest problem we have, is that we are all mental cases! We’re ‘mental’– we’re under the sway of mind, which is in turn a victim of the senses. We need to be spiritual, not mental! The soul, a princess of royal blood, has taken the company of a lowly sweeper, the mind, and become his slave. She now lives in this hovel of the world eating swill, when in truth she should be living in a palace and dining on nectar.

Nothing here will ever make us happy for long, worldly pleasure is short-lived and ends in misery, and then the karmic chains just bind us more tightly to this creation. Sahjo Bai says:

The rich, without exception,
are distressed and distraught.
And the poor, what to say of their lot?
Their misery and sorrow know no bound.
Blessed are sadhus
who the great secret have found.³

The ‘great secret’ that the sadhus, the true holy men, have found is the path back to the creator, the means by which the soul can connect to the divine Word that lies within, and by means of that divine Word travel back to its true home.

So the ills that the Master is talking about curing are not physical; he’s specifically talking about what sits at the heart of the suffering, the mental and spiritual anguish we all feel as a result of the soul being ‘infected’ by the mind. This is the root cause of suffering; all else is a symptom of this malignant disease of being dominated by the mind. Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

The soul suffers along with the mind – the soul doesn’t suffer without the mind. When the soul has no association with the mind, the soul doesn’t suffer at all. But then it takes the association of the mind, and of course it is suffering.

You see, the soul has an inclination towards its own origin. It’s always yearning to go back to the Father. So that suffering of separation is always there. But it forgets the Father because it has taken association of the mind, and mind has become a slave of senses. The soul starts suffering, being a slave of the senses.⁴

The source of all suffering and our chronic condition comes from the separation of the soul from its source, the Father. This separation is caused by the mind, and the ego. The belief we have of ourselves as separate entities existing apart from the Father – this is the grand illusion.

And meditation is the medicine that the master doctor administers to cure us of this condition. The Master has perfectly diagnosed our condition, its cause and the effects it has had on us; he is therefore able to prescribe the perfect medicine to cure us – and cure us forever. Hazur says:

Meditation is the solution to all our problems. Instead of putting up your list of demands, put up your meditation. Then you will rise above those problems and they won’t affect your mind at all. You will never be able to solve the problems of the world. But we always rise above those problems so that they don’t affect us, they don’t bother us, they become meaningless to us. Meditation helps; that is the real solution to those problems.⁵

The problem is that most of us don’t know that we are critically ill – that mankind’s general condition is so very far away from what it should be. The potential of being truly human is to be God-realized, at one with the Father. When the Master tells us that we should aim to be good human beings, this is an invitation to fulfil our potential, to experience an exalted state. Our soul is unlimited and immortal, but because of the association with the mind we remain limited and mortal.

Being mortal, we all have in common one thing: one day we’re all going to die. We are born to die. Who knows what will happen to us next? But the one sure thing we know about being human is that we will one day die. No one gets out of here alive!

If a doctor were to diagnose us with an incurable illness tomorrow, he might tell us that we only have so many months left to live. Think. How would we react – honestly – how would we feel to get that news? To hear those words said about us, well, most of us would be terribly shaken. The impact surely would be that we would reflect on our lives, reassess our priorities and make sure we focused on what was truly important to us. And that would be? Meditation.

If you search the internet you will find many versions of the ‘bucket list,’ or it may be titled “100 Things to Do Before You Die.” People post their own versions of what they would like to do before they leave this life behind. It’s an interesting list, almost all items relating to worldly pursuits, travel, action sports, etc. Basically it's a list of those people’s unfulfilled desires and their pursuit of sensual indulgence.

But for us satsangis it should be very different. The only item we need in that bucket is not a list at all, it’s one item and one item only. The one thing we need to do before we die is to die. To die daily, as Saint Paul said, to practise separating ourselves from the limitations and constraints of the body and mind and go within and commune with the divine.

We need to wake up and smell the coffin! And die to live, not just live to die.

So it’s not about a list of things we need to get done; neither are we here to change the world or make a dent in the universe, to make a big impression on the world. We’re here to change ourselves. No one else – just ourselves! The only dent we need to make is in the cushion that we sit on when we meditate. If we really want to make a good impression, well that’s it!

The Master asks us to sit in meditation daily. Sitting. We can all sit; look, we’re doing it right now. It’s really easy. Most of us have travelled here from the four corners of the world. We sat in a taxi to the airport, we sat on a plane for five, ten, maybe fifteen hours, then we sat on a train, and we’re sitting now. We can do it. None of us can say we can’t sit. As the saying goes: Don’t just do something, sit there!

And once we're sitting, we can just close our eyes and do our simran, simply repeat those five holy names that the Master has given us. We can surely put in that much effort. It's a journey to the inner heavens – it’s not rocket science, it’s spiritual science!

So why do we struggle so hard to do this simple thing that will end all our suffering, that is truly for our benefit? We make it difficult for ourselves by putting impossible demands on ourselves. We say to ourselves, What is the point of sitting – our meditation is so bad and only good meditation counts! But we should remember that we’re all works in progress, not the finished article!

Where does it say that we have to sit and do ‘good meditation?’ We are simply asked to sit and do our simran – to put in the effort for two hours, then for half an hour try to listen to the sound, the Shabd. Master himself has said there is no good or bad meditation – it is only meditation. No one is in a position to challenge the efficacy of the medicine that the divine doctor has prescribed until they have taken it fully, as prescribed.

We can make up all kind excuses why we have not done what we promised to do, reasons why we can’t meditate; but to my knowledge no one has yet found fault with it when they have actually diligently followed the Master’s instructions. No one has ever got up to the microphone and said to the Master, I sit every day in meditation for two and a half hours, I completely still my body and mind to such an extent that they appear dead to me, I repeat the five holy names continuously with one-pointed attention, and yet I have heard nothing, nor have I seen the light.

That won’t happen. Sant Mat is the science of the soul, it’s absolute and empirical. What the Master has prescribed for us will get certain results so long as we put in the effort and perform the spiritual exercises precisely as he has told us. Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji advised us to enter the laboratory of the body and perform the experiment for ourselves.

It is possible. The medicine of meditation will cure us all. Our part is to take the medicine, and it will cure us. Just sit every day and put in the effort – that is our part of the deal.

The perfect Masters always and exclusively prescribe meditation. This is the path of Surat Shabd Yoga, the most effective treatment in eradicating the soul’s entanglement with the mind. But what is sweet to the mind and senses is poison to the soul, and what is sweet to the soul is poison to the mind and senses. At first, because of the gross nature of our minds, the medicine seems bitter and hard to swallow, but it is for our own good. Hazur gives an analogy:

Our concept of love and kindness is that whatever we want, we should get. But sometimes the mother has to put bitter quinine in the mouth of the child. And the child has to swallow it, in his interest. But there can be no better love than the mother for the child.⁶

The Maharashtrian mystic Bahinabai says:

Saints are wondrous physicians
who cure the disease of the world.
Listen, I’ll tell you their method –
with the smallest bit of medicine
they cure all the soul’s sickness.
The diet they prescribe is free of sense pleasures,
but full of love and devotion for the Lord.
Knowing the patient’s inner condition, says Bahina,
the doctors vouch for this one method.⁷

When friends and family who aren’t familiar with Sant Mat ask us about where we are going when we come here, some of us may find it difficult to really explain what our visit is all about. Well, why not tell them the truth, but in a way that they will understand? We can tell them we're going in to rehab! Like those celebrities we read about in our newspapers and see on the news programmes. When they can no longer function in a normal manner, when their fast lifestyles catch up with them, they need rehabilitation. They need to be reset, re-calibrated to start to behave normally again – or relatively normally in many of their cases.

Just as with a computer or piece of technology that gets overloaded or has too many conflicting applications or programmes running, you have to return them to their original factory settings – how the manufacturer originally intended them to behave. We’re just the same. For us to be what we were designed to be, we need to get rid of all these coverings, the senses, the bad habits, the attachments and so forth and be as we should naturally be – True Human Beings, version 1.0. We need the manufacturer, our Creator, to reset us. We need to access the Inspiration Super Highway and download Shabd. We need to meditate.

That’s why we’ve come to Dera – we’re here for rehab. We need to be rehabilitated, recalibrated, to be reminded how to regain our spiritual health. We’ve got to clean up our act, come out from the shadows and into the light. When we get home we can attend the Support Group meetings with our fellow sufferers – or satsang as we know it. This is essential if we are to maintain our recovery.

Both Maharashtrian poets quoted earlier talked about the importance of diet. This means not just what we eat, but what we take in to ourselves, the impressions we make on our minds. The Masters say that we take on the colour of the company we keep. We should therefore keep good company. Adopt a way of life that moves us towards healing, that creates an environment that helps us build our resistance to the effects of the mind and its diseased behaviour.

Simply put: if we wish to cure ourselves of our illness, the same illness we have been suffering from for countless lives, then we must start doing things differently. Otherwise our behaviour is just madness or insanity. The definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The panacea for all ills, the medicine that will finally relieve us from our suffering, like all medicines has to be prescribed by a qualified person, an expert in the field. Such a one is the perfect living Master. He knows precisely what our condition is and how to administer the cure.

And for that we need a living physician, a living Master. Just as in the case of a physical ailment, a doctor from the past (and long dead) cannot help the living beings of today. It seems, on the surface at least, that the challenges of contemporary society are not covered by medical texts of old. And the same goes for spirituality. The human condition is the same as it has always been, but the specifics of modern day society have their impact on how we navigate the challenges of this time – and so we need a living doctor.

When we go to a regular doctor to treat our physical illness we go because we have faith in him and the treatment he recommends. He gives us a prescription; firstly we acquire the medicine and secondly, and most importantly, we take the medicine and follow the treatment as he has prescribed it.

Just imagine this. You go to visit an old friend, who on your last visit a year earlier had been suffering from a terrible cough. At the time he told you that he was going to the doctor the next day to have it looked at and to get some medicine. When you visit him now a year later he greets you at the door and still has the same hacking cough – actually it’s even worse than before.

I thought you were going to get that seen to, weren’t you? you say.
Well yes. I did.
And what did the doctor say?
He then points to a bottle on the sideboard and says, He prescribed that medicine.
Well, it clearly hasn’t worked, you say. How long have you been taking it?
Oh, I’ve never actually taken it, he replies. You see, I took the prescription to a pharmacist, who gave me the medicine with the instructions that it should be taken once a day until my condition approved.
So I waited and waited, day after day, but the doctor never came to put the medicine in the spoon and lift it to my mouth. And so I’m still suffering! In fact I’m beginning to wonder whether the medicine is right for me at all!

Foolish, yes, but do we behave any better? We have a part to play in all this; we need to put in the effort. Hazur says:

When Master initiates us, puts us on the path, he tells us to devote time to meditation. If we really love him, we will obey him. We cannot say we love him and, and at the same time, not obey his instructions, not live the life he instructs us to live. That is not love for the Master. If we really have faith in him, if we really love him, we will want to do what he wants us to do. And he wants us to meditate; therefore we should also try to meditate.⁸

Without taking the medicine, without devoting ourselves to the meditation, we cannot expect to be cured. We must take it as prescribed. The dosage is clearly indicated by the Master: to meditate in the manner prescribed at initiation for a minimum of two and a half hours a day. That’s a minimum dosage. As our capacities increase, the Master says meditation can be carried out throughout the twenty fours of the day. And such is our chronic condition that the minimum dosage must be taken for the rest of our lives. The moment we were prescribed the meditation at initiation was pre-ordained, and therefore the length of treatment until death is exactly the course of treatment we should follow.

Let us consider another point. As we know with many prescription drugs, there can be considerable side effects, and so it is with meditation. There are actually two effects to deal with – side effects and inside effects. With meditation, in both cases the effects are all positive. Positive in the true sense – that they help us towards our goal. Hazur tells us:

Meditation changes the very attitude of our life. That’s different from what we achieve within and how far we still have to go, but meditation definitely changes our attitude towards to life. You see, even if we don’t experience anything within, but we attend to meditation, we at least can enjoy the fragrance of meditation, if not the experience of meditation. A blind man goes to a garden full of scented flowers. If he can’t enjoy the beauty of the flowers, at least he can enjoy the fragrance. So meditation changes our outlook on life.

And here’s the most wonderful list of side effects you could wish for:

It makes us humble. It makes us more loving, more kind, more god-fearing. We don’t try to deceive anybody, cheat anybody, hurt anybody. In so many molds of our life. If we do anything wrong, it weighs on our conscience and we try to get rid of our guilt. These are the effects of our meditation, and if one is lucky enough to enjoy the experience, there is nothing like it.⁹

Meditation goes to the heart of our problem – our separation from the creator. It re-connects us to him via the Shabd. Rather than mask our pain as an aspirin or Paracetamol would and hide the pain from us, it removes the cause of our pain. It returns us to our natural state – our real state, one where the soul is in charge of the mind and the mind is in charge of the senses.

Through meditation we will gain that true experience that will change us forever, we will have gone from mere concepts to reality. As the present Master has often said: Knowledge applied leads to experience, and experience leads to understanding. Hazur says:

If a disciple regularly does his duty towards his lord, with love and devotion, he will realize that the Master guides and protects him at every step, that the Master is always with him – not only in this life but also helps him at death and throughout eternity. So take a pledge from today that whether your mind likes it or not, you will give a full two and a half hours to simran and bhajan every day, preferably in the early morning hours. Regularity is most essential for spiritual progress. You must do your duty without asking anything in return.

Do not mind whether you see any light within or not, or whether the sound is audible. You simply do your duty and leave the results to the Master. When a man pays wages to one who works for him, do you think that the Lord would not do so? He alone knows what is good for us and when it is to be given. He will pay in abundance. Have faith in him.¹⁰

So, let’s all keep taking the medicine.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, letter 312
Eknath in Many Voices, One Song, p.175
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, p.37
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.131
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.212
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.18
Bahinabai in Many Voices, One Song, p.272
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, p.290
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.376
Divine Light, letter 107

I Know the Way You Can Get - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

I Know the Way You Can Get

Looking at the world of today, we might say it is in turmoil, for we live in times in which intolerance, animosity and strife prevail. We live in times in which people distrust each other, have a fight, wage war against each other and kill each other. Almost daily the media confront us with news of people using mental or physical violence against fellow human beings in a struggle for existence, for power, for money, for freedom. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh repeatedly said that this turmoil is not specific to today’s world; unfortunately, conflicts are of all times, and Great Master (Maharaj Sawan Singh) gave the following explanation:

The world of today is characterized by tension, worry and anxiety. Apart from realized souls, no one is free from their impact, no matter what our walk of life. The notable absence of harmony in modern life comes from the spiritual bankruptcy of a society thrown into chaos by people whose souls are in distress. In recent history, humanity has made great strides in all spheres of material activity. People have explored the earth, water, air and outer space, but they have failed to explore their inner being and improve their spiritual lot.… People acquire knowledge of all kinds but remain ignorant of their soul, which is not only the basis of all knowledge, but the life that activates the body, mind and intellect.…

Not knowing our own soul and being separated from our source cause the constant strife that goes on within individuals. This then results in social unrest as people forget the ideal of the oneness of God and kinship among all their fellow beings. Discord among individuals, families, communities and nations then follows, throwing the whole world into turmoil.¹

So the unrest in today’s world is just a reflection of our own inner restlessness, which exists because our mind is not under control. Conflicts in the world are the consequence of a constant inner strife within each one of us – a strife that goes on as long as we are not conscious of our soul, and do not feel united with the divine source from which everything has emanated.

Mystics and saints – realized souls – live among us to show us the reality of the world and ourselves. At the same time they point out to us that we have the possibility to liberate ourselves from all conflicts and suffering by realizing God. So they encourage us to search for God, for permanent happiness, peace and rest, within our own body – the peace and rest which we all long for and which are so hard to find in the world around us. They assure us that if we live in accordance with their teachings, our inner restlessness will be dispelled and we will be able to live in a loving and compassionate way, in harmony with everything in our environment, and respectful towards all living beings, because of the bliss and unconditional, divine love we will find in our hearts.

Mystics assure us that once we are conscious of that divine spark of love in us, our soul, we can become one with the divine source from which we have emanated. Becoming one with God leads to a different experience of this world and our life, they say. Instead of discord, chaos and conflict, we will experience unity, coherence and harmony. We will realize that everything has a function and purpose, that nothing is meaningless; that everything is permeated with divine love; that every creature, every form of life is an expression of that love. The simple fact that we are not conscious now of the presence of this all-pervading love is exactly our problem and the cause of all conflicts and suffering.

What does living in accordance with the teachings of the mystics and saints imply? It means that we should keep a lacto-vegetarian diet; we should abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and mind-altering drugs; we should lead a clean and moral life; and we should practise meditation daily under the guidance of a perfect spiritual Master. Only by following all these instructions can our mind become still and under control. Only then can we reach deep concentration during meditation. Only then can we become conscious of the divine love within us, which will reveal itself as light and sound. A Buddhist text expresses this idea beautifully:

There is a supreme concentration called peace and bliss
Which can universally save and liberate
all sentient beings,
Radiating a great light, inconceivable,
Causing those who see it to all be pacified.
This light emanated is called ‘good manifestation’ –
If any sentient beings encounter this light,
It will cause them to benefit, without fail:
by this way they can attain unsurpassed knowledge.…

It also emanates a light called ‘tranquility’:
This light can awaken the scatter-minded,
Causing them to detach from greed, anger, and folly,
With their minds unstirring and properly stabilized.
Abandoning all bad associates,
Meaningless talk and impure action,
Praising meditation and solitude:
Thus is this Light produced.

It also radiates a light called ‘wondrous sound’:
This light can awaken enlightened beings
And cause all voices heard in the world
To be to the hearer the voice of Buddha.²

So it is the practice of the spiritual teachings, the practice of meditation, that will dispel our inner restlessness, that will bring us peace, tranquility and bliss and will make us conscious of the presence of divine love within us and around us. Not instantly, but gradually, because the inner unrest and dominance of our mind is enormous. That becomes obvious when we start to practise. Only through practising will we realize that just sitting motionless is very difficult for us, that our thoughts disturb the simran, the repetition of the five holy names, very easily. Only by walking this spiritual path will we discover that we sometimes have problems with getting our priorities right, with molding our lives in accordance with the instructions of the Master. And only through practising will we become conscious of the fact that we are more strongly attached to things than we had ever imagined.

Becoming aware of our limitations and all kinds of weaknesses might be painful, for our imperfection and powerlessness become obvious. As a result, some of us start to lose confidence and faith in the path. At these moments it is important to realize that this awakening has a purpose and is of great value. For it helps us to become humble. It helps us to let go – to let go of all the things which gave us confidence before. This is the way for us to learn to let go and surrender ourselves to God, to surrender ourselves to the Master, so he can be our helper. Saint Tukaram has put this aptly in one of his poems:

I want to devote myself to you, but I lack love –
All my attempts to sit at your feet have come to naught.
For some reason my mind is out of control.
When I wish to do good deeds, I lack willpower;
When I wish to give in charity, I lack the means;
I do not know how to honour priests and guests.
I have no mercy for my fellow humans in my heart,
Nor can I do anything for them.
I do not know how to surrender to my Master,
Nor how to serve the saints.
I cannot perform rites and rituals,
Nor can I renounce the world.
I cannot go to dwell in forests,
Nor can I control my senses.
When I wish to make pilgrimages, my heart is not in it;
When I wish to make vows, I do not know how.
Even though I say that God resides within me,
The feelings of ‘me’ and ‘you’ still remain.
All these weaknesses have led me to surrender to you.
I have no more worries now, says Tuka …
And I have become your marked servant.³

So our seeming failure has a purpose. It helps us to grow on the path. It is a phase we have to go through. That’s why the Masters encourage us not to lose heart and to continue the practice. As Great Master says in a letter to one of his disciples:

Stilling the wild mind and withdrawing the attention from the body and concentrating it in the eye focus is a slow affair. A Sufi says: ‘A life-period is required to win and hold the beloved in arms.’…

Human nature is frail. It is full of weaknesses and one begins to realize the weaknesses of human nature when one follows Surat Shabd Yoga. Frailties present themselves in almost every conceivable manner and interfere in concentration. But with the help of the Master and the sound current they are overcome, one by one, with every inch of the withdrawal of the current from the body towards the focus. The frailty of human nature is giving place to strength, and when the attention has detached itself from the centres of sense organs, the senses cease to function in this material world haphazardly and are under control.…

Do not lose heart but fight courageously. The battle has just begun. Mind is not stronger than the sound current. The Master is with you. He is watching your every movement. He is prepared to fight your battles with you. Take him as your helper. Have faith in him. Fight the mind and you will succeed.⁴

Keep on practising the teachings of the Masters, says Great Master, and you will succeed. All the Masters, whether Hazur Maharaj Ji or Baba Ji, give us this guarantee. We don’t have to walk this path alone. Our Master is prepared to fight our battles with us; he is prepared to guide us, to help us and to support us. That’s why Hazur wrote to one of his disciples:

Do not worry but go on doing your duty in the world; and as far as meditation is concerned, it is not for us to judge what progress we are making. This only he knows. With our limited intellect, being unable to see ourselves as we are, we cannot have any idea of what the Lord is doing for us all the time and how and in what way he is making us fit to enter his palace. Our duty is to do our meditation every day with love and faith. The rest he will do himself.⁵

Like Hazur, Baba Ji emphasizes not to worry, but also that despite the enormous help of the Master we have to do our part in the process of stilling the mind and realizing God. For there is a channel of giving and a channel of receiving. The Master’s teachings, his guidance, and the continuous showering of his grace and blessings constitute the channel of giving. Listening intently to his teachings, practising his instructions faithfully, remembering him constantly with devotion, remaining in complete obedience to him, and rendering service with utmost dedication in thought, word and deed – these constitute the channel of receiving, of becoming receptive to his grace and bounty, of putting our cup right-side-up so it can be filled with his love and grace. As Baba Ji has told us, the channel of giving is always open. We have to take care that the channel of receiving is not blocked.

That’s why Baba Ji keeps hammering on the basics, encouraging and urging us to keep remembering God, to practise meditation, and to take shelter at the feet of our Master. For in this world in turmoil, becoming conscious of the presence of God and drinking his divine love is our greatest, our vital need.

Hafiz, a Sufi Master, summarizes our situation – our vital need and the one way we can satisfy it:

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes …

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep Remembering God …

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me,
For I am a Sweet Old Vagabond
with an Infinite Leaking Barrel
of Light and Laughter and Truth
that the Beloved has tied to my back.

Dear one,
Indeed, please bring your heart near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a sane man can ever care about
is giving Love!⁶

Maharaj Sawan Singh, My Submission, 5^th ed., pp.31–32
Avataṁsaka Sūtra (The Flower Ornament Scripture) as quoted in Buddhism, Path to Nirvana, p.258–259
Tukaram: The Ceaseless Song of Devotion, p.88
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 210
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter 274
I Heard God Laughing, Renderings of Hafiz, Daniel Ladinsky, tr., pp.81–83

Attachments - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Attachments

We will go where our attachments lie… if we love this creation and we have deep attachments here, then we will have to come back here. If we love the Master and our attachment is to him, then we will go where he is and we won’t have to come back.

So far–as clearly we are all still here–we can assume that the attachments from our past lives have been too strong in the world.

And so we keep coming back, life after life. Our addiction to the world, our worldly relationships and the material objects of the world, have kept us incarcerated here. The royal road back home is very narrow, and the door by which we exit–very small. Because of this, when we die we can take nothing with us, everything will be left here. And if our attachments to what is left behind are many, then we cannot expect to go inward and upwards; we will be drawn back into the world.

Those of us who use email will know the frustrating experience when sometimes we try to send someone a message with an attachment. If the attachment is too large for their mailbox it will get ‘bounced back’ to us. Maybe their policy is that they can’t receive attachments, so unless you remove the attachment, the message won’t go.

The policy for attachments in Sach Khand is zero. Simply, we cannot be received there if we have any attachments. So long as our attachments remain here, so shall we. We will remain here in the creation, in this prison house of the world. Stuck in the Outbox–waiting to go, but unable to do so.

This is not our true home, we are all denizens of Sach Khand, we are pure spirit, held prisoner by the mind and manacled to this physical body. Through our long association with this plane of existence we have become institutionalized and believe this dank, dark and dirty prison cell to be our home. All our lives we have constantly dwelt on the things of the world; every waking hour we have been obsessed and infatuated by the illusory aspects of this material plane, so when we die, we come back to what we are attached to.

As it says in the Bible, “For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.”¹ And the soul being a slave of the mind will have no choice but to remain here.

When we sit in meditation at home, in those familiar, cosy and quiet surroundings, we all know how we struggle with our mind and find it hard to focus and concentrate–all the things of the world dance across the screen of our mind, even the most trivial of events can be replayed again and again. If this is challenging now, then how can we think that at death–which is without doubt the most stressful and challenging time of life–how can we think that somehow then we will be able to focus on the Master and let go of our attachments? Aren’t we kidding ourselves? Certainly he will be there to help us–of that we have no doubt! But if we still hold deep attachments to the world then we may have to come back.

How deeply are we attached? Let’s just reflect for a moment. We have all seen those traumatic scenes on the TV news where a community under the imminent threat of some marauding army, or a natural disaster, have to leave their homes with very little notice–they may have a few days’ warning, or maybe only a few hours, or possibly only minutes. And with only that much time they have to gather up what is most important to them, and just leave the rest behind. They may have a handcart or a car, maybe a truck or a mule–or only what they can carry, think of that! The rest–most of the stuff they own–they have to leave behind. Just look at the terror and fear on their faces, the desperation; they have no idea of where they are going, what awaits them, and they have left so much behind! Awful… it moves one to tears.

So what if we were in that unfortunate situation–what would we take, what is most important to us? Family and loved ones, for sure. Then what? Money? Food? Clothing? The more time we had the longer the list would get. And if we were to do a quick audit of that list it would reveal to all of us where our greatest attachments lie.

Now here’s the kicker: you can throw away that list! A day is coming to all of us when this will be precisely our situation. We may–or may not–get notice that we are about to leave. Death is always at our shoulder. And when death calls, nothing will go with us–not a single item on that list. Even the hand that wrote the list will not go with us! These bodies to which we are so attached will also remain here. If when we die we are not looking forward and are not happy to move on, but are looking backwards with longing, then back we may come!

Deep down we are all so lonely. We feel that deep longing for something–something we can’t express, something, someplace or some One we have forgotten. That craving leads us to seek to fill that void, and trapped in the world, we look for it here. Maharaj Charan Singh says:

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. Only then will it get true contentment and eternal peace. This feeling has been purposefully put in the heart of man.²

Sadly, the sweetness we find in the world is very sticky. We stick to it. We let it permeate every part and pore of our body, we become saturated with it and it weighs us down. Being so weighed down, we find it hard to move forward and so we remain here–life after life the pattern repeats itself and we can’t move. We need help. Deep within us our soul is so unhappy, and she cries for her Lord. He then hears the call and he comes to her rescue.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh used to tell a beautiful story about the child who visits the fairground with his father. The child is holding the father’s hand and sees all the bright lights and the whirly rides, hears the riotous music, the hurly burly and the clamour of the people. And the child enjoys everything around him. But sadly, in the midst of all this the child becomes distracted and loses hold of his father’s hand. Head down, he gets lost in the crowd. He looks around himself, full of fear. All the things that before he thought were so novel and enchanting now appear frightening and scary. Terrified and alone he tries to find some safe corner or someone who will comfort him and give him back that feeling he had in the company of his father. But there is no one and nothing–nothing can replace the father! The strength of the father’s hand made the child feel safe, and in his care he was just an onlooker passing through. Once that hand was gone, everything changed.

But the moment the child realizes he has lost the hand of the father and nothing else will replace that, then he cries out and the father comes immediately to his aid. Meditation is the way we call to the Father.

The child in the story, our soul, is actually never lost. Although to us it may seem so, just because we can’t see him doesn’t mean that he can’t see us. He was always watching us, keeping a close eye on us, walking with us. Then that indescribable feeling of loss or loneliness came upon us and we cried out to him. Suddenly there he was at our side. We came to the Path. He had been there all the time, watching and waiting. We were simply looking in the wrong direction–looking the wrong way out into the world, into the crowds of unfamiliar faces and the cheap illuminations of this shabby Theme Park we call home. We just needed to turn around–to look within–and there he was.

This world can be likened to a Theme Park (Universal Mind Studios), where the theme is sensory overload. It’s full of myriad attractions. The proprietor (the mind) wants to keep us all safely locked in; to him we are valuable paying customers, spending our precious wealth (our time and attention) in what are ultimately useless pursuits. Imitations of reality. So he employs his Weapons of Mass Distraction–love for body, family, wealth, position, sensuality. All the tricks of the trade keep us engaged and distracted from who we really are, from our true identity. We have become addicted and obsessed with the ‘rides’ of all our lives and the cheap baubles put before us.

The duties and responsibilities we have performed in all those past lives–in any of the 8.4 million species (or roles)–have more or less been the same. The CV or résumé of each life reads pretty much the same: in some form or other we had a mother and father, brothers and sisters. We will have taken food, we will have struggled to survive and we will have reproduced. The Circle of Life spinning us in a merry dance. Different rhythms, different tunes, different forms, always moving, around and around, never a chance to stop, look or reflect, constantly distracted. Busy fools digging our own graves.

But here’s the good news. The tide has turned. Our endless wandering has now come to an end. Unbeknown to us and without any clear sense of direction on our own behalf, we find ourselves at the top of the ladder of creation. We have received the highest promotion, the top job, we are Human Beings. The highest office for any soul in this creation.

So how is this life any different from all the others we have had? Soami Ji says:

Get busy with your own real work,
do not get caught up in other people’s affairs.³

We have spent all our past lives working for others, looking after the needs of everyone other than our real self. Our real self is not defined by those around us, nor by those things with which we have surrounded ourselves. Neither is it this body or our mind. Not even this narrow sense of individualism we call ego. This is not us. Our real self is our soul. As human beings we need to understand the work–the real task–for which we have incarnated into this body. Let’s look at our Job Description:

Position: Top of the Creation.
Job Title: Human Being.
Reporting to: God, the Father.
Job Purpose: To seek the Truth. To realize the divinity that lies within. To become one with the Father and return to our True Home.
Duties & responsibilities:

To meditate for a minimum of two and a half hours each day.
To be a lacto-vegetarian.
To abstain from alcohol, tobacco and mind-affecting drugs.
To live a clean and upright moral life.
To be a good human being.
To clear all our karmic debts and credits.

Qualifications: None–you are chosen by the Lord.
Working Conditions: You will be placed in the best environment for you to make spiritual progress.
Physical Requirements: You have a human body–nothing more is required.

That’s it!

As a quick note: certainly as part of our duty to be a good Human Being we should diligently carry out all our responsibilities in regard to taking care of our families, professional commitments and so on. But remember, these things–or some version of them–we have had in all our previous lives; having these is not our purpose.

To reiterate, our purpose is: To seek the Truth. To realize the divinity that lies within each one of us and to become one with the Father and return to our True Home. This is our priority. It’s why we are all here. If we prioritize this, then the Master in turn promises that he will take care of all the rest–both our spiritual and worldly needs. As the Bible says:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.⁴

Seek ye first… not second or third, or after my children are grown up, or when I have a steady income, or when I retire. No, seek ye first the kingdom of god and all things shall be added unto you.

The daily choices we make will reflect our priorities. When we make our daily list of things to be done, at the top of the list should be our meditation–remember it is in our Job Description. Everything else should follow from that. If we were to have a review meeting with the Master of the past year, what would we show him? Have we taken our job seriously? If we only place before him a list for fulfilling the basic activities of life, such as meeting family commitments, keeping our homes, attaining professional status, etc., then how are we making the best use of this opportunity he has given us? He knows what we are capable of and that is why we have been given this top promotion–Being Human.

If we meditate every day, then we have turned up for our real work–our real task. We have not burned our days in the needless and pointless toil of others. Not wasted the time weighing ourselves down with the accumulation of more useless baggage which will only hold us back and stop us from going home.

That’s what we need to get into our heads. When we die we’re not leaving home like those tragic refugees we talked about earlier. We’re going home. We should not be looking back at what is lost–nothing is lost. Remember, we’re homesick–we’re tired of this world and we want to go home.

It is our misplaced love that keeps us here. If that little love that we have has the power to keep us here, then if we can re-attach it to what lies within us–the Shabd, the divine melody that resounds within all of us–then all is accomplished.

The Master knows how we are, he understands that only attachment can create detachment. A beggar may hold on tight to those few pennies that he has in his hand; no lever could prise open that hand. It's all he has. But offer him diamonds and rubies instead and he will gladly open the hand and drop the coins in order that the hand can be filled with the treasure you have put before him. The Masters offer a far more priceless treasure. They offer us access to the Shabd, that divine treasure that has lain hidden within each of us since the beginning of the creation. The Masters say that the Shabd once tasted bestows such joy and bliss that by comparison everything the world has to offer becomes insipid.

Saint Bhika said:

None is poor, O Bhikha:
Everyone hath rubies in his bundle,
But how to open the knot he doth not know
And therefore he is a pauper.⁵

Our daily toil is like that; it is the result of a misplaced search for joy and happiness outside in the world, when inside, in our own bundle, there is an inexhaustible treasure of love and bliss.

It is by attaching our souls to Shabd–the only real and lasting joy–that we can free ourselves from the gross pleasures of the world. When we go inside, when we enter the reality within, we will have detached ourselves from the world and the senses and attached ourselves to him within. We will have crossed that threshold of the tenth door and entered into the heavenly spheres. Below the eye centre is only pain and suffering; above and beyond the eye centre these things vanish. And the more time we spend in meditation the less we will be attached to the world. We will start to refine our senses, seeking the purer and more subtle things in life. The gross attractions of the senses will slowly slip away and we will find greater pleasure in pursuing the spiritual life and whatever supports that way of living. Our love will only be for the Master.

We will be attached to our meditation; it will be our number one priority, which is as it should be. Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji says:

Your own work is that of doing simran and bhajan (the spiritual exercises) which will, in due course, liberate you from the vast prison in which you have been confined for countless ages. Life is short. Time is fleeting. Take full advantage of it, and if you have not done ‘your own work’ already, start doing it now. Seek a true Master and under his guidance attach your soul to the Shabd, the Word and reach your True Home.⁶

King James Bible, Matthew 6:21
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light; letter 10
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), 1^st ed., p.110
King James Bible, Matthew 6:33
Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, 7^th ed., p.17
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, 11^th ed., p.85

The Spiritual Journey: Balance, Discipline and Responsibility - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Spiritual Journey: Balance, Discipline and Responsibility

This life is a journey – a journey not from place to place, but from one level of consciousness to another. We are travelling from the finite to the infinite.

And, as with any other journey, we will pass through different stages as we move towards our destination. Take the metaphor of an automobile journey, for example. We may encounter heavy rain in one place, so we’ll have to pull over till it stops. We may have a flat tire, so we have to stop and change it. Or we may have really clear weather, and even find someone to help us drive – that phase of the journey will get easier. The point is that on the spiritual journey, like any other journey, we will encounter obstacles and maybe even detours. But the main thing is that we shouldn’t give up.

We need to keep moving towards our destination. As Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh once said: “We have only one future: to return to the Father.”¹ So let us not miss this opportunity. We may not get the human form so easily again.

Hazur often said that every step we take towards the Lord is a positive step. If we take just one step towards him, he will take one hundred steps towards us. And we need to make a commitment, a mental resolve, to do whatever is necessary to reach our destination. We have to understand what will take us in the direction we wish to go, and we have to set priorities for the way we live. We have to use our sense of discrimination with every action.

Our first step is to find someone to guide us – a teacher, a spiritual Master. Someone we can trust, whom we can respect and emulate, who has our best interest at heart. Someone who teaches a practical method that starts from our human level and takes us to the experience of the divine. And that person is the Master, who guides us and accompanies us on this ultimate life journey. He takes our hand when we lose confidence, and reassures us that we are on the right track. In that sense he is our best friend.

All mystics have emphasized the need for a Master. Some have called him a jewel, a priceless treasure. The seventeenth-century woman saint, Bahinabai, wrote:

Being with a master leads
the mind to detachment
and the heart to tranquillity.
A master is the noblest jewel of all.
The company of your master
will imprint in your being
both worldly and divine knowledge,
and bliss will be yours right here.
Those who know the value
of being with the mystics, says Bahina,
are the true lovers.²

So the true mystic wants to raise his disciples to his level. He doesn’t want them to worship him; rather he teaches them to explore their own spiritual potential, how to enrich their lives and live as true human beings. He teaches the true method of worshipping the Lord, which will transform us spiritually.

Christ said: “Ye are gods.”³ This means that the Master is not the only one who can experience God within himself – we can all rise to that level of holiness. We just need to raise our level of consciousness. The Master often says that he is no different from any of us; it’s only the level of realization that differs.

The mystics say that within us, there is a divine power that is the essence of all life. In the Bible this power is called the creative Word of God; Indian mystics call it the Shabd, meaning the Word or unspoken Sound – it is the flow of the divine will, the power of love. This eternal divine reality manifests within us as spiritual sound and light. Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh guru, said:

Pure is the Word, pure is the holy Sound,
and pure is the Light that permeates all hearts.⁴

In the Gospel of John it says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”⁵ This entire creation was projected by God through this divine power. This power gives life to everything. It pre-existed the creation and will continue to exist eternally, even if the creation should end. It is the life in the smallest molecule of a one-celled bacteria. and it is the power that holds the vast cosmos together. It is the power of love, the primal expression of God.

So the spiritual Master teaches us a method of meditation that will allow us to control our minds. Once the mind is brought under control through our repetition practice, we can catch hold of the divine reality of Shabd, the Word of God. Our level of consciousness rises and we become aware of the divine reality within.

We might ask why we don’t feel God’s presence all the time. Why don’t we see the inner light and hear the beautiful spiritual melody, if they are so intrinsic to our nature? The reason is that we are focused on ourselves, and not on God. We ruminate over our jobs, our families, our problems, desires, and so forth. We feel separate from God because we are wrapped up in everything else. We are out of touch with our true spiritual nature. And everything we do or think during the day that immerses us in the world around us reinforces that sense of separation, although in reality we are not separate. It is our ego, our mind, that creates this illusion of separateness, and we are under its spell.

And that is why we need to find the spiritual Master – to learn the method of meditation and the disciplined way of living that will liberate us from this illusion of separation and that will create the foundation for our spiritual journey. This way of life is embodied in four vows which we commit ourselves to following:

First is the vegetarian diet – we agree not to kill animals or have them killed for us. We don’t eat meat, fish or eggs or anything containing them. We want to cultivate a compassionate nature and minimize the great debt that accrues from killing animals.

The second vow is to avoid alcoholic drinks and recreational drugs. We know the effect of indulgence in these substances. The goal of our life is spiritual realization, for which we need clarity of mind. These substances scatter our mind and retard our spiritual progress. They warp our sense of values, to the point where we can’t discriminate between right and wrong. They hinder our ability to focus our minds in meditation.

The third vow is all-encompassing – it is to live an ethical and moral life. We must be objective. We have to weigh our actions to see if they will lead us in the direction we want to go. We have to be honest and straightforward in every respect; earn our own living and not be a burden on others. We need to be kind, loving, and forgiving. And we need to be chaste in both mind and body – keeping our actions and thoughts pure and uplifting. In short, we have to reflect the values that a spiritual way of life embodies.

A philosopher once said that self-respect comes from the ability to say no to ourselves – in other words, to maintain a discipline and strengthen our inner core. And that is what these vows do for us. They are actually a gift, not a burden – they are the doorway to eternal freedom.

The fourth vow is that we will meditate for two and a half hours a day. We need to cleanse our mind of all negativity and put it on a positive track. Our meditation will do this. It will give us strength to change our approach to life.

Tulsi Sahib, an Indian saint of the nineteenth century, advises us:

Cleanse the chamber of your heart
for the coming of your Beloved.⁶

Cleansing the sanctuary of our heart means attending to our meditation – our simran, the inner repetition practice taught at initiation, and bhajan, listening to the inner spiritual Sound that is always reverberating within us. In this way we will cleanse ourselves of our negative tendencies, of our ego, and our impure thoughts. We will make our heart and mind a suitable residence for the holy spirit, the Lord, who is our Beloved.

Our task is to plunge into our meditation with a clear sense of purpose – with total commitment and dedication. We know that if we want to succeed in anything, we have to give it our wholehearted attention. We have to make an honest effort. As with anything else, practice makes perfect – we have to continue to make effort – and then make more effort. The Master says we shouldn’t be concerned with results, we should just keep focusing on our efforts.

Concentration is the key to our practice. In order to concentrate on our repetition practice during our meditation, we need to keep a spiritual perspective while living in the world. We can’t expect to let ourselves get over-involved in every activity, and then be able to bring our attention within, in the morning, when we sit for meditation. We need to protect our energy and nurture the still place within us. So although we have duties to attend to during our daily lives, we need to keep focused on our spiritual priority all the while. ‘Hand in task, mind in God,’ is the old saying. We have to maintain our focus and balance during the day. A Chinese mystic once wrote:

Outwardly go with the flow, while inwardly keeping your true nature. Then your eyes and ears will not be dazzled, and your thoughts will not be confused, while the spirit within you will expand greatly to roam in the realms of absolute purity.⁷

We should live in the world like a duck in water – it sits on top of the water, but never gets wet. We need to sit on the edge of life and not fall in, to go through life and not become immersed. Eknath, a Maharashtrian mystic of the sixteenth century, sang:

Whether the body be
motionless in meditation
or moving in the thick of life,
let the mind stay in the middle,
forever still, pure and free ⁸

Here is an interesting story that illustrates this point:

There once was a king who was very devoted to God. A spiritual seeker was advised to get enlightenment from him. But when the man saw the luxurious palace where the king lived, he lost faith. He thought: How can someone surrounded by all this luxury and enjoying so much status be spiritually advanced? How can he give me enlightenment? So the king, reading the man’s thoughts, gave him a task. He told his courtiers to take the man on a walk through town, where a big festival was going on. But there was one condition. The man had to keep a pitcher of milk on his head. If just one drop would spill, the attendants were instructed to cut off his head.

Needless to say, when the man walked through town, his mind was always on the pitcher of milk sitting on his head, and he saw nothing of the celebrations or the festival. When he returned to the palace, the king asked him how he had enjoyed himself. The man said, I was so frightened of spilling a drop of milk that I saw nothing around me. I now understand how it’s possible for you to be surrounded by wealth and status, yet keep yourself humble before God – how it’s possible to have all these people bowing before you, yet still remain unaffected.

So, whether we are undergoing suffering and hardship, or living a life of luxury and ease, we have to keep our minds on God and detached from our outer circumstances. Our regular meditation itself will keep us from getting too involved and dragged down by the world. While keeping our minds positive during the day, and doing our simran whenever possible, we need to attend to our meditation regularly in order to create the structure and envrionment for our daily life. Hazur Maharaj Ji once said:

If you are tied to a strong chain, you can move only within a limited area. So if we are tied to our meditation every day, no matter how much we’re involved in other things, we will always remain within the circle. … If the chain is broken, then of course you are absolutely gone, you’re involved. So the chain of meditation should not be broken. Meditation must be attended to every day, and then no matter how much you try to involve yourself in other activities, you’ll never be allowed to go astray at all. You’ll never be allowed to get involved so much that you forget your real path, because your chain is very strong.⁹

It is true that sometimes we get lulled into a kind of complacency. We’ve been on the path for a while – we used to make effort – but now we’re coasting along. Maybe we’ve stopped reading the Sant Mat books at home, maybe we don’t go to satsang that often. We get up later and later in the morning. We lose the sense of urgency, the awareness that this life will end one day – we don’t know when – it could be in ten years or ten minutes. We don’t really believe the end could be near.

The Master often tells us we need to develop spiritual maturity. What does this mean? Spiritual maturity means that we are realistic, that we begin our journey from where we are and don’t get stuck in fantasies or illusions. That we understand our weaknesses and strengths, and take steps to overcome our weaknesses and build on our strengths. That we understand our priorities and take practical steps to live accordingly.

Inevitably we will face numerous obstacles – outright rebelliousness, laziness, discouragement, or simply bad habits. We can’t blame any outside power – not Kal, not the negative power, not the devil. Sometimes we say the mind made me do that, as if the mind were an independent entity that had this power over us. But the mind is us! We are doing it; we have the bad habits; we are lazy. It’s high time we recognized this.

Flip Wilson was a famous American comedian. He created a character named Geraldine. Geraldine would always blame the devil for her weaknesses. “I didn’t want to buy that dress – I have so many dresses in my closet. I didn’t want that red dress, but the devil made me buy it.” ‘The devil made me do it’ has become a familiar refrain. As someone once remarked: I don’t need the devil to make me sin; I do a good enough job myself! Wilson really captured our tendency to avoid responsibility for our actions and thoughts. So we need not blame Kal for our missteps and misfortunes. We have to take responsibility ourselves.

Our duty to do our meditation is something we have to take seriously. We have to do it whether we feel inspired and motivated, or not; whether we are sick or healthy. As we get older we have to expect aches and pains, even serious illnesses, and possibly lessening mental concentration. This goes with the territory, so to speak, the territory of being in a human body. So we should expect to go through various moods and levels of enthusiasm. The point is not to get discouraged, but to keep on keeping on. We should keep our goal foremost in mind and continue moving forward.

And let us not indulge in self-pity. Everyone has weaknesses – that is why we’re here in this world – but the Master sees our potential. He always says that we should try to strengthen our positive qualities rather than dwell on our weaknesses. He often uses the image of diluting red dye in water. You can’t take the dye out of the water, but by adding more and more water, the colour of the water gets lighter and lighter, until it gets absolutely clear. This example shows that the best way to get rid of the negative is to dilute it with the good, with the positive.

And we shouldn’t get discouraged even if we go astray. We can always return to the Master’s teachings. The Lord is all forgiveness. The Shabd is love. We just need to take one positive step and the Master will take those one hundred steps towards us. Hazur Maharaj Ji used to emphasize that if we stick with, or return to, our meditation, we will get the strength to overcome our weaknesses.

And it doesn’t matter if our mind behaves in meditation. We just need to keep doing it. “All the time you spend struggling with the mind during the course of your meditation is itself a meditation,”¹⁰ said Hazur Maharaj Ji.

This path is about developing our full potential as human beings. Right now we’re probably only using five or ten per cent of our potential. But by following these few simple vows and practicing our meditation, we can make ourselves receptive to the grace that is flowing all the time. Discipline and a sense of purpose have to form the basis of our daily life.

Let us end with some advice from Hazur Maharaj Ji:

Whatever you do, keep your destination and purpose in view. Keep your home in view and try to achieve it. Do not forget your destination. Do not forget the purpose of human birth. We should always keep that in view. Work in this world, live in this world and enjoy yourself in this world, but never forget that destination nor leave the path we have to tread in order to get there.

Where we want to go – that goal should always be there in front of us. Keeping that goal in view, going towards that goal, do not become a slave of worldly achievements and forget your real home. That is the only thing I can say.¹¹

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.200
Bahinabai in Many Voices, One Song, p.85
King James Bible, Psalms 82:6
Guru Amardas quoted in Jap Ji, A Perspective, p.197
King James Bible, John 1:1
Tulsi Sahib, Santon ki Bani, Gazal, p. 275, in Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II, p.140
Huainanzu, tr. Thomas Cleary, in Taoism Reader, p. 29
Eknath in Many Voices, One Song, p.9
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.165
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, p.112
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, p.441

A Spiritual Perspective - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Spiritual Perspective

Study shows that the message of mystics of all times and places is in essence the same, irrespective of language, culture or religion. A mystic is someone who finds answers to the big questions of life by research within his or her consciousness. Through their research mystics have discovered that that there is a ‘spiritual’ world that lies behind and animates the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ worlds. While for most of us things spiritual are no more than concepts, for the mystic they are facts of life, constantly experienced.

It is as if mystics are telling us that the human being is highly sophisticated hardware that comes with three software programs, the senses, mind and spirit. Most of us know of and use only two programs, the senses and the mind. The mystic shows us how to activate the spiritual program and make human life complete. To follow mysticism is therefore not like adopting a new religion or philosophy, which is a re-programming of our mental and physical software. Mysticism activates our spiritual software, our innate spiritual capacity, which benefits us regardless of what teaching we follow. Every human being has equal potential in this respect.

When we try to answer ultimate questions about our existence using only two of our natural software programs, we become confused and, due to our differing cultures and backgrounds, come into conflict. If anyone, whether a mystic or a priest, tells us profound truths about who or what we are, those words alone do not make us understand or feel those truths. We need, by developing the third software program through spiritual practice, to experience these truths for ourselves, to make them a lived reality. When we see the spiritual reality, our conflicts over religious dogmas evaporate. On the platform of spiritual life human beings can come together as one.

The Mystic Cosmology
In recent centuries we have developed many complex material sciences generating impressive bodies of knowledge about the world and human beings. But this research has been confined to the mental and physical realms. How far along is our research and knowledge about spirituality? For example, particle physics now recognizes the intricate interconnectedness of the entire universe. Mystics share this understanding, teaching that there is one divine wellspring of life, a vibrant and positive energy, a single source of all being, namely spirit. Scientists, in their search for the theory of everything, may have already reached the limits of the power of the mind to capture and describe reality using words, concepts, symbols and images. Mystics explain that for us to know about spirit we must go beyond mind and physical senses. One must use the method, the software, that is compatible with discovering spiritual truth, which is by developing our spiritual capacity within.

The Spiritual Journey
Mystics describe the quest for spiritual truth as a journey we make within our own bodies, within our consciousness. To understand this journey we need first to understand where we start from, our present spiritual condition. The life of each of us, mystics teach, is projected in its perfect whole from a single source beyond time. But on planes of mind and matter, we live our lives under the illusion of time and the law of cause and effect or action and reaction. Everything we do we have to pay for. The soul, coupled to mind and body, must reap the harvests of these sowings, and moves from life to life, form to form, living and dying over and over again. We are now caught in this cycle, called the wheel of life, the cycle of reincarnation, or the law of karma, which many of the world’s peoples have long understood as a basic fact of life.

Given this situation, how should we choose to act? Mystics urge us to wake up, ask ourselves what it is that makes us suffer and where our real happiness lies, and then make the appropriate choices. They advise us to turn our consciousness away from the pain-filled material life of ceaseless change, the spinning rim of the wheel of life, and toward the stability of life’s unmoving centre.

They explain that at the centre of life is spirit, one and indivisible. Spirit is perfection, imperturbable, the origin of all. From the one emerges all diversity, all forms from the most subtle to the most gross, all activity and complexity, the entire creation. Spirit is love. Spirit is energy. Spirit is life. Mind, matter and senses have no life of their own—they are the means by which spirit expresses and manages itself in material dimensions. Spirit comes from a source beyond mind and matter, and beyond the law of cause and effect. Soul, a drop of spirit that allows a being to be defined apart from the ocean of spirit, is the energy or power that sustains individualized life. When soul, the life force, leaves a body or living being, that body dies, disintegrates, and reverts to its original matter, dust to dust. If spirit leaves the creation, the creation disintegrates and reverts to an earlier, less-formed reality. The mystic journey of enlightenment, then, is the expansion and deepening of consciousness from life's most transient material manifestations to the permanence of its spirit-filled heart.

Making the Journey
For the practice of mysticism to be successful, a person works both on the inside and on the outside to create conditions favorable to the expansion of consciousness. On the outside, he or she minimizes the binding force of cause and effect through compassionate and mindful living: a vegetarian diet, no intoxicating or mind-altering substances, and a code of conduct that shapes positive and spiritually supportive relations with others. On the inside, time is given daily to the practice of meditation to re-orient the mind inwards. Meditation techniques engage the dominant faculties of speech, sight and hearing to focus the attention and shift it away from the senses and towards the spirit—and from this arises a state of concentration, heightened awareness and perfect stillness. When concentration becomes perfect, dedication absolute, and yearning so intense it can no longer be supported, consciousness passes naturally into another dimension. Wisdom literature from all traditions describes this experience as blissful beyond imagination, filled with the experience of spirit as captivating sound and radiant light. Look to the writings of any mystic to learn about this ecstatic state of being!

Meditation is thus the path leading to the depths, breadths and heights of spiritual experience. Meditation enables contact with spirit, the one continuum that holds creation together, the thread of life on which creation's pearls are strung. Spirit has been referred to in the writings of religions by many names—Logos, Word, Nam, Shabd, Holy Spirit, Tao, Kalima, Akash Bani, and many other names. Once contacted consciously within, this spirit draws our consciousness, our soul, upward through ever more subtle realms to the luminous tranquility of ultimate reality. Meditation is the journey of attuning oneself with the spiritual ocean of pure being.

Only as human beings can we make this journey. Only a human being has the ability to direct consciousness to its advantage. To meditate is to install the complete human software, to awaken the spiritual capacity. Through this practice we embark on the path, the ‘middle way’ of balanced living, that takes us to our ultimate destination.

Mystics down through the ages have left teachings that make us aware, inform us, about this path. But living mystics, if we can find them, perform a still more fundamental role. Because they have walked the path themselves, they can guide us personally along the way, just as they were themselves guided by their own teacher. And, because they have realized the spiritual dimension, living mystics manifest its reality even on our plane of existence, giving us immense inspiration and a powerful example to follow. Mystics explain to us that it is part of the natural order that true masters are always living on earth to guide spiritual seekers. In the Sufi tradition of Islam these teachers are called murshid or pir, in the bhakti traditions of India guru or satguru, in the hasidic tradition of Judaism, the zaddik.

To travel the path back to our divine source is the true purpose of life in the human form. Whether this divine source is referred to as spirit, God, Lord, Allah, Wahiguru, Adonai, Buddha, the One, any other name, or no name at all, is a matter of individual preference. How to describe one’s spiritual life, what outward practices to follow in support of one’s inner life, whether to belong to any religion and which one, are all equally individual choices. What is of importance is to cultivate the experience of spirit.

Claiming Our Inheritance
Mystics say that each one of us is the rightful heir to a treasure of inestimable value. We are all of one lineage and one family. But, because we have lost sight of who we are, we feel that something is missing in our lives and we suffer from confusion and conflict. The infinite wealth of spirituality is our birthright, and will be ours when we develop our spiritual capacity as human beings, awaken to our true identity and return to our spiritual source. To achieve this we need only right conduct and right spiritual practice under the guidance of a living mystic teacher.

The Red Carpet - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Red Carpet

On the evening news, we sometimes see kings and queens or prime ministers and presidents arrive in a country, step off a plane, and find a red carpet unfolding in front of them – a sign of respect, achievement and special consideration.

What about our own red carpet unfolding in front of us every minute? We stepped out of our room one day, and there in front of us, immaculate, lay our own red carpet, the beginning of a radically new life and the discovery of our true inner self. Through initiation, we too became dignitaries – dignitaries of Sant Mat.

Initiation is the greatest gift that can be given to mankind; it comes from the divine, the highest power, and is given to us each, individually. Why? We can’t possibly deserve it. We have been criminals, we have cheated, we have lied, we have killed, we have raped, we have been cruel; but we have also been angels, we have been philanthropists, we have been kind, we have cared, we have stood for justice and what is right. In other words, we have been everything we see around us. We are everybody we see or we encounter. For we are humanity. God resides in all of us.

So why me? Why am I being given the opportunity to walk the red carpet now? We do not know. When asked, Masters usually reply that everything comes in its proper time. “Everybody,” said Hazur, “has a time when he is to worship the father in spirit.”¹ Elsewhere he elaborated: “It is said to be taking a new birth because you start a new life completely – you become entitled to go back to your father from the day of your initiation.”²

We often ask the Master for grace and we expect it to be given upon the asking. Yet his grace and his love were given to each of us in the form of initiation. But we don’t recognize it as such because it does not come in the colour and form that we expected. Some of us who have received his gift of initiation don’t take the time to unwrap the gift to see what is inside; we don’t read, carefully, the card of instructions that comes along with the gift. And yet, year after year we sit in front of him, begging for his grace. Baba Ji has said that we have already received all the grace we need at initiation. It is there for the taking, provided that we do the necessary work – follow the instructions and practise.

Sant Mat is not an insurance policy that guarantees us salvation simply because we have received initiation. Although initiation marks the culmination of a journey of thousands of lifetimes, it is not the end of the journey. Baba Ji tells us that the event of our initiation is to be taken as the projection of our desire to grow spiritually. Unless we take action, we will not become true spiritual followers. The red carpet has been laid out in front of us, but we have to walk forward on it and keep the goal in front of us at all times: to contact Nam.

In the words of Guru Ravidas:

Nam is the root of knowledge,
Nam is the door to salvation.
The one whose heart is occupied by the Lord
Falls not into the entanglements of the world.³

Right in front of us is the red carpet, waiting for us to walk on it. Are we intimidated? Take the first step, says the Master. And he continues: I am not asking you to renounce the world or to renounce your loved ones. I am just asking you to take the first step. Come with me and walk along this red carpet which extends to infinity. It will bring you to realms you have never imagined, to discoveries beyond your present level of consciousness. Heed my advice: Do not worry – detachment will come slowly, by steps, incrementally. Nothing is forced.

We may have come to the path through negative experiences. Suffering, death of loved ones, failures, horrors of wars, famine and poverty might have led us to search for something more. But once on the path, something gradually changes in our perception of the world. God is in this creation! Love surrounds it, love controls it, and God is love. Love is in this madness.

So we just have to start, to make an effort. Anything one desires in life comes at a cost and with some effort. Long years of study are needed to acquire an education; hard work is required to succeed in business. No athlete receives medals and recognition without having first put in strenuous daily training. And so it is with us. Hard work is required to succeed in the science of spirituality.

We have a choice, even after becoming a satsangi. We can continue to dabble in the world, to be attracted to it at the expense of our meditation, or we can immerse ourselves – dive into – the opportunity given to us by our Master. We have this choice at every moment.

So let us think: Do we really want to continue giving more than is necessary to this worldly illusion? In the words of Matthew Arnold, an English poet:

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about
Here and there, eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, and hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving nothing,
And then they die.⁴

And then they die! Is this the fate we want?

Masters come for us, in their infinite mercy, full of love and compassion; they roll out the red carpet in front of us, and beg us: Heed my advice! Meditate! They use gentle persuasion, never force, pleading with us to save ourselves. What are we waiting for? We have a program to follow, as outlined in Sar Bachan Poetry:

Without the Master
no one will ever cross the ocean,
without his Nam no one will ever find salvation.
Without attending satsang
no one will ever learn the essence,
without love no one will ever meet the friend.
Without the proper technique
no one can penetrate the inner sky,
without grace the mighty gates will not open.
Without surat no one can ever catch the Shabd,
without nirat the soul cannot sustain itself
at the level of the Shabd.
First and foremost, develop love for the Master,
then conquer the mind
and drink the nectar of Nam.⁵

We are seekers after truth, isn’t that so? So let us ask ourselves this key question: What is it that we truly desire? What would our reply be if we were to ask ourselves, If I were to die within the next week, what would my regrets be, what would I have done differently? And if I were given one year, what would I try to change immediately? Do we want to be coming close to death and regret not having meditated, or not having meditated enough?

The compassionate one has rolled the carpet out in front of us and he has promised that he is waiting for us. We should have no fear, and just move forward on the red carpet buoyed by faith, like the little dog in the following story:

A sick man turns to his doctor at the end of a visit and says to him, “Doctor, I am afraid of death. Do you know anything about what lies on the other side?” Quietly the doctor responds, “I don’t really know.” The patient challenges him: “You don’t know, you a man of science and a seeker of God?”

On the other side of the door there is scratching and whining. The doctor opens the door and a cute dog jumps in all excited at seeing the doctor. “You see,” said the doctor, turning to his patient, “this dog did not know the room; he only knew that his master was in there. When the door opened he rushed in, without hesitation, without fear and jumped in his master’s lap.”

He continued: “I don’t know what is on the other side of death but I know one thing: My master is on the other side and that is enough. And when the door opens, I shall pass through with no fear, but with gladness.”

The Master is unrolling the red carpet day after day, asking us to walk the path. He provides direction, he provides protection, he provides a watchful eye, he provides faith, and he provides love.

One little thing he asks of us: meditation. We may feel that our meditation is poor, even horrible. But our Master looks at our potential. That is what he is focusing on and that is what he is working with. He sees light in us and tells us that we are already connected to the sound and to the light. He asks that we do not miss the opportunity of realizing this reality in this very lifetime.

Slowly we unroll our red carpet, and as we do that, the carpet behind us rolls back up. It’s done. Looking back does not help. There is nothing we have done that can be changed. With dignity and humility we can learn from the past and move forward. To a disciple suffering from depression, Hazur asked:

Why curse the darkness? Why not light the candle? We are worrying about our past, what we have done. … if we have done anything bad, we should try to improve ourselves for the future. That is the main thing … One must look ahead and make best use of the present so that we don’t repeat such mistakes again.⁶

“One must look ahead.” So, chin up!

One of our goals is to be prepared for death. When death comes knocking and says, “Here I am,” we can only hope that our attachment will be to the Master, and that we will have done enough meditation so that, in the words of Rumi, we “fall forward”.⁷

We are imperfect, and we remain under the terrible sway of the mind to a great extent; but we should not worry about this because we chose to make the effort – and this effort is all he asks. And our effort is vital if we are to be brought to him at the end of that red carpet. We need to play our part in unrolling the carpet.

There are distractions on the left and on the right side of the carpet as it unrolls. People want to shake our hands, others want to give us something, others ask for favors, and others distract us enough that we willingly step off our red carpet. There are temptations, there is forgetfulness, there is procrastination, and there is negative attitude. The mind will use every kind of trick to distract us from the straight and narrow.

Yet our guide is there. He may allow us to wander off, but sooner or later he will bring us back. As we continue walking on our carpet, it helps to keep in view the One who is waiting for us at the end of it, ready to shake our hand. That distance between where we currently stand on our carpet and where he stands waiting for us in his Shabd form – we are to travel that distance within with patience and determination and faith.

An invisible hand is guiding us on that straight and narrow red carpet. Master says, Hook on to it and hold on to it! The simran is his helping hand. If we can latch on to simran and keep remembering those words, the distractions along the way become less strong and less attractive. In the words of Guru Ravidas, “The one whose heart is occupied by the Lord falls not into the entanglements of the world.” This remembrance we practise in a focused way during meditation, but if simran can be practised during the day, as often as we can do it, it becomes a laser beam illuminating our lives and pointing at all times towards the Master. Brother Lawrence wrote beautifully:

I worshipped him as often as I could, keeping my mind in his holy presence. … I made this my business as much all the day long as I did when I came to my appointed times of prayer. For at all times, every hour, every minute, even in the height of my business, I drove away from my mind everything that was capable of interrupting my thought of God.⁸

There was once a peasant girl who walked through a field where a group of monks were offering their prayers. The law in those days was that no one was allowed to cross the area where prayers were being offered. After a little while, the young lady returned, crossing the field the same way. One of the monks called out to her, “Young lady, you have committed a grave sin by walking this route. We were praying and thinking of God.”

The young girl apologized profusely and turned to leave. But she thought about it, then suddenly turned around to the monk and exclaimed, “Sir, I was going to meet my young man, and I was thinking of him so I didn’t see you! I was just lost in my thoughts. If you were thinking of God, how did you see me?”

We have to immerse ourselves in his remembrance. Anything short of that pulls us out into the world. The life span we have is relatively short. We can’t waste too much time, as the saints remind us.

In Spiritual Letters Baba Jaimal Singh wrote:

Do not waste time uselessly. Be concerned about time spent in vain, and regret why so many breaths were wasted, since they were utilized neither in worldly affairs nor in spiritual pursuit.⁹

Master Jagat Singh used to say: “Think more and talk less.”¹⁰

The Master helps the disciples throughout their life and destiny. They are given the opportunity, the facility and atmosphere in which they can clear their karmic accounts, and at the same time go beyond the realm of mind and maya. Life, our destiny – every piece of it – is a miracle to be accepted full-heartedly, with the understanding that everything that happens is for our own good. In the words of Rumi:

Be grateful for your life, every detail of it, and your face will come to shine like a sun, and everyone who sees it will be made glad and peaceful. Persist in gratitude, and you will slowly become one with the Sun of Love, and Love will shine through you its all-healing joy.¹¹

Our lives reflect our priorities. Our actions speak louder than our words, for everything we do is done in accordance with our priorities. The time we get up, what we eat, what we think, what we do and what we abstain from doing – all stem from our priorities. We determine our top priority, and this becomes the most important thing in life. We might imagine ourselves inverting the present direction of our mind. We need to keep reminding our mind of the need to turn in the opposite direction, convincing it that it has to invert its natural downward tendencies – that it has to look upwards and act on what our Master says. If we choose to allow a pleasure-seeking society to brainwash us, our lives can easily become superficial and artificial. Becoming real, identifying not with the illusion surrounding us, but with the inner reality of who we are, becomes the goal as we travel on our red carpet.

It has often been said that Sant Mat is a path for the brave. Staying on the red carpet without stumbling off requires faith and courage, and along the way there are doubts. Writer and researcher Stephen Batchelor elaborates on this:

The Zen tradition speaks of three factors that need to be cultivated along the path: great doubt, great faith, and great courage. Thus, faith and doubt are brought together. …

Clearly doubt in this context does not refer to the kind of wavering indecision in which we get stuck, preventing any positive movement. It means to keep alive the perplexity at the heart of our life, to acknowledge that fundamentally we do not know what is going on …

Faith is the condition of ultimate confidence that we have the capacity to follow the path of doubt to its end.

And courage: courage is the strength needed to be true to ourselves under all conditions, to cast aside the obstacles that are constantly thrown in our way.¹²

We are seekers, and the compassionate one has rolled out the red carpet for each one of us. We are on the great way of discovering our true self. It is for us to keep on keeping on, not fully knowing, yet practising trust and letting go.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #34
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #33
Guru Ravidas, Guru Ravidas – Life and Teachings, 2^nd ed., p.135
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems, p.89
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), p.195
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #579
Rumi, as cited in Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, p.189
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, ed. Harold J. Chadwick, p.110
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, #111
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Spiritual Bouquet, #30, p.194
Andrew Harvey, Light Upon Light: Inspirations from Rumi, p.149
Stephen Batchelor, The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty, p.15

Longing for Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Longing for Love

The Gravity of Matter
When we are away from the Master and we look around us we might say that every step we take on the face of the planet Earth is a step in a mighty field of power. Every step we take is influenced by the power of gravity. This field limits our ability to move – every step we take is a struggle against the gravitational force of our home planet Earth.

When we set out on a trip from point A to point B on the face of this planet we have to overcome its gravity. We must strive against this power of matter when we raise our legs; we must overcome this power just to raise our hands. And we have to overcome this power when we want to rise from the ‘dead.’

In our current state, our consciousness is scattered, drawn to the objects of the physical universe and to events that all involve the physical universe in one form or another. We are constantly focusing on matter shaped into thousands of forms, and on fears and pleasures and wishes relating to this matter. Actually, we are totally absorbed by matter in our deeds and thoughts.

But there is one action we take in which Earth’s gravity shall not stand in our way. On the contrary, this action of ours shall be greatly helped by gravitational force – namely our fall. And be it a physical fall or moral fall it results in pain and suffering. Masters tell us there are five passions raging in our hearts that block our free passage to God. They all hold us down in the field of matter, and therefore stand in the way of God-realization:

Lust is very much connected to matter. It is but another form of material gravity when the pure spiritual longing for attaining unity with the Lord is distorted and replaced by the physical longing to be one body – to unify two bodies, to multiply.

Anger: We become angry when what is happening is not in line with what we want or what we think is right. My will is connected with how this material world functions and how I would like it to function. We become angry when our attitude of ‘My will shall be done’ is frustrated, instead of feeling at peace with the attitude of ‘Thy will shall be done.’

Julian Johnson says in The Path of the Masters that while lust draws us down to the animal level, greed draws us even deeper, down to the mineral level of creation.¹ We long for things. We long for sand and stones and mortar in the form of our houses; we long for the steel and plastic of our cars; we long for precious gold and precious stones. We long for fancy food. Underlying all of these longings, however, is our simple longing to find happiness, a feeling of security, a feeling of being special. And yet all our material desires, when we become obsessed by them, pull us down from the level of human beings to the level of dead corpses and stones.

Masters tell us that the fourth passion is attachment. We are attached to concepts about all the things and people around us. These things have no reality from the higher point of view, from a higher level of consciousness. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh used to say, “The pity is that what we see, what we feel, what we touch is not real. What we don’t see, that is real.”² In other words, we only think we know what reality looks like, and we are very much attached to our concepts about reality.

Last but not least, our egotism stands in the way of our experiencing God. It blocks our way by telling us that we are the physical body, that we are this position and that possession, that we are this house and that car, that we are this child and that spouse. But Masters tell us that we are not physical beings striving for spiritual experience – they tell us that we are spiritual beings going through the physical experience.

Gravity of Spirit
So far we have been speaking about physical gravity. But if we take Master back home with us in our hearts from Dera, then we can say that there are – thank God – other forces in play as well. Let us think about spiritual gravity now.

Now we can also say that every step we take on the face of the planet Earth is also a step in a mighty field of power. By our good luck, the gravitational force of matter is only one part of a much greater power. Mystics reveal to us that the pull of this power is far greater than the gravity of matter and of the Earth itself. This is the power of spiritual attraction.

Gravitational force pulls our body and mind in a material direction – as human beings we are bound by the laws of physics and forced to focus on living in the world of physical limitations. Yet the power of spiritual attraction is greater; it influences not only our bodies and thoughts, but it also influences our spirit – our inner being – which the Master teaches us to realize. The Master welcomes us to a totally new level of power. He welcomes us to the supremely powerful field of the Lord’s gravity. This ultimate power that created everything and sustains everything is nothing but pure love. Once we are drawn by the Lord’s grace towards his field of power – into his field of gravity – we begin to long for Love.

By the Lord’s mercy we are put in connection with a perfect living Master, whose intention is to unify us with our source, with the Lord, with love. And how does he do this? Through love. This is our great benefit, this is our consolation and this is our hope. Because love is the only force that can undo the shackles of the laws of karma. Love is so powerful that it is the only force that can overcome the gravity of matter.

How can we realize that love? Masters tell us that the main name of the game is meditation. We all know very well that there is one thing that lies heavily on any satsangi’s consciousness: breaking one of the four vows that we have taken at the time of our initiation. And at the same time, we know very well that there is only one thing in this creation that can bring us happiness and peace of mind. We all know that it is meditation practised according to the instructions given to us by our Master.

Our Father is thoughtful and very compassionate. He loves our souls even more than we love our egos. We are not yet able to perceive the intensity of love he has in his heart. It is such a great power that it is beyond our wildest dreams.

Sometimes we might feel down. Sometimes we might feel we are inadequate when we see all our shortcomings, all our weaknesses, all our sins. We see that we are not as good as we would like to be. And yet, Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said that everything that is to happen has already happened. And we know that once the soul has been initiated by a perfect living Master there is absolutely no chance of anything going wrong. There is absolutely no chance of us ultimately, in due time, not reaching our final destination. Not because we want to be perfect, but because he wants us to become perfect. Because he wants us to go to him, dwell in him and become him.

We are living in the midst of a beautiful power, an enchanting power that flows all around us, that encompasses us, that engulfs us, that supports us. This power is our friend; it is the source of our strength. This power is at the same time both wisdom and love. So we are floating in the waves of wisdom, we are floating in the tide of love. The only thing we have to do is to realize it. How can we realize it? By letting go of the concepts and pretexts and contexts that our own mind has woven around us. We ourselves, through our minds, have designed the most effective prison there is – the prison of maya, of illusion. This prison is constructed from our thoughts, our concepts, our fears, our hopes and attachments. We are our own worst enemy until the moment we understand that we cannot gain satisfaction on this level of consciousness. We are our own worst enemy until we realize that what we consider to be ‘me’ is in fact an empty shell.

We know that what the sensual pleasures have to offer is of a very transitory nature. We know there is no sensual pleasure that can grant us what we truly seek – pleasure everlasting. Human beings are programmed to seek everlasting pleasure and everlasting security. And Masters come to our level of consciousness to show us the path leading to this very state. Masters are not interested much in the current toys that we so much long to play with – our houses, cars, fancy clothing, physical attractions and the mental games by which we try to dominate others. They have not descended to our level of consciousness just to leave us on the hook of the world. For them, we are children of the Father, and the Father is calling us to enter his court. His court is noble and illustrious beyond our imagination. Our soul is of royal blood and the Master is there to explain this to us. And not only to explain – he is here to guide our soul, he is here to help her pay her debts and go home.

And so mystics and Masters tell us how to return to the court of the Lord:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.³

We are not aware of the great treasures that lie dormant within us, so Masters have to come to explain to us how to reach those higher pleasures that lead us to the lap of the Father.

A questioner asked Master Charan Singh, “Can we experience joy in this life?” Hazur clarified the path to joy:

You see the wars, people cutting each others’ throats. Read the newspaper. Listen to the radio. What is happening? Is it joy? All the bombs, tanks and bullets are being made day and night – is it for joy? We are deceiving ourselves that we are enjoying ourselves. Constant fear of death is there. It can come from anyone at any time, at any place. Then where is that joy? It is a self-deception….

The attempt to meditate is trying to escape the misery of the world. The more you open your eyes and try to find joy outside, the more miserable you become, the more unhappy you become. We are becoming more frustrated every day…. Where is that peace which we are searching for outside? We just live in illusion and self-deception. The more we try to find peace outside, the more miserable we are becoming every day. If there is any joy, it is within us. It cannot be outside at all.⁴

To conclude, there are two fields of human life. The first field is of matter and of material being – the gravity of matter. The second field is of spirit and of spiritual being – the gravity of spirit. We are caught in the middle of two great forces: the gravity of matter and the gravity of love. Which one will become the dominant force of our life?

We know what the final outcome shall be. Not because we want it to be so, but because he wants it to be that way. He wants us to come back home. He is pulling us, he is helping us. He is there for us twenty-four hours a day. We are sentenced to success despite our worries, despite our little faith and despite our shortcomings. It is only a matter of time until we shall become part of him, when we shall unite with him in our eternal home, the palace of love. It is all question of his grace. And we should always hold in our mind that only the gravity of love can overcome the gravity of matter. And we should always hold in our mind that it shall be overcome by the gravity of the Master and his love.

Of course, we have to do our part and meditate. The more we meditate the less our Master has to suffer. We have meditate, so that for every small step or stumble we make in the right direction towards him, he can take a thousand giant leaps towards us. And therefore let us end with a last beautiful quote of Christ that goes hand in hand with what our Master tells us:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.⁵

In almost every satsang Baba Ji conveys to us the following simple principle: We should apply ourselves and meditate. And then let the Master help us with the rest.

Paraphrase of Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17^th ed., p.285.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives Vol. I, question 16.
Bible, Matthew 6:19–20.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives Vol. I, question 425.
Bible, Matthew 6:33.

Why Be Vegetarian? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Why Be Vegetarian?

Being vegetarian is fashionable now, and that’s good. It seems as if every time you turn around, some celebrity, corporate CEO, health guru, IT genius, or your neighbor is extolling the benefits and virtues of a vegan or vegetarian diet—now often called a plant-based diet. People want to be healthy, to make dietary choices that are environmentally responsible, and to be moral human beings who honor the lives of not only other humans but animals too. In most countries without a tradition of vegetarianism, being vegetarian (or vegan) is no longer considered weird, as it once was. It is simply one lifestyle choice among many that people of all ages, races, and cultural backgrounds are more often than not free to make without dividing their families, being thought strange by business colleagues, or annoying restaurant servers – all common reactions not so long ago.

One of many benefits of this trend is that it’s much easier to be vegetarian than it used to be. Restaurants that cater to vegetarians, or that can at least accommodate them, are much more plentiful, especially in major urban centers. And many markets and grocery stores carry products like tofu and vegan pizza – to name just two examples – which were unheard of, or at least hard to find, as recently as the last century.

So there has never been a better time to be a vegan or vegetarian, in terms of convenience and cultural acceptance.

Which is why it’s important to be clear about exactly why we, as followers of Surat Shabd Yoga, are vegetarian, specifically lacto-vegetarian (a diet that includes dairy products, though many of us choose to avoid dairy as well as meat, fish, fowl, and eggs). It is not that followers of Sant Mat are better than other vegetarians – far from it! But there are important, specific reasons for the dietary requirement of vegetarianism in Sant Mat, and the better we understand those reasons, the less likely we will be to take our diet for granted. The danger is that if we take our diet for granted – for example if we were brought up in a satsangi family, and being vegetarian was just how we grew up – it will be easier for us to become slack in our commitment. If we don’t consciously choose to be vegetarian, the next time we’re super-hungry, and the only food available is a packet of biscuits, we might not be so diligent about reading the packet’s ingredients before digging in. This may seem like a silly example, but even people who have been initiated for decades can become lazy about checking ingredients, which may change over time. We cannot afford to take our diet for granted.

The truth is, it takes effort, attention, and conscious choice to embark on a vegetarian (or vegan) diet and most important, to stick with it over the course of our entire lives. That’s why we need to examine our commitment to this way of life and be sure that we understand our choice. Because if being vegetarian is not woven into our values in a very practical way, if we follow the diet blindly and don’t base our actions on our deepest beliefs and assumptions about the purpose of human life, then we won’t have the stamina and courage to live our beliefs day in and day out, even when that may be inconvenient or boring.

In Divine Light, Maharaj Charan Singh wrote a succinct explanation of why followers of Sant Mat are vegetarians: Eating “eggs and flesh meat, including that of fish and fowl, does retard one’s spiritual progress,” he wrote. “Taking of life hardens the heart and creates a heavy debt of karmas. The birds, cattle, fish, and so forth that we kill do not want to die. How piteously they cry and scream when we catch them to be butchered. Since they are capable of feeling pain and pleasure, the Merciful Lord, who is as much their Father as he is ours, will certainly call us to account for butchering them mercilessly. There is no injustice in God’s law.”

The term “God’s law” refers to the law of karma, which is the universal law of cause and effect. This law has been expressed in many different ways: As you sow, so shall you reap; every action has an equal and opposite reaction; what goes around comes around. Everything we do incurs a karmic debt. The karmic law plays out through the transmigration of our souls, which are reincarnated over and over again to live out the consequences of previous actions.

Our true essence is soul, which is born, dies, and then reborn into countless bodies until we can manage to break free by merging our souls back with the Lord. We’re trapped in this cycle by our karmas, or actions: In each body, we perform actions, which must by their nature result in reactions. Because we commit too many actions in one lifetime to live through their consequent reactions, we must be born again to reap their effects. And so the cycle continues until we can liberate ourselves once and for all from the karmic wheel.

The killing of any living thing incurs a karmic debt, which must be paid off. We want to incur as little debt as possible to lighten the burden that keeps our souls trapped in this world, so we are vegetarian because that diet entails taking the lowest form of life possible. But even then karmic law applies.

The fact is that we cannot remain in this world without killing. In the book Being Vegetarian, the author explains: “While every creature must eat to live – whether that means eating plants or other animals – humans can choose to do the least harm possible and consume a plant-based diet, perhaps including dairy products. Even a small child understands that, while picking a flower from the neighbour’s carefully tended garden may be naughty, harming the neighbour’s cat is a much worse offence. Harming the neighbour herself is worse yet. In the same manner, while consuming fruits, vegetables, and grains is taking a form of life, plants are less conscious than sea, air, or land creatures. We can keep our killing on the lowest possible level of consciousness, preventing immense suffering.”

What karmas we do incur from killing plant life can be neutralized through our meditation and leading an otherwise ethical life.

Aside from the ethical and karmic reasons for not extinguishing life merely to satisfy our appetites, there is a mental dimension. Saints tell us that extinguishing life to nourish ourselves affects the very structure of our mind. Our mind is scattered throughout the body and the entire world outside, which the mind perceives through the body’s senses. Mystics tell us that the path to self- and God- realization lies within ourselves and that we must collect our attention within, at the eye center, its natural focal point, rather than scatter it without.

Maharaj Charan Singh writes in Divine Light: “Food, like actions, affects the mind and therefore its capacity to concentrate at its natural focal point. Killing a man causes a more severe mental reaction than killing a goat. Similarly, killing a goat causes a more severe mental reaction than plucking an apple from a tree. Concentration of mind would therefore be … proportionately more difficult in the case of a man who has committed murder than in the case of a man who has killed a goat or one who has plucked an apple from a tree. The reason is that the manifest form of life in a man, in a goat and in an apple tree has different degrees of consciousness or awareness. Accordingly, the extinguishing of life in each of them causes varying degrees of mental reaction, and therefore obstruction to spiritual concentration of the mind.”

So the higher levels of life we kill to eat, the more scattered the mind becomes and thus the more difficult it is to withdraw our attention to the eye center in meditation.

Where does all this leave us in relation to the eating of eggs, and the harm of eating infertile eggs? Nature has made eggs for the hatching of chicks. The fact that infertile eggs contain no life is irrelevant; they were intended to be a vehicle of life, and so we should avoid them. In the words of Maharaj Sawan Singh, “Meat and eggs (fertile and infertile) … do not suit those who wish to subdue animal nature in them and who wish to still their mind and gain access to subtle planes.”

Saints and mystics advocate a vegetarian diet so that we can lighten our karmic load and thereby make spiritual progress in our meditation and everyday life. But being vegetarian makes sense even if we are not interested in the liberation of our souls from the wheel of birth and death. Sir Paul McCartney has said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” A life of nonviolence – not killing for food or sport – promotes peace in the world and peace within ourselves. Also, it is by now well documented that being vegetarian can make us healthier physically and can make a vast difference in the health of the planet, because by eating meat we contribute to climate change, destruction of the earth’s forests and the poisoning of our air and water.

Among all the animals and plants of the earth, only humans have the power of discrimination. Unlike other animals, which must obey their instinctual natures, we can make conscious choices. We can decide not to make a graveyard of our bodies by filling our bellies with the flesh of animals, which have souls just like we do. We can consciously choose to be vegetarian, not because we were raised that way, or because it’s cool, but because it’s just the right thing to do.

Sources

Divine Light,letter 438 (“…eggs and flesh meat…”)
Being Vegetarian, by Rebecca Hammons, publ. Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 2017; pp. 5–6 (“While every creature…”)
Divine Light, letter 439 (“Food, like actions…”)
Spiritual Gems,letter 55 (“Meat and eggs…”)
Being Vegetarian,Endnote 2 (“If slaughterhouses…”)
Being Vegetarian, 72–81 (“Also, it is by now well documented…”)

Mysticism and The Search For Truth - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Mysticism and The Search For Truth

A mystic is often thought to be someone lost to reality, head in the clouds, full of frothy, misty notions. Yet if we examine the writings left by great mystics throughout history, we find that real mysticism is practical, objective and scientific. Mystics instead turn out to be among the humans who have most dedicated themselves to the search for truth and reality and are among today’s great scientists, except that the questions they ask are different. Mystics only concern themselves with humanity’s ultimate questions, ones that fester in everyone: Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? Where has this consciousness of mine come from, and what happens to it at death? What is true? What is real? Mystics are like scientists in another way: they are not satisfied with words or promises, but insist on verifying every theory by their own experience, seeing and hearing the truth with their own eyes and ears, so to speak.

If this is true, then the question naturally arises: what have these mystics – who include among their number many of humanity’s most renowned religious leaders, philosophers, and thinkers–discovered over the millennia of their endeavors? If we turn to their writings, we find an extraordinary unanimity on many points – extraordinary given the diversity of cultures, times and places from which their voices come down to us. Indeed, the unity of their account is strong testimony to the validity of their discoveries.

One point on which all mystics agree is that no one, not even the accomplished mystics themselves, can simply tell us the answers we seek. This is, they say, partly because the answers cannot be captured in our ordinary words and concepts and partly because they must be experienced. Just as no parent can learn for his child, similarly each of us has to grow to see these truths for ourselves. While others can offer us guidance on where to look, and even suggest what we will learn, still the looking and learning must be our own.

A second point mystics insist on is that the answers we seek, indeed all true knowledge, can be found nowhere outside us but must be uncovered deep within our own consciousness. Socrates declared, “Know thyself.” Mystics tell us that this self-knowledge is the first step in discovering the Lord. They make a most astounding claim: they say that God, the Ultimate Reality and Truth, himself dwells within us. As Christ said, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” and the Qur’an reads, “We are nearer to [man] than his jugular vein.” Guru Arjan, the fifth in the line of Sikh gurus, wrote: “He who believes in God as Truth in his heart knows the essence of the Creator, the Cause of causes.” Kabir Sahib, the great Indian poet and saint, wrote:

Complete, entire, and ever present
Is the one true Lord
Within the body of each man—
The Lord who is beyond all bonds.

This wondrous statement, of course, meets instant doubt in us: if God is within us, how then can we be unaware of him? This leads to another point on which mystics speak as one: we are under the spell of a deluded mind. It is our disordered thoughts that drown out reality and muffle God’s inner voice. The Theosophist Madame Blavatsky wrote, “the Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.” Mystics tell us that the purpose of human life is to overcome this delusion here and now, and they show us how. They teach various forms of prayer or meditation by which ordinary human beings can still their thoughts, develop inner calm and concentration, and gradually become aware of God’s presence. In the Psalms God says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Another point of unanimity among mystics, handed down over the long reach of human experience, is that a life of purity and mental discipline is necessary for seeking truth. Immoral acts hold us back in several ways. One is because we have to account for our actions. Our actions require recompense. Indian scriptures call this the law of karma, or cause and effect; Christ explains it as “As you sow, so shall you reap.” Immorality is also an obstacle because only a pure mind sees God within. Therefore mystics urge us to adhere to the highest precepts of morality, among them vegetarianism, avoiding all intoxicants, and earning our own living.

Finally, mystics always insist that we seek guidance on our journey from another human being who has already traveled it. Though we must make the journey ourselves, still, as in other difficult areas of endeavor, a living guide is essential. The true spiritual seeker will look for a guide who knows the way, who can teach spirituality, no matter his race, sect, or country of origin. As the Muslim mystic Rumi wrote: “ If you wish to go on a pilgrimage, go with one who has already made it, whether he be a Hindu, a Turk or an Arab.”

Cults, Gurus, Religions, and Misconceptions - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Cults, Gurus, Religions, and Misconceptions

Are the followers of non-orthodox religious and philosophical teachers members of cults, or are they merely devotees participating in “new spiritual movements”?

The phenomenon of what we think of as cults is not new, nor are these groups only religious in nature. Certain corporations, political movements, self-improvement groups, exercise programs, product pyramid schemes, teen gangs, college fraternities, and even some families have cult-like qualities. Confusing matters even more, the word “cult” itself is controversial and has different meanings and interpretations in both popular culture and among scholars across different fields of study. According to Wikipedia the word “usually refers to a social group defined by its religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal.”

That is a fairly neutral definition. The bottom line is that in most cases cults are in the eyes of the beholder. As the renowned American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton noted, “One person’s cult … is another’s religion”—or spiritual community, or positive lifestyle, or set of beliefs that offer meaning and solace in a chaotic world. Lifton argued that “we must make careful distinctions … and judge each group by its own behavior.” (Quoted in Cults in Our Midst, by Margaret Thaler Singer, Jossey-Bass, 2003, p. xiii)

However we technically define the term, the fact remains that joining a destructive cult-like group can have devastating consequences for the individuals involved and their families. We as a society have a responsibility to understand the phenomenon—its causes and effects—which is not a romantic relic of the flower-child 1960s but metastasizing today in ever more virulent and dangerous forms. If we want to protect ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens, we need to be watchful and aware.

“Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and for society at large,” wrote the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. This is an old story: Some scholars believe that more than 2,000 years ago, for example, political hegemony and the decline of state religious observance in the Roman Empire contributed to the spread of early Christianity.

Today many believe that people flock to nontraditional religious groups—not just in India but all over the world—because mainstream institutions have failed them. Economies are unstable and inequitable; families have fractured, with younger generations moving to cities for work; politics often is polarized, corrupt, and even violent in some countries; religious institutions, too, are struggling with corruption and sexual abuse. It is no wonder that people feel let down by their families, their politicians, and their priests and turn to gurus and shamans for comfort, fellowship, meaning and even identity.

The impulse is not wrong; the problems come when vulnerable, idealistic or superstitious individuals place their faith in leaders and groups just as untrustworthy as the mainstream groups they have left behind.

Alexandra Stein, a British social psychologist who lectures and writes about cults and ideological extremism, has come up with a useful list of cult characteristics that tallies with the scholarship of Margaret Thaler Singer, an American clinical psychologist and researcher (now deceased) who published her well-known book on cults in 2002 (Cults in Our Midst). These characteristics include: a closed, hierarchical structure; the use of brainwashing, or “coercive persuasion”; and an environment in which cult members must put the interests of the group ahead of their own, even to the point of sacrificing their health, family relationships, and financial independence.

Most cults also actively recruit new members, are located in secluded areas (to better exert control and limit outside influences). Cults typically are run by individuals perceived as charismatic, who extract favors from followers, usually monetary or sexual (or both). These leaders try to manipulate followers’ attitudes toward life and society, often requiring or encouraging them to cut ties with their friends and families outside the group. Promising some sort of magical transcendence of life’s problems and using techniques such as sleep deprivation, long hours of tedious work, and inducement of hypnotic states by way of drugs, chanting, or dancing, for example, these leaders and their close associates attempt to squelch followers’ ability to think for themselves and make balanced life decisions.

The role of the leader and the power structure of the group, specifically the relationship between the leader (or leaders) and the followers, are key. Singer noted that “a cultic relationship is one in which a person intentionally induces others to become totally or nearly totally dependent on him or her for almost all major life decisions, and inculcates in these followers a belief that [the leader] has some special talent, gift or knowledge” (p. 7)

She further describes them as “self-appointed, persuasive persons who claim to have a special mission in life.” They “tend to be determined and domineering and … center veneration on themselves.” (p. 8)

So a major warning sign is a domineering, narcissistic leader who coerces his or her followers to obey him or her unquestioningly.

Cult-like groups also frequently deny members access to informational material, telephone, and mail and distort what information is available. Secrecy, isolation, and denigration of a follower’s individuality and self-worth tend to deepen followers’ dependence on the leader and the group as a whole. Frequently these groups use mind-control techniques such as forcing followers to spy on one another, forcing them to give their leader knowledge of their fears and mistakes, and then using this information to humiliate them. The resulting feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and humiliation make it even harder for people to extricate themselves.

Longing for meaning, purpose, transcendence, and peace are natural human instincts, so perhaps the biggest tragedy is how these positive, natural yearnings are exploited and perverted by unsavory characters. Legitimate spiritual and philosophical paths do exist, and they share characteristics sincere seekers can use as milestones, whether they are pursuing social justice, self-improvement, mindfulness, or self- and God-realization. These characteristics stand in dramatic contrast to those that define cultic groups and leaders.

A legitimate leader of any genuinely altruistic group will keep the veneration of adherents focused on God, abstract principles, or the group’s purpose. These leaders never claim to be more than human and never demand obedience or veneration. In fact, they never demand anything. They encourage people to think critically and independently, to explore alternatives, to use their best judgment and discrimination to examine the goals and methods of that particular group to see if it is the right fit for that individual.
A legitimate leader not only encourages critical, independent thinking but also offers support and encouragement to help followers build self-reliance and self-confidence in their personal and professional lives.
Legitimate leaders never accept money for themselves—from anyone, whether group members, prospective adherents, or local politicians. They have pursued a career or profession and live on their own money (which might sometimes include family assets).
Legitimate groups may accept donations (of money, land, real estate, and/or services), but these are always used to pay for whatever humanitarian services the groups provide (for example, hospitals and schools)—never for the personal enrichment of the leader. And group members are never pressured to make donations; these are strictly voluntary.
Materials are provided to help members and prospective members study and learn—broadly about the group’s history, for example, and specifically about the group’s tenets, values, expectations, and behavior. There is transparency concerning the group’s legal and financial status. And such groups provide transparent, informed consent (through interviews and written materials): what the way of life involves, what is expected of members, and what are the group’s presumed benefits.
All activities, lectures, group meetings that members might participate in are strictly voluntary.
Legitimate leaders and their close associates always follow the laws of their countries and hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. In turn, they emphasize moral living for all group participants. These moral standards are not relative but adhere to the universal moral codes (such as the ten commandments of the Christian Bible) of all mainstream religions. Leaders never advocate breaking the law.
Legitimate leaders emphasize the necessity of being a good citizen, a productive member of society, a good family member (whether spouse, parent, or child) and friend. They emphasize the importance of maintaining family harmony, even if some sacrifice is required; of studying hard for young people; and, for adults, earning one’s own living and not being a burden on one’s family or society. These groups stress the importance of living a balanced, healthy life of moderation rather one of ascetic extremes (such as fasting or prolonged retreats).
Legitimate groups do not proselytize, but rather encourage interested parties to do a thorough research into the philosophy, resist pressure from friends and family, and make an independent decision to participate based on their own judgment, goals, and self-knowledge. Once an individual joins such a group, the leader never dictates personal decisions but respects the dignity and autonomy of group members. Members are free to marry whom they choose, work in whatever profession they choose, bring up their children however they choose, and generally live whatever lifestyle they choose. The leader may make recommendations concerning particular life choices based on philosophical principles (a vegetarian diet, for example), but group members are never “kicked out” or shunned for disregarding such guidelines.

Scholars agree that there is no consistent profile of someone who is attracted to cults or vulnerable to narcissistic, domineering guru-types. Often such “seekers” are vulnerable because of naivety, youth, superstition, excessive idealism, or all of those things. Another factor may be that they are floundering in life and have experienced a loss of some kind—the break-up of a significant relationship, the loss of a job, graduation from college, the death of a friend or close family member—and are looking for solace, structure, and community. They may want someone to take charge of their life to relieve them of making difficult life choices.

The best protection against dangerous cults and false prophets, for ourselves and for those we care about, is to focus on the actions and behavior of these groups and gurus. Compassion and close observation are not mutually exclusive. In these troubled, uncertain times—no matter where we live and what our background—we need both.

Commitment - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Commitment

There was once an old monk who set out on a pilgrimage to the top of a great mountain, for it was said that there the enlightened Being of Wisdom lived. When after many long months the majestic mountain finally appeared before him, he approached an old woman by the roadside and asked if she knew how much longer he would have to walk before attaining his goal.

The woman just looked up, said nothing, and returned to her work. He repeated the question a second and then a third time, but still she did not answer. Thinking she was unable to hear, he walked on. However, after just a few dozen steps he heard her suddenly call out to him: “Holy One, it’s going to take you two more days to reach the top of the mountain.”

Somewhat surprised, the old monk called back, “Why didn't you answer my question before?”
“Well,” she replied, “you asked the question while you were standing still. I had to first see how determined your walk and how fast your pace!”

And herein lies the secret of the inner spiritual journey. How determined and committed we are in walking the inner path and how fast our pace is dependent on our innermost desire to succeed in our quest to climb that greatest mountain of all, that of God realization. You see, commitment is the foundation on which our meditation and spiritual life is built; commitment drives us deeper into developing love and devotion for the Father and enhances our desire to merge in him.

But for those of us who struggle with commitment, how can we build on it and sustain it? How can we grasp that invisible quality and allow it to grow in our spiritual life? Well, the Masters say that the best way to build and sustain commitment is through our daily meditation – simran, dhyan and bhajan – because the benefit of our daily meditation is that it creates within us the motivation and drive that propel us towards a stronger, more all-encompassing commitment to our spiritual goal.

And it’s also through commitment and constancy in our daily meditation that we cultivate the three precious virtues of faith, hope and love, each of which drives us deeper into the essential nature of our soul. So the question now arises: What is so unique about these three virtues of faith, hope, and love, and why are they such an important part of our spiritual development?

Well, let’s examine them one by one, beginning with faith. In the Old Testament, faith is described as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”¹ What exactly does this mean? Perhaps this can be illustrated by the following short story.

When a traveller in the early days of the American West came to the great Mississippi River, he discovered there was no bridge. Fortunately it was winter and the river was covered over with ice. But the man was deeply afraid to trust himself to the ice, not knowing how thick it was and if it would hold his weight. Finally, with infinite caution he nervously crept across the ice on his hands and knees until he managed to get halfway across. But then, quite suddenly from out of the blue, he heard a loud crack behind him. Shocked and fearful, he swung around and there, to his absolute amazement, came a fellow traveller cracking his whip and confidently singing at the top of his voice while driving a team of four horses who were pulling a large load of coal over the ice!

Now, not every disciple has the faith and confidence of the man driving his team of horses across the ice. Most of us probably resemble the man crawling on his hands and knees, overly cautious and unable to establish a footing of faith and trust in our Master. And why is this? It’s because we are fearful of the unseen and the unknown.

Let’s take the African Impala, a type of deer, as an example of what this means. The African Impala is able jump to a height of over ten feet and also jump a distance of thirty feet if it wants to. Yet these magnificent animals allow themselves to be kept in a walled enclosure in any zoo, even if their enclosure is only three feet off the ground, which they can’t see. The reason for this is that these animals have an inherent fear of jumping if they cannot see where their feet will land, and therefore they remain trapped in their prison house in the zoo.

Similarly, as disciples, even with the support and reassurance of the living perfect Master, we still find it difficult to trust and have faith in what we cannot see or tangibly experience in our spiritual life. If we truly realized that escaping from the prison house of this creation was simply a matter of surrendering our body, mind and soul into the care of our Master – who is always there to guide us into the unseen and unknown – all fear and lack of trust would immediately disappear from our mind.

Jesus extolled the power of faith when he said to his disciples:

Truly I tell you, if you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move and nothing will be impossible for you.²

Julian Johnson in The Path of the Masters wrote about the process of developing faith:

Having now found the Master, what next? Follow him with unwavering faith and determination. In other words, after you have accepted a man as a Master, accept his formula also and work it out with absolute fidelity. If you run up against many problems which cause your boat to rock, hold a steady hand upon the oars of self-mastery and wait while you work. At first there will be puzzling questions. At times you may be inclined to say outright, “I cannot believe it.” But just hold such things in reserve and wait. Do not jump at conclusions. Let them come to you. Wait and work. By and by, your questions will answer themselves; you will be surprised how very easily. When the light becomes strong, the darkness vanishes.³

From faith we now turn to hope. And again a question arises: What is hope? Well, we could say that hope begins in the silence of the darkest moments in our lives. It’s just like a very small candle that, when lit, suddenly illuminates a dark room, allowing us to believe again when life has come to seem utterly hopeless.

An example of hope is that of a twenty-one-week-old fetus who was diagnosed in the mother’s womb with Spina Bifida. The mother was told that it would not survive the birth process. In desperation she approached a surgeon who, she was told, undertook remarkable surgical procedures on babies in the womb, and asked him to try and save her precious child. He agreed to try.

On the day of the operation, just after the surgeon had managed to perform the procedure successfully and was about to close the mother’s womb, a magical thing happened: in front of the entire surgical team, the baby suddenly stretched out its tiny but fully developed hand and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger, as if thanking him for the gift of life.

The surgeon found himself utterly spellbound and riveted to the spot, for he’d never experienced anything quite like this before. A photograph taken during the operation remarkably captured this amazing event with perfect clarity, and was duly handed to the editors of a local newspaper who printed the story and entitled the photograph, “The Hand of Hope.”

You see, where there is life there is always hope. The beauty that arises from hope allows us the courage and confidence as disciples to believe in our own salvation, even when we feel overwhelmed by the darkness of impossibility. It is hope that summons our light, hope that increases our light, and it’s hope that eventually allows us to become the light itself.

For satsangis, confidence in the final outcome of our life, our escape from the wheel of transmigration – from the coming and going of our soul for countless lifetimes in this lower creation – is what gives us immeasurable hope for the future of our soul. And, through the gift of Nam, of initiation into the great Shabd stream, finally, and by the grace of the Master, that wondrous experience of joy, freedom and hope is now available to all of us.

From faith and hope we now arrive at that third precious virtue of love. In the Bible we read:

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.⁴

Thomas à Kempis, a medieval Christian monk and author of The Imitation of Christ wrote:

Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller nor better in heaven or earth; for love is born of God, and can rest only in God, above all created things.

Love feels no burden, takes no account of toil, attempts things beyond its strength; love sees nothing as impossible, for it feels able to achieve all things.⁵

Real love, which the Masters explain is divine love, is the most natural impulse within human beings and is reawakened through the Master’s gift of Nam. This gift empowers the disciple to soar within to those spiritual heights that enable us to surrender all – body, mind and soul – to love.

For once the floodgates of love for the Master open, there is no stopping inner progress, because divine love has us then very tightly in its grip. And this is a love that deeply caresses our soul and allows the light of our soul to merge into the light of the Master. This love is that great power within all of us that illuminates our way forward on the inner path and eventually delivers us back into the hands of God.

Evelyn Underhill quotes Jan Van Ruysbroeck:

When love has carried us above and beyond all things … we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity?⁶

Perhaps at this level it may seem impossible for us to achieve the perfection of this kind of love in all its divinity. However, we can always chase excellence by finding positive actions that complement our spiritual life and enable us to grow towards the perfection of this divine quality.

And the finest action for any disciple is through the four sevas or services to God, these being of body, wealth, mind and soul, carried out selflessly in the name of the Master. Outer seva, the saints and mystics say, is the greatest equalizer and leveller for any disciple, because through seva we learn to work side by side with one another, bending to the opinions and ideas of others, thereby learning submission and humility.

The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, said:

The reward of selfless service is great indeed. The saying goes: “Render service and reap the fruit thereof.” Human beings can even become saints and swamis through service.

If we render service with an ulterior motive or with pride and arrogance, we are deprived of its real reward. But if we perform service without any desire for reward we can attain great heights.⁷

So, service to the Master integrates the essence of spirituality within the activities of our daily life. It enables us to give of ourselves selflessly, promoting the very highest and best interest of everyone involved. And it is achieved by cultivating discrimination – learning to act in ways that sustain and support our spiritual life. Living a life of seva is the natural extension of our love for our Master, and we can serve our Master really well by always bringing the four ways of service to all our endeavours and encounters.

Bahauddin, the father of the great mystic Rumi, said:

When I was sick, it came to me that there are two approaches to work. One is bold and quick, fearless in action. The other is worried and constricted with concern about things that could possibly go wrong. If action flows from anxiety, the outcome is murky and disturbed. But if action moves with a swift joy and courage, the world begins to resolve its difficulties and grow whole.⁸

It’s through this kind of seva, bold and fearless, that we can constantly strive to perfect ourselves, to grow whole. And if we undertake our inner and outer service with deepest humility and the sincere desire to grow spiritually, all life’s impossibilities begin to vanish. Through seva our soul becomes fired with love and devotion for the Master, and this fire fuels our determination and commitment to travel the mystic path one-pointedly – to soar to those wondrous heights that bring us closer to God.

The Sufi mystic Hafiz said:

No one can keep us from carrying God
Wherever we go.
No one can rob His Name
From our hearts as we try to relinquish our fears
And at last stand — Victorious.
We do not have to leave Him in the mosque
Or church alone at night …
Our yearning eyes, our warm-needing bodies,
Can all be drenched in contentment
And Light.
No one anywhere can keep us
From carrying the Beloved wherever we go.
No one can rob His precious Name
From the rhythm of my heart –
Steps and breath.⁹

So. How do we carry God, as Hafiz says? We carry him through our daily meditation of simran, dhyan and bhajan, the greatest seva of all, which attaches our mind and soul to the divine unstruck melody within at the eye centre. For it’s this process that guides us gradually towards the perfection of the self and our merging into divine love.

Thomas à Kempis, once again, says:

A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing; every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let me make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught!¹⁰

But, of course, as we all know, hand and hand with that sound beginning every day goes our commitment to and constancy in spiritual practice.

Walking the spiritual path does not mean a gloomy or pessimistic approach to life. It just takes a heart filled with love and devotion for the Master, empathy and tolerance for one another, and a quiet calm that enables us to press forward in all our daily endeavours with faith in our Master, hope that each new day brings us closer to Him, and a love that draws him ever closer to ourselves.

Perhaps for most of us still finding our way, the three divine virtues seem somewhat unattainable. But once we are able to settle into the commitment and discipline of daily meditation, faith, hope and love become a natural part of our life, and the slow transformation into the deepest essence of our nature takes hold. And that is when the quiet and silent joy of discipleship gradually encircles and finally enfolds us.

As we have all likely heard before, one of the most enduring metaphors for spiritual progression is the transformation of the lowly caterpillar into a butterfly, because quite remarkably and quite spectacularly the ground-hugging grub – from out of its very own substance – weaves its metamorphosis. The chrysalis within finally evolves into a beautiful creature with wings.

Similarly, the spiritual path transfigures the very nature of our being because we undergo an equally dramatic transformation, eventually emerging irradiated by the full light of our soul, after great struggle and unfailing love and devotion for the Lord.

But what makes this all possible, ultimately, is the grace, mercy and love of the living perfect Master, who on initiating us into the path of the most sacred and divine Shabd, remains with us throughout the entire spiritual journey, fuelling our desire to evolve and transform and finally transfigure into a God-realized soul.

Hebrews 11:1 (American King James Version),
Matthew 17:20 (English Standard Version)
Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17^th ed., p.192
1 Corinthians 13:13 (Gateway NIV)
Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, tr. Leo Sherley-Price, p.98
Jan Van Ruysbroeck in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, p.vi
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. I, 6^th ed., p.1
Coleman Barks, John Moyne, The Drowned Book: Ecstatic and Earthy Reflections of Bahauddin, the Father of Rumi, p.92
Daniel Ladinski, The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, p.53
Words of Wisdom: More Good Advice, edited by William Safir, Leonard Safir, p.309

Prescription For Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Prescription For Life

In 2013 Baba Ji reportedly gave what might be called a four-part prescription for life:

Do your meditation.
Don’t analyze too much.
Don’t worry too much.
Be happy.

It sounds like a doable way forward, so let’s explore each component.

First, each of us on this path understands that our most important responsibility in life is to do our meditation. That is the purpose of our being here, in this human form. The saints say this is the purpose of life because through meditation we can return to our original home, to God, the Father, the One, the Divine.

The depth and breadth of God is incomprehensible really. Our mind cannot take it in because the enigma of what or who God is, is beyond the level of universal mind, let alone our individual mind at this level. If we look at the nature of the mind, we are told that it is closely intermingled with our soul at this level. But the mind has limitations and is unable to comprehend what lies beyond its range; therefore it must rely on creating concepts – all within the limits of its own programming – in an attempt to understand. But the true Masters see things differently because they are one with the Father, who is beyond mind, and they perceive reality directly. Until we, too, have actual inner experience and know, concepts are the best we can do.

Maharaj Charan Singh, said:

Human life is a journey, not a home; a road, not a city of habitation. We will not stay here forever. We must therefore weigh carefully what we do. … We have to apply the body to its real task and this real task is God-realization … The truth is that the body is not an end but a means.¹

He’s saying that life, our body, this world are not permanent. All are just a conveyance, a means, an opportunity to be about our real mission – God-realization. The human body is a great boon, and we are fortunate to have it, for it is essential for returning to the Lord.

But developing all the fine attributes of a human being and performing right action are just the foundation for approaching God-realization. Right action is a means, a very good means, to purify us, but it is not itself the end. The end, the goal, of God-realization can only be obtained by practising the meditation that a true Master teaches. It is inner, not outer. The critical component of the meditation is contacting the Sound, the Word, the Logos, the Shabd and Nam within; merging with it and following it back to the Lord. It sounds simple, but it is not, because the mind keeps getting in the way with all its gyrations, fears, doubts and negative tendencies.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, the Great Master, wrote:

All saints are sons of God; their mission is to make others the sons of God; their method is the Word – sound current. There is no other method. … The Word is light. It resounds throughout the whole creation – material, mental, and spiritual – within us and outside us. It is light and sound both.²

But as we said, it’s not so easy to contact this light and sound because our mind refuses to concentrate and is held down by its outward and negative tendencies. We struggle and struggle, and then we realize that we need the Master for traveling this inner path. And as much as this path focuses on the importance of and need for our efforts to control the mind, it can also be said that everything is due to the grace of the Lord – and particularly the role of the Master as a conduit, a bridge, the personification of the Lord and Shabd. Great Master wrote:

The Word has been, is, and will be, the basic reality. It is imperishable and all-pervading and is present in all beings. If people could derive benefit from this all-pervading Word, or if this all-pervading Word could help people directly, there would have been no need at any time for the Masters or ‘Christs’ to appear in flesh amongst people. If there was need for their appearance at one time, the same need requires their presence now.³

So we need the Master, and we do our meditation, which is the pathway for contacting this Word or Shabd within, and the way back to God, the Divine. As the Great Master wrote, “there is no other method.” And we do that meditation, regularly and punctually every day. That is the task we’ve been given to do, and by doing it we express our love and gratitude.

Now we get to the second prescription for life: Don’t analyze too much. What do the Masters mean by analyzing too much? Clearly, an accountant has to analyze the numbers in his accounts to present his conclusions. And so do many, many jobs require analysis. But that type of analysis doesn’t seem to be what the Masters are talking about. Hazur was asked: “Would you please explain the difference between clear thinking, discrimination, and analyzing?” He replied:

Everybody has his own concept of clear thinking. Even a thief thinks that he’s absolutely clear in what he’s going to do. Everybody is always just analyzing themselves. No matter what we do or don’t do, we are always analyzing within ourselves. As for discrimination, we have to develop a sense of what’s right for us and what’s wrong for us. … We have to develop discrimination so that we can make the right decisions and reject the wrong ones.⁴

So discrimination, discerning what is right and what is wrong, is essential on the path and must be developed. Discrimination is not what the Masters mean by analyzing too much.

But Hazur did say that no matter what we do or don’t do, we are always analyzing in our mind. We start analyzing (and worrying) that we have not made sufficient progress. Have we detached sufficiently from this world? Do we have enough love? And so on. And our mind then can put us into a rut because we, as humans at this level, will never be perfect, will never meet the ideal; and the mind can feel hopeless and then start undermining our efforts on the path.

Hazur was asked: “When I was a seeker I felt that intense longing, and now that I have been on the path for a while, I feel like the meditation is part of a daily routine, and I am wondering if feeling content with that is a hindrance to the progress.” Hazur replied:

No, it doesn’t become any hindrance. You see, after initiation we start analyzing ourselves too much, whether we have been able to detach from this object, that face, or not. … how much progress we have made … This calculation doesn’t lead us anywhere. We should just continue with our meditation, and detachment is automatically the effect of meditation.⁵

Another disciple asked Hazur: “Master, I have trouble sometimes reconciling myself – one moment I feel a lot of love and devotion for the Master, and the next moment I am off doing something that is just totally lacking in love and devotion.” He answered:

Sister, our problem is that we analyze ourselves too much: ‘Now I am in love, now I have no love, now I am dry.’ … The Lord has sown the seed of love, he is nursing that seed of love within us, and it is always developing. The fruit definitely will grow on the tree, but sometimes there is a wind which takes away the fruit – even the flowers fall – but the tree bears fruit again.⁶

Think of that. He says the Lord has sown this seed of love within us, he’s nursing it, and it’s
developing all the time. It will bear fruit.

The Masters also discuss how this analysis can depress us, make us despair. The mind turns on itself and pulls us towards the negative side. We don’t get what we’re expecting when we expect it, which is a bit of a demand on our part. The Masters want us, tell us, to stay positive, stick with our meditation, and keep following the path that the Lord is opening up before us. Hazur again:

Every day we judge ourselves. We are the judge, and we are the accused before the judge. The mind is just always running in a circle like this.⁷

He’s saying that first we are the judge, then the critic, then we become our poor, lowly, miserable self. Our mind plays all these roles over and over again. This is all just the mind. Hazur continues:

This self-analysis doesn’t lead us anywhere. Self-pity – it depresses us sometimes. Let the Lord judge. Let him know what we need. Our work is to do our duty. Our duty is to knock; it’s for him to open the door. We can’t take on our shoulders his responsibility also. It is for him to open up the door.⁸

So, if we think we are getting back to the Lord solely on our own efforts, we are mistaken. We cannot make it unless the Lord wills it and unless the Master takes us, by way of the Shabd. We cannot make it unless the ego effaces itself, which happens through contact with Shabd and love. But we also need our meditation to develop that love – to focus, concentrate and intensify that love which dissolves ego and allows merging.

The third part of this prescription for life – Don’t worry too much – is similar to the previous – Don’t analyze too much – in that both advise against the mind running to the negative side. Both take us down a worrisome path, perhaps one of despair, so that we become restricted, tense and limited by our own sense of limitation. We forget that our soul, that drop of the divine, can fly high – can with the help of the Master become unbound from the mind and return to its original home. Hazur was asked why a satsangi had nothing to worry about, and he replied:

It is a very simple thing. If something is destined and we have to go through the destiny, will this worry solve any problem? If this worry is not solving any problem, then why punish ourselves?

Interesting: worry is a means of punishing ourselves, and he asks, why punish ourselves? He goes on:

Worry can be of many kinds and it depends upon the individual, what problems they have. But our general attitude should be that since things are destined and I have to go through it, good or bad, then why worry? Why not solve those problems, face those problems, live through those problems instead of unnecessarily worrying about them?⁹

He says to take a practical approach. On the outside, solve those problems, face those problems, live through those problem; and on the inside the practical approach is to redirect the mind upward toward the Shabd and Nam.

He also says that the practical approach includes learning to accept what comes in our lives, in our destiny, and to turn toward the Lord, to trust that he has our best interests at heart. Hazur again:

So you are training yourself. Meditation trains you to accept what is in your destiny, if not cheerfully then at least with a smile.¹⁰

So there is a two-fold aspect to the practical approach. We do our meditation, which redirects our focus upward; and we also try to accept what the Lord sends our way, accept our destiny and then deal with it. This is part of what they call seva of the mind. We try to train the mind to leave the results, inner and outer, to the Lord and Master.

This brings us to the fourth component of a prescription for life: Be happy. Again, this is two-fold: an attitude of the mind, a training of the mind; and then with inner experience comes true happiness. And again, this attitude of mind is related to the other three components. There is overlap here. But the message is similar. Again, Hazur said:

If you stop worrying, you automatically become happy … By nature, man is happy and contented. What makes us miserable is our wishes, our demands, our ambitions, our desires. When they are not fulfilled, we become miserable. But if we don’t have any desires, automatically we are happy.¹¹

Very interesting that he says, by nature we are happy and contented. Who would think so? It is our mind that stands in the way of that happiness and contentment, that believes that if it could only have this, or become that, or be young again, or healthy, or married, or even single again, it would be happy. All these things, these desires, overlay and interfere with our true nature – that of being happy. And all our desires – some of them conflicting – cannot be fulfilled in this lifetime. Not only would we have to be reborn to fulfil them, but they may not be in our higher interest. We cannot see the bigger picture of what is in our best interest, of what must happen to pay off our karmic debt, of where we are really headed. The saints can see, and they advise us to get rid of these desires, these ambitions, these wishes, so we can be happy. If something is in our destiny, it will happen anyway. If it is not, our efforts to obtain it will not be fruitful; and all those unfulfilled desires just add to the mountain of desires standing between us and the Lord. We are just expanding our ego.

On the inner track, meditation itself brings us inner happiness because concentration gives peace and happiness. And the Masters say we feel the effects of meditation before we actually see progress within. We may feel an atmosphere within us, a growing contentment, a bit more detachment from events in the world. This is all very positive and it makes us happy.

So let’s strive to be our happy, natural, divine self. In the inner and outer worlds let us make our efforts, but let us also learn to accept what happens, whether or not the intended results manifest. For we are in his hands. We’ve always been in his hands, but now we have the opportunity to become more conscious of it.

We’ll end with a final quote from Hazur:

If you can take what comes to you through Him, then, whatever it is, it becomes divine in itself … Everything takes its flavour from God and turns divine; everything that happens reveals God. When a man’s mind works that way, things all have this one taste … therefore … seek joys that are not conditioned, that are certain, and that do not fade.¹²

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses I, 8^th ed., pp. 6–7,
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 104
Spiritual Gems, letter 105
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #446
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #446
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #447
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #448
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #448
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #256
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #254
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #253
Spiritual Discourses I, pp. 91-92

Remembering Our Objective - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Remembering Our Objective

When Guru Nanak was young he had a dialogue with a group of Sidh yogis, accomplished yogis who possessed miraculous powers. They initially looked down on him and challenged him:

Who are you and what is your name?
What path do you follow and with what objective?

The yogis asked about Nanak's objective because they knew that everyone is lost without a clear objective. This dialogue is so relevant to us today because many of us have to live among people who challenge our beliefs, directly or indirectly, and who present to us their own perspectives, often in a very forceful way. How to live in our diverse and globalized world without compromising on our own path and beliefs, without creating the confrontation and negativity of which this world is already so full? The dialogue in this whole section of the Adi Granth scripture shows us how to do that, and it perfectly captures our own experiences with the living Master and the teachings that he embodies and brings alive for us.

In the face of the arrogant attitude of the yogis, Nanak replies respectfully, while firmly stating his own experience:

May I humbly relate the truth and submit myself to
the Saints in veneration.…

Yogis:

We shun the clatter of the marketplace
and stay clear of worldly paths.…

Nanak:

While working in the marketplace of life
and treading worldly paths,
one should not lose sight of one's objective
nor be allured by another’s wealth and spouse.
Without Nam, O Nanak, the mind cannot be held still,
nor its cravings appeased.
The Guru shows a marketplace and a city within the body
where one deals in Truth with natural ease …
one contemplates the Essence.¹

Nanak talked about the objective of finding the inner marketplace of Truth, while at the same time living in the marketplace of the world. Almost five hundred years before Christ, Socrates hung out in the marketplace and also challenged his fellow citizens to get their priorities straight and to keep the interest of their souls as their true objective:

For I go about doing nothing other than trying to persuade you, young and old, to put your priorities straight and place the care of your souls first, so that it may become as perfect as possible, rather than placing the care for your bodies and your wealth above all else.²

Masters come to remind us of our highest objective, the larger perspective, the long view. They broaden our scope of vision. They help us avoid entanglement on the ‘horizontal’ level of life. They ask us to contemplate the essence, to direct our attention to the ‘vertical’ dimension. We are stuck on a horizontal plane of relationships with others, with our environment, and with our own selfish and scattered self – always vulnerable to temptations, always living and moving under the low ‘ceiling’ of the physical plane. We forget the vertical dimension, the rise within ourselves to a finer reality.

Masters teach us how to ‘carry the cross,’ as it were, of this intersection between the horizontal and vertical – how to live in the present, at the intersection of outer and inner life.

They come to remind us of our lofty, inspiring and divine objective of return to our true home. “Let's fly back to our dear country. Let us listen to the voices from on high,” says Plotinus.³ And “Come my friend, to your true home. Why live in an alien land?” says Soami Ji Maharaj.⁴ The mystics shake us from our deep sleep; they awaken us to the realization that we are pursuing contradictory and false objectives, trying to make ours that which can never truly be ours. They explain that whatever we achieve in this alien land can stay with us only for a limited time.

As initiates of a perfect Master we are headed for our true home, and our Master advises us never to lose sight of our objective. Hazur said, “We should try to face our day-to-day problems remembering our destination, remembering the path.”⁵

We often hear from the Master that we need to be objective, that without remembering the goal, the objective, our actions become empty ritual. By remembering our objective, we become inspired; without remembering our objective we become victims of routine. We forget the reason why we do what we do, so we become vulnerable to doubt or we become dogmatic and narrow minded. There has to be a reason for everything we do, Master keeps reminding us. Reason and spirituality as taught by the Sant Mat Masters stand on a common ground.

A writer in the field of economics, one of the most rational pursuits around, says: “Rationality involves pursuing ends that are coherent, and employing means that are appropriate to those ends.”⁶ In other words, rationality involves the pursuit of objectives that are not contradictory and that employ means appropriate to those objectives. This definition of rationality sounds a lot like the Master when he speaks of spiritual pursuit. Keeping the objective in mind is the essential ingredient both of rationality and of spirituality. Without a clear objective, without employing the means appropriate to attain the objective – practising meditation – we live in concepts and illusions. We may even become religious fanatics. Bowing before the slippers of past Masters is not the appropriate means to attain the desired objective of realizing the divine within ourselves: rationality and spirituality are both in agreement on that.

Spirituality is the highest form of rationality because it aims at the highest objective: obtaining and merging into the highest good of the soul – the divine.

But what about our daily routine? We know how numbing, how grinding it can be. The day-to-day problems tie our attention down and keep it from rising to the reality we crave. In our daily lives our energy is drained on petty trivia. The soul is tied to the physical plane not only with the five thick chains of the passions. In addition, our attention is attached to the material plane by so many little things, by so many trifles. Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputs, one day we woke up unable to rise, since every hair of our body was tied to the ground with the tiny ropes of the tiny creatures that we encountered during our travels.

While trying to adjust the tiny ropes and chains so they hurt less, we forget about our higher purpose of freeing ourselves from all these chains and letting our attention soar. We just need to untie the ropes and let the soul rise, as the Master repeatedly tells us.

We are caught in the web of our own making, in the web of our own ‘story,’ our personal drama – tragedy, comedy or soap opera. Our brain is a powerful reality simulator, it keeps projecting mental movies in our head; we can't stop it, we can't get out of the theatre, we are chained to our seats, we can't stop the revolving film of our thoughts. This is the condition that Plato called the cave, because the passions and the animal self keep us chained to the cinema screen and we have no choice but to watch the dramas and melodramas revolving before us, keeping us always involved and enthralled by our self-generated dramas.

Since ancient times, lovers of wisdom have recognized that we ourselves are the keepers – the prison guards – of our own prison, because we all have a natural inborn love and affection for what we perceive as ‘me and mine,’ as that which belongs to us. It is this universal instinct that Masters have the job to re-orient, because we are confused about our identity and what can and cannot belong to us. They come to change the direction of our love. At this point in time, the instinct of love for what is me and mine is misdirected and deluded. The Master has said that we love our negativity – we ride the train and keep our suitcase of negativity and worries sitting on our head, rather than letting it rest on the seat beside us – simply because it is mine.

We love even our troubles and burdens because they have become part of our identity, of who we think we are. But our higher objective is to go through our lives – through the story of our lives – like a puppet that understands it is a puppet whose strings are being pulled by karmas; a puppet that keeps its attention fixed on the divine objective, the true home, the vertical dimension, even through the thick fog of karmas. Hazur noted that this is not easy:

Our karmas, they are the strings – they are making us dance. And we think, who makes us dance? Ego is the attitude we have in life. We think we are doing it. We forget the string behind us, our karma, actions which we have done in the past causing the reactions now. That we have forgotten. So we have become egoistic.⁷

Ego is something we cannot touch or see, but it wraps a thick veil around our eyes. It forces us to attach ourselves to our story, even to our miseries and negativity, to all the images our mind projects.

We meditate so that we can overcome the passions that deceive us about who we are and what truly belongs to us. We meditate so that we can realize our true self as something different from the deluded mind that always keeps us moving out and away from our home in the eye centre – the deluded mind that forever binds us to outward-oriented actions, which in turn causes our rebirth and death and eternal misfortunes. Maharaj Sawan Singh says:

When man’s attention is confined to the Pind part of the body, he is literally full of evil, as the attention is slave to the passions … If this were not the case, there should be no difficulty in attaining concentration and going in and up.⁸

The word ‘passion’ derives from the Greek word for suffering; it means passively suffering the control of forces over which we have no power. Passions make us passive towards our higher objective and active in the world because they tell us a deceptive story:

Lust deceives us into believing that we can make the external beauty of people ours, that we can possess others.
Anger deceives us into thinking that people and events have trespassed against us, or against something or someone we think belongs to us. In anger, we think that the evil we notice in ourselves is caused by other people or circumstances, not by our own lower nature which we do not recognize as the root cause of our problems.
Greed deceives us by making us believe that external objects can become ours.
Attachment prevents us from letting go of external things and people because it makes us believe that they belong to us.
Pride – ego – deceives us by making us believe that our lower self and our passions are our self, our ‘me.’ Because of ego we desperately try to control of our external environment, to act like a king in our little domain of influence.

When the mind is under control, it is our best friend; if it is out of control, it is our worst enemy. It is not the case that there are two minds – these are two different aspects of the mind. The mind is one, but it can function in two directions – higher or lower, positive or negative. It depends on towards which side we channelize it, which side predominates. If we are able to evoke its positive side, the mind will help us rise within. If the negative side predominates, it pulls us out and down, spreads our attention out into the creation and enhances duality. Maharaj Sawan Singh says:

Our only but deadly enemy is our mind. Lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride are its agents. It is through these that the mind keeps us always out and on the move from our home in the eye centre, thereby binding us with this world; our actions becoming the cause of our rebirth and death and our eternal misfortune.

The positive qualities – continence (chastity), forgiveness, contentment, discrimination, and humility – remain suppressed and ineffective. Pious resolutions and so-called prayers afford us no protection against these agents.⁹

Defeating these deadly enemies is the main goal of all spiritual paths because they block our way to our eternal happiness and contentment. Why are they enemies? Because they succeed in deceiving us about what really belongs to us.

The soul has a natural love and affection for the Lord, but most souls living in the physical body as human beings do not appear to be lovers of the Lord. Why? Because the passions keep them confused about what is truly me and mine. The passions hijack and mislead our instinct of unity – of merging, belonging to the One.

Masters come to change our story, to tell us the sacred story of who we truly are and what truly belongs to us. They help us to claim our true identity and our true legacy of eternal divine Love. It is in the company of the Master that we learn to channel our affection and love in a different direction. In their company, we redirect our possessiveness and orient it to the Master, and to God. Now we start saying, ‘my God, my Master.’

And how about Nam, Shabd? The very notion of ‘mine and ours’ loses its meaning when it comes to Shabd, which is our true essence, our purest and deepest self. We cannot make our innermost self ours because it already is our most real and true possession. But we can reach a state of realization in which our sense of me and mine dissolves into the Shabd. Shabd is the power that links us to the Master, to God.

Today we are not conscious of Shabd’s working in us, of the fact that our essential deepest self is a drop of this infinite power vibrating through the universe. But Masters come to show us how to let go of our limiting selves and how to attune to Shabd in a conscious, vibrant and intense experience of transformation and bliss. Masters are living examples of this realization and they teach us that we can realize our true self – the real me – as a drop of this Shabd. At some point in the spiritual journey the self must dissolve into the Shabd, because the soul's tendency has always been towards merging, returning, abolishing the distinction between me and you.

We will realize that only God and Master is truly ours – we will realize God. At that stage, who possesses whom and who belongs to whom are all irrelevant, and we realize that there is only one Owner in the entire creation, the Lord. In the Indian language there is a beautiful word for the Lord: ‘malik,’ which means owner. Would we be owned by mind, maya and the passions or would we rather belong to the Master and the Lord?

How do we truly make God ‘mine,’ Master mine, the Shabd mine – reverting back to the dualistic language of our limited conceptual horizon? Just as we need to work hard in the world to make certain things mine, so we need to work hard to make God, Master and Shabd mine. But no, this is incorrect: we cannot make Master and the Lord ours, we have to make ourselves suitable to become the Lord's intimate possession. We have to blend into the Shabd and attain union with the divine, where duality of any kind vanishes like shadows in the sun.

Even though everything belongs to the Lord and he can do with it as he pleases, we are not conscious of that because our attention is mortgaged away to our karmas. We are under debt and we even owe more than we are worth – in real estate terminology, we are ‘under water.’ How can we give to the Lord a house that is under mortgage? So our objective now is to pay off our debts, our karmas, wrap ourselves in meditation and present back to him what has always belonged to him. The mother loves to unwrap the gift her child gives her, even though the child and the gift already belong to her.

Saints have completely reoriented their sense of belonging and their possessiveness. They view the external things as alien, distant, unreal, and the inner realms as close and real. They have directed their love, affection and sense of belonging towards the divine: Socrates cherished his wise ‘divine voice;’ Mirabai called the Lord ‘my father and my mother;’ Christ said, ‘Who is my father and mother; those who follow my teachings are my relatives.’ Plato said, ‘The physical is a shadow of the subtle and radiant inner realities.’

This is the level of intimacy that all Shabd Masters have with the inner voice of God; in fact, they are identical with it. The Shabd is their self. They have blended their self with it.

Socrates had an intimate relationship with the private divine voice which protected him from harm – he was seen to sit motionlessly in meditation for an entire night. This inner voice gave him his sense of closeness and merging into the divine realm. He had made the inner voice of God an intricate part of his life, always seeking guidance from it, never accepting disciples without the approval of his private divine voice or divine sign.

It was under the direction of this voice that Socrates resisted the temptation offered by his disciples to escape from prison. He calmly accepted his death in an Athenian prison, completely detached, in a happy and joyful mood. Thus he gave a personal example of how to keep one's divine objective, how to preserve the purity and eternal good of one's soul as a supreme priority even in the face of physical death.

Throughout his life, Socrates mercilessly confronted and exposed ignorance of the worst kind, which he called double ignorance, i.e. when people arrogantly believe they know what they, in fact, do not know and have not experienced first-hand.

Like Socrates, Guru Nanak, in his conversation with the Sidh yogis was also facing the double ignorance of those who lack realization while believing that they are wise:

What can I explain to someone
who knows the answer before he poses the question?
Truly, what can I explain to someone
who has already reached the far shore?

As the lotus growing in the water
and the duck swimming in the stream
remain untouched by water,
one crosses the ocean of existence, O Nanak,
by repeating God’s Nam …

_{Gurbani Selections, Vol. I, p.165}

Socrates's death started the so called Platonic tradition, the ideals of which overlap in most points with the tradition of Guru Nanak. In his dialogue with the Sidh yogis in the Sidh Gost, Nanak says:

…one crosses the ocean of existence, O Nanak,
by repeating God's Nam
and attuning one’s consciousness to Shabd.
Let us live detached,
with only the one Lord dwelling in our minds,
and remain desireless amid temptations.
Nanak is a slave of the one who not only sees,
but also shows others
the inaccessible, unfathomable Lord.¹⁰

Every line of this stanza corresponds to principles that Socrates also lived by and exemplified. Socrates said that he was in awe of anyone who could teach him about the power that wisely governs the universe; he also spoke of the repetition of magic words that can heal the soul and make it realize its immortal nature. Countless teachers in the Platonic tradition taught disciples how to cure the eye of the soul by turning one's attention inward and digging up the ‘buried eye’ through inner practice and contemplation.

They taught and were living examples of how to live in the middle of the noisy marketplace, the corrupt city, and remain unaffected, detached and free from hostility, antagonism and duality; how to attain the supreme Objective, the supreme Good of the soul. They showed how to accept firmly and graciously the harsh treatment that the world doles out to lovers of the Lord.

The objective remains the same with Socrates almost 500 years before Christ, Nanak 1,500 years after Christ, and the present Master 2,015 years after Christ. And the means for attaining it also remains the same: a pure moral life and vegetarianism as the foundation for the contemplative practice of meditation, which is humankind's pathway to its original source in the divine, whether one's starting point is East, West, South or North.

Gurbani Selections, Vol.1, pp.161–167
Plato, Apology of Socrates, 30a–b
Plotinus, Ι.6.8.16 ;V.1.12.12-21
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses II, 1^st ed., p.262
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spirtual Pespectives II, #510
Maurice Godelier, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, p.22.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives I, #40
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 202
Spiritual Gems, letter 202
Gurbani Selections, Vol. I, p.165

We All Have So Much in Common - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

We All Have So Much in Common

We all have so much in common. We are all in the same predicament: conscious beings shaped into human form; prisoners of time, space and ego – which are all illusory. We are spiritual beings going through a human experience.

We seem to start off OK. As children we didn’t have too much to worry about. Our needs were taken care of by our parents and others in the adult world around us. An English poet wrote:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
upon the growing Boy.¹

The saints can be painfully blunt about our critical situation. Sultan Bahu wrote:

I was bound and flung down:
banished from heaven, dumped on earth.
Bound by the dictates of my destiny,
I was exiled in an alien land.²

What an extreme situation he invokes. It’s as if he’s describing a war zone – a battle between mind, matter and soul – a tug-of-war. Well, if that is the case, something needs to change and we need a plan.

Now, if our body was unwell we would attend to it. We would visit the doctor, take the medicine. We might have to go to hospital, undergo an operation, recuperate, exercise, and change our diet and our lifestyle. We would do whatever it takes to get well.

If we had emotional or mental troubles, forgetting everything else, we would mull things over, discuss our problems with our friends and relatives and, perhaps, seek therapy of some kind. Mind and body would command us to attend to their selfish needs. There would be no getting away from it.

Now, doesn’t the same apply to our spiritual condition? Our soul feels its separation from the Lord, its source and natural element. We are in an alien environment and no matter what comforts we try to surround ourselves with, or whatever pleasures we turn to, there is no cure here at the material level. At this point Sultan Bahu gets very graphic:

I am a stranger, my home is very far away,
and my situation worsens
with every breath I draw here.³

Wow! One of the most heart-rending lines in the Sant Mat literature. This is the dark night of the soul. How can we live without feeling the presence of the divine? The world’s greatest poetry expresses the bitter-sweet anguish and longing for a love that has been lost.

However, it is with great good fortune that we have come to the human form, in which we have the discrimination and self-awareness to feel our situation and to seek a solution. We are full of potential. We may become aware, somewhere deep within, of our predicament, of not belonging, of feeling, as the title of the James Bond movie has it, that “the world is not enough.” How can we satisfy spiritual longing with material things?

We are like Alice in Wonderland, fascinated for a while by the strange characters around her. But, however curious and entertaining their behaviour, Alice eventually realizes that she misses her own home where she belongs and she starts to retrace her steps.

The Great Master wrote:

The number one sign of his being merciful to anyone is that he creates in him dissatisfaction with the worldly routine and a longing to seek the truth.⁴

This will turn us into seekers. And Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote:

This constant feeling of loneliness and missing something is in reality the unquenched yearning of the soul for its Lord. … This feeling has been purposefully put in the heart of man.⁵

It’s part of his long term plan to get us home.

The Lord automatically responds to the cry of the soul just as a mother responds to her crying child or a ship responds to another vessel in distress. Out of compassion the Master appears in our lives to uproot us – an even greater stroke of good fortune, which Kabir describes as the “propitious moment when the man of God came and graced my home.”⁶ As Hazur explains:

The saints take us out of this predicament by teaching us Nam Bhakti (devotion to Nam, Word or Shabd) – thus turning inward and Godward the tides which are now flowing outward. It is the nature of the mind to run after pleasure, but no pleasure in the world has the power to captivate it forever, so it flits from one object to another.⁷

The nature of the mind: one minute a creature of habit and the next craving novelty. Hazur continues:

When, however, it takes to Nam Bhakti and, ‘going in,’ tastes the bliss of Shabd, its fickleness is gone and it becomes steady. Guru bhakti and Nam bhakti are the means by which the mind is weaned from sensual pleasures and is attached to the Shabd, the Audible Life Stream, which ultimately takes us back to our origin – God.⁸

Shabd or the Audible Life Stream resounds in all of us. It sustains everything. Perhaps an echo of it can be caught at moments of concentration or elevation of the spirit. The poet Wordsworth described it:

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things.⁹

And in his play The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare interrupts the action with an interlude in which the character Lorenzo points out to his beloved Jessica how the heavenly orbs in the night sky sing like angels and says:

Such harmony is in immortal souls:
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.¹⁰

The Masters teach us how to hear the inner music and see the inner light so that we can immerse ourselves whenever we want. By ourselves we would never find the source – it’s under lock and key. Only the Masters know the combination. In the Bible St John says, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”¹¹ Who will help us penetrate that darkness? Hazur said:

With whose grace do we gain admission to the Court of the Lord? Surely not by our own efforts. Alone we can do nothing. We can never, by ourselves, traverse the uncharted terrain of the inner Path. We owe everything to the immeasurable grace of the Master.¹²

How can we show our appreciation for these great blessings? It is said that when we are happy we are grateful, but more likely it’s the other way round. When we are grateful we are happy. Gratitude brings happiness. The best way of showing our gratitude is to make the most of our opportunities and privileges, and we know what that means:

Practise living the Sant Mat way of life without compromise – no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts.’
Practise concentrating at the eye centre – focusing the attention, our crown jewel.
Practise repeating the names and listening to the Sound.

Soami Ji advised:

Hold fast to the Shabd with the Master’s Grace and with Master’s help make Shabd the mainstay of your life.¹³

On old sailing ships the mainstay supported the mast and held it firmly upright. Without its mainstay the mast would collapse and the ship would drift helplessly. Likewise, without the support of Shabd as the mainstay of our life we would drift aimlessly in this life.

Sant Mat is a minute to minute affair, a constant effort. We need to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into this project, diving deep to find those precious jewels. We may have made bad choices in the past which have brought us to our present situation, but now we can make positive choices and, for that, we need determination.

It’s not easy. The body doesn’t want to cooperate and distracts us with its aches and itches. The mind finds excuses. How often have we heard in satsang that we have to raise a fight against this powerful enemy, the mind. Blows will be given and blows will be received, we are told; we can’t escape that. Hazur wrote, “You are perfectly right in saying this path is difficult, but there is no alternative.”¹⁴

So we may as well knuckle down and enjoy the ride. In due course the licking of the dry stone of meditation will be transformed into the Song of Life, something not to be missed for anything. Hazur used to tell us that by and by the mind will take pleasure in it. The Master urges us to waste no more time and to start taking him seriously. We have no idea how much time we have left. Soami Ji wrote:

Why don’t you listen, dear soul, to the melody of the name? ¹⁵

We know we want to but how much? In October 1987 in Delhi, a questioner asked Hazur whether it was true that he is urgently calling us right now. And he replied:

What else are these meetings for? All these meetings, all these satsangs, all these questions, answers, are meant for that purpose, that we should do our best to come to that level where we can be pulled upward … The Shabd is calling every one of us.¹⁶

So, why do we hold back? Could it be that we are too preoccupied with analyzing our sense of self? As the poet, George Herbert put it:

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne… ¹⁷

It is this sense of “dust and sinne” that the Master says will be cured by meditation. Therefore, we should all listen to what he says and follow the method he proposes, and, as Soami Ji advises:

Why not submit to the Master?
You have spent this human life in confusion. …
Why don’t you seriously consider the fact
that this world is just an illusion? …
Radha Soami says: win over this enemy your mind,
and transform it into a friend.¹⁸

We all have a common need to follow the Master’s advice and find our way back home, where we belong.

William Wordsworth, from Ode to Immortality
J.R. Puri and K.S.Khak, Sultan Bahu, Bait 27
Sultan Bahu, Bait 27
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 28
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter 10
V.K. Sethi, Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, p.195
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, 8^th ed., p.6
Light on Sant Mat, p.6
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1
King James Bible, The Gospel According to St John, 1:5
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, 2^nd ed., p.295
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, 1^st ed., p.87
Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, letter 58
Sar Bachan Poetry, p.119
CD of Q&A session with Hazur Maharaj Ji in 1987
George Herbert, Love, published in The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin paperbacks, 1966)
Sar Bachan Poetry, pp.213–215

Rebuilding Our Platforms - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Rebuilding Our Platforms

There’s a story in Tales of the Mystic East about Guru Amardas, the third Sikh Guru, who was preparing to appoint his successor.¹ As there were several disciples who were hoping to be appointed, the Guru decided to test them. He requested that each one go out and collect some earth and build a small mud platform for him.

Each one did the task, but the Guru rejected every single one as not good enough. So he asked them to tear them down and build them again. When they had done it, he told them it was not quite the right place – could they build them on another piece of land? Again, the Guru was not satisfied and they had to build the platforms in another place.

This went on for some time, with the Guru always rejecting the disciples’ platforms for some reason or another. Before long, several disciples began to think that the Guru, who was already in his later years when he had been appointed successor to Guru Angad Dev, maybe was becoming senile and not in full possession of his faculties. So, many of them quit the work. For the few who remained, it continued to be the same story: no matter how or where the platforms were built, none met the Guru’s satisfaction. Finally, there was only one disciple left – Ramdas. He continued to build and tear down those mud platforms, even as his fellow disciples ridiculed him. He said to them, “Brothers, the whole world is blind. But if there is one man who can see, it is the Satguru. Then too, the whole world is mad. It is only the Satguru who is sane.”

Then they told him that both he and the Satguru must be out of their minds. Ramdas answered them saying, “Brothers, you may say whatever you like about this worthless servant of the Lord, but do not, I beg of you, utter a single disrespectful word about my Satguru. Even if I should have to make platforms for the rest of my life in obedience to the Satguru’s wishes, by his grace I would continue to do so.” And he continued patiently and cheerfully making and remaking his platform seventy times. Then Guru Amardas told him to stop building and said: “I am very pleased with you. For you alone have given me implicit obedience and complete surrender to my will and wishes.” None of the other disciples were able to give the Satguru their full love and devotion, to have utter faith in him, and obey his wishes with a grateful heart. Only Ramdas. And then Guru Amardas named Ramdas as his successor, saying, “It is a rare disciple who completely surrenders himself to the Satguru.”

Some of us may feel relieved that Baba Ji doesn’t put us to that kind of a test! Yet there is much we can apply to our own lives from this example. The platforms our Master asks us to build may not be made of mud – they might be our meditation or our seva or the way we live our lives. We might ask ourselves how well those platforms we build would meet his standard.

Daily life

Let’s first look at how we live our daily lives. At some point, before the path, most of us were probably looking for an alternative to the pain, uncertainty, and confusion of life in this material world. And when the Master accepted us, we could hardly believe our good fortune. At initiation, we promised him that we would live a way of life that would help clear our karmic debt, tame our wild and wandering mind, and allow our soul to become free and pure, unfettered by mind and senses. And we promised to devote a tenth of our day to our meditation practice every day, so that the soul could return to its source by means of the sound current, the Shabd.

Every day, we make a determined and sincere effort to maintain this way of life, and we probably succeed most of the time. But we are still dealing with the mind and the passions – anger, greed, lust, attachment, and pride or ego. Also, the karmic interplay between us and others may occasionally disrupt our good intentions. We fall, we fail, we mess up, we hurt someone – we do something we regret. Since we are constantly going against the current of this world, which glorifies and encourages so many behaviors and attitudes we avoid, it’s understandable that once in a while we may trip or be tripped up; we may hurt someone without even realizing it; we may make a bad choice, despite our best resolve. The platform we build at those times is not one we would want to present to the Master! So what do we do? We just have to build it again – and again and again.

This metaphor of rebuilding our platform simply means doing something again when we know we fall short, and never giving up. It means doing it for our beloved Master, because it pleases him.

The Master accepts our messes, our missteps; he doesn’t reject us. He does expect that we will recognize and clean up the mess, apologize if we have hurt someone, ask for forgiveness, learn from our mistakes, and forgive ourselves. Maharaj Charan Singh tells us:

In order to forgive ourselves, we must cease repeating that mistake. When we really repent and do not repeat that mistake again, then we can say that we have forgiven ourselves.²

So the Master forgives us, and he also wants us to forgive ourselves. Also, if someone needs our forgiveness, we must not hesitate to give it, or else, Hazur says, we are punishing ourselves.³ And he tells us that we get more happiness by forgiving than by seeking forgiveness.⁴ We must never seek revenge, but forgive from the heart, just as the Master does for us. And we always want to clear up misunderstandings, not decide who is at fault, not blame the other person. After all, we can never have the full perspective on what’s happening with the other person, what’s informing the other person. If they sow a bad seed, they will have the bad crop to harvest. But if we retaliate, then we become like that other person – we create our own bad seeds.⁵

Our master wants us to be forgiving. We should never be vengeful, but remember the basic teaching to love one another. If we have a spirit of revenge, then our heart cannot be pure. Unless our heart is pure, we will not be receptive to the Lord’s grace.⁶ So, in our daily conduct, we want o build our platform by giving Master our implicit obedience and obeying his wishes with a cheerful heart.

Seva

Seva is another area where we are constantly building and rebuilding the platforms we create out of our actions and our attitude. Great Master tells us that service is rendered in four different ways: with the body, with wealth, with mind, and with soul (surat).

Hazur tells us that the seva we do with our soul – listening to the Shabd within – is the real seva that will take us back to the Father and enable us to merge with that divine melody within. All the other sevas are a means to that end.

Regarding our approach to seva he says:

Seva comes from the heart. It is not a compulsion for anybody – it’s not that you have to do it, but you want to do it. It must come from within, and there must be love in doing seva. There should be no feeling of obligation that we have to do it.⁷

So, for example, no matter what physical seva we may be doing to serve the master or the sangat, we should do it with faith, love and devotion for him, and a cheerful heart. If we do seva out of a sense of obligation rather than love, if serving others doesn’t make them happy, or make us happy; if our ego is inflated by what we do as seva, then we probably need to rebuild our platform.

And what about mental seva? Do we make our meditation the priority in our life? Do we remember simran during the day when our mind is free? Are we able to sit still when we meditate? Keep our mind focused at the eye center? Put in our full time at one sitting? Our Master has given us this very important seva to do, but sometimes, no matter how hard we try, our efforts just don’t make the grade. Our platforms need to be rebuilt every day!

Meditation

If our attitude is like that of Ramdas, then we have a grateful heart when we sit for meditation, even if we see no lights and hear no sounds. It’s not like we need a discotheque in our mind. We are doing what Hazur told us is the one thing that we should never sacrifice to anything of this world. It doesn’t matter that our body doesn’t remain as still as Baba Ji’s when he’s sitting in satsang, we just keep making the effort. It doesn’t matter that our mind runs out when we try to concentrate – we just have to bring it back. Every day we get to build another platform with our meditation. We get to make another effort for him.

It is a long slow process to be transformed into pure and unsullied beings ready to return to the Creator. So we get up day after day and rebuild that platform, we do our seva of simran and bhajan without expectation. Hazur tells us:

We should attend to meditation with an absolutely relaxed mind and just do our duty. When it comes, it just comes. Our excitement or our anxiety does not bring anything. It is the concentration that brings it; concentration with love and longing and his grace bring it. So, when it has to come, it comes automatically.⁸

And despite what we may we read in the books about the inner splendors, sights and sounds, these are not the goal of our meditation. Hazur says:

You see, sometimes it is not in our interest to have those results, but progress is always there. Every time we attend to meditation, progress is there. ... He knows best when to give and how to give and how much to give. We have only to knock.⁹

We have only to knock on his door, and he will answer when the time is right. Whether or not any progress is visible to us, he is transforming us through our meditation, removing our karmic dirt so that we can end the long succession of lives we’ve had in this creation. Until then, we just have to go through our destiny, riding the roller coaster of our fate, taking the good along with the bad. Master will give us what we need to get through whatever comes our way, and our meditation acts as a buffer against the effects of our karma. Great Master tells us in Spiritual Gems:

The fate karma is undoubtedly strong. It has to be borne and there is no escape from it. But, through meditation, the will power becomes so strong that a person does not feel or mind either its favourable or adverse effects. ... Meditation is the antidote to karma.¹⁰

We can now face whatever our future might bring with the confidence that no matter what happens, he will get us through it without us losing our balance – provided we are keeping our promise to do our meditation. Although he won’t change our destiny, he will give us what we need to adjust to it.

If we are able to keep our perspective when storms of karma are raging around us, isn’t that a sign of progress? Even though we struggle to focus our mind and keep our body still when we sit for meditation, the Master knows the effort we are making. He is always with us and knows what we are going through every day. Meditation can give us peace within, no matter what is going on around us – when we do our practice. Hazur puts it this way:

You feel the effect of meditation before you actually see any progress within. ... And there is some sort of contentment. Your attitude towards the events of the world is also changing. You are developing a detached outlook on everything by meditation, though you may not have experienced any progress within at all.¹¹

Love and devotion

Another effect that comes with meditation is that our love for the Master grows. At its core, Sant Mat is a path of bhakti, or devotion. The path of devotion begins with the Master, a true mystic teacher who finds seekers, leads them away from the attractions of the world and connects them to that Shabd within, the life force that created and sustains the entire universe. If not for the Master’s intervention, we could never know God within us.

The Master has been described as a “splendid synthesis of the human and the divine qualities.”¹² He possesses a human body, like we do – he experiences hunger, thirst, fatigue and other human characteristics – yet he also has all the essential attributes of God. He is above all the negative passions, he has unselfish love for all beings, he is patient, humble, and always attuned to God. The living Master is our accessible link to the imperishable Nam. While he will eventually leave his human body, just as we will, the Nam, the Shabd he connects us to is eternal.

The Master teaches us the repetition of names that are imbued with the power and energy of God, the Father, the Supreme Creator. Their loving repetition generates remembrance of and love for God. This practice of simran or repetition “culminates in absolute absorption in the transcendent Name, the power that is God.”¹³

And this “absolute absorption in the transcendent name” is the real seva of the soul. This is what happens when we have finally built the “platform” that pleases our beloved Master. This is the culmination of our practice, when we reach the eye center through repetition of those Names that we are given at initiation, and our attention is concentrated and held there. For then we reach the Radiant Shabd Master who will pull our consciousness upward and inward on the journey back to the imperishable One.

We began with the story of disciples building mud platforms at the direction of their master Guru Amardas – many tried but gave up when they thought they couldn’t please their master with their efforts. But one disciple, Ramdas, was determined to do his duty cheerfully, building platform after platform in love, obedience and surrender to his Satguru, without question. If we, like Ramdas, give our Master our “full love and devotion, have utter faith in him, and obey his wishes with a cheerful heart,”¹⁴ why would he not give us the spiritual treasure that we long for? Ramdas rebuilt platforms for his master seventy times. Even if we have to rebuild them seventy times seventy times seventy times and more in our daily life, our seva and our meditation, our Master too will ultimately accept the “platforms” that we have built and rebuilt for him with our love and devotion. The time will come when we will be completely absorbed in him, in his Shabd form. Our love of the form will culminate in love of the formless, and that love is union, that love is eternal, that love is One.

“Guru Ramdas and the Mud Platforms,” in Tales of the Mystic East (2006), pp. 104-105.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #342
Ibid., #337
Ibid, #337
Ibid.,#334
Ibid., #335
Ibid., #190
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #357
Ibid., #359
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #28
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #161
Many Voices, One Song, p.90
Ibid., p.95
“Guru Ramdas and the Mud Platforms,” in Tales of the Mystic East (1977), p. 129; reprinted in Swami Paramatmananda Puri, On the Road to Freedom, Vol. 2; Amritapuri, Kerala, 2000, p. 83.

As Innocent as a Child - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

As Innocent as a Child

The popular 19^th-century English poet William Wordsworth was inspired by his great love of the natural world and felt “a sense sublime” that “rolls through all things.”¹ In the poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ² Wordsworth reflected deeply on his experience of the waning of “celestial light” in the passage of time from youth to old age:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream. ...
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there has passed away a glory from the earth. ...
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

The poet wonders what has become of the “celestial light” that he saw everywhere as a young child, when everything appeared fresh and bright to a young soul, newly born with a clean slate.

The poet reflects:

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

In childhood we have no responsibilities and nothing to worry about. All our needs are taken care of. There is nothing for the young soul to do but gaze in wonder at this bright, new, colourful world, full of curious and enchanting sensations. If only we could sustain that pure, innocent gaze and turn it inwards. But gradually, day by day, life begins to impose demands, and little by little the material world starts to lose its lustre and can no longer satisfy our inner hunger:

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy, ...
At length the Man perceives it [the celestial light] die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

It can’t be helped; we are hardly aware of it happening. This process has been going on for lifetime after lifetime. We are caught up in an unreliable world which holds out so much promise and delivers so little.

Soami Ji asks us:

Why don’t you listen, dear soul,
to the melody of the Name?
You’ve let yourself become trapped
in the labyrinth of creation.
Is this the happiness you were after.³

We can no longer see that “celestial light” that we could still see in our pure infancy. We’re too caught up in what Wordsworth calls our “noisy years,” but what will those look like when we look back in old age? Our outer lives won’t amount to much. How many older people have we heard say that it all went by so quickly? As Wordsworth says, those years “seem moments in the being/Of the eternal Silence.”

We’re left only with a sense of longing and nostalgia. The Masters tell us that this longing is a sign of the Lord’s grace and that it will turn us towards the Lord. What have we lost? Where has that “celestial light” gone? How can we find it again? Where should we look for it? The soul is crying out.

There was a radio interview with a celebrated personality who had once served as a merchant seaman. The discussion touched on his spiritual beliefs and he said, “I can assure you that on board ship in a raging typhoon in the South China Sea there is no such thing as an atheist!” We are always crying out from the depths of our soul, and Maharaj Charan Singh once told us that when we cry out earnestly to the Lord he can’t help but respond.

The mystics tell us that the Light has not gone anywhere. It is still within us, where it always has been. What we need to do is to become receptive to it. Hazur used to say that everything we need is within us.

According to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the disciples asked Jesus,“Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus replied by asking a small child to come and sit with them and said, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.⁴

In Light on St. Matthew Hazur commented on this passage:

Except you be converted means that our whole outlook on life should be changed. Now the tendency of our mind is outward but we have to withdraw our mind inward to the eye centre and turn it upward: that is conversion. We change from one way of living to another. And conversion comes by initiation and meditation.⁵

Just as an infant sees everything upside down and gradually learns how to focus its eyes to see properly, we must learn how to focus our inner eye. This inner eye unfortunately has not yet been opened, and we are unaware of its existence. Meanwhile our outer, physical eyes are focused on the material world and draw our attention away from that inner vision.

Hazur continues:

Unless you are converted – initiated and do your meditation and become as little children – you will not be able to eliminate ego from yourself and become as innocent as a child – and, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.⁶

This conversion involves receptivity, acceptance, giving up ego, becoming humble. The Great Master compared the disciple’s situation with that of a student learning a musical instrument. Reading a book about it will not be of much help. What the student needs are an instrument and a teacher – and then lots of practice. This will lead to becoming an expert – the more ardent the practice, the greater the development of understanding.

There is a saying among golfers that the more you practise the luckier you get.

It’s the same with spiritual practice. We have the perfect instrument to practice with. The human form is at the top of creation, the highest form it is possible to reach in all of nature. And we have a maestro teacher. How lucky can we get? Now the student is free to practise, attend satsang and absorb the teachings. Tulsi Sahib said, “Cleanse the sanctuary of your heart to welcome the Beloved.”⁷

It is not going to be a quick fix. Habits have become second nature. We need patience, determination and a positive attitude to overcome them. The Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett, notoriously bleak but humorous in his outlook, wrote, “Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.”⁸

Educational theorists say that FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning – a way of recognizing that we don’t always succeed at the first attempt but we need to persevere and that will lead to eventual success. So we need to follow what street posters used to say during the Second World War, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

What choice do we have? We are enjoying the best of possible circumstances—the human form and the association of a Master. Hazur once replied to a question concerning the succession of the golden, silver, copper and iron ages by asking, “Isn’t this a Golden Age?” ⁹ We have everything we need.

The trouble is that handing over to the Master does not come easily to our mind, the seat of the ego. We think we want to be in control. Like a wayward child the mind gets frustrated and angry when it doesn’t get its own way. It is lured by temptations and is then dissatisfied with the results. On the one hand it clings to old familiar habits while at the same time seeking novelty and new excitements.

Submission is the opposite of ego. Questions don’t arise. The mind fills with devotion and we submit to the Master’s guidance. According to the Buddhist sage, Padmasambhava, “Complete devotion brings complete blessing; absence of doubts brings complete success.”¹⁰

The mystics encourage us to use our intellect and discrimination in order to understand spiritual matters and the teachings of a Master, but after one has taken shelter with a Master one should surrender to him unconditionally.

Taking shelter means having full confidence in the Master and to be guided by him – not in the sense of worshipping him physically but of following his instructions and acting upon them. When the disciple surrenders to the Master for good, the Master looks after him in every way. Just as a mother brings up her child, so the Master looks after his disciple.

Soami Ji wrote:

“The mind dissolved when Radha Soami glanced at me
Now I’m like a child looked after in the lap of the Master.”¹¹

When we reach that stage we will become like a small child and once again enjoy that “celestial light” and hear that ringing radiance.

William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798, Stanza 5.
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”.
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 14, Shabd 5, p. 199.
Bible, Matthew 18:3–4.
Light on Saint Matthew, p. 211.
Light on Saint Matthew, p. 212.
Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, p. 230.
Samuel Becket, Worstword Ho!
Die to Live, p. 280.
Padmasambhava, quoted in Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Sar Bachan Poetry (Hindi), Bachan 6, Shabd 5.

Wonder - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Wonder

On the second to last page of Legacy of Love there is a final image of Hazur Maharaj Ji. His back is to us in the photo. He is standing in a shadowed doorway of the satsang ghar built by his master – he’s facing outside the building where the air seems lit with a delicate golden radiance.

Opposite this photo on the final page of the book is one of Maharaj Ji’s last messages: “May your love of the form culminate in the love of the formless.”¹ He’s turned away, we can’t see that face. We might imagine that he is reminding us to keep going with our practice of love, to love that face, that being, but not to stop there – to go where he has gone, to see what he sees, to love beyond all limit. This he wishes for us.

Soami Ji Maharaj also speaks about going beyond all limit. He describes in rich detail the sights and sounds of the inner spiritual regions. But when he comes to the destination of the soul in the Nameless One, words and descriptions fail. He simply says:

What more can I say? No one was there …
What there was I tell you now:
Wondrous wonder it was all in himself –
Wonder, wonder, wonder!

But then something happens:

Wonder then took on a form.…
In the form of saints He comes into the world,
And He himself reveals his secret.²

And this is the key to the whole story. Wonder takes on a form. In the form of saints he comes to the world to return us to the formless.

Even now, right down here in our strange little lives where we’re running around like ants in a hurricane – even with all the noise and distractions, people have always experienced moments touched with the awareness of some vast presence, moments filled with awe and joy at a beauty we can’t fully see.

Infants and little children seem to be in touch with this state; they seem to live there for a little while before life in the body fills them up with the debris of desires and fears, of ego, and makes them forget that place. The Gospel according to Matthew tells us:

Some disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.³

Traveling the inner way means to change, to become like a child again – pure, empty, open to give and receive love. This, Jesus says, means a second birth, a birth into spirit, and this time around it’s for keeps: it means to escape being dragged back to the world again and again to meet and love and then leave an endless procession of fathers and mothers. It means to come to rest in the formless Father.

But the question for every seeker is, How will I ever experience this wonder, how will it ever be more than brief hints from the beyond? Maharaj Ji gave us the simple diagram of return:

Deeply engrossed in wife and children, in friends and relatives, in wealth and possessions, you become a part of the ever-moving wheel. By deep devotion to Nam, you step out of the perpetual motion of the wheel and regain the axis with its equilibrium, its stillness, its ineffable bliss. Nay, you become one with the Lord.

Here is is a striking image: it is either life at the outer periphery of the wheel, or life at the radiant centre. Every day of our lives we wake up and we get moving – we wake up and doggedly get moving out and out onto the path of our mind. This path of the mind leads away from the sacred axis. We live and move and have our very being not in the Divine, but deeply engrossed in this fragile bubble of the body that we mistake for our real self.

We know nothing of stepping away from perpetual motion on the periphery, nothing of the way to the centre. We’re just out here flailing on the vast ocean of illusion, constant waves, no landmarks, sometimes sunny and calm so we feel happy, sometimes thunder and lightning and huge waves – no direction known. It’s everyone for himself or herself, trying to stay above water and piece together a tiny, fragile life with bits of debris that float our way. We build flimsy little rafts for ourselves, and then we invite others to climb on for company and warmth. Life on the high seas of existence. It’s exhausting. It’s frightening. It’s lonely.

And then… out of nowhere over the high seas suddenly appears a being like none we’ve seen before. He is so vast, so radiant, so present, so sweet, we can hardly believe our eyes. With one glance he touches that core of our being – he awakens a love like none other. And it’s all over. We sigh a sigh of relief that was a million eons coming. Then he calls from his beautiful, strong, seaworthy boat, Come with me! We’re going home. You just catch hold of this rope I’m throwing out to you, this rope of five words, and hold on to it for dear life. I myself will pull you into the boat of the Word, and we’ll ride that celestial Sound to that other ocean – the ocean of truth, of consciousness, of bliss.

This merciful boatman would then explain that our aloneness is a fiction of the mind. Soami Ji Maharaj says:

In the beginning there was only One, then there were two, and then three, then many, then thousands and lakhs, and finally there were countless beings. Now he who finds a perfect Sat Guru, who is one with the One and is the form of that One, will succeed through his grace in extricating himself from the illusion of the many and reach his Real Home.⁴

It is our supreme privilege to escape the illusion of the many and come to experience Oneness. Now this is a beautiful idea, but it is just an idea. Where does experience begin?

We really know nothing – about ourselves or life or God – but we do know without question when we have experienced something from the guide, the messenger from the formless. In the life of every disciple there is the turning point, the moment we understand that we have one true Friend. It may be love at first sight for some; it may take years for others to reach that critical mass of recognition. We could never describe this experience or prove it to anyone else, but this experience gives us the kernel of faith that lays the foundation for all our efforts to discover and love the Formless.

Now come the instructions. Sheikh Taqi, a Muslim seeker, has been awakened by the touch of Tulsi Sahib’s love, and Tulsi now gives him his part to play:

Listen, O Taqi, keep your gaze fixed on your Master
who has offered you his hand.
Leave it not through negligence, if you long to see
the splendor of your Beloved.
His grace will lead you to his very presence,
without any fear or danger on the way.⁵

He tells Taqi, If you really long to escape the ocean of existence and experience the Beloved, just keep your inner gaze fixed on me. Always. He says, I will hold your hand the entire way, but you have to keep holding my hand. This is meditation. And the foundation is simran: repeat my names at the eye focus, and like a child just be open, curious and receptive to whatever I show you within. Darkness or light, silence or sound.

We just follow. He does everything. This is grace. All true spiritual teachers have told their disciples how much they want them to experience what they themselves have experienced. Great Master says:

Your friend or Master is within you, nearer than anything else, and watches you. Whenever your attention is directed towards the eye center, He hears you and responds, but his response is missed by you because your attention wavers and runs outwards. If you could hear inside, you would be in tune. I wish you may come up to him and see him inside, face to face, instead of merely sensing his presence.⁶

The Master is with us – at a depth we can’t yet know or imagine; and now our life work is to be with him.

So he says, Repeat my names, remembering me until you forget yourself. In an evening meeting someone asked Hazur Maharaj Ji, “What do you remember about your Master?” He answered, “I am only remembering my Master.”

Our work is to fix our attention in those five names – in that presence – until we forget everything else; slowly, slowly over the years to bring our attention to a pinpoint focus at the eye centre, the place Dadu Dayal calls the door of eternity. Our work is to bring every ray of attention to the focus, in stillness and silence. Great Master said:

Unless we have complete silence within ourselves,
our soul cannot experience that Silence
out of which arises the Voice of Silence or the Shabd,
by contacting which our soul becomes merged in Silence.
This is the reality of Silence.⁷

Silence of the mind is the destination of simran. The glossary of Spiritual Letters notes that simran “is designed to focus the mind at the eye centre.” Someone designed simran. Who designed simran with this power? We certainly didn’t. Simran is a great wonder. Maharaj Ji quoted an old Indian proverb: “The elephant’s footprint covers all.” Then he continued:

All the benefits of prayer, penances, austerities, ritual worship, reading or reciting the scriptures, or good deeds and giving in charity, [all] are included within what we receive through meditating on the Word.

What greater prayer can there be than to have the Name of the Lord on our lips day and night through constant simran?⁸

The elephant’s footprint. Everything we could ever pray or say to the Master is to be channeled into simran. These five holy names are the way we thank him for finding us and bringing us back to life, the way we try to please him, the way we beg his forgiveness for turning away from him so often, the way we beg to feel his presence, the way we cry for help, the way we cry for refuge from our own mind, the way we show our obedience. Of all the countless names we could ever think or speak, these five names are the only names that lead to the Nameless, to Nam.

And yes, Tulsi acknowledges the challenge. He says: “Arduous is the way to the destination of love.”⁹ It is arduous to bring the mind again and again and ever again back to simran and bhajan, because our mind is the one thing we don’t want to give him. It’s just the mind’s nature. It doesn’t want to go still – if it goes still, what becomes of our self, what happens to our identity? So of course the mind puts up a fight!

And we constantly lose our fight with the mind. And yet … somehow it is through all our failures that we come to discover his grace.

Tulsi reminds of us of the Master’s grace, the circle that encloses our entire life. He says:

The one who dissolves difficulties is with you
and has given you his hand.¹⁰

No matter how forgetful or rebellious we are, no matter how ignorant or arrogant we are, the Friend within never withdraws his hand – he holds us in mercy and compassion, grace and forgiveness. Our only job is to persist with the practice of becoming present to him. Sarmad says:

The ocean of his generosity has no shore.
The tongue is powerless to thank,
the heart too bewildered to understand.
Though my sins are many
his compassion is greater still –
I swim in the seas of disobedience
but I do not drown.¹¹

Legacy of Love, p.547
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan 38:12, in Radha Soami Teachings, 7^th ed., p.168
Bible (NIV), Matthew 18:1–5
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Prose, #171
Tulsi Sahib: Saint of Hathras, 2^nd ed., p.92
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #105
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, 4^th ed., p.25
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II, 3^rd ed, p.70
Tulsi Sahib: Saint of Hathras, 2^nd ed., p.92
Ibid.
Isaac Ezekiel, Sarmad: Martyr to Love Divine, 5^th ed., p.289

Devotion and Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Devotion and Love

What is our situation in life? Are we not like a water boatman, a little insect that can run across water without penetrating the surface – walking across a lake of reality without any chance of knowing the depth or extent of it? The water boatman can only know what is on the surface; what lies beneath will remain a mystery until the surface is penetrated.

Within all of our hearts sounds an echo from our real home. But we don’t comprehend the depth and intention of that call, so our response is just to dive into the next experience that comes along, hoping that the void can be filled.We truly are ‘strangers in a strange land’ and are essentially living life as ‘sensation seekers,’ hoping that the next sensation will bring us peace, reality or even bliss. Even in our meditation many of us hold on to a desire for some sort of sensation, some sort of result to prove that we have made progress.

We have no idea why we are who we are – why we are born into the family we are in, why we speak the language we speak, why we are the colour we are, and, possibly most important, why we believe what we believe.

In the film Little Big Man a Native American chief observes: “I believe what I was given to believe.” Fate has decided his outlook on and understanding of life, and he, like us, is just a being going through a predetermined drama he can do nothing to change. He can only go through it thinking and reacting according to his nature, beliefs and karmas.

We all know that there is an emptiness in our life that we seek to fill, but no resolution of our quest can be achieved by going to the world for answers. Before coming to the path, we all probably felt that we were dissatisfied with ourselves and life in general; but with no alternative we just carried on plugging away, trying to get peace and bliss from the world. This habit doesn’t suddenly stop when we come to the path; it leaks into our time, and we have to work to go in the other direction – within ourselves – to know true love and reality, the Shabd or Word.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once explained that at our level we cannot know our soul, and this reality will only become apparent once our attention collects at the eye centre. At our present level we live life almost as automatons. We know we exist but do not know what we truly are. So, until we realize the reality of soul, we are effectively living in an arid desert of understanding, endlessly seeking reality where there can be nothing to find.

Kabir Sahib discussed the challenge of knowing the inner reality:

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes
cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded
within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.¹

Kabir is saying that our external senses are useless in comprehending the inner reality. Our external eyes cannot see the moon and sun inside. Our external ears cannot hear the inner sound. We have to develop our inner eye and inner hearing, through meditation, in order to comprehend the inner reality. The Shabd cannot be accessed by our superficial faculties.

Kabir goes on to say:

So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine,
his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead,
then the work of the Lord is done.²

If we chase after the things of the world and direct all of our efforts towards that end, then our life will be wasted. Only when the love of the world, of ‘I and mine’ is dead, will the work of the Lord, and our own spiritual work, be completed.

Count Leo Tolstoy observed that when there is a vacuum in life, something must come in to fill it. We can fill that vacuum with worldly knowledge and possessions, or with true inner knowledge and spiritual understanding. That choice is with us every moment.

Now, for some unknown reason, the Lord has decided to bring us into the company of a true living Master to fill the vacuum in our lives. He wants us to know the moon and the sun within and to hear the drumbeat of eternity.

In the Bible it is written that Jesus explained the pivotal role of the Master in taking the soul home:

All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.³

So, only the Master is the gateway to inner reality, and through him we have to become the “Son.” In John 3:35 it states:

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands.⁴

In the Bhagavad Gita it is written that Lord Krishna said:

Give me your whole heart,
devote yourself to me,
worship me and surrender to me.
Thus having made your heart steadfast in me,
with me as your supreme goal,
you shall come to me.⁵

This is the message of all Masters. However, it is our nature to worship the world instead and to love the beings and things in it, and so we have to be dragged to the path of devotion. When someone is lost it may often be the case that to reach his intended destination he will need a guide to take him through territory alien to him. In our case we do not know the way to our inner destination, or indeed how remote from it we are. Our own particular road to our true home may be strewn with obstacles and difficulties that are impossible to predict. But if our guide knows the way and also what is required for us to reach the final destination, then it is his duty to assess us before we embark on the trek to make sure that we are fit for the journey.

The Master tells us that we wouldn’t have been pulled to the path unless he knew that we could reach the final goal and become one with him. Often this statement will fly against our own assessment of our capabilities and experience. However, the Master will stick with us through thick and thin. The Master wants us to give our whole heart to him – to devote ourselves to him, because devotion to him is the only action that is needed. Hazur once wrote:

Slow internal progress is always best; therefore, one should not be impatient. Go on doing your bhajan and simran with love and faith. The inward progress is naturally slow. The work of withdrawing the consciousness from the lower centers on which it has been dwelling for millions of ages is not an easy job and requires time and constant effort. Of course, love and faith are wonderful accelerators, but the process is essentially a slow one.

One should not feel disheartened if one does not see any outward sign of progress, because progress is surely there. Such a person should give more time to meditation and keep the mind in simran at all times. One should not worry. The Master will see to the rest.⁶

In the recent Indian film Jodhaa Akbar, a Sufi tells the following tale to Emperor Akbar:

The Angels were asked:
What is heaven?
And they answered:
Every heart where love dwells is love itself.
They then were asked:
And what is Hell?
They answered:
A heart without love is hell itself.

So we are living in a kind of hell when our consciousness is focused on the world, but when love is in our heart we are in heaven. There can be no ifs or buts in this matter – we are in heaven or we are in hell; we have love in our heart or we do not; we are one with our Master or we are not.

We don’t just want to know what love is; we want to actually be in love. And all true teachings indicate the one way to achieve this love. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna said:

One who serves me with the unfailing
devotion of love
is fit to attain the supreme God.⁷

So, love means to follow the Master’s instructions faithfully, with unfailing devotion, and to attend to our meditation. Automatically love for the physical Master develops. If we live the Sant Mat way of life and attend to our meditation, we strengthen love and faith for the Master. Our love and faith grow with our meditation and ultimately lead us to become one with the Master, and ultimately the Lord.

I have heard over 2,000 satsangs since I came to the path, and yet the sea of words and concepts I have reflected on during all these years appears, at least to my conscious mind, to have changed little in me. However, Baba Ji recently made the point that not being aware that anything is happening as a result of our efforts at meditation does not mean that nothing is happening.

Our problem is that we are lost in a trackless desert; we are blind to the reality of our progress because we still focus primarily on the physical, so how on earth can we know anything about inner progress? And intellectual questions can never resolve our sense of being lost – the answers to these questions may merely put a flimsy patch over our lostness for a little while, enabling us to continue the struggle to experience inner reality.

Hazur once offered encouragement, however:

Once the disciple has been accepted, he must go back to the Father. The Master will not leave the disciple. He is responsible to take that soul back to the Father.⁸

In the Book of Mirdad, the mystic Mirdad says to his disciples:

Man shall be so weary of change that everything in him shall yearn, and yearn with unabating passion, for that which is mightier than change, and surely shall find it within himself.⁹

I would venture to suggest that we are all weary of change – we know that a new car, a new house, a new spouse does not alleviate our craving for bliss and contentment. We have to look inside. Mirdad goes on to say:

Happy are they that yearn, for they are already upon the threshold of Freedom. Them do I seek, and for them do I preach. Have I not chosen you because I heard your yearnings?¹⁰

So, the Master has heard our yearning – our cries of exasperation and desperation, our calls from the desert of our existence. And he is bringing us to him.

Arithmetic in the mystic tradition is different from that of the world: One and one equals one, and also, one and a million also equals one – when the one is a true living Master. Devotion to carrying out the instructions of our Master automatically gives us a heart that is filled with love, and so we will become the Son and thus will automatically come to know the Father.

Bhai Gurdas revealed a heart full of love for his own Master:

The Master is all merciful;
His praise is beyond understanding.
I bow again and again
To the one and incomprehensible Master.¹¹

One Hundred Poems of Kabir, tr. Rabindranth Tagore, p.5
Ibid.
Bible (King James Version), Matthew 11:27
Bible (New King James Version), John 3:35
Bhagavd Gita, 9.34, in Pathways to Liberation, p.238
Divine Light, #19
Bhagavad Gita, 14.26
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #2
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.95
Ibid.
Bhai Gurdas, Kabitt Svaiyye, quoted in Hector Esponda Dubin, Living Meditation, p.52

Don’t Worship the Physical - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Don’t Worship the Physical

What is the purpose of a master? Why do we need a physical master – one who is living now, in the flesh? Why can’t we just read a book, like the Bible – or any Sant Mat book for that matter – follow its instructions and merge with God? A beautiful exchange recorded between a disciple and Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh, in December 1988, delves into the role of the Master in God-realization.The disciple asked:

How can a living master establish a connection with the disciple who has never seen him and is not advanced enough to see anything inside? How does the relationship with the master benefit the disciple when the master is so far away that it is very difficult to visit or communicate with him?

Hazur: Sister, when we are expecting our past masters to help us, about whom we have only heard – they don’t even exist in the flesh – what is the problem with anybody living in the flesh in this world to help us?¹

It’s difficult for many people to accept that a living incarnation of God can exist in the world. For whatever reason, many find it easier to believe that spiritual teachers existed only in the past. Here Hazur questions that assumption: If such beings existed in the past, why couldn’t they exist now, and be able to help us? The questioner persists:

But if we can’t meet that person, and we ourselves are confined to the physical, then how can he contact us any better than one who isn’t in the body, since we can’t talk to either one of them?

Hazur: I know. Master is Shabd, not the body. He projects himself from the Shabd, since he is in the flesh. So he can be anywhere through Shabd. Once he leaves the body, then he cannot help us. He only helps those disciples whom he has put on the Path – that also through Shabd – not others. As long as he is in the flesh, he can be anywhere. The real master is Shabd. ²

This is the most important aspect of Sant Mat, of God-realization: “Master is Shabd, not the body.” The Father, or the Lord, is unknowable by the human mind. God is merely a concept to us. The mind is so limited that it cannot possibly comprehend the Creator. The mind can only understand its own world, the physical. So the Lord sends an ambassador to the physical world – the Son in the Christian trinity of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” – to give our mind a representation of God that it can comprehend. Yet still Hazur tells us, “Master is Shabd, not the body.” The real master is not the physical master but the Holy Ghost, the spirit of God within all beings, all things. That physical master projects himself from the Shabd, so therefore “he can be anywhere through Shabd.”

In other words, even though we may never have met the physical master, or perhaps have only seen him from afar and never talked to him, if we have been initiated by him the master is closer to us than our own breath, because he and Shabd are one. And the Shabd is our very essence – it infuses every atom of our being.

Hazur explains in this passage that once a spiritual master leaves the physical body he cannot help a seeker. “He only helps those disciples whom he has put on the Path – that also through Shabd – not others.” Past masters are gone. They have merged back into the ocean of God and are no longer projected from the Shabd. Past masters can help only those whom they initiated, no one else. Masters who are alive now, however, can help any seeker anywhere because the master is projected from the Shabd, which is everywhere.

But why can’t one just read about the Shabd from a book and merge into it without the help of a living master? If the Shabd is in everyone, why can’t everyone simply go within and merge with the Shabd on their own, without a middleman, so to speak?

In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur wrote:

Even other persons sometimes hear the sound within, but they don’t know what it is. Many people who have come on the path say that they had been hearing the sound and seeing the light for a long time, perhaps fifteen or twenty years before they were initiated, but did not realize its value. Sometimes they were even frightened and consulted doctors. They would not like to sit in the darkness or close their eyes out of fear of that light. ...

So it is not that other people who are not initiated will not hear that sound, but the sound they hear will not be able to pull them up to that level, as they have not been put in touch with it by a living master in this lifetime. Anybody who attends satsang and hears about the sound and light can try to hear the sound, but it will not pull that soul to the level of consciousness where we ultimately have to go.³

So, although the real master is Shabd, it is only through a physical, living master that one can be put in touch with that Shabd and be pulled to the highest level of consciousness within. Baba Gurinder Singh emphasizes this point repeatedly. Devotion for the physical master alone without effort to merge with the Shabd within will not bring one closer to the goal of God-realization.

The physical master is easy for the mind to comprehend. He looks like us, walks like us, talks like us. But devotion for the physical master alone ultimately is just another attachment to the world. Like any other worldly attachment, it is temporary. Physical masters come into the world, they lead souls marked by the Father to go back to God via the Shabd within, and they leave the world. So attachment to the physical master alone without attachment to the Shabd is fruitless, because like everything else in the physical world, the physical master will die.

We do, obviously, become attached to the physical master. That attraction is a manifestation of being marked by the Lord. But that attraction must lead us to seek the real master within – the Shabd. Love and devotion for the physical master is no substitute for love and devotion for the Shabd. Our devotion for the physical master, like any worldly attraction of the mind, is variable and temporary. But attachment to the Shabd or the Holy Ghost of the Christian trinity ultimately lives beyond mind, beyond this world. It’s real and permanent and is the only way to worship and merge with the Lord. Therefore, it is for us to make devotion to the Shabd our top priority. The physical master has brought us to the Shabd, and for this we are grateful. But ultimately the master is only a means to an end – a means to the Father via the Shabd.

That is why lapses in devotion to the physical master are ultimately inconsequential. But our devotion to the Shabd – our meditation – must be steadfast because it is only through attending to the Shabd that we can realize God. In the Bible Christ said:

And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.⁴

Hazur explains:

He [Christ] says, even if you turn against the Master, you can be forgiven because you are in the flesh and I am also in the flesh like you, in this world. So if you have no faith in me, if you do not realize or even think that I have come from the Father, then your sin against the Master can be pardoned, provided you are giving your time to the light and sound to which your Master has attached you, you are attending to your meditation [emphasis added]. Because then you will yourself realize who I am.⁵

Hazur continues:

So he [Christ] says, do not turn your back on the Holy Ghost, even if you have no faith in me or are sometimes doubtful about me. Do not bother about it, because when you attach yourself to the Holy Ghost within, that Holy Ghost will itself fill you with faith in me. At another place he says that since I am at your level, all sorts of doubts come to you, but when you “have lifted up the Son of man” (John 8:28) – when you have lifted up your consciousness to the level of the son of man – then you will have no doubts about me. Then you will know that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11), and that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

True masters are humble servants of the Father. They are not interested in being deified and adulated. Their only focus is bringing their marked souls back to the Father. Hazur wrote that even if you turn against the master, you can be forgiven because you and the master are “in the flesh ... in this world.” Being in the physical world, he is imperfect. He makes mistakes. He is playing the role of a normal human being. The purpose of the physical master is not to be a revered God-man, but rather to attach his marked souls to the real master, the Shabd.

Once initiated the disciple must attend to the Shabd, must do his or her simran and bhajan, despite the mind’s unsteady faith in the physical master. Once we are drawn inward and upward by the sound and light of Shabd, beyond mind, only then will we understand who the physical master is. But until then our dharma, our duty, is to attend to the Shabd regardless of our fluctuating faith.

Hazur has said:

You don’t have the pull always the same. The pull [is] sometimes less, sometimes more. But we have to train our mind that we have to sit in meditation every day, irrespective of the pull or not. Sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly. We have to sit in meditation. Soldier everyday has to go out for parade in the morning – sometimes very happy to do the parade, sometimes he doesn’t want to do the parade, but he has to do the parade. That’s part of the discipline he has to go through. So everything we don’t have to do happily. Sometimes we are trained to do it by forcing – to force our mind that it has to sit in meditation. We have to fight with our mind. ⁶

Soldiers are trained to have discipline – they must do their duty. It may be a beautiful, sunny day – perfect for marching. It may be cold and rainy – miserable for marching. It doesn’t matter; the soldier must march. Hazur tells us we must have the discipline to force our mind to attend to the Shabd every day, regardless of how much faith we feel on any particular day. And that is exactly what Christ is telling us when he says that sinning against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven: we must attend to the Holy Ghost, the Shabd, every day. Chasing after the physical master will get us nowhere.

In fact, deifying the master, focusing on him as the end rather than the means to God-realization, can impede our spiritual progress. If we are attached only to the physical master, to the point where we are not driven to seek the real master, the Shabd within, we will not progress spiritually. So physical masters will sometimes even ‘force’ their disciples to seek that real master within. Christ said:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him to you.⁷

Hazur explains, paraphrasing Christ:

When I leave you, it will be in your interest. Hearing this the disciple is surprised. How can it be in the interest of a disciple that the Master leave him physically? Christ explains: Day and night you are running after me now. You are mad in your love, and you are not trying to devote your time to the Spirit inside. But without attaching yourself to the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, you can never go back to the Father. So when I leave you physically, you will not find me anywhere outside and will have no option but to seek me within. Then you will be in touch with the Comforter, who will pull you up to my level, the level of the Father.⁸

The masters take on the responsibility of ensuring that their disciples return to the Father. They do not come to make our lives in this physical world a paradise. They don’t want to attach us even more to the physical plane. They take whatever steps necessary to drive their marked souls within to merge with the Shabd, even sometimes by distancing themselves or physically leaving their disciples altogether, in order to force them to seek “comfort” in the Shabd within. The Comforter is such a beautiful name for the Shabd.

Hazur has told us that the definition of grace is anything that brings us closer to God. Worldly misfortunes such as the loss of one’s business, public humiliation, sickness, death in the family, and even the death of the master, can cause such distress that we are forced to seek comfort within, in the Shabd.

But how can we reach the Comforter? Baba Ji repeatedly emphasizes that we must take responsibility for our spiritual growth, for seeking the Comforter within. We have to do our part. We can’t rely on the physical master to do it for us.

During his recent visit to Haynes Park in England, Baba Ji focused on this theme of over-reliance on the physical master. He used the terms ‘over-dependence’ and ‘co-dependence’, terms often used to describe the relationship between addicts and their enablers. Addicts of alcohol and opioids, for example, become helpless slaves to their addictions. Addicts desperately seek comfort in their drugs. And when they indulge in those drugs, they do, in fact, experience transient comfort. But because the drugs’ effects are temporary, like everything else in the world, they leave the addict even more distressed when they wear off.

Baba Ji seemed to imply that we are seeking comfort in the wrong place – in our addiction to the physical form of the master, rather than the master who has transcended form, the the Shabd within.

And then Baba Ji said something stunning, something like: Your dependence on the physical master will drive him to leave the world. This sounds just like Christ saying, “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him to you.”

Is Baba Ji warning us that he will leave the world soon? Who knows? But the context of his statement is almost exactly the same as Christ’s – that our mad love for the physical master instead of the Spirit within is misguided. Both Christ and Baba Ji seem to imply that we need an extreme intervention to break our attachment to the physical master, to force us to attach ourselves to the true master within.

In this same vein, at Haynes Park, Baba Ji said something like this: At some point you will have to kill the master. Whoa! This sounds a lot like the Zen saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Again, the point is not to worship the physical, not to attach ourselves to the outer form of the master, or our concepts of the master, but to find the true master, who is formless, within.

As satsangis, we are seeking God-realization, not physical-master-realization. At some point we must shift our focus from the physical to the spiritual. Now, ‘kill’ is a strong word. Baba Ji is trying to slap us awake. This is a wake-up call, an intervention. We have become co-dependent, enmeshed in an unhealthy addiction that we must break. The master will do whatever it takes to bring us back to the true Divinity within, but we have to do our part.

He just wants us to do our meditation every day. Whether our attention is focused at the eye center or not, whether we are filled with love and devotion or not – that is not our business.

Hazur has told us that sinning against the Holy Ghost means not to attend to meditation at all. We have only a short time in the human form to repent, to wash away our karmic debt by attending to the Shabd. We must take advantage of this incredible gift of the human form and initiation by the master. Hazur explains:

You see, not attending to meditation is also sinning against our own self. Opportunity we get to get out of this creation – and we are wasting our time. Christ said sin against the Holy Ghost can never be forgiven. We are sinning against ourself – an opportunity we are trying to lose. And we should try to make the best use of this opportunity. Because if we commit other type of sins, that can be forgiven by meditation. If we don’t attend to meditation at all then how can we be forgiven for any karma, for any sin at all?⁹

Radha Soami Satsang Beas Audio CD, December 3, 1988, track 4
Ibid.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #262
Bible (King James Version), Matthew 12:32
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint Matthew, 5th ed. (revised), p. 154
RSSB Audio CD, #15, track 23
Bible, John 16:7
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, 7th ed., p. 205
RSSB Audio CD, November 29, 1987, track 27

Becoming Conscious - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Becoming Conscious

Let’s look today at two aspects of a disciple’s life on this path. Both should be part of our daily life, part of who we are and how we live in the world. They are key components of Sant Mat as Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh used to describe it – an attitude of mind to be developed and a way of life to be lived. Both must be built on the foundation of our daily meditation practice. These two aspects or tasks are: watching our mind, and keeping our simran going throughout the day.

1. Watching the Mind
The saints tell us that our mind is the greatest barrier in our efforts on the path. They tell us that we need to keep constant watch on our mind if we are to succeed, as its tendency is towards the darkness, while our goal is toward the light. Our mind looks downward, the path leads upward. If we give in to our mind, we can slide slowly, or fall quickly, toward the pit of this world. If we keep our mind busy in positive things and hold it back from the negative, we begin to ascend toward the light.

Maharaj Jagat Singh says:

All the actions the mind tells us to do in this world bury us in layer after layer of filth. When we look with desire, filth accumulates.… And when we ourselves gossip, filth and more filth accumulates.¹

One could add endless other examples of inappropriate ways in which our mind behaves: negative, judgmental thoughts about others; angry reactions to someone else’s actions; indulging in self-pity; or thinking with pride, “I did a pretty good job with that project,” and so forth.

In a commentary to the Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching,we read:

It is not easy to learn to rectify the mind and make the intent sincere. It is necessary to make a genuine effort in order to accomplish this. Genuine effort involves being careful of yourself, wary of what is unseen and unheard, consciously aware at all times, examining yourself again and again, not letting the stubborn mind or its arbitrary intentions stir at all, even in secret. This is like chaining a wild monkey or bridling a stubborn horse, not letting them indulge in their natures.²

Hazur used exactly the same example: “The mind does not like to be imprisoned or channelled. It is like training a wild colt – but it can be trained.”³ And he said:

This means gaining control of the lower mind. But you know it never ceases playing pranks and we should always be ready to control and curb it if it shows any sign of revolt. The essence of Sant Mat is to control the mind and to put it under the discipline of the Satguru.⁴

Mystics advise us to deal with the mind’s negative tendencies while they are still small, before they take root. It has been said that when a negative thought or tendency first comes into our mind, it is called a ‘passer-by.’ If it continues to come into the mind, it is then known as a ‘guest.’ Finally, if it becomes a habit or established pattern, it is called ‘one who occupies the house.’ In other words, a permanent resident.

Imagine that your boss hires his nephew for a position that you had hoped to get. The first thought to come into your mind will be, “He got that job only because he’s the boss’s nephew.” That’s natural. The thought is now just a passer-by. The next time the thought comes, we can let it go and move on, saying, “It’s the boss’s decision.” Or we can let it fester in our mind, getting angry and feeling mistreated: “That job should have been mine.” Now the thought is a guest. Finally, if it comes again, we can ignore it, do our simran, and move on. Or we can let it get us really upset, so that we begin to hate the nephew. The thought now ‘occupies the house’ – it lives with us and can lead to angry words and actions, all with karmic repercussions.

It’s so much easier to let a passer-by go on his way than it is to throw out someone who has moved into your house. But this choice requires awareness. The Tao Te Ching:

The excellent masters of old …
Like men crossing streams in winter,
How cautious!
As if all around there were danger,
How watchful!
As if they were guests on every occasion.⁵

So we should be as awake and aware of our mind as a person is when crossing a stream in winter, where one misstep can mean death. We should live as if we were guests here – which we really are! – always on our best behaviour and careful that we don’t offend our host, the Lord, by thoughtless behaviour.

In all of this we have to remember that the Masters always encourage us to be positive. So, rather than saying, “NO! I shouldn’t be thinking this,” we should replace the negative thought with something positive, either the Master’s words on a topic or our simran. A marvellous sentence that Hazur wrote is useful to remember whenever someone has done something we don’t like – which, of course, happens almost every day. He said, “Nobody ever does us any good or bad thing.” That sentence is a bit of magic that transforms a situation instantly, if we can remember it. Here’s the full quote from Hazur:

Nobody ever does us any good or bad thing. Nor can any person offer us insult or bestow honour on us. The Master moves the strings from inside and makes people behave towards us according to our karmas. So do not take too much to heart the behaviour of other people towards us.⁶

If we pulled out that card and read it each time our mind said, “I don’t like what that person just did to me,” what a difference it would make!

The story goes that a Sufi was asked, “What have you brought and what have you been doing?” He replied, “I have brought this dog of an ego, which I have been watching for a lifetime, so it doesn’t fall on myself or someone else, and I have brought this mind full of filth, which I have spent my life trying to purify.” That’s the kind of sustained attention to our mind that we need to develop.

2. Simran
Let’s look now at our simran practice during the day. Simran is, or course, a critical part of our daily meditation period. But simran during the day is also an essential part of our spiritual work. It is not just something nice to do if convenient, but a required aspect of our work if we are to advance from square one. Hazur wrote to someone:

Repetition should be our constant companion while walking, talking, at meals, awake or asleep … We should get so used to simran that even if we are talking to others its course should continue mentally. It should be practised at all times for this is the only way to collect consciousness from the body. Success in this is the first essential before any contact whatsoever is possible with the Sound Current.⁷

Basically, if we let our mind run out for twenty-one and a half hours, it won’t be possible to pull it back in just two and a half hours. We have to keep the mind busy in simran whenever it’s free, if we are to have any hope of withdrawing the consciousness from the body during our meditation.

Master tells us that we first have to get into the habit of doing simran whenever our mind is free, and that eventually it will develop into simran that continues without a break, day and night. Hazur explained:

One ought to cultivate the habit of doing simran at odd hours of the day; in fact, at any time when one is not particularly occupied. This would in due course develop into subconscious simran or what you call automatic simran at the back of the mind.⁸

How can we learn to do our simran during the day? Baba Ji was asked this and replied that it was like any habit – it just has to be repeated enough until the habit is formed. He also mentioned that when we are at a discotheque in the evening and hear a song over and over, that song jumps into our head first thing in the morning when we wake up. This suggests that simran before going to sleep would be a good place to start in trying to bring it more into our day. In fact, the Masters do recommend that we do fifteen minutes of simran before going to sleep. So that’s one tangible step we can take.

The easiest times to bring the repetition into our day are probably when we are doing common and repetitive tasks, like showering, cooking, washing dishes, or walking. If we make a conscious effort to link simran to each of these tasks, one by one, it can begin to expand through our day. Hazur wrote: “There are moments in the working day which offer a good opportunity for simran – for instance when travelling to or from work, or when not particularly concentrating upon any task, whatever it may be.”⁹

To these we could add: while waiting for the computer to start, making copies at the Xerox machine, waiting for the bus, waiting in line at the grocery store, or exercising – all times when our minds are unoccupied. If we look at our day, we’ll find that large portions of it provide great opportunities to let the names flow through our mind.

And as our simran begins to be active during more periods of our day, let us remember to thank the Master, for it comes only from him.

⁹

When we have, with the Master’s grace, worked simran into all the free time in our day, it will continue to spread into all parts of our life and our time. As we quoted Hazur earlier: “This would in due course develop into subconscious simran or what you call automatic simran at the back of the mind.” It will become, he said, “our constant companion while walking, talking, at meals, awake or asleep.”¹⁰ Hazur discussed this at length in a question and answer session:

Question: Master, when a person is unconsciously saying simran – like if you’ve spent two or three hours saying simran and then you have your duties to perform, and you get up and you may have to go to the grocery market or down the street or something, and suddenly you realize that at the back of your head somewhere simran is going on automatically – is that of any real value to you?

Master: Sister, the stage will come when it will go on automatically. Even if you are talking to people, you will feel that you’re doing simran, and we should get into that habit, because only then are we able to concentrate at the eye centre. Only that will help us to become unconscious of the world, of what is going on around us. Then we will just move as actors move on a stage.

In this state we will feel that there is no reality. Sometimes you will be talking to a person and you will feel that you are not you, someone else is walking and talking with the other person. Simran helps to separate your individuality from yourself.… Then the whole day you will see the world as a stage, as if somebody else is acting, talking, doing a husband’s duty, a wife’s duty, a child’s duty, and you are someone different from yourself. And that helps. That is the effect of simran, and that is ultimately what we want to achieve. We want to separate our real self from this world.¹¹

3. Motivation
So we’ve talked about watching our mind and doing simran throughout the day. Both are critical aspects of our lives as disciples, essential prerequisites for becoming conscious, mindful humans. But are we able to do them? If not, do we still bring our full attention to these tasks, do we still make them a priority in our lives? Or have we given up on them as too difficult? We tend, as time goes on, to do our meditation as a matter of routine or as a ritual, without any real intensity, and to live as sort of half-baked disciples, going through the motions without any real zeal or devotion.

In The Imitation of Christ, Thomas á Kempis, a fifteenth-century German monk, wrote:

We ought every day to renew our purpose in God, and to stir our heart to fervour and devotion, as though it were the first day of our conversion. And we ought daily to pray and say: "Help me, my Lord [Jesus], that I may persevere in good purpose and in Your holy service unto my death, and that I may now today perfectly begin, for I have done nothing in time past."¹²

He’s saying that we need to constantly renew our sense of commitment and devotion. That no matter how good our intentions are, we have to bring to our spiritual work a firm sense of purpose and some passion.

What motivates us to work hard on this path? What is it that gives us the fire inside that prompts us to get up when the alarm rings, to go the extra mile on a seva project, to continue to try to do our simran through the day even when we continue to forget, to apologize when we’ve lost our temper and still think the other person was wrong, to approach our meditation every morning with energy and a commitment to do our best? Here’s a quote that embodies the attitude we should have:

Some disciples, caught up in a whirl of activity, were neglecting their meditation. The Master cautioned them: “Do not say: ‘Tomorrow I will meditate longer.’ You will suddenly find that a year has passed without fulfilment of your good intentions. Instead say: ‘This can wait and that can wait, but my search for God cannot wait.’”¹³

That sense of single-minded focus that puts the path first in our lives is critical to any success in our spiritual work. How does that develop? Can we help it to grow? Let’s look at some possibilities.

4. Having a clear objective
Why do we get up every morning to meditate? (Assuming we do!) It may be because we promised the Master that we would. That’s a good reason, but it may lose its force over time. We may get up, but only out of routine and without any real sense of purpose. That’s why Baba Ji encourages us to remember what motivated us to ask for initiation and to remember what our goals are on the path so we can sustain our enthusiasm.

If we keep in front of us our key objective – to reach the eye center, to see the radiant form inside, to please the Master – whatever it is that reaches our heart, that awakens something at our core – we are more likely to be able to use it to inspire us to action and to bring to that action an enthusiasm and energy that this highest and noblest task deserves.

This is one possible way to increase our motivation – to have a clear objective before us.

5. Pain of Life
Some of us have a strong understanding of the pain that is built into being alive in this world. The Masters describe this world as a place of considerable suffering. It isn’t uniformly painful; there can be a good deal of pleasure as well. But on balance, and especially in contrast to higher realms, the Masters say this world is dark and painful.

Maharaj Jagat Singh, in a discourse entitled “The World Suffers Pain,” talks about the pain inherent in being in this world of duality and ego and maya (illusion):

Anyone who enters the sphere of ego enters the sphere of suffering. If we had never left Nam and entered duality, we would never have come into the land of suffering. It’s like a border – it’s just a line, a frontier. Stand on one side – it’s your country and you’re comfortable and happy; stand on the other side – you’re in hostile territory.… There is no pain like that of maya. A person who has left Nam and come into maya, who has left oneness and come into duality, has entered delusion and worry. In worry lies suffering.¹⁴

Understanding the certainty of pain in life – whether mental or physical illness, poverty, divorce, or war – can be a powerful motivator to work hard to escape that suffering.

6. Awareness of death
Another motivator can be the certainty of our own death, and the uncertainty of its timing. Hazur used to say that when we pick up a cup to take a drink, we don’t know if we’ll still be alive for it to reach our lips. Or when we open the door to get out of our car, we may not live until our foot touches the ground. We may have forty years or forty seconds remaining. We have the opportunity now, while alive, to work toward our permanent salvation under the guidance of a living Master. The uncertainty of the length of our life may motivate some of us to greater effort.

7. Gratitude to Master
Another motivator for some of us might be gratitude. If we really understand and appreciate what we have been given, we will take full advantage of it. Out of all the billions of people in the world, what are the chances of us hearing about this path, and being receptive enough to be open to it? What are the chances of us still being on the path after ten, or twenty, or fifty years, if left on our own? Zero. It is the Master who finds us, who plants the seed of devotion in us, and who nurtures that seed and keeps it alive, in the face of all the pressures of the world and all the downward forces of the mind. If we feel the wonder of what he has done for us – and what he continues to do for us every day – we can use our gratitude for these gifts to push us to give all that we have on the path.

8. Devotion
For those of us with a more devotional bent, tapping into the love we feel for the Master can be a powerful source of inspiration to work harder on the path. What better way to express our love for him than by trying our hardest to be a good disciple, digging deeply into our reserves to do whatever it takes to please him?

9. Surrender
And a final motivator can be a sense of surrender. Maybe we come to the point where we begin to understand – really understand – how little we can really do, and how much he is asking of us, and we continue anyway, because he has asked us to and because we have nowhere else to go, nowhere else we want to go. Maybe we find more strength in obedience and surrender than in striving.

Let’s end with some thoughts from Baba Ji – my best recollection from the February 2011 session in Dera. He said that we can all do more than we think we can. We have so much more capacity than we know. We don’t know our potential. We just have to keep working. Baba Ji said that we all can do more – even five more minutes of meditation – that we should make him proud of us, and we’ll see the difference it makes in each of us.

Maharaj Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II, p.52
Liu I-Ming, Awakening to the Tao, ed. Thomas Cleary, p.54
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, letter 51
Light on Sant Mat, letter 83
Lao-Tzu, The Way of Life (Tao Te Ching), tr. R.B. Blakney, chapter 15
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter 259
Maharaj Charan Singh, Science of the Soul Newsletter, Jan–Feb 2004
Light on Sant Mat, letter 49
Maharaj Charan Singh, Science of the Soul Newsletter, January–Feb 2004
Science of the Soul Newsletter, Jan–Feb 2004
Die to Live, #177
Thomas á Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, p.53
Paramahansa Yogananda in Spiritual Link, August 2009, p.18
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II, pp.53,61

Listening - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Listening

In Sant Mat there is a saying that ‘Seva is what we are asked to do.’ Not necessarily what we want to do, and not necessarily what we would like to do, but just what we are asked to do. And in order to do this successfully, we first have to listen – listen very attentively – to what we are being asked to do.

So this discussion is all about the importance of being able to listen and listen well. ‘Listen’ is a word that is often used by the mystics when speaking to their disciples. Many times in answering questions Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh would say “Listen, I will tell you," and in letter after letter, Baba Jaimal Singh Ji would advise his beloved disciple Baba Sawan Singh to listen to the Shabd-dhun every day, to listen for, and attend to, the Shabd.

This advice, to listen, in both the worldly sense as well as the inward spiritual sense, is given by all the great mystics. They advise us of the need to become good listeners.

Dictionaries define the verb ‘to listen:’ “to give attention with the ear; to pay attention to, to heed, to notice.” They also list: “to wait attentively for a sound, to take notice of a sound, to attend to a sound for the purpose of hearing.”

And there is a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is “the faculty or a sense by which sound is perceived.” It is passive. It is what happens when sound waves strike our eardrums and are processed into audible information. We can hear the sounds around us that are within our hearing range as they occur. We can say hearing is an unconscious action.

Listening, however, is active, a deliberate or conscious action; it’s what we do when trying to hear a specific sound, or what we do after a sound is perceived – when we actually pay attention to what we are hearing. If we just hear something without listening, it is easily ignored and quickly forgotten. But listening requires concentration, focused attention. It is a deliberate activity with an intended result, which is to hear something specific, with clarity and attention.

So let’s discuss listening: in our daily lives, listening to the Master, and listening to the Shabd.

Listening in our daily lives:
From our birth, the process of acquiring language takes place through hearing, listening, and imitating. Long before we learn to read, we learn to speak and to communicate, and we've learned to do this through listening, mostly to our parents and family.

Then when we go to school, learning success is heavily dependent on our ability to listen to our teachers with focused attention. Teachers at every level from kindergarten through graduate school spend a lot of time talking to their students. If a child is a poor listener the teacher often asks ‘Are you listening?’ or ‘What did I just say?’ And the response is often ‘What did you say?’ or ‘I'm sorry, could you repeat that?’ As children we often missed what we were being told because we weren’t listening with full attention.

And what about listening in our personal and family relationships? Many of us do not listen well to our friends and family members; we often display poor listening skills with the people we are closest to. If we were to deliberately decide to just listen one-pointedly to our family members, giving them our undivided attention, not interrupting them, just letting them talk, we would demonstrate much more love for them than hours of talking to (or at) them. All we have to do is learn to listen.

Frequently in question and answer sessions, when young people ask him for advice, Baba Ji tells them to listen to their parents. He says the parents have their children’s best interest at heart. And we should listen to Baba Ji for he has our best interest at heart.

Then there is work. We obviously need to listen to our boss, to know what is expected of us. We also need to listen to our co-workers and our customers, and again most of us do not do this well – most of us are more eager to talk than to listen, which results in poor communication.

And with today’s modern technology, good focused communication is even harder to achieve. With the use of cell phones, iPhones, smart phones, music players, and I-tablets, it’s even easier to ‘tune out’ in class, or meetings, or when spending time with family or friends. While they are speaking to us we are sending instant text messages, reading e-mails or surfing the net, Googling or updating our Facebook page – not paying any kind of attention, let alone really listening to them.

All of these many and varied activities involving modern technology we call ‘multi-tasking,’ and multi-tasking results in our having scattered attention, shorter attention spans, and reduced ability to retain information. The best way to learn effectively is to listen with focused attention, and if we consciously practice this, the better our listening skills will become, and the better we will understand and absorb what we are hearing.

Listening to the Master as an aspect of a spiritual life:
In Sant Mat, the act of listening begins for many of us when we first hear about the teachings of the saints. We listen to stories and have conversations with other satsangis about the Sant Mat teachings. We attend satsang given by the Master or an appointed speaker who is discussing the Sant Mat philosophy, giving us encouragement to understand and live our lives in accordance with these teachings.

The Shabd Masters tell us it behooves us – it is to our advantage – to listen attentively to what we hear at satsang. There is no substitute for the advice, the wisdom, and the guidance of a mystic. There is a transformative power to the Master’s words – if we listen to them and apply them in our daily life. We have a wealth of Sant Mat books, we have satsang, we have tapes to listen to and we have the opportunity to do seva (service) of the Master. We have a living teacher who we can talk to, and get advice and answers from. We just need to take the opportunity to listen to him sincerely, and then follow his advice unconditionally.

Baba Ji has told us that we often ask for his advice, but do not really listen to his answer and do not always follow his instructions – so then, he asks, why do we bother to ask for advice?

Maharaj Jagat Singh used to say in satsang that we are like the man who was feeling ill and went to a doctor who prescribed some medicine. The man got the medicine, took it home and put it on a shelf in a back cupboard. Most of us, having got the medicine (meditation), then simply wander out and complain to the first person we find about our illness.

In Sar Bachan Prose, Soami Ji Maharaj says:

Mere reading and memorizing the Bani (teaching) of the saints will avail nothing so long as the teachings are not translated into action. Make the Bachans (discourses) that you hear, the rule of your life; otherwise what you hear and understand will be useless.¹

Soami Ji is telling us to listen with deep attention, to hear what the Master tells us, to follow his instructions, to think about what he says and put it into action. Reading books alone will not help much if we do not internalize them, because, as Baba Ji tells us, this is a path of action, discipline and obedience.

A perfect example of this is Hazur Maharaj Ji, who would always follow the Great Master’s (Maharaj Sawan Singh) advice. He said that when Great Master spoke, he listened to what he said and followed his instructions. This was the way Hazur lived his life: he listened to the instructions and advice of the Great Master in every aspect of life – his family activities, his school activities, his career activities and his seva activities.

Paul Tillich (1886–1965), a German-born American theologian who wrote on Christian mysticism said, “The first duty of love is to listen.” If we wish to demonstrate our love for the Master, then it is our duty to listen to what he has asked us to do, and just meditate, just attend to meditation every day. This act alone will demonstrate our love for the Master.

Hazur recalled his early years with Great Master, saying: “Worldly things – we always discussed everything with him. Actually, not discussed – we listened. We received orders and obeyed them; no questions had to be put. For everything else, we kept quiet.”²

Keeping quiet means to remain silent, and it’s interesting that the words ‘silent’ and ‘listen’ are spelled with the same letters. Having the ability to remain silent and just listen is a rare quality to have in this world, where everyone is encouraged to speak their mind no matter what the consequences or who they may hurt.

There is a saying:

When we are talking we are not listening
When we are truly listening we are learning.
When we are learning we are improving.

However, Baba Ji often tells us that we are good at asking questions, but we are not always good at listening to the answers.

If we observe Baba Ji when he is answering questions or when he is speaking with someone, we notice that he gives them his full focused attention, listening with undivided attention to what they are saying. He is not distracted by surrounding activities, but just focuses on the person, looking at them. He lets them speak, does not interrupt, lets them finish – then he speaks. It is as though, at that particular moment, no one else exists but the Master and the person asking the question.

So if we were to follow Master’s example by listening to him first and then to one another, without judgment, without anger, without trying to offend the other person, we would in effect be practising tolerance and respect for one another. One of the most sincere forms of showing respect to someone is actually to listen to what they have has to say without interruption, just the way Baba Ji does.

Listening in our spiritual practice – our meditation
When we are given Nam, every detail of the Sant Mat way of life is thoroughly explained. We are taught how the do the practice of simran (repetition), dhyan (contemplation) and bhajan (listening to the Sound Current). And bhajan is the act of listening – in the spiritual sense.

Mystics explain that the soul possesses the faculty to see (nirat), and the faculty to hear (surat), to listen. All Shabd mystics teach their disciples to listen to the Shabd, to listen and to merge into it.

The very essence of the spiritual practice, the meditation, is ‘listening’– listening to the Shabd, to the spiritual sound of the Dhun that the mystics tell us created and sustains everything. It is listening to the Shabd with focused attention that is the royal highway to the soul’s salvation.

In the book Living Meditation we read:

Each time we sit, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes, we should create the habit of becoming receptive to the Shabd-dhun by giving time to bhajan. Even if we don’t hear a thing, we should develop the habit of being receptive to whatever is there. Even if what we here is silence we should pay attention to it. That silence will give rest to our mind, will settle the thought waves, and from the silence, the Shabd-dhun, will become audible. If we don’t practise being receptive, how will we ever listen to the Shabd? If we don’t become receptive how will we ever obtain the full benefit of our meditation?³

The Great Master wrote to a disciple:

I would enjoin on you the paramount necessity of regular repetition of the holy words taught to you at the time of initiation, and of constant listening to the sound current. It is this practice, regularly performed with loving devotion, which can give you salvation.⁴

In the Dera, from the 1960’s to the early 1990’s, Professor Bhatnagar, a disciple of Great Master, would give satsang. He used to say that as students most of us get D or F grades, but that we should listen to the Masters and at least sit every day – get a good attendance record. He said this might be all we have, but it would be enough to get us home and not have to come back here.

Great Master also wrote:

You also ask for the method I worked out for myself during my own early experiences. In regard to that, I may say that I never worked out any method for myself. I took instructions from my own Guru and he gave me the exact method.⁵

In other words, he listened to his Master.

In another letter in the book Spiritual Letters, Baba Jaimal Singh tells Baba Sawan Singh, “Whether for an hour or two, or for fifteen minutes, or ten, or five, whatever free time you have you must listen to [the Shabd-dhun] regularly.”⁶

Once again we see that it is a matter of listening to the Master’s advice and then following the instructions – doing the practice. It’s not always easy to do this, but it is always possible to do.

So in summary: We have had a brief discussion about the advantage and the need to become good listeners during our daily lives in dealing with the people of this world; to listen to and act on the advice of the Master, which is a true expression of our love for him; and to try to listen regularly to the Shabd during the inner practice of our Sant Mat life.

Baba Ji often tells us that it’s all about focused attention and thinking clearly about our situation – why we are here, why we are following this path – and acting accordingly. As we mature spiritually we will learn to become good listeners like the Masters. And if we do this in our lives while focusing on the Master, we will become better human beings, better listeners of the Shabd, better lovers of the Master, better devotees of the Lord.

In Sar Bachan Poetry Soami Ji offers a conversation between the soul and the Lord (Radha Soami). The soul asks several questions, and then at the end of the exchange the Lord answers the soul simply:

Dear surat, it is time you listened to my advice –
go up and on and listen to the Shabd of Sunn.
By listening constantly to the Shabd melody,
you will reach my country, my home.
I have now made you my own.⁷

Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Prose, 11^th ed., p.57, #23
Legacy of Love, Radha Soami Satsang Beas., p.18
Hector Esponda Dubin, Living Meditation, p. 119.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 85
Spiritual Gems, letter 154
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, letter 2
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, 1^st ed., p.273

True Grit - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

True Grit

The Master’s words should stay uppermost in your mind all the time:
I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing.¹

This excerpt from one of Baba Jaimal Singh Maharaj’s letters to Maharaj Sawan Singh, or Great Master, a future master in the making, contains the refrain “I am nothing,” – also found in various forms in other letters throughout the collection. His message is clear: humility is an important quality to cultivate on the spiritual path.

But how do we do that? It seems to automatically happen when we are confronted with someone or something greater than ourself. In an interview on a radio talk show, Adam Frank, an American astrophysicist, asks:

Does the size of space – those zillions of stars and zillions of miles of nothing in between them – freak you out? Well, if it does, guess what? You’re not alone. ...

Just to be clear, space is pretty big. It took 10 years for the New Horizon probe [in the summer of 2015] to cross the solar system and reach Pluto, even though it was speeding along at 36,000 miles per hour. ... The Milky Way galaxy, which is kind of like our local city in space, has 400 billion stars – and they are so far apart from each other that even if you traveled as fast as New Horizon it would take 100 centuries to get from one star to the other. ...

But ... that is no reason to get all freaked out. Instead ... it’s reason to celebrate. ... Sure, space is unimaginably vast and you are just a tiny speck ... in the vast wheeling cosmos. But does that mean you’re insignificant and unimportant? Yes, it does – and that is awesome! Because that means you’re off the hook.²

We would agree that our inconsequentiality, compared to the immensity of the cosmos, humbles us, but we would also acknowledge that even the cosmos is not as immense as the Shabd and our Shabd masters.

Next, we hear the astrophysicist explain why our smallness and insignificance frees us from societal and self-imposed shackles:

Space is so crazy big that most of the day-to-day stuff that we sweat just doesn’t matter and that’s a very good thing.

Did your car get a flat on the way to work? Doesn’t matter.

Did you spill coffee on that new white dress shirt just before a meeting? Doesn’t matter. ...

It doesn’t matter because the immense vastness of the universe can be a kind of gift reminding us all to chill out. ... The whole stage of our lives, with all its immense joy and sorrow, is really part of a much larger and much grander play. Knowing the true scale of the universe doesn’t have to freak us out. Instead it can remind us to do the best we can, to be careful, compassionate, give it all our effort and then step back.³

This sounds just like what our masters have been telling us: to be good human beings, to analyze and worry less, and to try our very best at whatever we do, and then let go of the results.

There is a beautiful line of a shabd sung at Dera that touches on this: “I will sit back and enjoy the play, by my Beloved’s side.”⁴

How can we not enjoy everything when we feel the presence of our Beloved? At the same time, we are like the child enjoying the fair, in that often-told story; but once she lets go of her Father’s hand, the clown with the big red smile and the merry-go-round with flashing lights and loud music suddenly seem menacing.

The astrophysicist ends his talk by highlighting a worthy reminder: “The universe is a big place and there is a lot going on. That means, by one scale at least, our problems just aren’t that important. So, stop worrying so much and remember ... : It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.”

How true. But this raises the question: what does matter? What matters is deepening our relationship with our Master and deepening our spiritual practice. Soami Ji gives us a hint about how to do that:

Serve the Master, please him with your service;
come on, my friend, adopt this way of life.⁴

The present Master simplifies and clarifies this further by distilling it down to doing just one thing – meditation on Nam, the paramount seva, the utmost way we can serve our beloved Master, lighten his tremendous load and please him.

Maharaj Charan Singh tells us more about how best to adopt this service as a way of life – by becoming what he describes as a good satsangi:

Who is a good initiate or satsangi? The answer is very simple: He who keeps all his love and attention in the Divine Sound, and performs his worldly duties as a matter of routine. He is not affected by anything that comes in his life – good or bad – because he has perfectly submitted to the Master.⁵

This definition of a good satsangi emphasizes two attributes that are essential to deepening our practice and our relationship with the Beloved: (1) keeping our attention on the Master and Nam; and (2) living in his divine will.

Regarding the first attribute, reflect on Great Master’s beautiful explanation:

Just as a stream loses its identity when it is poured into the Ganges; just as the iron blade of a butcher becomes gold when touched with a philosopher’s stone; just as a neem tree acquires perfume when grown near a sandalwood tree; just as a piece of stone turns into salt when it stays in a salt mine; so also one becomes a saint if one remains in the company of saints.⁶

What a poetic reminder that what we dwell upon and whoever’s company we keep will greatly affect who we are and who we will become. And what a powerful reminder to sharpen our simran, especially to Sardar Bhahadur Maharaj’s high standard, that our simran be “incessant, unceasing, continuous, and constant.”⁷

As the masters have stated, simran is the only thing we can do to quiet the scampering mind and reach the eye centre, where, by the way, the lasting fun begins!

About the second attribute of a being a good satsangi – living in the Lord’s will – here’s a wonderful Sufi story about Nasruddin the Hodja, who is alleged to have been a real person, born in 1208 in what is now Turkey.

One day, when Nasruddin was working in his garden, he become very warm and sat down in the shade of a walnut tree, slipping off his turban to cool his bald head. Relaxing, he observed a fine pumpkin in the garden. Smiling, he mused out loud, “Allah, your ways are great indeed, but there are a few things that I would have done differently were I in charge. See the proud pumpkin growing on a spindly little vine, and then consider the walnut, a tiny inconsequential nut upon a great and lordly tree.

“Well,” he continued musing, “if I had been planning things, I would have reversed it. I’d have hung those pumpkins in all of their glory from this magnificent tree and let the teeny walnuts cling to the spindly pumpkin vine on the ground.”

As he was day dreaming of the other things he might do differently, a gentle breeze stirred the branches above him.

Suddenly, a walnut fell from the tree and landed with a thud on the top of Nasrudin’s bald head. As the lump began to swell and the pain increased, an understanding smile spread over his face.

Bowing down he murmured, “O Allah, forgive me. Thy wisdom is great indeed. Suppose I had been arranging matters? I should just now have been hit upon the head by a pumpkin.”⁸

Isn’t this one of our chief struggles? We pit our will against the Master’s will. Perhaps the struggle to let go of our will would not be so difficult if all that was required was a walnut dropping on our heads! Or perhaps the struggle would not be such a challenge if we regarded our Master’s will as Great Master did his Master’s will, as we hear in the following line: “A satsangi performs actions without desiring their fruits and leaves the results to the sweet will of the Master.”⁹

The sweet will of the Master is easy to see. Surely it is sweet that our Master is always looking out for us spiritually. And that Baba Ji is continually thinking up new ways to motivate and inspire us, such as with new books and the greatly enhanced RSSB website. He wants us to tune out the world and tune in to the music of the spheres. Really, how could his will be anything but sweet since he wants only to free us from the shackles of our body and mind so that we can attain oneness.

However, to arrive at this lofty state of awareness and surrender, we have some work to do.

In a TED talk about grit, the speaker, Angela Lee Duckworth, describes how schoolchildren are more likely to succeed in life if they have grit, which she defines as a combination of patience and perseverance.¹⁰ One can easily see how these qualities would be extremely helpful in deepening our meditation practice and our relationship with the Beloved. Grit is stamina.

We know that longing, which is a form of passion, is essential if we are to persist on our path. We need longing to feel the Master’s presence and to become who the Master wants us to be. Longing for his darshan inside is what propels us inward and upward. As Kabir has written, it is longing that does all the work.

Regarding perseverance and stamina, we know these qualities are necessary for success in worldly endeavors, so it makes sense they would be essential for the much more demanding spiritual goals.

In her talk, Duckworth tells us that grit is sticking with our goals day in and day out, not just for a week or a month but for many years. For those of us who have been on the path for a while, we know what it takes to get up every morning to meditate for years, even decades. It is no wonder Hazur calls this daily act of devotion the most courageous thing we can do. Last, Duckworth says, to live a life of grit one must live as if it is a marathon, not a sprint.

About this, Ken Foreman, a pastor, writes in his book Imagine Living Your Dream:

If you take on the mindset of a sprinter you will expect to reach the finish line quickly and if you don’t, you will run out of breath and possibly give up the race.

Take on the mindset of a marathon runner:
On the way to your [goal], there are twists and turns ... hills and valleys.
On the way to your [goal], there is a lot of territory to cover.
You know the finish line is out there. You know it will take some time to get there,
[so]... just keep putting one foot in front of the other. ...

Who knows, it could be around the next turn.
There may be one lap to go.
If you are patient, persistent and persevere, you will cross the finish line.¹¹

In our Radha Soami books, the Masters urge us to be patient, imploring us to persist and persevere. They understood, long before recent studies revealed, that the single most important factor for success is the degree to which one has grit.

We need only to look to our Masters as examples. Reflect on the patience, persistence, perseverance, passion and stamina that Baba Ji has displayed these last 29 years trying to persuade us to make meditation our Number One priority – trying to get us to trade in our troublesome, worthless crow of an ego for the release of our pure swan-soul so that we can ascend the inner skies back home. Baba Ji is our supreme example of grit.

Interestingly, although the TED speaker focused on the need for children to have more grit, she ended her talk with the confession that educators do not know how best to help children develop grit. Fortunately for us, we do: bhajan and simran.

Hazur, in Quest for Light, writes that “bhajan and simran are the only ways to improve ourselves and achieve our goal.” ¹² That is why the Masters tell us not to analyze, just to meditate. As Hazur so lyrically explained: cream always rises to the top.

This is the grit part, our part to play – churning the milk into cream. And the grace part? The Beloved’s part to play? Hazur finishes the paragraph with this astonishing guarantee: “With the Lord on our side, nothing can keep us away from our eternal home, which we will certainly attain one day.”

The Masters just ask us to make it to the eye centre (with their constant support), and then they promise that they will take care of the rest of our journey home. So basically, we just have to sit, repeat the names and let go – a small show of gratitude for all they do for us.

There is a vivid story whose meaning can encourage us to strive to be gritty lovers, who will not rest until we behold our Beloved’s face within.

During the filming of the epic movie Ben Hur, it is said that the lead actor had trouble learning to drive a chariot. With a lot of practice he was finally able to control the chariot but he still had some doubts. He reportedly explained his concerns to the director saying, “I think I can drive the chariot, but I am not sure I will win the race.” The director replied: “You just stay in the race, and I will make sure you win.”

This is just what the director of our lives, the Master, ask of us: just to stay in the race, meditate on Nam every day with love and devotion and without expectations. Just let go of our will and accept his will, just keep our attention on the Master and the Lord 24/7. These are the only things that go with us beyond death. If we do this, he will make sure that we cross the finish line – meet him inside and return to him, in this very lifetime.

Baba Jaimal Singh Ji, Spiritual Letters, #68
Adam Frank, “Does the Size of the Universe Freak You Out?,” All Things Considered (National Public Radio), June 1, 2016
Ibid
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 134
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, 7^th ed., 1985, ltr 93
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. I, 7^th ed., 2002, p. xliii
Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, 11^th ed., 2002, 2014; p. 184
Retelling of traditional story
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, ltr 124
Angela Lee Duckworth, “Grit: The Power of Patience and Perseverance,” TED talk, May 9, 2013
Ken Foreman, Imagine Living Your Dream, Cathedral of Faith, 2nd ed., 2013, p. 156
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, ltr 280

Cinderella and the Dead Parrot - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Cinderella and the Dead Parrot

A poem of Saint Paltu runs, in part:

In the court of the Lord, O Paltu,
nothing counts except love and devotion.
Love and devotion alone count,
for they please Him most.
He prefers a poor devotee’s insipid food
to a kingly feast.¹

Of this poem Maharaj Charan Singh says: “All saints have a universal message to give. They have the same teaching to offer. ... They teach us that man and God are one, and there is the veil of ego which separates the two. Love alone can remove that veil. This is the core of their teachings.”²

That only “love and devotion count” means that a lot of things don’t count in the court of the Lord. A short list would undoubtedly include:

Pride, anger and arrogance
Wealth or poverty, health or sickness, worldly success or failure
Male or female, straight or gay, short or tall
Self-pity
Ingenious explanations of why we haven’t attended to meditation

Here are a few more things that don’t count in the court of the Lord:

Seva with body, wealth and mind unless carried out with love and devotion
The number of satsangs we’ve listened to, or indeed given
Humility, unless it is true humility – the realization that I really am nothing; only Shabd is true. This level of humility cannot even be imagined while we identify ourselves with the body or the mind, though it can be glimpsed in the generosity and selflessness of the exemplary sevadar – the physical master.

Cinderella goes to the ball

OK, we can all recognize our failings even if we don’t admit them. There is a saying: if the cap fits, wear it. It’s a saying that derives from the dunce’s or fool’s cap, and it means “if a criticism of you is true, acknowledge it.”

A modern variant of that saying is “if the shoe fits, wear it.” This seems to be derived from the story of Cinderella. In that tale the prince visits all the houses in a town trying to find the beautiful girl he has fallen in love with. She left one glass slipper behind when she fled at midnight from the grand ball at the palace. In this case the saying ‘if the shoe fits’ is positive; the story of Cinderella is a tale of love, after all. When the glass slipper fitted only Cinderella’s foot, Cinderella and the prince got married and lived happily ever after.

Stories are told and retold because they carry meaning, sometimes meaning that is hidden. We can look at the Cinderella story from a mystical and spiritual point of view. Cinderella is the soul, so she is beautiful beyond imagination. However she is imprisoned in a hostile home and dressed in rags, her beauty concealed. Powerless, she is at the beck and call of her cruel stepmother and her two considerably less beautiful sisters – let’s call them Mind and Maya. These relatives have ugly characteristics – ignorance, anger, pride, greed and so forth. They force Cinderella to stay at home and do all the dirty work for them. In other words Cinderella, the soul, is the slave of the mind, the senses and the passions. Naturally, she yearns to be free.

On the night of the ball, Cinderella is in despair at her plight. Her longing to escape her imprisonment and attend the ball captures the attention of a good fairy – let’s say it is the guru. The good fairy tells Cinderella that she can go to the ball and shows her how to get there. These are the initiation instructions: the master enabling us to meditate. But she warns Cinderella that she still has responsibilities to fulfil at home, and that she must leave the ball and return home when the clock strikes eleven.

Cinderella is revealed in her true beauty and travels to the ball. The lights, colours and dancing there symbolize the bliss of Shabd within. She dances with the handsome prince, who is her true love; her lord. The soul and the Lord are temporarily connected. But the fairy godmother’s spell is broken when the clock chimes midnight and Cinderella finds herself again dressed in poor rags. She has to flee back home, losing a glass slipper on the way. She is still under the power of time, still in the realm of mind and maya. She has left the prison house of the body and made contact with true love, but this is not permanent liberation; she is still bound down by her karmas and cannot escape from the clutches of mind and maya by her own efforts alone.

We all know the end of the story. The prince, representing the grace of the Lord, seeks out his loving devotee and identifies her as his own, by her glass slipper. The slipper is a fragment of Shabd, the ocean of love, of which Cinderella’s beautiful soul is also a drop. The glass slipper, being made of Shabd, rejects the two sisters Mind and Maya. When the prince, the inner Shabd master, finds Cinderella, he rescues her from her captivity to the mind and passions and unites her soul with his own in the court of the Lord – where love alone counts.

The story of Cinderella is a story of dying while living. Cinderella goes to the ball one night – that is to say she goes within – and fleetingly meets the prince, the radiant form of the master. However, she has to return to this world to fulfil her responsibilities, to complete the course of her karmas. Likewise, through meditation we can taste the bliss of Shabd within, but by our own efforts we cannot achieve permanent liberation. We need effort and we need grace. But to be receptive to that grace, we need to make like Cinderella and go to the ball; we need first to die, to die while living.

The parable of the dead parrot

Death, as has often been observed, is not an event in life. If I drop dead, I won’t be around to join those who survive me in viewing my mortal remains and having an interesting chat about the meaning of life and death. Nor will I take with me anything that I currently think of as me, or belonging to me. And I won’t be aware that I have died, any more than I am aware when I fall asleep that I have fallen asleep.

So where will I be? As Baba Ji says, that depends. Dying while living obviously does not mean ordinary physical dying. Everybody dies. Despite astonishing medical advances the death rate remains at a stubborn 100 percent.

We use many synonyms and euphemisms for physical death. In the famous Monty Python ‘dead parrot’ sketch, the customer in a pet shop has bought a parrot in a cage. But when he gets home he finds it stone dead and standing upright only because it is nailed to its perch. He returns to the shop to complain and to insist that the parrot is dead despite the shopkeeper’s protestations that it is just resting. This parrot, says the customer, is deceased, demised, has come to the end of its life, has passed away, shuffled off the mortal coil, kicked the bucket, popped its clogs, expired, ceased to be, drawn its last breath.

Now, none of those represents any kind of accomplishment. Dying is not advancement, it is not progression. As Hazur Maharaj Ji very often said, one does not suddenly become a better person just by dying. If we are illiterate when we die we’re not going to get a PhD just because we’re dead. If we want to learn how to play guitar or drums, waiting until we are dead doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Another couple of terms for death in that Monty Python sketch however give us pause. The indignant customer says that the parrot ‘has joined the choirs invisible’ and ‘gone to meet its maker.’ These are no doubt euphemisms; we like to think that someone who has died has gone somewhere nice, or gone to God. At the very least these terms reflect a belief that there is more to death than just the end of life. However, the same principle applies. If we haven’t joined the choirs invisible while still alive we won’t suddenly find that we have a singing voice and a place reserved in the heavenly choir when we’re dead. And if we are not already good friends with our maker in life, are we likely to be invited to God’s house to meet him personally, just because we have left our body behind (and our home and family, nationality, bank balance, mobile phone and everything else) and thus have nothing else to do? Unless we’ve made advance plans, rather than being greeted like a celebrity at the gates of heaven just because we’ve died, we will continue going into whatever situations our choices and actions (karmas) have created for us, in whatever form we’ve earned. And unless there’s a major change in our consciousness, we’ll keep reacting to events and creating new karmas in that form in just the same way as we do now.

While we’re under the sway of the mind and senses we really don’t have a choice. Yes, we can read the Sant Mat books and listen to satsang and try to meditate and resolve to behave with the patience of saints. But as as long as we are below the mind, subject to the passions, we’ll react to events according to our conditioning. And we’ll either express that reaction, which will create new karma there and then, or we’ll repress our reaction, file it away and probably act on it another day.

On the other hand, if we have learned how to die while alive, then death is an event in life.

Dying while alive

Dying while alive means leaving the body in meditation while remaining fully aware and fully awake – indeed more awake than we currently are. This state of wakefulness is achieved by by stilling and focusing the attention at the eye centre in meditation. The eye centre is the only doorway within the body which leads inward and upward toward the Shabd, the One, rather than downward and outward into the realm of the scattered senses. If we can still and focus the mind in this way we can rehearse dying – rehearse what happens when we leave the body behind – while still living. Maharaj Ji used to say that meditation is nothing but a rehearsal for death:

Meditation is nothing but a lifelong rehearsal to die, a rehearsal to learn to withdraw our consciousness to the eye centre and then leave the body.³

Great Master, talking about meditation, particularly simran or repetition, said:

Simran should not be done in haste. It should be done slowly and with love and devotion, the Names being repeated clearly and correctly. To do it in haste or to regard it as an unwanted task, or to go through it merely as a routine leads nowhere. If the mind becomes lazy while doing simran, or the attention turns towards sense pleasures, one should repeat the Names audibly for ten or fifteen minutes, so that the mind’s attention reverts to the proper place.

Repetition should be done with one-pointed attention. By so doing, your hands and feet will become numb and the entire consciousness of the body will collect at the eye center. In due course a stage is reached when repetition ceases and the Form contemplated upon manifests itself. This is the culmination point of repetition.

The results of repetition will be in direct proportion to the love and faith brought to bear upon it. Carry out the simran of the Lord with love and faith. His Names have a great power. When done with faith, one feels intoxicated with joy, with the result that he forgets his body and himself and is aware of the presence of the Lord. How potent and blissful is the Name of God, for it creates in the devotee a fast-flowing current of bliss, peace and soul force, and he gets truly blessed.⁴

Meditation, dying while alive, is not about how or when we die physically. We die physically when our karmas for this particular life come to an end. Until our karmas for this life are over, then we are like Cinderella – can go to the ball and taste life in the court of the Lord but only for a limited time. We can temporarily leave the body in meditation but we will come back to face another day because we still have karma here.

Our karmic load will lessen if we follow the vows: avoid killing (the vegetarian diet); live honestly without cheating; avoid drugs and alcohol, thereby preserve our capacity to discriminate, to make good choices; and, most important, make our best effort in regular daily meditation to contact the Shabd through simran and bhajan.

But reducing our karmic load, that is, ‘cleaning the cup,’ will take us only so far. The cup keeps getting refilled with more choices, more actions. Something has to get rid of the karma once and for all, otherwise we will remain stuck here, unable to escape mind and maya. Since we can’t liberate ourselves on our own, we need help. Someday our prince – the Shabd form of the master – will come and take us inward to merge with him. Love, said Maharaj Ji, is to lose our identity and become another being. That being is the Shabd, the Lord.

Meeting the Shabd form of the master is the real initiation, according to Maharaj Ji. He says:

The real initiation starts when you see the radiant form of the master. What is initiation? To be led on the path back to the Father. So actually, you start your spiritual journey from the point where you see the radiant form. ... But to reach the radiant form of the master, you also have to know some technique and method, so that is also a form of initiation. But the real initiation is when we are led by the master within, back to the level of the Father.⁵

When this meeting occurs – the contact between the soul and the Shabd – the physical so-called disciple becomes the real disciple: the surat, the soul. Whether we call the union of the soul and the Shabd ‘Sach Khand’ or ‘living happily ever after’ doesn’t really matter. These are just concepts we use out here to give us something to aim for.

Rumi’s dead parrot sketch

The great Sufi poet Rumi had his own dead parrot sketch, just as amusing as the Monty Python one though considerably more profound in its spiritual meaning. In Rumi’s story,⁶ a merchant in the Middle East has an Indian parrot whom he loves on account of her sweet song, so he keeps her in a cage in his house. He is about to set off to India on a business trip and asks the parrot if she has any message to be delivered to her relatives in India. The parrot says, “Tell them I’m trapped in this cage and please ask them how I can get out.” The merchant agrees to do this.

When he reaches India he finds a flock of parrots in a tree, and passes on the message. Immediately, one of the parrots falls down dead. When the merchant finally returned home his own parrot asked him, “What was the reply?” “I’m very sorry,” said the merchant, “but I have not brought back any reply for you. As soon as I asked your question about how to escape one of the parrots fell down lifeless to the ground, and I didn’t have the heart to keep asking.”

As he said these words, his own parrot also fell down lifeless from its perch. The merchant berated himself, saying, “Why did I pass on such a distressing message? I should have kept my mouth shut!” Then, lamenting the loss of his fine songbird, he scooped up the dead parrot from the floor of the cage and flung the small corpse away. To his surprise, the parrot spread its wings and flew up to a nearby tree.

The merchant asked, “What’s going on?” The parrot replied, “That true friend of mine in India secretly answered the question you delivered on my behalf. By falling down dead, she showed me how to escape. You kept me prisoner because you wanted me to serve you by singing your tune. While alive and singing I could never escape. By dying, I became worthless to you, the door of the cage was opened and I was free.”

Rumi goes on:

The merchant said to her, “You have
now shown me a new path.”

The merchant (then) said to himself, “This is the advice for me: I
will take her path, for this path is luminous.

“How should my soul be inferior to a parrot? The soul ought to
(follow) such as this, for it is a (very) good track (indeed)!”

The body resembles a cage. The body has become a thorn to the
soul because of the deceptions of those (who are) inside and
outside.”⁷

Rumi’s message is clear. If we want to get out of the cage of this body, if we want to escape from the cycle of life after life, we need to die. But this has nothing to do with physical death. It means dying daily, leaving the body, flying up to spend at least some time every day on a branch of the tree of the Lord, so that when the grace of the Lord is bestowed and that door to eternity is opened, we are capable of accepting that grace – we know which way to fly, we are free, not imprisoned by our karmas. Then we do indeed go to meet our maker, or, ‘join the choirs invisible’; that is to say, merge with the Shabd. We can do that because we’ve already established that relationship with the Lord while we were in the body. As Jesus told his disciples according to John 12:35: “For a little while longer, the Light will be among you. Walk while you have the Light, so that darkness will not overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.”

By ‘walk’ Jesus means undertake the journey of meditation while we are alive. Attend daily to simran and bhajan for at least two and a half hours. Not because we can, not because we necessarily want to, not because we’re any good at it, not because anybody else is watching, but because that’s the instruction we got from that wise, positive and helpful master-parrot in India when, by some strange quirk of fate, we got a chance in this life to meet a true master and ask him for guidance. His message is: the way to become free is to die while living. Initiation explains how it’s done. We still have to do it; we still have to learn for ourselves how to fall off our ego-perch and lie there, apparently dead to the world but actually wide awake on that threshold within and ready to fly away the moment the inner doorway is opened.

If we die physically and we still have karma here, we’ll have to come back to pay it off. In fact, that’s what happens every day; we only wake up in our familiar body in the morning because our karma for this life didn’t happen to run out while we were sleeping. We can die daily while alive through simran and bhajan. When our meditation period ends, we come back to ‘ourselves,’ our daily karmas. We’re back inside the cage of the five senses, like a captive parrot singing for its supper with a backing group called the five passions. That is life. Our bhajan and simran is our expression of devotion. The rest is marking time.

When Paltu says “love and devotion alone count in the court of the Lord” he means that these are the only actions that evoke the Lord’s grace. We cannot get there by our own efforts, but without our effort his grace will not flow. Why? Because only love and devotion count in the court of the Lord, and love and devotion are nothing other than making the effort in meditation. We don’t have to be successful by our own standards, just persistent, regular, punctual, positive, unflinching. The Lord is surprisingly generous in his appreciation of our paltry efforts, which is very lucky for us. As Paltu says: “He prefers a poor devotee’s insipid food to a kingly feast.”

Isaac A. Ezekiel, Saint Paltu, 4th ed. 2009, p. 27
Discourses on Two Poems of Saint Paltu, 3rd ed. 1988, p. 1–2.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #328
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters (abridged), Chapter 2
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #30
Versions of Rumi’s story of the parrot can be viewed at http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/n-I-1547.htm and at http://www.masnavi.net/1/50/eng/1/1503/
http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/n-I-1547.html#22

Simplicity - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Simplicity

“Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” asked some disciples of Jesus:

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.¹

A child is so simple and innocent. His or her mind is still pure and unsullied by the world. Children live in the moment and harbor no ill will against anybody. Christ is saying that if we want to enter within we need to change our way of life and become pure and simple like that little child.

But… we have strayed far from that state of simplicity and purity because of our ego, which makes us see ourselves as separate, different and better or worse than others. We have strayed from that simplicity and purity due to our attachments to people, possessions and pleasures; and due to our intellect, which only leads us deeper and deeper into confusion. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said:

To accept simplicity in a simple way is very difficult for us.² … If you tell a simple person in a simple way, he will follow it. If you tell an intellectual person, in a simple way, he will never follow it. He's so intellectual he cannot accept simple things in a simple way. It must be put to him in a very complicated way. First he creates a problem with his intellect; then he wants to solve that problem with his intellect; then he takes pride in solving it or feels frustrated in not solving it. That is the fate of an intellectual person.³

The highest thing we can do with our intellect is to realize that we must put it aside, but this can be done only after the intellect is satisfied. Otherwise it will be a hindrance on the path. That’s why Hazur Maharaj Ji and Baba Ji have spent so much time answering our questions, in order to help us resolve our doubts. But still, the intellect cannot take us to our destination. Ultimately, faith and practice – not intellect – will take us to our destination.

So when we talk about simplicity, what can be more simple than the number one:

There is one Truth… one Reality… one God… one Father. There is one path within each one of us that leads back to him. In this life we have only one true friend, who is here to show us that path by connecting us to that one power, the Shabd, which created everything. There is one thing we can practise to make contact with that Shabd, to tread the path to reunion with him. And there is one point in the body, the eye center, where we have to focus all our attention in order to enter within.

There are many more ‘ones,’ including the one thing which is keeping us from realizing all that oneness: the mind. As long as we are under the sway of the mind we are seeing multiplicity, not oneness.

We see human beings in all different sizes and shapes – tall, short; skinny, fat; skin that is black, brown, yellow, red and white; male, female; rich, poor; old, young; healthy and sick. Well educated and illiterate. Respected and shunned. People come from so many different countries and speak so many different languages. And they may follow any one of the many religions that human beings have created.

Yet, when it comes to spirituality we are all exactly the same. There is no difference. Our essence – the soul – is the same in everybody. We are all drops of the same ocean of divinity. God has no caste, color or religion. If we study the teachings of the Masters, we will find that they all teach us to rise above all these differences until we see that same one God who resides within every one of us.

The soul is like a diamond that has fallen into the mud. The mud represents the layers of mind and matter covering the soul. There are many different types of mud, making us appear different from each other, but when you wash off all the mud, every diamond shines – every soul shines just as it did before it fell into the mud. And when this happens nobody will remember, nobody will care about what type of mud covered us.

And when the soul leaves this world, everything connected with the body and personality is left behind, and there is only one thing that matters. Hazur says:

There what is judged is our love, the intensity of our love, our desire to go back to the Father, how strong our inclination is to go back to the Father, how much we have been able to withdraw from the senses, withdraw from the riches of the world, withdraw from this creation, and how anxious we are to go back to the Father. Those things will be weighed there.… All that counts is that love and devotion for the Father.⁴

So, all those things that we think are real and important have no meaning beyond this life. All the things that we spend our time and energy on – our health, our beauty, our finances, our car, our house, our job and all of our relationships – none of these things can go with us. They have only made our lives more complicated and more difficult to put our attention where it really matters.

In a letter to a satsangi the Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, wrote:

How strange that being so wise you cannot go in. Last month I was touring in the foothills of the Siwalik Range. People there are very simple-minded. At initiation there were three ladies whose attention went in at once, and it became rather difficult to explain to them the details of the path – light, sound, regions, and so on. Their necks had to be massaged to bring the attention out. They were illiterate. They would be quite justified if they called the worldly-wise ignorant.⁵

The people who lived in the Siwalik Range lived a very simple life in a very simple environment. All the choices of the complex world were not available to them. For instance, they didn’t have to decide how many times a day to check their email! When presented with the simple teachings of the Saints they didn’t analyze, judge, compare, question, evaluate, calculate or doubt. They just took the teachings at face value and got the results.

Today we live in a very different environment. The world has intruded more and more into our lives, this intrusion taking a giant leap with the advent of the internet and all the mobile devices. Looking at screens has become what humans do most of the time. We are constantly fed the latest news on everything happening in the world – all the natural disasters, all the cruelty that human beings inflict on each other, and all the greed and power-hungry actions done in the name of governance. And so on.

All the options for material comforts and diversions – anything we could possibly need or want – come right to us through the new, more invasive marketing techniques, and then with one click these items are delivered to our door.

It’s so easy to buy into the convenience, the instant gratification, but when we start believing this is the way to happiness, our inner life begins to wither away. Kal is a marketing genius and his methods of catching us and keeping us in his web are getting more and more sophisticated. In A Spiritual Primer it says:

By attaching ourselves to money, possessions and things of the world, we strengthen our egos, weaken our inner focus or balance, and, in the process, alienate ourselves from who we are. This is how we lose our peace of mind, and, possessed by our possessions and our ambitions, we become anxious and stressed.…

Mass marketing media, the face of human greed, has replaced our spiritual values with material ideals. Consumerism dictates the way we live. Going shopping has become a substitute for religious experience and the malls and shopping complexes have become the new places of worship.…

Greed is destructive. Greed blinds a person. It makes people so obsessed with getting their perceived share of the proverbial cake that they are ready to sell their souls for a song.…

Greed and the relentless pursuit of self-gratification harden a person's heart, scatter the mind and waste precious energy, making spiritual development very difficult to achieve.⁶

So, living in this environment how are we ever going to be able to “enter the kingdom of heaven?” How do we navigate through this maze of complexity and make our way back to that childlike state of simplicity that we so badly need?

The answer can be found in two words that we often see on the internet: Opt Out… Opt Out. In other words, “unsubscribe”… hit the delete key… click that little X up in the right-hand corner. We have to exercise our power of discrimination and boldly make choices not to play in that game, not to fall into that trap. More than ever, we have to take charge of our attention.

When Tulsi Sahib told us to cleanse our hearts and to remove from our attention all that is other so that the beloved may be seated there, he was telling us to opt out of everything other than the Master – to empty ourselves of all the trash that the world is sending our way so that we may enter into the pure spiritual path.

The overarching choice that we have to make is to follow either the mind or the Master. We have been following the mind for eons, and it hasn’t worked out well for us. It has made pitiful slaves of us and kept us locked up in this prison of birth and death. Now we have the option to take refuge with the Master and to live in his will. This is the only way out!

So we should understand what it means to live in his will. Living in his will begins and ends with obedience. Soami Ji Maharaj makes it very clear:

Leaving everything else aside, one must implicitly obey the Satguru of his own time, and faithfully follow his instructions. This will lead him to success. This is the long and short of everything.⁷

And what are the Master’s instructions? He is really only telling us to do one thing, meditation, and he tells us the Master will take care of the rest. Everything else that we speak about doing either supports our meditation or comes as a result of our meditation. The Master tells us that there is only one command – one thing which pleases the Lord and only one thing that will go with us – and that is our meditation on Nam and nothing else.

So this now becomes our measuring stick for making choices: simply to ask ourselves if something helps our meditation. Does it bring us closer to the eye center, closer to the Master?

We are like the blind man who fell into the well and the Master is the one who has come to get us out. If it weren’t for him we could never get out of here. He extends the rope of Nam and asks us to grab hold so he can pull us out. Very simple! Simple obedience means just grabbing the rope. But as we’ve discussed, most of us are not oriented around ‘simple.’

In the original story the blind man asks a long series of questions: how he had happened to fall into such a deep well; why the good man wanted to take him out – did he have any personal agenda in helping him; why wells were made at all; who was the first designer of a well; where was the guarantee that he would not fall into some other well, and so on.

The intellect is not really helping us at all. Better to realize our ignorance and simply put all our trust in the Master. And despite our resistance, he never seems to get tired of telling us to just grab the rope… thank God!

And we can’t just loosely grab the rope – we have to grab it with whatever love and devotion we can muster. Because unless we are holding on tight how can he pull us out? Holding on tight means that when sitting in the stillness and in the silence we are bringing our full attention to the eye center. When we do simran we should put all of our attention into the words. As Hazur says, we should put our whole self into the words. If we do this we can begin to feel his pull.

So grabbing the rope of Nam is obedience to the Master and it pleases him. Everything else is obedience to the mind. The human form is given to us only for gathering the wealth of Nam. Therefore the one thing that we must strive for is Nam. Hazur explains:

If you do not do this, you cannot but repent dearly at the time of our exit from this physical plane. A leper who is in possession of this wealth, who is in touch with the Word, who is guided by it, is thousands of times better off than a person who has health, wealth and worldly fame but is not in contact with this Immanent Power.⁸

Living in his will also means accepting our destiny cheerfully. Hazur said:

It is His pleasure to keep us as He likes, as He thinks fit, and always for our own good. It is not for us to appeal or pray that it should be like this or like that. We should acquiesce in His Will and try to merge ourselves into Shabd. Desires are born of the mind, and when we pray for our desires to be fulfilled we are placing the mind above God. We should surrender ourselves to God and accept cheerfully whatever comes from Him, confident that whatever He does will be for our own ultimate good.⁹

What choice do we have anyway? We can’t change our destiny. What has to happen has to happen. In fact, it has already happened on another level. If we have any choice at all it is how we receive the events of our life. So when we’re able to see that the Master has taken us under his wing and there is a positive reason for everything that happens to us, then we will accept it with a sense of gratitude. On the other hand if we allow ourselves to get bummed out, if we grumble, it means that we have the wrong perspective – and so we suffer. As they say, “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.”

We suffer because we have desires and expectations that cannot be fulfilled. If it is not in our destiny, no amount of worry will be able to fulfill those desires. Soami Ji makes it very clear that he doesn’t want us to worry about anything:

I carry your burdens in my own heart
so that you may be free of worries
and nurture my love in your heart.
Give up your misgivings, be steadfast in your love –
a love tempered with faith.
I shall myself help you put in the effort.¹⁰

Hazur said:

Actually, he is doing everything. We're all puppets, and our greatest realization is that we are puppets … By meditation we learn that we are puppets, that we are helpless. The ego goes and we begin to learn that whatever is being done is being done by him.¹¹

So what could be more simple than being a puppet? Puppets have no problems or burdens of their own. No difficulties. No struggles. They just let the puppeteer pull the strings. He does with us what he pleases and we happily accept whatever happens. We just leave everything to him.

Finally, remembrance lets us come to realize that we are his puppets and leads us to live in his will. Remembrance means to become conscious of his presence by bringing our attention to where he resides in our body, the eye center. The Master, the Shabd, is living right within each one of us. Our practice is to awaken to that reality and to live in that reality day and night.

This path and our practice are all about our relationship with the Master and with Nam. Every satsangi has a personal relationship with his or her own Master, who is always with every one of us. This is not a worldly relationship that will come to an end, but a spiritual relationship that will endure and last forever. This relationship is so important that nothing else really matters in comparison. Hazur says:

The Lord is always waiting for you there. The nectar is flowing there day and night. The ringing radiance, that Spirit, is there day and night, waiting to pull you to your own destination, your eternal home of peace and bliss.¹²

In other words: The door is always wide open! Hazur sums it all up beautifully:

What greater prayer can there be than to have the Name of the Lord on our lips day and night through constant simran?

What greater austerity than to be living in the sweet will of the Lord, abiding by his command day and night?

What greater worship than having the form of a saint with us twenty-four hours of the day, wherever we go?

What greater recitation than listening at all times day and night to the unending music of the Word within?

What greater renunciation can there be than the indifference to the world that arises when the mind tastes the nectar of the Name?¹³

Bible (King James Version), Matthew 18:1–4
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #152
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, #27
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #354
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #116
Hector Esponda, A Spiritual Primer, pp.49–50
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Prose, #116
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, 5^th ed., p.28
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, 7^th ed., p.91
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 33, Shabd 16
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #41
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, 8^th ed., p.67
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II, 3^rd ed., p.92

Habits – The Stockholm Syndrome - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Habits – The Stockholm Syndrome

In Spiritual Gems the Great Master writes:

I am well aware that you have struggles. You have some things within yourself to overcome and some things outside of yourself which must be surmounted. But you can do it. If you have full confidence in the inner Master, he will always help you. And often when you find the difficulties greatest and the hour darkest, the light will appear and you will see that you are free. Let nothing discourage you. … You are one of the lucky sons of Sat Purush, and he has chosen you to get Nam and go with the Master to Sach Khand. You must reach there. Nothing can prevent you. But you can hasten the progress or retard it, as you like.¹

Here the Great Master is both encouraging us and offering us a challenge. We have to overcome both external and internal challenges during our life. External challenges could include illness, family problems, money, employment, or whatever – events that we have no control over but that we have to go through as best we can.

Our internal challenges? What are they? Lack of focus? Bad habits and their negative inclinations? All the aspects of our personality that impede our progress on the path? We have probably carried these weaknesses along with us for many years, maybe even lifetimes. They may get crystallized into bad habits if we allow them to grow deep roots. The deeper the roots of these habits, the more difficult it will be to overcome them.

There are many books and websites that deal with the subject of habits from a mental point of view – they recommend methods of strengthening the mind to overcome bad habits. Ways to break the cycles of habits. But the Masters put things in spiritual terms: they see our efforts to overcome our negative tendencies and weaknesses as part of our spiritual growth, eventually leading us to spiritual maturity.

Yes, this process involves our trying to control the mind, but our engine of control is Him – the Shabd. Our meditation. Our simran.

The Great Master says, “Let nothing discourage you.” He tells us that with the power of Nam, the strength of the Master within you, you can overcome anything. And he reminds us, “You are one of the lucky sons of Sat Purush.” The strength of the Master is our engine of control. We need to stay positive and turn to the Master, have faith in him and in his power. The Shabd is the positive power that gives us strength. So instead of focusing on the negative, ruminating over our weaknesses, we should just attend to our meditation, and repeat our simran with faith and love. If we seek his refuge, all negativity will be dispelled.

Of course, we need to recognize that our situation is desperate, and that we are trapped in our negativity. Then we can pull ourselves out of it with the strength of Shabd.

Soami Ji Maharaj put the same thought this way:

Soul, who are you?
Where have you come from?
The mind has created worldly entanglements –
why have you strayed into this net?
You are a child of Sat Purush, the true Lord,
and once you were a resident of the eternal
home.
But Kal has put his noose around your neck.
Through the Master’s grace
and the company of realized souls,
reverse your direction
and you will reach your home.
Listen to the boundless Shabd within.
Radha Soami has said this
for you to understand.²

Soami Ji is saying here that the web of maya, of illusion, has entangled us in worldly attachments and desires and dragged us downwards. Yet, he insists, we can let go of negativity and reverse our direction by listening to the Shabd, under the Master’s guidance. We can take a positive approach and return home. He’s not asking us to dwell on our weaknesses – rather to focus on the positive.

So, what prevents us from doing this consistently? Why do we keep reverting to our old ways?

It is not a coincidence that we often come across the phrase “we are slave to our senses.” It is repeated many times by the Masters in their satsangs, and in the Sant Mat literature. What does it mean? It’s not just a throwaway phrase. It is not just meant for certain people. It’s all of us who remain slaves to our senses until we turn away from the illusions in which we live.

The problem is that we are fond of our illusions – we enjoy living in delusion even though we know it is not the reality.

There is a term sometimes used for a person who has been kidnapped or taken hostage, but who gives up trying to free himself. He identifies with his captor and accepts being a prisoner. In fact, he no longer sees himself as a hostage, or a prisoner. Instead, he begins to trust his captor and even feel affection for him. He mistakes his enemy for his friend. This psychological phenomenon is often referred to as the Stockholm syndrome.

And this is what happens to us when we become slaves to our senses. Maya – illusion – is our captor. We enjoy being hostage to the power of our senses. We happily live in delusion. We are reluctant to face the reality that we are prisoners and not free at all. We even get comfortable living in that state, as it is easier – great effort would be required to put up resistance and free ourselves.

Since we have internalized our weaknesses, our negative tendencies, we think that’s who we really are. We have willingly given up our independence and become slaves. Yet the Master reminds us over and over that this is not who we are. We have to take the power back! We have to empower ourselves.

That is why Soami Ji challenges us by saying: Soul, who are you? Free yourself from the noose of Kal. Listen to the Shabd under the Master’s instruction and return home!

We are slaves to our senses, to pride of intellect and knowledge, to status and wealth. We take comfort in distracting our mind through these things. The strongest chains that imprison us are our own bad habits, the negativity that dissipates our energy and which we no longer resist.

In The Path of the Masters, Dr Julian Johnson wrote quite extensively about bad habits and how we can take control. He says that any habits quickly create grooves in the mind, and that the mind enjoys the repetitive action. He writes:

Mind can never will to depart from its beaten path, any more than a locomotive can will to leave the track upon which it has been set. Habit is the chief method of mental action. Habits are likened to grooves in which actions run. … After many repetitions, the mind runs on very smoothly in its grooves and enjoys it. And it much resents being disturbed and compelled to get out of its grooves. Each time the mind is stimulated by the same thing, it will react just as it did earlier.³

The more a habit is indulged in, the more easily and certainly the mind will run in that groove. Even indulgence to the point of utter exhaustion never conquers the mental bond of a passion.⁴

Johnson gives an example:

I recall once I was walking along the streets of St. Louis with another man. He was a pitiable drunkard. … We passed by saloons, and in every such instance he hesitated, gazed longingly into the saloon, while his whole body stiffened and trembled. An awful struggle was going on in his mind. The old mind wanted to take him into the saloon. But for my mind and my strong right arm acting in an opposite direction, he would have gone into the saloon in spite of his own better judgment. But his power of judgment had become weak.⁵

Johnson makes the point that people can choose only what their minds have been predisposed to choose, unless a new force enters into it from outside itself. For us, that force is the Master’s guidance and our Shabd practice. That is the only way to overcome the downward pull of the mind. Johnson warns us:

There is one thing in particular which the soul should guard against – that is, the insidious creeping-up, serpentlike, of bad habit. All habits tend to grow stronger with repetition, as we know. All indulgence fastens the chains of habit. At the beginning habits may be easily checked and broken by a determined will. But by and by they become so strong, the outward and downward movement so impelling, that the soul is quite helpless. It then rushes on to disaster. Every one of the five enemy passions uses the method of habit to fasten its claws in the heart of its victims.⁶

Johnson gives another example:

A man in a small boat was drifting down the Niagara River just above the falls. People on shore shouted a warning to him, but he paid no attention to their warning. When, a little later, he felt his craft impelled forward with increasing speed, he awoke to his peril, but it was too late. He was then quite powerless to escape the current. So it is with all bad habits. There is a point, a fatal moment, a deadly crisis, when the soul is no longer able to handle the situation. It cannot reach the mind, and the mind itself is in the grasp of a relentless fate created by its own conduct.⁷

A story is often repeated in Indian spiritual literature to demonstrate the importance of controlling the mind, and the habits we create, before they get too strong.

A man asked his young son to pull out a tiny flower growing in his garden. The child did so easily. Then he asked the boy to pull out a strong weed, which was tough with deep roots. He pulled it out with difficulty, roots and all. Finally he asked the boy to uproot a large bush, almost a tree – but it was too strong. He couldn’t budge it.

“So it is with bad habits,” said the man. “When they are young it is easy to pull them out but when they take hold, it becomes impossible to uproot them.”

The moral of the story is that if we are careless about our bad habits, then we will not be able to get rid of them. The proverb “Practice makes perfect” holds true for all habits – be they good or bad.

So it is very important that we keep a constant check on ourselves, on whatever things we see, hear and do in our day-to-day lives. Everything we do – what we watch, what we read, what we allow to enter into our minds in so many ways – has a strong effect on us.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg quotes William James, the American theologian and philosopher:

“All our life … is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional, and intellectual … bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny.” …

Habits, he [James] noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, to do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.”⁸

That is a great image – we always fall into the same folds or creases.

It has also been said that habits never really disappear. The old mental pathways are still there, lurking for opportunities to re-activate. That is why we always need to be on our guard to avoid them.

And this is why alcoholics, even after they've stopped drinking, continue to attend meetings of Alchoholics Anonymous. No matter how many years they have been sober, they stand up and declare to the others at the meeting: “I am an alcoholic." One remains an alcoholic because he still has the urge to drink, even if he is not drinking at that time. It is a habit still latent, lurking within, waiting to show itself. And this is why one of the principles of AA is that one has to turn to a Higher Power for the strength to overcome the habit of drinking.

This is the outside power Johnson referred to. But it is really the inner spiritual power within us that we need to tap into. Satsangis have a way to invoke this power. It is the Shabd practice.

Duhigg discusses another insight of James:

If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real. So [James] says that ultimately your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs – and becomes automatic – it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, as James wrote, that bears “us irresistably toward our desiny, whatever the latter may be.”⁹

We don’t have to be slaves. If we believe that we have the Master’s strength empowering us, and we have confidence in his spiritual power, we can overcome any bad habit.

Our Master always tells us we can be free if we turn to the Lord. The first step we need to take in our efforts to turn our lives around and invoke the Master’s power is to cultivate the positive habit of simran. To attend to our meditation and keep our mind on the Master in all our free time. The Master emphasizes cultivating the habit of simran rather than ruminating over our weaknesses and our negative tendencies. He tells us to take a positive approach:

Keep your mind in simran. There is only one mind. If it is busy in simran, if it is absolutely absorbed in simran, other thoughts automatically will go. They’ll vanish; they’ll fade out. If, without doing simran, you try to eliminate them by thinking, “I’m not going to think; I’m not going to think,” you can never succeed. Put your mind in a positive direction; think about something positive. That is simran. When your mind is absorbed in that, other thoughts will automatically vanish. There’s no other way to keep them out.¹⁰

Hazur also said:

If you try to eliminate the pressure of the world by negative means, you will never succeed. But when you try to create a better impression in your mind, other impressions automatically will go. The mind must form impressions, the mind must think about something. … it can never remain still. But you take a positive step. If you create the impression of light and sound within – in the mind – the other impressions automatically fade out. But if you fight with your mind to eliminate outside impressions, you will never succeed. Your object should be to create in the mind the positive impressions of shabd and light within. Then the other impressions will automatically fade out.¹¹

So again, he is telling us to create positive mental impressions through meditation, through our simran. We shouldn’t forget just how powerful our simran is! He emphasizes this when he says symbolically:

Why curse the darkness? Why not light the candle?¹²

Why complain and ruminate over our failings? – we just need to move forward.This problem of entrenched bad habits and our difficulty in controlling them is not just something that comes with modern life, with Internet and cellphone addiction, or too much television-watching. All the challenges we face in modern life are just a new manifestation of the same downward tendencies that people have encountered throughout the ages.

Once we recognize that the problem lies in us, in giving over our independence and freedom to our enemy, our captor, we need to exert the effort to reverse the downward direction of our mind through meditation and Shabd practice. We need to believe we have the ability to get free. We need to have confidence that, with the Master’s help, we can change. As William James said, if we make a habit of that belief in change, the change becomes real. We can adopt good habits as well as bad habits, so why not adopt the good habits and reclaim our freedom?

In another of his poems, Soami Ji presents us with a dialogue between mind and soul. The mind is confessing its weaknesses and then the soul offers a solution. I’m sure this sounds familiar to all of us:

The mind spoke to the soul, saying:
I am unable to overcome my taste for
sensual pleasures.
What can I do – how can I take your advice?
My enslavement to the senses is no small matter.
I have lost all strength; I have given up all effort,
I can no longer exert my will against them.
I really do want to give up the sense pleasures,
but when faced with them, I lose my resolve.
I severely repent, before and after,
but at the time I do not miss a chance to
indulge.¹³

Then in the poem the soul proposes to the mind that they seek the Lord’s help by attending satsang. Soami Ji goes on to tells us that the soul and mind ascended together to the inner realms and enjoyed the spiritual bliss within.

So let us break free from our chains of delusion, from our addiction to the world, and enjoy the company of the Master. As Sheikh Farid wrote:

Farid, it is so difficult to become a humble saint
at the Lord’s door. I am so accustomed
to walking in the ways of the world.
I have tied and picked up the bundle;
where can I go to throw it away?¹⁴

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #152
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 14, Shabd 2, p.115
Dr Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17^th ed., p.270
Ibid., p.273
Ibid., p.273
Ibid., p.278
Ibid., p.278
Duhigg, Charles, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, pp.271, 273
Ibid., p.273
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #401
Ibid., #403
Ibid., #579
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 32, Shabd 2, p.305
T.R. Shangari, Sheikh Farid: The Great Sufi Mystic, p.65

Running From Death, Longing For Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Running From Death, Longing For Love

Most of us stay in perpetual motion all our lives. Afraid of death, we fill up our time – and minds – with the comfort of busyness, with responsibilities and pleasures. We fear death because it lies on the other side of the barrier between known and unknown. Although it is the one inevitable event that we are all moving towards, we avoid thinking about it and run desperately the other way. We plunge into all kinds of enjoyments. We pursue money, power, and status. We submerge ourselves in our family responsibilities and attachments. But still we have the nagging realization that something awaits us at the end of it all, and that is death.

Is there any way to know what is on the other side? Has anyone ever been there and come back to tell all? It would seem not; it would seem that we’re all in the same situation. Yet somewhere amid the din and distractions of life is the voice of the mystics, those enlightened souls who have appeared in all religions and at all times in history and all places in the world. These mystics teach us that if we can still our minds and take our attention within, we can transcend the limitations of the body and mind and experience God. Their process of meditation takes us beyond the barrier of death, and that is why it is sometimes called ‘dying while living’.

It is our divine nature or core, our soul, that is the only permanent thing about us; everything else is temporary. At our death, the soul leaves the body and the body dissolves and decays. Earth returns to earth, water to water, air to air. So what are we really? The mystics say that our essence our soul, is nothing but love, but we are not aware or in tune with our true nature because we are so caught up in the activities of our lives. We identify with everything we do and we stay ignorant of who we really are.

The mystics teach a method of meditation that enables us to realize our intrinsic divine nature. They tell us that life itself can become a journey of self-discovery through which we can lose our fear of death. Now we are slaves to this fear. With practice we can be free.

By seeking the guidance of a true mystic, we can take our attention to higher planes of consciousness within ourselves and experience God’s love manifested as spiritual sound and light. This sound and light is projected from the highest realm of the Godhead, the source of love, the source of all. The spiritual journey cannot be taken without the instruction of a master who has himself experienced God-realization and whose purpose is to take souls back to their origin. The path home cannot be followed only by reading scriptures or performing the traditional rituals of religion. Every student of spirituality requires a master to guide him on the journey within – and to walk with him side by side through the challenges of life.

The masters teach that if we really want freedom we will have to make sacrifices. Freedom requires discipline. We will have to follow a lifestyle that will lessen our bonds to this world, rather than increase them. But the sacrifice is worthwhile, because it brings with it total liberation. A spiritual way of life includes more than just meditation – we have to make ethical and moral choices at every moment of our lives, through a vegetarian diet, steering clear of alcoholic drinks and drugs, and so much else.

We run from death, while we long to love and be loved. We give lip service to the concept that God is love, but we want to experience that love and live in its reality. When we become truly conscious through spiritual practice, we will be attuned to the will of the Creator and experience his great love.

Human Being - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Human Being

Every society and culture through the ages has had its own moral laws. The moral ecology shaped by these laws is the set of norms, beliefs, assumptions and behaviours that emerge at that specific time and define the criteria for right action. These criteria encourage us to be a certain kind of person, and the society that we come from supports that.

However, at some point there comes a time when the societal system we are a part of pushes us in a direction that does not support either our internal or our external life. Thomas Merton says that we experience a sense of estrangement “from the inner ground of meaning and of love”¹ – which then provokes a yearning within us to become one with the One. When we realize that we are out of balance we begin to ask the questions we hope will satisfy us at the deepest level of our being, and will make visible the road to our internal life.

Masters, mystics and holy people from all philosophical traditions – be they Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or followers of Sant Mat – propose that the foundation for becoming one with God, for realizing God, is formed in very large part by our behaviour. Our behaviour is informed by the moral culture of our time and is supported by our own internal ‘landscape’. For some religions the way to discover this internal landscape is through prayer; for some it's penances, austerities, etc. In reality, however, our behaviour is the result of the basic beliefs we hold dearest and closest to our heart, and how we translate those beliefs into our every day actions. And how we behave and what kind of human being we are does matter!

In Yoga and the Bible the author says:

No questions of greater importance confront a human being than those of discovering who and what he really is, what place he occupies in the universe, what his relationship is to the Supreme Creator, and what path he should follow to “do the Father’s will” and gain … salvation.²

In other words, God-realization can’t be had for the asking, can’t be won by our dazzling smile; God-realization can only be attained through the day-to-day active expression of the basic assumptions that form and support our primary goal in life. That assumption is: We don’t live for happiness alone, we live for something greater. This is what the masters mean when they tell us that the entire purpose of the human form, of our existence here on earth, is to become one with the Lord. To be that type of human being who shapes our life in such a manner that everything we do points us in the direction and sustains our goal of God-realization.

So, Master’s repeated suggestion that we become good human beings takes on both a practical and powerful focus on a daily basis in our life. We recognize that the road to God-realization cannot be a hedonistic one, but rather, as John Stuart Mill posits, a road on which “We have accepted the responsibility to become more moral over time, where our goal is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul, and is nourished with the joy that is a by- product of a successful moral struggle.”³

This moral struggle is the beginning of the long journey that builds the type of character and steadfastness we need to traverse not only our life in the world but also the inner path to God-realization. At first this may seem like too long and arduous a journey, but it is suggested in Adventure of Faith that, “Nobody should lose heart … for the inner path is a retracing, in reverse, of the soul’s long descent from her original home, which took place over an unimaginable span of time.”⁴

Because we are human, we can’t arrive there in one giant step. The journey begins with the understanding that we are flawed. But the good news is that while we are flawed, we have the pathway home within us. We do perform many negative actions, but we also have the capacity to overcome our weaknesses. Our soul has “come from high spiritual regions, from ultimate reality, and has the capacity to rise again to those heights and regain its lost freedom.”⁵ We have the capacity to struggle with ourselves, and we are capable of making the sacrifices that are needed in order to secure the inner victory we seek.

The Gospel of Jesus states:

Difficult through it may be, the struggle for human purity is only a means to contacting the inner Music, and it is this Music which ultimately brings perfection to a human being.
The best and most effective approach, therefore, in the quest for human perfection is to seek divine perfection through meditation on the Word of God. Then, all the good human qualities rise to the surface, like cream on milk.⁶

So it is a two-pronged approach: The goal of becoming a good human being is supported by our commitment to the struggle against our own weaknesses, and the struggle against our own weaknesses is automatically made ‘doable’ through our meditation and the path we are on.

The Gospel of Jesus continues:

In most people however, a sense of human identity, an aspect of the mind, has taken over the position of the self.⁷

Initially, we don’t realize that we – with our sense of identity – are simply an illusion. In this unbalanced form, “human identity becomes the ever- present human ego, asserting itself as selfishness and I-ness in every aspect of life…. Take take away the illusory sense of self from these [selfishness and I-ness] and they become their balanced counterparts – unattachment, contentment, chastity and forbearance.⁸

This is the human journey. To struggle against our own weaknesses is a step towards attaining the ultimate goal that we seek. And in this struggle a little humility helps us. Why do the saints put so much emphasis on the need to balance and rid oneself of the ego and acquire the trait of humility?

One thought is that we become humble when it becomes clear that in this struggle our individual talents alone are inadequate to the task that we have taken on. Humility reminds us over and over that we are not the centre of the universe, but that our lives serve a greater goal. In Spiritual Letters, Maharaj Sawan Singh is told by his master to keep the following words uppermost in his mind: “I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing.”⁹

Maharaj Charan Singh says:

The Dera … is built on seva and love and devotion and humility and meditation. And we have to build our whole life on these principles.”¹⁰

The ravages of the ego on humanity are legendary throughout time, and are in contradiction to the principles that we are trying to build our life upon. Ego blinds us and makes us believe that we are better, or worse, than we are – and better or worse than those around us. Ego even tells us that the path we are on is better than any one else’s. In buying into these beliefs we have lost the sense of humility that is necessary to walk the road to God-realization.

In The Gospel of Jesus, it is written:

Without some degree of spiritual insight the natural human sense of self becomes a massively enlarged ego…. Conversely, a true appreciation of human identity and one’s relationship to all else in the Lord’s creation lead to humility … a truly humble person will automatically be kind, generous, patient and self-controlled.¹¹

No outer conflict will ever be as important as this struggle against our own inner deficiencies. Our struggle against selfishness, bigotry and insecurity gives meaning and shape to our lives. Contending with our weaknesses continually challenges us to be aware of the choices that we make. The ultimate purpose is not to reach a final destination at all costs, but to get better at waging the battle within our selves. Remember that the finest gold is made from the hottest fire. Similarly, each challenge we meet on our journey is an opportunity to experience the grace of the Master and bolster our courage to continue on the road. When we take each heartache, each moment of helplessness, each doubt and fear, and answer it with courage – no matter how unworthy we feel – we are walking towards him and our true goal in life. Soon we may realize that we are not angry so often, we are more honest, we are softer towards those we haven’t felt empathy for, and so on. These are all signs of progress.

Engaging in the struggle for building our character is the most important adjunct to our meditation on the path. Our character becomes the set of habits and responses that are engraved upon our inner mind during the process of our transformation. We are shaped by the million small acts of self-control, of sharing kindnesses, of considerate care that eventually and slowly engrave themselves upon our inner mind and create the tendency towards right action.

Eventually, we realize almost in horror that to continue to make selfish, cruel choices is actually keeping us from our true self. We then can understand the rationale, role and necessity of the four vows on the path in shaping us into individuals who behave with habitual self-discipline and caring.

The things that lead us astray are all short term, but they have long-term consequences. The things that form our character in becoming a good human being endure forever; they form the interior of our existence and nourish our soul. We become hardier in our ability to be obedient to a loftier goal, rather than giving in to the immediate reward of a short-term goal.

Maharaj Charan Singh says in Die to Live:

If we don’t have good moral character outside, we can never make progress within at all…. If you’re weak outside, you’ll be more miserable and weak within; you’ll never be able to make much progress.¹²

And we can’t do this on our own. Compassion, reason and individual will are not strong enough to consistently defeat our selfishness, pride, greed and self-deception. We need assistance from somewhere; we have to draw on something larger than ourself. We need the Master, who chisels our character and curbs the impetuosity of our spirit; we need meditation, and we need each other in satsang. There are times when we can draw from the cultural values of Sant Mat to re-educate our heart in the right direction. We do best when we wage our struggle in conjunction with others waging theirs. Hazur speaks about the purpose of satsang:

We are able to build humility and meekness in us … and we can be a source of strength to each other and help each other rise above our weaknesses. That is the purpose of satsang.¹³

At the very least we are a community of souls engaging in the same journey. He continues:

And the people who attend to meditation – good, noble satsangis – even they need that atmosphere, just to retain that humility within themselves, just to escape from unnecessary ego.¹⁴

But, actually, we are not saved by our singular struggle against ourselves – we are all ultimately saved by grace. The struggle against weakness is too large. We think ‘we have it’ and then something comes to knock us off our course – failure, illness, death, loss of employment or a twist of fate. These times are gifts from him that remind us of the humility we need in order to move forward.

And the moments that humble us remind us of his grace. Grace may come in the most unexpected ways: a look of compassion from a friend, assistance from a stranger, a road sign that says, ‘hang in there’. And suddenly our course is set right again. We are reminded that he is the doer.

During our moments of misery, challenge and vulnerability we are open and sensitive to the fact that grace is always there, present and with us on this journey. Master describes this as a quieting of the self that takes place when we can experience his presence, and this can only be had when we quiet the sound of our own ego. The problem with our minds is that we tend to feel that we can earn grace, but he is the one who is always giving us the gift of grace. It is important to renounce the idea that we can earn it.

It is in stillness that we can gain the equipoise to continue in the struggle with our own weaknesses and with the immensity of the journey that we are on. Paul Tillich says:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear … when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness…. In that moment, grace conquers sin.¹⁵

Hazur says:

It [grace] is not in our hands to get it. All we can do is be sincere and faithful to our meditation, and then leave everything to the Lord’s mercy.¹⁶

We aren’t at the level to be able to see the ‘private stock’ of reasons for the things that come to us in our life, and we remain unable to comprehend the depths of our own minds. But we come to see that humility, courage and grace all play great roles in our journey.

The good news is that it is OK to be flawed. It is our humanness – our having weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and recognizing them – that helps us have empathy for others. Accepting our own weaknesses, we become more able to open our hearts and our arms and to give care and love to others.

The beauty of engaging in the struggle to become a good human being is that we become more graceful as time goes by. We might be pulled off course here and there, but we can approach each challenge with renewed commitment to our greater goal. Each weakness becomes an opportunity to wage a campaign that gives further and deeper meaning to our life and makes us a better person. We can repeatedly commit ourselves to a nobler way of being, and every time we repent and seek forgiveness there is dignity in the failing. Hazur says:

One who runs has a chance of falling, but he only falls to get up and run again. Pitfalls here and there do pull us back, but as long as we try to overcome those weaknesses, we again get up and again go ahead.¹⁷

We should take all these failures as our pillars of strength, provided we get up and walk again. If we don’t get up again, that is different. We are full of weaknesses, so pitfalls are there. But we should always be steady on the path. Our destination should always be before us, and we should try to get up again, and again walk. Ultimately we succeed.¹⁸

Each struggle we go through leaves an impression that makes us more substantial and deep as humans. This alchemy transforms us into self-realized and God-realized human beings, and it brings us joy. It is the joy that comes from knowing and remembering what truth we serve.

Ultimately, those who successfully struggle against their own weaknesses may not become rich and famous, but they will become spiritually mature. Spiritual maturity is not based upon talent, beauty or wealth. It isn’t earned by being better than other people, but by being better than we ourselves used to be. It is earned by the constant struggle to become a better human being by facing all that comes before us. Spiritual maturity is not glitzy. The spiritually mature person no longer relies on reactions from others to determine what is right, but on that inner yardstick that only asks, Will this take me closer to Him?

It has been said that this path calls for the bravery of a warrior. Even to meditate two and one half hours daily demands not only determination but also the renunciation of many things that other people consider important. We get there by saying a multitude of no’s for the sake of a few yes’s. We get there through the thousand choices that we make in favour of our ultimate goal. We get there on the pathway of grace that he is constantly putting before us. We get there because we have been pulled to something that is far larger than we are and he has made us willing players in this plan.

We get there by the day-to-day decisions that we make to engage in the repetition of simran, and in our meditation that will clear the way and dissipate our little selves for the sake of our true self. The guiding spirit for this journey is the Master. It is he who pulls us forward. Tulsi Sahib says:

Listen, thou art constantly being called from the Most High.
There ever beckons thee the voice of thy Beloved.
It is not meeting with the Beloved that is arduous;
What is difficult, O Taqi, is that it is hard to behold Him.
Without the grace of some realized Guide, says Tulsi,
The path of salvation is distant, beyond thy reach.¹⁹

When we are touched by his grace and allow ourselves to enter its field without fear, we see that we are all part of a whole, that we are elements of universal harmony, that everything – our inner and our outer landscape – is playing together in and for God. Our meditation and being a good human being are the essential components of this journey; they are worthwhile and bring the goal within our reach – our soul “retracing” back to its original home. You see he already has us in his arms. When we were initiated, he made us the promise that we will succeed. He will take us home. He only asks that we do our part.

Thomas Merton, Essential Writings, p.87
Yoga and the Bible, p.2
John Stuart Mill, as quoted in The Road to Character, p.282
Shradda Liertz, Adventure of Faith, p.251
Bulleh Shah, p.34
John Davidson, The Gospel of Jesus, p.863
The Gospel of Jesus, p.865
The Gospel of Jesus, p.865
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, p.106
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #139
The Gospel of Jesus, pp.866–67
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, p.57
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #165
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #171
Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich, p.131
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #477
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #578
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #538
Tulsi Sahib, p.77

Search for a True Guru - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Search for a True Guru

In Sar Bachan, Soami Ji writes:

Search for a true Guru, my dear friend –
he is the rarest jewel in the world.
The true Guru manifests himself
to those he showers with his grace.…
Let me tell you everything you need to know
to recognize the true Guru,
the one who is dyed in the colour of Shabd.
Open your eyes, you will see him close by.
What more can I say?
I have revealed the whole secret.
From now on it depends upon your destiny, beloved!
If you do not act on what I’ve just said,
you will keep drifting from form to form.
Radha Soami has said, and said at length,
all that is necessary.¹

Search for a true Guru, my dear friend –
he is the rarest jewel in the world.

Saints, when they try to tell us something that is beyond our limited experience, use metaphors referring to something we’re familiar with. What is a jewel? Something precious, something intensely beautiful; if it’s rare, it might be extremely valuable. And Soami Ji is saying that a true guru is the rarest jewel in the world. So he’s telling us that we need to search; our work is to seek that rarest of all jewels – the true guru.

Then Soami Ji says:

The true Guru manifests himself
to those he showers with his grace.

So here we have a seeming contradiction – a paradox. First he says we need to search, then he tells us it’s all a matter of grace when the true guru will manifest himself.

All over the world, when satsangis meet each other, our favorite thing is to say to each other: Tell me the story of how you came to the path. And we love those stories, we can’t help it, because there is always something miraculous – it’s a personal miracle for each person. Whatever the details of the story, we always sense the truth of Soami Ji’s words here:

The true Guru manifests himself
to those he showers with his grace.

However, as Baba Ji has said so forcefully, the physical body is not the true guru. The physical body, he said, doesn’t have the power to be the true guru. And he said that the true disciple, in fact, is also not the physical body. The true guru is Shabd, and the true disciple ultimately is also Shabd. But knowing this as a teaching is one thing, and knowing it as an experience is something else.

So when Soami Ji says, “Search for a true Guru, my dear friend,” he is talking about a deeper, more profound search. When we got initiated we did not join the club of ‘those who know’; we did not join any exclusive club at all. When we got initiated we became seekers – seekers in earnest, seekers who had taken vows to cement their resolve, seekers who now had instructions on how and where to seek.

So we sit here in the Master’s satsang today, and we are still seeking that reality which is the true guru. Even with the Master before us, we are blind to a reality that we can’t yet see. Something about sitting before the Master often makes us only more keenly aware of how limited is our capacity.

We might want to say, together with Julian of Norwich, “I saw him and still sought him.”² (That is: I saw him, but I was also still seeking him.) Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century Christian mystic, and when she wrote about her mystical experiences she must have been marveling over the strangeness of her state, because she saw the radiant Christ within, but still knew there was deeper seeking yet to do. She writes: “And thus I saw Him and I sought Him, and I possessed Him and I lacked Him.”³

But then she sums up something she learned through her inner experience, saying that “the constant seeking of the soul pleases God very much, for the soul can do no more than seek, suffer, and trust … And … seeking is as good as beholding during the time that He wishes to permit the soul to be in labour.”⁴

As Baba Ji said recently, however poor our attempt at meditation may be, even that pleases him. We may think it is a poor offering that we bring. He said, “No, it was like when a friend comes to see you – you don’t look at what your friend has brought you, you’re just glad to see him.” Julian of Norwich even goes further. She writes that the Lord says to us:

Pray inwardly even though it seems to give thee no pleasure,
for it is beneficial enough though thou perceivest it not.
Pray inwardly, though thou sensest nothing, though thou seest
nothing, yea, though thou thinkest thou canst achieve nothing,
for in dryness and barrenness,
in sickness and in feebleness,
then is thy prayer completely pleasing to me, though it seems to give thee
but little pleasure. And thus all thy living is prayer in my eyes.⁵

She uses here the word ‘prayer’ for what we might call ‘meditation.’ She is speaking of what she calls “an exalted imperceptible prayer” in which “all our purpose with all our might is fixed wholly upon the contemplation of Him.”⁶ This type of prayer, she says, unites the soul to God.

Actually, she doesn’t use the word ‘unite.’ She can’t find in the entire English language a word that communicates the oneness that she means, so she uses ‘one’ as a verb:

Prayer ones the soul to God, for though the soul is ever like God in nature and in essence, it is often unlike God in its external state.… Then is prayer a witness that the soul wills as God wills, and it comforts the conscience and inclines man to grace.⁷

We might ask: Does our meditation stand as a witness that we will as the Lord wills, that whatever he chooses to send us is just fine with us? Julian suggests that when this is our approach and our attitude to meditation, it inclines us toward grace. It opens us to grace.

When we pray – or meditate – in “dryness and barrenness,” it is greatly pleasing to the Lord, according to Julian. And all our living is then prayer in the Lord’s eyes, she says. If she’s right, then it is very much to our benefit to just carry on with our meditation, such as it is, and keep hoping, waiting – in essence to keep searching for the true guru within.

Soami Ji continues in the next stanza:

Let me tell you everything you need to know
to recognize the true Guru,
the one who is dyed in the colour of Shabd.

Now he’s about to tell us the whole secret, everything we need to know so that we can recognize the true guru, the one who is dyed in the colour of Shabd. It is a beautiful image to reflect upon: how do you dye a piece of cloth? You immerse it in the dye. You plunge it into the dye vat, and if you keep it there long enough, it comes out absolutely the colour of the dye. I don’t know if Shabd has a colour, but if it does, we’d have to say its colour is love.

The Sufi mystic Fakhreddin Eraqi describes the melody of Shabd as Love itself singing a serenade. Now, a serenade is a particular kind of a song; it is a song you sing to your sweetheart to attract her, to awaken love for you in her heart. Eraqi writes:

Love serenades in secret
Where is there a lover to hear?

Every breath, a new note is struck.
Every moment, a fresh tune issued.

The entire creation is the Sound of this Melody,
Who has ever heard a song to extend so far?

Love’s secret could not but be revealed,
For how can this Sound be concealed?⁸

He wonders, how can the sound of this love serenade be concealed? It is resounding twenty-four hours a day. It is life. It is consciousness. We are Shabd; Shabd is us. If it ever withdrew, we’d be dead. How can it be concealed? But how can we not hear it? Eraqi is saying that we’re like a lady who’s being serenaded. She’s fast asleep in her bed, while her lover is singing a beautiful serenade to her. She needs to wake up, go to the window and see who is singing. We need to wake up and listen to the song our lover is singing to us.

Soami Ji describing the true guru as the “one who is dyed in the colour of Shabd” implies something very important for us. Because, if he is dyed in the colour of Shabd, we too can become dyed in that colour. If one cloth can be dyed, then another cloth that’s plunged into that dye vat can also become dyed in that same colour. By immersing ourselves in that Shabd, its colour will also penetrate and transform us – we too will take on the colour of love.

So now Soami Ji is going to tell how to recognize the true guru. He says:

Let me tell you everything you need to know
to recognize the true Guru,
the one who is dyed in the colour of Shabd.
Open your eyes, you will see him close by.
What more can I say?
I have revealed the whole secret.

That’s it?! Open your eyes? That’s all he’s got to say? Some of us have been almost half a century striving and struggling on the path, and he says, “Open your eyes, you will see him close by.” Is this really the whole secret?

The true guru, he is telling us, is that one who is with you always, closer than your hands and feet, closer than your own breath. Day and night he is with you; waking or sleeping, he is never far from you.

We often talk about the spiritual path as if it were a journey, as if we have to get from some place to some other place. It’s a trek, a long hard journey. But Soami Ji says, No, it’s right here, right now. Just wake up. That’s all.

The Sufi mystic Fariduddin Attar wrote:

Since your Lord is always with you,
Walk and act in this Presence,
For every step you take in denial
Brings you only remorse and betrayal.⁹

Soami Ji goes on in the next line:

I have revealed the whole secret.
From now on it depends upon your destiny, beloved!
If you do not act on what I’ve just said,
you will keep drifting from form to form.

Another paradox. In the first line Soami Ji says it all depends on your destiny; in the next he says you’d better act on his advice. How to resolve this paradox? I don’t know. But if it all depends on our destiny, then at least we can take heart from the fact that he calls us “beloved.” Maybe, because he loves us as he does, there’s some hope for us in our destiny.

But it’s probably a much better idea to focus on his admonition to act on what he has told us. That is: we need to turn to the Master within, the Shabd. As Hazur wrote: “Shabd is the real essential form of the Satguru and it is in this essential form that the Satguru is present everywhere and looks after the disciples.”¹⁰

How then do we cultivate the awareness that he is with us and, as Hazur Maharaj Ji put it, looking after us? Let’s look to the words of advice from one of the earliest Tibetan Buddhist Masters, Padampa Sangye. He describes this process of developing an inner relationship with the Master in a particularly colorful, but profound, metaphor:

In the narrow defiles of birth, death, and the intermediate state, bandits await –
the five poisonous emotions – sure to ambush you;
People of Tingri, avail yourselves of the teacher as your escort.¹¹

Padampa Sangye lived in the village of Tingri, and his disciples gathered around him there, so he addresses his advice to the people of Tingri. He says the journey through life is like going through a narrow pass with rocky cliffs on either side, where bandits wait to ambush you. Those bandits are the poisonous emotions – all our negativity, which robs us of the happiness of life, what to say of our spiritual wealth. He says, To get safely through such a narrow pass with the bandits ready to ambush you, you need a skilled escort. An escort is someone who walks by your side, giving you the support you need. He says “avail yourself of the teacher as your escort.” “Avail yourself” means the teacher has already offered his services as an escort; you just have to accept his offer. Then Padampa Sangye says:

Your never-failing source of refuge is the teacher;
People of Tingri, carry him constantly on the crown of your head.¹²

He says, If the teacher is really our escort, walking by our side through life – if we really turn to him for guidance, follow his instructions and accept his help – then he becomes our refuge, our shelter . But Padampa Sangye also says, There’s only one way to actually do this: “carry him constantly on the crown of your head.” Carry him with you, not just sometimes, but constantly. In Padampa Sangye’s way of saying it, carry him on your head. As we might say it: turn our attention to him within, at the eye center. Be aware of his presence. Walk and act knowing that he is with us. Padampa Sangye continues:

If your protection is the teacher, you’ll reach wherever you aspire to go;
People of Tingri, cultivate devotion as the fare you pay for the journey.¹³

And so we need to cultivate devotion. Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, says:

Devotion consists in fixing the form of the master in our heart. … Then love is awakened in the heart of the disciple. So long as love is not of that type, the effort to create conditions for such a love should be continued. Once devotion of this high type is established in a human heart, the soul automatically starts rising upward and is able to catch hold of the Sound Current.¹⁴

Devotion consists in fixing the form of the master in the heart. If we continue, and if we persevere, someday we may be able to say, along with the Sufi poet Rahmat Ali Shah:

I etched Your Beautiful Face
On the inner wall of my heart.
Long since my heart has gone to ruins,
Only the wall bearing Your Image
Remains.¹⁵

But we may not be there yet. Our devotion may not be perfect yet, so our work is to go on with the efforts to create the conditions for such a love. What are those efforts? Daily meditation, certainly; satsang; seva; the practice of simran during the day. And the practice of his presence, remembering that he is with us, that he is our escort through life. But above all, the daily meditation practice. In other words, we continue searching for the true guru, as Soami Ji expressed in the first line of this shabd. We continue seeking.

In this seeking, though, there is a mystery. We ourselves may not be able to discern the difference between seeking and finding. As Julian of Norwich wrote:

For I saw Him and still sought Him, for we are now so blind and so unwise that we never seek God until He of His goodness shows Himself to us.¹⁶

In other words, if we are seeking that realization, if we are striving to follow the path he has shown us, if we are yearning to know the true guru within, it is a sign that he is also already showing himself to us. As she puts it, “of his own goodness” he is revealing himself. Our seeking, striving and yearning is clear evidence of his gift of grace.

As the Sufi poet Hakim Sanai said:

You will never find anything until you seek,
Except the Beloved,
Whom you do not seek unless you have found.¹⁷

Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), p.111
Julian of Norwich, The Complete Julian of Norwich, tr. Father John-Julian, p.95
Ibid., p.95
Ibid., p.99
Ibid., p.193
Ibid., p.201
Ibid., p.201
Vraje Abramian, Poetry, Stories and Teachings of Sufi Mystics and Saints, p.72
Ibid., p.12
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, #26
Padampa Sangye, The Hundred Verses of Advice, tr. Dilgo Khyentse, revised edition, p.36
Ibid., p.37
Ibid., p.38
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p.20
Winds of Grace, p.58
The Complete Julian of Norwich, p.95
Winds of Grace, p.xx

Living in the Will of the Lord - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Living in the Will of the Lord

Masters often give the same answer to our many different questions: We reap the benefits of being on a spiritual path if we live in the Lord’s will. The dialogues with disciples go like this:

Will the Master meet me at the time of death? – If you have been living in the Lord’s will.
How do I overcome tragedy? – Accept the Lord’s will.
How do I live my life? – Live in the Lord’s will.

In today’s discussion we will focus on two concepts concerning will:

Living in the will of the Lord and following the instructions of the Master are interchangeable. They are one and the same.
We have the ability to choose between living in the will of the Lord or succumbing to the will of the mind. In other words, effort is in our hands.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, the Great Master, writes:

The Master is the Lord’s will personified or made flesh. It is by following the will of the Master that the will of the Lord is known. But this can be known from a perfect Master only.¹

Here the Great Master clearly states that it is by following the will of the Master that we will come to know the will of the Lord. In ordinary life how could it be possible to know the will of the Lord? There are so many religions, so many conflicting interpretations of the teachings of the Saints. How can we sort out the truth among all these?

We need a Master who has been sent by the Lord to teach us how to live in the Lord’s will. At the time of initiation the Master tells us everything we need to know to achieve God realization. More importantly, he enables us to live in the will of God by directing us to the Shabd, Nam, Word or Logos within us. The Master empowers us to know the Lord’s will, as well as live in it.

So what actually is the Master’s will? Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh offers this explanation:

What is the Master’s will? Just to be firm on the principles on which we have to build our meditation and attend to our meditation – that is his will, that is his teaching, those are his instructions. That is the base on which we have to start. The real will of the Master we can know only when we go beyond the realm of mind and maya.²

Hazur affirms that to know the Lord’s will we simply have to follow his teachings, to hold steadfast on the principles on which “we have to build our meditation.” Hazur Maharaj Ji always reminded us that we have to build the atmosphere of meditation twenty-four hours a day, and we build the base for this with our daily actions of reading spiritual books, doing seva, attending satsang and holding firmly to the four vows we took at the time of initiation.

But to truly know the will of the Master we have to go beyond the realm of mind and maya, and this can only be done through conscientious simran and bhajan. It is the will of the Master that we sit for 2.5 hours each day.

But now let us ask oursleves: Who decides if we remain in his will or don’t remain in his will? The answer to this question brings us to the second concept: effort is in our hands. We must act as if it is within our own power to choose between living in the will of the Master or living in the will of the mind. Do we succumb to lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride, or do we cultivate chasity, forgiveness, detachment and humility? Do we make helplessness our excuse?

We tell ourselves that this is not in our own hands – the devil made me do it.
We tell ourselves that we can only do the right thing when he gives us the strength to do the right thing.
We tell ourselves that we are doing all these negative things because it is our karma.
We tell ourselves that we will sit in meditation when he wants us to sit in meditation.

It’s important to remember that the Master does not ask us to do anything that is not within our power to do. It’s important to believe in our ability to follow his instructions. This means that there is no excuse or justification for not doing what we promised to do at the time of our initiation. Great Master tells us:

If by the Lord’s will it is meant that everything that happens is bound to happen and that man’s efforts are of no avail whatever, then what was the use of the Guru’s incarnating themselves again and again, giving out their teachings, taking pains to hold spiritual discourses and putting out scriptural writings? The Gurus say that it is necessary for us to make our own efforts, but these should in in accordance with the will of the Lord.³

When we sit at the feet of the Master, when we see what sacrifices he makes to be with us, we would do well to remind ourselves why he is here:

He is here to tell us what we need to do.
He is here to tell us the consequences of not living in the Lord’s will.
He tells us we can live in his will – we can do it! He tries to build our confidence.

We ask for more tapes, more books and more satsangs, while we are barely absorbing what is in them. Even when we ask questions, we often cut the Master off during his responses. Whatever is contained in 100 books or 100 tapes or 100 satsangs is contained in each tape, each book and each satsang. It is not by reading hundreds of books, listening to hundreds of CDs or attending hundreds of satsangs that we will achieve God realization. It is rather by putting into practice the principles they offer that we will come to live in and realize the Lord’s will.

A word to the wise is sufficient: A mountain of books and tapes and satsangs are distilled into the instructions given at the time of initiation. If we follow these simple instructions we ae living in the Lord’s will.

And this thought brings us back to the question of our ability to follow the instructions, to put the principles into practice. Great Master reflects on this question:

A man conceives thousands of plans and puts some of them into effect, but fate sits by his side and laughs at him. Effort is the outcome of man’s will. Fate however, is the outcome of the will of the Lord.⁴

We see the very definition of effort and grace in this quote. This is profound. Great Master is telling us that we had no control over how we got to where we are. “Man proposes, God disposes.” We did not choose our parents, our country, our innate genetic makeup which controls so much, or the environment in which we live.

But then Great Master says something extraordinary. There is something that we can control: “Effort is the outcome of man’s will.” He does not say that effort is the outcome of the Lord’s will or the Master’s will. He says it is the outcome of man’s will. It seems that Great Master is telling us there is something that is in our hands after all – our ability to make an act of will to make the effort.

It is effort that will bring success.
It is effort that will have us do our meditation each day.
It is effort that will propel us to do seva.
It is effort that will force us to make the right decisions.
And effort has to come from an act of will on our part.

He gives us everything to enable us to succeed. But it is up to us to will ourselves to accept his gift. We are starving, the food is on our plate, but we have to lift the spoon. Almost every page of every book talks about our effort being rewarded with his grace. The spiritual rewards of merging in the Shabd are always showered upon us in response to our efforts.

We have heard the advice to “rise above the fray.” The Master personifies this at the highest level. He expemplifies the statement: “Be in the world and not of it.” But is it possible for us disciples to reach the stage where we can step above the fray and onto a level where we can act in concert with the Lord? Can we step out onto this higher plateau where we have escaped the dictates of the mind? Great Master offers an interesting answer to this question:

When by following the directions of a perfect Master, one understands it, he becomes the administrator of his will. Whatever he does, he does on behalf of the Lord. The Lord works through him. His will becomes one with the Lord’s will.⁵

When we follow the directions of the Master, we become the administrator of his will. We are acting on another level.

Baba Ji has quoted a saying, in paraphrase:

Don’t walk behind me, I cannot lead.
Don’t walk ahead of me, I cannot follow.
Walk beside me, I need a friend.

Great Master amplifies this thought:

Those who act in accordance with the Divine Law or Will are conscious co-workers with it and act according to its provisions.⁶

What a wonderful way to describe this state! Great Master is making it profoundly clear that when we follow the directions of the Master, we become the administrators of his will. We become one with his will, so the Lord works through us.

Then Great Master tells us that we become conscious co-workers. We become that friend Baba Ji talks about. We become a partner with him in the effort to return our soul to its rightful home. We have stepped out of the fray of the mind and stepped into his world. Each time we meditate, each time we do as we are taught, we are becoming one with the Lord’s will and we are becoming a conscious co-worker.

Now let us reinforce these concepts about the Master, the disciple and the Lord’s will with some passages from Spiritual Perspectives:

When the Father wants you to see the light and remove that veil of darkness from within you, he sends a man to our level.⁷

The concept that the the Father wants us to see the light is overwhelming. In the case of each and every disciple of a true Master, the Lord himself determines that he wants that disciple to see the light.

So why would the Lord put any impediment in our way? He wants us to see the light. He would not send a Master to initiate us if he was not sure that we could succeed. The answer must be that only we ourselves put impediments in our way.

Now Hazur continues this quote:

You have to meet somebody who has come from God to our level, and being at our level he has the privilege of still being one with the Father. God has given only him this privilege so that through him you can see the light.

This privilege is given to him so that we will be able to put our faith in him and practise accordingly, and then we will also experience the same light that is within every one of us.⁸

We have to meet someone who has come from God, someone we can relate to. A Saint is not a concept, but rather the embodiment of the teachings of all the Saints. From him we receive the instructions for achieving God realization first-hand. When we sit in front of the Master, we sit at the feet of all the Masters who have come before.

The Master is the example. When we see the Master’s devotion to seva, his discipleship, the way he treats people, the way he lives in the world, we have a model of what we need to become.

The Master is someone we can love and put our faith in. Hazur has just said that the Master is sent so that “we are able to put our faith in him.” Faith creates love and love creates faith. If we love him we will do what he asks. If we have faith in him we will do what he asks.

Hazur also slips in a very beautiful thought: “being at our level, he has the privilege of being with the Father.” The Master has this wonderful privilege of being in two places at once! How many times have we read or heard and read that that:

The Masters want to give us everything they have.
The Master wants to make the disciple like himself.

So we can extrapolate: We too – in this very life, in this very body – can be in two places at once. Great Master told us this very same thing: we too can become administrators of his will, when we live in his will.

Now we come full circle, back to our part to play in rising to the level of living in the Lord’s will. Hazur in the above quote says to “practise accordingly.” It is so wonderful to have a Master; it is so wonderful to have someone to love; it is so wonderful to hear the teachings directly from a God-realized being. We are so happy to sit at his feet. But what good does all this do if we do not will ourselves to make the effort to practise accordingly? This effort to live in the Lord’s will must manifiest itself in one simple way:

Live in the will of the Master.
Follow his instructions.
Live the life.
Do our meditation.

Hazur continues in the answer in Spiritual Perspectives:

But unless the Father sends somebody to our level and we are able to place our faith in him, and then practise and do the needful, for our part we cannot eliminate that veil of ignorance or darkness and see that light within.⁹

Finally, it is the miracle of grace that underlies everything. It begins with the Father sending someone in whom we can place our faith; only then can we can begin to exert our little will to practise and do what we need to do. Only then can we begin to make the effort to dispel the veil of darkness, and to live in the light within.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, 4^th ed., page 88
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #284
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, p.87
Ibid., p.83
Ibid., p.80
Ibid., p.74
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #20
Ibid.
Ibid.

A Clear Mission - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Clear Mission

Regarding the invaluable nature of human life, Kabir Sahib said:

This precious chance
You will not get again.¹

Various saints have used graphic allegorical images to portray how rare it is to be born a human being. The problem, however, is that souls are born into this world without any knowledge or awareness of the value of this birth, apart from the common belief that we are born with an intellect in order to appreciate and enjoy this life. People therefore use the intellect at every opportunity to experience the pleasure and enjoyments offered by the world.

The greatest good fortune that a human being can experience is to learn what this life is truly all about. The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, spoke about utilizing this precious opportunity:

Let me assure you that it is a most fortunate thing in any one's life when he has found a definite purpose and a definite end towards which to work. I am glad you have found that definite end and purpose. You shall not be disappointed.²

Great Master clarified this purpose:

Our soul is a drop from the Ocean of Bliss, Life and Energy, from which it separated milliards of ages ago. It is a stranger in this foreign land of agony and grief. There is nothing homogeneous to it here below in this world of earth, water, fire and air. Unless it returns to its Ancient Original Home, its sorrows and sufferings cannot and will not end. … No one has ever found nor will ever find Him outside.³

Because of our state of ignorance of this, however, we start our journey in life ill equipped to deal with both the unfathomed limitless sea of life as well as the return to our original home. And in reality we have no means of coming to know the answer to this crucial question of life without the intervention of someone who already knows it. The simple fact that we have been born with an intellect capable of understanding what such a person may have to say is a great boon, as we can never gain this knowledge by our own capability. This knowledge is grace, the pure grace of God.

Along with the blessing of being told of our real purpose, there is something we have to do – we have to turn knowledge into experience. And we start with the inherent confidence that we will be able to do what it takes. But again, ultimately we find that this experience also can be accomplished only through the grace of God. And yet we discover that even though everything, in truth, is his grace, somehow the requirement of our effort is profoundly associated with that grace. Baba Ji once suggested that we must feel that we are working in this process.

So despite the absolute necessity of the work we need to do in order to become aware of grace, our lesson of life is that we must turn to him 100 percent for help. The lesson of life is that we cannot do this work by our effort alone. In fact, in the end the lesson is: only he can do this work – or alternatively put, he will extract this work from us.

The problem is that our mighty foe, our ego, will not concede. So therefore we could say that it becomes the purpose of life to concede. And as always, the Master has a simple solution to get us to do our full share of the work and to concede our ego to him. He simply makes us fall in love with him. Then we are prepared to do anything for him, and we take shelter under his wing. His wings are strong and can lift us high into the sky – and far beyond into realms we can’t even imagine.

All saints say that it is he and he alone who will bring us face to face with the supreme One himself. At that point the purpose of our existence will be clear, and we will have accomplished our goal.

In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh describes this process of grace and effort:

We are so mixed up with this mesh of maya [illusion], so involved in worldly and sensual pleasures that we would never even think about the Father but for the pull, which he creates in every one of us. First we start with his grace that he starts pulling us, then he makes us worthy of his pull, he makes us receptive to his pull, and then we attend to that pull – we try to achieve our destination.⁴

This statement by Maharaj Ji makes it clear right up front that the entire process, whatever it may be, is instigated and carried through by the grace of the Father. He continues in the same letter:

With his grace we go back to him. So who is doing it? Isn’t he worshipping himself through us?… He … gave us the company of mystics and saints and made us more restless to become one with him – so restless that day and night we’re thinking about him… . So when we achieve our destination, who’s worshipping whom? Through our body he’s worshipping himself, because without his pull, without his grace, without his making us receptive, without his giving us the opportunities and facilities to meditate, nobody would do anything at all.⁵

When we meet a saint, a true Master, we are drawn to learn all we can. He gives us the desire to put what he teaches into practice, and he motivates us further by saying that we can thereby reach the same goal he has already attained. It is an old adage that you have to find a teacher who has experienced everything he is going to teach you, and then you have to make the effort to experience it for yourself. Otherwise it is all hypothetical. So the formula for life is: learn about Nam or Shabd through someone who is knowledgeable in these things and do our very best to put into practice fully what he asks us to do. That someone is our Master.

Great Master quotes Guru Arjan Dev on the nature of a Master:

A Master is a lover of God. In him there are boundless currents of true love. He is the physical form of that love. To love him is to find the most important medium for developing love for God, because he is a manifestation of God and his heart is full of love for Him. His face shines with the light and energy of God. By seeing him, love and longing for God increases. To love such a person is to love God himself, because by loving him we always remember our Lord.⁶

Guru Nanak identifies the key attributes of the one inner power within us all:

Nam, Light, Melody, Master, Love.

The Master in his true form is Light and Melody and Love. And he has taken up residence within our inner being. We can we turn to him for refuge at any time – and all the time – throughout the long spiritual journey as we attempt to put what he says into practice.

If we turn within under the guidance of our Master, our inner consciousness will discover that amazing Melody and Light which are actually the true form of the Master, whose composition is that of pure Love. If we rely on him and turn to him, he will become our pilot in this world and bring us in touch with that power of Nam. Nam will enable us to rise above the shackles and pain and suffering of this world. In this way, our voyage in this world becomes one of purpose, with a clear mission to be accomplished in this life. This is clarified beautifully by Dariya Sahib:

Practise devotion and cultivate true knowledge,
And blessed will be your life in the world.
You will never again fall
Into the dark well of the world.

The Divinity will come to your sight
And you will cross the ocean of the world.
You will go beyond the cycle of old age and death,
And will not enter the womb of the mother
to take any more births.

Be awakened at heart, says Dariya,
The Satguru has made this thoughtful utterance.
O men, and women, offer devotion
To the soothing holy dust of the Satguru’s lotus feet.⁷

Wondrous is the Creator who has designed this body.
The human form is the top of the whole creation.
You are the beautiful mirror, O brother;
The Lord reveals His Form within you.⁸

Despite all that has been said about our goal, however, if we carefully examine our actions we will have to admit that they still serve primarily short-term worldly goals – even after we are initiated. Saints remind us that nothing of this world accompanies us beyond death, but we are like someone who spends all his time on a business that is certain to fail. And every action we take exacts its own karmic price. Baba Ji has exhorted us to ask ourselves: What goal have we chosen for our lives? Do we keep it before us, and work toward it every moment?

The simple essence of our spiritual work can be found in the Bible, in Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Dariya Sahib also refers to this stillness, or steadiness, of mind:

Having made the mind steady,
one attains profound wisdom,
Which is called the manifestation of Nam,
the true Diamond. ⁹

The simran given to us at initiation is designed to still the mind. When the mind is totally preoccupied with the holy words, there is no room left for the world. Letting ourselves ‘go with the simran’ in meditation, repeating each Name attentively with confidence in the method and the Master, we experience the mind gravitating toward stillness. The relentless oscillations of our attention are calmed momentarily by this concentrating pull, and we can experience “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.”¹⁰ The sweetness of the inner Master, although as yet invisible to many of us, is always at work, luring our spiritual heart inward and upward. This is true love at work – the affection between the Source and the soul. And this is what it is all about: love, true love.

Right here and now, though, through habit – and despite our knowing the critical importance of simran and meditation – the mind remains largely focused on the outside world. So it may take a long time to actually put his instructions into practice properly, and to persuade ourselves to keep going in the face of apparent failure.

Therefore we need to be reminded continuously of the big picture and our true goal in life. When, with his grace, we learn to fully concentrate the mind internally, we eliminate awareness of the outer physical world, and the gateway to the upper realms of consciousness opens. We have embarked on a long journey inward that leads to reunion with God under the guidance of the Master. Even so, it is not we who will accomplish anything; what we will ‘accomplish’, perhaps, is the humility to realize we can do nothing of ourselves, and that in the end, it is all his grace. Everything is his grace – everything.

What the saints are telling us about the role of work is that “profound wisdom” is the unique fruit of attending to meditation. Absent that inner experience, the only direct experience we can have of Nam on this material plane in its pure divinity is in the physical form of a true Master. This is supported by a series of abbreviated quotes from Philosophy of the Masters, Volume V:

The Guru … is a power which is manifested in this body temporarily. … [He] is a Perfect Man … the fulfillment of spiritual evolution in human beings. … He is the life of the Universe. … truth personified or Reality in human form. … He is the top of creation. There is no one better than he. There is no one greater than he, here or hereafter. … He lives in this world radiating love … The blending of power with solicitude and humility, and of wisdom with love … is to be found in a Satguru only. … A perfect Guru … has the power to take others to the highest region.¹¹

Repeating our earlier quote, Maharaj Ji said:

With his grace we go back to him. So who is doing it? Isn’t he worshipping himself through us? … he gave us the company of mystics and saints and made us more restless to become one with him – so restless that day and night we’re thinking about him… . So when we achieve our destination who’s worshipping whom? Through our body he’s worshipping himself, because without his pull, without his grace, without his making us receptive, without his giving us opportunities and facilities to meditate, nobody would do anything at all.¹²

Maharaj Ji said, “Actually he worships himself through us – we're just puppets.”¹³ Many mystics have explained creation as simply the Lord’s worship of himself through us. This worship transforms a human being into the Lord himself – which is the crowning objective of life here in the manifestation of God’s love that we call the creation.

However, we are not quite yet his lovers; we don’t experience ourselves as puppets yet – as tools in his hands. But when our puppet-realization dawns, we will be wonder-struck at his game of duality. Great Master reveals in Philosophy of the Masters that we will eventually see that all is he, all is one:

A true lover is a real believer in the oneness of God and is a true discerner of the jewel of His non-duality.¹⁴

Rumi writes of the singularity of duality and unity:

His description is not contained within the intellect, for He is the Coincidence of Opposites. Wonderful Composition without composition! Wonderful freely acting Compelled One.¹⁵

Finally, Mirdad says:

Not a punishment is duality, but a process inherent in the nature of unity and necessary for the unfolding of its divinity.¹⁶

What a goal and spiritual process the Saints have outlined for us in their writings! And what a purpose behind it all!

V.K. Sethi, Kabir: The Weaver of God’s Name, 1^st ed., p.422
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #208.
Ibid., p.viii
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #504
Ibid.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, 7^th ed., pp.146–47
K.N. Upadhyaya, Dariya Sahib: Saint of Bihar, pp.159–60
Dariya Sahib, p.166
Dariya Sahib, p.75
Bible, Phillipians 4:7 (NKJV)
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 4^th ed., selections from pp.113–116; 74
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #504
Recorded February 26, 1982
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, 3^rd ed., p. 171.
The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, tr. William C. Chittick, Diwan 26832, p.50
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.154

Finding Peace and Happiness At Last - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Finding Peace and Happiness At Last

The pursuit of happiness is universal and valid. In one way or another, we are all seeking peace and happiness. We search for it in relationships, work, food, alcohol, movies, sex, shopping, money, and what not. But, although these things, if we achieve them, give us some type of happiness, it is only a second-class type of happiness, which doesn't last and usually ends in frustration or sorrow. That is because all things of the world are perishable; they have a beginning and an end.

Human beings have physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects with which they search for peace and happiness. Our physical, mental and emotional selves are only capable of connecting with these things of the world that change and die. Because they are perishable, the happiness they provide is perishable too. Only by developing our spiritual nature can we find a source of peace and happiness that is permanent. This fountainhead of all joy and peace is called by many names, such as God, Universal Consciousness, Tao, Shabd, Word, and so on. One way to make conscious contact with this infinite Source of peace and happiness is taught by the “shabad” masters. Their teachings are known as the Radha Soami path or Sant Mat (“teachings of the saints”). These masters teach a practical way of developing our spiritual nature so that we can achieve lasting peace and happiness in ourselves. These teachings of spirituality have experienced for themselves the truth of the method they teach. They offer their method and knowledge free of charge. Their technique rests on a foundation of four principles: following a vegetarian diet, not taking alcohol or mind-altering substances, living a moral and honest life, and giving time daily to the practice of medition. The first three principles support the fourth — meditation, which is the key to developing spirituality and finding lasting peace and happiness.

As we begin to put the teachings into practice, we start to develop our spiritual nature and come to understand more and more that our suffering is rooted in our distorted or unclear way of perceiving the world and ourselves. But when we achieve peace through the practice of meditation, our minds become settled and clear. We then begin to see life as it really is. We see events and people for what they are, rather than for what we have always projected on them. The resulting light-heartedness we experience enables us to go deeper into our meditation practice. The deeper we go, the more clearly we understand the true nature of the mind. We are able to watch how the mind creates infinite scenarios and then dissolves them again. We start to recognize that the source of our problems lies in the deceptive nature of our mental creations, and in our yearning for permanent or lasting solutions in an ever-changing world. As we continue with our meditation practice, our mind becomes still until eventually our soul is left unencumbered and we can contact directly the Source of all peace and happiness: the Tao, the Shabd, Buddha Nature, or God.

These teachings don't belong to any race, nation or community. Sant Mat cannot be considered a religion, because it does not have any of the elements common to religions, such as rituals, holy books, churches, holy images, clergy, and sacraments. Yet the fundamental concern of Sant Mat is the same as all the world religions–reuniting the soul with the ultimate Source of everlasting peace and happiness.

Butter, Rope, $20, and Happiness - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Butter, Rope, $20, and Happiness

Karma
The question is not: “Is what’s happening in the world today caused by karma?”

The question is: “What is not caused by karma?”

Satsangis often like to discuss karma, blaming karma for various events and occurrences. But do we really understand karma? No, we do not. Consider for a minute that this entire world (and beyond) is nothing but a massive, interconnected sphere of karma, choreographed into a perfectly integrated dance of events. The subtlety and enormity to carry this out in one continuous, fluid motion is beyond our comprehension. Every action brings forth a multitude of reactions that ripple out across people, places, and things like a stone thrown into a still pond. Is it important that we gain a better understanding of this all-pervasive and encompassing law of action and reaction? No, it’s not. Our simple understanding of the law of karma is sufficient to guide us through life. There is no need to get complicated. The following story illustrates all we need to understand.

A Pound of Butter
There was a farmer who sold a pound of butter to a baker. One day the baker decided to weigh the butter to see if he was getting the correct amount, and he discovered that he wasn’t. Angry about this, he took the farmer to court. The judge asked the farmer if he was using any measure to weight the butter. The farmer replied, “Your honour, I am a simple farmer. I don’t have a proper measure, but I do have a scale to weigh the butter.” The judge asked, “Then how do you weigh the butter?” The farmer replied;

“Your honour, long before the baker started buying butter from me, I had been buying every day a one-pound loaf of bread from him. Now, every day when the baker brings the bread, I put it on the scale and give him the same weight in butter. So you see, if anyone is to be blamed, it is the baker.”

The Moral of the Story: In life, you get what you give.

The popular expression used today is, “What goes around comes around.” So, what more do we really need to understand? Our actions cause reactions. “As you sow, so shall you reap,” as the Bible says. The accumulation of all our past actions form the events of our lives today. To avoid adding to our karma we only need to follow the four vows, thoughtfully provided by our master, and one simple rule: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Bible, Matthew 22:39)

It also helps if we can remember that in life, we get what we give. So let’s give out love and forgiveness with both hands.

Hazur Maharaj Ji has explained that when you keep the company of the mystics, the teachings become so simple to understand. You think: Why do I remain in delusion at all? Why didn’t I realize the simple truth before?

But to follow the path is not so simple. To follow a simple thing is very difficult. To live a simple life is very difficult; to live a complicated life is perhaps very easy. To accept simplicity in a simple way is very difficult for us – we always like to be told the truth in an intellectual way. If you tell an intellectual person something in a complicated way, then he tries to think about it; but if you tell him a simple truth in a simple way, he doesn’t accept it at all, doesn’t understand it at all.

The teachings become very simple to us when we go to the company of the mystics and saints. The Lord has brought us into their company because he wants us to understand the teachings. He is the doer, and he wants us to follow them, so the teachings become simple for us.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #152}

Ties That Bind

It seems for most people, life doesn’t always go the way we plan. From a very early age we experience our share of disappointments and failures. Things we pinned our hopes on just didn’t work out. Life has its ups and downs, wins and losses, yet we are expected to carry on and keep trying. However, sometimes these disappointments make a strong impression on our mind, consciously or subconsciously. These impressions can stop us from attempting something new without our even realizing it. Even when it comes to the path, sometimes our past efforts for improvement didn’t yield results, and these failures can influence our making renewed efforts. The master has said many times that we all have the ability to succeed on this path or else he would not have initiated us. While we can face up and recognize our conscious hesitations to take a positive step forward, what about our subconscious fears of failure that stop us from even trying? Perhaps we can learn a lesson from the following story.

The Elephant Rope
A gentleman was walking through an elephant camp when he noticed that the elephants weren’t being kept in cages, and all that was holding them back from escaping the camp was a small piece of rope tied to one of their legs.

As the man gazed upon the elephants, he was completely confused as to why these enormous elephants didn’t simply use their strength to break the rope and escape from the camp? They could easily have done so, but instead, they didn’t try at all. Curious, he asked a trainer standing nearby why the elephants were just standing there and never tried to escape?

The trainer replied: “When they were very young and much smaller we used the same size rope to tie them. At that age the rope was strong enough to hold them. As they grew up, they become conditioned to believe they cannot break away, that the rope can still hold them, so they never even try to break free.”

The Moral of the Story: Never let a failure from the past hold you back in the future.

The only reason that the elephants didn’t break free was that, over time, they adopted the belief that it just wasn’t possible. No matter how much the world tries to hold you back, or does not reward your efforts, always continue to believe that what you want to achieve is possible. Believing you can become successful is the most important step in actually achieving success. The master never loses faith in us. He only sees our potential. He ignores our failures and rewards our efforts. And with effort he himself steps in and helps. See what Soami Ji says about how the master helps the disciple:

I carry your burdens in my own heart
so that you may be free of worries…
I shall myself help you put in the effort,
I shall myself take you to your ultimate home.
Listen to what Radha Soami has to say:
All will be worked out…
_{Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 33, Shabd 16; p.331}

It is clear that our success is guaranteed!

What Are You Worth?

If someone asked you to put a value on yourself, would you put a high or low value? What criteria would you use to assess your value? Consider this: If you went out walking in nature and saw a rough, dirty stone, would you bother to pick it up? But what if you were a jeweller accustomed to working with diamonds in the rough? You would recognize immediately what type of stone it was and could see past the rough exterior into the core of the diamond. The difference here is that we have not developed the insight to see past the externals, but the jeweller has. The master is the jeweller who looks past our rough exterior and sees only our potential, our true value. In the eyes of the master-jeweller our value never diminishes. The next story explains in a very clear and simple way how we should always value ourselves.

You Still Have Value
A popular speaker started off a seminar by holding up a $20 bill. A crowd of 200 had gathered to hear him speak. He asked, ‘Who would like this $20 bill?’ 200 hands went up.

He said, ‘I am going to give this $20 to one of you, but first, let me do this.’ He crumpled up the bill.

He then asked, ‘Who still wants it?’ All 200 hands were still raised.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘What if I do this?’ Then he dropped the crumpled bill on the ground and stomped on it with his shoes. He picked it up and showed it to the crowd. The bill was now crumpled and dirty.

‘Now who wants it, he asked?’ All the hands still went up.

My friends, I have just shown you a very important lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20.

Many times in our lives, life crumples us and grinds us into the dirt. We make bad decisions or deal with poor circumstances. We feel worthless. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value. You are special – Don’t ever forget it!

The Moral of the story: Our worth never diminishes, no matter how rough and unpolished we are.

Our soul, the shabd within, is our true nature, our sparkling diamond of great value. Nothing we can do will ever change that. We can cover it with layers of ego, desires, less-than-exemplary behaviour, but such actions never change our core value. If the master values us, shouldn’t we value ourselves too?

Soami Ji says:

The Master and Shabd constantly look after your best interests – they are the protectors of your body and mind. Be grateful and keep them always in your heart, they will drive away all pain from your life.
_{Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 18, Shabd 8, p.185}

Are You Happy?

How many of us can say we are truly happy? If you can, then God bless you because it is no small task. Too often we seek happiness in the things of the world: That new car in the colour I like will make me feel better; that trip to the beach will help my spirits; remodelling the kitchen will certainly improve my life. In themselves, there is nothing wrong with any of these things but we often fool ourselves into thinking that if we make enough such changes, our life will be better, we will be more happy. It is easier to change our car than to change our perspective. We all know true happiness comes only from within, but how many of us apply our efforts inwardly to achieve this? Here’s a simple story about looking in the wrong place to find something that exists elsewhere.

Stop Chasing Happiness
An old man lived in the village. The whole village was tired of him because he was always grumpy and gloomy. He constantly complained and was always in a bad mood. The longer he lived, he only became worse. People did their best to avoid him because his bad mood was contagious and often created a feeling of unhappiness in others.

But one day, when he turned eighty, an incredible thing happened. Instantly everyone started hearing the rumour: “The old man is happy today, he isn’t complaining about anything! He even smiles and his face is fresh and relaxed!”

The whole village gathered around the man and asked him, “What happened to you?”

The old man replied, “Nothing special. For eighty years I’ve been chasing happiness but it proved useless. Today I decided to forget about trying to find happiness and just start enjoying life. That’s why I’m happy now.”

The Moral of the Story: Happiness cannot be found outside through things or situations. Happiness comes only with acceptance and contentment.

How did Hazur Maharaj Ji define contentment?

To be happy to go through our destiny; not to have any desire, and not to pray to the Lord for anything in the world. We are happy with whatever he gives us; we are contented to go through our life. We just see the drama of our life as a spectator in this creation. So we are contented with whatever he gives us. In other words, we live in the will of the Father – that is also contentment.
_{Spiritual Perspectives III, #291}

When you cannot change the events of life – you have to face them, you have to swim along with the waves – then why not accept them smilingly? Why howl and cry, why have a sorrowful face? There’s nothing much to weep about, because the events of our life are not going to change. If they are not going to change, then why worry? Take them as the will of the Lord.
_{Spiritual Perspectives III, #273}

Thoughts from Lockdown - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Thoughts from Lockdown

On my desk is a calendar with quotes from Rumi. The one for this month of April says, “When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray.” For several weeks now, each one of us has been challenged by the doings of this little thingamabob, alias coronavirus. It is turning our world upside down, or outside in....

As seekers on the path of Truth, we’re called upon to surrender our ‘selves’ to an ever greater degree than before to our satguru, to our guide to the Truth, to Love, to that which is real, eternal, blissful, and unchanging.

Many of us are familiar with the letters written by Baba Jaimal Singh to his disciple, Sawan Singh, in the late 1890s and early 1900s; we have read them or heard them quoted in satsang countless times. They represented an inspiring ideal, but our lives were carrying on in their usual pattern – so surely that degree of surrender was not expected of ordinary disciples like us? In letter after letter, Baba Jaimal Singh reminds his “obedient son” to please do his bhajan and simran, to understand that nothing belongs to him, that everything was given to him in the first place by the satguru, not to concern himself about whether he will have enough money or not for that particular year, that instead he should do more bhajan and simran. And he also says, “I am very pleased with you, my son, ... more precious to me are you, my son, than even the breath of my very own body.”

So, right now, all this education in being a true disciple resonates with us far more deeply. And this process of surrendering, of letting go, of trusting, is happening at different levels of our being, and it can be painful. More for some, less for others. And the degree of our attachment to this world is quite a revelation. All those little pleasures of life – visiting parents, children and grandchildren, a cup of tea with old friends, a walk in the mountains or on the beach, a trip to the garden centre to buy plants for one’s garden, or a visit to a museum or an art gallery, a game of golf – whatever it is that give us that special little treat, all this right now is out of bounds. But even more is asked of us. Some may be finding themselves in the heart-breaking situation of being unable to be at the bedside of a dying parent, or child, or husband, or wife, or any dearly loved one – or to visit a close relative in hospital, or being the one in hospital not allowed any visitors.... At every step, we are being confronted with our total helplessness.

One is reminded of a book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, ‘dictated’ by the chief editor of Elle magazine after a major stroke had left him completely paralyzed. He could only move one eyelid, but thanks to a speech therapist who taught him how to ‘spell’ by blinking, he was able to communicate from his personal ‘lockdown’. He says that the two most painful things he had to face were being unable to hug his children or to crack a joke with friends. And he had no spiritual practice and understanding to sustain him. So, in comparison, let us be truly grateful for what we have been given.

In letter 9, Baba Jaimal Singh writes: “‘Look upon the hour of pain as a blessing,’ as pain or pleasure comes from the Lord himself. Since it comes by His command, why should we treat it as bad? The Lord, ever present, watches over us, and if our good lies in suffering, He sends us suffering; if it lies in happiness He sends us happiness. Both, beloved son, are within His will. So now you are not to have any worry; the suffering will come to an end very soon.”

And a contemporary Moroccan Sufi, Faouzi Skali, reminds us to be always grateful:

O friend, stop trying to figure out
the why and the wherefore.
Put an end to the ceaseless spinning
of your being.
Right here, where you are,
Right now,
Everything is given to you
in the most perfect way.
Accept this gift;
Squeeze the juice of the present moment.

So we are being called upon to make that extra push to discard the cocoon and let the butterfly emerge. So let us learn to fly!

Time and Opportunity - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Time and Opportunity

In the 1971 musical play, Godspell¹, John the Baptist calls on people to follow the teachings of the Master Jesus. One of the songs sung in the musical is called “Day by Day,” which follows a prayer attributed to the 13th-century English bishop Saint Richard of Chichester, who wrote the following:

May we know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.²

Essentially, these are the words of a true devotee; a believer who longs to bridge the gap that lies between himself and the Lord; and give voice to his longing to bond truly and utterly through prayer, thereby meeting his Lord face to face. In the musical itself, however, there is the poetic addition of “three things I pray.”

Day by day
Day by day
O, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray –
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly
Day by day.

This modern addition highlights the basis of those things that we so desperately desire from our Master. Yet, how is it conceivable that we are considering these words of prayer – where we ask our Master to help us see him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly (closely) – when during the normal course of our lives, we find ourselves rushing blindly from one thing to another, always busy, minds cluttered and in overdrive and thoughts far from where they should be.

We eat, drink, sleep, and somewhere in between our twenty-four-hour day we make an attempt to sit in meditation and think of him. Mostly, we fail to sit for our two and a half hours and perhaps even sleep through this precious time.

Our feeble attempts leave us disheartened and we feel spiritually adrift.

However, suddenly life has changed and the world we know so well and are so familiar with has ground to a literal standstill. Someone remarked jokingly, that the world is now under repair! And so it seems.

Our “normal” has changed. Due to the Coronavirus we have to stay home and generally curtail so many of the worldly activities that usually take up our mental, emotional, and physical space. We cannot even go to Sunday satsang anymore.

Yet, surely this is now our time. A time to place our spiritual lives under repair, a time of Grace, to be still and silent and get to know our Master more intimately; and moreover, a time to develop our inner satsang and bridge that gap.

We always say that if we weren’t quite so busy we would devote more time to meditation, quiet down, socialize less, and generally focus that much-needed attention on the path. Well, for many of us here’s our opportunity, right here and now and perhaps even for some months to come. We have been given the time to repair our spiritual lives – to dig deep within our daily meditation. This discipline will sustain us when the whirlwind of daily life resumes. In this way, with this new found daily discipline, we can establish a strong routine that resets the foundation of our spiritual life.

It is said that a man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life. There is great truth in this comment, because life indeed is short enough as it is. Time flies and no sooner than one year has come to an end that a new year begins. We may make a New Year’s resolution to be a “better satsangi” – meditate more and attend satsang more regularly, yet as the days pass by and turn into months and then years, precious time has been wasted, and what have we accomplished? Very little, other than occasional pangs of guilt. Sometimes we may even excuse ourselves by saying, “I feel no inspiration or very little motivation.” Yet, as the American author H. Jackson Brown, Jr. reminds us: “Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin and inspiration will find you!”³

You see, the only cure for inactivity is action. Regret has its purpose but sitting around feeling guilty doesn't accomplish anything. The very first thought that ‘I haven't done what I need to do’ should be all the nudging and prodding we need to get us moving.

The more determined we are to act decisively on repairing our spiritual life, the more motivated we will become. And the more motivated we are, the more inspired we become – it’s a domino effect or chain reaction leading to positive outcome.

Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh says:

Practice makes a man perfect. Even though he starts with misgivings, in due course, perseverance and sincere effort enable him to develop a strong fervour and piety.⁴

These words bring to mind the story of a king who in ancient times had his men place a boulder on a roadway. He then hid in the bushes, and watched to see if anyone would move the boulder out of the way. Some of the king’s wealthiest merchants and courtiers passed by and simply walked around it. Many people even blamed the king for not keeping the roads clear, but none of them made any effort to try and remove the stone.

Then along came a peasant carrying a heavy load of vegetables. Upon approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to push the stone out of the way. It was extremely difficult but after much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded. When he went back to pick up his vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. To his amazement, the purse contained a large number of gold coins and a note from the king explaining that the gold was a reward for the person who had taken the trouble to remove the boulder from the road!

The moral of the story

Every obstacle that we come across in our spiritual life allows us an opportunity to improve our circumstances. While some may complain and justify why we cannot attain a positive spiritual outcome, there are others who take advantage of every opportunity life offers.

We now have a tremendous opportunity to strengthen our spiritual lives, a State of Grace one could even say, because how often do circumstances like this arrive?

Although the Coronavirus has dealt a heavy blow to many people in the world and still continues to do so, there are many positive scenarios that have arisen from it.

Families have become closer, life is quieter, and that infernal rush of time seems to have slowed down. We now even have time to “smell the roses,” re-evaluate our spiritual lives, give more precious time to simran, dhyan and bhajan, read the Sant Mat books again, and generally steep ourselves in our Master’s love and care.

What more can we ask for, and how grateful we should be for this rare opportunity, because in this precious moment in time we can strive to “see Him more clearly, love Him more dearly and feel Him more nearly, day by day.”

Godspell: The Anglo-Saxon term for ‘good news’ or ‘good story’; the musical play is based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew.
The full prayer, in English translation from the original Latin, says: Thanks be to you, our lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which you have given us, for all the pains and insults which you have borne for us. Most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother, may we know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day. Amen.
Life’s Little Instruction Book, Vol 2, Q 695
The Science of the Soul, “Spiritual Bouquet,” p. 102

How To Be a True Sevadar - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

How To Be a True Sevadar

Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted as saying: “The best way to find your self is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

On our spiritual journey we are trying to discover who we really are. And in Sant Mat, self-realization comes before God-realization. The obstacle to this is that we have identified ourselves with the physical body and with our personality, which have been shaped by our actions in previous lives, including our interactions with the world around us and with other people.

We are raised to be someone “important,” to have self-esteem and to have an individual character. In our meditation though, this obsession with the self becomes our biggest obstacle. This is why Gandhi says we have to “lose” ourselves by helping others, by being of service to our fellow human beings. Caring for others changes our perspective; it reduces our sense of self-importance and self-infatuation. This makes it easier in meditation to forget ourselves and focus on the Divine within.

Our soul, which is a drop of the celestial ocean, is slowly cleansed of countless layers of mind and maya so that its loving nature surfaces more and more. Our higher nature knows only how to give, how to help, how to serve without expecting anything in return. We start becoming those good human beings that the Master wants us to be. On one occasion, when sevadars were helping earthquake victims build a shelter or community hall, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) asked to film them. The sevadars politely declined, saying that they were doing this purely to help the people in need. This is the attitude we want to imbibe in our seva – that it is a privilege to help other human beings in the name of the Lord, without profiting in any way. Rendering such selfless service is an expression of love that pleases the Lord.

The primary service and expression of love we can render to the Master and to the Lord is our spiritual practice. We have to slowly disconnect from the physical plane, raise our consciousness, and connect it with the sound current or Word within. Neglecting our meditation and concentrating only on physical, mental, or monetary seva – though these are surely good deeds – will not liberate our soul and help us escape from the creation. We may reap rewards in our next life, meaning we might enjoy certain luxuries or positions or regions in higher realms. But we will remain prisoners trapped in the cycle of birth and death.

It is only our meditation that has the power to transform us, allowing our weaknesses to diminish so that we can be filled with more peace and gratitude. If we do not meditate, then we carry our dominant weaknesses into our seva, where we are still ruled by our emotional heart instead of our spiritual heart, at the eye centre. If someone tries to give us advice about our seva, we might feel insulted. No one may dare to criticize our seva, as we would definitely get angry. And if our seva is taken away or shared with someone else, we might feel outraged.

So meditation is the foundation on top of which all other sevas are built, and it brings out the best in us. As Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh explains:

To serve humanity is a good thing; you are cleaning the “vessel.” But our approach is that if you love the Lord, all good qualities come in you like cream upon milk. If you love the Lord, you become kind, loving, generous and helpful to all humanity. But if you eliminate the Lord and try to help the creation, then you must involve yourself and become attached to the creation, which does not help you love the Creator at all.¹

Hazur is motivating us to do our spiritual seva, as this will bring about the change we desire in ourselves and instil in us ‘sevadar qualities.’ Traditionally, the Masters have praised the humbling qualities of seva, which help us in our meditation. Lately, though, we hear that we need to do our meditation first and foremost so that we can gain the capacity to serve with the right attitude. Thus seva and meditation complement each other.

Sometimes we ask ourselves, Which seva should I do? The best answer is: The one given to you. If we want to serve the sangat, there is no harm asking for seva; but we should be absolutely open to take up whatever seva is given to us. The minute we start calculating, “What am I good at; where will I get the most recognition; I want the same seva as he or she has,” we are calculating our advantages and bringing the wrong attitude into seva. All personal considerations of what benefit we might receive from seva are inappropriate. Seva is about serving the Master and the Lord, without any personal interest or gain. Serving shoulder to shoulder with other sevadars, no matter who is rich or poor, who is educated or uneducated, who is strong or weak or what the color of their skin, brings a feeling of equality. We should be grateful for whatever seva we get. As the following story shows, contentment is not an exclusive privilege for the rich and successful. It may be the exact opposite.

On one of Maharaj Ji's visits to Indore, he was accompanied by Mr. Sam Busa, one of his representatives in South Africa. In the evening, Maharaj Ji asked Sam to visit the satsang area and see how things were arranged by the local satsang centre.

It was about ten o'clock at night when Sam, in the company of a sevadar, reached the satsang grounds. Most of the satsangis had retired for the night. Sam was taken around the entire complex and shown all the tents, shamianas and places where the sangat were sleeping. It was a cold February night, and because of the very large gathering of satsangis, enough covered sleeping space was not available. Many satsangis, both young and old, were therefore sleeping under the trees, covering themselves with only a thick cotton sheet.

In the morning, Maharaj Ji asked Sam if he had made a round of the satsang complex. Sam replied, “Yes Maharaj Ji, I did. But I felt very sad, for people were lying on the bare ground under the tents and even in the open under the trees. It was very cold, and they had only ordinary cotton sheets or mats with which to cover themselves. I was shocked; their standard of living is very poor.”

Maharaj Ji smiled softly and said, Yes, Sam, their standard of living is very poor, but their standard of contentment is very high.²

So let us not fall into the trap of thinking that the more we have or the higher our position in life, the happier we are. The same applies to seva. The happiness lies in serving, in helping and making other people happy. The Masters have always lived by this principle, as we can see from the following anecdote:

Just before the Great Master passed away … [he] called his sons and their families and said, I have settled you all independently and well. Now [that] you are all earning, I would like to advise all of you, “Never spread your hand to receive, always extend it to give.” His sons replied, “By your blessings, it will be as you desire.”³

This tradition carries on to the present day. The Masters and their families perform all types of seva to support the sangat. It will do us good to follow their example. It is an illusion of the mind that we will be happier by constantly getting and receiving from others. It is giving and being helpful to others that will make us happy. No one should think they have nothing to give. It is not so much the monetary things that count. Giving time, attention, support – just listening – can be very meaningful to people today. Therefore, it is possible to perform seva not only in the sangat but anywhere, as long as we are giving without expecting anything in return. The best way is to give in the name of the Master – meaning, we are doing it for him.

As seva is based on humility, we need to be aware of its opposite – pride and ego, which sometimes do creep into our mind during seva. There is no such thing as an important or unimportant seva. It is the love and devotion with which we serve that count, not the type of seva we do. We should keep a vigilant watch over our mind so that it does not get inflated with pride. Did not Sardar Bahadur give us the following advice?

The Lord loves the humble and the low.… Always speak gently[?], lovingly and selflessly. The higher the position you hold, the humbler your mind should be. A sweet word never costs anything, but wins the world.⁴

In seva there is no need to be bossy and commanding just because we think our seva position allows it. On the other hand, we should be thankful for the seva, as we are doing it for the Master himself. It is our meditation that gives us the strength to adapt and find the right attitude in seva. Instead of feeling separateness, seva makes us feel oneness with everybody.

And beware of vanity – that is, believing we are irreplaceable. We need the seva; seva does not need us. In previous years, it was possible to do the same seva or keep a certain position for decades. This, however, increased the risk of our identifying too much with a certain position rather than with doing the seva itself; this made it more difficult to let go when it was required. Currently, regular rotation in seva has been introduced. This provides more people with the opportunity to do seva. So whenever we accept and begin a seva, we should remember that there will be a time to let it go.

Let us look at a gurumukh’s attitude toward his seva. (A gurumukh is one who has completely surrendered to his Master.) When Maharaj Charan Singh was formally installed as the Master, he addressed the congregation by saying:

My love for Hazur Maharaj Ji, the commands of Sardar Bahadur Maharaj Ji, and the affection of the sangat compel me to carry out the wishes of Sardar Bahadur Ji to serve the sangat and the Dera. But when I look at myself and my shortcomings, I feel diffident and find myself unable to decide whether I am really fit for these onerous duties…. I request the sangat to look upon me as their younger brother and thus help me in serving them and this great institution. If the sangat looks upon me in any other light, it would mean that you do not wish to support and to cooperate with me, and that would be doing a great injustice to me.⁵

If we approach our seva with this attitude of humility, then perhaps it won’t be difficult to deal with criticism or to let go of a duty when we are asked to step down. Remaining faithful to our meditation practice will help us lose our own self-importance.

Often we get too preoccupied with the goal of our seva. We forget that it is the service itself rendered in the right spirit which is our objective. Naturally we will perform the seva task given to us to the best of our ability. Maharaj Charan Singh gives an example of a satsangi with only one leg who came to Dera with a desire to give:

He used to come from the hills of Himachal, and was very poor. Just to save money to give in seva, he used to walk from his village in the hills to the Dera, with the help of his crutches, covering a distance of over 75 miles. Once he was brought to me during money seva by Mr. Bolakani. He offered one rupee in seva. Looking to his poverty, I asked the sevadars not to accept it, but he burst into tears, and I had to accept his offering. How can you value this seva? Is it not worth much more than the hundreds and thousands that the rich give? The value of seva is not in how much one offers, but in the feelings and love with which it is offered.⁶

So before we start any seva, let us remember that we are serving our Master and want to give as selflessly as this satsangi. Serving in this spirit, without ego, will achieve harmonious and cooperative teamwork, which the Master cherishes far more than any particular outcome of seva.

The real sevadars are the Masters, who come to the physical plane to liberate their chosen souls. They have, through devotion to their Master and the Shabd, annihilated their ego and they serve the sangat in that true devoted spirit. They sacrifice their private life willingly to fulfil the wishes of their Master, sometimes even at the expense of their health, as depicted in the following letter from Maharaj Charan Singh to a friend:

Physically and mentally I am dead, though living. Maharaj Ji's mission has reached every corner of the world, but I have done a mess with myself and my health. I do not want to fail in my duty nor do I want to be short in the expectations of my Beloved Master. I have given to the people all I have. What I could not give, I just did not have. All that I am doing is just with a sense of duty and out of love for my Beloved. If anyone cares to follow my daily routine – minute by minute – then only one can know what I am going through.⁷

Maharaj Ji was telling his friend that he was travelling nonstop for nearly nine months, never sleeping under the same roof for longer than a week. He was totally exhausted but happy to serve his Master, giving all that he had. We can see that the Masters, even at the expense of their health, are willing to fulfil the purpose of their mission. Maharaj Ji’s written lines have another meaning though. The saints have conquered death and have risen above the physical and mental realms. For them the body is a means of achieving their spiritual mission. When their bodies are no longer able to serve this purpose, they leave them like someone taking off their coat. We know that is how Maharaj Ji left this world.

In many of his satsangs, Baba Ji has said that the soul is the true devotee and the Shabd is the true Guru. So let’s try to emulate our Master by merging our soul in the sound current within, so that we too become true sevadars.

Seva is always done with love and humility. Humility is a part of love. If there is love, automatically there will be humility. There can be no love without humility. Love makes you humble, love makes you meek. Love means that you want to do what pleases the other person rather than what pleases yourself. That is love, and that is humility before another person. Seva is done to please another person. Seva is not done so much to please yourself. When you please another person, you'll be happy to do seva. There’s more happiness in giving than in taking. More happiness in donating than in accepting. More happiness in helping somebody than in getting help from anybody. The pleasure that you get by helping somebody, making somebody happy in life – nothing can compare with that pleasure. So, seva is always done with love, otherwise it is not seva. Seva is not mechanically working with our hands. Seva is our intention to please another person. Automatically there will be humility in it. Humility is part of love. Love is part of seva.⁸

Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, #271
Treasure Beyond Measure, p. 116
Treasure Beyond Measure, p. 38
Maharaj Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul (10^th ed. 1996.); “Spiritual Bouquet”, #60
Shanti Sethi, Treasure Beyond Measure, pp.63-64
Ibid., p.244
Ibid., pp.46-47
The Maharaj Jagat Singh Medical Relief Society, Labour of Love, p.100

Look into the Darkness - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Look into the Darkness

In 1948, when Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji became the master, many people were surprised by his way of giving satsang. For forty-five years the Great Master had given very long satsangs, full of stories and anecdotes. Now, Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji gave very short, very precise satsangs, getting right to the point. No frills. No extraneous matter. In his diary, Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, the secretary to the masters, comments again and again on how Maharaj Jagat Singh’s satsangs focus on only the absolutely most essential teachings.

So we might think, if we were going to boil down all of Sant Mat to only the essential teachings, what would that be? We might say that there is one power that permeates everything, and that the One is Love. Or we might say that our own true self is the same as that One who is Love. Or we might say that Shabd is the power that creates and sustains the whole creation, and that we can follow that Shabd back to its source. Rai Sahib Munshi Ram writes:

He [Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji] is precise, to the point, and does not tell stories or narrate anecdotes. Emphasizing only meditation, he says: “Keep your attention between the eyes and do simran. While doing simran, do not try to listen to the Sound. As far as possible, do not let your attention wander. If you cannot see the light, keep looking into the darkness. Even looking into the darkness with the seeing faculty of the soul, the nirat, is difficult. As the mind becomes focused through simran, the nirat stops wavering.… During simran we should not attempt to listen to the Shabd. If it comes of its own, well and good, but we must not abandon simran and run after it. The attention must not stray away from the point between the eyes. Even if you see beautiful sights inside, continue with simran and keep the nirat fixed.”¹

So it’s about action. What Maharaj Jagat Singh focuses on is just this: what do we need to do? He gives instructions for meditation. Why? Because if we actually follow these instructions we will find out for ourselves whether or not there is one power, one Lord, and whether He is Love. We will find out for ourselves whether or not our own essence is the same at that Lord. We will find out whether or not Shabd is the power the brought the creation into being.

Otherwise, it’s just theory. And theory, without personal realization, is just dogma.

In this quote from Maharaj Jagat Singh’s satsang, there are three themes that particularly stand out about meditation:

First is about attention. He lays great emphasis on where we keep our attention. We have to hold the attention at the eye center.
Second, he says that for those of us who do not yet see light, we have to keep looking into the darkness at the eye center. Just placing the attention at the eye center won’t keep it there. We have to actively use the seeing aspect of attention to look into the darkness.
And third, he tells us that just looking into the darkness is difficult. And it is a little surprising, because it seems like such a simple instruction, why should it be so difficult?

Interestingly, these three same themes come up again and again in the satsangs in the first year after Maharaj Jagat Singh becoming the master. Perhaps this was the message that the sangat particularly needed to hear at that time. But it is probably relevant for some of us now too.

So, first: Attention – Attention is key
Maharaj Jagat Singh tells us: “Keep your attention between the two eyes.” And he repeats: “The attention must not stray away from the point between the eyes.”

We are so used to our attention going instantaneously and automatically to whatever the mind directs it to. Eyes see something – attention goes right to it. Ears hear something – attention goes right to it. Mind generates some stream of memories, worries, old grudges, whatever – attention goes right along for the ride. Rai Sahib Munshi Ram quotes from one of the satsangs in 1948:

The mind is weak. It cannot move without the help of surat [or attention] and cannot activate any of the senses unless the attention is focused on the sense it wants to activate.²

Mind is weak? Of course, this is exactly what Baba Ji keeps telling us also. He tells us that the mind has no power of its own; he says we give it power. How do we give it power? Attention. The idea that the mind has no power – that it can’t even activate any of the senses unless we agree and put the attention there – this is revolutionary! In the above quote it says that mind can’t even move at all without the help of the attention!

So Maharaj Jagat Singh is telling us that, in meditation, remaining aware of where we are keeping our attention is key. Regardless of what distractions the mind cooks up, our job is to hold our attention at the eye center.

We have to face the fact that mind is not going to stop generating thoughts, images, memories, fears, and all sorts of other stuff. Saints say that our minds carry the impressions from millions of lifetimes – in so many forms. It’s not just this one lifetime, but millions of lifetimes have left impressions. With all those impressions stored in there, obviously mind is going to go on and on generating images, thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires, feelings. That’s going to happen. This is its nature and to think it is going to stop is kidding ourselves.

Do we have to give our attention to all that activity in the mind? Can we actually just detach our attention, just put it somewhere else? And if we don’t give our attention to this activity of the mind, is it true that mind really helpless, unable to do anything, unable even to move?

But, we have to ask: If our attention is such a powerful thing, then why does our attention seem like a helpless victim, dragged here and there, wherever the mind wants to take it? Saints tell us that is because it is scattered. It is diffuse, all spread out.

The masters repeated assure us that simran is the easiest and quickest way to collect the attention at the point between the eyes, at the eye centre. And, they assure us, once our attention is collected to one point, it will begin to know its own power.

But if simran is the quickest and easiest way to collect the attention at the eye center--- we might wonder why, if we’ve been practicing for many, many years, why is the attention still scattered? Rai Sahib Munshi Ram paraphrased another of Maharaj Jagat Singh’s satsangs:

While explaining [the shabd] Maharaj Ji said that only a few people really know how to do simran, so that even though many practice it, their inner eye is not opened. If the mind does not go out during simran and the attention remains fixed between the eyes, there is no reason why the mind and the soul should not gradually collect there.³

He is saying that if we practice simran but don’t also keep the attention fixed at the point between the eyes, then we might practice for many years without the inner eye opening.

Look into the Darkness
So that brings us to the second theme – that we need to keep looking into the darkness at the eye center. As Maharaj Jagat Singh said, “If you cannot see the light, keep looking into the darkness.”

Saints tells us that there are two aspects to our attention; the hearing aspect of attention, or surat, and the seeing aspect of attention, or nirat. If we want to hold the attention at the eye center, we have to occupy both the hearing aspect of attention and the seeing aspect of attention – the surat and the nirat.

The surat is occupied with repeating simran – we hear the words repeating. But we also have to occupy the seeing aspect of attention, the nirat, by keeping on looking and looking and looking into the darkness at the eye center. As Maharaj Jagat Singh said, “Keep the nirat fixed.” Fixed means focusing our attention and looking into the darkness. Rai Sahib Munshi Ram wrote:

Maharaj Ji gives satsang like a professor; he is to the point, stresses devotion to the Guru and Nam, and asks satsangis to concentrate between the eyes during simran and while doing simran to not try to visualize the Satguru’s form. He advises them to look into the darkness, saying the Five Names, concentrating on any light that might appear.⁴

Of course, Baba Ji gives the same advice: He says the dhyan of the Satguru’s form will come naturally once a certain level of focus is there; and it will come naturally as a result of an intensity of love. But we should not make an effort to visualize his form, or that very effort will distract us from the focus on simran. As Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji says: If we are not seeing the light, we just have to “look into the darkness, saying the Five Names, concentrating on any light that might appear.”

In another of his satsangs, Maharaj Jagat Singh says that the nirat is asleep and needs to be awakened:

Until the light appears within one can assume that the nirat has not awakened. Once the nirat is awakened, the mind becomes fixed on the light. This is dhyan of the Satguru. The path to the higher regions will be closed until the nirat awakens.⁵

There’s so much depth in this short quote:

He says: Once we see the light within, then the nirat will easily stay fixed, gazing at the light.
Then he also says: Seeing the light within is dhyan of the Satguru. The Satguru is a power within. That light is Satguru. As Baba Ji stresses so often, Satguru does not mean a person. Satguru is a power, an inner reality.
Then Maharaj Jagat Singh says: the path to the higher regions will be closed until nirat awakens, that is, until that eye opens, until we see something other than darkness.

At one of the Hostel 6 sessions last year, someone asked Baba Ji, “It’s obvious that the door is wide open. Why don’t we go through?” And his answer was something like this: “Because your eyes are closed.” Great Master points to this same truth when he says:

There are two currents of the soul: Surat, which knows and hears, and Nirat, which sees. The Nirat goes ahead of the Surat in the spiritual journey, just as a person on a journey first looks at the path ahead and then follows it.⁶

Rai Sahib Munshi Ram paraphrased another satsang, saying:

Surat is blind, and unless led by nirat, it cannot make any headway. Nirat is the seeing faculty of the soul. Devotees who do not use their nirat remain blind inside.

Like the flame of a lamp in the breeze, nirat is always flickering. How can the soul go inside before it becomes steady? The object of meditation is to hold the nirat at the eye center.⁷

But we might wonder why – if nirat isn’t even awake yet as long as we don’t see light – then why is it so important to look into the darkness at the eye center? Maybe there’s a clue to why it is so important when he said: “Devotees who do not use their nirat remain blind inside.” Maybe looking steadily into the darkness is ‘using’ the nirat? Even though it is not awakened yet, not seeing any light, but maybe we are using it, exercising it?

This seems to be confirmed by Hazur, Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, when he writes in Light on Sant Mat: “Make your nirat strong by fixing your attention between the two eyebrows, all the while repeating the five Holy Names with the attention of the mind.”⁸ Interestingly, the context is a letter to a woman who is hearing the sound of the bells, but he tells her, “Make your nirat strong by fixing your attention between the two eyebrows.”

Maybe, possibly, also there’s a clue to why it is so important in something that Baba Jaimal Singh Ji wrote to the Great Master in Spiritual Letters. In this letter Baba Jaimal Singh Ji is giving Great Master (before he became the master) a message he should pass along to all the satsangis who live in his area. He writes that they should: “…slowly and gently fix the inner hearing and seeing faculties, surat and nirat” and then he says “– the inclination of the inner mind towards love is called nirat…”⁹

We have often heard nirat defined as the inner faculty of seeing, but here Baba Jaimal Singh Ji says that nirat is “the inclination of the inner mind towards love.” Probably we have never thought of it that way.

Hazur always used to repeat over and over: Do your meditation with love and devotion. And as he often explained, the love and devotion he was talking about did not mean the fleeting, temporary swell of emotions that we generally associate with ‘love.’ The love he referred to is something much deeper, something permanent and unchanging. How do we do this daily practice of meditation with that love? Well, possibly, if nirat is somehow intimately connected to love – if nirat is, an inner faculty of seeing, but it is also “the inclination of the inner mind towards love” – then maybe looking into the darkness really is a way of doing our meditation with love and devotion.

Looking into the darkness is difficult
Then that brings us to the third theme in Maharaj Jagat Singh’s satsang: that looking into the darkness is difficult. Rai Sahib quotes from another of the satsangs in 1948:

It is easy to hear the Sound, but it is difficult to fix the nirat. Success is achieved when the nirat becomes fixed. This happens after many years of effort and honest and virtuous living. …When doing simran, rather than trying to listen to the sound, devotees should concentrate on fixing their attention between the eyes. ¹⁰

He says it’s easy to hear the Sound, but difficult to fix the nirat. Great Master lays emphasis on the same point in Spiritual Gems when he writes: “If the nirat is not developed, the veil will not be rent, even if you go on listening to the Sound all your life.” ¹¹

So looking into the darkness is important, but as Maharaj Jagat Singh reminds us, this simple looking is difficult. He said, “Even looking into the darkness with the seeing faculty of the soul, the nirat, is difficult.”¹² We might wonder why this seemingly simple task should it be so difficult.

Maybe we don’t like darkness?
Maybe it’s like looking at nothing – and we don’t like to look at nothing?
Is it fear of the dark? Or fear of the unknown?
Are we afraid of the unknown in that darkness, so we run away from the unknown, circling back to the familiar – taking comfort in the very familiar chattering of the mind?

Well, whatever the reason that it is difficult to hold the attention looking into the darkness at the eye center, the more important question is how do we change ‘difficult’ into ‘easy’?

Baba Ji has given two answers about how we can make ‘difficult’ melt away into ‘easy.’ First he tells us that it is our frame of mind that makes it difficult or easy. If we remember that our only job is the effort, and the results are really irrelevant to us – then when we try to hold the attention at the eye center, the question is not – what am I seeing? – but only – am I looking? If it’s only a matter of ‘am I looking into the darkness?’ Then how can it possibly not become easy?

Baba Ji has also given us another way to turn ‘difficult’ into ‘easy’. We only have to remember that we are doing nothing…. He reminds us to be glad we don’t have to crawl on our knees to some holy altar. All we have to do is nothing.

Well, doing nothing ought to be easy. But, probably the day we actually are able to do nothing, that day we will also be nothing – and it’s game over. Once we can be nothing, then only the Lord is.

Well, we might not be at that place just yet. So we’ll have to take Maharaj Jagat Singh’s solution. He assures us that simran – just continuing simran -- will eventually make the nirat strong and steady. He said: “As the mind becomes focused through simran, the nirat stops wavering.” ¹³

So, as always in Sant Mat, simran is the key. If our nirat is like a flimsy flame that is blown right and left by every breeze that comes along, we just have to keep on looking unflinchingly into the darkness…all the while doing simran. And through simran the nirat will stop wavering, and we’ll step through that wide open door.

Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, RSSB, ed. 2018, vol. 3, pp. 6-7
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p. 59
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p. 26
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p.18
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p.48
Spiritual Gems, Letter 198
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p. 59
Light on Sant Mat, ed. 1985 letter 41
Spiritual Letters, ed. 1998, p. 153, letter 100
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p.48
Spiritual Gems, Letter 9
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p. 6
With the Three Masters, vol. 3, p. 6

Doubt - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Doubt

It may seem strange to talk about the topic of doubt in a satsang; we generally come to satsang to have our faith refreshed and renewed. However, doubt can be a productive phase on the spiritual path. Baba Ji encourages us to keep our thoughts positive, but sometimes we have doubts, and we worry that entertaining doubts is the opposite of positive thinking. But we can be a very positive person and still have doubts; we can hold doubt and positive thinking in our minds at the same time.

In fact, the three foundations of Zen Buddhism are Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Determination. They are viewed as three legs of a stool because all three are needed to keep our balance while leading a spiritual life. In this framework, doubt is not the opposite of faith but rather a complement to faith. The American writer Anne Lamott said:

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. ¹

This quote illustrates that our problem is often not doubt, but certainty. In the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few.”² Periods of doubt can help bring us back to our beginner’s mind so that we re-examine our understanding of the teachings of Sant Mat and, in doing so, face our misconceptions, illusions and superstitions.

Doubt is a natural part of the spiritual path. We don’t need to suppress it, and we have never been asked to have blind faith in the teachings. In the book A Wake Up Call, the authors say, “Sant Mat is a spiritual path and has no need to lean on the crutches of blind faith.”³ However, when the winds of doubt blow through our lives, we do need to hold our seat in meditation – to perservere. That way doubt is bookended by faith and determination. What we may find, if we continue to do our meditation, is that once a period of doubt has passed, our faith is deepened and our determination is strengthened.

The mystics write about doubt because they know that it something that we experience when we attempt to following the spiritual path. When Rumi realized that his beloved Friend, Shams-e Tabrizi, was gone and would never return, he wrote:

I am that black night, angry at the moon.
I am that naked beggar, angry at the king.
The grace of that Peerless One
was calling me home,
but I made an excuse, angry at the path!⁴

There may be times when we feel “angry at the path,” but it is important to remember that after this period in his life, Rumi went on to write some of the most profound and beautiful spiritual poetry every written. In Sar Bachan Poetry, Soami Ji sometimes wrote from the perspective of the disciple talking to the master or the soul talking to the Lord. In one poem, he said:

Day and night I call out to you –
Why do you not listen to my cries?
I just cannot understand the working of your will….
You do not protect and save me,
even though I’ve always lived in your company.⁵

In another poem, he wrote:

... though I try
I cannot follow the path leading to (my Beloved).
Dark and fearsome is the uphill path
and no one is there to hear my cries of pain.
I do not know what else to do;
I feel demoralized,
for I cannot win my Beloved’s heart.…
I cannot even practice the path of Surat Shabd
that has been granted to me.⁶

In these poems, Soami Ji shows deep compassion for the disciple who is mired in doubt, perplexed about the master’s will, feels that it is impossible to follow the path, and demoralized by failure in the practice of meditation.

One of the benefits of doubt is that it helps us to let go of the burden of being attached to ideas and concepts that we actually know nothing about. And Baba Ji has said that we don’t know anything about Sant Mat! Our doubts are often about our misconceptions and superstitions rather than the teachings themselves. Isn’t it a good thing if we doubt our misconceptions and superstitions? Doesn’t this help to deepen our understanding of the true nature of Sant Mat? In the book From self to Shabd, the author wrote, “Beware of beliefs that can turn a true spiritual path into a religion of superstition.”⁷

Joseph Goldstein, a well-known American Buddhist teacher, spent seven years in India during the late 1960s and early 1970s studying Theravada Buddhism. A key figure in these teachings was Sariputra, the chief disciple of the Buddha. He was considered to be a fully enlightened being who would not reincarnate again in this world. When Goldstein returned to the United States after his time in India, he was teaching at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He saw a poster on the wall about a talk to be given by a Tibetan Rinpoche who was known to be a great and enlightened being, and who was also apparently, according to the poster, the incarnation of Sariputra. Goldstein wrote that when he saw this, his mind just stopped. He wondered, How could this be? According to the teachings he had dedicated himself to, Sariputra was definitely not reincarnating. In the book One Dharma, he wrote:

As I struggled with this dilemma, I had a certain epiphany. I realized that I had no idea whether or not Rinpoche was the incarnation of Sariputra, and since I didn’t know I really had no need to have an opinion about it. It was an amazing and immediate relief, and I understood the tremendous burden of being attached to opinions and views that were not part of my direct experience.⁸

In the book When Things Fall Apart, the author Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun, explains what can happen when the conceptual framework we have about our spiritual path falls apart. She calls this experience – this phase of doubt – “being squeezed.”

We continually find ourselves in that squeeze. It’s a place where we look for alternatives to just being there. It’s an uncomfortable, embarrassing place, and it’s often the place where people like ourselves give up. We liked meditation and the teachings when we felt inspired and in touch with ourselves and on the right path. But what about when it begins to feel like a burden, like we made the wrong choice and it’s not living up to our expectations at all? The people we are meeting are not all that sane. In fact, they seem pretty confused. The way the place is run is not up to par. Even the teacher is questionable.⁹

How often has Baba Ji asked us: How do you know I’m not a fraud? Chödrön goes on to say that this is the very place where we learn the most:

This place of the squeeze is the very point in our meditation and in our lives where we can really learn something....This is the place where we begin to learn the meaning behind the concepts and the words.¹⁰

Isn’t this what Baba Ji has been trying to get us to do? To learn the meaning “behind the concepts and the words”? To go beyond our concepts to a deeper experience of the spiritual path?

Kabir talks about the same thing through poetry and metaphorical language. In this poem he seems to be having a conversation with himself, referring to himself as a “wanting creature.” And this is what we are: wanting creatures.

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?

In other words, what is your idea of becoming enlightened? We seem to think that enlightenment is over there, across the river, and we want to get across the river in order to experience it. But he goes on to say:

There are no travelers on the river-road,
and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank,
or resting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!
And there is no body and no mind! …
Just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.¹¹

In this poem, we see the three foundations of Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Determination. Great Faith is wanting to cross the river, wanting to become enlightened. If we have embarked upon a spiritual path, we have this faith. Great Doubt is realizing that there is no river, that we have to let go of our conceptual framework in which we believe that enlightenment is across the river, somewhere external and separate. Great Determination is standing firm in what we truly are. And what are we? Baba Ji says that Nam is our identity.

Ultimately we are beings of love. This whole path that we are trying to travel is all about the heart and the spirit, our attention turning inward toward love, opening up to love. But for some reason, we have great difficulty with this; it is hard for us to turn toward love even though, as Baba Ji says, love is the core of our being.

The experience of doubt can help us to “throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,” as Kabir says – to let go of what we think we know and to turn our attention toward our true self, our true home. As Soami Ji said, “Let us turn homewards, friend – why linger in this alien land?” ¹²

The American writer, Annie Dillard, wrote:

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.¹³

And Baba Ji has said, “The only thing that matters is going within. All the rest is a story.”¹⁴

Baba Ji seems to enjoy his role as Confuser in Chief. He carries it out with a lot of humour, but what he is doing is very important: he is chipping away at a conceptual framework that is holding us back – our misconceptions, illusions, and superstitions. He is putting the squeeze on us, as Pema Chödrön might say, and when this framework falls apart, he is there with open arms to hold us in a vast ocean of love.

In the poem “Surrender,” Rumi wrote:

The Beloved won’t let you stay
loyal or disloyal,
in acceptance or in denial.
Wherever you put your heart,
He will pull it disapprovingly,
so don’t put yourself anywhere, O heart –
and don’t insist …
O brother, don’t you know
who you’re dealing with?¹⁵

Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, p. 257
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice, Prologue, p.2
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, From self to Shabd, p.102, p. 9
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Jalal al-Din Rumi, p.279
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.321
Ibid., p.309
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, From self to Shabd, p.102
Joseph Goldstein, One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism, HarperOne, 2003, pp.136-37
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart – Heart Advice for Difficult Times, pp.116-17
Ibid., p.117
Robert Bly, ed., The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir, Poem #14
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.219
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, p.62
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Essential Sant Mat, p.9
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Jalal al-Din Rumi, p.219

Illusion - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Illusion

Mystics talk at length about the illusory nature of this world and our existence in it. They use a variety of graphic words to describe it: dream, falsehood, shadow, sham, illusion, unreality, mirage. What do they mean when they describe our life and our world this way? Isn’t my body real? My house? My wife and children? Mountains and oceans?

Let’s look at the many ways in which the mystics tell us that everything we see, touch, and value so highly is, from their perspective, illusory.

The world is illusory because it’s impermanent

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh:

Q: We are told that this whole business is a dream. Would you comment on that; what you mean by that?

Master: Well, it is a dream in the sense that there’s no reality in this body – and so the dream consists of 50, 60, 70, 80 years. Where are our forefathers, where are they now? Haven’t they quit the stage? It was just like a dream; they came and went away. They don’t exist anymore; they don’t exist permanently. Anything which doesn’t exist permanently is just like a dream.¹

That was always Hazur’s primary way of defining what made this body and our existence like a dream – that it was impermanent. He would say that, in contrast, reality or truth was permanent and unchanging. So this world and our life in it were obviously not real, because they’re so short-lived and changeable.

He continued:

Our past relationships, the role which we played in the last life as a husband, as a wife, as a child, as a friend, isn’t that a dream to us? Where are they? We’ve forgotten everyone. It was just like a dream. So this will also become a dream after we leave this body. There’s no reality. Saints say there’s no reality to that which you are attaching so much importance. A real thing always exists – it doesn’t perish, it is stable.

Then he said: “We’re all in a dreamland. We have to be awakened from this dream and find the reality, and when you are with the reality then you will know that you have got to get up from this dream – not before that.”

What does he mean by “when you are with the reality”? Perhaps he means in the Master’s presence, where the influence of the Guru changes our perception enough so that we can see this world more clearly? Or when we are able, in our meditation, to bring the attention higher and begin to escape from the world of duality? He says we only really understand that we have to awaken from the dream when we’ve at least temporarily escaped its influence.

Finally he concluded: “Mystics want to explain to us not to give so much importance to all these things because they’re not going to last. They’re going to leave you.”

The ego’s belief in its separate existence is an illusion
Another key source of the illusion we live in is the essential error in how we see ourselves. At the deepest level, each of us thinks, “I am me and I am separate from everyone else and separate from God.” That is the ego speaking, a part of our mind that is responsible for creating an imaginary barrier between our soul and the Father.

Guru Nanak Sahib describes, from a very high perspective – one that is outside time and above this physical plane – how we cycle through life after life, caught in the delusion created by the ego. That delusion or illusion, though not real, still has the effect of binding us to this world. He said:

Each one from ego takes his birth,
And clad in ego dies;
And comes and goes,
Gives and receives, and earns and spends,
And deals in lies or speaks the truth,
In ego all the while. ²

“In ego all the while”: Everything, everything we do, he says, is tainted by ego, that sense of being a separate self. But despite this powerful illusion and its repercussions, “we are in fact not separate from the Lord and never have been. But our mind and ego convince us that we are, and we have to escape that illusion before we can surrender our being into His.” ³

Maya draws its power from our unfulfilled longing for the Lord

For reasons we cannot understand, the Lord sent us out from his kingdom ages ago, into this strange existence we find ourselves in. We were given bodies and minds, and the ego developed. But underneath all those coverings, we have always carried deeply embedded memories of him. The mystics tell us that every desire, every need we feel is an expression of our native hunger for God, that yearning to end our separation and return to him. But our mind corrupts that pure longing and tries to satisfy it with impermanent and petty things.

Hazrat Inayat Khan says:

[A man’s] mind, his reason, always puts forward some other cause for his unhappiness rather than the real one, in order that he may be kept in illusion all his life, in order that all his life he should run after things which are not the real aim of his soul….And if the whole universe were given to him, his heart would not be satisfied, because the demand of his soul still has not been understood.³

And according to Idries Shah:

People, Rumi teaches, do not really know what they want. Their inner yearning is expressed in a hundred desires, which they think are their needs. These are not their real desires, as experience shows. For when these objectives are attained, the yearning is not stilled.⁴

So maya, in a sense, perverts our natural yearning for the Lord into lust, greed, gluttony and whatnot. The desires of the mind are all based on a false premise – that if we satisfy them, the craving will stop. But of course the mind is never satisfied, because it doesn’t get what it really misses. And the desires are almost irresistible. A disciple needs to beware of them his or her whole life.

The body is illusory
Let’s look next at another seemingly solid pillar of reality – our body. The mystics see it as utterly ephemeral, nothing but a dream, and they encourage us to realize how short-lived it is and to prepare for its end.

The mystic-poet Eknath says, “Your body is the shadow of a cloud, the water of a mirage – passing, unreal.”⁵ And then:

The body goes in a moment,
but we don’t believe it.
A ripple on water – this is the world.
A mirage of water is not water,
the shadow of a cloud gives no rain.
A statue of salt dissolves in water –
this body is dying while you look at it,
says Eknath.⁶

And yet we don’t believe we’re going to die. There’s a story about a minister who began a sermon on death by saying, “Everyone in this congregation is going to die.” As he scanned the audience to see the effect of his words, he noticed a man in the front with a big smile on his face. He asked the man, “Why are you smiling, given what I’ve just said?” The man replied, “I’m not from this congregation!”

We use any excuse to fool ourselves!

Saints see the entire arc of a body’s existence, from embryo to corpse, as the briefest flash. They also see the whole range of our past incarnations, all the many bodies we have inhabited. So how can they take this particular body seriously? They warn us to look higher and not get caught in the body’s dream.

Although the body is a dream, it is a magical gift
Although the physical body can indeed be a trap and is an illusion, it also carries within it the secrets and power of the Shabd, the divine energy that permeates the universe, which transcends all illusion and is the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality. In a way, the body is a sort of Trojan horse. Kal, the negative power, created this creation so cunningly that every aspect of a human being is surrounded by maya, so the poor human is trapped. But the Lord hid himself within the human body in the form of Shabd, and is there to sustain the soul and, when a Master appears, awaken the soul and help it escape.

Hazur once said, “Sister, it is better to treat this whole life just as a dream and during the dream try to find out the reality which is within every one of us.”⁷

So during the dream, we need to discover the ultimate reality inside ourselves. The saint Bahinabai says:

Only within this dream of a body
can you awaken to Truth and rest in the One.…
If you walk the way of a teacher of Truth,
you’ll reach the Real through the unreal.⁸

She’s saying that to reach the real (the Shabd, the Lord) we have to use the unreal (this body), and, of course, we have to have a Master. And the Master contains that same dichotomy – his Shabd form is real, but his physical form is unreal, is maya, as he has been saying. So again, we reach the real through the unreal.

Another mystic speaks on the enormous value of this strange lump of flesh we inhabit:

What a treasure has been placed in your hand!
Unlucky souls turn this treasure to dust –
this body that holds the essence of all goodness,
this body that holds a library of scriptures,
this body that breathes true holiness into holy places.
Kanhoba says, Nothing can compare
with being born human.⁹

So in this amazing device, this pot of filth and temple of divine love, we have to find the real while immersed in the unreal.

Are we wake or asleep?
A story goes like this:

A disciple met with his Master to discuss the nature of liberation and to ask about the position adopted by those who attain it. The disciple asked: “Master, how is it possible that a liberated human being can remain at peace when faced with the tragedies suffered by humanity?” The Master said, “Imagine you are sleeping and that you dream that you are in a boat with a lot of other passengers. Suddenly the boat hits a rock and starts to sink. In your distress, you wake up. Would you go back to sleep in order to warn the other passengers that the boat is sinking?¹⁰

Now, this is not to say that masters aren’t compassionate. They are supremely tender-hearted and feel for the suffering that beings undergo in this world. But they have a higher perspective, which helps to answer the common question, “How could a loving God create a world that contains so much suffering?” They say that human beings are, in effect, dreaming their existence and their suffering. As Baba Ji has told us, only the Shabd is real; everything else is illusion.

Mystics say that the problem isn’t with the creation, but with our perception of it. Hazur once said that the creation looks perfect to the perfect one. The bottom line is that the masters are trying to wake us up from the dream so we can share their higher perception.

Science’s argument against the illusion of this physical world
Let’s consider our situation from the perspective of a modern physicist. It turns out that physicists also argue that we are living in an illusion.

They say that each of us is made up of about 50 trillion cells. Each of those cells contains 20 trillion atoms. Each atom, when looked at closely, consists of a lot of sub-atomic particles, but each sub-atomic particle, if looked at closely, consists of nothing but energy. So, we are in effect, nothing but energy. What we see when we look at ourselves or at another person or object is just an energy field, an illusion of solidity that is in fact almost entirely empty space, with just a certain amount of energy creating the illusion of substance. ¹¹

For example, if you expanded an atom to the space taken up by a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble sitting in the middle of the field, and the much smaller electrons would be whizzing around at the outer reaches of the stadium. Everything else would be just empty space. Not much there! But very convincing to our senses.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once had the following interchange with a disciple:

Q: Is this world really here or is it a dream world?
Master: This world is perishable. You will not be able to stay with this world forever. This world is perishable.

Q: Does it really exist?
Master: It exists in a manner of speaking. When you are in a dream, everything looks real to you. When you wake up from a dream, then only you realize that there was actually no reality at all. It was just a dream. While being in this world, we think it is absolutely real. When we leave this world, then we know it was just a dream.

Q: Are we in the world or aren’t we?
Master: At this time we are dreaming! When we wake up from this dream, then we will know that this world is perishable. ¹²

So that’s a good transition from talking about all the different forms of illusion to asking why it matters and what we do about it.

Why do the mystics emphasize the illusory nature of this world, this body, this life? Essentially, they are trying to wake us up, to shake us out of this trance induced by maya, in which we’re completely seduced by the world – its pleasures; its promises of wealth, power, and fame; and its horrors, which fascinate us so intensely that we can’t take our eyes off them. The saints keep telling us not to get sucked into the show of this world: it’s only a very compelling reality show, but it’s not Reality. Turn your attention, they say, away from the reality show to Reality. That’s why Baba Ji has told us to be serious about our meditation but not take life too seriously.

But we don’t want to wake up; we’re absolutely glued to the screen of life and can’t tear our attention away. And we’re so dead asleep that we don’t even realize it most of the time.

Fortunately, our master is not content to let us sleep. He will wake us up. And that’s the single most important lesson from this discussion – that we will never wake up from the dream, we will never see through these myriad layers of illusion, without the assistance of a living master, someone who is awake, someone who exists outside the fog of illusion.

In her book The Case for God, Karen Armstrong, a writer and former Roman Catholic nun, retold this famous story:

One day a Brahmin priest came across the Buddha sitting in contemplation under a tree and was astonished by his serenity, stillness, and self-discipline. “Are you a god, sir?” the priest asked. “Are you an angel … or a spirit?” No, the Buddha replied. He explained that he had simply revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of conflict and pain at peace and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. “Remember me,” the Buddha told the curious priest, “as one who is awake.” ¹³

So our master is constantly shaking us in various ways, to try to get us to open our eyes and wake up from this dream, this illusion. And he urges us, prods us, tries desperately to persuade us to do our meditation with all the intensity, love, and commitment that we can muster, as that’s the only path to awakening to Reality.

And what is that Reality? The Shabd or divine power or Name. The Shabd or Name is God in action, and it takes physical form as our master. The Shabd or Name is the power that will save us from this world.

As the mystic Narhari taught:

A painter strokes his brush on a wall –
this is the world, nothing real here.
Children build houses of sand,
then knock them down and go home.
Everyone does their work here –
they love it as their own so they take it to be true.
If you really want to achieve something real,
just repeat the Name, says Narhari, and stay close to the mystics.¹⁴

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #39
Quoted in Divine Light, 7th ed., p.32-33
RS Greetings, Autumn 2001, p.9
Idries Shah, The Sufis, p.140
Many Voices, One Song, p.260
Ibid., p.208
Maharaj Charan Singh, Tape of 2 December, 1988, Question 10
Many Voices, One Song, p.147
Ibid., p.143
Quoted in Spiritual Link, March 2009, pp.24-25; from 101 Cuentos Clasicos de la India, comp. Ramiro Calle,
Much of this was drawn from a 2011 TED talk by Jeff Lieberman on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0--_R6xThs
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #18
Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p.330
Many Voices, One Song, p.166

Sticking to God's Plan - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Sticking to God's Plan

There’s a Jewish proverb: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

We think that we have to plan everything, and we are incessantly planning. We all make plans. Some are small, like what to get at the grocery store, when to meet a friend, or plans for the day. Some plans are big, like starting a business or buying a house. And what’s the plan for our children’s education? Our retirement?

We all planned our trip to Dera.

So many plans! Business plans, family plans, financial plans, lesson plans, contingency plans, architectural plans, wedding plans. Five-year plans, ten-year plans, life plans.

Let’s look at what the Masters say about planning. The following is from a series of questions in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III.

Q: How much capacity do we have to plan our future, Master? Is it set for us when we are born?
Master: We have only one future: to go back to the Father. There’s no other future.¹

This is the future of every satsangi. The Master plan for our souls.We can show our thanks by doing our daily meditation and doing simran continuously. We are the lucky sons and daughters of the Masters, and we are returning home with them.

Q: But we have to live in this world also.
Master: In better hands, you will live much better. If you keep the planning in your own hands, you will live miserably.

As in the tragic story Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, we may have the best of intentions, but things don’t always go according to plan and we end up making a mess: As the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Planning is the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve a desired goal. The Masters have a specific plan of action for our desired goal of self- and God-realization. That plan consists of the four vows. The most important vow is the two and a half hours of daily meditation. When we follow the plan laid out for us by the Master, we are living in his will.

What is the master’s will? Just to be firm on the principles on which we have to build our meditation and attend to our meditation – that is his will, that is his teaching, those are his instructions. That is the base on which we have to start.²

What’s the rationale of the Master’s plan for us? The Saints tell us that this is not our true home. They explain that we have been caught in this illusion, this play of maya, for countless lifetimes. We think that we are making plans and that we are free to choose our destiny. In reality we are not free. We are slaves of the mind and the mind is a slave of the senses. We keep making plans as if our life in this world is permanent and we will live here forever.

There was a satsangi woman who was dying of cancer; she knew that she was to die that evening. In her early-morning meditation her husband heard her laughing. “What’s the matter, dear? Are you OK?” he asked. She replied, “Yes. I’m laughing because my mind is still making plans even though it knows that I am leaving tonight!” That’s how strong this habit of the mind is.

When we go beyond mind and maya and we merge ourselves into the Master, then we are living in his will. Then we can really working his plan; then we become truly free.

Planning complex scenarios is unique to humans, and it requires executive function in the frontal lobe of the brain. We humans are avid scenario builders and project what the future might bring. There are even futures-studies departments at universities whose graduates are hired to do strategic planning in government and corporate positions. The field is a sort of forecasting or projecting into the future. And so many questions to the Masters are about what will happen in the future.

In the early 1990s, when Baba Ji first came to the United States, a man asked him a pointed question during a question-and-answer session. He started by describing a prevalent idea of the time, that the earth would go through rapid geographical changes as the polar ice caps melted. The oceans would rise, cataclysmic earthquakes would occur, and California will fall into the ocean and become an island. Then he asked Baba Ji if he had a prediction. Baba Ji said something like: Yes, I do have a prediction. We are all going to die someday, and we should prepare for that.

The Saints all say the same thing over and over because we really don’t believe we will die. We see our friends leaving (and as we get older, more and more are leaving!), yet we don’t believe that our own time is coming.

We are like those young soldiers in the briefing room. Their captain tells them: “Gentlemen, I’ll be frank. This is a very difficult assignment. Not many of you are coming home. We estimate that 90 percent of you will die on the battlefield.” Like those men, we think, “I sure am going to miss these guys when they’re gone.” We never think we will be in that 90 percent.

Saints tell us we should take a practical approach to the inevitability of our own death, as in the following anecdote:

There was a man shipwrecked on a remote island. It was inhabited by people who had the tradition of making any shipwrecked person the king of the island for exactly one year. Then what? The person was placed on a nearby deserted island where there was no food, water, shelter or transportation. The shipwrecked man noted that the previous king had enjoyed a wonderful year as king. Then he he had been taken to the deserted island, where he died. The current king-for-a-year thought: “I am the king now and have full authority. So I will plan for the day when my year is up.” He told the people to build a shelter, plant gardens, dig wells and make all necessary arrangements for living on that deserted island so that he could survive when his year as king ended.³

Saints say we should be like this man: we should prepare for our death. They say that meditation is nothing but preparing for death, dying while living. We must practise for that day when we will leave our family, our possessions and our home here. Great Master says if we have died before our death in meditation we will look forward to the day of our death as if it were our wedding day.

Saints also say that the divine sound and light are so fine and pleasurable that they cannot be compared to anything here in this world. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh often said that we can detach from this world only if we attach ourselves to something more pleasurable and attractive. For us, that something is the Shabd or Nam.

The Saints have come here to guide us home. The love play between Master and disciple is all part of a divine plan. Someone asked Hazur, “Is it coincidence when we meet a master?” He answered:

There is no coincidence in Sant Mat. Everything happens according to a divine plan. You don’t meet a master as a coincidence; you don’t come to the path as a coincidence. You don’t select your parents just by coincidence; you don’t select your brother and sister by coincidence. There is some karmic relationship which brings you to that. There is some string at the back which is being pulled – why you are being asked to play that part on the stage. There is no coincidence here.⁴

It is no accident that we have been drawn to the path or that we visit the Dera and other venues around the world to be with the Master. It’s all part of his plan, though we don’t always allow ourselves to feel the love and care that the Master gives us. There’s that famous line popularized by John Lennon: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

Hazur continues his answer on planning:

If you leave it to him to plan your life and go on accepting what comes to you, you will be happy. Because planning is in his hands, and you just have to adjust to the events of life.”⁵

This aligns with the Taoist concept of wu wei, or effortless effort, which roughly means going with the flow. We humbly yield, and by yielding we become strong.

Master wants us to live a happy, relaxed life. Hazur continues:

You are just adjusting, going along with the waves. You can never change the events of life, no matter how much you plan, no matter how much you pray. But you can always adjust to the events of life.⁶

Master tells us we have to let go in our meditation, and when we do, we become receptive and more able to adjust to the events of our life.

Anthony de Mello, who was an Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, tells a story in his book The Prayer of the Frog how the mind can keep us from living a simple and relaxed life.

A guru was so impressed by the spiritual progress of his disciple that, judging he needed no further guidance, he left him on his own in a little hut on the bank of a river

Each morning after his ablutions the disciple would hang his loincloth out to dry. It was his only possession!

One day he was dismayed to find it torn to shreds by rats. So he had to beg for another from the villagers. When the rats nibbled holes in this one too, he got himself a kitten. He had no more trouble with the rats, but now, in addition to begging for his own food, he had to beg for milk as well. “Too much trouble begging,” he thought, “and too much of a burden on the villagers. I shall keep a cow.”

When he got the cow, he had to beg for fodder: “Easier to till the land around my hut,” he thought. But that proved troublesome too, for it left him little time for meditation. So he employed labourers to till the land for him.

Now overseeing the labourers became a chore, so he married a wife who would share the task with him. Before long, of course, he was one of the wealthiest men in the village.

Years later his guru happened to drop by and was surprised to see a palatial mansion where once a hut had stood. He said to one of the servants, “Isn’t this where a disciple of mine used to live?”

Before he got a reply, the disciple himself emerged. “What’s the meaning of all this, my son?” asked the guru.

“You’re not going to believe this, sir,” said the man, “but there was no other way I could keep my loincloth!”⁷

In other words, the mind keeps our lives complicated. But the Masters say we are bigger than this mind. They say we can still the roving mind and meet the radiant form of our Master inside. Would a businessman start a business if he thought it would fail? Does a farmer plant crops thinking they will not grow? We can do this!

The Saints tell us to make our best effort and leave the results to the Master; to live a simple, happy and relaxed life; to take care of our responsibilities in the world but not get so involved that we forget our Number One priority, our meditation.

The plan that the Masters have for us is really quite simple. It addresses our biggest obstacle of the mind and its many worries.

Q: How do you stop yourself from worrying?
Master: What makes you worry? Uncertainty about the future and repentance for the past. … So attend to meditation. When your mind is attached to the shabd and nam within, then you don’t think about the past or worry about the future. … And you are training yourself. Meditation trains you to accept what is in your destiny, if not cheerfully then at least with a smile. That is the purpose of meditation.⁸

And then Hazur concludes by saying, “So, we should plan for a day and then live it thoroughly and happily, and attend to meditation. That is the only way one can get out of these worldly worries and worldly problems. And learn to accept rather than to demand.”

The mind is powerful. Let’s follow the plan that our Master has laid out for us. Plans are meaningless unless we act on them. This is a path of action. Let’s please our Master and do our meditation.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #260
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #284
Folktale; source unknown
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #452
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #260
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #260
Anthony de Mello, Prayer of the Frog (Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1995), p. 38
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #254

Ancient Myths, Modern Mystics, Unchanging Truths - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Ancient Myths, Modern Mystics, Unchanging Truths

This is the story of Tiresias, a famous seer of antiquity.

As he was hunting in the mountain forests, he became thirsty, so he looked for a spring to quench his thirst. He found a fountainhead, but there he saw the goddess Athena, bathing naked in its cool waters. Angered, the goddess blinded him immediately, but then took pity on him and granted him two boons: She cleaned his ears so he could understand the language of birds (thus gaining the capacity to interpret omens) and gave him a staff to help him move about.

What do we have here? A spicy interlude that would make tabloid headlines today, or a spiritual truth disguised by a story?

A saying often attributed to Sir Francis Bacon is: “Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” In other words, truth sometimes needs to be made palatable by weaving it into stories or parables. That is what mystics do – they clothe the truth to suit the times in which they live and the audience they want to address. As societies change over time, so do people’s tastes. That is why mystics highlight different aspects of their teachings in different eras: to help people relate to them and benefit from them. The teachings themselves never change.

It is actually these coverings that people relate to, that ferry a mystic’s message across the mental ocean of mankind, so that, like a message in a bottle, it eventually reaches those who will understand its real meaning.

How can we understand these stories today? They seem so strange, yet they resonate within us in ways we cannot define.

About 50 years ago, a 2,500-year-old wooden shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Cyprus. Normally it would have disintegrated completely, but this one was fairly well preserved. Naturally many of its parts were missing, while others were half rotted and deformed.

Now, would someone wanting to become a shipbuilder today go and learn shipbuilding by studying this shipwreck? Obviously not. It’s the other way around. Only someone who is already a shipbuilder could make sense of the various bits and pieces lying scattered on the seabed, because he already knows the science of shipbuilding; he could easily recognize how each part relates to the whole structure.

It’s strange, then, that mankind generally tries to understand the science of the soul and to relate to the divine by studying various religions. Once, mystic teachings ferried souls across the ocean of existence, but now only the remains of these teachings lay scattered on the metaphorical ocean floor. As a result, when trying to study mysticism, one can make sense of its obscure allegories and fragmented traditions only with the help of a contemporary spiritual scientist – a living master.

We had this experience with Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh. He worked his whole life to make Sant Mat available to the West, which he partly did by explaining it from the Christian point of view, with which so many Westerners are familiar. Gradually the underlying truth of Christianity became clear to us, both its hidden meanings and their misinterpretations, which explained both our attraction and the aversion some of us felt to the Christianity we were born into. At last we could put this religion into its correct mystical context.

Somebody asked Hazur:

Q: Can initiates of a perfect Master learn anything from the Bible? Should we be reading it?

A: I think there's more reason to read the Bible now, because now you can understand its real meaning. Initiation is a key, and through that key we can open the Bible, unlock its treasures, its mysteries, and find the real jewel there, the real mysticism.¹

Back to Tiresias. The myth presents a physical analogy of a spiritual state. Tiresias – a seeker aspiring to spiritual heights – is hunting in the mountains, and his thirst brings him to the source, where he inadvertently is captured by a goddess.

Who is this goddess? According to myth, Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, the Supreme Power. She is a direct emanation from the Godhead – God’s wisdom – so she is the Logos, the Shabd, the Truth. And no one is able to stand face to face with the naked Truth of the pure, unveiled Shabd without being radically transformed for good.

From the moment that Tiresias is blinded, he loses interest in this world of dreams, which we perceive as reality. He becomes blind to the physical world as he wakes up spiritually. Now his inner eye has opened to the beauty and Truth of the higher worlds, and he is enraptured by them. Now he can hear the Shabd, the voice of God, and he understands the birds, divine messengers – like the dove, the Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit. As the inner meaning of events and circumstances are revealed to him, he becomes a seer who can help and guide other people.

The blinding of Tiresias was essentially a gift, the granting of a plea we often hear being sung in shabds: “Reveal your own real form to me, Master.”² Blinded to the physical world, he was granted inner sight. And, like all disciples of a mystic, he also received support and protection, in the form of a staff, as he had to continue living on the physical plane without stumbling at every step and losing his balance.

Christ speaks about the same spiritual truth, in a veiled way: “For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not, might see; and that they which see might be made blind.”³

This is a very strong and apparently inexplicable statement. To restore sight to the blind –that’s obviously praiseworthy. But to blind those who can see? Why would somebody want to do that? Many Christian books simply avoid explaining this passage, while others give explanations that are misleading at best.

But for an expert on spirituality, the meaning is clear. Hazur explained:

As Christ said, I have come to make people blind, and give eyes to those who do not see. That is the miracle mystics come to perform. Those who see only the world, see only the creation, are attached only to the creation – I have come to make them blind, meaning I have come to detach them from this creation. And I want to give them those eyes which see only the Father. I have not come to give eyes just to see the creation – but to those who are blind to the Father, who don't see the Father – I've come to give them eyes. So these are not worldly miracles, they are spiritual miracles. We are awakened from deep slumber by the mystics.⁴

Mystics come and connect the dots for us, so that a meaning starts to emerge. More important, they teach us the method by which we can connect the dots ourselves. That method is meditation, the only way to expand our consciousness and develop spiritually, if we actually practise it.

Otherwise we go through life like those two friends in a car. The one driving wants to overtake the car in front, so he activates the blinker to change lanes, but then hears someone honking angrily behind them. He pulls over, stops by the roadside and says to his friend: I’m sure I used the blinker. Can you have a look to see if it’s working? His friend walks behind the car and shouts: It’s working. It’s not working. It’s working. It’s not working. It’s working. It’s not working.

That is exactly our situation regarding many aspects of our spiritual life. His grace is working, not working, working, not working. Master and meditation are working, not working, working, not working. My faith is working, not working. Like the friend who did not understand that the function of a blinker includes the light going on and off, our consciousness in its present state sees only disconnected fragments of reality, without being able to comprehend how they form a functional whole.

Who is a mature person? Master used to ask. One who has seen both the ups and downs of life. He also says that success is measured not by how much money you make but by how well you solve your problems – meaning, how you deal with both ups and downs, because each presents a different set of problems.

Maybe this is also why we sometimes think that saints contradict themselves, as the following story illustrates.

Rock climbing is in fashion now. Like our spiritual rock climbing, it requires utmost concentration, careful practice and strict adherence to the coach’s instructions. Imagine someone hanging onto a rock face, asking the coach: Now what? The coach says: Lift your right hand. We return to our countries and tell our friends: Coach said we must lift our right hand. At another training session, another climber, who’s in a different position on the rock face, gets the instruction to lift his left foot. Those who attend that rock-climbing session go back and say: He said we must lift the left foot. The others object: No, you got it wrong, it is the right hand. The left-footers say: No, no, no, I heard it with my own ears, it’s the left foot. Someone else comes up with the idea that the mauj has changed, so the coach is changing the teachings. Yet another loses faith and leaves because the coach seems to have contradicted himself. Dissension starts, arguments and fights break out. Without the Master’s guiding hand, we would soon have the right-hand wing fighting against the left-foot wing in a power struggle about the correct interpretation of the teachings.

It is much easier to speculate about what the Master means – because that entails no effort on our part – than to do what we have been asked: put effort into our meditation, where all the answers will reveal themselves. The problem is that in order to develop the discipline and patience needed for meditation, we need discipline and patience, which is why this is necessarily a long process for most of us. The danger is that out of impatience we give up too soon and stop watering the seed of Nam, because we do not see anything coming out of the ground. That would be very unfortunate because all the while the seed is invisibly growing and will appear at the right time.

Fortunately, we do receive help and prompts to keep us on track. We might not be able to see the flower that grows from the seed of Nam that has been planted within us, but sometimes we can smell its fragrance, as Hazur used to say.

Is that flower love? Is it the presence of God? What is God anyway? God is love, the mystics say, and we parrot their words, but how do we know? We can say an apple is a fruit because we know what apples and fruit are. But we do not know what God is or what love is.

We can only take the notion that God is love as a working hypothesis; enter the laboratory of our body, which is our personal copy of the universe; test the hypothesis; and attempt to prove it through our own experience.

Still, we keep asking, what is love? For us, love belongs to the world of duality, so it has a direction. We can say it is a stream from one heart to another – from mother to child, from lover to the beloved: it connects and binds two beings.

But what is God in his essence, at the level where we have merged in him and only he exists? We don’t know, but mystics give us hints here and there, maybe just to whet our appetites.

God’s essence seems to be joy, bliss, happiness of the highest degree, though it is beyond words’ capacity to describe it. But there is a Greek word that tried to describe it, in the ancient language from which it is derived. We all know it and have felt it to a greater or lesser degree.

Enthusiasm. It comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, from enthous, meaning “possessed by a god, inspired.” -En means in, or inner; theos means God; ousia means essence; and the ending -sm denotes the state of something. The literal meaning of the word is “the state of the essence of God within.”

Even stepped down to its mundane meaning, the word retains traces of its mystical heritage: the flood of joy that nothing can overshadow, the inspiration, the sense of inner confidence that anything is possible, the desire to share it with others. When this inner bliss overflows to another being, then it is felt as a stream of love, duplicating itself, as it were, in the other being. That is why happiness and love are so interconnected. Love is to please another person, Hazur used to say – to make him happy. For example, seva is done out of love for the Master, to please him.

That is why we feel enthusiasm when we are in his presence. Whether he smiles or not, whether he is joking or being stern, around him we feel joy, happiness and gratitude – because he has touched our soul, the essence of God within us. He awakens us to the reality of who we are.

“Islands in the stream / That is what we are.”⁵ We are islands in the stream of his love, soaking in bliss and slowly dissolving in it, until there is no more island left – only the stream.

Love is to become another being, Hazur used to say – until there is only one being, only bliss, enthusiasm, only the essence of God within.

As Rumi says:

Everyone and everything perishes,
but celebration in your state of oneness
is forever, forever, forever.⁶

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #383
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 329
Bible, John 9:39
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #536
“Islands in the Stream,” song by the Bee Gees
Jalal al-Din Rumi, ghazal 356

Catch-22 Download | Print

Catch-22

There’s a story about an Air Force pilot who flew missions in a horrible war. He was being driven slowly insane – by thoughts of the death and destruction he was inflicting, but also by the constant fear of his own death. The Air Force rules say that a pilot suffering from insanity can be discharged and go back to his normal life. But there’s a catch. The catch is that any pilot who claims that the war is driving him mad and making him want to leave is being incredibly sensible. Any sane person would want to leave the war. That means he can’t be insane. So he can’t be discharged.

This catch is known as Catch-22, and the story comes from a novel with the same name. And the spiritual path, too, is filled with Catch-22 situations and paradoxes. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said that being in this world is like having fallen into a deep, dark well. We humans are the lucky ones. We have a mind which can reason, and we have the willpower to make helpful choices. Animals don’t have the same ability – they just run around as slaves to their instincts – eating, sleeping, and reproducing. We are the only beings here who can use our minds to figure out a solution to our predicament. However, there’s a Catch-22. We need this human mind to conceive of getting out of the well, back to the light that we glimpse. But our mind has a tendency to strengthen our attachments to the world around us. Our mind, which we need to help us get out of the deep well, can also form attachments that can keep us here. Thus the Catch-22. Our mind, if we are able to keep it focused on our goal, will help us escape from the deep, dark well. If we cannot keep it focused, then our mind will only create reasons why it’s good to stay in the well.

What do we do in the face of a paradox like this? Do we just give up? What is the right attitude to take? When people confront Baba Ji with these sorts of confusions, he often says that we have to take a practical approach. When people say that it’s all hopeless, he asks: Is that the attitude you take when faced with worldly challenges? Perhaps if we would investigate the way we deal with worldly paradoxes, we might get clues about how to deal with the spiritual paradoxes. Thankfully there are examples of people who successfully navigate Catch-22 situations.

One common example, at least pre-Covid, is trying to obtain an apartment in a new country where you’ve just arrived. Often, in order to sign the lease for an apartment you need a local bank account from which payments will be deducted. The catch is – you need a permanent address to be able to qualify for a bank account. No apartment without a bank account – but no bank account without an apartment. Hence, Catch-22.

There is a tried-and-true workaround or “hack” to this paradox. You find a friend who has an established home in your new city, and ask if you can sleep on the couch (or in the guest room) for a month or two. You provide your friend’s address to the bank and open an account. You then use this bank account to arrange your own apartment and change the address on the bank account to your new apartment’s address. It’s all perfectly legal.

And it’s the same with us, stuck at the bottom of the dark well, stuck in this world which isn’t the real home of our souls. Like a New Zealander or Australian in London, however, we also have a friend who comes from the other side, where we want to go. We have the Master. He gives us a hack or workaround, the singular way of using our minds that can loosen these cords. He gives us the five names we use in meditation.

So those of us in this well who have been initiated by the Master, the Friend, have been given the royal words that will get us out. But do we use them?

Often we get caught up in all kinds of other things. We ask the Friend how we got into the well in the first place. We look up at that glint of light far above, the light of our attention, and we say: “How do I know that’s really an exit and not just a light inside the well? What’s the proof? How do I know there’s even such a thing as ‘outside the well’? What’s it like out there?”

The thing is, having lived our whole lives in a dark well, we have no concepts or experiences or words that can capture what life is like outside the well. How could the Friend explain the light of sunset on the ocean to those who have only seen that one tiny spark of light above their heads in the darkness? It’s the same with spirituality. We really have no idea of what it’s like in our true home. We come to satsang, read books and so on, and think we know something. But we really don’t. For example, we read that the soul will be released from the mind and exist in a realm of beautiful music beyond time. But since all of our experiences are through the mind, what would awareness without the mind be like? And if there’s no time, how could there be music? There would be no melody of any sort that we know. It means we actually have no concept at all.

We say that the Master is the Shabd made flesh. But the Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji, says that everything is Shabd. Rocks, plants, lights, smells, tastes: they’re all Shabd¹ – everything comes from that Word, that Logos. So the Master might be Shabd, but so is your glass of water. We can tell that there is something different about saints, but actually we have no accurate concept of what saints really are, what makes these men and women so special. The problem is that concepts are tools of the mind, and we are talking about a reality beyond the mind. The sooner we move beyond concepts and into action and experience, the better. To paraphrase Baba Ji, the more we realize that we know nothing, the more we will be open to real learning. The more we realize that we have nothing, the more we will open our hands to receive.

So the Friend can’t fully satisfy our questions about why we fell into the well, or what it’s like outside. All he can do is give us the technique to climb out and see for ourselves. It’s almost all he asks of us. And if we repeat those words – for him – if we simply repeat those words, the bonds start to loosen. We don’t have to do anything else. We don’t push. We don’t try to find any place. We can look at whatever is there, but we don’t strain, we don’t try to imagine, because imagination doesn’t grasp the reality. The soul wants to go up. If we loosen the bonds with our simran, the soul automatically finds its way.

As Hazur Maharaj Ji says, you don’t need to find the eye centre:

Don’t try to find any particular point in that darkness such as two or three inches up or down. Then you are lost in that…and you don’t concentrate.²

You don’t have to invert the eyes physically in order to find any particular object within, because these physical eyes have nothing to do with what you are going to see inside.³

You are automatically there. When you close your eyes, you are nowhere else but there behind the eyes in that darkness. Just close your eyes and forget where you’re concentrating. You don’t have to find that spot at all…You close your eyes, and you see the darkness, and being there in the darkness, do the simran. That is the point being referred to [as the third eye]. You’re automatically there... You also feel that your Master is there and that you are there in the darkness and you are doing simran in the presence of the Master.⁴

He says that if no form comes of its own accord, and if it is not easy to visualize the Master, just feel that the Master is there with you, and that is enough dhyan for now. He says:

Just be there and also feel your Master is there, and that will hold your attention there in the darkness.⁵

As long as your attention is there in the darkness, you are there, but when you start thinking about all the problems of the world, your attention is not there, whether you see the darkness or something else. When your attention is there, you are there.⁶

And that is all we have to do – make the effort to keep the attention on the Master and his words. If, when you do that, you find that

something’s pulling you upward…Then give yourself to it. Just submit yourself to it.⁷

With the help of simran and concentration, other sounds will fade out, and the real Sound will become distinct and clear, and will start pulling you.⁸

He keeps it so simple. Just use the trick our Friend on the other side gives to get us out of the well, the practice that beats the Catch-22 trap of this existence.

It’s a question of commitment.

Look at athletes who commit fully to their quest for gold. At the Olympic Games, it isn’t uncommon to see the winner of a race collapse – and quite frequently the runner coming in second doesn’t. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the winners wanted it more – it meant more to them. Rugby coaches call it ‘turning up.’ If we want to win our spiritual race, we also have to turn up. What can mean more to us than pleasing the Master? It’s a simple question of priorities.

Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh Ji writes:

Complaints often reach me from satsangis that the mind does not allow them to sit in meditation. They are too prone to yield to its suggestions. If the spirit is unwilling and the flesh is weak, wherein lies the remedy?

At the slightest discomfort caused by the maintenance of the posture and withdrawal of the soul current, the mind urges the practitioner to give up meditation. Let us remember the unfailing verdict: ‘No pain, no gain’.

Only the most valiant of fighters, who are prepared to embrace death (that is, closing the nine doors of this body to worldly satisfactions), and storm the dark fortress of the negative power, can achieve their purpose.

Listen to what lovers say: ‘O Farid! In my efforts to reach the Lord’s palace my body is afire like an oven and my bones are burning like fuel. Shall I delay? No. When my legs are withered and move no more, I shall walk on my head if I could have only a glimpse of Him.’⁹

Mira Bai, a sixteenth-century mystic poet, adapts a Rajasthani folk tune to express the longing of a true disciple.

Without seeing my Beloved,
how will I live?
Only the healing herb of his darshan
can cure my suffering.
Long have I stood at the palace gate;
with my eyes glued to the path,
I wait for him.
Mira has sold her very self to the Lord.¹⁰

The main thing is that we make a start. We can’t say that longing like Mira’s is a gift from the Lord and that until we feel that depth of longing we’ll just carry on as before we were initiated. We can’t stay stuck in the prison of a Catch-22 like this one, as articulated to Hazur by a disciple:

Maharaj Ji, it says often in the writings that the Shabd will eliminate the negative tendencies, but my understanding is that you have to eliminate the negative tendencies before you can hear the Shabd.¹¹

Hazur responded:

Both are right. To some extent you have to abstain from these negative things in order to withdraw to the eye centre, but you can escape from them permanently only when your mind is attached to the Shabd and Nam within and the Shabd pulls you upwards. But you have to fight before that, to some extent, in order to withdraw your consciousness to the eye centre – with the help of simran and dhyan, and by abstaining from these negative tendencies. But that is not a permanent cure. Again your mind will come back to the senses. When the mind is attached to a better pleasure than the sensual pleasures, only then is it permanently detached from the senses.¹²

Baba Ji has been emphasizing over and over recently that we always need to do our bhajan, not just simran, and here Hazur explains why. He says:

Let me give you an example: If you put a dam across a flowing river, you will be able to hold the water for some time, but not permanently. When the water rises too high in the catchment area, it will break the dam and overflow the banks. But if you make another channel for the river to flow – in a different direction – the dam will stay there permanently, and the river will also start flowing in a different direction. Without the second channel the dam could hold the water for some time, but not forever.

Similarly, simran and dhyan is holding your attention at the eye centre, which is suppressing your outward instincts, and that even makes you wild sometimes. But if you are able to attach your attention to the Shabd, the whole direction of our attention is changed, and the dam is permanent.¹³

So we may have to fight to make ourselves sit, and fight with negative tendencies of the mind, but there is no fighting to go ‘up’. We simply need to make ourselves receptive to the melody that will resolve the paradox of our existence.

Become receptive to that sound. Relax in it. Bathe in it. Enjoy the peace you find there. You don’t have to do anything; only be receptive. Master will do the rest. The consciousness will rise on its own. Relish the peace you find in being in this “place” of sound with no thoughts, focused on the Shabd.¹⁴

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol 4, p. 120
Die to Live, Q101
Die to Live, Q99
Die to Live, Q92
Ibid
Die to Live, Q95
Die to Live, Q136
Die to Live, Q224
Maharaj Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul, p. 194 (“Spiritual Bouquet,” #31)
Mira Brihatpadavali, p. 127.
Die to Live, Q310
Ibid
Die to Live, pp. 301-302
Hector Esponda, From self to Shabd, p. 64

Be Doers of the Word - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Be Doers of the Word

Absorbed in the game of duality, we view ourselves as winners or losers, successes or failures. We are caught in a whirlwind of tension and power struggles. We inhabit various levels of unconsciousness. In the animal world some eat, some are eaten. In the human world, so-called winners degrade and ‘consume’ the losers. And the so-called ‘losers’ fight back, sometimes with violent means, empowered by long-suppressed hatred or fear, or both. This dark game is not new; it is a very old game, and it keeps renewing itself. And with the help of modern media, it intrudes into our attention with uglier and uglier twists and turns.

The saints tell us that there is a path out of this excruciating and exhausting game, and that true power and success is attained through a completely different game, in which there are no winners and no losers. It is called the game of love – bhakti – love for the divine. It is a game in which the winner gets the Lord and the loser becomes the Lord.

We are constantly active, constantly “doing” in the game of life, but to participate in the game of love, we must become a different kind of doer – a doer of the Word. Actually, we are naturally gifted to play the game of love, to be doers of the Word. We have just forgotten how to play.

We have been doers of so many things other than the Word. Some call these doings karmas, because in the Indian languages karm means doing. Doing the divine Word undoes all our previous human doings – our karmas. But how do we become doers of the Word? And why should we become doers of the Word? It boils down to a choice between truth and deception. Do we want truth, or we are happy to be deceived?

In the New Testament Bible, in a section considered to be the oldest part of that scripture, there is a letter by Christ’s brother James. In that letter, James says, “But be [you] doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.”¹

This verse says that if we do not practise the Word, we practise self-deception. Self-deception is when we are ignorant and confused, but not aware of our ignorance and confusion. We think that we know and understand. Yet we are deceiving ourselves. If we are tired of falsehood, of fake appearances and delusions, we will want to become doers of the Word rather than doers of all those other things with which we deceive ourselves. Earlier in the letter of James it says:

Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.²

This verse explains clearly what kind of word we ought to become doers of, and also how to become doers of that Word.

First, the only way to know this Word is to “receive [it] with meekness.” The key to unlocking knowledge of this Word is meekness and humility. We leave behind our achievement-oriented and competitive mentality – our desire to keep proving that “I’m better than you.” This special kind of Word cannot be achieved – it can only be received, in stillness and humility. So receptivity and stillness are essential to one who wants to be a doer of the Word. We become doers and receivers of the Word by losing ourselves.

James describes the Word in a peculiar way. He calls it “engrafted Word,” an English translation for the Greek phrase emphytos Logos. When one tree is grafted onto another, there is one tree made from two – the two become one. But the original Greek in this Biblical passage does not really talk about grafting at all. Emphytos Logos really means: native, natural, inborn Word, constituting our inner nature. This Word was not grafted upon us; rather we were born with it. It is a Word we have known since we took our first breath. It is our inner nature that we were familiar with even before we took our first breath in this physical body.

This innate Word is part of our essence and nature (phy means nature), but as we became rooted in materiality, we lost awareness of the Word. It is vital that we regain this lost awareness because, as James says, this Word that sustains the entire universe, including our own body, from the second it is conceived to be born in the flesh, is the only thing that can save our souls. James is not saying anything new with this. Many saints from various traditions have said that the Lord’s Word is all that can save us from deception, confusion and the meaningless suffering born out of this confusion. Guru Nanak said:

He alone is learned and wise
Who practises the Lord’s Name.³

Socrates had a similar insight. An oracle, a divinely inspired person, declared that there was no human being wiser than the Athenian philosopher Socrates, who lived 2,400 years ago.⁴ In all humility, Socrates thought that this pronouncement made no sense if it were taken literally. But to show his respect for it, Socrates spent his entire life trying to discover its true meaning. He mixed with intellectuals, professionals and experts in various branches of knowledge at that time, thinking that surely the wisest human being had to be among them.⁵ However, his tireless questioning, described in Plato’s dialogues, revealed that the knowledge these experts possessed was narrowly specialized. Outside of their own specialty, their ‘wisdom’ seemed to consist only of opinions and concepts. In addition, these experts kept contradicting themselves, saying contradictory and illogical things – all the while considering themselves wise, skilled and learned. Socrates finally concluded that when the oracle had called him the wisest human being, he had meant that Socrates was the only human who was willing to admit his ignorance and not deceive himself that he knew when he did not know.⁶

Socrates was the only person willing to openly declare that he was confused. He used to say that he knew nothing and never taught anything.⁷ He only asked questions⁸ because true knowledge resides at a different level – beyond the opinionated mind, at a level where the soul can recollect, recall and remember its original inborn knowledge. The insight that all concepts and opinions lead to confusion was to him the height of human intelligence, for “Human wisdom is of little or no value.” ⁹

The realization that all human knowledge is actually confusion was spiritually the most fruitful state for him. Therefore he did everything in his power to bring his disciples into a realization of how confused they were, so that they could stop relying on their arrogant belief that they were experts, and instead begin to shed their opinions and seek the true knowledge that cannot be communicated – that can only be experienced.

Likewise, Maharaj Sawan Singh, the Great Master, says in Spiritual Gems:

You want knowledge. Knowledge lies within you. Sound Current is knowledge. The more you study it, the higher you rise and the wiser you become. And this knowledge is complete in Sach Khand [the True Realm].¹⁰

The knowledge is within you and it is from within yourself that you are to find it. Books give the description and induce you to go within, but do not give the experience and knowledge.¹¹

Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French lay brother, arrived at this same insight that James, Socrates, Guru Nanak and Great Master expressed. Although he spent his life in a monastery kitchen, for him every action, however small or insignificant, was an act of love for the Lord. He lived in the presence of his Beloved even among the din of pots and pans. He wrote:

If you would go forward in the spiritual life, you must avoid relying on the subtle conclusions and fine reasonings of the unaided intellect. Unhappy they who seek to satisfy their desire in that! The Creator is the great teacher of Truth. We can reason laboriously for many years, but fuller far and deeper is the knowledge of the hidden things of Faith and of Himself, which He flashes as light into the heart of the humble.¹²

We cannot be doers of the Word by reading books, by thinking about the Word or talking about it. Only a living Master can show us the meaning of the books and help us understand how to be doers of the Word. Samarth Ramdas says:

I will explain by master’s grace:
the deepest of the deep is known
only through the words of a master.
This gives perfect satisfaction.
My own experience has shown that
all knowledge, spiritual and worldly,
is carried in the words of the master.
The words of the master guided me
to all that is most profound –
in this I found the greatest fulfilment.¹³

When we go to a Master, his words always direct us to the inner Word, which does not perish and does not change and therefore can save us from the perishable material plane. But merely coming to see the Master is not sufficient for becoming doers of the Word:

All the world can see the Master,
But this does not lead to salvation
Unless one practises the Shabd.¹⁴

We need the Master to teach us how to climb gradually from our limited physical form to the formless creative power of the Shabd. We start with love for the physical Master, then gradually we fall in love with his teachings, and then we fall in love with the practice that he prescribes. And that practice leads us to the reality and Truth that this verse refers to as Shabd.

This gradual ascent from the physical to the spiritual is also what Socrates taught when he spoke about the ladder of love in Plato’s dialogue called the Dinner Party¹⁵. A group of distinguished intellectuals, a doctor, a successful playwright, etc., gathered for a dinner party, and Socrates was invited. They decided that everyone would give a discourse about love. All gave very sophisticated and learned speeches, but all these refined speeches presented love as a calculated transaction. Socrates spoke about the ladder of love – how it starts with attraction to physical beauty and ends with love for eternal unperishable Beauty, the Divine itself. At the end of the evening a young drunken disciple crashed the party and gave an impassioned speech about how Socrates made him feel like a teenager in love:

When I hear him…I find that my heart leaps and the tears stream down my face at his words. And I see him having the same effect upon many others. I have listened to…other skilled speakers, but…never experienced anything like this. They haven’t disturbed my whole being and made me dissatisfied with the slave-like state of my life.

Besides infusing this young man’s entire being with intense love similar to the ecstatic state of dancers celebrating a mystery cult, Socrates also provoked in him a state of intense intellectual confusion:

What is most amazing about him is that he is like no other human being whether past or present.… He is so odd (atopos), and so odd are his words that however hard you look you will never find anyone who comes even close to him. If you open up his words, you will find that they are the most divine and full of ideas of goodness. They range over all the subjects that you must examine if you are going to become a truly good person.¹⁶

The disciple who delivered this love speech did not know how to make sense of Socrates. He had only experienced love as sexual attraction – he had barely put his foot on the first rung of the ladder of love. With Socrates he had experienced spiritual love for the first time and did not know what was happening to him. And so he gave the strongest speech on love of the entire evening. While the others were weaving together intellectually clever thoughts, he spoke from experience. He confessed that he had even tried to seduce Socrates multiple times, but failed – he, the irresistible young and attractive aristocrat had no charms with which he could entice Socrates.

Through the unhinged speech of this rascal, who broke all social rules and intruded upon the civilized party, we now have an inkling of the intensity of love that Socrates inspired. Plato called his master the “embodiment of Love,” similar to Eros, the great mediator between the human and divine realm.¹⁷ Socrates spent his life helping his friends channel their love from the physical toward the Divine itself. He served for many years as a teacher of spirituality in Athens, five centuries before the birth of Christ.

Why did Plato include the raw, ungroomed confession of a young disciple, with all its embarrassing sexual overtones, in this refined dialogue full of learned speeches about love? This disciple, whose name was Alcibiades, was also an opportunistic politician who brought his city to the brink of catastrophe. Plato included his words because he wanted to show the power of the master over anyone and everyone, regardless of their social position or level of maturity.

But he also included it because he wanted to present in a dramatic way the three powerful tools of Socrates’ guidance. The first was intellectual confusion, the second was intense love, and the third was ethics. However drunk – both with wine and the intoxication of physical attraction to the elderly and homely Socrates – the disciple summarized the master’s teachings well: he said that Socrates was perplexing and confusing, but also that his ideas were full of goodness and that he taught everything one needed to become a truly good human being.

Today Socrates is considered the originator of the study of ethics, which explores the ins and outs of how to become a good human being, with the aim of climbing the ladder of love and rising to the level of divine immortal Beauty. He insisted upon ethics and purification as the foundation for spiritual ascent. Love without ethics can be destructive. Spirituality and religion without ethics become extremism or narcissism. All three – intellectual humility, intense love and ethics – are necessary if one is to become a doer of the Word, receptive to the divine gift of the Word and a humble follower of divine Love.

Masters throughout the ages have taught various methods for purifying the mind and elevating people’s ethics. They often prescribed a repetition, chant or incantation to occupy the constantly buzzing mind and allow the soul-energies to gain momentum. For satsangis, our Master provides simran, which is sweet to the lover due to its association with the Master who gave it. Every form of purification initially involves effort and pain, which only a genuine lover can endure. Kanra Ram Das encouragingly says,

Blessed is the Guru’s Word,
For with it one attains the Lord’s Nectar….
The words of the Master are sweet;
One gets nectar through them.¹⁸

Why do we not taste that sweetness? Some of us are like sick bees that have forgotten how to enjoy the flowers’ nectar. Like us, sick bees confuse nectar with poison. The Name has always sustained us, but we have been unaware of it, poisoned as we have been with the disease of ego. Now, however, the Lord’s nectar, the Name, can reside consciously in our spiritual heart:

The Master whispered the Lord’s Name in my ear;
It dwells inside my heart.¹⁹

We receive the Name through our physical ears, but the inner practice of simran starts opening our spiritual ears as well, and it transforms our consciousness. Like is attracted to like. The Name is inside, and so is our ability to enjoy its sweetness. As Samarth Ramdas says:

Listen to the signs of knowledge:
true knowledge is knowledge of the soul,
it is seeing our true Self –
the name for this is knowledge.²⁰

We know the soul only when we experience the Shabd because only the Shabd is like the soul; in fact, the soul is of the same essence as the Shabd. Both are eternal and imperishable:

What’s important is to know the Lord,
to recognize that true form.
Distinguish imperishable from perishable –
the name for this is knowledge.
Listen to the signs of pure knowledge:
that pure form is what we are.²¹

Yes, the Word is what we are – but this Word will attract the soul consciousness only when it is purified of poison. Just like Socrates, who cared so much for ethics, the Great Master wrote:

The first essential step to a spiritual life is character.… It is the duty of a devotee to keep constant watch over his mind and never let it loose. As a mother looks after her child, so does a true devotee watch his mind. ²²

He also wrote, “The Sound will attract a pure mind, which is free from passion’s dross [poison].”²³ He and all the Sant Mat Masters have always emphasized the importance of ethics, of being a good human being.

The Sant Mat vows are all about ethics and regaining the soul’s purity: living a pure ethical life in relation to other humans by treating them with respect, compassion and understanding; ethical treatment of animals by not killing them for food; and also an ethical relationship to ourselves by not drugging ourselves with substances that degrade our capacity to reason and to exercise the most essential feature of our humanity – discrimination. The fourth vow, to meditate daily for at least two and a half hours, ensures our ethical relationship with the Lord – not sinning against the Holy Ghost, the Word, which gave us our breath and which is our very essence.

As Baba Ji said recently, Sach Khand is a concept to us. The only reality for us now is the Master. The Master alone can lead us to the imperishable Word, the eternal Shabd that will truly liberate us from the bitter roller coaster of shifting Fortune, in which we are winner today, loser tomorrow.

With the Master’s nectar we are freed from the endless ups and downs that have kept us sick, confused, and ignorant of Truth and reality for so long. We become receptive to his grace, the only thing capable of moving us beyond the field of winning and losing, opinions and interpretations. He does whatever it takes to make us open and receptive to that inner reality that is already ours. We just have to realize it.

Through confusion, intense love and strict ethical guidelines, which are all gifts of his grace, we can come again into the fresh awareness of our true nature, which is all about enjoying the nectar of Nam, the Word that gave birth to us and which is our only hope for sweetness in this bitter, poisoned world.

Author’s Note: For the quotes from Plato I used the Loeb Classical Library volumes Apology, Vol. 1; Meno, Vol. 2; and Symposium, Vol. 3. I consulted the Greek for this article, first using my own translation in The Spiritual Guide, then modifying it further here.

Bible (King James Version), James 1:22
Ibid., 1:21
Guru Nanak, Adi Granth, p.1288, quoted in Sultan Bahu, p.111
Plato, Apology 21A
Apology 22D
Apology 21D, 23B
Apology 33B
Plato, Meno 82A
Apology 23A
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 175
Ibid., Letter 66
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 1999 (Bridge-Logos), p.17
Samarth Ramdas in Many Voices, One Song, pp.134–35
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 6th ed., p.347
Plato, Symposium 211C
Ibid., 215 D-E, cf. The Spiritual Guide, Vol. 1, p.313
Ibid., 202 E-203A
Guru Ram Das, in Philosphy of the Masters, Vol. V, 6th ed., p.344
Ibid., p.130
Samarth Ramdas in Many Voices, One Song, p.134
Ibid.
Spiritual Gems, Letter 177
Ibid.

Going to the Giver - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Going to the Giver

Maharaj Charan Singh often said that love is losing your own identity and becoming another being. In My Submission, Maharaj Sawan Singh says:

Love is a state of being consciously absorbed in the intimate and intense sweetness of the Beloved and is the ultimate objective of devotion. In this state the heart is saturated with the remembrance of the Beloved and the eye with the contemplation of his form.… Every pore of the body becomes a tongue to sing his praises.… Love is a constant and everlasting pull.¹

How many of us can really say that we have experienced such a state? Is the kind of love we feel for our Beloved constant? Is it everlasting? Is it true love?

Hazur gives us a simple yet profound criterion for true love: Once it comes, it never goes. If it goes, it is not true love.

In our present state, we sometimes feel that closeness, that love for the Master, for the path, for meditation. Yet at other times we feel completely empty, dry, and distant. Is love just a positive emotion that comes and goes? How can we find that true love that comes and never goes?

Naturally we try to look to the world to fill that need. We think that if we could just get some desire fulfilled or befriend so-and-so or have a new relationship, maybe that experience or person would be able to give us true love. We don’t realize that the other person is also expecting us to fulfil their need for love. As Hazur used to say: We can only give someone what we have; what we don’t have, we cannot give. So we’re like a beggar begging from another beggar, and so we set ourselves up for disappointment.

But the question remains: Where do we go to find true love? Guru Nanak brings us right to the point when he says, “Without the Name there is no love and affection.”² And Great Master also tells us, “God himself is Nam or Shabd, as he is love.” ³

So we must go to the giver of Nam, who is also the giver of love. If we want that Nam or Shabd, we must go to the true mystics, because the Lord himself has so ordained. But just by going to the Master, we won’t get it; just by our wanting it, we won’t get it. We will only get it when he wishes to give it to us.

In the meantime, we must go to the Master with an open mind, a sincere mind, like a child who goes to school and listens earnestly to his teacher. The child may just be learning the letters of the alphabet, but when he listens intently to the teacher’s lessons and does his homework, that becomes the basis of all the education he will receive throughout his entire life.

Saints teach us the ABC’s of love. Our alphabet is the simran given to us by the Master. We just have to sit and start the repetition. Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh says:

Just go on repeating the Holy Names as the small boys repeat “one, two, three, four.” Simran is a great force.⁴

Simran is the foundation.… There is hardly any limit to what can be achieved by proper and intensive simran.⁵

Our simran is similar to the prayers of the elderly man in the folktale who goes to church to pray but realizes that he has left his prayer book at home. Instead of going back, he decides to sit down and talk to God about the situation. He says: “God, I have forgotten my prayer book and without it I cannot pray, because my memory isn’t what it used to be. Let’s do it this way; how about I recite the alphabet and you fill in the words of the prayer?” ⁶

We have heard Baba Ji say something like: We can only do simran; everything else is the natural consequence of focused simran. So if we do just that, just recite the alphabet (simran), he fills in all the other components: the grace, the love, the devotion.

We do get frustrated and sometimes complain that the mind doesn’t sit still. But it is not our job to make the mind still. Our job is to do simran. It is the simran that has the power to still the mind, because it is infused with the power of the Giver. It is the Giver who gives us those words out of love for us. We can show our gratitude by using that gift, by ceaselessly repeating the simran, since that is the only thing that will gain us the pleasure of the Beloved.

We must do our job to invoke his grace and love. Love is a two-way street. When two people fall in love, they want to see each other all the time. How long will that that relationship last if one person stops showing up? Nobody likes to be stood up. We claim to be in love with the Master. He has been waiting for us at the eye centre, yet we stand him up time and again. If we want this relationship to last, as we proclaim, then we must show up and repeat our simran during meditation.

Great Master says:

The whole beauty, therefore, lies in the Word and its practice. Because the saints are rare and the Word cannot be had except from a living saint, … without the grasp of the Word there is no awakening of the soul, no victory over the mind and senses, no development of the positive qualities and no banishment of evil; the man, no matter how intellectual, remains an animal.⁷

Fundamentally, it is a matter of obedience. In most of the letters that Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to the Great Master, began by saying, “Radha Soami … to my obedient son, Babu Sawan Singh.” ⁸

Don’t we all want to be an obedient child? Great Master says, “Love is not the path of arguments, excuses and justifications.”⁹

Nor is it a path of analysis. We worry too much about whether we are making progress, whether we will get somewhere, when we will get there, etc. But Hazur says:

We shouldn’t worry much about progress or anything. We should go on giving our time to meditation, and attend to meditation with an absolutely relaxed mind, without any tension, without any excitement, and progress automatically goes on.¹⁰

He says don’t worry about anything, because the Saints tell us that whatever has to happen has already happened. This means that the seed of the action was sown before we were born, and the destiny is now set. No matter how much we worry about the events of our life, they will take place as destined. They do not require our attention for their unfolding, despite what we may think. Our attention is a precious commodity. Let’s not waste it on things that don’t matter. Let’s remember only what is important and forget everything else.

We tend to blame the world for taking our attention out. But we can turn off the world and turn on our simran just as we can turn a light switch on or off. Saints tell us that our attention can be preserved and held in its headquarters behind the eyes; we can regulate its outward and downward flow.

Saints impress on us a sense of urgency because we don’t have much time left. The countdown to death starts from the moment of our birth. Sardar Bahadur says: “Life is like an empty dream. There is nothing real about it. Just as a blossom does not last for long, so does not life.”¹¹

We are so shortsighted when it comes to matters of death. We don’t realize the end has arrived until it is right upon us. We are like someone holding a small candle in pitch darkness who can only see a few yards ahead. The moment of our death is coming closer everyday. In an instant this drama will be over. Saint Paltu says:

Why do you walk the earth so unwarily?
Listen to my warning!
Right behind you sits death,
Awaiting the contracted time….
O Paltu, like the morning dew on the grass,
your life will soon vanish into thin air.¹²

That’s why saints encourage us to go within now: to illuminate our inner selves so that we can see what lies ahead. We eliminate fear of the unknown by illuminating it with the Shabd’s light. Our physical body is given to us so that we can prepare for another state of existence. With regular meditation, we can learn what death means and also what lies beyond. Life becomes joyous, as the soul is liberated, rising on the power of Shabd. As Shams-e Tabrizi says:

What a blessing it would be
If you were one night to bring your soul
out of the body,
And, leaving this tomb behind,
Ascend to the skies within.
If your soul were to vacate your body,
You would be saved from the sword of Death:
You would enter a Garden that knows no autumn.¹³

Only through our daily simran and bhajan, by cleaning our vessel and holding it right side up, can we become worthy of receiving the gift of that constant and everlasting love and merge in him and become him.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, My Submission, pp.137,139
Ibid., p.141
Ibid.
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, p.188
Ibid., p.161
Source unknown
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 202
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters,7th ed.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, My Submission, p.140
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, 7th ed., p.269
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, 4th ed., p.106
Pt 1, Kundli 43, 47; quoted in Sant Paltu, 4th ed., p.104-05
Shams-e Tabrizi, quoted in Die to Live, 7th ed., p.25

Love - Bhakti - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Love - Bhakti

In Sar Bachan Poetry, Soami Ji Maharaj writes:

Listen, my friend, while I tell you
about the greatness of bhakti,
as explained by the Saints.
Know that this is the very path of the Masters,
and all other paths are false, misleading.
Without bhakti all are hollow, without substance,
like a husk without the seed.
Hold fast to bhakti, O ignorant one,
and give up all your ‘wise’ pursuits.
Call it devotion, adoration or love;
the three differ in name, not in form or essence.
Understand that Gurumat means bhakti and love,
and that every other path
is a contrivance of the mind.¹

In this poem Soami Ji tells us that bhakti – love and devotion – is the basis of the path of the Masters. Maharaj Charan Singh also says: “There is no spiritual practice greater than love. There is no law greater than love, and there is no goal beyond love. … In love the lover becomes one with the beloved.”² And Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh says:

If you have love, it’s good! If not, go ahead all the same and act on his instructions. As you continue to practice, love will grow. … The more you cultivate his love, the more you will love him, and this love will keep on growing.³

He says the “love will keep on growing.” Love is not limited. It is similar to a magnetic power that keeps drawing our attention toward the Lord. This pull we experience allows us to keep our attention heading in the right direction toward our goal, that of self-realization and eventually God-realization. At the time of our initiation we made a promise to the Master that we would give 10 percent of our time to meditation. But it turns out that Masters don’t want 10 percent. They want 100 percent. How can we limit love to a certain percentage of our heart or a certain percentage of our time? Love is not limited.

So the relationship of a Master and a disciple is one of love. The Masters express their love by creating an urgency in us to give ourselves to them. And how do we give ourselves to them? Through our meditation practice. In giving them our focused attention with love and devotion during our meditation, we are showing them how committed we are to our promise. When we sit in meditation every single day, we demonstrate our urgency and commitment.

In the life of the mystic Eknath, there is a story about how his Master created an urgency in him to meditate.

Eknath learned a lesson … from his guru, Janardhan. One day Janardhan asked Eknath to find a mistake of one pie (the smallest unit of currency at that time) in the account book. Eknath pored over the book all night, and finally he found the mistake before daybreak. He was elated. Quite proud of himself, he triumphantly showed his guru his finding. Janardhan said to Eknath, “How much effort and concentration it took you to find this one trivial mistake! Can you imagine how much more work it will take on your part to find God? You were thrilled at finding this one error. Can you imagine the joy you will feel at finding God?” On hearing this, Eknath realized that his feeble efforts at meditation so far were insignificant. After that, he spent much of his life in deep meditation and introspection.⁴

This was a major turning point in Eknath’s life. But why are masters so intent on encouraging us to practise meditation? It is because “Out of the practice will come love. Out of love will come Shabd.”⁵ And it is the Shabd that will help us reach our ultimate goal in life, to return home to the Father. If we are attached to the Shabd and Nam, the Shabd and Nam will pull us back to the level of the Father. Those who are attached to the Shabd by their meditation practice become intoxicated with love and devotion. As we are now, we may be in love with this creation. But in time, love of this creation will lead us to fall in love with the one who has created it. Once we attach ourselves to the Shabd within, all coverings of the creation will fade away, and we will see only the Lord in all that exists. That real love will stay and all other loves will evaporate.

In the next part of Soami Ji’s poem, he explains the form that real love takes:

Love is the essence of God and soul,
and true Name is the real form of bhakti.
Bhakti and the Lord are one and the same,
and the true Master is the real form of love.
In fact, your own real form is also love,
so you may accept all beings to be
of the same essence.
But you might discern one difference:
while some are drops,
others are waves of that love.
In some it appears as a sea of light while in others
it is called the fountainhead of all love.⁶

If we read about the life of any mystic, it’s nothing but a story of love – the love they have for their own Master and the love they have for their disciples, how they inspire and encourage them to come to a higher level of consciousness. The real Master is the Shabd, but contact with a Master at this level can uplift us and help to create this feeling of love and longing.

In The Spiritual Guide, we read how a Master (in Judaism called the tsadik) can influence those around him:

Like a ladder, the tsadik’s feet are set firmly on the ground as he participates in the ordinary life of the community, yet his spiritual consciousness is in the celestial realms. He is a link between those living in his own time and the heavenly reality. Through the tsadik, the grace of God descends to those on earth. Through him, those who yearn for spiritual realization can climb towards higher levels of consciousness.⁷

So Masters teach us by acting as a link or a ladder to a higher reality. They show us the way by being a light and inspiration to everyone. It is their love alone that shines through everything they say and do. But the Masters love with a humble detachment. Their sole purpose is to return to the Father all those souls marked for their return. The only universal law the Master serves is the universal law of love.

Masters come to help us to understand that we are all of the same essence – that of love. No one is better or worse than another. We are all brothers and sisters of the same Father. Thus, mystics come to this world to unite us, not to divide us. Soami Ji continues with the next verse by talking about the obstacles on the path. He says:

Desire defeats one person
while maya dominates another.
But there comes a stage where maya is diminished,
dissolved in the Ocean and purified by its grace.
At the Source there is no maya at all,
only love prevails there – nothing but love.
It is the great treasure house of love,
it has no beginning, no end.
No one except a Saint has access there –
Only a true Master makes it his home.⁸

It’s easy to complain about problems in life or obstacles on the path. But these problems may have their own role to play. Masters show us by their behaviour how we should live. They show us how to be happy and carefree in life regardless of our circumstances. They show us how to have the right balance, in which we can take life lightly while being serious about our commitment to meditation. If everything were perfect in our lives, perhaps we would never think about the Lord, and we would never try to find a Master or a spiritual path. We are also told by the Masters that achieving love and devotion is a gift from them. We can’t deserve it or earn it. It’s just a gift. This gift of love transforms us, and then our life takes us on a different course because of our coming in touch with a Master.

The poet Kahlil Gibran talks about the power of love, which can alter the direction of our lives, when he says: “Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”⁹

In conclusion, “Soami Ji says that the essential thing for all of [us]… is to go on increasing [our] love and gradually reach that place where the only thought that exists is of the Master. Until the Master becomes the sole object of [our] love, [our] work will not be complete.”¹⁰

Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.103
Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, #436
Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II, pp.130-131
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, The Spiritual Guide, Vol. I, p.67
Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II, p.120
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.103
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, The Spiritual Guide, Vol. I, pp.173-174
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.103
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Knopf, 1969), p. 13
Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II, p.131

The Purpose of Human Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Purpose of Human Life

Throughout all history humans have been trying to understand the meaning of life. At one time or another, most of us have wondered where we came from, why we are here, and where we will go after death. This search for the purpose of life distinguishes humans from every other species. In every age there are those who have a special insight into these questions. These mystics or saints understand who we really are and what our real purpose is.

As Soami Ji says:

Soul, who are you?
Where have you come from?...
The mind has created worldly entanglements –
why have you strayed into this net?
You are a child of Sat Purush, the true Lord,
and once you were a resident of the eternal home.…
Through the Master’s grace
and the company of realized souls,
reverse your direction
and you will reach your home.
Listen to the Boundless Shabd within.
Radha Soami has said this for you to understand.¹

In these verses, Soami Ji tells that we are not who we think we are. We are not limited beings defined by race, gender, wealth, and the hundred and one parameters we use to define ourselves. He says, “You are a child of Sat Purush, the true Lord, and once you were a resident of the eternal home.” The Saints remind us of our legacy. They clearly and unequivocally tell us that it’s just an illusion that we are limited beings. And it’s just an illusion that we are separate from one another. Our real self is a particle of the eternal and ultimate reality, and when we realize that, we will understand that we are all one.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh says: “When we belong to him who belongs to everybody, we then also belong to everybody.”²

The world may tell us that we have no value, but the saints tell us the opposite. They talk about our potential and show us how to realize that potential. As Mark Twain reportedly advised a young girl in the early twentieth century: “Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”³

That’s what the saints do. Their purpose in coming here is not to be worshipped but to encourage us to seek and experience the divine within ourselves. They tell us about our divine potential and show us how to realize the spirit within ourselves.

Saints say that we have been in this world for ages. We have experienced what this world has to offer. We know what it is like to be healthy and sick, rich and poor, powerful and powerless. We have done both good and evil deeds and had them done to us. We have done it all, repeatedly. Now in this life we can take a different path. We can move in an inner direction. And we can do this only as humans.

Yet, even after getting initiation, we sometimes get sidetracked and forget our purpose. It’s so easy to get caught up in the problems of the world. So many things happen that are not to our liking – in the realms of politics, health, finances, family. We get very upset by these things. But masters tell us that a satsangi should take the world lightly. We can take action when action is called for, but the trick is not to let these things penetrate our hearts. If we do, we will forget our purpose in life. Hazur used to remind us that if we allow every problem in life to be the size of the Himalayas, then how will we be able to concentrate and meditate?

Masters understand the obstacles that lie in the way of our realizing our potential. To repeat what Soami Ji advised us: “The mind has created worldly entanglements – why have you strayed into this net?” He calls the world a net that entraps us.

Many of the problems we experience in life happen because of two reasons: We act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting. We act without thinking when we get so entangled in the world that we just react as others do. We mindlessly follow the crowd and incur karmas that further entrap us.

In the book “What Is God?” the philosopher Jacob Needleman discusses this passive approach to life: “We constantly disappear into our emotional reactions.We do not live our lives; we are lived and we may die without ever having awakened to what we really are – without having lived.”⁴

When we just mindlessly react and follow the crowd, before we know it our life is over and we have wasted a precious opportunity. Equally problematic is thinking without acting, as when we receive initiation but then fail to put our heart into our meditation; we don’t put the teachings into practice.

To achieve our purpose in life, our actions need to be consistent with our desire to find the truth, and the Master shows us how to do this. As Soami Ji says in the poem quoted above: “Through the Master’s grace and the company of realized souls, reverse your direction and you will reach your home.”

It is only a true Master who can help us to reverse our direction – from outward to inward. This reversing of our direction is extremely important, much more vital than we realize and no small achievement.

Hazur Maharaj Charan once responded to a questioner this way: “Meditation means that we are training our mind to go inward and upward.... To create that tendency in the mind is the purpose of meditation.” The exchange continued:

Q: I know you say we shouldn’t expect results, but what part do results play?
Master: Results come and go. Often you may not see anything within, but you feel so happy, so contented, so at peace within yourself – you feel detached from everything.

Q: And that is enough at the time of death to take us up?
Master: That is more than enough. Because your tendency is not toward the creation now.⁵

Reversing the direction of our attention is so important that Hazur used to call this the real miracle in the life of a disciple:

What more important miracle can come in a disciple’s life than that his whole attitude to life is changed?... People who were running after worldly things and worldly desires don’t want to look at them anymore.… Day and night they are filled with love and devotion for the Father. What more of a miracle can a disciple have than this? His whole approach to life changes.⁶

Elsewhere Hazur says:

Mystics come to give their teachings, to change our attitude and approach to life. Their main purpose is to detach us from this creation and to attach us to the Creator. That is the miracle they perform. And this miracle is individual with every disciple. He feels that miracle within himself.⁷

Just as Soami Ji advises us to “listen to the Boundless Shabd within,” all the Masters emphasize that we need to meditate on Nam. We know from the teachings of the saints that the boundless Shabd is within us, but the process of coming to the level of that Shabd can seem like the work of a lifetime or many lifetimes. So, when the goal seems so far away, how do we avoid abandoning our purpose? One step is to realize where we’ve come from during our journey in this world.

There is a relevant story from a Buddhist text:

Many years ago a traveler developed a great thirst. Fortunately he came upon a wooden conduit with clear water running through it. He drank until he was satisfied and, when he was done, he held up his hand and said to the running water, “I am finished drinking now. Water, stop running at once.” Though he had spoken these words, the water went on running. When the man saw this he became very angry….

People are like this. They develop a great thirst in the realm of birth and death and therefore, they drink the bitter water of the five senses. Then, in time, they grow weary of these desires and, like the man who drank his fill, they say, “You forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and things I have touched, I demand that you no longer appear to me.”⁸

As satsangis, we may wish to no longer feel the pull of the world. But it’s not so simple. Just getting initiated doesn’t remove our desires and attachments. We have so much previous association with lower species and have incurred so much karma over many lifetimes. A change in direction from outward to inward requires that we rise to a higher level.

Just putting in sincere effort on the path gives us a profound sense of satisfaction, even if our effort seems to produce no tangible results. What happens when we work hard on something that is really important to us – something that ties into our core values? We feel happy. Conversely, if we work hard on something that is not important to us, we feel uneasy – we find it unnatural. Even if we succeed in something that is not important to us, we don’t feel so good about it. So, if we establish our priorities and then we focus on achieving them, the effort we put into those high-priority items is valuable. If we are practising and working hard on something that is a high priority for us, just that effort alone will give us enough happiness to sustain us.

In his book What Is God, Needleman asks, “What, after all, is the meaning of my own human life if I live without the yearning for ‘what the religions call God’?”⁹ If we abandon the search for truth, life has no meaning. We might as well have been born as animals.

Our Master has specifically and repeatedly asked us to do our meditation. He wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t important. That makes meditation meaningful to us.

Progress on the path is reflected in and strengthened by a positive attitude – and an attitude of accepting his will and having a grateful heart. He will take us as and when he likes. The results of our efforts are not in our hands. As Soami Ji has written: “Put your faith in the Lord’s will, not in your labour, not in your effort.”¹⁰

One action the Masters tell us we can take is simran. Perhaps we are not yet experiencing the boundless Shabd. That’s not in our hands, but we can do simran. These are words that we can repeat, just as we repeat words of the world. Soami Ji tells us to “turn the rosary of your mind with simran”¹¹ and, according to Maharaj Sawan Singh:

By simran alone the soul leaves the body and goes up…. When the simran is complete, one hears the sound within. If you can vacate (withdraw the current from) even half the body, you will see light inside.¹²

This meditation is not something to be done with half a heart. This is a path of love. It is a path of forgetting ourselves and letting go of the world. Following this path is the purpose of our life. Great Master urges us to give it our best effort:

Reach your eternal spiritual home in Sach Khand so that your wanderings in the worlds of mind and matter may end. Do it now, while alive. This is the purpose of human life. Love, faith, and perseverance make the Path easy and possible to attain the unattainable.¹³

Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.115
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #589
Website www.quoteinvestigator.com
Jacob Needleman, What Is God? (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010), ch. 19
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol.I, # 272, p. 217
Ibid., Vol. III, #539
Ibid., #536
K. Tanahashi & P. Levitt, A Flock of Fools: Ancient Buddhist Tales of Wisdom and Laughter from the OneHundred Parable Sutra.(Grov/Atlantice Press, 2004), “The Wooden Conduit”
Jacob Needleman, What Is God (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010), p.224
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), p. 315
Ibid, p.243
Spiritual Gems, letter 9, p.15
Ibid, letter 89, p.121

Dera’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Dera’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

At a time when the entire world is in the grip of the terrible coronavirus pandemic, and as fear and anxiety flow through the whole of humanity, it is only natural that people look for effective and compassionate leadership to provide hope and a practical course of action to steer them through the “ocean of fear and dread.”

In February 2020, in order to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, Baba Ji cancelled the scheduled satsang programs in India, including the March satsangs at the Dera. He returned to Dera and under his guidance, Dera systematically shut down all non-essential departments and activities. By the end of March only essential services and activities remained operational.

For a time, satsang was still held at the Mand pandal, but attendees were seated one metre apart. Baba Ji sometimes came for darshan during the week, but not on the weekends as this would draw large crowds. Those living outside Dera were requested not to come to Dera and those who did come were given health checks at the gates before entering.

In mid-March, the Indian government implemented a 21-day national lockdown and stay-at-home policy. Dera gates were closed to almost everyone. Dera residents were asked not to leave Dera. Family members living in other cities were asked not to come, in an effort to control the possible spread of infections. Dependent school-age children staying in boarding schools outside of Dera could come and stay with their parents but were asked to home quarantine on arrival.

Many people do not realize that the majority of seva done in Dera is carried out by jatha sevadars, temporary sevadars who come from Punjab and other places around India for fixed periods, usually lasting from one week to one month. They are the backbone that keeps all the Dera services running. This mandatory lockdown would stop the flow of these sevadars and thus would put a tremendous strain on the Dera’s resident sevadars. So just before the lockdown took effect, jatha sevadars were asked if they could commit to staying for a month in order to do seva. This way they would not have to come and go but would stay in Dera accommodations, and their food and other necessities would be provided. Many chose to stay, which is how the Dera is still managing to provide all its necessary services.

Due to the coronavirus problem, the master took the unprecedented decision to stop the daily morning satsangs at the pandal. Since people could not enter or leave Dera, and those in Dera needed to maintain a safe distance from others, the satsang on the pandal was replaced by a telecast satsang over Dera’s internal CCTV cable TV network. Shabds are sung for 15 minutes, followed by the satsang, delivered by one of the regular Punjabi satsang kartas (speakers). So, in the comfort and safety of their own homes, Dera residents now have satsang every morning via their television.

Because of the limited number of sevadars, and the reduced size of the total sangat in Dera, certain sevas have been curtailed. Food service normally utilizes many sevadars. With the reduced sangat, some food outlets have been closed and consolidated. Dera residents are encouraged to cook at home. The bhojan bhandar is still open for those who cannot prepare their own meals. Non-essential Dera departments and activities such as book restoration, archives, BAV, and other departments were curtailed. Departments were told to run with a skeletal staff and were asked to give up sevadars that could be utilized elsewhere.

As the national lockdown took effect, news stories from all over India showed the devastating consequences the lockdown was having on many factory workers, labourers, and daily wage workers. Living hand to mouth, the lack of work meant they had no money to buy food. This also affected many villages around Dera, where many daily wage labourers reside.

Baba Ji quickly mobilized Dera sevadars to prepare meal packets for delivery to the surrounding villages. Everyone not fully occupied in their departments has been asked to help in preparing the meal packets. It is like a war effort. Under Baba Ji’s guidance, sevadars assemble every day to prepare the packed meals in shifts, starting at 3:00 AM. Before entering the hall where the meals are prepared, their temperature is taken and their hands sanitized. Strict attention is paid to the health and safety of the sevadars preparing the food, as well as the hygiene of the food itself. Those preparing the food wear caps or scarves so that that their hair is covered; they are provided with face masks and disposable gloves to ensure sanitary working conditions. They wash their hands or sanitize them frequently. Ladies are told to trim their nails short, and not to wear nail polish, henna, or rings on their fingers. The sevadars prepare three meals a day for delivery at 6:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. Some sevadars go early in the morning to help before satsang or before reporting to their regular duties. It is an almost round-the-clock operation.

Preparing the packed meals is a two-part process. First is the cooking of the multi-grain rotis (flatbread), most of which are prepared using a mechanized system that rolls out the dough and cuts it into circles. There is also a team rolling out the rotis by hand. Every hour, 25,000 rotis can be produced. The rotis are then deep fried, and made into traditional puris. Sevadars prepare lemon pickle to serve with the puris. Alternatively, meals with rice will be prepared. Each food packet provides a substantial, nutritious meal.

Then comes the packing. Seated on low stools in long rows at stainless-steel tables, sevadars form a makeshift assembly line. One team takes the plastic bags, opens them, and folds back their tops for rapid and easy access by the food packers. Three puris and lemon pickle are put into each bag. The completed bags are then given to other sevadars who seal them.

Even the schoolchildren from Pathseekers School are involved. Some help prepare the rotis with great focus and single-mindedness. Others help pack the meals into cartons for delivery to the villages. It is wonderful to see these strong young teenagers, who would otherwise be engaged in sports or other activities, working so assiduously in the master’s work. After the meals are packed into the cartons, they are brought by truck to the Dera gates. To maintain an effective quarantine within Dera, representatives from the villages pick up the food at the gate, placing it into their own vehicles for distribution back in their villages.

Baba Ji has been visiting the seva area every day, touring the entire facility at Dera as well as facilities in other areas of Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, and Haryana, to see that the work is going on properly and to give darshan to the sevadars. The sevadars anticipate his visits with great enthusiasm, spurred on to continue their work even more happily in the supercharged atmosphere. In private, Baba Ji expressed his great pleasure with the unbounded generosity, love, and joy of the sevadars in helping their fellow brothers and sisters. He said:

I haven’t seen so much love of the sevadars – they are so happy in doing the seva and being part of the large chain in helping humanity. There is no department where we are lacking in volunteers. Everybody is coming on their own – housewives, teachers, engineers – everybody has joined in to prepare packed lunches to be sent outside.

How does Dera have enough food for this effort, at a time when transportation and deliveries have been curtailed throughout India? Baba Ji said that Dera always has enough stock for two of the 3-week satsang periods. Because the February and March satsangs at Dera were cancelled, there is sufficient food. Currently more than 100,000 packed meals are being prepared daily.

In India, millions of people travel from their homes to the cities where work is available. Now, with the almost-complete national lockdown, factories and businesses are closed. Trains and buses have been cancelled, and the situation throughout India has become dire. India’s vast migrant labour force is being forced to leave the cities and return to their homes on foot. They have little or no money and are unable to get food, medicine, or water for their journey. There are reports and news videos of countless numbers of people walking hundreds of miles to reach their distant homes.

Baba Ji has directed sevadars at satsang centres throughout India to prepare packed meals and offer shelter for these migrant workers making the journey home on foot. As of March 31, in the state of Haryana alone, more than 16,000 migrant labourers have been lodged and fed at Radha Soami Satsang facilities. In Yamunanagar, a large city in Haryana, in coordination with local police and administrative officials, people are being brought by bus to the satsang centres, where they will stay for two weeks until furthers orders are received from the government. People arriving at these locations are being examined by a team of doctors.

A video from a Delhi television news station showed the large operation of langar sevadars at the Chattarpur Centre preparing packed meals for these migrant labourers. They are given a substantial meal which may consist of rice, puri, pickle, potatoes, vegetables, or chickpea curry. The video news reporter commented on the hygiene of the kitchen, the frequent cleaning, and the fact that the sevadars were wearing masks.

Baba Ji has authorized that 8 crore rupees (approx. US $1 million) be sent to the States’ Chief Minister’s Relief Funds as well as to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. So far, two crore rupees have been given to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and one crore rupees each has been given to the Chief Minister Relief Funds of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, and Rajasthan. The same amount of one crore was given to the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir.

RSSB facilities all over India have been offered to local governments to help with their efforts and to prepare meals. As of now, food distribution is going on regularly in over 50 centres in many districts of Punjab and Haryana, as well as Uttarkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and other states. If need be, Baba Ji said, some centres that have large enough sheds could create isolation wards. In such instances, the patients would also be cared for and fed. As of 31 March 2020, approximately 560,000 food packets in total are being served daily by satsang centres all over the country. In a televised interview on March 31 with Prime Minister Modi, Baba Ji offered the full support of Radha Soami Satsang Beas for any and all needs of the Indian populace, including shelter and food.

Baba Ji has given the Dera’s residents and satsangis throughout India a way to channel their love for the master into practical help for their brothers and sisters undergoing this difficult period. Through his love, compassion, and practical guidance, the master can transform a dire situation into a transformative experience of love, gratitude, and personal fulfillment. As Hazur Maharaj Ji once said:

“The greatest reward in seva is the contentment and happiness that you feel within, that you get an opportunity to serve someone.”

The Coronavirus and Karma Theory - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Coronavirus and Karma Theory

The coronavirus pandemic is one of “nature’s responses” to our ignoring the current ecological crisis, Pope Francis said in a recent interview:

We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods? I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses.¹

Certainly, the virus is a reminder of the age-old saying, As you sow so shall you reap, or, Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The theory of karma has come vividly to life in this pandemic.

Could it be that our environment is an extension of our actions: peaceful and tranquil if our actions are positive and loving; full of strife and suffering if our actions are negative and destructive?

In the last fifty years our conversations have become more and more disturbing: global warming and climate change, melting glaciers, cities flooded by rising oceans, rivers either drying up or flowing at half their capacity, water wars, vanishing and near-extinct animal and plant species. A global wildlife trade worth billions of dollars, combined with intensified agriculture, deforestation, and urbanization, have brought people and animals closer together, creating greater opportunity for animal viruses to leap to humans: HIV, Ebola, SARS, MERS, now Covid-19, and many more.²

But nature does not harm itself: animals don’t kill themselves, rivers don’t dry up because of their own doing, vast swaths of forests don’t denude themselves, and diseases don’t jump from animals to humans for no reason.

According to scientists, animals are not the problem: we are. Perhaps now is the time to face our own role in the terrifying drama playing out around the world. Are we pushing the balance of nature to its limits? Is this some kind of karma for which we all must take responsibility?

Most of us don’t believe we are directly responsible for causing this misery, perhaps because our conditioning is so strong that it clouds our judgment. We say we believe in God, that this world is God’s creation, that life in any form, from the smallest to the largest, is God-given. If that is true, we must face whether and how we are harming his creation. Are we causing fear, strife, pain, and disrespect to God’s creatures?

According to some estimates, more than 200 million land animals are killed for food around the world every day – that's 72 billion every year. Including wild caught and farmed fish, we get a total closer to 3 billion killed every day, which adds up to 1.1 trillion animals killed each year.³

It suits us to look the other way. After all, we are not the ones killing all those animals – other people are doing that. But if those animals end up as food on our plates, if they are being slaughtered for us, then we are responsible. The same is true for all the other environmental damage being done to satisfy our demands.

One could say that karma and corona are both viruses – one the cause, the other the effect. Actions have consequences; the law of karma is clear about that. By hunting or farming animals and fish to satisfy our palate, we have created karma that must be accounted for. Who is to say that the coronavirus is not one of those consequences, as the Pope has pointed out?

Perhaps Mother Nature is reminding us to slow down – in our everyday lives and our collective rates of production and consumption; to think how little we need to live a simple life; to bring back the love, care, and warmth that we have forgotten in our race to amass all that does not really matter.

Perhaps we are being reminded to love and respect God’s creation, for it provides us with unlimited abundance, regardless of our religion, country, language, colour, creed, position, or wealth. To contemplate his gifts is truly humbling.

Perhaps we can use this pandemic to help us appreciate nature and one another more, to be more giving, more caring, more loving.

Perhaps the karma we are all undergoing is a plea for us to be more humble – to be better human beings.

Perhaps we are being told of a tomorrow that we can make better than our yesterday.

One Spiritual Family - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

One Spiritual Family

The Fatherhood of God – The Brotherhood of Man

Sant Mat means ‘teachings of the saints.’ By ‘saint’ is meant a spiritual adept, one who has experienced union with the divine. These saints or masters teach a path of God-realization which has existed from the beginning of time and has been described through the ages in many different ways.

As modern technology and international mobility make our planet increasingly small, we frequently encounter religions and cultures foreign to our own. Now more than ever, we are able to appreciate the relativity of our own traditions and historical perspectives, even as the leaders of the great world religions reach out through ecumenical movements to identify and acknowledge their common ground.

Sant Mat concerns itself with this common ground which is the spiritual heart, or heritage, of every great religion. Spiritual masters come for this one purpose only: to reveal to the world this common heritage which links all humanity within God’s love. By experiencing the oneness of God within us, we can experience for ourselves that we are all part of one spiritual family.

The root of the word “religion” is “re-ligare,” which means “to bind back.” The true purpose of all religions is to bind back, or reunite, each individual soul with God. Problems come when saints, the great teachers of reality, die. Their followers formalize their teachings in an effort to conserve them, or to gain personal power and prestige. This is how separate religions are born, as the simple common foundations are developed into complex edifices, shaped and coloured by the historical and geographical conditions of the time. Issues of power and wealth gain precedence, and the original teachings become obscured. Spiritual practice is relegated to second place while maintaining the organizational status quo becomes paramount. Soon we find one religion setting itself against another, and man killing his fellow man in the name of God.

Yet if God is one and he is our Father, then we are all his children, a fellowship of humanity. This is what the great saints of all religions teach: There is one God for all humanity, although he is known by a multitude of names. Whether we refer to him as God, Khuda, Wahiguru, Ram, Lord, or by any other name, we are speaking of the same, supreme, omniscient, and omnipotent Being.

Saints teach that God, undifferentiated and one, through his own power, projects himself and creates and sustains the creation. This dynamic power of God is also known by many different names. In Christianity it is the Word, the Holy Ghost; in Judaism, the Word, the Name, the Holy Spirit; in Chinese philosophy, the Tao; in Islam, it is the Kalma; in Indian philosophy, the Shabd, the Word, the Unspoken Language. Each religion, differing in time and place, has described the same power with different words. Saints tell us that each and every living being is imbued with this power. When we refer to the soul within any being, it is to this power that we are referring.

Since every living creature is enlivened by a power which is the projection of God himself, so everything that lives is in essence a part of him. Conversely, the supreme Being is immanent and present within every living creature. The soul is nothing other than pure spirit; but to function in the worlds of mind and matter, it is endowed with various coverings which conceal its true nature, and it becomes subject to the fundamental dynamics of the creation, the law of cause and effect. This is a law of perfect justice by which all action in the creation must be compensated – thus we live in an invisible prison of debts and credits. The soul, knotted to its covering of mind, is born again and again in different forms to settle this account.

Of all the creatures in the universe, only human beings are self-conscious. But as we live out our daily lives in the physical creation, our essential nature remains hidden, concealed by mind and matter, like a bright and shining light wrapped in many layers of black cloth. Thus, in spite of having the attribute of self-consciousness, most of us remain blind to our true selves.

It is only when we finally meet a saint or master that a soul can rise above this level of duality, of action and reaction, reward and punishment, and discover its true spiritual nature. It is this divine essence within us that is permanent and not subject to the law of justice. Masters have the power to awaken us to the divine spirit within, by acting as a mirror to our soul and reflecting our pure essence to ourselves in spite of the dense coverings that obscure it. They explain the technique of discovering God within the body and teach a practical method of internal prayer, or meditation. Meditation enables the practitioner to still the mind by withdrawing the soul currents from the outside world and concentrating them instead at the eye-centre, the spiritual heart. Once the mind is absolutely focused at this point, he or she becomes conscious of God.

Sant Mat is not related to any race, nation, community, cult, or sect of any kind. Despite the relatively large numbers of people practicing this way of life, it remains a personal, private bond between each individual and God. The teachings have no bearing on the external aspects of life, other than the requirements that a practitioner be at least twenty-two years old, lead a moral life, abstain from all alcohol, tobacco products, and mind-altering drugs, maintain a lacto-vegetarian diet, and give time daily to spiritual practice. Masters do not require anyone to change his or her religion, they never charge fees, and they unfailingly support themselves from their own earnings. They teach us how to nurture the spiritual dimension of life while fulfilling our family and social responsibilities. In doing so, we expand our spiritual horizons and experience for ourselves that divine spirit which enlivens the entire universe. We receive internal proof that we are indeed all children of the same God.

Advice from the Masters in Times of Upheaval Download | Print

Advice from the Masters in Times of Upheaval

Humanity has faced catastrophes, both natural and man-made, for as long as there has been life on this earth, which, saints remind us, has never been and never will be a paradise. In each instance of heartache and pain—be it earthquake, floods, war, or illness —the Master of that time has provided comfort, reassurance, and loving guidance. He has reminded us of the Lord’s love for us, his constant presence within us, and the importance of doing our meditation to contact him there so that we can escape from this “ocean of dread” and return to our true home. The Master is our lodestar: we turn to him for comfort, love, and inspiration, and he always provides it, with profound spiritual insight into the workings of the Lord, destiny, and the ephemeral cycles of this material world.

In this time of extreme instability and fear, we are fortunate to have access to Sant Mat literature and other writings of the saints, which are filled to overflowing with their penetrating wisdom—both worldly and spiritual—articulate advice, and loving encouragement. A sampling in the following letters from saints past and present reminds us that we need not worry. The Master is our companion now and forever, and, in the words of Great Master, “He who has been connected with the Word cannot go amiss in catastrophe or peace.”

Spiritual Gems is a compilation of letters to European and American disciples and seekers during the momentous period between 1919 and 1948, which was filled with heinous crimes against humanity, economic devastation, political instability, and fear of worldwide nuclear destruction. In Letter 72, Hazur Maharaj Sawan Singh reminds us that karmic law is supreme—only our destiny dictates what suffering we will undergo, not world events. All that is created is subject to change and decay; we should worry only about seeking the Master within and direct all our effort and attention to uniting with him inside—only then will we find lasting peace and safety.

The Karmic Law is supreme on the material and the mind planes, and nothing happens of its own accord, spontaneously, so to say. The law governs the planes; therefore, no haphazard happening of events takes place anywhere, whether the events are of microscopic or astronomical dimensions. In peace and in cataclysms or catastrophes, only they suffer who are destined to suffer.

All that has been created is bound to change and decay. There is dissolution of earth, planets, sun and stars but at very long intervals—too long for human conception. … Who can say how often this dissolution has been repeated? Only He who creates, knows it. Suffice it to say that for human beings sitting outside the eye center, the time is infinitely long since the creation came into being and when it will disappear again.

So there is nothing to worry about the next war or the atom bomb; this very kind of loose, vague talk was indulged in during and at the end of Great War I, and is also indulged in after floods, earthquakes, famines, and plagues. The worry should be about one’s entry into the eye center and meeting the Radiant Form of the Master, so that the Master is our companion, on whom reliance can be placed here and hereafter. He who has been connected with the Word cannot go amiss in catastrophe or peace. He has a place to go to, goes there, and is not lost.
_{Hazur Maharaj Sawan Singh}

Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh also tells us that we need not worry or fret about anything, because our destiny is pre-ordained. He writes in Science of the Soul (“Spiritual Bouquet,” Number 99): “Old age, health, poverty, richness, sickness, disease, wealth, learning, honour, dishonour and time of death are all pre-ordained while a man is in the womb of his mother. So a wise man never worries or frets or regrets anything.”

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh repeats those themes in Letter 233 in Quest for Light, another compilation of excerpts from letters to disciples and seekers, written between 1965 and 1971. During this politically and socially tumultuous period of political, racial, and generational division and unrest, Hazur reminds us “that this world has never been a paradise to live in, nor will it ever be so.” In the face of karmic law, where is so-called injustice? He advises us to escape from the cycle of birth and death once and for all and to follow the advice of saints, who “not only give us the key to return to our true home of eternal bliss, but also help and guide us on the way back to this blissful abode from which we need never return to this world.” Hazur encourages us to continue with our meditation and not dwell on worldly conditions and events, because “everything is happening as the Lord wants it to happen.”

You seem to be greatly upset by the political happenings in your country. I might tell you that this world has never been a paradise to live in nor will it ever be so. We look on the happenings in this world with our limited vision and therefore find much so-called injustice. In reality, everyone is undergoing his own karma—receiving reward or punishment for his own actions in past lives or even in this one. The Creator never rewards or punishes one without a cause. “As you sow, so shall you reap” is the unalterable law of this universe, and no one can change it. In the face of this law, who is to blame?

Moreover, when has the world been a happy place to live in? Read the history of the world of the past and you will find that this killing and slaughter has been the rule. Even in so-called peaceful times, how much suffering we find in this world in the form of mental and physical ills, cruelty, murder and other crimes. It is for these very reasons that the saints tell us to leave this “ocean of dread” forever and to get out of this cycle of births and deaths. They not only give us the key to return to our true home of eternal bliss, but also help and guide us on the way back to this blissful abode from which we need never return to this world.

Everything is happening as the Lord wants it to happen. Not a leaf can stir without his command. No man can change the course of nature. How then can a few men, howsoever good-intentioned they may be, stem the tide of a torrent which flows in all its fury? It is best to leave these things as they are and let them take their natural course. Saints never interfere in worldly conditions, which are all going on according to the plan of the Creator. They tell us to rise above all this and eventually escape from this world of fury through meditation, while living a normal life and performing all our worldly duties.

Continue with your meditation with love and devotion and do not attach your mind to the happenings in the world by dwelling on them. It would serve no useful purpose and would only retard your spiritual progress if you permitted yourself to get involved, no matter how good your intentions may be.
_{Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh}

Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington DC, Baba Ji empathized with the American sangat trying to cope with the trauma of that catastrophe. “Such catastrophic events … test us to the extremes of our humanity,” he wrote. “They demand that we go to the deepest levels of faith, trust, and generosity of spirit if we are to endure them without losing our balance.” Surely that same advice applies to us now during the current coronavirus pandemic. Baba Ji urged us to help and support one another, to have courage, and “to show fortitude in the face of unpredictability and fear.” Only love can take us beyond terror and pain, Baba Ji wrote, adding that God’s love “is far greater than anything we can see.”

After the terrifying earthquake and tsunami in Japan in Spring 2011, Baba Ji again empathized with all those affected, and praised the humanity shown by the Japanese people in their offer of support and comfort to one another. He reminded us of the real purpose of life: “to regain our conscious contact, through our meditation, with the Shabd within.” It is our meditation alone that can truly help us, he said, and urged us to continue our spiritual practice with renewed commitment.

Radha Soami! Everyone here at Dera and throughout the world is aware of the tragedy which has taken place in Japan. The destruction and misery on such a large scale is unimaginable. Our hearts go out to everyone affected. To their credit the Japanese people have met this tragedy with grace and dignity. Even when faced with personal loss they have given comfort and help to others, never losing their sense of humanity. Their exemplary behaviour is an example for all of us. It is my hope that our sangat in Japan has not been too adversely affected by these events. We pray to the Lord that the worst is over and life for so many people can quickly return to some semblance of normalcy. Our life in this world is short and uncertain. We need to stay ever vigilant and keep focused on the real purpose of life; to regain our conscious contact, through our meditation, with the Shabd within. With our efforts in meditation, and with His love and grace, we can secure our transition from this world of pain and suffering to an eternity of bliss and happiness. Never lose faith in the Lord's love and compassion. It is our meditation alone that will be of any real help to us, nothing else provides any lasting benefit. In the face of these recent events, please continue your spiritual practice with a renewed sense of purpose and commitment.

With love and affection,
Yours sincerely,
G.S. Dhillon

Finally, the Masters provide us with practical as well as spiritual advice, consistent with Sant Mat’s insistence on our obeying the laws of our respective countries and being good citizens as well as good human beings. Baba Ji’s compassionate letter to the global sangat (see below) not only takes responsibility for doing the right thing by temporarily cancelling satsangs, but also urges us to show restraint, support, and sensitivity in our own behaviour to fulfil our social responsibilities.

Radha Soami Ji
We are extremely saddened that we will not be seeing our beloved brothers and sisters at the Dera this session. Whilst we appreciate the love of the sangat and their desire to visit Dera, keeping in view the current situation and the health concerns, it has been decided to cancel all Satsangs in the months of March and April. We need to stand with all our brothers and sisters at this crucial time and show our support and sensitivity by fulfilling our social responsibilities. Therefore all are requested to comply and follow the directions to stay where they reside. Please exercise extreme caution where your health is concerned and restrain from any travel that is not absolutely necessary.

Humbly seeking your cooperation.
Loving regards,
G.S. Dhillon

We are fortunate to have the compassionate guidance of a true Master during this frightening phase of our brief sojourn here on earth. Let us take his advice to heart and attend to the divine presence within us all, while offering comfort, kindness, and support to one another. As Great Master wrote, “He who has been connected with the Word … has a place to go to, goes there, and is not lost.”

The Magic of Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Magic of Life

We should appreciate the gifts from the Lord; we are receiving so much more than we deserve. Baba Ji repeatedly emphasizes this point when disciples ask for grace, or for more grace than they feel they have received or deserve. He reminds us that we don’t have to ask the Lord for anything. Everything we need has already been given to us. The only prayer we should offer is not one of petition, but one of thanks. Expressing our gratitude is to become a way of life, taking us to the core of our spiritual being – bringing with it a deeper awareness of the divine, which is surrounding us in an endless multiplicity of forms.

There is a mysterious connectedness between us and all of life, of which we become increasingly aware as we get engaged in building that relationship with the divine. In the downward journey of the soul from its divine origin deep into the creation, this relationship has gotten lost. Once the soul becomes homeward bound, though, this relationship is slowly being restored. Life takes on a sheen, filling it with a sense of spirituality, a feeling of homecoming. We begin to feel at home in another dimension, in the spiritual dimension.

That spiritual reality fills us with a sense of presence of the divine. For a disciple of a living master, this is closely bound up with his relationship with that master. The living master will always refer to himself as a servant of the Lord, as a spiritual teacher, or a spiritual guide. In all of these capacities he is a source of inspiration, pointing the way to our destination, deepening our understanding of spirituality. He indefatigably gives out the teachings, which you come to love, because on this earthly domain it is probably the closest we can get to the Truth. A seeker on the path of God-realization, whose being is suffused with longing for the divine, experiences these teachings as balm for his soul. It is not the words but what is behind the words that catches his full attention – invisible to outer ears and eyes, to be experienced within. Tasting something of an inner sweetness, which goes way beyond words, the seeker finds himself more and more at home in his inner sanctuary. It’s like coming face to face with the sacredness of life, being filled with a sense of awe and wonder.

In A Treasury of Mystic Terms, Volume 9, which concerns spiritual guides and practitioners, there are some fascinating descriptions of the practices of Native American holy men. In contemporary times, nearly all traces of this ancient wisdom tradition have been wiped out, yet certain aspects of this precious spiritual legacy have been preserved. Fools Crow, a Lakota holy man, gives the following account:

The old holy man and other medicine people had taught me that the more time you spend [on concentration] and the deeper you go, the greater the success of your quest. The entire idea has to do with achieving a state of complete union with Wakan-Tanka (the Great Spirit) and the helpers. Once this is accomplished, they can enlighten and lead you, giving you comfort, hope and power. The amount of time spent in immersion is never wasted, and it reverses the usual procedure we follow when we are faced with time-consuming and critical chores.

Ordinarily, we think we must rush and organize to get at the work because there is so little time. If we pray at all regarding the situation, it is only briefly, because we have so much to do. Then we spend the entire day working on the chores, and end up frustrated and drained. With immersion, you spend a lot of time in prayer, obtain from the higher powers the strength and guidance you need, and then finish the same chores in a fraction of time, ending up fulfilled and fresh.¹

In the above passage, Fools Crow describes the effects of prayer, of meditation, or, as he says, of “immersion.” In essence, he is referring to the process of transformation, of turning within. The wonderful thing is that this process has a direct impact on our so-called ordinary life. While undergoing this impact, your life can hardly be called ordinary, as everything you do, every thought you have, stems from a higher consciousness. Higher powers are at work within. Wakan-Tanka and, as Fools Crow so beautifully says, “the helpers” guide the seeker on his spiritual quest at every step of the way. It’s like living in two worlds simultaneously – the world of our earthly existence permeated by the spiritual world. We are in an in-between state of being, in which we’re gradually leaning more and more to that sacred presence within.

Another Lakota holy man, Wallace Black Elk, in Sacred Ways of a Lakota, also bears witness to our connectedness with all living beings. It is this realization that lifts us above the mundane, giving us a deep sense of the magic of life.

Our real Father is Tunkashila (Creator), and our real Mother is the Earth. They gave birth and life to all living, so we know we are all interrelated. That is why you hear us always saying “mitakuye oyasin.” We say those words as we enter the sacred stone-people lodge and also at the end of every prayer. It means ‘all my relations.’ It helps to remind us that we are related to everything that exists.²

Quoted in A Treasury of Mystic Terms, Vol. 9, pp. 29-30
Ibid, p. 29

Freedom from Misconceptions - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Freedom from Misconceptions

Sant Mat is a path of universal spirituality and a path of unity. It emphasizes the common thread, the common spiritual legacy of all humanity. This common legacy is the creative power within, called Shabd, to which every human being can awaken when he or she rises above the slumbering body and the dormant mind-bound consciousness. Five centuries before Christ, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said:

For those who are awake, there is one unified common cosmos, while each one of those who is asleep is turned towards his own private world.’¹

What is it that keeps us bound to our own limited private world? Soami Ji, the first of the Radha Soami Masters, said that he tried all possible methods, pilgrimages, study of scriptures, book learning and still could not awaken his mind. He finally found a Master who showed him the way. He describes it in Sar Bachan Poetry:

Without Shabd this mind can never awaken, whatever we may do.²

The oldest mystical tradition in the West, that of the Greek philosophers Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus, spoke about the “music of the spheres,” and about “voices from on high.” These Greek philosophers did not want to be credited with some special wisdom. They said they had learned everything from the much-more ancient civilization of the Egyptians. They also believed that there is an innate, inborn knowledge residing within each human being, waiting to be awakened, that is shared by all nations. They did not consider themselves unique thinkers, but as one Platonist of the second century said:

All Masters are representatives, mouthpieces of an ancient wisdom and unity of truth that lay at the core of all traditions.³

He cited Indian Brahmins, Jews, the Babylonian Magi and the Egyptians, because in the second century Christianity was not yet a mainstream religion and Islam was still 500 years in the future.

Baba Ji also wants us to acquire this perspective of universal spirituality, otherwise why would the Dera publish books about so many spiritual traditions or build a library collecting them all, including seva to read and review books to place in the library? It’s all to show us that there is a common thread running through every human being’s search for happiness and spirituality. He wants to open us to the “unified common cosmos” of which Heraclitus spoke, the microcosm within us, which we can access when we leave our limited private world behind. Soami Ji says in the same poem:

Slowly, gradually, the mind is now awakening
and the world is beginning to appear false.
The soul gets help from the mind
and each reaches its destination.⁴

The sign that the mind is awakening is that the world begins to appear false. The soul cannot get released from its connection to the mind until the mind awakens and rids itself of misconceptions that confuse it about what is true and what is false. Once truth dwells in us, misconceptions vanish. Our mind can help us. The upward and inward turning mind can be our best friend.

Maharaj Jagat Singh Ji said that “clear thinking is ninety percent meditation.”⁵ When the mind is controlled by the body and its passions, forgetful of its Lord and oriented towards his gifts alone, it is our worst enemy. But when the Intellect is turned inward and upward, it liberates our soul which is nothing but love, and is ready to merge into its source. A soul’s wisdom and love are the highest form of intelligence. We can’t call divine love and devotion irrational, can we?

The process of awakening is the process of getting rid of irrational misconceptions. The soul gets help from the mind by transcending the mind. In another poem, Soami Ji begins by asking a question that bothers all those who are trying to awaken from their irrational dream-like state:

How can I rid myself of the misconceptions that keep haunting me?⁶

This question, and the entire poem, could have been written by Socrates or Plato, who spent their lives helping people get rid of their false opinions and misconceptions which lead to bad choices and cloud the power of discernment. Baba Ji has said that intellect is given to us for the sole purpose of discerning right from wrong and to understand the purpose of everything. Our choice is not between good and bad because nothing is really good or bad. Our choice is between the “real good” and that which only appears as “good” to our senses for a short moment but isn’t so. People have always struggled to distinguish between what only seems good and what really is good. Misconceptions, mental impressions and fantasies haunt us and prevent us from awakening to our divine essence, to our divine inner light and divine life within.

Plato said:

When Divinity loves us, it grants us true understanding of what truly matters, the highest principles governing all.⁷

And the reverse is true: misconceptions and wrong opinions are a divine punishment in themselves because those confused thoughts keep us wandering around through various life-forms, aimlessly and helplessly. In the next verse of Soami Ji’s poem, he describes the state of the confused mind:

The mind never accepts the Master’s advice,
instead, it harbours doubts and misgivings.

Masters do not want us to accept their word blindly; they do not issue orders but give friendly advice. We take such advice casually because we are educated and think, “Who can tell me what to do?” We end up with doubts or we even attack the Master, blaming our failures on him. We try to measure him according to our own limited yardstick, distorted by the fog of our obsessions and negativity, of which we may not even be aware. We end up with misgivings, mistrust, worry, anxiety, doubt, questions, uncertainties and suspicion. Soami Ji continues:

With an intellect moulded by lust and anger
it [the mind] tries to appraise the wisdom of the
Master.

Baba Ji frequently gives the example of how absurd it is to pour clean water into a dirty vessel, meaning that the spirit will not enter a mind that isn’t clean. Similarly, 2500 years ago the Pythagoreans also thought that they should not

…pour teachings and divine insights into individuals confused about ethical standards and troubled by obsessions. This would be the same as if someone pours pure and clean water into a deep well full of mud. Such a person both stirs up the mud, gets splashed by it, and spoils the clean water.”⁸

The members of the Platonic tradition felt that their teachings could be correctly understood only by a purified mind. Soami Ji is voicing a universal truth when he says that no matter how intelligent, clever, successful and skilful we are, if our mind is under the influence of obsessions and negativity, we cannot judge or appraise the wisdom of the Master. Also, no matter how wise the Master is, and how wise his advice, it still can provoke doubts and misgivings from an intellect that has not been purified or is not in the process of gaining its purity.

Therefore, when initiating disciples, Radha Soami Masters do not just convey teachings or information but lay out an entire program and discipline for the purification of every level of our being. They give us the dietary vows; they provide their physical presence and seva for our purification on the material level; they prescribe continuous Simran with love and devotion for our mental purification; and they connect us to the Shabd for our lasting spiritual purity and liberation, which is the true purification from misconceptions and confused thinking.

Soami Ji further describes the condition of the impure mind:

Instead of serving the Master and having faith in him,
it expects flattery and recognition from him.
It doesn’t understand the severity of its own situation –
how will it ever reach its destination?

We are in a desperate situation. We are bleeding to death, from a spiritual point of view. Our energies, our will, and our love are drained by materialistic obsessions. We are plagued by what Socrates called double ignorance, which is the belief that we know when we do not know. He explains wisdom as the humility to realize our own ignorance:

For you will have the wisdom not to think you know that which you do not know.⁹

This is the condition to which Soami Ji also refers. We are ignorant of the severity of the situation, and in addition we are unaware of our ignorance. We don’t even know that we don’t know. We use clear, logical thought when orienting ourselves in the outside world. However, when it comes to making choices that matter most for our inner happiness and ultimate well-being, we allow ourselves to be swayed by irrational forces inside or outside of us. As Baba Ji said has often said, we get scared, we compromise under the pressure of circumstances, and then we have to pay for the rest of our life.

Masters offer us their physical presence and the priceless opportunity to selflessly serve them, and they teach by example the ideal of selfless love. In these verses, Soami Ji says that serving the Master and having faith in him without the expectation of flattery and recognition is a step in the direction of liberating ourselves from our misconceptions. We set aside our own views, the misconception that we are the “doer,” because from that comes the sense of personal achievement and the egoic fantasy that we are important. Soami Ji identifies the clinging to our own opinions as our greatest obstacle.

Similarly, Socrates had identified opinions as the greatest enemy of divine knowledge because opinions are based upon an illusory reality that is in constant flux. For Socrates, human wisdom is nothing compared to divine wisdom¹⁰, or to the wisdom of contacting the Shabd, as Soami Ji would describe it.

The storms of greed and worldly love run dry,
yet people chase the mirage night and day.
How can they comprehend the path of the Masters
when they are always preoccupied
with asserting their own opinions?

Here Soami Ji describes the most powerful force that keeps us locked into our own private world: the desire to assert our opinions. Even when greed and worldly love run dry, even when the spiritual seeker has had some success in eradicating negativity, the desire to assert our own opinion is still there.

Freeing seekers from their entrenched opinions has been a major focus for every spiritual Master throughout time. Socrates invented the method of dialogue and dialectic to demonstrate that even the most logical course of reasoning undertaken to defend one’s opinion has its limitation and leads to contradiction and impasse. The original purpose of logic and dialectic, of reason and critical thought, was to protect us from dogmatic close-mindedness, from the arrogant belief that only our opinion is right and that everyone else is wrong or inferior. Religion arises when we become closed or rigid in our beliefs and start thinking that we are the exclusive and privileged possessors of truth. Every true spiritual Master takes all possible steps to prevent us from remaining in our narrow cocoon and does everything possible to universalize us, because the core of their teachings, the Light and Sound within, is universal to all humans.

Platonism never became a religion, because it rejected blind faith and used reason and logic as a handle to open a window into the realm beyond words where universal truth resides. Outward-oriented reason leads to a dead-end. Inward-oriented intelligence, coupled with divine love, leads to union. Ancient mystics like Plotinus spoke of a loving “intellect” (nous) as the highest form of intelligence, the organ of mystical union¹¹. However, the meanings of words and language keep changing and can be confusing. To Plotinus, intellect (nous) meant “the purified soul.”¹² Today we use intellect to describe mental tendencies that can oppose the soul’s ascent and merging in the Divine. But that which is beyond words cannot be described. Some scholars describe it as “supra-rationality,” a realm more intelligent than the linear limitations of outward- oriented reason and logic. Where rationality ends, supra-rationality begins.¹³

There is nothing more humiliating to the ego than admitting ‘I do not know.’ This is the point to which Masters throughout the centuries tried to bring their disciples. Zen Buddhist teachers used “koans,” or phrases that were impossible for the mind to analyze. Socrates employed a teaching method of questioning and confusion. Even Baba Ji has his way of confusing our intellectual mind and drawing us out of our limited comfort zone into the zone of learning and openness to the universal truths that take us beyond our individual tiny shell. We may need a shell to protect us and allow us to grow until we attain spiritual maturity, but eventually, we have to crack the shell and come out into the unbound ocean of first-hand experience which is always universal.

Saints do not assert their opinions. They know that we cannot turn around in a short span of time, that our transformation and change of mind and heart happens gradually. They put us on a path where we can acquire our own experience of the sweetness within. Until and unless we acquire our own experience, we each remain in the darkness of our own private shell and are subject to misconceptions.

Enlightened saints see all the contortions in our thinking, but they also do not want to impose upon us blind faith or insights for which we are not ready, which we cannot value or digest with our polluted mind. Later in the same poem, Soami Ji says that we only harm ourselves when we try to assert our opinions, and instead of moulding our lives around the path, we try to bend the teachings to our own liking.

Such people harm only themselves, for
Saints simply withdraw from them and stay quiet.
They are all victims of their twisted thinking –
how many of their contortions shall I describe?

So many misconceptions posture and present themselves under the guise of religion and spirituality. Due to the lack of critical and logical thinking, people can be deceived and lured into inhumane treatment, even violence against others, in the name of religion or for the sake of asserting their own opinions and perspectives upon others.

This is because the ego seeks ways to “blow itself up.” The English idiom “blow up” means to enlarge, but it also means to blast or explode. The internet and social media are an ideal tool for the ego to blow up its image and importance. In the process of trying to appear bigger and better, the ego is even willing to blow itself up, to destroy itself. It is terrified of being ordinary and obscure; it is terrified by the calm simplicity of the divine.

The divine is the most humble, invisible and obscure giver. It has hidden itself so well that people can deny its existence and spend their lives in that condition. Saints do not seek prominence or fame or glamour. True spirituality, as Baba Ji says, is the experience of the divine in the midst of our everyday ordinary lives. There is nothing glamorous about spirituality. Masters themselves come amongst us as ordinary human beings and resist being placed on a pedestal or stage. Their teachings have a simple beauty that does not excite the mind, but calms and elevates it through the all-encompassing love which is the source of their teachings. Everything they do flows from the pure fountain of love; they are not here to prove anything to anyone. They are not here to impress us, to teach any external knowledge, but to inspire us and give us hope. They do not care if they are abused or mistreated; they do not depend upon anyone; they come to serve with love not only their allotted souls, but all who come in contact with them. That is why they are a safe haven for those who have spent lifetimes in misconceptions and aimless confused wandering. Soami Ji continues:

With the Lord’s grace they seek refuge in the Master
and are able to recognize him within.

When the Lord’s grace allows us, we see fully the severity of our condition and situation, and we become refugees at his feet. We are all refugees, seeking stable ground at the feet of the Master, seeking protection from our own twisted thinking that leads us into the same predicament again and again. Elsewhere, Soami Ji called us homeless wanderers because the impurity of the mind makes us forget our real home:

Through ignorance of its own real home
the soul is living here like a homeless wanderer,
stumbling through different life forms
tossed about in the cycle of birth and death.¹⁴

“We recognize the Master within,” Soami Ji said above. We recognize someone we’ve known before. The Master and the knowledge he imparts are not something we learn, as we learn unfamiliar new things. We recognize the Master because we have always known him. True knowledge, knowledge of essence and reality, is remembrance. The question of how we recognize reality does not arise because it is not external to us. It is an act of merging: the knower and the known become one. There is no difference between knower and lover when it comes to merging.

We immediately recognize reality because it is innate to us, it is part of us, it is our very essence. Soami Ji continues describing those who seek refuge in the Master by saying:

They abandon their cleverness and so-called wisdom
and realize how ignorant they are.
Only then is the Master pleased
and he directs them to their destination.

Soami Ji talks here about two types of wisdom – the so-called fake wisdom and the real wisdom or recognizing one’s ignorance, the limitations of one’s human knowledge. The third-century Platonic Master Iamblichus also said that there are two types of knowledge: the inferior, external knowledge and superior innate knowledge of every soul. That innate knowledge is more powerful than every judgment and deliberation. It existed before all reasoning and proof. It is higher, prior to our reasoning mind. It is a state of consciousness from which our reasoning and logical mind itself draws its energy and power. That is our essence which is above and beyond the realm of reasoning:

“…where we are enveloped by the divine presence, and
we are filled with it.”¹⁵

Platonic Masters did not think that they were imparting information, but rather that they were helping souls to regain their innate knowledge, which is much higher and much deeper than the superficial knowledge and wisdom of linear reasoning and analysis of facts. Soami Ji also advocates that we abandon the external kind of wisdom. He finally explains how we can rid ourselves of our misconceptions for good:

He [the Master] rids his disciples of their
misconceptions and puts their souls to
contemplation on the Shabd.
Every Saint has affirmed the fact
that without Shabd there is no salvation.

We can keep talking and reading books endlessly. Words generate more words. We will not get rid of our misconceptions in this way. These misconceptions are fed by impressions from countless lives. Our mind is like a storehouse of impressions and projections, fantasies and false opinions; and it is due to them that we remain in the wheel of births and deaths.

Masters bestow upon us a new set of associations and impressions; they give us the ability to contemplate their spiritual form. They give us Simran, so that we can start remembering our real home and create a relationship with the inner power of the Shabd which alone can lift us out of the mud of misconceptions. From a different poem also quoted above, Soami Ji says:

People waste their lives;
they never reach their destination.
Without a Master they wander aimlessly,
for without a Master no one can recognize Shabd.¹⁶

The best use of external words is simply to encourage us to persevere in attaining the innate self-knowledge that makes it possible to recognize the Shabd. The persuasion of the external discourse of words (“logos” in Greek) is not lasting and it does not save us from wandering aimlessly, wasting our lives and never reaching our destination. Only the inner “Discourse,” the true “Logos” or Name of God (the Shabd) can help us get rid of all our misconceptions.

This eternal discourse of the soul, the music of the spheres of the Pythagoreans, called Shabd by Soami Ji, transports us to our essence. It is here where we get to know ourselves, to know the knower and to blend into the all-embracing love of the Shabd, which is the ultimate knower, lover and our saviour from misconceptions and transitory falsehood. Only the intelligence of the soul, which has remembered its royal status and has regained its purity, can grasp the truth of the Shabd. It is Shabd alone that can help us emerge from our private world of misconceptions and confusions and to blend into the universal power that unities all humanity.

Heraclitus fr. B 89 in Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker. Edited by Hermann Dielsmann and Walther Kranz. 6th ed. Reprint (orig. 1903). Dublin & Zurich: Weidmann, 1966. (Greek/German).
Shiv Dayal Singh (Soami Ji), Sar Bachan Poetry, RSSB, 2002, p. 167.
Origen, Contra Celsum, translated with introduction and notes Chadwick, H. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1953 (1980) p. 17.
Sar Bachan Poetry, RSSB, 2002, p. 167.
Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul, RSSB, ed. 1982, p. 202.
Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 165.
Plato, Timaeus, 53D.
Tr. Dillon, J. and Hershbell, J., Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press 1991). [Greek and English] ch. 77, p. 101 [tr. from Greek by the author]
Plato, Meno 84A; Theaetetus 210C; Plato in Twelve Volumes (Loeb Classical Library), tr. H.N. Fowler. (Meno in vol. II, Theaetetus in vol. VII.)
Socrates, Apology, 23A.
Armstrong, tr. Enneads, VI.7.35.
Ibid, VI.7.15.27.
Addey, Crystal (2014) Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods. Ashgate. P. 273-275.
Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 125.
Iamblichus and Clarke – Dillon – Hershbell (2003) Iamblichus On the Mysteries. Society for Biblical Literature, Atlanta GA. [Greek and English], paraphrase by the author of ch. 3 on pp. 12-13.
Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 167

The Secret of Attention - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Secret of Attention

For meditation, we are instructed to hold our attention at the eye center. But have we ever really thought about what this thing called ‘attention’ is? Once when Great Master was having a conversation with some visitors, answering their questions and trying to explain the basics of Sant Mat, he made an intriguing statement about the nature of attention:

In our body, the soul current appears in the form of consciousness or attention. Surat is the term used for soul in Sant Mat philosophy, and it means ‘attention.’ The second current that animates our body is the God current, the Word or the Holy Ghost. It manifests itself in the form of Shabd or Sound, which by different writers is called the celestial music, heavenly melody, unstruck symphony or audible life stream.”¹

So he didn’t exactly say that the soul is attention; he said that in the body – when our consciousness is at the physical level – soul appears in the form of attention. Our attention is the aspect of soul that we can connect with, that we can experience, that we can know while we are still functioning at the physical level.

That’s important. Usually, when the saints try to explain the nature of the soul, they say that if the Lord is like an ocean, then the soul is a drop of that ocean. But that’s just a concept.

The problem is that we don’t know what God is. We merely have concepts. You could say our concepts give us a working hypothesis, and maybe that’s enough. But we can’t really know what God is until we have that experience. Similarly, if all we know about the soul is that it is a drop of something that we don’t know, all we have is a concept.

What is key about the above quote from Great Master is that attention is not a concept. We all know a lot about attention through our own experience. We know how it feels when our attention is scattered, and how it feels when it is focused. We know what it feels like when our attention is jumping from one thing to another, and how it feels when it’s more steady, more calm.

We can probably all remember an experience, perhaps back when we were in school with a paper due or a big exam the next day. We couldn’t settle down to the task at hand. Maybe we read the same page over and over, making no sense of it. We got up to make a cup of tea, or flipped on the TV, or called a friend. Then, at some point, we said to ourselves, “Enough! Stop messing around! This thing is due tomorrow!” And we got down to it: our attention got focused, and suddenly it all made sense, and we got it done. So we know a lot about our attention and its restless nature.

In From self to Shabd the author writes, “Our transformation begins when we become aware of where we keep our attention.²” Do we know where we keep our attention? Does it go willy-nilly here and there, without our awareness, much less our control? We open our eyes, see something, and our attention goes to it. We hear something, and our attention goes to it. A thought pops into our mind, and our attention goes right along for the ride.

But it’s also true that our attention is selective about a lot of the sensory input coming at us. We tune out whatever seems irrelevant to us – fans whirring, birds singing, traffic noises. A well-known audiologist said that most of the patients who come to him for a hearing test are husbands, referred by their wives. The wife says, “Darling, you seem to be missing a lot of what I’m saying – maybe you should get your hearing tested.” The husband comes in for the hearing test, and his hearing is just fine.

We’re very good at taking our attention away from whatever we’ve decided (consciously or unconsciously) is irrelevant to us. The problem is that for most of us, most of the time, what we are tuning out includes the Shabd. It is resounding 24 hours a day, but our attention is somewhere else. Where? Usually it is quite occupied with our busy, busy minds.

We like to say: The mind is so tricky, so powerful! We seem to be slaves of it. Certainly we are dancing to its tune. On the other hand, Baba Ji keeps telling us that the mind has no power of its own; it has only the power that we give it. What does that mean?

We read in the books that the mind takes its power from the soul. Mind comes from the second spiritual region, and the soul comes from much higher. All this is often explained in the form of a story: The soul is a princess of the royal realm but has fallen into the company of the mind. So now the soul is like a handmaiden to the mind, following helplessly wherever it leads. It’s like a slave, even though really it is a princess. The soul has the power of the king behind it but has given it over to the mind.

This is a fine allegory, but how does it help us? If to us ‘soul’ is an abstract concept, a drop of an ocean of we know not what, we’re still helpless. (And, honestly, if we’re not experiencing those higher regions, they don’t mean a lot to us either.)

But what happens if we understand the soul as our attention? Or, say, we understand that attention is an aspect of soul that we can connect with? Then how do we give power to the mind? Attention. And how do we take power away from the mind? Attention.

Maybe we don’t have such a big, fierce battle with the mind after all. Maybe it’s more like pulling the plug. Picture this: You’re standing in front of a machine that’s gone haywire, but you’re holding the power cord in your hand. Maybe you can just pull the plug. You switch your attention to simran, and you withdraw the source of power that keeps that busy mind churning. In From self to Shabd the author says, “Thoughts come to life when we give them our attention…. Thoughts don’t have a life of their own. By giving attention to our thoughts, we make them come alive…. The more attention we give them, the stronger they become.”³

Saints tell us that our minds carry impressions from millions of lifetimes spent in many different life forms. Not just this one lifetime, but millions of lifetimes have left impressions. With all those impressions stored in our minds, obviously it continually generates images, thoughts, memories, imaginings, desires, feelings. Baba Ji has even said that the negative impulses like anger, lust, greed, and attachment are residual impressions from our lives in lower forms, as animals. Those impulses have no place in human consciousness – but we’re only in the process of becoming truly human. So, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the mind, left to its own devices, will go on generating thoughts, images and even animal-like impulses.

But do we have to pay attention to them? Can we shift our attention from those thoughts to simran? Can we switch our attention to the Sound? Our attention and our thinking are so tightly bound together that they seem like the same thing. It feels as if our attention is what is doing the thinking. But our attention is one thing, and the mind that is generating thoughts is something else. Our attention actually is different from the mind – something independent, free, powerful.

In From self to Shabd, the author writes: “There is nothing more important in spirituality than to be mindful of where we keep our attention.”⁴ He quotes Maharaj Charan Singh: “The ageless secret, the ancient wisdom, the path of the saints lies in withdrawing the attention back to this point [the eye centre].”⁵ Part of the secret that the saints share with us is that we can detach our attention from the activity in our minds. This is the freedom that we have. According to the Masters, it is the only freedom that we have. In this world where everything is destined – as the saints often express it, “Whatever has to happen has already happened” – our one and only freedom is what we do with our attention.

Let’s return to the quote from Great Master. He said that the soul current, in the body, appears in the form of attention. But he also said there were two currents in the body, the second being “the God current, the Word or the Holy Ghost that manifests itself in the form of Shabd or Sound.” So just as he said that the attention is not exactly what the soul is – for us, at this level, the soul appears in the form of attention – similarly, for those whose attention is at the physical level, the vast and powerful current of God, which has brought the whole creation into being, pervades everything, and sustains every atom of the universe – that current manifests itself as Sound. The Sound or Shabd is the aspect of that God current that we can experience while our consciousness is still limited to the physical level.

Baba Ji has also said the Sound is a symbol. It is a pointer. If we give our attention to that Sound – to any sound we hear, no matter how feeble or indistinct – that sound will take us to the reality of what Great Master called the God current. And what is that reality? We’re told that it is love.

Great Master writes: “God is Shabd. God is love. Therefore, Shabd is also love.”⁶ In Philosophy of the Masters, in the section on “Love,” Great Master often refers to the Shabd as a “current of love.” He talks about how the Lord’s current of love supports and sustains every being.

What is a current? In this world we could think of a current as a small, rippling stream of water, or as a powerful current in a mighty river as it travels thousands of miles to the ocean. Or we might think of the vast currents in the ocean, like the Gulf Stream. A current is something that flows relentlessly in a particular direction. If you jump into a current and don’t fight it, don’t try to swim upstream, don’t grab onto something to hold yourself back, the current takes you where it’s going.

Where does the current of love take us? Great Master says, “The current of love takes one beyond good and evil, belief and unbelief, to a state so sublime that it cannot be described.”⁷ He is telling us that this current of love, if we just let go and flow with it, will carry us to a sublime state where the world of opposites doesn’t exist, where – we have no idea what we believe or don’t believe. Perhaps we reach a state where we don’t know anything in the traditional intellectual sense.

Baba Ji once was asked: What is Sach Khand? What’s it like? What do we do when we get there? After a long pause he said something like: Have you ever felt happiness? Multiply that times a hundred, a thousand, a million.

What happens when we give our whole attention only to the Sound? Great Master says, “Those who practise Shabd and listen to the Divine Music become oceans of Love. They love everybody and by the currents of this Divine Love radiate a virtuous influence in this world…. The dormant love within our souls can be awakened by the practice of Shabd.”⁸

Baba Ji has frequently said that love is the core of our being. Sometimes we might think, well, love might be the core of our being, but it is dormant. Great Master assures us that this dormant love is awakened by the practice of Shabd. Actually, he says that giving our attention to that Sound transforms us. It makes us like itself; slowly and slowly, it turns us into what it is: love. And what is the nature of love? Great Master says:

God is Love. He is the Bestower and demands nothing in exchange for His gifts. Similarly, love demands nothing in return. It knows only how to give; hence it is free from all selfishness…. Love inspires generosity and obliterates selfishness, because it has no ulterior motive.”⁹

So the nature of love is to give, without any expectations. Our meditation is a practice – to give, without any expectations. To give our attention, our time, ourselves to the practice, day after day, never wondering what we’re supposed to get in return.

How do we – selfish beings that we are – acquire this capacity to give without expecting anything back? Great Master explains that listening to the Sound, putting our attention into what he calls the “current of love,” slowly makes us like itself. It awakens in us the capacity to give selflessly, with no expectations.

Think about how Great Master said there are two currents in the body, the soul current and the God current. Or, as experienced at the physical level, there’s the current of attention and the current of Sound. Picture two rivers flowing together, merging – the tiny river of our attention merging into the big river of the Sound. Eventually they would mix and mingle and become indistinguishable. Our soul current would become one with the God current, the current of love.

Great Master says, “God lives in His own latent state of Love, and a lover frees himself from the bondage of the body and life and becomes a form of God.”¹⁰ That is the goal of each one of us. The Masters tell us that the current of love is within us, at the core of our being. Even if it is dormant, or buried somewhere we can’t find, it is inherent in us. Our goal is to jump into that current of love and let go, to fix the current of our attention firmly in the Sound and become part and parcel of that current of love.

Great Master tells us that although love is formless, one who realizes love becomes a form of love. He writes:

If and when a rare individual experiences true love, it is manifested in every cell of his body. In other words, it is like seeing the very Lord himself in that manifestation…. If you wish to see Love, then you should meet a lover. Then you will discover its unique currents.”¹¹

Daryai Lal Kapur, Call of the Great Master, p.150
Hector Esponda Dubin, From self to Shabd, p.86
Ibid., p.42
Ibid., p.43
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, p.181
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p.153
Ibid., p.163
Ibid., p.153
Ibid., p.102
Ibid., p. 205
Ibid., p.219

Rumi on Meditation - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Rumi on Meditation

We may think of Rumi as giving clear instructions on how to live and telling us, like Baba Ji, how to be good human beings – and he does. We may think that, in contrast, his instructions about meditation were given only in private; some of Rumi’s poems tell us something else.

Not only do we have Rumi's long, extemporaneous poem, the Masnavi, and his lovely ghazals, but we also have his quatrains. These – each just four lines – have a fine-pointed intensity. He uses them to give us important lessons, not only about his own sheikh, Shams-e Tabrizi, about the lives of teacher and disciple, about personal discipline, about love, and about God, but also about meditation.

In the following quatrain, he speaks of meditation:

Hurry up! It's time for the morning drink,
between night and day.
Light a lamp that is different from the moon or sun.
Bring back a flame from the liquid fire,
set it to the foundation of worry,
and burn it completely!¹

It begins:

Hurry up! It's time for the morning drink,
between night and day.

In his ghazals, Rumi often talks about the morning wine. The morning drink is the same image. Others call the time "between night and day" the time of Elixir, the time before dawn.

It is not its purpose, but the day goes better when we are focused in the morning, when we have sipped that "morning drink" carefully, lovingly, with full attention. More important, the next meditation goes better when we pay constant attention to what we are doing. Therefore, one key to continued proper attention to meditation is to remember tomorrow morning what we learned this morning. If He is gracious and we get this right, we can remain close to our meditation all day – and that is what Huzur is telling us when he says, in Die to Live:

Meditation is a way of life. You do not merely close yourself in a room for a few hours, then forget about meditation for the rest of the day. It must take on a practical form, reflecting in every daily action and in your whole routine. That itself is an effect of meditation. To live in the teachings, to live in that atmosphere is itself a meditation. You are building that atmosphere every moment for your daily meditation. Everything you do must consciously prepare you for the next meditation.²

Most of Rumi's ghazals carry the name of Shams as the signature line; he was channeling Shams’ teachings in glorious verse when what we have from Shams is prose. However, sometimes Rumi used to sign off: “Khāmūsh!” – “Silence," and it is not always clear exactly what he means: perhaps "that is all I'm going to say;" perhaps he is telling us words will not convey inner truth; perhaps he is admonishing himself into silence.

But Rumi also tells us that silence is a state we should seek. He says:

Why do you become dull and bored with silence?
Get used to silence, for it is one of the essentials.³

The essentials – the essentials of meditation – silence, stillness, and one-pointed attention. No promises of "progress;" just a reminder about the essentials of practice.

Elsewhere, he says:

Everyone knows the intent of a seller of pretty words,
but I am the devoted admirer of that one
who knows silence.⁴

The world is full of people with pretty words, although it seems that few even care whether their words are pretty; they just shout louder and longer than anyone else. But, “no” says Rumi – silence – "I am the devoted admirer of that one who knows silence."

Rumi, far from keeping the importance of meditation hidden, is talking about it all the time. In the Masnavi⁵, he goes into a long riff on meditation and listening to the Shabd:

On the bank of the stream, there was a high wall and,
on the top of the wall, a sorrowful thirsty man.
The wall stopped him from reaching the water;
he was in deep need of the water, like a fish.
Suddenly, he threw a brick into the water:
the noise of the water came to his ear,
like spoken words,
like words spoken by a sweet and delicious friend:
the noise of the water made him drunk.

The man begins hurling bricks, one after another, at the water – and the water complains. But the thirsty man says that he receives two advantages from throwing the bricks and does not plan to stop: firstly, he can hear the noise of the water, as melodious as a rebec – or like a trumpet, restoring life to one who was dead, or like the message of deliverance to a prisoner

Then the thirsty man goes on:

The other advantage is that, with every brick I tear off
this wall, I come nearer to running water,
because the high wall becomes lower
every time a brick is removed.
The destruction of the wall becomes …
the remedy that brings about union with the water.

Making clear that not all parables need to remain subject to debate, in the next line, Rumi says:

The tearing away of the firmly joined bricks
is like prostration in prayer:
it is the cause of nearness to God.

Repetition is our call; Shabd is God's response. Throwing the bricks one by one is repetition and the answering splash is the Shabd, the Water of Life. How do we get to the point where we can listen to the splash of the Water of Life? In Sar Bachan Poetry, Soami Ji says:

Accept your Guru after thorough scrutiny, brother,
for without a Guru no one can find the way…
The Master ferries all those devotees across the ocean
who contemplate on his feet
and seek his protection.⁶

Saints remind us that it is not we who do the search. We are so tightly bound to the things of the world that we settle for distractions – lust, anger, the delights of the physical ear and eye, of smell, taste, and touch – how would we know a Guru? The best we can do is realize our hideous plight – rooted here in the physical world, tangled in our own mind – realize it and cry in helplessness and longing. He will come. He cannot ignore us – the nature of the Love, the “wine” that Rumi so often talks about, compels Him to come to our rescue.

When we are found, He tells us what we have to do: simran and bhajan. We have to do what we can to chop off the roots we have embedded in the world – and we chop them off with our simran. We have to keep the vows and keep the company of Saints in order to reduce our capacity to plant new roots. We have to learn to concentrate at the eye center. There, we listen to the Shabd – the splash of the Water of Life – from which we have been so long separated in our endless hunt for pleasure, dominance, and ownership.

Great Master says:

The simran of the objects of the world should be replaced by the simran of God, and thoughts of the world by contemplation of the master who is God incarnate…

Where the waves of the world once dominated the scene, there will now be remembrance of the Lord and contemplation of the Master. The devotee begins to forget the world and its shadow shapes… Any leftover rambling tendencies are ended by listening to the Sound Current…⁷

Kabir says:

Mind should be still, body should be motionless,
tongue should be quiet.⁸

We absorb what we are taught by the Guru and we consider what other duties we have in our lives. We establish the time that is right for us and we commit to that, regularly and punctually. Many of us like the time of Elixir, the early morning, but, as Great Master has said, any time that allows us to focus and concentrate fully is the right time. Shams says:

The hearts of those who realize the value of night
become as brilliant as the noonday sun.⁹

With all that in hand, we focus on our meditation – simran, dhyan and bhajan. We are reminded to do simran for all of the 24 hours – sitting, standing, walking, talking, awake, or asleep. This brings us that precious gift of rising from sleep, waking up, and sitting in meditation, our mind less scattered and better able to focus. Slowly, we learn to turn off the intruder, the chatterer, the commentator, and the narrator.

Very recently, Baba Ji reminded us of the only command in the whole of the Adi Granth: meditate on Nam. In one of Huzur’s beautiful late satsangs, we hear:

Once we keep our attention on the Word all day long – wherever we are, whatever we are doing – and we are completely absorbed in it, then our mind becomes pure... This is true worship of the Lord. This is the devotion that will take you to your ancestral home. It is this gift of the Master’s grace – meditation on the Word – that releases the knot tying the soul to the mind, cleanses the soul and purifies the mind.¹⁰

This is the ultimate reward for meditation – and for living in the atmosphere of meditation – the release of the knot that ties the soul to the mind.

In the second line of the original quatrain, Rumi says:

Light a lamp that is different from the moon or sun.

We can hear both the outer and inner meanings here. The inner lamp is not the same kind of light as the moon and sun that we see out there – but nor is it like the inner sun and moon. Rumi refers frequently to the inner lights – and to travelling beyond them. He also spoke of the night ride of Mohammed, again meaning going inside, beyond the inner sun and moon to what the Koran calls “the farthest mosque” – the dwelling place of God.

Elsewhere, Rumi says about God:

O You, when it comes to generosity and magnificence
and the scattering of light,
the sun, moon, and stars are all Your servants.¹¹

So, under the instruction of the guru, we light the inner lamp: the light is feeble at first, flickering and fading as our attention wanders, brightening and steadying as we get better focus. Eventually, we will come into the presence of the Radiant Form.

In the third line Rumi says:

Bring back a flame from the liquid fire,

The liquid fire of the Radiant Form will give us that flame. Elsewhere Rumi again reminds us about meditation when he says:

Walk at night, for the night is your guide to secrets,
Because the secrets of the night are hidden
from the eyes of strangers.
The heart is stained by love and the eyes by sleeping,
but the beauty of the Friend
is our preoccupation until dawn.¹²

The beauty of the Friend, the liquid fire, the Radiant Form: these words provide us with just a sketch of what awaits – but all of them drive us on, remind us about the vows, remind us about our commitment to the Guru and the path, remind us about the need for meditation every day.

In a joyous and light-hearted mood, Rumi gives us this:

Your love entered my heart and left again happily.
It came back later, deposited some baggage of love,
and left.
I said, with welcoming formality,
“Stay here for two or three days.
”So it settled down – and now it has forgotten
to leave.¹³

This is where we are aiming. When we bring back the flame from the liquid fire, we will have cleansed the chamber of our heart – and he will be willing to move in.

In the last line, Rumi says about that flame:

Set it to the foundation of worry,
and burn it completely!

What is it that we need to worry about? Are there any people more blessed than we are? We know, deep in the core of our being, that we have been here far too long. We know, deep in the core of our being, that we are on the way to being rescued. His rope has snaked down into the well – we just need to grab it. His hand is reaching out to us – we just need to take it and walk, with Him, out of the fairground of the world. Worry? Rumi tells us to take the flame that we have brought back from the liquid fire, to set it to the foundation of worry and burn it completely.

Huzur says in Die to Live:

To live in that atmosphere is to live a simple, happy and relaxed life. The effect of that peace and bliss of meditation enables you to adjust according to the weather of life while retaining your equanimity and balance. You contentedly face your karmas, both good and bad, by continually adjusting to their ever-changing pattern.¹⁴

Namdev says (in a lovely counterpoint to Rumi):

My fickle and restless mind has become still
and motionless.
It has become absorbed in the revelation of the Lord.
What shall I do, my heart is lost to me?
It went to see Him and now refuses to return….
“What is He like?” asks Nama.
He is like water brimming in every vessel.¹⁵

Namdev’s cup is right side up and overflowing with the Water of Life. As the Psalmist also says:

My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.¹⁶

Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-957, p. 548
Maharaj Charan Singh. Die to Live. First Edition. Beas; RSSB. 1979. p. 257
Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-1096, p. 545
Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-642, p. 546
Nicholson, R.A. (translator). The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi. Book 2, 1926. Reprinted 1982. Cambridge; EJW Gibb Memorial Trust. Lines 1192-1209, p. 282-3
Soami Shiv Dayal Singh, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections). Beas; RSSB. 2002, p. 179
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji. Philosophy of the Masters, Series One. Beas; RSSB. 1963. Second Edition 1971. p. 48
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji. Philosophy of the Master, Series One. Beas; RSSB. 1963. Second Edition 1971. p. 62
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji. Philosophy of the Masters, Series One. Beas; RSSB. 1963. Second Edition 1971. p. 38
Maharaj Charan Singh. Spiritual Discourses, Volume 2. Beas; RSSB. Second Edition 1997. p. 71
Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-1351, p. 480
Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-201, p. 532
Gamard, I. and Farhadi, R. (translators). The Quatrains of Rumi. San Rafael; Sufi Dari Books. 2008. F-406, p. 496
Maharaj Charan Singh. Die to Live. First Edition. Beas; RSSB. 1979, p. 257
Puri, J.R. and Sethi, V.K. Saint Namdev. Beas; RSSB. 1977. 3rd Edition (revised). 2001. p. 123
The Holy Bible (KJB). Psalm 23:5-6.

The World Has Come to a Full Stop - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The World Has Come to a Full Stop

The world has come to a full stop.

Baba Ji has told us to make the best use of the current time. Let’s follow Baba Ji’s advice and use this time to become spiritually strong. We all know that meditation is the seva that pleases Baba Ji the most. Now that we must stay at home, and before everything returns to its usual hectic pace, let’s use this time to meditate more.

Each one of us can adapt her or his own routine to fit one, two or three formal sittings of meditation a day. Be practical about how much time you give to each session. It’s better to make a realistic plan that we can really stick to. Slow and steady works much better. The important thing is that in these exceptional times, we add a meditation session to our daily routine. Whatever time we can give is enough. But make it happen.

In Spirtual Letters, Baba Jaimal Singh says: “If the mind attaches the inner hearing and seeing faculties to the Shabd-dhun for an hour, a half-hour, a quarter-hour, or for ten, five or even one minute, even then you will reach Sach Khand.” If you are able to keep your attention in the Sound, even if it is for one minute, for that minute, you have taken your consciousness up above the realm of thinking and into the higher, formless, Shabd-consciousness. This is how we turn from the person that we are now into our higher Shabd-consciousness.

Baba Sawan Singh describes our real “form” as “a shining light – a formless radiant divine energy that does not belong to this physical plane.” In Die to Live, Maharaj Charan Singh says: “Ultimately, you become pure soul, without form and shape, and the soul just merges into the Shabd.”

Make room for an extra meditation session to become familiar with your own Shabd-guru. Always begin with simran, but never forget to listen to the Sound. The inner Sound is the Shabd-Guru.

In Spiritual Letters, Baba Jaimal Singh writes: “The Sound of the Shabd-dhun that comes from our original home, from the wonderous Anami Radha Soami, is the true form of the Satguru.” By listening to the inner Sound we become familiar with the Shabd-guru. Keeping the attention focused on the inner Sound is the spiritual breakthrough that takes us into a higher level of consciousness beyond thinking.

Baba Ji often tells us that whatever Sound we hear within, that is the one to work with. Don’t think that because we don’t hear a loud, thunderous or melodious inner Sound, our spiritual practice is lacking. In Die to Live, Maharaj Charan Singh says: “Any Sound that you hear in the beginning always has a purifying effect on the soul. Even the echo of the Sound has a purifying effect on the soul. Every internal Sound of any stage has a purifying effect on the soul.”

“Any inner Sound that we hear in the beginning has a purifying effect on the soul” means that the Sound, no matter how dim it is, has the power to detach us from the world, to take our fears away and to attach us to the highest Consciousness.

Let it do its cleansing, its detaching. All you have to do is become receptive to the Sound. You don’t have to do anything. Just be receptive to the Sound. That is the first step in becoming familiar with the Shabd-guru. That Sound we hear, no matter how slight, is very important.

Soami Ji writes in Sar Bachan Poetry: “Tie the thread of your consciousness to Shabd so the door to the Lord’s court is opened to you. You will be rid of the mire of lust and anger when you bathe in the pure stream of Shabd.”

Constant contact with the Sound will transform our life, making it more peaceful and joyful. In the Bible, the prophet Zephaniah is quoted praising God: “He will quiet you with his love, He will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zeph. 3:17)

Rise above fear by putting your attention in the Sound. When thought waves do not arise, a higher level of consciousness is experienced. As long as the thought waves have not been stilled, we cannot go deep within, where we can get peace of mind.

Shabd meditation is the practice of going above the thought current and into the Sound Current. In Sar Bachan Poetry, Soami Ji says: “In my domain there is only the One, Satnam, and thought has no place there at all.”

Shabd-consciousness is beyond any mental constructs, ideas or thoughts. Shabd-consciousness cannot be described in words. That’s why mystics just point to the spiritual experience. How could anyone describe the moment when the mind is still and our consciousness is in a state of deep contemplation, absorbed in Shabd-consciousness?

Shabd consciousness is always within, far from the madding crowd, basking in its own infinite, glorious, ringing radiance.

Alone in Majesty.
Endless Light.
Eternal Bliss.
Love Supreme.

And it’s there, available to us. Total attention in the Sound allows us to experience that we are pure consciousness without shape or form, made of Sound and light.

To experience this inner Light and Sound, Baba Ji advises us that during meditation, once we locate the inner Sound or buzz, we should hold on to it for as long as we can.

The daily practice of putting the attention in the Sound generates detachment from the drama of the world and acceptance of our karma. Detachment from the world gives us peace.

Acceptance of our karma brings a peaceful resignation and a joyful state of mind. The more peace of mind we have, the more balanced and wholesome we become. The first step in becoming wholesome again and making the best use of this incredible opportunity is to pay attention to the inner Sound.

When our attention is completely absorbed in the Sound, we will have reached the highest level of consciousness available to human beings. From then on, consciousness rises on its own, and there are no words to describe that state of consciousness.

Dropping everything else, become receptive to the Sound. Nothing else is needed. In simran we talk; in bhajan we listen, we become receptive to the Shabd guru.

Allow the Sound to manifest.

Immerse your attention in the inner Sound. Develop receptivity for the inner Sound. Learn to be in the Sound. Have its darshan.

In the presence of the Sound, there is no talking.
Contemplation is the conversation.
Let consciousness contemplate on Consciousness.
Relax.
Rest your fear in the Sound…
peace is there.

In Spiritual Letters Baba Jaimal Singh writes:

…at every moment the Shabd-dhun is resounding in your body. This is the Sound – the Creator of all. It has brought forth everything and by giving support has made everything exist. This Sound, the life and breath of all… is calling you in the form of the Shabd-dhun within your body. Keep alert to the Sound of the Dhun within. Lots of grace and mercy are being showered upon you.

Trusting Mystery - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Trusting Mystery

A committed atheist once said to me in a conversation about beliefs something like: Beliefs seem shallow to me. I trust a loving and caring presence that I have felt in my life since I was very young. I understand love and I trust it, but I do not trust beliefs and faiths because they divide people.

Self-professed atheists may intuitively grasp the essence of spirituality better than self-declared believers, who may change their beliefs when circumstances change. Belief and faith are often understood today as adopting a belief system, a set of concepts on which people rely for confidence, certainty, and identity. But beliefs are easily shaken. On the other hand, trust and faith acquired through experience are harder to shake, for these develop over time within the context of a relationship – with a Master, the Divine, or an unnamed loving presence nurtured through daily meditation and remembrance (simran).

For this atheist, mere belief in God felt superficial, like a label one would hang around one’s neck saying, “I believe,” with emphasis on “I.” Trust, on the other hand, is a product of “we.” Trust involves losing track of the “I.” In trust, we merge into the loving essence of God, even when doubts and confusions compel us to say, “I do not understand; nothing makes sense.”

Platonism and the role of confusion and mystery

Doubts and confusion are beneficial on the spiritual path because they lead the rational, analytical mind into a dead end. Confusion humbles the mind by confronting it with the mystery of life and the realm of personal inner experience. More than a thousand years ago, there was in the West a spiritual path called Platonism. It was based on entering into deeper and deeper levels of unknowing, unlearning, and the confronting of paradoxical impossibilities – a stripping away of unverified beliefs and false certainties. It was a path that prepared people to enter into the mysteries of the One. The founding master of this tradition was Socrates, who transformed those who put their trust in him through a method called, in Greek, aporia (dead end, confusion).

The method did not deliberately try to confuse disciples. Rather, it was about freeing them from conflicting beliefs and undigested knowledge and bringing those contradictions and unexamined beliefs to the surface. People often think they know, when they actually do not. Only when someone challenges their assumptions do they realize their confused state.

This cleansing state of confusion did not aim to make people stupid, but to open them to Mystery, a direct experience of the Divine called enthousiasmos (the inspired state of dwelling within Divine essence). Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, called this state divine madness (mania), which is incomprehensible to outside observers because it is out of step with their social and conceptual programming.

The mysterious ways of the intuitive mind that operate outside established codes and programs is becoming evermore rare in our increasingly computerized world. Аs Einstein said in a quote attributed to him: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”¹

The programming of the modern mind includes excessive confidence in external knowledge, a belief in its ability to solve problems, and an assumption that one can understand spiritual realities without having experienced them directly. This is in direct contrast to the science of the soul, which leads to enlightenment through confusion and confronting the rational mind with conceptual dead ends. Socrates practised this spiritual science 2,500 years ago, and it is as relevant and necessary today as it was then.

Why? Because, as the contemporary American philosopher Gabriel Marcel states, “We live in a broken world” – one that is “on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery.”² The mysterious and the awe-inspiring unsettle the left-brained tendencies of the modern rational mind. Therefore, it is easier to deny mystery and focus on techniques that attempt to solve problems through analysis and logic.

An alternative is to treat life as a mystery to be experienced. Struggling with a terminal illness, the writer Phillip Simmons chose the second approach:

At its deepest levels Life is not a problem, but a mystery…. Problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not…. Each of us finds his or her own way to mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a ‘problem’ are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness and confusion, or leap forward into mystery. And what does mystery ask of us? Only that we be in its presence, that we fully, consciously, hand ourselves over.… We can participate in mystery only by letting go of solutions.³

Trusting mystery

Trust and love are two of the greatest mysteries of life, as are suffering and death. We may be able to explain our beliefs or fight for them, but we can never explain why we love someone, or trust a particular person rather than another. While beliefs hold us in a bubble of certainty and make us feel as if we can understand everything through the lens of those beliefs, trust embraces the unknown, the uncertain. It encompasses the mystery of our temporary existence on earth, with all its horror and joy, tragedy and comedy.

We cannot solve mystery; rather our ego dissolves in the face of mystery.

Trust is essential to this dissolving. Where we put our trust and love determines where we go spiritually. The tragedy is that we often trust and desire what is illusory and have lost trust and desire for what is real and therefore most trustworthy. We encase ourselves in illusions to make ourselves comfortable. For example, we somehow believe that suffering is only for those who do not follow a spiritual path, and that if we follow a spiritual path, serious illness, financial disaster, and public disgrace cannot befall us. Those are only some of our illusions that get shattered when we begin practising a spiritual path that enables us to reorient our trust to more lasting, permanent realities.

Baba Ji once said that saints come not to fulfill our desires but to shatter our illusions.

We have lost trust precisely in that power which is the only stable and reliable reality in an illusory world that keeps betraying our trust. But we forget that betrayal and foolishly trust again and again the same things that have deceived us so many times.

Spirituality, as Baba Jaimal Singh explains in Spiritual Letters, is about restoring trust in what is real through a slow, gradual process that we call meditation. Meditation is the supreme act of trust, and its goal is to reorient our love and loyalty. Baba Jaimal Singh writes:

The day the individual being, that is the soul, separated from Sach Khand and the Shabd-dhun, that very day its trust in the True Lord and the Shabd-dhun was also severed. The Shabd-dhun looks after it all the time, but it does not realize this because its love and loyalties are deeply entrenched in mind and maya.⁴

We are loyal to mind and maya because that is what we know and identify with. We trust people and things that support our health, wealth, and good reputation. These so-called good things of life inevitably colour the way we see the world and make us believe that the comforts we now enjoy will last. But how short-lived and deceptive those trusted gifts are: health turns into sickness and death; wealth turns into liability and misery, and, along with our wealth, good reputation and former friends vanish as well. Baba Jaimal Singh advises us to shift our trust and loyalty from the ephemeral things we value so highly to the eternal reality of Shabd.

But it takes a lifetime of sustained meditation to reorient our trust. Trust is like a tall arch that cannot be built overnight. Arches rest on two strong pillars. The arch of trust rests on the pillar of love on one side and the pillar of suffering and experience on the other. Both pillars must stand on the foundation of meditation because only meditation can sustain our love. It does that by giving us inner experience and supporting us through difficult and disorienting experiences as well.

Masters are experts both in the mystery of love and the mystery of suffering because they have experienced the greatest depths of both. That is why they are able to reorient our attention and loyalty toward that which will never betray our trust. Baba Jaimal Singh continues:

The Shabd-dhun looks after it (the soul) all the time, but it does not realize this because its love and loyalties are deeply entrenched in mind and maya, and in maya’s objects and the senses that deceive.… [The soul] is dizzy in the love of the mind, and the mind is dizzy in the pleasures of the senses. Maya has spread such a veil over it that it may never regain awareness.⁵

We are in a dire predicament. We are sick and dizzy, our minds cluttered with the false concepts and beliefs that we call knowledge. We need urgent care. Suffering powerfully cuts through our deluded, dizzy state; it sobers us; and it awakens us to the reality of the people and things that have preoccupied our attention for so long.

Maharaj Sawan Singh (known as the Great Master) also talks about two pillars: Nam practice combined with experience and suffering, which lift us out of this world. In Spiritual Gems he describes how the average struggling soul progresses on the path:

He has heard of the magnificence of Nam from the saints. A tiny spark is kindled in him. He gives it some attention. The days are passing. Partly through receiving knocks (sickness, death in the family, demands on purse, shocks to pride, etc.); partly through age; partly through Satsang; partly because he has passed through some of his pralabdh karma (fate); and partly through devotion to Nam, his attention is slowly contracting. So, by the time he reaches the end of his days, he is almost ready to go up and grasp Nam.⁶

Meditation combined with pain and suffering shatter the trust we have invested in temporary things. The saints keep telling us: enough. Now sit still within and gradually restore your trust in the One who is truly trustworthy. Seek help from a spiritual Master who can restore your broken trust in your permanent source:

The Satguru, attaching the disciple again to the same Shabd-dhun, will guide him back to Sach Khand. So the disciple’s trust that remained broken in life after life has been restored by the Satguru.⁷

The gift of suffering

We can begin to rebuild our trust in lasting reality through a loving relationship with a Master. Saints come to teach us and transform us through their love, through their selfless sacrifice for us. When someone asked Baba Ji why mystics seem to undergo suffering much more intense than most human beings, he responded by saying something like: That’s how we learn to live in the will of the Lord. In other words, that’s how mystics teach us to live in the Lord’s will – by being examples.

But do saints really suffer? In fact, they have escaped the trap of suffering and help us do the same. They experience illness and emotions just as we do, but they are not trapped by them. They have broken the iron chain that links misfortune to mental resistance.

Resistance, not painful circumstances, causes suffering. We suffer when our ego resents and resists the events of life. Saints do not have this resistance, so they do not suffer. They call this lack of resistance living happily in the Lord’s will. The Great Master says that the Shabd alone (with which saints are in constant contact) allows a person to remain unscarred through the ups and downs of life:

If one concentrates his attention and catches the Sound Current, his will power becomes strong; thereby his capacity to go through his fate karma increases, and the ups and downs of life leave no scars on him.⁸

Difficult events and circumstances can be perceived as providential care looking out for our spiritual welfare. That is the perspective of the eternal self with which we get in touch through meditation. Or we can perceive difficulties as karma – punishment for past misdeeds. Meditation gives us the opportunity to see our life circumstances as the manifestation of divine care that perfects the soul rather than as karma that drags the soul down through suffering. The Great Master writes:

If meditation has taken us above the point from where the fate karma works on us, we become indifferent to its effect. Therefore, meditation is the antidote to karma.⁹

When we rise to the level of the Shabd, we understand that everything that happens is part of a chain of cause and effect that has given us countless, wonderful things: birth in a human body, the environment in which to develop spiritually, the support of a loving Master. So when that same power also sends us misery, loss, and pain, should we not accept it in the same spirit of gratitude, trusting in the overall caring, providential design? If good things flowed from this care, then what we perceive as bad karma is also part of the same design. We have received the priceless gift of life and consciousness. And this inner power is doing everything possible to make us even more alive and conscious. It does this by sending us painful events that scramble our routines and the programming of our computer-like mind.

Sometimes in the midst of extreme crises, danger, and pain people become conscious of a protecting hand supporting them from the inside. Sometimes, in the depths of extreme suffering, we become most conscious of our soul’s reality. Many have reported that they felt most alive when faced with mortal danger or when lying on their death bed.

Spirituality itself grows out of intense, even unimaginable suffering and self-sacrifice combined with unfathomable, mysterious love. The suffering of countless mystics and saints over the centuries shows that trusting the Mystery may not be comfortable for body and mind, but it brings the sweetest fruits of the human spirit, fruits that multiply and nourish suffering souls for generations. And the truth is, we suffer even if we do not trust mystery and surrender to it; we actually suffer more and longer without trust and surrender.

The mystery of suffering brings us to the edge of the cliff, so that we can awaken. This is what happened to the 17th-century mystic Tukaram. He came from a prosperous family and grew up in a house with servants and plenty of everything. Then famine struck. He borrowed money to keep his family alive, but eventually lost his parents, wife, and son to the famine. Then he lost his good name as well because he could not repay his debtors. He had no other place to turn but to the Lord, and he turned to him completely and gratefully, thanking him that there was now nothing and no one standing between him and the Lord:

My wife is dead, she is freed from suffering –
The Lord has released me
From the maya of attachment.
O God, it is just you and me
No one is left to come between us.¹⁰

Tukaram’s losses awakened him to the realization that there is more to a human being than the flesh that passes and is no more.

When we begin to cling to the physical, the Masters, God’s ambassadors on earth, take drastic measures to turn our face from the perishable to the eternal, from the visible to the invisible. They give us loss, physical suffering, and discomfort. And this suffering, combined with meditation, restores the soul’s trust in its own Reality, in its essential life. Rumi says,

God’s worst cruelty is better than the mercies of the two worlds. …
In His cruelty lives hidden tenderness.
To submit the soul to God out of love for Him
Makes the soul’s essential life blaze and glow.¹¹

The greatest paradox of spirituality is that in order to restore the soul’s essential life and trust, it has to be torn (sometimes forcefully) from the charms of the visible. God’s logic is different from ours: we train a dog to trust us by giving it treats. God deprives us of visible treats to help us turn to him so that we can begin to receive his invisible, but lasting gifts:

Our greatest problem is that we rely too much on our ego for support. Ego makes us believe that we can rely on people, events, and circumstances that actually have no permanence and are out of our control. We are deluded in the belief that we know what is happening when in fact we do not know. Ego does not like the humbling experience of life’s mysteries and sends us in all the wrong directions trying to solve them rather than confront them. When he sees us in this state, the compassionate Lord sends us troubles to cure us and redirect our attention to the only thing we can trust and cling to:

To pull us back to that place of No-direction,
He sent us troubles from all directions.¹²

Shabd is the place of No-direction. While the physical realm is obsessed with directions and boundaries, in Shabd there are no directions and no boundaries. By entering this divine stream, the saints escape the suffering that we call “the human condition.” This is because they fully surrender to the mystery of life and do not resist the iron logic of its unfolding.

To help us surrender, the Lord, in his infinite love, puts us face to face with the mystery of life’s suffering, so that we can find our way back to a state of trust. The pillar of our love and the pillar of our suffering support and restore our trust in the Lord of our soul, Radha Soami. But the arch of trust can rise tall only if its supporting pillars – love on one side and the experience of suffering on the other – are firmly planted on the foundation of meditation, our only source of lasting love and true experience.

Gary F. Moring, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Einstein, Gary Moring, 2004, p.286
Gabriel Marcel “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existenialism, trans. Manya Harari, 1995, p.12
Philip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, 2000, p.8
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, Letter 46
Ibid.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 24
Spiritual Letters, Letter 46
Spiritual Gems, Letter 96
Ibid., Letter 28
Tukaram: The Ceaseless Song of Devotion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, p.11
Andrew Harvey, Teachings of Rumi, 1999, p.113
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, p.108

A Hero’s Journey - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Hero’s Journey

In Light on Saint John, Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh says:

The more effort we make, the more grace we receive to make still more effort until we reach our goal.¹

This path we’re on is about the spiritual work and our efforts. It’s an astonishing fact that we’re on this path at all. We’re truly Homeward Bound now. We’re definitely going from station to station. We’re on a seemingly never-ending journey, going back Home after our descent into the creation so many aeons ago. In this creation we are re-living experiences we’ve had before. Any freshness we’re experiencing right now comes from the slow awakening of the soul power within us. It’s the soul with which we’re primarily concerned.

From time immemorial the soul has been bound to the mind, which is always eager for more and more-varied worldly experiences. The mind wants more of everything, be it recognition, reputation or status and power. It’s never enough because the ego can never be satisfied. Our ego has expanded and become so powerful that it takes heroic efforts to get it under control. For our life’s journey is truly a hero’s journey.

It takes time to get an even basic understanding of what is required from us on this spiritual path. Years, and even decades, pass before we begin to notice some subtle changes in our attitude towards life. Initially, meditation is one of the many activities in which we’re engaged. Work, family and other pastimes take up so much of our time, that there is hardly any room left for our meditation. Efforts are being made, but more half-heartedly than whole-heartedly. Somehow or other a new groove has to be made in our mind.

At the early stages ─ and mind you, early is a very relative notion in Sant Mat ─ it is more out of a sense of duty, or a sense of guilt rather than anything else, that we sit in meditation. At this stage, discipline, perseverance and even routine play their part. Yet, something miraculous takes place as well. A foundation is being laid, which is built on rock and not on sand. Keeping within the Sant Mat parameters is the biggest challenge, but slowly and gradually it’s taking effect.

Wake-up calls though are necessary as well. The biggest wake-up call is when your Master passes away. You’re overwhelmed by a deep sense of loss, but at the same time you’re left with no choice. You have to seek the Master within.

A hero’s journey is no child’s play. You will be tested and tried; you will go through trials and tribulations, but you will end up with a deeper understanding of the purpose of life’s journey. At crucial moments there is a shift of perspective. The focus and drive to succeed in the world become increasingly less important, and there is a slow turning within. During this process of transformation, the spiritual traveller is gradually becoming aware that he or she is being accompanied by an unseen travelling companion. The physical Master may have left this earthly plane, but the Comforter is always with the disciple. As Huzur says in Light on Saint John:

So, when I leave you physically, you will not find me anywhere outside and will have no option but to seek me within. Then you will be in touch with the Comforter, who will pull you up to my level, the level of the Father.²

The subtle changes in our attitude towards life and the shift of perspective have everything to do with our increasing awareness of a richer life within. We’re little children on the path and are being spoon-fed with small drops of divine nectar. Somehow our consciousness is being raised and we’re starting to breathe in a different dimension, the spiritual dimension. Boring sessions of automatic repetition and constantly being out of focus are being replaced by sessions in which we move towards stillness. The incredible has happened, stillness is becoming part of our daily routine. We’re getting glimpses of the richness of an inner life.

Turmoil and disturbances are still there, but the knowledge that any time you can escape to that quiet place within is immensely comforting. Unknowingly to us, the relationship with the divine is being restored. That relationship is the most precious thing in the whole universe. The way that the bond between Master and disciple, between the Father and the devotee, is being forged is beautifully explained by Huzur in Light on Saint John:

The Master comes to our level to fill us with devotion and to put us on the path, and he fills us with so much love that we cannot live without him. Physically we cannot always be with him, so the love he creates in us ultimately leads us within. When we turn within, we are in touch with the Comforter, which pulls us up to the level of the Father.³

Living in the world, and not being of the world, means spending time in your own company. This is where our relationship with the divine comes in. The aloneness we’re seeking is closely bound up with the inner company we’re experiencing. We have found a true friend in the Master. Friendship with the Master is so much more than any notion of friendship we may ever have had. It’s hard not to remember Hazur leafing through the Holy Bible and hitting upon this passage:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.⁴

In Light on Saint John, he offers this explanation:

When we make progress on the path according to the instructions of the Master, we are no longer slaves and servants of the mind and the senses. He brings us up to his level; we become his friends, his brothers. The Master has come into the world just for this purpose.

He has come down to our level and laid down his life for us. No love could be greater, for even to come down to the level of a human being he has to take on some karmas to get a human body. He lays down his life of perfect bliss with the Father in order to come into the dark and filthy dungeon of this world; he tells us how to get out of it; he puts us on the path and even carries some of our load himself, just to bring us up to his level of supreme and eternal happiness.⁵

Baba Ji asks us to work with him. What a wonderful invitation, to which we can only respond by taking to the task at hand. For we won’t get anywhere by talking about the path; the only option is walking the path. We are spiritual workers, to which Hazur refers when he explains this passage in Light on Saint Matthew:

The harvest truly is plentiful, but the labourers are few.⁶

It’s hard work to get to the eye centre. Hazur used to call it, “a lifelong struggle.” The harvest is waiting for us and we should become labourers, so that we can collect that harvest. Everything has been prepared for us. The best conditions for our spiritual growth have been created for us. This is something one has to slowly come to realize. So many gifts from the Father have been showered on us. There is “no dearth of Grace, no dearth of the blessings of the Father.”⁷ So, there are no excuses for not doing His work. Quoting from Light on Saint John:

Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest?⁸

Time is fleeting; it slips through our fingers. You wake up one morning and realize you have become old overnight. Postponing and delaying our action is pure self-deception. We have to build our treasure in heaven, saving for our spiritual pension, as it were. That moment comes sooner than we think. It won’t work, if as Huzur says, “We always like to give the worst part of our life for worshipping the Father.”⁹ Instead, we should give the best part of our life for worshipping the Father.

As Shabd practitioners, our primary task is to grow that inner capacity. The more that capacity grows, the more we become aware of the subtle changes that take place inside. We are turned inward in a process of transformation. Our longing to be with the divine, to be with the Shabd Master, grows day by day.

The more effort we make, the more grace we receive to make still more effort until we reach our goal.¹⁰

We can never do enough, but we can always do more. How will we spend the precious time given to us? What choices do we make? Apart from becoming more aware, we also become more alert. We can choose fewer distractions and more focus, with the realization that we are in the company of Saints. We can try to follow in their footsteps and belong to that great chain of spiritual beings. The heat from the world is being kept away from us when we take shelter under that huge tree of Shabd. We are being submerged in the water of life, which keeps us cool.

Being friends with the Master means being engaged in a unique relationship. The etymological meaning of friend is lover, which makes sense because we are committed to a relationship of divine love. It is this relationship which causes us to go beyond our physical and mental boundaries. In the stillness of our mind we become receptive to the divine. Through the constant practice of the art of doing nothing, we automatically enter that spiritual atmosphere which gives us peace of mind. We begin to collect the harvest which is referred to in passage after passage in Light on Saint John:

Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.¹¹

Hazur explains:

When you are able to be at the eye centre and still your mind there, then ‘look to the fields; for they are white already to harvest.’ When you have raised your consciousness to the eye centre, you have as it were, the crop of your meditation ripe and ready for harvesting, and you can begin to gather it.¹²

The joy and that sense of fulfilment coming from meditation becomes so strong that we start to cherish those hours of meditation as the most precious thing in our life. We can’t even begin to imagine what incredible reward is waiting for us. The reward we’ll get, the wages of our meditation, is “fruit unto life eternal.”¹³ We’ve come a long way and we’ve still got a long way to go, but we’re definitely on the journey home. Sacrificing worldly pleasures, putting in the hard work, it’s all so worthwhile. Leading an inner life, in communion with the Spirit, in your own company but always with the friend next to you, is where we end up.

A cosmic journey of descent which left us deeply entangled in the creation is being reversed into a cosmic journey of ascent. We’re fulfilling life’s purpose under his guidance. We’re seekers after truth who have been given the method of worshipping the Father. To quote Huzur again:

I [Christ] have given you this knowledge. Do not think that you have searched for me and found me. Actually, my Father has drawn you to me. But for my Father, you would never have known anything about me.¹⁴

The Father’s love for his children has brought us into the company of Saints. We can labour in his vineyard, now that it is day. No amount of gratitude will ever be sufficient, but we do know that our labour pleases him. What greater joy than pleasing your Master, not adding to his load but lightening it!

Baba Ji has said that love is the core of our being; love is the core of our existence. It is this love, which is with us, all throughout our life on our hero’s journey. We can tap into it any time and make contact with it. It is so far beyond the physical and is the direct cause of our peace of mind. It is the source of our contentment and stillness. It is an immense power that is slowly obliterating our ego. We find our true identity when the ego fades into the background. That true identity is strongly connected to the inner Master.

Additionally, when we speak about gifts from the Lord, what an incredible gift to feel our connectedness with all of the creation. We’ve also been made part of a wonderful support group, which manifests itself in so many unexpected ways. The understanding from a brother or sister, members of our spiritual family, in words and often without words, can have a huge impact on our spiritual well-being. Recognizing that you’re on the same path can give such a feeling of joy. You can’t explain it, and you don’t have to analyze it. We’re truly spiritual beings, part of that Great Being.

This is beautifully expressed in the chapter about the Jewish tradition, called “Ladder to the Divine,” in The Spiritual Guide:

My teacher, may his memory be for a blessing, cautioned me and all the brethren who were with him in this fellowship that before praying the morning service, we should take upon ourselves the positive commandment, “…and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”¹⁵ … And especially when it comes to the love of our brethren, each and every one of us must bind himself to the others as if he were one limb within the body of this fellowship.¹⁶

Rung by rung, we’re stepping on the ladder to the Divine, getting closer to our destination every minute of the day.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, RSSB, Beas, 2007, p. 217.
Ibid, p. 231.
Ibid.
Gospel of John 15:13; & Light on Saint John, p. 221.
Ibid.
Gospel of Matthew 9:37; Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint Matthew, RSSB, Beas, 2008, p. 101.
Ibid.
Gospel of John, 4:35; Light on Saint John, p. 65.
Ibid.
Light on Saint John, p. 217.
Gospel of John, 4:35; Ibid, p. 66.
Ibid, p. 67.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 69.
Bible, Leviticus 19:18
Beverly Chapman (editor), The Spiritual Guide, Vol. 1, RSSB, Beas, 2017, p. 215.

Very Beauteous Is the Body-Bride - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Very Beauteous Is the Body-Bride

In one of his poems Guru Amardas writes:

Very beauteous is the body-bride
with whom abides her Darling Spouse.¹

Guru Amardas emphasizes in this poem the beauty of a human being. How admirable this form is when it is used for the purpose for which the Lord has given, when it is used in the quest for the Divine. During this life when we become conscious of Shabd, the “Darling Spouse” of our soul, then by the grace of that power we realize our true self and the Lord. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh says:

The main purpose of life is to realize God. This privilege the Lord has bestowed only on human beings. The human body is the top rung of the ladder of creation. From here we either drop down to lower species or we can go back to the Father and escape from the cycle of birth and death. Everything else we have been getting every time we have come into this world, in any form, in any species.

But the privilege of going back to the Father can be achieved only in the human life. So, we should always be mindful of our destination and try to follow the spiritual path which leads us back to him. While working out our destiny, our karmic accounts or adjustments – our other duties, responsibilities – we should not forget the end and purpose for which we have come into this world.²

Saints and mystics live among us to remind us of this “end and purpose” for which we have been born, to find our way back to the Lord. They offer us the key by which we can open the door that will gain us access to the spiritual path that leads back to the Father, which is hidden within every human being. By following this spiritual path, we get the understanding that going back to him doesn’t mean we’re going to a specific place. It’s just a matter of realization, of becoming conscious of his all-pervading Divine presence. In order to realize his presence, to experience his greatness, we don’t have to acquire certain virtues – qualities like love, compassion, forgiveness, devotion, humility or patience. Nothing is further from the truth. These qualities are already in our hearts. As Great Master used to say:

Every soul is virtuous. Our eyes and hearts are at fault if we fail to see its worth, for God himself sits in every human heart.³

The loving divine essence is already in our hearts, in our bodies, so all the qualities which are connected to this essence are there too. That’s why Guru Amardas writes in the same poem:

In the body are the invaluable wealth
and the brimful treasures
of the Lord’s meditation.⁴

Sardar Bahadur Ji gave the following explanation of this line:

Innumerable priceless things are there, lying inside this body… Inside this body where you find lust, anger and so on, you also find forgiveness, discrimination, patience – those things are there too.

Inside each person is a treasure trove of love, a storehouse of devotion for the Lord, lying there, brimful. There’s not just a drop or two, there are oceans, full to the brim.⁵

So, don’t think there is no love or devotion in your heart. We are all full of love, filled to the brim with devotion and full of divine light. But we’re not conscious of it. Isn’t it distressing, that the essence of life is invisible for us? And that qualities such as anger, jealousy, lust, pride and greediness predominate in us? According to saints and mystics, this is due to the restlessness of our mind and all the impressions that are stored in it. These impressions cloud our mind and cause ripples in its surface, through which the depth of the Divine, that lies hidden underneath, is invisible.

The focus of the spiritual path is on stilling the mind and cleansing it of all these impressions. Everything serves that goal – satsang, seva, spiritual books, question and answer sessions with the Master – are all meant to expose our mind to a certain atmosphere. These all create a longing in our mind to search for God and to find everlasting peace. Every practice of meditation is an effort to focus our mind on Shabd, so it can be cleansed of its impressions. Under the influence of this loving power we dare to let go of all our concepts, ideas, desires, attachments, and above all, ourselves. Sant Mat is about letting go and surrendering in stages. It’s about removing that which limits us. Hazur Maharaj Ji would explain this in the following way:

...the soul is full of devotion for the Father. But it is helpless due to the weight of the mind. And the mind has become a slave of the senses. So being mixed up with the mind – rather dominated by the mind – we do not feel that love for the Father. Love is there in every soul. Potentially, every soul is God. So, the more weight we remove from the soul, the more love and devotion we feel for the Father. There’s no other way. You see, you have to remove the weight.

The needle is always attracted by the magnet, but if there’s a weight over the needle, it becomes helpless. It’s not that the needle is not being attracted by the magnet. The attraction is the same as it was before the weight, but it just has become helpless. So, all we have to do is remove the weight from the needle; then automatically it goes to the magnet. Similarly, the soul is always in love with the Father, full of love and devotion for the Lord, for its Creator. But it has become helpless due to the weight of the mind, and the mind has become helpless due to being a slave of the senses. So we have to adopt that means and that method by which we can remove the weight of the mind from the soul.⁶

Hazur Maharaj Ji then continues and says about these means and method:

Satsangs, discussions, meetings, good company, good literature – they are ways to create longing in us for meditation, for the Father. But achievement can only be done through the meditation. The means create longing in us, strengthen our faith in meditation, but the real achievement we will only accomplish by meditation. So there’s no short cut to meditation. That is why Christ said: Sin against the Holy Ghost can never be forgiven. There’s no other way to seek the forgiveness of the Father but to attend to the Holy Ghost. The devotion is already there, love is there – we are not creating love in the soul, we are only removing the weight of the mind. And then we realize the love from within.⁷

This is the message of all mystics. Love, compassion, devotion, and the divine presence, will reveal itself in our hearts when our mind becomes still, and we surrender to Shabd. And for that, the daily practice of meditation is essential, as is the guidance of our master.

How often has Baba Ji emphasized this? He seizes every opportunity to remind us of meditation. Without our daily practice we will not get the experience, the understanding or the consciousness. Without meditation we will remain under the delusion of our mind, deceived by our own thoughts, convinced of our own ability and knowledge. It is exactly through the practice of meditation that little by little the scales fall from our eyes, our ego loses its power, and we begin to recognize how insignificant and ignorant we are. We realize that without his grace and help we are not able to do anything. We get the understanding that nothing is in our hands, absolutely nothing. As the Buddhist scholar, Edward Conze, writes about bhakti (faith or devotion):

The bhaktic trend eliminates, in faith, all reliance on self-power, all reliance in one’s own ability to plan and control one’s own life and salvation.... Surrender in faith involves a high degree of extinction of separate selfhood, partly because one does not rely on oneself, or one’s own power, and partly because one sees the futility of all conscious and personal efforts and allows oneself to be ‘carried’ to salvation.... Elementary modesty lets us perceive that any merit we may claim compares as nothing with that of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and with the power of their help.... All pride in our intellect, all pride in the purity of our heart, sets up a self against others. If the intellect is seen as futile, the heart as corrupt, that self is deflated. The grace of the Absolute alone can carry us across, and our own personal schemes and endeavours are quite trivial.⁸

Conze describes in a beautiful way how the daily practice of meditation fills us with humility; how devotion to the master wipes out the idea of a separate selfhood. Devotion makes us receptive to the grace of the Absolute, the Divine. It’s the experience of ostensibly failing in meditation, of the difficulties with concentrating our attention at the eye centre, and the constant wandering of our thoughts, that makes our ego fade away. It might sound a little bit strange, but it is the attempts that don’t bring us the results that we expect and hope for, that bring us to the point at which we let go and surrender. With letting go, with surrendering, we become receptive to the grace of the Divine and allow the master to carry us back home to the Father. That’s why Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

Please remember that wherever you may be the Lord is always with you and he should never be forgotten. We should always do our duty towards him with single-minded devotion and without letting anything in life take us away from this important task.⁹

When we get a chance to go to Dera, we should make best use of the time away from our worldly responsibilities with the opportunity to focus completely on the Master and his teachings. We can serve and follow Master’s most important instruction: the daily practice of meditation. The result of meditation is beautifully illustrated by a legend in the Puranas. In this story there was a man called Pundalik, who was travelling with his wife and parents. They joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Varanasi.

One night the pilgrims stopped at the hermitage of a great sage. Tired from the day’s long walk all fell asleep except Pundalik. As he lay awake, he saw a group of beautiful women clad in soiled clothes enter the hermitage. They swept the floor, fetched water and washed the sage’s clothes. Then they had darshan of the sage, and when they came out, their clothes were spotless, pure white. Astonished at this sight, Pundalik asked them who they were. They replied that they were the river goddesses in whose waters thousands of people bathed. Their clothes became soiled because of the pilgrims’ sins, but when they purified themselves by serving the sage, their garments became snow-white again.¹⁰

The aim of this legend is to show us the exalted value of serving our master. It highlights that we, like the river goddesses, can be cleansed and purified through service to him. Let’s obey our master, so the divine light that fills us to the brim can reveal itself again. Let’s become beautiful human beings, body-brides, with whom abides our “Darling Spouse,” by taking the advice to heart of the Maharashtrian mystic Eknath, who writes in this poem called “Master Guides His Disciple”:

Meditate deeply three times a day
in search of the Light
that’s your soul.
Close yourself to the world
with thumbs in ears, eyes closed.
This is the way you open to meeting
the Self that shines within you –
the face of life itself,
the face that fills the universe.
But don’t stop there, my son,
search for your master beyond all this…
Continue meditating, my child…
Soon the Imperishable, the Lord of body and soul,
will appear in your heart.
Keep on gazing, Eknath –
finally you’ll see that he is you.¹¹

Guru Amar Das, Adi Granth, Raag Soohi, 754.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Volume I, RSSB: Beas, 2010, p. 193-194.
As quoted in Enigma of Love, p.
Guru Amar Das, Adi Granth, Raag Soohi, 754.
Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Volume II, RSSB: Beas, 2006, p. 22.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Volume II, RSSB: Beas, 2010, p. 335.
Ibid. p. 336.
As quoted in K.N. Upadhyaya, Buddhism: Path to Nirvana, RSSB: Beas, 2010, p. 207
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, RSSB: Beas, 2002, p. 150.
As quoted in Judith Sankaranarayan, Many Voices, One Song, the Poet Mystics of Maharashtra, RSSB: Beas, 2013, p. 73-74
Ibid, p. 172-173

Happiness Is Available Right Now - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Happiness Is Available Right Now

The masters always teach that the key to happiness is surrender to the will of God. The opposite of such surrender is ego, and ego manifests itself through attachment. Therefore, the saints say that our misery, all our misery, is due to attachment. The most significant attachment we suffer from is not the attachment to other people. It is the attachment to our idea of “the way things should be.” We have a deeply integrated concept of who we are, how people should view us, and what we have – our houses, our cars, our positions, our status, our seva positions, our reputation and honour in the sangat, and so forth. All these have been incorporated into our ego. Our great big attachment is to this entire picture of how our life is and should continue to be. It is part and parcel of our sense of self. Put all this together and we have created a self-centred stage for the petty drama of our own lives. Most of our energy is spent maintaining and preserving this stage and our role within it. Let us label this “Our Drama”. When any disturbance occurs in Our Drama, we freak out. Loss of money wrecks Our Drama. Loss of loved ones wrecks Our Drama. Loss of position, loss of health, any loss we can imagine, disturbs Our Drama and we feel pain when this happens. Not just loss but change, any kind of change, threatens Our Drama. So it stands to reason that a global pandemic is going to wreak havoc with Our Drama.

The root of our trouble is that we think the purpose of human life, this life which the Lord has conferred upon us as a valuable gift, is to defend and protect and preserve and maintain Our Drama. We forget that as Hazur has said:

The purpose of human life is to enable us to know ourselves and to know the Lord, which cannot be accomplished in any other form. ¹

Isn’t it the case that we find out more about ourselves in times of crisis? Suddenly, instead of worrying about a house, we realize that health is more important or that it is love that counts, not money. When a real shock comes along, we are torn away from our comfort zone and we turn to God. As Our Drama is destroyed, we find that the lasting wealth is our faith and love and that our priorities have been distorted by stupid attachments. Now we wish that we had prioritized meditation so that, instead of reading messages about Baba Ji’s phone calls to comfort the sangats around the world, we had developed an inner relationship beyond the physical where we need no WhatsApp to keep in touch with our master.

Let us use this pandemic crisis to achieve real change within ourselves. Let us resolve firmly to abandon Our Drama and surrender to the Lord’s drama, His play… After all, His play is going to occur whether we like it or not. He will ignore Our Drama and unfold his own play. Why not let go and submit and enjoy?

Take life easily as it comes. Worry never helped anybody. There is a Higher Power that guides our destinies. Try to move along with His Will. He alone knows what is best for us. He is all good and merciful. Give yourself up to His Hands. May the Lord bless you. ²

If we jettison Our Drama and become open to His Will, then whatever comes is acceptable and will not make us unhappy. In fact, properly viewed, whatever the Lord sends to us will be a source of fun and joy for us. Let us treat the whole global pandemic as an adventure. Life had become too boring and predictable. Now everything is shaken up. How exciting. What a challenge.

The challenge for us all is to put the teachings into practice. Of course, it is easy to feel that we are surrendering to His Will when things are going well. However, we really discover how little submission we have when things get difficult. Perhaps we can embrace this challenge as an opportunity to test ourselves, as an exercise in self-discovery. Baba Ji often encourages us to be objective in our thinking. All the mystics have extolled the virtues of clear thinking. Maybe we can become a little less involved and a little more objective by viewing these events as if we were watching a movie. After all, saints say that this drama was scripted before we were born. Some people even enjoy watching disaster movies, but it is not so much fun when we are actually in the midst of the disaster. Based on our knowledge of the law of karma and the teachings of our masters, we could try to observe the current events as if this Covid 19 Global Pandemic were also a movie, now being released not by Netflix but by Karmaflix. While we may view it as an unavoidable part of the divine plan, it’s still a good idea to do our part as actors in the movie: keep a safe distance from the other actors, wash our hands frequently, keep our faith and trust in God’s love, and above all, never miss our bhajan and simran even in the midst of this scary film.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, letter 107
Maharaj Charan Singh, Divine Light, letter 106

Shabd Amrit Dhara - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Shabd Amrit Dhara

(Song of Devotion on the Stream of Immortal Grace)

There are times in probably every life when the old familiar moorings that give us a sense of who and what we are get disrupted or are even taken away from us entirely. The material comforts and expectations to which we had become accustomed suddenly become irrelevant or of little value. The death of a parent, a life partner, or a child; a sudden illness that leaves us or a loved one incapacitated or dependent; an unexpected negative reversal of our finances – there are many possible scenarios, but few of us had seriously considered the effects, global and personal, of a sickness that sweeps the planet like the one we are presently facing.

Yet along with all the disturbance, this tiny virus has achieved things that we human beings, for all our talking and discussion, have been unable to do. Civil wars have ceased or at least declined in their ferocity; politicians have toned down their rhetoric; oil prices have tumbled; atmospheric pollution has cleared; wildlife is rapidly reclaiming newly deserted areas; and families are spending more time together (maybe not always with positive results!). It has become self-evident that we are all in the same boat (socially distanced, of course, and hopefully not a cruise ship!), rich or poor, well-known or obscure – whoever we are. And all this and much more has taken place in a matter of days and weeks. Many people are saying that life has taken on a surreal quality, like a dream.

As spiritual seekers and initiates of a master, how do we handle the situation? In the eye of a hurricane, all is calm; at the centre of our being there is tranquillity and bliss. But how can we find that centre and remain in it? The problem, we know, lies in the mind – its thoughts, emotions, and disturbances that draw us away from the peaceful centre. How then to recognize the negative tendencies of the mind? How to control them? How to surrender our mind to the Divine so that it ceases to be a hindrance and a cause of separation?

We have often heard our masters say that meditation is easier than surrender, because anyone can sit down and try to meditate. But to reorientate our thinking and emotions into a state of complete acquiescence to the divine will – that is another matter.

We have also heard it said so many times that the real guru is the divine energy that has created and sustains creation. We may think of it as the Shabd, the Word, the Kun, the Dao, the immanent divine Power, Will, Intelligence, or Wisdom – there are many ways of thinking of it. Nothing happens that is outside the province of this power; “Not a leaf stirs but by His order;” and although we are harvesting the fruits of our karma, the administrator of these karmas is the divine power, the Shabd. And in a way that we may find difficult to understand, the karma that we have to face is not only a paying-off of the past, but also a means of present spiritual correction and evolution. If we have sufficient humility, we can learn from the experience. It is all, ultimately, for our own spiritual benefit.

Although much comfort and strength can be derived from the living satguru, the real satguru is this divine energy, which choreographs the dance of our lives. Therefore, in this song of devotion to the satguru, the unknown author writes that everything in life, including difficulties and suffering, should be taken as coming from the satguru. Everything is being done for our spiritual benefit. Afflictions are all his corrective measures and, in the end, all suffering will disappear when drowned in the stream (dhar) of immortal grace (amrit) that continuously emanates from him. The author says it all so much better than any commentary could:

In whatever circumstances your satguru wants to keep you
you should always be happy, even if you are in trouble.
He will mould your mind in several ways;
Sometimes he may even cause you to be ill.
He will frighten you in many ways,
and sometimes he even makes you fight against your enemies.
Sometimes he may cause you to lose money and prestige,
suffer losses and humiliation,
and sometimes put you in such extremity that you fear death.
Sometimes you may be very sad and depressed without reason,
and sometimes he makes you feel disappointed,
or doubtful whether you will receive his grace.
In many other ways, he will try to correct you.

Often, silently, he is kind to you
or gives you grace without your knowledge.
With the help of bhajan, contemplation (dhyan), and satsang,
he will sever your ties with the world.
Understand all these corrective troubles to be his will,
and through them all you should remain contented and happy
and know them to be his will.
Whatever should happen to you,
you should never waver in your devotion to him
or leave the refuge of his holy feet.
Whatever he does, you should feel it is for your good
and whatever your circumstances,
you should realize it is his grace and for your good.

Sometimes, when trials are many and great,
your faith may waver and they will make you forget the satguru,
but this is the time when you should remember him.
Understand, this is the time when you should control yourself
and crush your mind.
This is the time when you should think
of nothing else but your satguru.
This will steady your mind.
It is the only way in which your mind will be purified.
Get the stream of grace (amrit dhar) from the satguru,
the ocean of mercy, and thus be rid of all affliction.
_{Author Unknown, Shabd amrit dhar}

Transforming Prison Into a Refuge - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Transforming Prison Into a Refuge

Perhaps we feel that the world is spinning uncontrollably and we have no power to stop it and reverse its direction. We may feel overwhelmed by the global pandemic, and that we are losing our comfortable life and predictable future. In the short term, we do not know for how long that distancing or lockdown conditions will last, and when the danger and fear will be over … and we can feel safe again. We have no control.

But we need to be comforted by knowing that our Master has prepared us for just this kind of situation.

Hasn’t he told us that this world is not perfect nor will it ever be! That we shouldn’t expect conditions to suit us – we have to adjust to changes in circumstance. (We just didn’t expect them to be so stark or extreme!) He has told us to be positive, and we have to find ways to be so; to experience all these changes in a positive light. He used to say that if the terrain we are walking through is rough, we just need to wear strong boots. Those strong boots will protect us. Those strong boots are our meditation, seva, and satsang. He has encouraged us to take a positive view of whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. This kind of positive thinking is no small thing. It can transform any fearful situation into one of love and freedom.

And if we feel anxious about our future, we can sublimate that anxiety into helping others. And then we will be able to maintain our equilibrium. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

We often encounter stories of people overcoming insurmountable odds and finding a way forward. An inspiring example was recently published in The Guardian newspaper –

A 41-year-old woman, who had been in prison for 20 years, wrote about how her period of incarceration changed her for the better. After a long inner struggle, she was able to adjust to her circumstances and change her outlook.

At first she felt that the walls of her cell were closing in on her, and that she was cut off without choices. But after some time she realized that with a change in her attitude, and using her time in jail productively, prison could become a refuge from all the problems of the outer world – all the temptations and weaknesses that had once driven her to commit the crimes in the first place, for which she had been imprisoned. Once she was able to see the prison walls as a refuge, she felt liberated, that she had been given freedom. She learned to live “in the now” and appreciate every moment of her life.

Finally she was granted parole. But just as she was about to enjoy her first taste of life outside the prison walls, the Covid-19 lockdown began. How ironic! Yet because of her experience in prison (even having been in solitary confinement for some time), she came to appreciate her solitude and once again saw this period as a refuge from the problems of the world. She wrote:

I sometimes fear there’s nothing meaningful I can contribute to society, but with a global pandemic forcing much of the world into lockdown, I have an unexpected opportunity: to share the lessons from my prison experience that might help others to adjust.…

In prison, I found myself believing that walls were all that existed. They stood unsympathetic to my suffering and closed in a little bit more each day.…I often thought that I would lose my mind from the feeling of slowly being entombed and cut off from the world, but then something happened.

She writes that as she shifted her focus from the outside world to her inner self, a new world took shape and revealed itself to her.

The most important lesson I learned during this time was that I had to accept my circumstances as they were, then change my perspective about them. To my surprise when I did this, those once-menacing walls,… were no longer holding me hostage but offering refuge.

She continues:

Restrictions and stay-at-home orders are the reality, but if we can shift our perspective, our homes become sanctuaries, not prisons. We are not locked in but rather the threat of disease and hundreds of other harmful things are locked out, distractions and misaligned priorities among them.

Solitude challenges you to look at things differently.… I had to learn what was within my control and what wasn’t. I also discovered that time exists in relation to an emotion or experience, and it slowed or sped according to my ability to be present. So, I learned how to flow with it, not rushing nor procrastinating, but fully engaged in whatever was before me. … It was as simple as just paying attention.¹

She then describes how she started reading books carefully, listening to others, and quieting her mind from incessantly ruminating over events of the past and present. She started giving her full attention to every activity. Her increased attention and awareness made her feel increasingly strong and grateful, and she realized that she could transform her prison cell into a refuge.

We can look upon this period of lockdown or home isolation as a bonus period during which we can focus more on our meditation, seva (if we have any we can do at home), reading inspirational literature, and finding opportunities to help others. This will enable us to strip away the unnecessary preoccupations that used to define us and dominate our minds. It’s a process of reversing the flow of our attention from outward to inward, from negative to positive. And there’s a parallel in the realm of our inner work, our meditation.

Chinese Taoist masters emphasize that in our normal waking state, our spiritual energy flows outward and downward, dissipating into the world. With meditation we can reverse this outward flow of spiritual energy and attain inward focus, and an awareness of the all-pervading and all-encompassing divine spirit.

The spiritual light is always shining within – it is our essential nature. Unfortunately, the light of our consciousness is easily spread outside, dissipated through our desires, our fears, our sensual and intellectual activity, and interactions with others. We need to “turn the light around,” to reverse its illumination, so that it shines within us, awakening our spiritual consciousness, and not allow our attention to scatter into the creation.

As Hazur said, the Master is always pulling us from within, giving us facilities, opportunities, and a conducive atmosphere, so that we will think about the Lord and try to go back to him. That atmosphere and opportunity are often not the cheerful and rosy situations that we expect. Sometimes we have to confront frightening situations so that we understand the reality of this life, turn to Him and submit to his will.

Hazur was once asked:

How can we manage to have a calm or accepting attitude when suffering?

Hazur’s response urges us to take the long view:

Take it as his grace and think more about the Father. When we are suffering, we think more about the Father than when we are in happy situations. So which is better from his point of view? Any moment when we remember him is to our credit. So only that is a moment of grace when we think about him, when we remember him. And when we forget him – that is not a moment of grace at all.

So if worldly happiness makes us bow down before him and makes us remember him – that is grace. But if worldly happiness makes us forget about him, if he has given us so much that we are lost in the pleasures of the world and we forget the Lord even, that is not his grace. So grace may not be to our liking.…

The Lord knows what is best for us. So he will only give us that which pulls us to him. The master will not give us those things which make us forget the Lord and attach us to the creation. That is not his grace at all.

Not that he wants us to suffer. He wants to save us from suffering. We don’t even know what suffering is. We are only worried about these few moments of suffering here, but we’ve forgotten the suffering from birth to birth, from species to species – what we have gone through from age to age.

The Lord wants just to save us from all that, and we are only concerned with these few moments of pleasure, and we think the Lord is unhappy with us, that he doesn’t want us to enjoy this life.²

He is trying to bring us back to him as quickly as possible. So let us use this time to our advantage.

The Guardian, April 13, 2020, “I was in prison for two decades – here's what I learned about isolation”
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #410

What Is Our Perspective on Life? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

What Is Our Perspective on Life?

Where do we look for comfort and relief from the stress and worries of the world? Society is never stable; it is subject to the whims of the moment. There is always a war somewhere, and poverty and disease endure on every continent. We hardly find a moment of peace as we are bombarded by the latest distressing news. These days it’s all about the pandemic; pandemic news without end. We turn to our gadgets as distraction for a few moments of relief, but more and more they seem to take on a life of their own. They are controlling us instead of us controlling them. How long can we go without checking WhatsApp or Twitter or our emails?

Our personal perspective changes as the outward events of the world constantly change. We find ourselves judging others with an abundance of criticism, but love and forgiveness are often in short supply. The underlying cause of unhappiness in the world remains consistent and unchanging. Since the world never really changes, a time comes when we realize that it is we who need to change. We cannot make the world a better place but we can make ourselves a “better place”.

We have the ability to look at life from a more positive point of view, to have a positive perspective, one of hope and joy. There is a perfect satguru in the creation. That fact alone changes everything. He comes to aid us in experiencing hope, joy, and gratitude. He reminds us that there is a higher purpose in life – that life is not a random and discordant jumble of events. As humans we have an opportunity to experience the underlying unity in life. And this unifying force, as we all know, is shabd. Shabd is the very Lord himself. It is the essence of all things. It is the creative Word that is the universe, holds the universe together, and created the universe in the beginning. It is the ultimate expression of God’s love. When shabd is withdrawn from any living thing, that thing ceases to exist.

As pupils of the living master we are working towards experiencing that shabd. Let’s approach this opportunity with a sense of awe. What have we done to deserve this grace? If we look at our lives objectively we know that we are as imperfect as everyone else. Yet the Lord has decided to give us this opportunity to experience what lies beyond this world. It is our time to view life from a new perspective. We begin to understand that we are all fragile and imperfect. By acknowledging that imperfection we begin to forgive. Instead of holding on to anger we start letting go of it. We are less bothered by the judgments and rejections of others. As we become more forgiving, we become stronger. This strength comes from this new perspective on life.

It is a positive perspective on life which is strengthened and enriched by our relationship with our master and ultimately by the shabd. What an opportunity we have! Soami Ji Maharaj says, “Now I have found a wonderful opportunity.” But do we expect the master to automatically give us the peace and comfort of the shabd? Anything worth having comes after effort and commitment. We don’t value things that are too easy to obtain. We take them for granted and don’t treasure them. Pleasing the master and experiencing the shabd are the most valuable treasures available to us.

Let us be clear about our purpose and focus and what will help us to sustain a more positive perspective on life. The forces outside of us will try to capture our attention and keep us focused on that which is temporary, things that will give us only a brief moment of satisfaction. It is only our time spent in nurturing positivity that will give us any long-lasting contentment. Our feeling of contentment also has an influence on everyone around us. And as we become more positive we are reinforcing and strengthening ourselves, so that when difficult times arise, and they will, we have the inner strength to cope with them. The grace of the master is not given to remove our karmas, but it is the strength given to help us go through them without losing or balance and focus.

What tools do we have to reinforce and strengthen our positivity? We have seva; in particular the seva of bhajan and simran. By practising bhajan and simran we are showing the master that we appreciate his faith in us. Bhajan and simran strengthen us from within and are his gift to us to reinforce our positive attitude, which will help us sail calmly through the events of life.

Any seva that we do out of the goodness of our heart, without expectations, awakens love in our heart and makes us stronger. We can do seva at our local satsang or property, or we help someone in crossing a busy road, or we can help a neighbour with shopping during this time of lockdown. Anything that we do without expectation of reward or recognition strengthens our positivity and strengthens our love. Such acts express our gratitude that the master has chosen someone as weak and undeserving as we are to receive his gift. We need to take the first steps in realizing that it is all his grace. And with that blossoming understanding of how lucky we are, we become more positive, more grateful. This virus-of-positivity will naturally spread and infect our whole being and will infect others as well. Let’s commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the master and his shabd. Let the way we live our life be a reflection of our gratitude, our commitment, and our love. We have a hidden treasure – let’s dig deep and find it.

Love Defined - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Love Defined

Maharaj Charan Singh often used to say that Sant Mat is nothing but love.

So, we might ask – what do Hazur and other mystics mean by “love”? We know of many kinds of love: romantic love; love between parents and children; love of country; and, among religious people, love for God. We even love our cars and our smartphones. But how is love understood in mysticism, in Sant Mat?

Hazur offers a unique definition:

Love means to become another being, to merge into another one, to lose your own identity, to become another one.… You do not exist anymore at all, only the object of your love exists…. Then only the Lord exists, and we are no more. That is love.¹

Because Hazur has given us this definition, we need to think about it deeply, and try to apply it to our understanding of Sant Mat, which, as he told us, is nothing but love. What happens if, wherever we encounter the word “love” in his teachings, we stop to remember how he defined it?

But before we can do that, we need to look at his definition of the term “God” or the “Lord.” He tells us that the Lord himself is love.

God is love and love is God, because the real form of the Lord is love and only through love can we go back to him. ²

He has told us that Sant Mat, the path to God, is nothing but love. And now he is telling us that the goal of that path, God, is also love. Love is not only the method of the mystics; it is also their goal.

So, what might Hazur mean when he says that the real form of God is love? If we use here Hazur’s own definition of love, then God is love because God is always becoming everything that exists. God, having created the universe out of love, pervades it out of love, has merged himself into it. He has and is giving himself infinitely to it, to its every particle. In a way, he has given himself so fully to the creation that he no longer exists – just that union remains. He cannot be found anywhere in it. At the same time, he remains separate from all – and nothing exists but him. This is a subject that only the saints can understand, but which they sometimes attempt to put into words for us.

For example, in Saint John we read:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.³

In the form of the Word or Shabd, God pervades everything – giving everything life, his light shining everywhere.

Now we find that whenever the saints describe how God pervades everything, they always mention that he also pervades us, even dwells right within us. They say that our essential being, our soul, is a particle of the Divine. Indeed, they go even further and say that the soul is nothing but the Divine.

As Saint John said, the light of God, the Shabd, shines everywhere, and God in the form of the Word is within us and is our very “life” and “light.”

And Hazur said, commenting on Saint John:

Our soul is that divine spark of that creator, that divine light which is giving us life.… Potentially, every soul is God, because its origin is the Creator. ⁴

So, from all this, what have we learned about mysticism, which we call Sant Mat?

God is already within us in the form of our soul.
Though his light is within us, is us, we remain in darkness and “comprehend it not.”
Mysticism is the path, the process, of learning to leave that darkness, to see that “light,” to “comprehend” God’s presence.
We must not only see or know God, but actually become him, merge in him, lose our own identity.

And there is a related point: if the soul is nothing but God, and if God himself is nothing but love, then isn’t the soul also nothing but love, with “love” meaning to become another being?

Hazur says, using the analogy of a needle being always drawn to the magnet:

The needle is always in love with the magnet.… The inclination of the soul is always towards its own origin. That is love. ⁵

So, the soul doesn’t have love or not have love. Rather, love is its very essence. It isn’t that we “desire” to become one with God. It goes deeper than that.

The soul by nature, by instinct, is in love with the source, in love with the divine ocean, since it is a drop of that divine ocean. So, the characteristic of love is actually there in the soul. And it is the same love which is in the Father. Potentially every soul is God. ⁶

Then why doesn’t the soul instantly fly back to the Father, like a needle to the magnet? Hazur explains:

If you put weight on the needle, the magnet cannot attract it. It cannot go back to the magnet. That doesn’t mean that if the weight is there, the love has become less. Love is always there.… But … we have a weight on the soul – the weight of the mind, of karma, of our sins, of our actions.⁷

The mystical path, then, is the process of gradually removing that weight of mind and karma so that the soul can fly back to God. How do we remove that weight? Only by love for the Shabd, by merging into it. Only the pull, the attraction, of the Shabd can draw us away from the mind.

Our karmas relate to our mind. Therefore, when, with the help of Nam or Shabd, our mind goes back to its origin and the soul rises above the mind; those karmas just drop away.

So how do lowly mortals like us make a start on this path of love, start becoming another being? We can better understand this if we remember Hazur’s definition of love. Saints say there are two key essentials required for us to travel the path.

The first essential is initiation – instruction – by a living Master. Such a Master is one who has himself merged back into the Divine and is also charged by the Divine to instruct others. He teaches us how to meditate, guides us through the process of merging with the Divine, and gives us a living example to emulate.

But beyond being one with God, the Master manifests God on this plane – thus giving us an experience that is a forerunner of the eventual union. Seeing him, we are seeing our goal. As Christ said, “He that seeth me seeth Him that sent me.”⁸ Our love for the Master gradually merges into love for the Word and then for God himself. As Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”⁹

The second essential element, according to the saints, is spiritual practice, or meditation as taught by the teacher. Hazur has said that meditation is simply remembrance – remembering the Lord and forgetting ourselves. According to an ancient teaching, we become what we think about intensely. Therefore, by remembering the Lord intensely, we gradually merge into him.

By forgetting ourselves and remembering God through meditation, we are simply practising love – in the sense of practising and experiencing becoming another being. So, meditation is the only time when we can, with total focus, practise losing our identity, becoming another being, merging in another person.

Meditation is therefore the highest expression of our love for God. After stating that “meditation itself is love,” Hazur was asked “So, by doing our meditation we’re loving God?” He replied, “That is the height of love.” ¹⁰

This is why the Masters insist on meditation – because it is nothing but the purest possible practice of love, which again is both the path and its goal.

We can now see how Hazur used his definition of love when explaining the basics of the mystical path. But he also frequently used that meaning to answer many of our more specific questions. When we read his answers, we see how, if we remember to understand love in the way he defines it – to become another being through the method of meditation – many things become clearer to us.

For example, here’s how he explained what it means to be receptive to the Lord’s grace:

To be receptive to the Father’s love in our everyday lives, to accept whatever he gives us unconditionally – without hesitation, without sitting in judgment over it. To accept with gratitude what he gives, because he never does any wrong. When you are not there, then who’s to judge what is wrong and what is right? The realization will come to us that we don’t exist – only he exists. Whatever comes from him, we accept with cheerfulness, with gratitude. We don’t even differentiate between what is good and what is bad because the one who differentiates doesn’t exist anymore. We have merged into the Father.¹¹

About worry he said:

Whatever has to happen, has already happened and we human mortals are just helpless spectators. If we can just withdraw this “self,” then only we can enjoy this drama of life.¹²

In other words, if we have no self, if all is decided by God, then we have nothing to worry about.

Or, to return the topic of meditation, using Hazur’s definition of love we can learn more about how love and meditation relate to each other. For example, we sometimes worry or complain that, though we are doing meditation, we don’t “feel” any love. We may be meditating, but we don’t feel that we are doing it with “love and devotion.”

But, remembering Hazur’s definition, what would love be beyond making effort – through meditation – to become another being, to remember the Lord and forget ourselves? What feeling matters more than a willingness simply to do meditation, to the point that we actually do it? As Baba Ji frequently tells us, just do it. Perhaps we are confusing mystical love with worldly love, in the sense of an emotion or a passion.

A final way to illuminate Hazur’s definition of love is to examine our understanding of what we call spiritual progress.

We are always concerned about whether we are making progress or earning the Lord’s grace. But because meditation is so exactly what we need to do to progress on the path – itself being the “height of love” – it’s no wonder that saints say that every effort put into meditation must yield progress, indeed is progress.

Hazur says:

Any minute you spend in love and devotion for the Father is to your credit. It’s a steppingstone. You are making some progress – maybe at an ant’s speed, but you are making progress.¹³

What is the best sign of success in our meditation? Is it traversing inner regions, seeing inner sights and sounds? No, it must instead be any decrease in our sense of self and a corresponding increase in our desire to complete our union, to end our separation.

The more time we devote to meditation, the more we strengthen our love, grow our love, become rich in devotion. I personally think the more time given to meditation, the more pain of separation you feel. And the more pain of separation you feel, the more progress you make within because ultimately this pain of separation will make you one with the Being, with the Lord.¹⁴

Hazur even says, “If [a seeker] has longing, a desire to go back to the Father, love for the Father, … yearning for the Father, is there anything else to be done?¹⁵

How do we get this longing? Through our efforts at meditation, yes, but perhaps next through the fruitlessness of those efforts, their very failure. Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh may be revealing a deep secret:

Work hard on the path shown by the Master. When the mind finds little apparent progress despite its labor, it grows restless and begins to feel pangs of separation from the Master. This develops into an intense longing and ardent love for Him, which actually burns up all worldly desires, frees the soul from its shackles and makes it fit for mystic transport. This fervent love is the essence of all spiritual discipline and it is attained by faithfully carrying out the devout practices as explained by the Master at the time of Initiation.¹⁶

We have petty expectations of what progress is, what meditation is supposed to bring. These expectations are missing the point, as Hazur explains in the following interchange:

Q: What can one expect? We know we are nothing, and we shouldn't expect anything, but…

A: Just give yourself to Him. To love somebody means to give yourself without expecting anything in return. To give yourself, to submit yourself, to resign to Him is all meditation. We are losing our own identity and our individuality and just merging into another Being. We have no expectation then.¹⁷

Maybe, from the narrow perspective of our petty selves, progress is measured not by what we gain, but by what we lose.

And when by giving we can become God, what else is left? If by giving yourself – as a drop you become an ocean – have you gained or lost? If in losing your own identity you become the Father, have you gained or have you lost? That is love.¹⁸

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #144
Ibid.
Bible, John 1:1-5
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #223, #227
Ibid., #265
Ibid., Vol. II, #170
Ibid., Vol. I, #265
Bible, John 12:45
Bible, John 14:6
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, p. 101, #143
Ibid., Vol. III, #294
Quoted in Treasure Beyond Measure, p.196
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #344
Ibid., Vol. III, #96
Ibid., Vol. III, #107
Maharaj Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul, Part II, #8
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, 7^th edition, #277
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #597

Life’s Contradictions - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Life’s Contradictions

Our birth launches a life full of tensions and contradictions – within us and around us! The contradictions are within us because man is a blend of spirit, mind and matter, each of a very different nature and origin. The contradictions are around us, because of that fundamental opposition between spirit and matter underlying our worldly existence. On the one hand, there is the opposition between soul, which is Shabd, and our body and mind on the other. This is an opposition between our inner and outer world, between heaven and earth, between the One and the many. We live with this permanent tension between day and night, light and shadow, good and evil, pain and pleasure, love and hatred, and also between male and female. This basic polarity marks our worldly experience as spiritual beings from birth until death.

Baba Ji has recently pointed out that we start on the spiritual path with a fundamental contradiction. Our education from our parents, teachers, and professors is all about building up a strong, unique individuality. But when we come to the spiritual path, we have to unlearn what we thought to be important in life. On the spiritual path we have to realize that there is only One and that we are nothing. However as we begin, we believe that we are a separate ray from the sun, and not the sun. We don’t even know that there is a sun. As incarnated human beings, we are clouded by mind and illusion (maya), and subject to the universal laws of polarity and duality, as is the whole universe.

What does it mean that we are spiritual beings living in a human body? It means that we are constantly being pulled back and forth between these poles and opposites. On a deeper level, we feel torn and alienated, restless and homeless. Our physical body belongs to this world. The origin of the mind lies in a subtler world, and the home of the soul – our true being – is in a purely spiritual realm. That’s why here on earth we are somehow always out of balance. Driven by one extreme or the other, we are inconsistent, illogical, contradictory beings full of conflicts and can never experience true everlasting harmony and wholeness.

About 200 years ago the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his famous tragedy of Faust highlighted the human dilemma of being trapped between light and dark powers. At the peak of his agony Faust confesses:

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.¹

The “two souls” which stand in deep conflict with each other are the mind or psyche, on the one hand, and the soul – the true, unchanging, eternal soul – on the other hand. Who among us doesn’t know this kind of conflict in life? At times we feel a strong inner urge and would like to meditate for hours and hours. At other times we feel completely blank and have a hard time sitting in meditation at all. Sometimes we feel like isolating ourselves from society and want to dedicate our life completely to the spiritual path; sometimes we are overcome by the desire for closeness and communication and become victims of socializing and social media.

To paraphrase Baba Ji, he once said that one of our biggest contradictions is that we want to be alone and at the same time we want to live in society. He then also said that we always tend to go to extremes from worldly to spiritual, but that both extremes are wrong.

It is our great fortune that unlike Faust, who in his despair makes the wrong choice by seeking refuge in magic, we have a Master who keeps us on the spiritual path, and safe from the worst extremes – if only we would cooperate with him and play our part.

In a dialogue with a young, restless disciple, Hazur Maharaj Ji gets to the heart of the dilemma of our schizophrenic situation here on earth and how we can best cope with it:

Q: Why do I feel like a helpless Ping-Pong ball between God and the worldly pleasures? I feel like God pulls me and so do these worldly pleasures, or you would call them illusions, pull me in the other direction. Why do I feel like that? They tear me apart!

A: Well brother, it’s very simple. There is a combination of the soul and the mind… Tendency of the soul is upward, inward. Tendency of the mind is downward, outward. So the mind is trying to pull us downward and and soul is trying to push us upward. And that conflict is always going on within us.²

Hazur is telling us that this conflict is always going on within us! We have to live with this conflict. We have to cope with it and accept it as our lifelong task and battle – a battle between outer diversion and indulgence, and inner focus and fulfillment. Even if we have grown tired of this battle, even if we want to lay down our arms on the battlefield like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, we need this conflict. We need this resistance. For Baba Ji has said that it is in adversity that we meet success, not in haramony and well-being. That is why it is here on this inhospitable earth, in adverse circumstances, in the Kali Yuga – the worst of ages – that we best make progress.

Nevertheless the disciple asks Hazur in return: “How can I stop it [this conflict]? And what is Hazur’s answer? We already know it, don’t we? We could just skip over it and go on to the next topic. But no, we love his answer – as we love all answers of our Masters – although at times it may taste bitter like medicine. We love his answer because he has engaged us in a love affair which we can not resist, a love affair of which this answer and its fulfillment are the very heart.

“By meditation,” replies Hazur! Meditation is the only commandment. It is the only solution, the only true and everlasting cure for our dilemma here on earth, to win that battle, to set our mind at rest and free our soul. Meditation is the purest and best of all actions as we hear from Baba Ji during his satsangs. Meditation is the only true peacemaking strategy. As long as we have not solved our innermost conflict between soul and mind, as long as we haven’t silenced and actually disarmed our mind by meditation, there will also never be any peace in the outside world.

Rabindranath Tagore spoke of a mind out of control, when he said:

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.³

How do we disarm the mind? Hazur continues from the quote above: “Meditation draws the attention of the mind from outside to inside.” It sounds simple and convincing. We just have to reverse the process. If we want to win this battle and get cured of our inner conflict, in order to regain true balance and lasting harmony, then we have to take his medicine by all means. Yet his medicine is not an ordinary medicine we pay for in cash – if we take it with love and devotion it turns sweeter than honey and transforms our whole being.

Hazur continues his answer by saying:

So the mind can also enjoy something better than the wordly pleasures. Then the mind becomes a great help to the soul.

Our mind itself is also not happy as a slave of the senses. More often than not, our mind doesn’t know who and where it is and what it really wants. Seduced and driven by the senses and feelings in all directions, our mind itself is full of contradictions. We all know how quickly we can change our mind, if it only suits a momentary whim, desire or instant gratification. What was valid yesterday isn’t valid today, or even the very next moment! Our mind can throw overboard its best resolutions in a second. Baba Ji has asked us whether or not it isn’t a contradiction that when we want to overcome and get rid of our mind, at the same time we listen to it?

As we do with naughty children, we have to put clear limits on the unending desires of our mind. We have to fix the rules – the do’s and the don’t’s – and stick to them. As elsewhere in life, we have to learn to say “No” to our mind. Let’s start with small steps, with little “No’s” and we will see how each “No,” however little it may be, will work wonders and strengthen our willpower. For instance, we can say “Yes” to set the alarm clock for the end of the meditation session, but “No” to our mind when it wants to look at the clock during meditation.

Continuing the dialogue, the restless disciple replies to Hazur persistently:

I can understand it intellectually but these pleasures play tricks on me all the time!

Don’t we all know it? Yet in Sant Mat there is never any ground for being disheartened. The Masters always have a positive, encouraging answer to everything in life, and also to our existential dilemma. Hazur confirms emphatically:

Yes, because for ages we have been enjoying them [the pleasures]. But if you constantly go on rubbing on the sandstone it does have an effect.

After driving for such a long time in the wrong direction, we can not expect to reach our actual destination overnight. It is a long, slow and tedious process of turning around. We have to change our way of life, but not all of a sudden – not a U-turn – no, that would be completely impossible and even dangerous. The change of direction has to be gradual, slow and mindful, following Baba Ji’s advice to avoid all extremes. When a young man once told Baba Ji recently that he wanted to think only of him at every moment and every second, the Master told him that no, we have to keep a balance. After meditation, we also have to think of our health, our family and our job.

Man is the only living being who by his upright carriage is able to look at the horizon, keeping both heaven and earth in perspective. So this is our task: to keep both our worldly duties and our spiritual tasks in view, without going too far and too long in one direction or the other, and without neglecting either one. An ideal image for keeping balance in life could be that of our grandmother’s old pendulum clock that always moves back and forth at the same pace and rhythm.

However, keeping the right balance and rhythm of life depends on individual circumstances and may also vary in the different phases of life. Yet the keys for success on our way back home remain the same: patience and persistence. Baba Ji, who is our living example, always tells us that we can do it. He even has said that he was very average, but the only quality he had was perserverance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One. Verse 1112-1117.
Q&A recording of Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh, March 14, 1988; record # 17721
Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1958. CXCII, p. 249.

The Meaning of Satsang - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Meaning of Satsang

The unprecedented cancellation of satsang throughout the world has left a lot of initiates and seekers bereft. Our lives have been turned upside down, our daily routines shattered. This includes our usual Sunday satsang, our sanctuary from the influences of the ever-encroaching world around us.

But what is satsang? The word literally means “the company of the truth.” The beauty of satsang is that we already have that company inside of us, with the Master, with the Shabd. All the inspiration we need is within. Sant Mat is not a religion. At its core, it is an individual relationship between the Master and the disciple. Its mode of communication is meditation. We gather in satsang to be inspired to do our meditation, to be encouraged to lead a Sant Mat way of life. But satsang is not a social event, nor is it a religious ritual.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh tells us that “anything which is persuading us towards meditation” is satsang.¹ That could be a phone conversation with a friend, reading a Sant Mat book – or any book for that matter. It could be watching films about seva and the Dera on the RSSB YouTube channel. It could be listening to shabds or Hazur’s question-and-answer sessions on the RSSB website. It could be going for a walk and appreciating the beauties of nature, and perhaps even remembering our simran. It could be sitting with a cup of tea and staring out the window, watching tree branches wave in the wind against a stormy sky.

The point is, satsang is not an outer ritual. It is not something we do because we have always done it, or an event around which to organize our lives. Hazur wrote to a seeker: “In life we have to go to so many places, and everywhere you may not be near satsangi brothers and sisters. We have to build our own atmosphere of the Sant Mat way of life and live within it.”²

To build our own atmosphere of the Sant Mat way of life and live within it is the challenge we took on at the time of our initiation. That is the goal and purpose of our lives, and to pursue that goal, attending satsang is helpful but not essential.

Baba Ji said last July when he visited the USA something like: We’ve read enough, heard enough, talked enough. Now it’s time to practice.

Practice – what a concept. Actually, it’s the one thing at our level that’s not a concept. It’s something we can do, and we can do it all by ourselves. There is an old saying: When life gives you lemons, turn them into lemonade. We need to turn the adversity of these strange days to our advantage. Life will not adjust to us; we have to adjust to life. Now is the time we can take all those spiritual teachings and inspirational messages we’ve heard at satsang over the past many years and act on them. Now is the time to turn concepts into experience. Now we can look within and build our spiritual strength. Now is the time to practice what we preach.

It’s time to get back to basics. We can’t always be near our brothers and sisters. It doesn’t matter. This path is between us and our Master. When we turn to him within – whether with simran, prayer, tears, confusion, longing, or gratitude – with whatever we’ve got and whoever we are, that’s satsang. That’s keeping company with the truth. We have all we need.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #177
Unpublished letter

Denial and Acceptance - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Denial and Acceptance

Saints tell us that we accept what we should deny, and we deny what we should accept. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said in a satsang back in 1964:

If we regard as permanent our stay in the world … we are only deceiving ourselves. … While we are alive, we should gather what is our own here and will remain ours hereafter. This wealth is devotion to Nam: attaching the mind and soul currents to the audible life stream, the Word or Logos. If we fail to do this, we must again enter the dark dungeon of the world, where we do not know what pain and privation may await us. Our colossal ignorance of Reality keeps us forever chained to the wheel of transmigration.¹

This quote encapsulates many of the basic teachings of saints throughout time. First of all, Hazur tells us that this world is not our true home; it is not permanent. Everything we see, everything we own, our status, our class and our caste will all disappear. Hazur refers to our grasp on Reality as “our colossal ignorance.” He’s not telling us that we are a bit mistaken; he’s telling us that we have no idea what is really going on in life!

Secondly, Hazur tells us that “while we are alive” we have to gather what will remain with us in the hereafter. Saints throughout time have told us that the human form is a rare gift, and it’s only in the human form that we can achieve God-realization.

Third, he’s telling us that the wealth we need to seek is devotion to Nam – the practice of meditation given to us through a living perfect Master at the time of initiation. It is a practice that consists of sitting in meditation and repeating five holy names, known as simran and then listening to or for the Shabd, also known as the Word or Logos in the Bible. Through this practice we connect with the audible life stream and begin our journey home.

Finally, Hazur reminds us of the laws of karma and reincarnation. If we fail to use this human birth to achieve God-realization, “we must again enter the dark dungeon, where we do not know what pain and privation may await us.”

Hazur tells us that we are deceiving ourselves. Another way to say it is that we are in denial. So let’s examine some of the many ways we are in denial. We are in denial about the idea that our time on this earth is limited. We know that every single person in our lives can be divided into two categories:

Those who we will leave behind at the time of death and,
Those who will leave us behind when they pass away.

Yet we are so surprised when someone passes. And many of us are surprised that suddenly we are “elderly,” and our time is limited. Hazur reminds at another point in this satsang:

We must not put off spiritual discipline until tomorrow, for tomorrow never comes. It is another name for Kal….no one knows when the eagle of death will pounce upon its prey.²

Since we are in denial about the nature of this world, Hazur also encourages us to:

…realize the dream-quality of this earth plane. Only then do we stop running after the mirage in which the water of Truth is constantly receding from us.³

What is this “mirage in which the water of Truth” keeps receding before our eyes? Recent research related to social media found that about 50% of all news found on social media is greatly exaggerated, misleading or completely untrue. People become upset and react one way or the other based on misinformation. This is how we operate every day in this world – in our lives at our work and even in seva. We live in false realities created within false realities. We get upset; we get angry about things that never happened and live in fear of what people tell us may happen in the future. We allow these things to upset our balance, our peace of mind. We stew on these things during our meditation. As if this world is not enough of an illusion, we create internet worlds where we seek “likes” and “followers.” The internet and social media become more fertilizer for the weeds that grow in our minds. How can we possibly find truth in this world when Hazur describes our grasp on Reality as “colossal ignorance?”

We even find ourselves in denial about our progress and efforts on this path. As disciples we get despondent about our progress and about our spiritual practice. We are in denial about our ability to succeed. We deny our ability to live the life of a disciple. We deny that we can find a way to meditate for 2.5 hours each day.

Fortunately for us, the Master is also in a state of denial, but it’s a state of “positive denial:”

He denies our outward nature and our failures,
He is the only one on this earth who sees what we will become – who we really are,
He knows us far better than we know ourselves,
He denies that we can’t do it, and he tells us that we can do it,
He denies that we can’t meditate.

Recently, Baba Ji also spoke in a satsang about the wretched condition in which we find ourselves, from a spiritual point of view. To paraphrase, he said that we are mired in worldly pursuits and are steeped in lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride. But then he also said something quite interesting, which is that it’s not our fault. He pointed out that our current condition may be due to karmas from our past lives. Then he told us that the Masters come to rescue us from this condition, to save us and to cure us. The Great Master Sawan Singh says:

The perfect Master or Satguru is the true physician, for he has the life-giving herb of the Name or Shabd.⁴

And Hazur answers a question in Spiritual Perspectives by saying:

It’s not essential that only good people become satsangis. Who goes to the doctor? A healthy person or a sick person?⁵

Perhaps Sant Mat is the trauma hospital of spirituality, and the doctor is not going to focus on how we got there. He knows we probably did something stupid. He’s going to focus on healing, but he’s also going to insist that we do our part. He instructs us to avoid the things that made us sick and only do the things that make us healthy.

Hazur speaks about how we help or hurt ourselves when he says:

When he knows how helpless we are, what victims we are of our mind, that at every step we are full of failures, it’s nothing new for him to know about us; he already knows us. …So the question of displeasing the Master doesn’t arise at all, but definitely we can please him by living the Sant Mat way of life, by attending to our meditation.⁶

So, we have spoken about the denial that helps to create our predicament. Now let’s talk about acceptance. The Master accepts the disciple unconditionally, and we have to accept the Master unconditionally. In the quote above, Hazur tells us that if we don’t follow the teachings, if we don’t live the Sant Mat way of life, if we do not attend to meditation, we are not denying him so much as we are denying ourselves. We are denying ourselves the cure for all that ails us. We are not accepting him! So if we fall into denial and fail to follow the instructions of the Master, it is ourselves that we displease. We harm ourselves; we delay our progress and we incur karma.

However, we do have to be careful with this idea that our condition is not our fault. It can be a bit of trap. We can’t take the point-of-view that it is our destiny to do these things or that we can’t help ourselves, so we’re in the clear. We can’t say that we’ll meditate if he wants us to meditate.

The saints tell us that while we may not be accountable for our current condition, once we’ve been initiated there are no more excuses. We’ve been given the tools to overcome the plight of our soul, and we must choose to use those tools. We must make a choice to follow the teachings and the instructions of the Master. We cannot plead ignorance any longer.

In short, we must replace denial with acceptance, as follows:

To accept is to follow the vows of being vegetarian, abstaining from drugs and alcohol and living a clean and moral life.
To accept is to devote our time to meditation
To accept is to accept his love, and in return, we turn around the love that we have for the world and refocus it on him.
We have to accept the Master and deny the world.

He has accepted us, and it is through our actions – and not our words – that we accept him. This is the true way to become God-loving. We are generally told to be God-fearing. We are told to not incur the wrath of the Lord. We are told that if we do thus and so, God will be angry. But why do we try to place human attributes on the Lord? By doing this, we’re trying to bring Him down to our level and ascribe worldly behaviours to Him.

Very significantly, Hazur tells us:

The basis of religion is love, not fear – at least it should be.⁷

The path of Sant Mat is about being God-loving, not about being God-fearing. It’s about loving the Master and being loved by the Master, unconditionally. What do we have to fear from the Lord who is calling us home, who knows our condition and privation? What do we have to fear from the master who has been sent by the Lord to free us from this prison and take us home? What do we have to fear from the master who only has our best interest at heart? If we have to fear anything at all, we should fear the mind. Hazur says:

What frightens you about the Master? Actually we are always frightened of our own self. We’re frightened of our own weaknesses, of our own handicaps, and that becomes a barrier between us and the Master. There’s nothing to fear about the Master. He comes to create love, to strengthen love, to help it to grow and to absorb a disciple within himself. …He knows us. We are all struggling souls, full of weaknesses. What is there to judge?⁸

It’s interesting that Hazur tells us that being frightened of our weaknesses “becomes a barrier” between the Master and us. Sometimes we do not feel as if we can face him. Baba Ji reminded us recently, by saying that self-pity is our worst indulgence. Instead of saying to our self, “I am so awful, so miserable,” which is denying our true self, he wants us to say, “Here is what I can be.”

The Master’s acceptance is such that Hazur says:

He comes to create love, to strengthen love, to help it grow and to absorb the disciple within himself.⁹

How much more accepting can you be than that? Just to repeat again, we accept the Master by:

Living the Sant Mat way of life,
Taking advantage of every opportunity to do seva, and
Most importantly, by attending to our meditation.

There is no better way to deny this world and accept the Master than by sitting in our meditation. Great Master says:

Whenever we have a desire to express our love for someone, we should try to discover what kind of love the beloved would prefer. We should then inculcate in ourselves those qualities or actions by which the beloved is pleased, and we should always talk about those things only, for by listening to them he will naturally be attracted. …When you are able to develop the qualities that are liked by the beloved and he is satisfied that you have actually developed them, he will then automatically bestow his love on you.¹⁰

Foremost, we know that meditation is the love that the beloved most prefers. But let’s think of some other qualities that the Master loves. He is the living example of so many good qualities, so let’s remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Can we absorb the following qualities through imitation?

Can we see the best in everyone?
Can we be kind to everyone?
Can we be peaceful?
Can we live a simple life?

Finally, we have spoken about the Master’s acceptance of us, but what about our acceptance of ourselves? We often say to our self, “I am so bad. I am such a failure. Oh, my meditation is useless. During my meditation, I only focus on all the bad drivers on the road, my mother-in-law, and my investments!”

But what has the Master been telling us lately in response to these concerns:

Who says we’re not making progress?
Don’t calculate.
We just need to put in the time,
And try our best to concentrate.
Try our best to keep the simran going,
And leave the rest to him.

Hazur reminds us:

Perseverance will ultimately bring its reward. For obvious reasons the progress has to be slow and we should never feel disheartened on this path. The burden we have collected during millions of lives will take time to clear off. Simran and bhajan with love and devotion will do this. One day you will ultimately reach your home if you continue to do your best.¹¹

He tells us to persevere, and to just keep up the effort. Again, and again we are told not to worry about the results. How do we know we are not making progress? He accepts all our efforts with the joy that a father shows when the child gives him a silly little gift. He turns that gift into a nugget of gold. Hazur tells us that, “…it will take time.” If you save one dollar each day, you will have enough money to go to Dera and sit at the feet of the Master within three to four years. Yet each day you feel as if you are not closer to being in his presence. You feel as if you are just as far away. Then suddenly you have a ticket, and within a day or two you are there. So, he says that, “…we should never feel disheartened.” He reminds us that we are burning off the “burden we have collected during millions of lives.”

Finally, here is a passage from Soami Ji:

Moved with extreme compassion for souls,
Radha Soami explains all the mysteries
and cries out:
Unfortunate souls, listen to me
and accept my word,
Radha Soami can turn your fortune around.
Make haste to embrace his holy feet
and do whatever it takes to submit to him.
A chance like this may never come again.
Grasp this opportunity now, at any cost.¹²

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol.1; “Nam is Our Only True Friend,” RSSB: Beas, 1987, p. 184, 182.
Ibid, p. 185
Ibid, p. 181
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, RSSB: Beas, 2010. p. 191.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 1, RSSB: Beas, 2010, p. 408.
Ibid, Vol. 3, p. 15-16.
Ibid, p. 371.
Ibid, p. 16-17.
Ibid, p. 17.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, RSSB: Beas, 2010. p. 162-163.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, RSSB: Beas, 2002, p. 84.
Soami Shiv Dayal Singh, Sar Bachan Poetry, RSSB: Beas, 2002, p. 13.

Do We Need a Minister of Loneliness? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Do We Need a Minister of Loneliness?

In January 2018, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister appointed a "minister of loneliness" to tackle the social and health issues caused by social isolation. “For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life,” the Prime Minister said.

What does it say about the modern world that a government felt it needed to address loneliness in the population by adding a new arm of the government? What legislation will they enact to help overcome people’s loneliness?

What has happened to the family structure and our ability to support each other if we now need government to help us overcome our loneliness? What is the root cause of loneliness? The masters have taught us that loneliness goes deeper than being without someone to chat with or to go out to lunch with. That conscious or even unconscious feeling of loneliness, which we all feel if we look deep within ourselves, stems from our separation from the divine.

All of us are alone, we arrive in the world alone and we leave alone. Once we were an undifferentiated part of the divine ocean of love. We now perceive ourselves as only an individual drop removed from that divine ocean of love. However this could not be farther from the truth. Our connection with the divine is buried under the weight of our desires, actions, and sense of self. We cannot see beyond ourselves.

Our whole being is permeated with shabd. Divine love, peace, and contentment are at our very centre. But when we look in the mirror we see an individual and automatically feel that we are separate, with our own individual needs and wants. Thus, by identifying with our body and mind, we strengthen our feelings of loneliness and disappointment. We don’t see God in the mirror, we only see ourselves.

For our own mental and spiritual health we need to change our perspective. We need to see past the obvious and focus on our potential. Focus on what we know is true and real and achievable. We need to strengthen our confidence, confidence in ourselves and in Baba Ji. We need to remind ourselves of the tremendous strength available to us if we only look inside and tap into that unlimited power of the shabd, the real form of the master. The true guru in his shabd form is inside us, waiting for us to meet him.

Our master will do anything and everything he can to move us towards this direction. But we need to work with him. First, we need to resolve to change. Secondly, make simran and bhajan a priority; not occasionally but routinely, every day. Baba Ji has made it clear that he will not change our destiny, but he will help us overcome any obstacles we may encounter, including those erected by our mind. If we do his work he will help us with ours. Soami Ji said:

I shall myself help you put in the effort,
I shall myself take you to your ultimate home.
Listen to what Radha Soami has to say:
All will be worked out…¹

It is no surprise that so many people feel lonely. This world isn’t our true home nor is there any real and lasting comfort that comes from it. If we feel unloved and lonely at times it only points to the reality of this world and our need for true love – true love so fulfilling that is only possible if we develop an inner relationship with shabd master.

Nothing else is important in our life. The master is our lifeboat in this raging storm of the world. He is our lighthouse, the bright light pointing the way to safety in the dark sea of separation and loneliness. The master in his shabd form is unceasing, always there to help and provide strength and support. The master always has our best interest at heart. You can rest your head on his shoulder and expel all feelings of fear and loneliness.

Soami Ji, Sar Bachan (Poetry), Bachan 33, Shabd 16; p. 331

Patience - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Patience

We all long to live a spiritual life. But in our attempts to create a spiritual atmosphere in which we can live, we often feel frustrated, because we feel that our efforts are fruitless. Sometimes we feel that something external is holding us back, and sometimes we feel that the obstacle is internal. But whatever it is, that frustration can bring on a feeling of negativity, of hopelessness. Perhaps we’ve been on the path for many years, or maybe we are recent initiates. But we need to understand that frustration and self-criticism will probably hinder our progress. We need to adopt a positive and cheerful attitude, be patient and disciplined, and our spiritual life will unfold in its own time.

What we need is patience. We have to make effort, yet we have to forget about results. We need to continuously put in our best efforts, sincerely trying to please the Lord by doing our meditation, living the Sant Mat way of life, following the vows, and being harmonious with others. That will all create an atmosphere of love, of meditation. And our efforts will invoke his grace. As Hazur Maharaj Ji once wrote – effort and grace are like two wings of a bird. A bird cannot fly with only one wing. It needs both to balance and stay aloft.

Being patient is probably the hardest thing for us – we are so geared up to living a results-oriented life. We are brought up to think that if we study hard we’ll get a good job, or a promotion. That if we are sick and follow doctors’ orders, we’ll get well. But things don’t always happen as we expect them to. We have to let go, relax, trust in the Lord, and not think we know what’s best for us.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once wrote to a disciple: “When you believe that the Lord loves you and is promoting your welfare, you will cheerfully accept whatever comes about.”¹

Maharaj Ji explained why meditation is the best means for us to submit to His will, rather than praying for the Lord to live in our will. He said:

In prayer, we speak to God. We expect something from him to fulfil our desires. In meditation we hear God, we submit to his will. In meditation, you hear the voice of God, and you submit your will to him. You live in his will. In prayer you are asking the Lord to fulfil the desires of your mind. You are dominated by your mind, and you are using the Lord to fulfil those desires. In meditation you just resign yourself to the will of the Father. You give yourself to him. Whatever he gives you, you are happy, contented. That is the difference between prayer and meditation.²

We need to accept our destiny and give up thinking about inner progress. Why do we calculate? Calculating goes against the very essence of the teachings. We don’t meditate because we want results. We meditate to please the Master, the Lord. There is a big difference. It means letting go.

That might be difficult to remember sometimes. But if we think about it, letting go and accepting His will is how we can keep him close to us at all times. When we let go, we are leaving a space, an opening for him in our hearts and minds, where we accept whatever he gives us, rather than expecting anything. We have to empty ourselves of preconceptions. When we approach him in a calculating, or transactional manner, we are saying – here, I’ve done this for you – now you do this for me. We need to let go of wanting to see results and patiently await his grace.

There is a traditional prayer repeated every morning by religious Jews. It says: “I firmly believe in the coming of the Messiah; and although he may delay his arrival, I daily await his coming.” Imagine! They’ve been waiting two thousand years with no expectations! That’s faith. That is the kind of patience and faith we need to have. To show up at His door every morning. To sit in meditation without expectations.

A mystic once said: “The root of impatience is the mistaken belief that we are the masters of our fate.”

Let us take a lesson in patience from the life of the bamboo tree.
In its first four years of life, some varieties of the Chinese bamboo show no growth above the soil. But in its fifth year, it can grow as much as 60 feet in a span of just six weeks. This is because in the early years, the tree develops a strong underground root system to support its growth.

The same principle is true for our maturity on the path. Out of impatience, we look for early signs of progress. But reversing the outward flow of our attention is a slow affair. To turn our attention inwards, we need to be patient and build our efforts on a strong foundation.

The joints on the tall bamboo stalk are very strong, and occur at intervals of eight to twelve inches. In this way, the bamboo grows steadily, segment by segment, as high as 60 feet, despite the stalk being only eight to ten inches wide.

Similarly, by attending to our meditation regularly, day after day, we too are growing ‘segment by segment’. We experience a change in attitude. We become more content and receptive to His will. We are maturing slowly, just as the bamboo tree matures slowly after building its strong foundation. And that is why the bamboo can tolerate the greatest windstorms. It bends but does not break.

The Chinese mystics take a lesson from the bamboo. They teach that just as the stiff and inflexible reed breaks with the intensity of the wind, so the disciple needs to be flexible but firmly rooted. Then he may bend, but will not break.

When our beliefs are rooted in consistent practice, the storms of life might bend us a little, but we won’t break. The periods of waiting, of frustration, are needed, to strengthen us.

The butterfly’s life cycle illustrates the importance of effort and struggle
Butterflies grow and mature through a process of transformation. First they are caterpillars, then they create a cocoon around themselves, and while in the cocoon they slowly mature until they emerge as butterflies. The butterfly needs to go through each stage naturally.

Once there was a man who found a butterfly cocoon. He thought he would help the butterfly emerge faster. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the opening. Finally the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily, but it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would expand and be able to support the body. But that never happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

The man didn’t understand that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were Nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon. The struggle strengthened it! And for us, too, sometimes our struggles are exactly what we need. If God allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, we would not become strong and independent – able to stand on our own two feet.

Without the struggle we would never mature. The struggle is our effort, even if we sometimes think of our efforts as fruitless. But the effort is what endears us to the Lord. We need to be patient, but we also need to be making effort. There is a balance we need to maintain. So although we need to be patient, we should not become lazy and think that he will do it all. If we want to reach the destination, we have to keep our eyes, and efforts, true to our goal.

As Great Master wrote to a struggling disciple:

The path of the Masters is a long one and it takes time to mould the mind. The withdrawal of the scattered attention into the eye centre requires patience, perseverance, and faith. The learned get impatient when they find themselves helpless in controlling their mind. They begin to doubt the efficacy of the method given. They want quick results, little knowing that mind is a power which is moving the world, and the world dances to its tune. It expresses itself through lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride, and who is free from them?

To try to concentrate the mind in the eye centre is to pick a quarrel with it, and it is a lifelong quarrel. If we are successful in this struggle (with the mind), the prize is everlasting bliss. Then there is no more revolving on the wheel of births and deaths.³

Patience, perseverance, and faith – the foolproof formula!

In one of his poems, Soami Ji Maharaj reassured us that the Master is always looking after us and there is no need for anxiety or worry. The poem begins with the disciple begging his Master to reveal his true inner form, and the master answers with kind reassurance:

Listen, dear soul, and let me explain:
Unique and wondrous is my real form,
which no one can perceive until I lend a hand.
Practise meditation and subdue your mind
by holding your sense impulses in check.

Have patience, keep the company of the Saints,
and I shall purify you through my grace.
I shall not rest till I show you that form –
why are you in such a hurry?
I carry your burdens in my own heart
so that you may be free of worries
and nurture my love in your heart.
Give up your misgivings, be steadfast in your love –
a love tempered with faith.
I shall myself help you put in the effort,
I shall myself take you to your ultimate home.⁴

Hazur always emphasized that the Lord never withholds his grace when we are sincere and honest in our love and devotion – when we consistently put in effort to meditate and follow the vows. He said that “all this meditation, all these spiritual practices, are simply to make us receptive to his grace. We have to be sincere with ourselves. We must live with ourselves rather than living for others. We have to put in honest and sincere efforts, then leave the result to the Lord.”⁵

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Ji why we have to wait so long. Hazur answered:

Why all this waiting? Because we are separated. We are separated from our focus. We are not at the door of our house, and the master is there at the door of our house, so we are waiting to go to the door. Let us go to the door of the house; then there will be no more waiting.⁶

It’s a question of trust. We have to trust that he has put us on the path out of his love, and he will see us home. Continue with our meditation while trusting in the Lord. Attend satsang and rely on the master. He has our interests at heart and will not abandon us.

Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh once said: “Initially, the mind will make you cry, but in the end the mind itself will cry. At first you will become frustrated, but if you persevere you will ultimately win. All devotees must remember this. They must not get disheartened and give up.”⁷

Why is this so? Because ultimately the Master’s grace will take us across the whole realm of the mind. If we follow his instructions and stick to the path, following the four vows, make our best efforts and trust in him, there is no doubt that he will see us through. He has taken our responsibility. We have put ourselves under his protection and guidance, so we have to trust that his advice is for our own good, and follow it.

A nineteenth- century philosopher wrote words that will certainly encourage us to keep moving ahead:

I find the greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.⁸

The point is that, like the bamboo that needs its root network to be strong, or the butterfly that needs to mature slowly and naturally – in the same way, the disciple, trusting in the Master, needs to cultivate patience in order to develop the love and discipline necessary to follow the path. The disciple needs to be persistent and keep moving forward, knowing that he or she is being guided towards the ultimate destination.

Unpublished letter
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #203
Spiritual Gems, #131
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 33, Shabd 16, pp. 329,331
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #454
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #83
Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, Vol. III, 1st ed. 1967, p. 116; 5th ed., 2018, pp. 184–185
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A Change of Perspective - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Change of Perspective

Perhaps you have heard this story before, but it is worth retelling:

A poor man lived with his wife and six children in a tiny one-room house. They were always getting in each other's way, and there was so little space they could hardly breathe! Finally the man could stand it no more. He talked to his wife and asked her what to do. "Go see the rabbi" she told him, and after arguing a while, he went.

The rabbi greeted him and said, "I see something is troubling you. Whatever it is, you can tell me."

And so the poor man told the rabbi how miserable things were at home with him, his wife, and the six children all eating and living and sleeping in one room. The poor man told the rabbi, "We're even starting to yell and fight with each other. Life couldn't be worse."

The rabbi thought very deeply about the poor man's problem. Then he said, "Do exactly as I tell you and things will get better. Do you promise?" "I promise," the poor man said.

The rabbi then asked the poor man: "Do you own any animals?" "Yes," he said. "I have one cow, one goat, and some chickens." "Good," the rabbi said. "When you get home, take all the animals into your house to live with you."

The poor man was astonished to hear this advice from the rabbi, but he had promised to do exactly what the rabbi said. So he went home and took all the farm animals into the tiny one-room house.

The next day the poor man ran back to see the rabbi. "What have you done to me, Rabbi?" he cried. "It's awful. I did what you told me and the animals are all over the house! Rabbi, help me!"

The rabbi listened and said calmly, "Now go home and take the chickens back outside."

The poor man did as the rabbi said, but hurried back again the next day. "The chickens are gone, but Rabbi, the goat!" he moaned. "The goat is smashing up all the furniture and eating everything in sight!" The good rabbi said, "Go home and remove the goat and may God bless you."

So the poor man went home and took the goat outside. But he ran back again to see the rabbi, crying and wailing. "What a nightmare you have brought to my house, Rabbi! With the cow it's like living in a stable! Can human beings live with an animal like this?"

The rabbi said sweetly, "My friend, you are right. May God bless you. Go home now and take the cow out of your house." And the poor man went quickly home and took the cow out of the house.

The next day he came running back to the rabbi again. "O Rabbi," he said with a big smile on his face, "we have such a good life now. The animals are all out of the house. The house is so quiet and peaceful and we've got room to spare! What a joy!" ¹

Nothing had changed in this man’s life except his perspective. He still had a wife and six children, but now their noise was acceptable and bearable. We can achieve the same contentment in our lives that this man achieved if we have the right perspective. Hazur Maharaj Ji used to say that we cannot change the weather outside, but we can put on strong boots and a warm jacket so we won’t be bothered by the storm. We cannot change the events of our life but we can adjust our attitude towards these events. In essence, we can have a positive attitude towards life or a negative one. Contentment and happiness are in our hands.

How then, do we achieve this right attitude, this positive perspective? The world is in turmoil. There is neither certainty nor peace to be found in the world except the certainty that things will always be uncertain; that we will not find contentment or happiness through our jobs, through the policies of our government nor through having more possessions. So, again, how do we find that peace of mind that we all desire?

The answer is clear. We have to find it inside ourselves. Outside there will always be unrest. Inside, if we search hard enough, we will find an ocean of contentment, a sea of peace and equilibrium. But how do we make this search? Where do we look inside? The ocean of contentment is already there within everybody. We just have to realize who we actually are. We aren’t the unrest or fears of our mind. We aren’t our worries or our anxieties. We are, at our core, Shabd – the very Lord himself. What a profound thing to realize; that our essence is the Lord. We can realize it!

We each have that same Nam inside us. It is what gives us life and sustains us. We have the grace and love of the Satguru inside. But we are continually getting lost on our journey and believe that we can achieve happiness if certain worldly desires are met. At that moment we need to remind ourselves that what we have is what he has given us. What we have is enough; we can be contented with things as they are. We just need to get rid of that extra cow and those chickens that are crowding our mind.

Those of us who have the gift of Nam have the perfect tool to focus our mind, simran. Simran will help us to empty our mind of lust, greed, anger, and all the passions that plague us. With focus comes the ability to control our emotions, to not react. The ability to control our mind doesn’t come in a week or a month. It is a lifelong struggle. But as we journey on the path and commit ourselves to the goal of stilling the mind we do find that we react less. We find that we are able to see someone else’s perspective on an issue; therefore we become less angry with them. Slowly, slowly we are changing.

Our commitment to a positive lifestyle is a huge step in the struggle to channelize our mind in a positive direction. By being vegetarian, not drinking alcohol, or taking drugs, by living a positive and honest life, we are making a statement that we are clear in our goal, clear in the direction we want our life to go. This is no small thing. Society today wants us to consume, wants us to realize that happiness comes from consumption. More, more, more is the cry that comes from every advertisement but this cry is false and misleading. Happiness comes from controlling our behaviour. It comes from our commitment to our goal of being positive and realizing that satisfaction comes from inner contentment, not outer indulgence.

Our master is always reminding us that through positive action we will be creating an atmosphere in our mind that is strong enough to withstand any and all attempts to steer us off course. Baba Ji is inside us, always pushing us in the direction of love. If we take his advice to heart and put in as much effort as we are able, then we will have the same contentment as that farmer. Nothing will have changed, but our attitude, our perspective, will be different. Now our attitude will be positive – fragrant with that atmosphere in which we will be able to enjoy His Will.

Traditional story: retold by Aaron Zehah in https://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2292

Something Is Missing - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Something Is Missing

Many years ago a keen young disciple, enthralled by Dera and the satsang centres he saw in India, asked Maharaj Charan Singh if they could purchase and develop a property in his home country. It would, he said, make it easier for the Master to visit. However, this was clearly not the right time, and Hazur memorably replied that he would come “for people and hearts, not bricks and mortar.”

Now, in the twenty-first century, we are blessed with a fair share of “bricks and mortar” – satsang properties scattered in many countries outside India, and these are maintained by thousands of sevadars across the globe. Some of them are used to host the Master’s official programmes in those countries, and year-round they fulfil a further function as administrative centres. Whether sevadars are engaged in preparing for a national or international satsang, maintaining buildings and grounds, providing services such as catering or first aid, or keeping the accounts, they are part of a two-way process whereby in giving devoted service they also receive.

Baba Ji has often asked us to support each other in the worldly jungle in which we live. So the purpose of our properties, as well as being a practical solution to the challenge of finding a suitable venue where many people can gather for satsang, is to establish a framework on which seva can grow. They provide a supportive trellis for that tender vine, our spiritual life. Here, at the Science of the Soul properties, we can indeed find that support group which Baba Ji wants for us and that support is what sevadars receive – not praise, not worldly recompense, not status, not position, but simple companionship, occasional learning experiences, and always a reminder of what it’s all about – devotion to the Master we all want to please.

What, then, of the present time, when due to the Covid 19 crisis, many satsang properties are closed? As a caretaker in one such centre, I can report that the wildlife is thriving! At this time of year in the western hemisphere, birds are building their nests and their calls sound from dawn till dusk, clearly audible now that the roads are so much quieter. Marauding geese have taken over the grounds, rabbits frisk outside their burrows, and the kitchen has been invaded by ants. A handful of sevadars are able to deal with these intruders and can tackle the other essential tasks. But how strange the atmosphere. Beautiful? – Yes, it’s always beautiful. Peaceful? – Yes, more peaceful than when filled with busy people at a weekend. Quiet? – Yes, of course. But something vital is missing, and the residents, whilst carrying out all that can reasonably be carried out, experience a lack of what can best be described as buoyancy. Just as sevadars are missing their regular visit or weekend stay at the property, the property is missing them.

It's as if the atmosphere which is usually like a buoyant balloon, lifted and made airborne by the breath which fills it, is now deflated. The loving energy of the sevadars who usually come here is gone. We are missing those affectionate, enthusiastic, devoted, diligent, companionable lovers of the Guru, now confined to their homes.

It’s been pointed out in the media and otherwise that some unlooked-for benefits have accrued from confinement in our dwelling places. Families are having to ‘dig deep’ to keep themselves and their children well-occupied and well-exercised. They have woken up to the need to give attention to elderly family members and elderly neighbours who in the normal hurly-burly of working life may have been overlooked. It’s a good reminder, a salutary lesson, that “charity begins at home” and that this applies to seva too. Seva, or service, begins at home in caring for every member of the family, and only when we are doing our best at home can seva beyond the home be honestly offered.

The other lesson can be summed up by that line in Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi – “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Now that sevadars are no longer able to come to the properties we are all recognizing just what we’ve got and praying for its eventual return. The following question-and-answer with Hazur Maharaj Ji sums up the great gift of seva that we are missing.

Q: Maharaj Ji, could you tell us the value of seva at home, at our own satsang centres?
Master: The greatest reward in seva is the contentment and happiness that you feel within, that you get an opportunity to serve someone. That is the greatest happiness one can ever get, to make someone happy. It doesn’t make you so happy if anybody makes you happy, but it definitely makes you very happy when you are in a position to make someone else happy, and that is the real seva. Seva for any institution, seva for any individual, seva for the masses – in other words, a charitable attitude of helping other people – that is seva. We do seva with our body, we do seva with our mind, we do seva with our money. The base of seva is love and devotion for the Father.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #191}

The Wisdom of the Virus - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Wisdom of the Virus

We have been here before: the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1917, the Stock Market crashes of 1929 and 2008, the Tsunami of 2004 were all devastating. As the Great Depression was worsening in 1933, the first words President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at his inauguration were: “The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” But we don’t even have to fear fear itself; it is a primitive, instinctive response to perceived dangers, a response to a perception of danger, a response that need not happen. The focussed still silence available to us through our meditation knows no danger, fears no emptiness, welcomes love. Hazur said:

We should never feel frightened within ourselves. We are never alone. We always have somebody with us, watching us and guiding us and helping us. You mustn’t get depressed. You just continue with your meditation. Let anybody appear - don’t bother about anybody. You continue with your meditation, and nobody can do you any harm at all.¹

The things we fear are concepts, dragons of our own making. The current fear of abrupt and massive change, of financial ruin, of living much closer to death than usual, all this is the work, the creation of the mind. The mind analyzes and makes judgments; it is what the mind does, what the mind has to do, so it can navigate through the dense fog of time and illusion. But focussing on the still calm within requires no navigation, just discipline and devotion. Make contact with the love that is within us, hiding in the darkness, and fear, loneliness and depression are dissolved.

Change is an essential manifestation of time: without time (and space) there is no change and, obviously, without change there is no time. The huge yet invisible changes that have happened to us all in the last few weeks are incomprehensible, yet the physical world around us appears unchanged. The birds are singing louder than usual, the grass and wildflowers are more beautiful than ever before, as nature continues to ignore our human tribulations.

The quiver of words useful in these circumstances is limited to the likes of “unprecedented”, “difficult”, “crisis”, “uncertain” and “frightening”. This drought of language is indicative of the apparent depth of the crisis – it is unprecedented, in our lifetimes, so we have not previously had to find words to talk about such things. We are left stuttering to each other at a safe distance of two metres. Sure, it certainly is a huge wave of karmic happenstance, where the very foundation of the human race could seem to be under threat, but it is even more clear that we could instead be stuttering those five words of remembrance, simran. That is the way we discover, yet again, that, actually nothing has changed. We simply have a stronger imperative to withdraw from space and time.

The law of karma applies to individuals. It is the specific load we have accrued that we must burn off, ourselves, in the privacy of our own struggle with the mind. Although it might seem that most of mankind is suffering the same karmic Coronavirus disaster, it is each one of us separately that must undergo our part, our version of it. Hazur said:

There is no such thing as group karma, but definitely people’s association with each other forms a type of group. A thousand people are fighting together and trying to kill another thousand people in the army, so each side has made a group. They have a karmic relationship with each other, but everybody will have individual karma, and any individual can escape from that group. It’s not that the whole group has to escape or be condemned.

Any individual can escape from that group according to his own karma. So, there is no group karma, but they have an association with that group; they are all interconnected in relation to that group.²

Love takes all our anxiety into its arms. The Master leads us through our confusion to the calm of his balmy shores. It is abundantly clear that love is the solution. The way we go to our balconies to clap our loving support for nurses and doctors. We are locked down in our bubbles of love with our families. We have nothing to do but meditate; the silence is sometimes deafening! The skies and roads are clear of traffic. We have nowhere to go but in. There is nothing to fear but fear itself and meditation makes short work of that!

In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts wrote: “If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.”³ Our anxiety is about the imagined unknown on the horizon, as if there is a wisp of material happiness that is somehow being denied to us.

The fact that the crisis is global, that no one is immune, not even prime ministers, and that no one knows how or when it will end, these all indicate the fragility of the human experience. It seems like a massive upheaval of the karma machine, an upheaval as big as any so far seen on planet Earth but brought about by something so small it is invisible even under optical microscopes. These tiny, invisible things – coronavirus virions – are transmitted from one of us to another of us humans thereby making their new hosts ill whether mildly or terminally. And these virions are tiny: 20 nanometres where a nanometre is one billionth of a metre. The diameter of a human hair is at least a thousand times bigger.

Invisible things with a diameter of 20 nanometres are at the root of an upheaval that is affecting the entire human race, changing how we live, and this in the space of just a few weeks! Surely, we have every right to be extremely scared! And yet there is nothing to be scared of, nothing, not a thing.

Alan Watts wrote: “Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought.”⁴ A spiritual master gives us the way to get beyond thinking, beyond pain, beyond fear. His love reminds us that we are spiritual beings going through an, albeit testing, human experience. The point is to get us home.

Alan Watts concludes: “To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beetroot.”⁵

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q#436
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q#89
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for the Age of Anxiety; Vintage Books, 1951, 2011, p. 15
The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.55
The Wisdom of Insecurity, pp. 77–78

Two Faces of Creation - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Two Faces of Creation

What is our relationship to this world, the physical world around us? Saints and mystics over many centuries have described this world as a place of misery for us. The saints tell us that we will always be miserable here, regardless of whatever charms and attractions worldly life offers. This is because we can never be happy in separation from God. Saints tell us that our true self is neither this body nor our mind, but our soul. And this soul is, as Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh says:

… that divine spark of that creator, that divine light which is giving us life… Potentially, every soul is God, because its origin is the Creator.¹

So, because God is our origin, Hazur says:

Without meeting him [the Lord], without merging back into him, we will never find eternal peace. … But for that, nobody would search for him; and that is why we seek him, our source.²

While this is the ultimate reason we can never be happy in this world – that our soul belongs somewhere else – saints go further and give other strong reasons why we can never be happy. First, they point out that everything here passes. It is subject first to change, then to death or destruction. So if we attach ourselves to this world, to whatever attracts us – pleasure, power and status, wealth, relationships with others – we must always be disappointed. Hazur says:

… whatever our pleasures are in this creation, there’s always a fear at the bottom of that pleasure. When you get married, you’re always worried: What if my wife leaves me, becomes unfaithful, deserts me, or I annoy her? You see, there’s always a fear, and wherever there is a fear at the base of a pleasure, it can never be a pleasure. It’s only a question of time before it is converted to misery.³

Then, going even further, saints remind us of the horrors and evils all around us:

Read the history of the world of the past and you will find that this killing and slaughter has been the rule. …how much suffering we find in this world in the form of mental and physical ills, cruelty, murder and other crimes.⁴

We hardly need this reminder, since every day our newspapers are full of such horrors. We ask then: why is the world this way, if God is all powerful and all-loving? In answer, saints reveal that the state of the world is God’s will; it’s not that some other power has perverted the creation. Hazur says:

Everything is happening as the Lord wants it to happen. Not a leaf can stir without his command.⁵

And:

I think he has created this world as imperfect. You see, nothing existed before the creation. Only he existed. All that we see is nothing but his own projection. He has projected himself in an imperfect way, so to say, because otherwise this creation cannot continue at all. …. Why has he created it? He knows best.⁶

All these lessons about the world just reinforce the essential truth – that we in our essence, our soul, will never be happy here. But saints and mystics also offer another – very different – vision of this world. This vision of the world starts from the truth just revealed by Hazur above: “All that we see is nothing but his own projection.” Then, all mystics and scriptures tell us that God is love – as Hazur says:

It is said that God is love and love is God, because the characteristic of God is love.⁷

Can’t we conclude from this that, if God is love, and the creation is his projection, then the creation must be a projection, expression, of love? So this is a second vision of the world – as an outpouring of God’s love. Great Master confirms this:

All living beings are of the same essence as the Lord. They are His children. … A mother is never neglectful of her child. Because of her genuine love, she cannot be indifferent to him. … The Lord is never unmindful of us even for a moment. He is always looking after us. We have never been separated from Him. He is always with us and always pervades our entire being.⁸

Hazur says, “His grace is always there… his grace is always flowing.”⁹

Guru Arjan Dev says:

He is the Lord of myriads of universes,
the Sustainer of all life.
He takes care of all and supports all.
But the universe does not acknowledge
his beneficence.¹⁰

Christ said:

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings,
and not one of them is forgotten before God?
But even the very hairs of your head
are all numbered.¹¹

We are told that God is love – but what is love? Let’s remember the unique definition of love given by Hazur. He defines love as “becoming another being.” He says:

Love is losing your own identity and becoming another being. To lose your individuality and merge into another being – that is love.¹²

If, as Hazur just said “the characteristic of God is love,” and if the creation is God’s projection, then this suggests that God is always giving himself to, and becoming, all that exists. God, having created the universe out of love, pervades it out of love, and merges himself into it. He has and is giving himself infinitely to it, to its every particle.

Mystics tell us that as we become lovers of God, we start to perceive this around us – to see glimpses of God’s love even in this lowly creation. In the Quran we read:

Surely in the heavens and the earth there are signs for the believers; and in your creation, and the crawling things He scatters abroad, there are signs for a people having sure faith, and in the alteration of night and day, and the provision God sends down from heaven, and therewith revives the earth after it is dead, and the turning about of the winds, there are signs for a people who understand.¹³

Additionally, the Quran says: “Whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God.”¹⁴ So, given all this, can we seriously think that the creation is evil? How do we reconcile these two visions of the world? As we see, great saints have revealed both – and therefore we accept both as true. But they seem totally in contradiction. However we know from experience that when truths are contradictory in Sant Mat, this is because they apply at two different levels of realization.

Now the question for us is, which world would we rather inhabit? Of course, the second.

Then how do we gain that level of awareness so we can see this world not as a place of horror, but as full of God’s presence, grace and beauty? We can find the answer to this question in Great Master’s treatise on bhakti or devotion in Philosophy of the Masters, Volume 2. Near the beginning of that treatise, he lays out what he calls “five principles” of devotion to guide us in developing true devotion to God. These principles make clear that it is devotees of God who come to see the world according to the second vision, as abounding with God’s love, mercy and grace. Let’s go through these five principles, one by one. Great Master says:

The first principle underlying devotion is that God is the Creator of all and is omniscient. He is pure, flawless and whole. He is omnipresent. Human beings, the lower species of life, and in fact the entire universe are a sign of His existence. We are all His children.¹⁵

As did Maharaj Charan Singh above, Great Master tells us that this world – the entire creation – is a projection of God. Nothing exists but Him. Seen in the right perspective, the creation reveals His presence. The entire creation is – and must be – “pure, flawless, and whole.” The divine is omnipresent, infinitely present around us, and omniscient, infinitely aware of each living thing, indeed of every particle. Each of us is not merely His creation, or even His child – we are infinitely pervaded by Him. Our imagination has to expand to take in such infinities.

While we are still far from realizing all this, Great Master is putting it forward as a principle to live by if we aspire to be God’s lovers. If we remember it and make our faith in it our touchstone, it will help us see the world in a new light. Great Master continues:

The second principle is that this universe is His creation, and it is all beautiful and full of happiness. Each one, of course, looks at this world according to the state or condition of his own mind.¹⁶

Here the Great Master strikingly, emphatically, confirms what we described above as the second way of seeing and relating to the world around us. Even though, as saints remind us, this world is no doubt a horror, yet, Great Master tells us, it truly – really – is “all beautiful and full of happiness.”

How can both be true? Great Master explains – how we see the world depends on the “state or condition of our own mind.” It seems that this world is a horror when we see it through the distorting lens of maya or illusion – of desires for pleasure, possessions, power and worldly relationships. It becomes a place of beauty and happiness for those who practice true devotion. Great Master further explains:

The third principle is that one should be happy in the Will of God, and should always remain contented and grateful for whatever happens to him. Whatever is being done is for our own good. This is beyond any shadow of doubt. What we may consider as trouble, has actually come in order to elevate the condition of our mind.¹⁷

We saw previously how God is omniscient and omnipresent. With this principle, we learn that he is also omnipotent – in fact, nothing happens unless he wills it. If everything is his projection, then how can it be otherwise? Is what he wills good in our eyes? How can it be good when things like automobile accidents, deaths of relatives and illnesses happen to us? But Great Master says that – “beyond any shadow of doubt” – everything that happens is “for our own good.” And not only for the good of initiates of a spiritual master, or of just human beings, but of the entire creation. Once again, we confront the concept of infinity: for every being in creation, from the origins of this creation until its dissolution, everything has been for the good of all. How can this be?

Hazur would tell us that we must return to God to understand this. Again, while we are far from seeing this truth with our own eyes, Great Master is giving it to us as a principle to live by. He says there is no room whatever for us to doubt it. Without question this truth will be difficult to live up to when we face tragedy – but what is our choice? Reminding ourselves of it will give us some comfort and release. Again, it can become a touchstone to keep us stable on the path of devotion. To the extent we become aware of this truth, we at once feel gratitude to God for his infinite mercy and grace, and we gain a degree of contentment with whatever he has decreed as our lot. As Hazur says:

We must have faith in him. Whatever he gives, that is for our advantage, and we should accept it. We shouldn’t desire anything at all.¹⁸

We all know that this principle – that everything that happens is for our good – in no way excuses us from exerting all possible effort, or from bearing the consequences of our actions. As we know effort and grace go hand in hand, though they operate at very different levels of reality.

Great Master continues speaking about the principles of devotion by saying:

The fourth principle is that one should consider it to be the greatest sin to hurt the feelings of others. To provide comfort and happiness to others, should be considered the highest obligation….¹⁹

Saints enjoin on us as seekers of God that we must live moral lives on this plane. This includes fulfilling all responsibilities to others. Hazur explains:

… we have to fulfil all our obligations. You have to just do your duty. Your attitude should be to help [others] in every way, to discharge your obligations in every sphere of life. This applies not just to your wife and children but to everyone. You have to be a good citizen, good friend, good brother, good father, good husband – kind, loving to everybody, helpful to society.²⁰

As Hazur suggests here, and as Great Master confirmed, we must act toward others not just according to bare moral obligations, but, beyond that, with a loving urge to help others, everyone, however we can. It seems we are to act toward others essentially as God does toward us. God is love, and in his infinity, gives infinitely of himself to each living being, compassionately caring for us and sustaining us in every way. If only in gratitude for this, as a reflection of our faith in it, we too, in our infinitesimal way, should do the same toward the world all around us.

Hazur was asked whether a devotee should practice indifference toward the suffering all around, to avoid becoming attached to this world:

If that had been our attitude, I would not have opened the eye camp at the Dera every year or taken on the very big hospital project. We are very much concerned with the suffering of humanity, and we want to do whatever we can. Our attitude should always be to help and to be a source of strength to people, and to be loving and kind to everybody.²¹

And in response to a questioner asking if we can love in a detached way, he says:

To have a sympathetic heart is very different from attachment. If you are driving and see a dog that has been hit by a car, you just stop the car. You take so much pity on the dog that you even shed tears, seeing him in such a pitiable condition. That doesn’t mean you are attached to the dog. … You must have a kind and loving heart, a sympathetic and helpful heart.²²

As does God with us, this loving kindness toward others is done selflessly, without thought of reward. It is the fundamental inspiration behind outward seva. But to love and help others is not done in hopes of changing the world, because if the world is to change, God himself will do it. Again, from Great Master:

The fifth principle is that one should become a devotee by taking support from his Guru or Master, so that by being in contact with such a higher being one may also eventually attain the same stage.²³

Here Great Master answers a further question: how do we “become” such a devotee, such a lover of God, and not just take on faith but actually realize these five principles? For that, he says, we need to seek support from a true lover of God in our own time, the living master.

And, who is the living master? As saints teach, everything we have heard so far about God and the creation can now be said about the master. The master manifests God on this plane and on every plane within. Great Master writes,

Although the Lord, like electricity, pervades everywhere, the Master is the point where He shines out as light.²⁴

As we are with God, we are surrounded by the infinite presence, knowledge, and protection of the master. But being on this plane with us, the master also can show us the path back to God and instruct us on how to follow it. He tells us that we need to break our attachments to this world, to maya. He reveals to us the secret way to do this. Hazur says:

[we can become detached from this world] only when we are attached to something better than the sensual pleasures, the worldly faces, the worldly objects. When we are attached to something better, we automatically become detached from everybody. … when we get that taste of nectar within, that living water within, we automatically withdraw from the senses.²⁵

What is that nectar, that living water? It is the Shabd or Nam, the creative power of God resounding within us, that the master reveals to us within. Shabd or Nam is God’s voice calling us back to our origin. As we become attached to it, it purifies us and leads us back to God. And even before we reach our destination, it gives us a degree of communion with God, that progressively grows and grows.

How do we make contact with this inner power? Through meditation – simran and bhajan. It is only through meditation that we can gain awareness of the divine. And as we do so, we can begin to see the world in the second way. As Hazur says:

So meditation gives you that bliss, that peace, that happiness, that contentment within you.²⁶

Then one day, as Great Master tells us, following the master’s instructions, and learning from his example, we will one day reach his level. But this does make us wonder – how do saints see this world? Let’s close with some of their writings to give us a glimpse. Huzur explains Paltu’s outlook by saying:

He [Paltu] says that the lovers of the Lord find the Lord everywhere, in everyone. … He is in the guru; he is in the disciple. He is the Creator; he is in the creation. … The lover sees none but the Lord in this creation.²⁷

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 1, Beas: RSSB, 2010, #223, #227.
Ibid, #256.
Ibid, #423.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, Beas: RSSB, 2002, #233.
Ibid.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 1, #62.
Ibid, Vol 2., #597.
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, Beas: RSSB, 1989, p. 11.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 2, #443.
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, cf. p. 16.
Holy Bible, KJV, Luke 12:6-7.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 2, #338.
Arberry, Arthur John. The Koran Interpreted: A Translation. Reprinted by Touchstone (1996). First published 1955. 45:3-5.
Ibid, 2:115.
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, Beas: RSSB, 2009, p. 25
Ibid, p. 26.
Ibid.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 1, #339.
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 26.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 3, #366.
Ibid, #210.
Ibid, #366.
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 26.
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, Beas: RSSB, 2010, p. 27.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 3, #367.
Ibid, Vol. 1, #424.
Ibid, Vol. 3, #494.

In the Stream of the Friend - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

In the Stream of the Friend

The thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi says:

It is the duty of lovers
to search for the friend.
Like an unstoppable torrent
without regard for their lives,
they rush headfirst into
the stream of the friend!¹

He opens this poem by making the point that there’s an inherent force within human beings that seeks divine love and union with the Lord, or the “friend” that’s within each one of us. Rumi calls our seeking an “unstoppable torrent,” which rushes headfirst towards the Lord, since it’s our “duty” to follow the inner attraction our soul feels towards its divine origin.

Mystics and spiritual teachers throughout time have explained to humanity that each one of us has a soul within us that is a spark or drop of the same essence as the Lord. To paraphrase, Baba Ji has said that love is the core of our being. It’s the link to our divine heritage, and it’s natural for us to be drawn towards that source, in the same way that a stream of water flows without heed for any obstacles in its way.

Divine love is the way that our innermost heart experiences our relationship with the friend, who, to Rumi, is both the inner Lord, and also the master or Sheikh, which in his case was Shams-e-Tabrizi. The master is the mirror within whom we can catch a glimpse of the elusive Lord. And the master provides us with the example and inspiration that divine union is possible. True seekers are willing to give up anything in the world in order to experience this connection.

Rumi often uses images of water to describe divine love. In another poem, he says:

Don’t give value to a life lived without love.
Accept love – the Water of life –
into your heart and soul. (Ibid, p.23)

He’s saying that we need love in the same way that we need water, and again that love flows like a constant stream from the Lord. Our job is to be receptive to it, in the depths of our being. He continues in the original poem, speaking about the friend, saying:

He is the seeker and we his shadows.
All our talk and conversation
are words of the friend.

He’s changing the imagery here, by saying that we are the same as the Lord, just in a shadow form, which is a very revealing image. A shadow is an opaque and fleeting shape that mimics a real shape because of the way the light shines on that shape. The light illuminates the shadow as similar to the real shape, but not quite the same. Shadowing is also a term used to follow or imitate someone. So Rumi is saying we are a somewhat darker reflection of the Lord. We’re like him, but a less substantial or developed version.

He’s also implying that everything the shadow does is directed and inspired by the Lord. The Lord is the mover behind our actions, and his love and intent are expressed in everything we do. When we examine and understand our actions in life, we see that everything that happens, and all our movement towards the Lord, are through his guiding hand.

We all come into life with a destiny assigned to us to fulfill, in order to resolve obstacles that stand between us and the Lord. These are our karmas, or debts from prior actions that must be repaid and balanced in order for us to be reunited with the Lord. So, it’s in our best interest to positively face our destiny and fulfill our obligations by leading a clean, positive, moral life and not creating new obligations to tie us to this creation.

But everything we do is being directed by the Lord, as we are his shadows. This is the way He’s designed to pull us towards Him. The poem continues:

Sometimes we flow happily like water
in the stream of the friend.
Sometimes we are confined like water
in the pitcher of the friend.

Sometimes, as we boil like carrots in a pot,
He stirs us with a spatula of thought.
That is the nature of the friend.

The stream of the friend doesn’t always flow smoothly. This is just how life works – what Rumi calls “the nature of the friend.” Just as water rushes and ebbs and flows in and around obstacles and rocks and waterfalls and deep pools, the flow of our lives isn’t smooth either.

Spiritual teachers point out that life is about learning to make decisions that take us in the right direction towards the Lord. The great Persian mystic saint, Zarathushtra, called life the “fiery test of truth,”² in which we constantly have to make choices between going towards that which is eternal and truthful and away from that which is temporary and untruthful. It’s the nature of life and destiny that we’re faced with situations in which we need to learn how to turn to the positive, and away from the negative.

Rumi continues by saying:

He stealthily puts his mouth to our ear
to fill our souls with the fragrance of the friend.

He’s explaining that the friend gives us inner guidance by whispering in our ear and filling our soul with the fragrance of divine love. Here he’s referring to inner sound and music, the Voice of the Lord, or divine inspiration or intuition that helps us to know right from wrong. This is the creative power of the Lord, the Shabd or Nam or Audible Life Stream, which we learn how to contact in our meditation practice, and which slowly and slowly helps to steady and guide us on the spiritual path. The Shabd is our true inner friend or master.

In another of Rumi’s poems, he says:

A wondrous Sound comes
from the sky every moment.
That Sound cannot be heard except
by someone who has risen within. (Ibid, p. 322)

The Lord is constantly guiding us from within, but we aren’t always tuned into the right frequency to receive His message. In another poem, Rumi says:

The Beloved has constant interaction
with your heart and soul.
You see only what happens
in the outer layer. (Ibid, p. 175)

Again, he’s emphasizing that the Lord is always connected to us, and constantly guiding us from within. But we’re distracted by outer appearances and can’t always feel His presence. He’s always there, and we can’t get away from Him, even when we try. But we often ignore Him.

Rumi continues in the original poem, speaking about the presence of the Lord by saying:

Because he is the Soul of our soul,
we cannot escape him.
In the world, I have not seen one soul
who is an enemy of the friend.

So we are soul with a small “s,” and the friend is Soul with a capital “S.” Because we are of Him, we cannot escape Him. We are in the friend, and the friend is in us. Rumi also points out that the friend is in everyone; He has no enemies, since we all have this same essence flowing through us. All human beings are the same on the inside. We may look different on the outside; we may have different life experiences, or come from different backgrounds and cultures, or speak different languages, but inside we’re all the same as the Lord, which makes us all the same as each other.

Rumi continues speaking about the friend by saying:

His coyness will melt you
and make you weak as a strand of hair,
but in exchange for both worlds
you would not give up even one hair
from the friend.

The master and the Lord play a game of love to pull us within. We’re made to feel completely out of control and weak to increase our receptivity and inner reliance on Him. But can we quit this path? Not easily. Not even if we received everything we might desire in this world. For a seeker, the love of the friend has a higher value than anything. But sometimes we don’t recognize the Lord and his ways. We don’t make room for him to reveal Himself. The poem continues with Rumi saying:

Sitting with the friend we keep asking,
“O friend, where is the friend?”
Drunken with pride we ask, “Where? Where?”
even though we are in the land of the friend.

We act as if we’re separate from the Lord, and that we’re seeking something that is outside of us, which we cannot find. We keep looking everywhere outside to find this inner happiness and fulfilment. We’re so full of our ideas about how right we are that we become “drunken with pride,” so that we cannot even see that what we’re seeking is right within us, closer than our own breath, as Huzur used to say. We’re with the friend all the time, but we think we have a different identity that is unique and special.

It’s this identity that keeps us from experiencing the Lord. It’s what creates a barrier and an inability to see anything beyond this material life, which we assume is here for our enjoyment and exploitation. He’s here with us all the time, but it’s we who become distracted and turn away from him. In another poem called The Secret of Harmony, Rumi says:

Go become one with the friend’s shadow –
don’t show a sign of yourself. (Ibid, p.328)

He’s telling us that the key for the shadow to truly be one with the friend is to “not show a sign of our self.” He means that we’re a shadow, after all. How can a shadow exist separately from the entity that is creating the shadow? We can’t exist without the Lord.

In the Introduction to the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi book, from which these quotations are taken, the author speaks about Rumi’s emphasis on humility (faqr) as the way to divine union, by saying:

Only when the ego is fully annihilated is God automatically confirmed as the one, true, everlasting existence. When a seeker understands this truth, then he understands that everything, including his own self, belongs to God. He is just a beggar who possesses absolutely nothing. This experience brings about a profound sense of liberation and deep gratitude to God.³

This attitude is woven throughout all of Rumi’s poetry, that if we can just get our small self out of the way, we can fully appreciate our oneness with the Lord and be grateful for everything He’s doing for us every minute of every day. We can live in that presence. Baba Ji even said recently that humility is as simple as listening to others and taking into account their point of view, whereas pride is assuming you’re right all the time. How can we develop our relationship with the friend, when we can’t or won’t even listen to Him?

Rumi continues in the original poem:

A weak nature creates bad images
and indecent thoughts.
These are not the way of the friend.

Rumi is saying here that we need to strengthen our character in order to fully appreciate the Lord. He’s saying that when we give into negative ways of thinking, we pollute our minds and turn them away from the Lord. It’s only when we can focus on uplifting our thoughts and actions that we can be receptive to the love and guidance that comes from within. We need to still our errant thoughts through meditation in order to quiet the mind and experience our oneness with the Lord.

Rumi ends his poem by emphasizing the importance of quiet meditation. He says:

Stay quiet so He will describe His attributes.
Your empty words and noise
cannot be compared
with words and noise from the friend!

Jalal al-Din Rumi, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (Selections), trans. Farida Maleki, Beas: RSSB, 2019, p. 130
Taraporewala, Irach J.S., The Divine Songs of Zarathushtra, Bombay: Hukhta Foundation, 1993, Yasna 30.7
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (Selections), p. 12

Balance and Stillness - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Balance and Stillness

There's hardly a person who hasn't faced the dilemma of how to achieve a more balanced life. We all recognize the need for balance in order to effectively and objectively cope with the challenges life presents to us. When we lose our balance, we get pulled to extremes and emotional reactions, and we lose focus on our goal – spiritual realization.

The Master emphasizes that to find balance in our external behavior and actions, we need to bring our mind to a state of stillness, where we can experience peace of mind. If we find stillness within, through our meditation and a relaxed attitude to life, we will be able to concentrate and be receptive to our intrinsic spiritual nature. We will be able to throw off the worries and obsessions of the external, mundane world in which we live day to day.

Stillness is the key to spiritual knowledge, to finding God within. As the Bible says, in the book of Psalms:

Be still and know that I am God.¹

God is within us, at the point of equilibrium, of balance. When we become still, in body and mind, and stop the mind from pursuing its infinite obsessions, we can find God within ourselves. Once our mind is quiet, our spiritual nature will reveal itself naturally.

But how can we do this? How can we bring the mind to stillness? For most of us, the mind seems totally uncontrollable. It barrels from one thought to another and hardly ever stops. If we give up worries, then desires march in, demanding to take their place. If we curtail some of our desires, we start obsessing and worrying in some other way. So our challenge is to quiet and calm the mind.

Mystics give us various hints on how to achieve this inner balance – how to find the point of equilibrium within, between the extremes; how to hold on to our inner axis.

There's a beautiful passage in the Book of Mirdad, in which Mirdad emphasizes the importance of finding that inner axis, as that axis is God himself, eternal, still, beyond the changing events of wheel of time. The axis also represents our spiritual center, our core. And it is from here that the Lord pulls us to find him. Mirdad says:

The wheel of time rotates, but its axis is always at rest.
God is the axis of the wheel of Time.
Though all things rotate about Him in time and space,
yet is He always timeless and still.
Though all things proceed from his Word,
yet his Word is as timeless as He.
In the axis all is peace.
On the rim all is commotion.
Where would you rather be?
I say to you, slip from the rim of Time
into the axis --
and spare yourselves the nausea of motion.
Let Time revolve around you;
but you not revolve with Time. ...
When one is dead to change,
one becomes changeless.
Most men live to die.
Happy are they who die to live.²

Happy are they who die to live! They give up their attachment to this changing world, and become happy. In order to hold on to the axis, the spiritual reality within, we need to detach ourselves from the wheel of time, the wheel of change and transmigration.

In Spiritual Discourses, Hazur Maharaj Ji urges us to let go of our worldly involvements, and return to the point of stillness and equilibrium within ourselves. He says that when we are engrossed in the external aspects of life, we are constantly spinning around on the rim of the wheel; but when we return to our inner core of stillness, through meditation on Shabd or Nam, it is like catching hold of the axis. He said:

Deeply engrossed in wife or husband and children, in friends and relatives, in wealth and possessions, you become part of the ever moving wheel. By deep devotion to Nam, you step out of the perpetual motion of the wheel and regain the axis with its equilibrium, its stillness, its ineffable bliss. You become one with the Lord.³

Here Maharaj Ji is giving us a method to become detached from the rim of the wheel, where we are constantly spinning, slaves to time, to anxiety, to death and rebirth; where we have no control, and where we are out of touch with our spiritual identity. And through devotion to Nam, by attending to meditation, we will get in contact with the Shabd, the source of stillness and equilibrium, the creative power. The Shabd nourishes us from within and is changeless and eternal.

A contemporary Sufi mystic wrote about the spiritual axis as "the constant center" that keeps the entire creation, and all beings – externally and internally – in balance. He says:

The divine message is heard on the horizons of equilibrium. Balance and equilibrium ensure stability, and are the result of the existence of a constant center.

If we consider the universe, it is easy to see how perfectly balanced the planets are around the sun, each in their own orbit, and even how balance prevails in the galaxies. If such perfection, balance and harmony are inherent in the universe, then surely human beings, as part of the universe and therefore bound to the same laws of physics, do not need to look very far to recognize this perfection, balance and harmony.⁴

In summary, the mystic is saying that we are a microcosm of the universe and so we too have perfection, balance and harmony within us. On an external level, living in the world, adjusting to change is essential – we need to let go of our obsession with control over circumstances, and instead focus on the divine Reality, our central core of spiritual strength, within. That will give us stability. The principle of equilibrium is inherent throughout the entire creation, from the microcosm of our individual beings, to the macrocosm of the universe.

If we believe that everything that happens to us, happens as a result of our karmas, that it is our destiny, then we will understand that there is nothing we can change. We can adjust our attitude with the grace of the Master and the strength gained through meditation, but certainly we can't change the basic events of our lives, our relationships, or the circumstances we face. How could we worry, or be consumed by anything happening outside of us, if we accept that we cannot change our destiny?

So, the first step in achieving balance is to train our mind to accept our destiny. That will allow us to meditate with a relaxed mind. And by attending to meditation we will be able to accept our destiny. It is a never ending circle of love. Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

We have to face situations at every step in this life, and at every step in this life we have to explain to our mind to accept whatever comes in our fate smilingly, cheerfully – why grumble? It's a constant training of the mind.

This is also doing service, because that will help us in meditation. If we always feel perturbed with every little thing, then how can we concentrate, how can we meditate? If we make every little thing an issue the size of the Himalayas, then how can we concentrate? We have to forget; we have to forgive; we have to train our mind to take things easily, lightly, to laugh them away, ignore them. This is all training the mind.⁵

Hazur often reminded us to keep a balance. Accept your destiny, swim along with the waves, not against them. Adjust to life, don't contend with it. He said:

On this plane, there is a certain destiny we have to go through. But if we are attending to meditation, then our willpower becomes strong enough so that we can go through that destiny. And naturally, the decision has already been made. You are not making any decision at all. Whatever has to happen has already happened. You have to go through that, but you are now better equipped to face the situation, to face the events of life. You don't lose your balance in going through those events of life, but you can't change those events of life. So meditation definitely helps us. We should do our best and leave the result to the Father....

We must accept the events of life. You cannot change the course of the events of life, but you can always adjust to them. Adjusting to the events of life will always make you happy and relaxed. If you swim against the waves, you will drown. If you swim along with the waves, you will get to the shore easily.⁶

Hazur Maharaj Ji once elaborated on the balance between our lives out in the world and our meditation. He reassured us that our meditation would protect us no matter where our destiny places us. The Master is always with us. He said, in answer to a question:

Well, sister, if you are tied to a strong chain, you can move only within a limited area. So if we are tied to our meditation every day, no matter how much we're involved in other things, we will always remain within the circle – we will not be able to get out of the circle. If the chain is broken, then of course you are absolutely gone, you're involved. So the chain of meditation should not be broken.

Meditation must be attended to every day, and then no matter how much you involve yourself in other activities, you'll never be allowed to go astray at all. You'll never be allowed to get involved so much that you forget your real path, because your chain is very strong – you are just tied down to that bulldozer and it will not let you go anywhere. So if we don't compromise with that, then everything will be all right.⁷

In his conclusion to this response, Maharaj Ji said:

Meditation is a way of life.... Meditation should reflect in your whole life, your whole day. It becomes a part of your life, your way of life. That way your whole day is spent in meditation.

We can think about how this applies to our lives, no matter in what situation our destiny places us. If we attend to our meditation, we will find the balance we need in order make our way through life. The Master is an example for us.

When we meet the Master, we are seeing a person who is in balance. We use the term the true, perfect or complete Master. This means that he is complete; all his aspects are in balance. He is the ultimate example of how a person can live in the world, fulfilling all his duties, while still attending to his inner spiritual life. In that way we try to emulate him.

We need to achieve a balance, an equilibrium in our lives – both inner and outer. The point of stillness within is at the eye center, the third eye. If we still our minds and focus within, on simran and Shabd, as our Master has advised us, we will automatically be able to balance our worldly lives with our inner life. We will have the balance needed to go through all kinds of circumstances in a relaxed way. We just need to hold on to our inner axis, our intrinsic spiritual nature.

In the language of the Chinese mystics, this axis is the Tao – which means the Way, the path, the eternal and infinite creative power. The Taoists devote much of their spiritual literature to the importance of finding the axis or still point within, which allows us to go through life without being thrown off balance by circumstances or change. By holding on to the Tao, we can adapt to change while staying attached to our inner spiritual core. We won't internalize the events of our lives – they become external and less relevant to us.

The Tao is the source of strength, the point of equilibrium between the extremes. If we don't find that equilibrium, that center, within ourselves, we will be pulled apart by the centrifugal force of the ever-moving wheel. We will lose our focus and get absorbed by mundane events.

In an early Chinese Taoist classic, the Huainanzi, the axis is also called the pivot and the handle of Tao. Here are a few lines:

If one regulates the external from the core
of his person,
His various affairs will not end in failure.
If he gets at the core,
He can nurture externals.
The sage, having scanned all around
and left nothing out,
Remaining whole, he returns to guard
what is within.
He manages the four corners of the earth
Yet always returns to the pivot.⁸

He manages the four corners of the earth, yet he always returns to the pivot. He guards his inner treasure. In other words, if we hold on to the core, the handle of Tao, we can nurture whatever is external to us without losing touch with our true self, our inner treasure. We can meet the demands of daily life, and not get lost, but remain whole no matter what is happening. We can stretch and bend, but not lose balance; we can live a composed and serene life.

We normally live between two extremes. In all our activities in the material world we are buffeted by the tension between these extremes. By holding on to the inner core, the Tao, we can become detached while going through life in this world. We can "go with the flow."

At the end of the Chinese text, the author summarizes how we can live in this world happily, adjusting to change, without losing our balance. He says:

Defer to what is natural and preserve one's genuineness. Take external things lightly and return to one's nature as it really is. It is as easy as turning a ball in the palm of one's hand, and enables one to find personal happiness.⁹

As easy as turning a ball in the palm of one's hand – This is a wonderful image. How do we go through life, generally? We internalize everything that we should leave external. We grasp the world tightly. We hold on to every experience and relationship. We need to loosen our tight grip, our need to possess things and people; to let go of our cherished opinions and self-importance – even our fear of death – so that we can attend to the needs of our soul – our true self. Then living in the world becomes as easy as turning a ball in one's hand. The ball just rolls around. Our hand relaxes and the ball rolls freely. We are not worried about anything.

To close, let us remember the reassuring words of Tulsi Sahib, the satguru of Soami Ji Maharaj. Tulsi gives us a perspective on the great gift the Masters bestow on us struggling souls. It is the Master who so generously guides us on this path. So when we feel we can't possibly control our mind, he reminds us that the Master himself has come to lift us out of the morass of this worldly existence and take us home. He is always there to help us. First the master introduces us to the path, and then he takes us by the hand and never leaves us. Tulsi wrote:

Such is the nature of saints – they ferry souls
across this ocean of existence to their true home....
The destination of this path is love,
and reaching there is not difficult.
For the one who removes all difficulty
stands before you
and has given you his hand.¹⁰

Tulsi's words are meant to inspire us in our meditation. Sit in meditation with a positive frame of mind. Be mindful of the Master's love and compassion. Love for the physical Master will eventually lead to love for the inner Master, the Shabd, which is the true Master, and that love will liberate us.

To conclude, let us remember three important things:

Let go of the rim of the constantly spinning wheel of change and hold on to the axis. Let go of the externals and hold on to our inner core.
Cultivate a balanced and relaxed attitude, so we can live happily. Then life becomes as easy as rolling a ball in the palm of our hand.
Third, to quote Tulsi Sahib, "The one who removes all difficulty stands before you, and has given you his hand." The Master is waiting for us to take his hand. Let us not keep him waiting any longer.

Bible, Psalms 46:10
Mikhael Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, pp. 68, 69.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I (1987), p. 52
Hazrat Shah Maghsoud Sadegh Angha, “Balance and Equilibrium in Sufism”, in http://www.mto.org/aos/Main/All/en/balance.html
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 265
Ibid, #258
Ibid, #218
D.C. Lau & Roger T. Ames, Yuan Dao: Tracing Dao to its Source [first section of Huainanzi]. NY: Ballantine Books, 1998, p. 113.
Ibid, p. 7
Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, 4th ed., 2017; p. 231

Use It to Go to God - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Use It to Go to God

This is a time of upheaval, breakdowns, and challenges on global, national, and personal levels. Covid-19 has ground our lives to a halt, teaching us to come to terms with the stark timeless lessons of impermanence, change, and unpredictability in this world.

All human beings live in two worlds, the world outside and the world inside of us. Although we have little control over outside events, we have ultimate control over our inner self. Our response to our outer circumstances in this turbulent time illuminates our inner development and progress on the spiritual path.

As long as our happiness depends on external circumstances, we’re going to experience some degree of inner turmoil, anger, and fear. If we become so disturbed that we can’t handle what’s happening outside of us, we’re of no use to ourselves or others. To perform optimally we must come from a centered, calm, and clear seat of consciousness, which we develop through meditation.

Our internal world belongs to us, and it doesn’t have to be negatively affected by the outside reality. Spiritually speaking, our inner development is put to the test in difficult times. The question is: Do we have the capacity to find and operate from our calm, peaceful center within, or do we fall prey to panic, fear, and resentment? When confronted by adversity, the saints tell us: Use it to go to God.

The whole purpose of spiritual growth is to let go of our small personal selves and do the necessary work to connect to our true infinite self, the Lord. These turbulent times that are so fraught with peril and so much out of our control provide a perfect opportunity to do that. So, let’s get our focus off our personal wants and preferences and learn to accept his will. Remember, we don’t run the universe, God does. When fears and anxieties disturb our mind, we can learn to withdraw into our seat of awareness, our soul, through simran, and feel the presence of God.

This difficult time presents an unprecedented opportunity for us to evaluate our spiritual trajectory. Hopefully we are reaping the benefits of our efforts in meditation and finding solace within. However, if we’ve neglected to make meditation our top priority, we may find we are living in spiritual poverty. What better time to change our course than now?

Great Master gives us a glimmer of the advantages of our spiritual practice:

You will get everything you wish – things more wonderful and remarkable than you ever dreamed of. He who has to give you all is sitting inside, in the third eye. He is simply waiting for the cleanliness of your mind and is watching your every action.¹

So why not be good to ourselves, do our meditation, accept what is unfolding in front of us, and trust in our Master and God? That doesn’t mean throw up our hands and make no effort; it means we acknowledge the reality of our situation and work with it. We accept the Master’s invitation to take refuge in him and the Lord, do our best, and then let go. We might not be able to do this perfectly. However, the saints tell us that if our intention is sincere, we will get their help and eventually succeed.

All life is interconnected; the coronavirus has clearly shown us that we are not separate. Covid-19 doesn’t respect national boundaries, race, religion, or socio-economic class. As we watch the upheavals occurring throughout our world, it is normal and human for our hearts to break over the hardships many of us are undergoing. In this time of global suffering, confusion, and adversity, let’s not use spiritual platitudes to deny or hide from the pain we all feel about what is happening around us. Instead, let’s use this opportunity to open our hearts, feel compassion and love for our own and other’s suffering, and help wherever we can while maintaining our peaceful inner center.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh encourages us to cultivate a loving and compassionate heart. He says:

If you have a kind heart, a loving heart, you are kind to everybody, you are loving to everybody, you are helpful to everybody…. We have to develop that. It happens automatically if we are filled with love and devotion for the Father.²

Now is the time to stop living small lives by clinging to the world outside of us. Instead, let’s seek the treasures of wisdom, love, and compassion that exist within all of us. The Lord’s grace is always there, waiting for us to surrender and turn to him. Our primary job remains the same: Use whatever is going on in our lives to go to God.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 171
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #500

The Gift of Fear - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Gift of Fear

Fear can be the greatest gift if used wisely.

If a child is sleeping peacefully, he is content in his own bed. But when he has a nightmare, he runs to his mother and seeks comfort in her arms.

This creation is set up to let us blithely fend for ourselves until we feel the need to turn to the Lord. As long as we feel we are coping reasonably well, we depend on our ego to protect us, and we spend our lives consumed by defensive thoughts – psychologists even say that every thought we think is defending our ego. But when we are faced with a terribly fearful situation, we realize how inadequate our ego defences are and we have a powerful motivation to take refuge in the fortress within. In our helplessness we turn to our Master and beg for his help. We take refuge in our simran, and the Master enfolds us in his arms. Maharaj Charan Singh says:

There is something wrong with us. We never want to be happy at the present moment. Either we are worried about what we have done or about what is going to happen to us. We don’t want to make the best use of the present moment. If we make this moment happy, our past automatically becomes happy, and we have no time to worry about the future. So we must take life as it comes and spend it happily. Every moment should be spent happily. And simran helps.¹

Even if we remember the Master only because of our fear, this small remembrance grows our bond with him. Bhai Gurdas says: “If you take one step to take refuge in the Master, the Master meets you on the way by taking hundreds of steps.”²

Rumi tells the story of a youth who was tortured with love, but was stymied in every way that he sought to deliver a message to his beloved. He even sewed a love letter onto a bird’s wing, but the wing was burnt by the ardour of the letter. At last his mind was completely broken, and his soul was purified by his fervour. After seven long years of knocking, of waiting, of digging for the water that would soothe his heartsickness, he was out in the streets one night when the night patrol started chasing him. One watchman after another barred every avenue of escape.

The youth was greatly afraid and moaned that the patrol was the angel of death or a tyrant coming to bring him great harm. He ran from them, but finally came to a tall garden wall with no outlet. And then suddenly, with the goad of his fear, he was able to scale the wall and fling himself into the garden. And once there ... he beheld his beloved, radiant as a lamp!

So the lover prayed: “O God, have mercy on the night patrol! Unknown to me, you have created the means. From the hell of my fear of the night patrol, you have brought me to paradise, so that I may not hold even a single thorn in contempt.” For God says: “Do not consider whether you are on a tree or in a pit: consider me, for I am the key of the way.”³

Be Still in God’s Protection
Be still and know that I am God.⁴

This command from God comes in an intriguing context. It appears in Psalm 46, in which the Psalmist speaks of how God is our fortress even in the most dire circumstances. He sings:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.⁵

The Psalmist continues, telling us of the Lord’s power to protect us: although nations rage, when the Lord speaks, the earth melts, wars cease, spears shatter and chariots are burnt. And then, as the biblical story is told, God silences the Psalmist and gives the command: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

What are we to make of this? Why was this command given in this context? It is as if the Lord is saying: Stop all these words! There is no need to describe the Lord’s protection, his might and glory. Simply stop, be still, and know God. Know the God who is. As he bluntly put it when he revealed himself to Moses: “I am who I am.”⁶ Once we are still, we know God, and with this knowledge we rest wholly sheltered and secure in his unassailable fortress.

When we begin to foster stillness within, we discover that this quiet consciousness is our essence, that it is God’s essence. In this still presence we come to know the God who is, and know that we are one with that eternal Reality. We discover the Oneness that is “without fear and without enmity,” as the Adi Granth describes it⁷. In this tranquility, fear automatically dissolves, and when fear dissolves, enmity dissolves, for enmity is derived from fear. And then what exists? Love. Only love.

So how do we become still, how do we transform fear to love? The musical composer John Cage says:

If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love.⁸

“If the mind is disciplined”: such a big if! The mind has been habituated to constantly produce thoughts – to plot and to scheme. This is because the undisciplined mind mistakenly believes that the machinations of the ego can protect it.

However, if we don’t suppress our fear, but simply refocus our attention back into our centre – rather than allowing our mind to ricochet all over trying to think of ways to deal with the fear – we can simply feel without thinking. As soon as we stop thinking, we will feel the Master’s presence and automatically calm down. When the mind can be disciplined, quieted, and trained, we will be able to simply be aware of the fear, without having to do anything about it. At that point the heart turns quickly from fear to love.

It is not our mind that can turn us from fear to love – it is our true consciousness, our stillness. Our real self is not our ego, it is our devoted heart, our loving awareness, our still essence, which cannot be hurt or destroyed and doesn’t need protecting. It accepts all. The Nei-yeh (“Inward Training”) an early Chinese Taoist text, says:

When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,
When you relax your vital energy (qi)
and expand it,
When your body is calm and unmoving,
and you can maintain the One
and discard the myriad disturbances –
You will see profit and not be enticed by it,
You will see harm and not be frightened by it.
Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,
In solitude you delight in your own person.⁹

Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, # 69
Bhai Gurdas Ji, quoted in Philosophy of the Masters, vol 3, p. 136
Mathnawi, Book 3, 4749–4810; book 4, 40–80; retold by Bahaullah. The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys. US Bahai Publishing Trust, 1991. p. 12-16)
Bible, Psalm 46:10, New King James Version (NKJV).
Bible, Psalm 46: 1–3 (NKJV)
Bible, Exodus 3:14
Adi Granth, p. 1
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary ed., p. 64,
Nei-yeh, ch. 24, tr. Harold Roth, cf. Original Tao, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999, p. 92; Louis Komjathy, Handbooks for Daoist Practice, Nei-yeh, The Yuen Yuen Institute, Hong Kong, 2008, p. 41

Beyond Judgment - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Beyond Judgment

Ram Dass, an American spiritual teacher once said:

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it…. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.¹

Our mind, left unmonitored on autopilot, automatically judges other people. And not just others, but especially ourselves. What is the alternative to this constant judgment? Complete acceptance. What a lovely example of that acceptance Ram Dass gives – simply observing trees. You allow them to be what they are – bent, straight, whatever. You let them be without judging them, and you appreciate them for what they are.

In Sant Mat, our ultimate goal is to live in God’s will. To be able to live in God’s will means that we should not be judgmental – not of other people, not of ourselves, nor even of situations. Intellectually we understand that God is all-knowing and all-powerful; therefore all that happens is his will and is therefore good. As Great Master put it, “Take for granted that all that has happened is happening or will happen, is with His will.”²

Maharaj Charan Singh has said that living in God’s will means becoming receptive to the grace of the Lord and accepting our destiny smilingly. This is how he describes being receptive to God’s will:

To be receptive to the Father’s love in our everyday lives, to accept whatever he gives us unconditionally – without hesitation, without sitting in judgment over it. To accept with gratitude what he gives, because he never does any wrong. When you are not there, then who’s to judge what is wrong and what is right? The realization will come to us that we don’t exist – only he exists. Whatever comes from him, we accept with cheerfulness, with gratitude. We don’t even differentiate between what is good and what is bad because the one who differentiates doesn’t exist anymore. We have merged into the Father.³

Ram Dass’s quote on not judging gives us a glimpse into what living in God’s will might be like. Imagine truly letting everything just be – just pure acceptance and appreciation. What a wonderful, peaceful way to live that would be. Why is it easy to let trees just be the way they are but so difficult to allow other people to be who they are are? What is judgment anyway? Here’s what Hazur has to say about it:

We judge others when we think we are superior and other people are inferior to us. We think we are much better human beings and they are an inferior type of human being…. Naturally the purpose of meditation is to eliminate the ego. When you are able to eliminate the ego, then you don’t think you are superior at all…. Then you start realizing what your real self is, your insignificance. When that realization comes, we don’t see humans at all, we see his light in every human. We become humble before the Father.⁴

Maharaj Sawan Singh explains how the saints never judge us. They look past our outer condition and see only our inner spiritual potential, our true self.

A perfect Master can, with a single glance, find out one's inner condition. He then instructs us according to our condition. When anyone visits him he can see the visitor's inner condition as if that person were encased in transparent glass, but he keeps it a secret.⁵

The Shabd is in all. When we direct our consciousness within and realize the Shabd, we begin to understand the folly of self and the oneness of everything. We begin to comprehend that everything is God’s will – that all is exactly as it is supposed to be. That understanding becomes complete when our consciousness goes beyond the mind, when we can escape the separate, sad, lonely world of the self and see the Lord inside us and everyone.

What freedom that will be! Total acceptance. Total appreciation. Total love.

Until then, let’s enjoy the trees. And turn within to the One who is smoothing our path home: “The moment He considers it the fit time to give, He will give; He is waiting for you at the eye focus and is making the path smooth for you.”⁶

www.ramdass.org. "On Judging Yourself Less Harshly"
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, Letter 64
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #294
Ibid., #319
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, p.250
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, Letter 66

All Dressed Up and Ready to Dance - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

All Dressed Up and Ready to Dance

When the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic and governments around the world ordered nationwide lockdowns, schools were besieged with e-mails from panicked parents wanting to know how the education of their children would be affected.

Some students who were about to graduate from high school, however, had concerns beyond just exams and teaching arrangements. Many had been planning for months to celebrate their upcoming graduation through a dance party, or prom, a traditional rite of passage in many countries.

These graduating students were wondering what would come of their elaborate arrangements; limousines had already been hired, suits ordered, dresses carefully chosen. All these plans now seemed up in the air.

As disciples we may find ourselves in a similar situation: perhaps we had planned to see our Master at the Dera in the first half of the year, or at a satsang program in our country over the summer. We had probably booked our tickets, had our leave approved at work, and purchased our travel essentials. Suddenly, in a matter of a few short weeks, our plans came crashing down: we, too, were all dressed up and found ourselves with nowhere to dance.

The ongoing global pandemic has paused the present and caused us to look far into a murky future. We may feel that amidst this uncertainty, we are even more in need of the strength and solace that we derive from our master. But regardless of whether we are rich or poor, in India or overseas, young or old, employed or unemployed, we find ourselves helpless given the circumstances.

In such times, we must dig deep to understand our role as disciples on the path of the saints. For years we have heard the master tell us that real spirituality is found within us, not outside. At a time when satsang has been cancelled in numerous countries, when we are unable to see the master physically, and when we have this gnawing emptiness borne from having limited opportunities for physical seva, we are being forced to put the real teachings into practice in our daily lives.

But we should recall that when questioners expressed their sadness to Maharaj Charan Singh Ji for not being able to visit the Dera, he said:

The dera is not a place made of bricks … So don’t think that a few buildings or houses or a colony make a dera. The dera is just your love, your harmony, your affection, your understanding, and your cooperation with one another. That is a dera.¹

In the midst of a world with hyperventilating media and constant coverage of the latest tragic story, it is easy to forget that everything that happens is the Lord’s will. The saints tell us that each of us have to go through our destiny and that happiness lies in adjusting to our karmas; if we do not prepare ourselves for the change of seasons, we will be the ones to suffer.

In the beginning of the Adi Granth, Guru Nanak proclaims that God is Truth because in this transitory world, it is only God that is changeless and permanent. He goes on to ask “How then to become true?” and answers his own question in the next line by saying:

Hukam rajaa'ee chalnaa, Nanak likhiaa naal.
By walking in his will, O Nanak,
in step with the writ of destiny.²

No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, Guru Sahib is explaining that we must remember to walk in the will of the Lord if we are to achieve union with him.

The reality is that the divine will, the hukam, is like a mighty river which will not change its direction just because the fish living in the water want it to. If the fish resist and decide to swim against the current, they will be the ones to suffer. The river loses nothing. So it would be wise to accept what comes before us, and surrender to the Lord’s will.

Elsewhere in the Adi Granth we read that those who recognize the will of the Lord never weep.³ As Maharaj Charan Singh Ji explains:

Well, brother, when we say that we have to live in the will of the Lord, actually it means we have to live with our destiny, smilingly taking it as assigned to us by the Father … But to live with our destiny happily and to accept our destiny cheerfully is to live in the will of the Father.⁴

How can we accept our destiny cheerfully? It is said that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

We can take social distancing to its logical conclusion and focus on inner introspection; if we cannot go out, let us go within.

During the lockdown we can draw inspiration from the publications, discourses, and videos available. Further, Baba Ji’s letter to the global sangat in March of this year urges us to fulfil our social responsibilities. This instruction involves standing by our families and being responsible and compassionate members of society.

The masters have always told us that no matter what circumstances we are placed in, meditation is our primary duty. As a sign of our sincere gratitude to our master, we can consider attending to our meditation with renewed zeal and vigor, thereby preparing ourselves for when we are next in his physical or spiritual presence. So, if before these unforeseen circumstances we were struggling to give our practice its full time, we can now strive to complete our two and a half hours or even aspire to sit for longer.

Perhaps we can be inspired by Bulleh Shah, who was separated from his master for twelve painful years. It is perhaps not coincidental that in one of his famous poems he speaks of his realization of love when he finally meets his beloved. He says:

O Beloved, on meeting You all my sorrows vanish!
I have now realized His mystery, O Bullah!
He is neither near nor far.⁵

Bulleh Shah is explaining that only when he met the Lord within did he realize that though the beloved may not be physically near him, neither was he far away because the beloved is always right within every one of his disciples.

And so, while at times we may feel like those high school teenagers who are all dressed up with no dance to attend, the reality for us as disciples could not be more different. The current circumstances are in fact an opportunity to allow us to remember how close the master truly is to us. So since we are now fully dressed up, all we have to do is show up within and commit ourselves, once again, to continuing our divine dance with the Beloved. As the mystic Eknath wrote:

Blessed are those that dance through life
loving God, singing his Name.
Merciful towards all, they feel
happiness and sadness as one.
Fountains of wisdom, love and devotion,
they’ve forgotten their senses,
forgotten ‘I’ and ‘You’ as two –
they live in contentment and certainty.⁶

Spiritual Perspectives (RSSB), Vol. III, #143
Jap Ji (RSSB), p. 19
Guru Granth Sahib, Guru Arjan Dev, p. 523, Jinhi pachhata hukam, tin kadey na rovna, www.srigranth.org
Spiritual Perspectives (RSSB), Vol III, #289
Bulleh Shah (RSSB), p. 321
One Song Many Voices (RSSB), p. 179

The Joy of Solitude - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Joy of Solitude

What a topsy-turvy world we live in – forever in a state of flux. Science tells us that at its deepest, most-minute level, the materiality and solidity of the world disappears into a boiling ocean of boundless energy beyond comprehension.

Life is a turmoil of unpredictable change and vanishing certainty. One moment something delightful happens and the next something dreadful – it’s a roller-coaster. No wonder we are constantly taken by surprise and our carefully prepared plans get scuppered so often. “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans,” goes an old Yiddish saying, repeated by many comedians. The world is certainly uncertain, firmly insecure, reliably undependable, and can suddenly spring surprises on us. The Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, invented a new word, “suddener” for it. He wrote, “World is suddener than we fancy it…”¹ Aren’t we bound to be disappointed if we count on finding something lasting and permanent in it?

Who would have guessed what the current year would bring: locked down at home with our closest ones, our daily pattern of life jumbled up. Who is not bemused by the suddenness, the unexpectedness of it all? We find ourselves without work, school or satsang, and helpless to effect any change to our situation.

We have been frequently warned that such events are bound to knock us sideways from time to time. The mystics have been telling us about the capricious nature of this material world for ages. Kabir called it “the City of the Dead” where everything eventually meets its demise. Great Master wrote, “There has never been peace here, nor will there ever be. Problems of today give place to problems of tomorrow. In a place where mind and matter are active, there can never be peace.”²

We continue to imagine that the world can be put right by well-intended actions, and we overlook all of the previous attempts to cure the world’s ills. Such efforts very often lead to disappointment, desperation, or loneliness. For little do we realize that the world continues to fulfill its role as a stage where debtors and creditors meet and settle their scores and is not designed to satisfy our dreams of perfection. Meanwhile, our attitude and response to events in the world shape us and leave their mark on us.

In Soami Ji’s words, “You have come into the world and entangled yourself in an intricate web of attachments.”³

The world is impermanent and illusory, offering nothing tangible for us to cling on to. The more we try, the more the carpet is pulled from under us – very unsettling! This feeling of impotence and separation from permanent reality is the root cause of our suffering.

Long ago the Buddha expounded on the impermanence of all created things which are not worth delighting in, not worth approval, and not worth clinging to. The Vietnamese Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh, commented, “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not.”⁴

Therefore, dissatisfaction with the way of the world leads to frustration and impotence, but realizing the world is imperfect and impermanent is the beginning of wisdom. Moments of such insight can occur at any time. As one small example, William Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair ends with, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire, or, having it, is satisfied?” Quite so! It is widely accepted that happiness is a very fugitive quality in this world. Chase it and it slips through our fingers.

Maharaj Charan Singh Ji sympathizes with our plight and the loneliness we feel in an impermanent world, like being strangers in a strange land. In answer after answer to disciples’ questions, he explains in very compassionate terms how that feeling of loneliness is a natural consequence of the soul’s exile from its true home:

That loneliness cannot leave you. It’s the yearning of the soul to become one with the Father. You cannot overcome that loneliness…. It is a natural instinct of the soul towards its own source … In spite of everything that you need in this world, that feeling of loneliness does not leave, and will not leave us unless the soul merges back into its source. That is the divine law.⁵

Feelings of loneliness do automatically creep over our mind when we seriously take to bhajan. It indicates the natural inclination of the soul towards its original home and its innate disgust with the world.⁶

Please do not worry if you are lonely in this life. You should look upon this feeling of loneliness as a blessing. In fact we are all lonely in this world.… Please take advantage of this blessed feeling and turn to him who never leaves us.⁷

The feeling of loneliness and depression that we sometimes feel is due to the natural inclination of the soul towards its home. You may give to your mind whatsoever it desires and try to satisfy its habit of flitting from one pretty object to another, but there comes a moment when you feel that all this world is nothing but a mirage and there is no one in the world that you can call your own. In such moments of depression and loneliness, if a person studies the situation rightly and, taking advantage of these moments (which come very rarely in one's life), puts his soul on the path of devotion to God, he reaches his goal and attains his true object in life. But if, instead, he turns to the world to get rid of his loneliness and depression, he makes a further mess of his life. He loses the precious opportunity of human life that God had given him to enable him to return to his home, where peace and bliss reign supreme.⁸

The solution is for us to devote time and effort in finding our way back to our real selves in the way that the mystics have explained. These days have presented us with a golden opportunity to do just that.

Soami Ji wrote:

Get busy with your own real work;
Do not get caught up in other people’s affairs.⁹

Sound advice as always! The question arises, what do we consider to be our real business? Is it to take on affairs of the world and become exhausted and frustrated? Or is it to bring relief to our embattled soul, the most intimate part of our being and do something for ourselves? Hazur has already explained that the urge to return home is already there. We will find our source by exploring the silence and solitude within ourselves where all answers lie.

This is the issue we need to resolve, so how do we go about it? Our present circumstances may help us out there – and turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

We have time on our hands, and many of us are cut off from normal activities. Why not use the time to our advantage? The world is quieter than usual – there are fewer callers and distractions and less travelling to do and more silence and solitude – which normally we don’t appreciate in full.

The 17th century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal wrote, “All of humanity's problems come from one thing, … not knowing how to sit quietly in a room alone.”¹⁰ In addition to solitude, we have a general fear of silence and regard it as something that has to be broken, something negative – an absence.

We should take full advantage of the precious gifts of solitude and silence for they are golden. Otherwise, how and when will we have a better opportunity to explore the hidden depths of our being, discover our real selves in that still point of the turning world, and reach the inner treasure promised by our compassionate Master?

The time is ripe. We should look after ourselves in a responsible manner – it’s all we have. What is our greatest need? It is to find ourselves and discover that we are indeed a spark of a far greater reality. To reach it we need to enter a self-imposed confinement – our own monastery.

Hazur answered a question about entering a monastery as follows:

Your body is a monastery in which you have to live. You cannot find a better temple, a better monastery than your own self, your own body…You are already living in a monastery where nobody can harm you, nobody can reach you, where you can save yourself from the senses and all the enemies of the world who are pulling you in different directions.¹¹

By entering there, may we find the permanence we have always been searching for!

“Snow”, Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, p. 23
Spiritual Gems, Letter 148, p. 253
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 15, Shabd 7, p. 139
The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, Shambhala Publications, 2012; p64
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 1, pp. 31, 349
Divine Light, letter 143, p. 230
Ibid, letter 166, p.245
Ibid, letter 185, p. 255
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 19, Shabd 18, p. 219
Blaise Pascal, Pensées 136, Penguin UK, 1966, 1995.
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 3, p. 170

Responding to Stress - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Responding to Stress

During this drama of life, we face stresses. There may be illness, unemployment or other kinds of losses. How we respond to these events is extremely important to our health and success, but, most of all, to our spiritual development.

A common reaction to misfortune is fear: will something terrible happen to me, my family, my community? We may say, “I have never felt such stress; I am totally stressed out.”. We may lose our usual confidence and even abandon meditation. Are you turning to overeating, binge-watching television, online gaming, social media entertainments, or numerous other distractions when faced with stressful situations? We try to avoid the stress.

However, as Hazur Maharaji counseled us, “Unhappy moments often prove to be a blessing in disguise.”¹ In another book, he wrote, “He is the One who’s doing all this drama from within. ... He is instigating us to come to the third eye.”² We see how positive he is.

Our attitude toward stress matters. When we practice meditation, with a devoted heart and our best intention, we come to view stress as a challenge, not a threat. We accept our situation and seek good solutions.

Prominent social scientists join the Masters in stating that a positive attitude toward stress brings better results. “Stress mindsets are powerful because they affect not just how you think but also how you act…. When you view stress as harmful, it is something to be avoided … instead of taking steps to address its source.”³

The latest scientific research “reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger and more successful. It helps you learn and grow. It can even inspire courage and compassion.”⁴ The Masters agree. As Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote, “Paradoxical as it may seem, even suffering can be a source of power, and it has a chastening and cleansing effect if gone through with understanding.”⁵

Regular meditation helps us keep our balance and not get too upset. We find if we can accept the reality of our situation, we can find a solution. “Welcome the moment of suffering, for it reminds you of the Lord. It comes through His grace, not otherwise. So, do not get perturbed in suffering.”⁶ In our own time, Babaji often expresses the thought that there is no stress too great for a satsangi to manage, and we observe how he keeps his balance during his own times of personal stress. As Hazur Maharaji wrote, “Meditation gives mental strength and spiritual bliss and enables us to face life with great hope and courage.”⁷

Through meditation, we learn to tolerate all kinds of mental states which arise. We sit and practice simran, no matter what dismal fantasies our mind projects. We are paying attention and focusing on simran. Research scientists affirm that such practice leads to a better attitude: “mindfulness and the ability to tolerate uncertainty seem to be associated with a more positive view of stress.”⁸

At initiation, we freely agree to a spiritual purpose in our life under the guidance of our living Master. Never does that change. “Once a Master has accepted a disciple, he never leaves him, but is ever ready to guide him on the path. He does much more for us than the human mind can comprehend.”⁹ Naturally, daily meditation keeps that sense of purpose alive.

Again, prominent scientific research supports the Masters’ promises: “Many people who have a sense of purpose live longer. For example, in a study that followed over 9,000 adults in the UK for ten years, those who reported highly meaningful lives had a 30 percent reduction in mortality… the ability to find meaning in our lives helps us stay motivated in the face of great difficulties.”¹⁰ Sant Mat gives our lives deep meaning.

Sometimes, we may be sheltering in place without work to do or people to care for. Other times, we may be facing numerous choices and we don’t know which one is best. Whatever is our stress, it is always best to keep Master in mind and to find the time for spiritual practice. Then we are accepting the guidance of the inner Master. We are trusting the Master when he says, “Turn to the Lord for help and you will receive it.”¹¹

Quest for Light (1977), Letter 103
Die To Live (1979), Letter 371
McGonigal, Kelly, The Upside of Stress, Penguin Random House, New York (2015), p. 17
McGonigal, Kelly, The Upside of Stress, p. xvii
Light On Sant Mat (1977), Letter 152
Baba Jaimal Singh Maharaj, Words Divine, p. 48; cf. Spiritual Letters, p. 205
Quest For Light 197, Letter 396
ibid., McGonigal, p. 17
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light On Sant Mat (1977), Letter 173
ibid., McGonigal, Kelly, pp. 66–67
Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, Quest For Light (1977), Letter 38

My Satguru - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

My Satguru

In The Book of Mirdad, the principal character, Mirdad, says to his disciples:

Man is a god in swaddling-bands. Time is a swaddling-band. Space is a swaddling-band. Flesh is a swaddling-band, and likewise all the senses and the things perceivable therewith. The mother knows too well that the swaddling-bands are not the babe. The babe, however, knows it not.¹

Throughout the ages mystics and saints have tried to explain to us that we are not this body. Neither are we that personality with a certain character, a part of the mind with which we identify ourselves so strongly. If we are not this body and not this mind, what are we then? They tell us that we are soul. But what is soul?

Both body and mind are bound by time and space, and because of that, they are temporary, perishable, changeable and fickle – as fleeting as a dream. Whereas soul is eternal, immortal, true. As Master Charan Singh Ji explains in Spiritual Perspectives:

Soul is immortal. Soul neither dies, nor can it be killed. It just changes shape – from one flesh to another flesh, from one body to another body, from one form to another form. So soul is immortal.²

If we envision God as an ocean, then the soul is a drop of that ocean. If we compare the Almighty to the sun, then the soul is a ray of that sun. Soul is our true self, according to saints and mystics. Mind and body are just coverings, swaddles that envelop our true self. These are garments we received and had to put on the moment we were born into this creation so that we could operate in the physical realm. During our long stay here, over lifetimes, these garments of mind and body have become dirty, and veils of illusion have accrued, due to our actions. They are stained with all kinds of colours due to impressions we have absorbed from our past experiences. Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, explains:

If a lantern were wrapped in a thin muslin cloth, its light would be dimmed. If there is another envelope of thick, coarse cloth over the muslin, the light will be cut off entirely and the lantern will cease to serve the purpose of a lantern. Man is much like a covered lantern. There is light in him. There is the spark of pure Existence, Knowledge and Bliss in him; but the envelopes of mind and matter dim his light, and he gropes in darkness.

Real existence has degenerated and appears in him as reason, intellect and instinct. Bliss has degenerated into fleeting experiences of pleasure and pain. Clothed in our dark coverings, we are incapable of understanding our Source. And the extent to which we succeed in removing our coverings marks the degree of our capacity to understand our Source.³

The mystics tell us that our true self is soul, pure light, pure being. But we have become unconscious of its existence and of our divine source, identifying ourselves instead with the soul’s coverings. As a consequence, we focus our mind only on the physical world that surrounds us – on what is visible and tangible – and experience our life as a chain of ostensibly unrelated, fleeting experiences. Identifying ourselves with the soul’s coverings, our consciousness is ever in flux, our understanding is foggy, and our life is out of balance.

The Lord and his realized souls know very well that we are not these coverings of mind and body. But most of us, God’s children, do not know this until we meet a saint, a true Master, who can make us understand. In addition to their intellectual arguments, saints’ living example – as human beings whose coverings of mind and body are so pure that the divine light of their true being shines through – shows us the reality.

A true Master bears witness with his whole being that the Divine really exists. When the time comes, the brilliance of that light that emanates from him attracts us in such a way that within our heart a longing arises to search for that divinity; to search for that divine power that can be found within this body. He shows us the way to true happiness, radiant peace, and serene stillness. His radiance helps us to realize our true self and, finally, our oneness with our source – with God.

The soul is drawn to that divinity and we all are searching for it. In this quest, the guidance of a true living Master is essential. Why? Because in his physical form, he explains the teachings of the mystics to us, again and again, and emphasizes the importance of daily meditation. With his guidance and grace, he makes it possible for us to withdraw our attention from the world and focus it within on the divine power of the Shabd, and thus to see his true form. The practice of meditation and simran during the day enables us to remember God at every moment. Our devotion to these practices and to him allows us to develop love for the Divine.

As a human being, the Master is an example for us. He shows us how to deal with daily responsibilities and circumstances and gives us advice if necessary. And in his true form, as Shabd, he removes the stained veils that cut off our sight, and he purifies our garments – the coverings of body and mind. Through this process, the darkness within us and in our lives diminishes, and we gradually begin to perceive the divine light of our true self.

The guidance of the living Master is essential because this removal of our veils doesn’t happen without a struggle, without resistance. It can even cause pain. When a bandage has covered a wound for too long, so that it has become attached to it, it is painful when it is removed, even if it is done with utmost care to prevent damaging the underlying tissue. Likewise, removing the veils of misguided concepts and opinions can be painful for us. The process may also confuse us, even if it is done with utmost care. We have identified ourselves with our body and our mind for so long. They give us a feeling of certainty, security, and of being in control, which of course is an illusion.

The guidance of the living Master is absolutely necessary during the sometimes difficult purification of all that covers the soul. The Master explains to us that there is no easier way. As gold has to be held in fire to be purified, and dirty clothes have to be washed with strong detergents or even bleach to get them clean again, so the garments of body and mind must be purified by means of certain experiences. We have to go through these experiences, these karmas, to attain our goal: realization of our true self and our oneness with God.

How are we to endure this cleansing and turning away, step by step, from the world that once fascinated us so much? What can allow us to let go of our illusory ideas and convictions, which we have clung to for so long? The answer is love – divine love. The Master immerses us in divine love. And whether we are conscious of it or not, this immersion generates such sweetness within us that a longing arises to let go of everything that stands between us and the Divine. Being in the safety and warmth of Master’s love enables us to let go and sacrifice our wealth, body and mind. It enables us to surrender our very life. It is divine love that purifies and transforms us.

There is a story based on a legend in the Puranas, a group of ancient Hindu scriptures, that describes the cleansing transformation of the garments of body and mind by the Shabd, personified by the Master. In this story a man called Pundalik, traveling with his wife and parents, joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Varanasi.

One night the pilgrims stopped at the hermitage of a great sage. Tired from the day’s long walk, all fell asleep except Pundalik. As he lay awake, he saw a group of beautiful women clad in soiled clothes enter the hermitage. They swept the floor, fetched water and washed the sage’s clothes. Then they had darshan of the sage, and when they came out, their clothes were spotless, pure white. Astonished at this sight Pundalik asked them who they were. They replied that they were the river goddesses in whose waters thousands of people bathed. Their clothes became soiled because of the pilgrim’s sins, but when they purified themselves by serving the sage, their garments became snow-white again.⁴

Baba Ji asks us, like other mystics and saints, to pay attention to the symbolism of such stories rather than taking them literally. The aim of this legend is to show us the exalted value of serving the Master. It highlights that our garments of mind and body, like those of the river goddesses, will be cleansed and purified when we serve him. And serving him implies serving others unconditionally, since he is in everyone. When our garments are clean, they can absorb the deep “red hue” of the master’s love, as Kabir describes in the following poem. That love will allow us to realize that we are neither body nor mind, but soul, pure light, which is of the same essence as God. Then, as the poem describes, we will become absorbed in bliss.

My Satguru, the adept dyer,
has dyed the fabric of my soul....

Removing the dark stains,
he gave it a deeper red hue;
repeated washings cannot discolour it,
and with each passing day
it acquires a brighter glow….

In the pool of affection
brimming with the water of devotion,
he immersed it and dyed it
in the hue of his love.
Intensified with a longing so profound,
the colour became fast and vibrant….

My Satguru … has dyed the fabric of my soul;
he is the wise and adept dyer.
I sacrifice everything unto him –
my body, mind, wealth and my very life….

Says Kabir, my Guru, the adept dyer,
has showered his grace upon me.
Wearing this garment of serenity,
I have become absorbed in bliss.

My Satguru, the adept dyer,
has dyed the fabric of my soul.⁵

The Master dyes the garments of our soul in the hue of his love. The only thing we can do is take care that the colour of his love adheres, that the cloth of the garments covering our true self can absorb the deep red colour of love. In other words, all we can do is be receptive to his love, to the grace that he ceaselessly showers upon us.

Receptivity comes when we listen intently to the Master’s teachings, when we practise his instructions faithfully, and when we remember him constantly with devotion during meditation and during our simran throughout the day. We are receptive when we remain in complete obedience to him and when we render him service with utmost dedication in thought, word, and deed. Then we will be able to absorb the dye of his love, and that love will help us to let go of all that stands between us and the Divine.

In his atmosphere of mystic love and bliss, let’s make best use of the time we have been given by being receptive, so that we can have this experience of truth and reality:

The flood of mystic love washes away all our dirt and filth; the storm of mystic bliss drives away all our doubt and suspicion; the sun of mystic knowledge dissipates all our delusion and darkness; nothing is left but the naked truth beaming in its own radiance, the absolute reality glowing in its own refulgence.⁶

Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.43
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, p.168
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 157,
Judith Sankaranarayan, Many Voices, One Song, p.73–74
Kabir Sahib Ki Shabdavali, Vol. 2, p. 63; in RSSB Video, Enigma of Love at approx. 33 minutes. Will appear in forthcoming book, Santon ki Bani
L. R. Puri, Mysticism, the Spiritual Path, 2nd ed., 2009, p.73

Love Reigns Supreme - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Love Reigns Supreme

Daily broadcasts continue to report numbers soaring in the millions of infected people around the world by the coronavirus pandemic. Every number represents a brother or sister in our global family. For many of us, our initial shock and disbelief have now been transformed into a silent grief.

We should accept that grieving is natural, a consequential response to the suffering or loss of someone we love. By delving deep into our faith and our human spirit, we may be able to identify the nature of our love and the ensuing grief. Reaching beyond love of self and grieving out of love and compassion for ‘the other’ defines us as spiritual beings. It has within it the seed that propels our heart to love of all humanity, which is at the core of universal and divine love. Compassion for others makes us human. It’s who we are.

And yet a wise man said:
You mourn because the world is fading; be wakeful
And lament not, for God never fails.
With Him is all that is worthy of love,
And that returns in new radiance –
Yes, all beauty’s deepest melody.
And know: all good that passes away
Is so made that it rises again.”¹

Viewing all human experiences through the lens of a ‘spiritual traveler’ brings to light that grief and suffering – like joy and happiness – are part of the soul’s temporary journey and experience as a human being in this physical creation. During challenging times, we can revert to our faith for hope and answers when we lose our focus, by remembering the beloved satguru Baba Ji’s words that “love is the core. We can find comfort and solace in his timeless message which is shared by all true mystics: that all of creation, and all beings in it, are expressions of God’s love. This truth can be directly perceived once we experience the Shabd, the voice of God, the divine presence found within our innermost core. Thus, we are reminded that, as spiritual beings, we are all intrinsically linked to one another by the same bond of love that unites all of us to our master and the Lord.

From a spiritual perspective, this life is a stopover on our long journey to our true Home ‘where love reigns supreme.’ Our journey leads us through physical, mental and spiritual stages, each with their valleys and peaks, of trials and tribulations, as we ascend on the way, experiencing ever increasing indescribable joy. While all human experiences in this creation will come to an end one day, the bond of love we nurture for the living master and the Lord, will never end, nor can it be lost or broken. The master reveals the method whereby all human emotions are sublimated in the experience of inner prayer or meditation on God’s love within. Through our meditation we align our soul in loving devotion with the inner master, the Shabd, the divine melody emanating from the Supreme Being, the ocean of all love, compassion and bliss.

In recent weeks, we witnessed once again Baba Ji’s boundless love-in-action and never-ending compassion, while directing and inspiring thousands of volunteers / sevadars to provide shelter, food, medical assistance, and comfort to so many of our vulnerable brothers and sisters in India. By showing us the example set by these wonderful sevadars, he is reaching out and inspiring us to rise above our personal grief and discomfort during these times and lend a hand to help others in our own communities and reach out to those we know are vulnerable. In so doing, he encourages us to rediscover our own inner strength, love and compassion, and humanity.

We cannot choose the tragedies and challenges that come our way but we can choose how we react to them. Soon, within a relatively short time, we will look back at these recent experiences with a different perspective. And if through it all, we were able to lend a hand, extend a kindness to someone in need, while staying focused on our ‘real work’, we would have pleased our master very, very much. If we face the future with hope and with faith in his love for us, we can “bring ourselves to that level where we can always be with our master.”²

The master is holding our hand. His love will carry us through this. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

The more the mind is one-pointed at the eye centre, the happier we are. The more it is scattered outside, the more unhappy we are. So we have to see that our mind doesn’t scatter out into the world. The more it is concentrated at the eye centre, the more happiness and bliss you will feel. No matter what situation you are going through, you will feel that bliss and happiness within yourself.³

Frithjof Schuon, Songs for a Spiritual Traveler (Selected Poems) p. 143
Spiritual Perspectives Vol. III, # 547
Spiritual Perspectives Vol. III, # 545

Self-Reflection in Times of Disruption - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Self-Reflection in Times of Disruption

The Corona crisis has turned our world completely upside down. For some of us this change has been very stressful, and perhaps it still is. For others, things may only have changed in a milder way. Still, we all experience the impact of this unprecedented situation, in which nothing is as it was before. We are even locked out of our satsang centers, our ‘safe havens’ until just a few months ago.

Naturally, we have all felt disrupted by the drastic changes around us. At the same time, many of us have been able to gradually find a new balance in working (mostly) at home and family life, and created acceptable alternatives for social and other leisure activities.

Meanwhile, we might have asked ourselves in which way this global crisis directly affects our responsibilities. What does ‘being a good citizen’ mean in times like these? And what does it mean to be a good satsangi? Should we find any alternative for seva, now we are not allowed to do seva in our centers anymore? Should we try to spend more time on our daily meditation?

We have to reflect on this. We have heard Baba Ji say this so many times in satsang. And these are not mere words; it is actually a call to action. But we also know this is one of the hardest things to do: to really get through to what is being said in satsang, or to what we read in the books. Fortunately, we have more than words at our disposal to reflect on. After all, the path we are trying to follow is a very practical one. In Essential Sant Mat we read:

The path of Sant Mat is in essence a commitment to regular meditation of at least two and a half hours each day under the guidance of a true teacher. This commitment is built on a way of life which combines all normal social, occupational, and family responsibilities with that period of regular, private, daily meditation.¹

It is exactly the above-mentioned combination that prompts us to the same question over and over again: how can I be a good satsangi, given the circumstances I’ve found myself in? Actually, grappling with this question on a daily basis is an important practical basis of the path of Sant Mat, even in our regular lives, when there is no worldwide crisis going on.

Our personal situation is constantly changing, so adapting our daily routine of meditation to changing circumstances in work, family life or social obligations has become an integral part of our life as satsangis. Molding our lives along the way is not so much a by-product of walking this path, but rather something that defines us as satsangis.

Looking at it from this perspective, we could understand this worldwide crisis as another situation in our lives to reflect on – provided of course we are not completely preoccupied with our current health or financial concerns. After all, this major change of routine provides an excellent opportunity for reflection. Instead of going through our days almost thoughtlessly, we are now constantly adjusting and learning what works best for us. Reflecting means deliberately pausing and considering what all this means for us. In an explorative approach we might ask ourselves questions like: What is the actual impact of this crisis on my life? What do all the drastic measures really mean to me? What do I experience as most disrupting?

Self-reflection can be defined as a process of serious thoughts about one’s character and actions or a means to observe and analyze oneself in order to grow as a person. The more we make self-reflection a strictly personal process, the more we may indeed learn from it and grow as a person – presumably an important aim to most of us.

So how can we do this? How can we put this process of self-reflection at the service of our desire to become a better person?

Firstly, we could try not to approach that self-reflection too philosophically or intellectually. Instead we could choose a more practical approach, focused for instance on the above-mentioned combination of the worldly aspects of our lives and the formal meditation time that we somehow need to fit in our daily routines.

Secondly, we should look out for an all-too moralistic approach. Starting from preconceived notions of what we think a good life should look like might not necessarily help us grow as a person. If it were that simple, we would probably all be much better persons by now. In this respect, our feeling of belonging to the global satsangi community, however comfortable that may be right now, could even be a pitfall when it comes to reflecting. Naturally, we may now, more than ever, feel connected with our fellow satsangis around the world, who are also shut off from their centers and looking for meaningful alternatives to shape their lives. Perhaps we even feel inspired by specific ways they are coping with this. At the same time, we are still all individuals. We live our own lives, with our own individual responsibilities, in our own respective countries. The fact that everyone is currently experiencing the same worldwide disruption does not change that. So, to make our reflection process more worthwhile, we might like to remind ourselves that the process of self-reflection is still, as any aspect of the Sant Mat path, a very personal matter indeed.

Bearing the two above-mentioned directives in mind, reflecting on the disruptive situation we are currently in might lead to an interesting and engaging endeavor. Not in the least because the Sant Mat framework for that reflection process, as well known as it may be to us, is at the same time very open-ended:

So long as these four principles – the vegetarian diet, avoiding alcohol and drugs, living a clean moral life and practicing daily meditation – are adhered to, disciples around the world live, dress and do as they wish. The master has nothing against singing, dancing, family life, fashion, sports, work and business, charity, holidays, rock music, study and research, going to the movies or belonging to a religion. He only asks that we bear in mind the primary goal of human life so that we never compromise our principles and never neglect our daily meditation.²

So, as long as we keep an open mind and do not restrict ourselves in advance, there is so much that we can learn about ourselves by closely evaluating how we are doing in this extraordinary situation.

The key is to keep asking questions to ourselves, and not being content with our own answers too soon. Questions like: ‘Ok, I miss some of my activities, but what is it that I really miss? And how does the alternative meet that need?’ Or: ‘What is the best way for me to fill the extra time now that I can’t travel? What inspires me? What seems to be more of a distraction?’ And: ‘Which are aspects of my new routine that I would like to continue when things go back to (the new) normal?’

The variety of questions we can ask ourselves is almost endless. And the more open-ended our approach in self-reflection, the more we will be able to actually learn from it.

A helpful criterion might be whether what we are doing brings us closer to or further from our meditation. As satsangis we are always searching for balance in terms of combining our worldly and spiritual duties.

Balance means recognizing, out of our many interests, what our real needs are, and then rearranging our priorities to reflect those needs.³

In this Corona crisis many of our choices that have led to our – perhaps laboriously obtained – balance need to be re-evaluated. It is like a major reset for all of us. Naturally, we all long to return back to normal – or the new normal at least. Meanwhile, we could also realize that this unique time will – hopefully – never return. So we might want to make use of this once in a lifetime opportunity. Which also includes: simply reflect on it to find out what this really means for us as a satsangi.

Essential Sant Mat, p. 13
Essential Sant Mat, p. 16
Spiritual Primer, p. 5

“What, me worry?” - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

“What, me worry?”¹

Mark Twain, the American writer and humourist, once said: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Isn’t this the truth? That we worry about things all the time which never happen? There are people who worry if they find that they have nothing to worry about. Surely they must have overlooked something! If we are honest with ourselves, we all have to admit that we worry. This current global situation has given us plenty of extra things to worry about. It is human nature to worry, but we should understand that worry reveals a certain lack of faith. Maharaj Charan Singh described our tendency to worry this way:

If one is a satsangi, then there’s nothing to worry about. You see, we worry about things which we don’t expect to happen but which we think will happen. But when we say our destiny is set, the events of life are already chalked out and we just have to go through that, good or bad, then what is there to worry about? It’s not going to change the events of life. If we have that attitude, then why worry?²

We worry because we want certain things to happen in the way we want them to. We have certain desires, certain wishes to fulfil, certain ambitions to fulfil. And we are always worried about whether we’ll be able to achieve them or not, whether we’ll be able to satisfy those desires or not. That keeps us worrying. If we leave it to the Father, if we live in his will, he knows best what to give us. We just prepare ourselves to accept what he gives. Then what is there to worry about?

The purpose of meditation is just for that. The purpose of meditation is to train ourselves to adopt that attitude. It’s not easy; it’s a lifelong struggle, no doubt. But that is the purpose of meditation – to develop that attitude of accepting things as they come.³

What about surrender? The master has said that the most direct path of living in the Lord’s will is through surrender, but it is also the hardest path. Apparently meditation is the easier path. Surrender, like humility, is not an attribute that one day we can decide to have. “Today I have given up my ego and have become truly humble!” “Starting today I have submitted to the will of the Lord!” It just so happened that today’s Quote of the Day on the RSSB website was: “Well done is better than well said.” We simply cannot talk our way into becoming humble or surrendering to the Lord’s will. Maharaj Sawan Singh said:

Although hard to practise, sharan or complete surrender to the will of the Master has a very important place in Sant Mat…. When the mind has completely surrendered, its interference ceases. As long as the mind is active, we cannot claim to have completely surrendered. This is why saints say it is easier to meditate than to surrender.⁴

I will end with another applicable quote on worry from Mark Twain: “Worrying is like paying interest on a debt that you don’t even owe.” For us, the payment of “interest” is our attention, our focus, our trust in the Lord and the Master. Let’s not squander our spiritual wealth through unnecessary worry about imaginary boogie-men that never materialize. If we have not reached the stage of surrender, at least we have it in our power to reduce our tendency to worry with the understanding that the Master and the Lord are managing our affairs with our best interests in mind. We simply need to do our best and “leave the rest” to the higher power that is managing everything.

Alfred E. Neuman, in Mad Magazine
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, 165
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, 165
With the Three Masters, Vol. 1, p.104

Wake Up - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Wake Up

The one sure thing about life when we are born: we will die one day.
With this present pandemic crisis, death in the news is a daily harrowing occurrence unlike any other time that we have lived through. We might tune in every day to see the toll it’s taken, or to hear the predictions about how much longer this disruption in our lives will last. It’s become a blight of soundbites, charts, and scrolling updates that leave us confused, overwhelmed and unsettled. We wonder if it will go back to the way things were, or worry if it doesn’t, what the new world will be like. It’s an urgent wake up call for us to be in touch with our own mortality, no matter our age or health.

Wake up, O man,
Shake off your slumber;
Be alert within, obtain chintamani
The rare wish-fulfilling jewel.¹

With so many of us in government-sanctioned isolation, what a gem of an opportunity to reflect upon things we rushed past daily and pushed aside in our “normal” lives. We can examine what our priorities are in life versus what our priorities should be. Do they match up? How can we rearrange our lives to be in line with what we want? Do we have the courage to make changes, to press that reset button? Why not make this into a fortuitous time while we are trapped inside the sanctuary of our homes! We’ve been primed by our Masters and the teachings for this. Don’t we wish for more hours in the day – well, it’s like we are now granted this gift of time to do extra meditation and stepped up simran. Let’s wisely use these thoughts of mortality as positive motivation, a clarion call for action.

Life is so uncertain, brother,
And I still haven’t unraveled its secrets.
What am I to do? No formula has worked for me,
I have now decided to seek refuge in the Master.²

As followers on this Path of Love, in times of trouble (as well as times of happiness) we know what to do. We have the cure, the panacea to all ailments: our meditation. Waking up for us means waking our spiritual selves that have been dormant for lifetimes. It means shaking up our routines to make meditation our number one priority. It’s essential that during this time of so much uncertainty, that doing our spiritual work regularly will provide the calmness and balance needed to get through all the challenges we could be faced with, not just during this present health crisis, but throughout life in general.

As Baba Ji often proclaims, “Just do it!” Sit down and do your meditation. Do it with grace, sincerity, and ease. Close your eyes. Navigate the inner darkness with a steady stream of the five holy names. Hear the sacred sound and grab on for dear life, because the Shabd is the eternal spring of spiritual awakening, the precious jewel within.

Death will come one day for sure. Let’s be prepared.

Kabir Sahib, The Weaver of God’s Name, p.379
Sar Bachan Poetry (selections), p.313

Death - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Death

In that marvelous Indian epic poem, the Mahabharata, the sage Yudhisthira is asked: “Of all things in life, what is the most amazing?”

Think for a moment for yourself: “Of all things in life, what is the most amazing?”

Yudhisthira answers: “That a man, seeing others die all around him, never thinks that he will die.”¹

The way we think about our own physical death determines in a fundamental way our perception of life and therefore how we live, what decisions we make and don’t make, and probably most important of all, our attitude towards our meditation practice. So, what is our relationship to death, our own physical death? Before we read the Master’s wise words, let’s make an experiment by reflecting for a moment on two different situations.

Consider the first situation: what are the implications if you knew without a shadow of a doubt that you would die one month from now? Just think for a moment and imagine for yourself. How would you think, feel, and act right now if you knew for sure, that in one month, your timespan on earth would expire and you would die a natural, peaceful but sudden death? If that was the case, how would you spend your last days? In other words, if we adopt the belief that very soon, no matter what, we will die, then how does it change our perspective on this amazing life that we are living right now? How does it change our appreciation of the valuable opportunities we have right now with our living Satguru who is eagerly supporting us and instructing us how to live beyond our physical death?

Our teacher’s challenge is that we are very difficult to teach and instruct because we somehow don’t believe that we need his instructions right now, because we’re not planning to die right now! If we really were seriously preparing to die soon, our motivation for dying daily in our meditation would be just a little bit more intense than it is now.

If we knew that our time was up for sure – in one month, in exactly 720 hours – we would perceive every second of our precious life with much higher value, and our priorities would be much more laser sharp than they are now. We would focus so intensely on holding our Guru’s hand so tightly that we couldn’t imagine one moment where we were not connected to our sweet teacher.

Would we worry about money issues, property issues, relationship issues, worldly disaster issues, family issues, and so forth? Not really. We would worry about and focus on letting go of all issues with the world, so we could focus on and be one with the spirit, the Shabd, the life-giving soul force of our universe. This is the life force that doesn’t die, but that leaves the body when we die, and to which that our Master is truly identified. He teaches us every day how to connect with that life force.

Did this thought experiment do anything? Did it influence you at all? Did you get a sense of how your time now could be fine-tuned, if you changed your perception about the timing of your death? It was just an experiment, but now let’s go to the second part.

Now let’s imagine you’ve received a guarantee that you’ll not leave this creation for at least 20 more years, when your time allotment in this world will expire. In comparison to the first experiment, will this imaginary promise of 20 years, or 172,800 hours more life in the physical form, change anything in your way of being now? Probably not!

The point is that when we bring our own physical death close to us, it makes us very sharp, very vulnerable, very small, very insignificant, and much more focused on what is alive, important, and relevant to us the short time we have our body in this creation. We also become aware that when we postpone our death, or maybe even “cancel” it, our involvement and attachment to the world increases to a degree where it may be at the expense of our focus on and engagement in our relationship with our teacher. Our meditation practice may lose its urgency, because we live in the illusion that we have endless time.

Our challenge is that we don’t know when our time will end and death will strike. It could be this week, this month, 20 years, 40 years or more – only God knows. In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Maharaj Ji states it as clearly as it can be said: “When the soul leaves the body -- that is the physical death.”²

A friend recently told me a story about death that arrived suddenly. A young man lost his two best friends very early in life. A couple, both 21 years old, were instantly killed in a car accident caused by a drunken driver. He cried and mourned for days. Besides the sadness of his loss of two great friends, for the first time in his life he realized his own mortality in a very real way. When he saw this young beautiful couple lie in each of their own coffins next to each other before they were to be cremated, he clearly began to get an understanding of the difference between the physical body and the soul. As their bodies were lying there in their coffins beautiful and young, he knew that the spirit he had known in both these people was totally gone. He experienced that the real life or soul current of his friends had left, leaving behind lifeless, cold bodies. His friends were gone even though their bodies were right in front of him. Paramahansa Yogananda said the following at his death bed:

Death is only an experiment through which you are meant to learn a great lesson; you cannot die.³

What wisdom do spiritual teachers have to share with us about death and what cannot die? Tukaram says:

I am surprised at the people of this world!
How is it that they never think
of their own welfare?
They seem so sure of themselves,
But who will help them on their last day?
Why are they so carefree?
What answer will they give
to the messenger of death?
Have they forgotten that they will die?
What are they so pleased about?
What is wrong with them?
Is there anything they cannot do?
Why don’t they remember the Lord
And be free from bondage?
It will cost them nothing!⁴

This is an amazing poem filled with provocation, desperation, wonder, and the call of urgency. It’s a poem that calls us to see clearly that we must be humble towards our death. Our death will come much sooner than we can imagine, and we must begin to prepare for our last day – right now. Guru Nanak says:

Death is nothing but a gateway to birth.
Nothing that lives ever dies, it only changes form.
When a man’s body is weary,
the soul leaves the body
to receive newer and fresher garments.
And so, on goes the great play of God –
from eternity to eternity.⁵

In the foreword to the book Die to Live it states:

“Die to live and live forever,” we are told by our Master. Satsangis, his initiates, daily die to this world in their meditation. Daily they rehearse for that inevitable final departure. But now, with their Master always with them, they travel those regions of Light and Sound through the celestial spheres of the creation within, back to the level of the Father, back to their divine source.⁶

The explanation in Sant Mat is that you die to the world in order to be liberated and live forever and merge with our divine father. Let’s therefore get focused and ready to die to the insignificant and counterproductive aspects of our life. We need to kill the distractions. We need to eradicate our false perception of the things to which we lend our attention. We need to strangle our shortsighted awareness that makes us lose perspective of where the focus should be in life. We need to master our attention when we sit in deep and concentrated meditation, and thereby be able to fully and completely die to the world. Otherwise, we will never succeed in the promise we have made to our Master.

In Maharaj Ji’s answers to questions in Spiritual Perspectives regarding death, he keeps repeating that letting go of our attachments is one of the most difficult aspects of the process of dying. When we die, our ability to detach is ultimately tested. It’s a test in which our true priorities will be revealed. Are we able to let go of our attachments in this world, to which we have become a part, or are we so attached that we need to come back and be reborn?

As we are told, meditation is the tool, the answer, the practice that will enable us to learn to die a little bit each day. Meditation is nothing but a never-ending repetition of letting go of the world and focusing on the soul and the Shabd inside. As our Master keeps reminding us, the soul is inside and the Master is there inside, waiting for us. We “just” need to die to the world and its distractions so we can merge in peace and harmony and be one with the Shabd. Meditation is nothing but a daily preparation for death.

In a question about death, Maharaj Ji is asked:

As a result of meditation, does our soul detach itself at the time of death?

He answers:

Sister, that is why we are told that slowly, gradually, we have to withdraw to the eye centre. If you put a fine cloth on a thorny bush, and you pull it all at once, you will tear the cloth. Similarly, if suddenly you withdraw to the eye centre, it becomes very painful. For this reason saints always advise us: Slowly, slowly try to withdraw. Pick the cloth off one thorn at a time and you will be able to save the whole cloth. So this process is very slow. Then it’s not painful at all. But if suddenly you have to withdraw, naturally it is painful. Therefore, we are always advised to try to withdraw slowly.⁷

To underline the seriousness of the challenge of letting go of our attachments to the world, Maharaj Ji further explains how even focused meditation training – taking one thorn at a time – is not always enough to cut our relation to the creation. He says in response to another question:

If we are not attached to anything in this world, nothing can bring us back, even if our meditation is insignificant. If, on the other hand, we are attached to this creation – its objects and faces – even if we have lot of meditation to our credit, we will come back.⁸

Isn’t the message here that it’s really difficult to let go of the world? But don’t we already know that? We should get on with it and use our time wisely while we’re alive, so at least we’ve done what is in our power and haven’t wasted our time in worldly distractions. Otherwise, we may live in the lie that death is not going to happen to us anytime soon. Not thinking seriously about or preparing for our own death may be what Tukaram is referring to when he exclaims: “What is wrong with them?”

Here is the advice from two meditators about why we need to confront our own death and prepare wisely. Swami Muktananda says:

If one wants to die peacefully,
One must begin helping oneself
Long before one’s time to die has come.⁹

Finally, Milarepa, a great Tibetan saint says:

You should strive for a readiness to die!
Be certain and ready; when the time comes,
You will have no fear and no regret.¹⁰

So, let’s all prepare ourselves for death by doing our meditation and tuning into the Shabd now!

Sushila Blackman, Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, Colorado: Shambhala Publications, 2005, p. 7
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Beas: RSSB, 2010, #468
Graceful Exits, p. 92
Chandravati Rajwade, Tukaram: The Creaseless Song of Devotion, Beas: RSSB, 4th ed., 2010, p. 97
Graceful Exits, p. 97
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Beas: RSSB, 1999, p. ix
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #456
Ibid, #459
Graceful Exits, p. 106
Ibid, p. 123

Love is a Verb - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Love is a Verb

Reflections from Dera Beas in the times of Covid-19

This is a story of love, a story told to celebrate how the conscious practice of love can lead to a deeper experience of life and a kinder world with less suffering.

On Sunday, March 22, 2020 in the context of the worldwide spread of Covid-19, India imposed a nationwide lockdown in order to contain the pandemic. Within days, a tsunami of hardship and suffering spread out across the country as hundreds of thousands of people left the cities and their places of daily work to reach their homes. With the possibility of daily wages gone and the specter of a new killer disease, people set out on journeys of sometimes hundreds of miles, on foot, with no back-up funds or food. Where else but at home could they survive?

From RSSB at Dera Beas in Punjab, the response to the crisis was immediate. Under the Master’s instructions, Dera volunteers swung instantly into action. Do you want to be part of a problem or part of a solution, is a question often asked by the present Master at Beas. If your choice is to be part of the solution, then appropriate action is required. At the very least, we can provide food, was the Master’s response.

Work started immediately. Food was to be prepared for anyone hungry and needy, of any community, of any background, wherever they could be reached. RSSB would provide the ingredients. RSSB would prepare the food – rice pilau and a meal of enriched flatbread puris, in ample quantity. Distribution across towns and countryside would be enabled. Shelter would be made available using the RSSB Centres’ large sheds, located mostly near main roads all over the country. Comfort and relief were to be offered in any way the local Centres could provide, and to all, without concern for class, caste, or creed. RSSB got to work. A public commitment was made to the Prime Minister of India, who had called on the nation to help. Apart from this simple commitment, there was no fanfare. That later on, that these relief works were widely broadcast through TV channels and newspapers was a reflection on their impact.

“All hands on deck” is the order of the captain when a ship is in peril. The sailors immediately obey their commander. So here and now the ship of humanity was in peril – our brothers and sisters and children, linked to us in our shared humanity, were suffering on an unbelievable scale. Within three days of the lockdown announcement, meals were on their way to the hungry. Love in action – delicious food, nourishing food, fresh food, cooked daily with loving care and a generous spirit. Such is a doing of love.

For those with hearts to hear, the thought ‘someone has noticed me, someone cares’ enlivens sinking hearts. When you are that down and out, such practical kindness reaches deep. ‘Thank God for these good people’, says the displaced person. ‘I thought I might die.’ And some, indeed, did die as they travelled the long journey home. Thank God for unqualified compassion and a practical heart of pure love. Thank God for clear thinking. Thank God for the leadership of spirit. Within days RSSB Centres in many parts of India engaged with relief work in the same spirit of service.

For an idea of the scale of operations that ensued, both in Dera Beas and RSSB Centres elsewhere, some statistics are shown below. The relief provided was recorded from March 26 over a span of some 57 days and notes several categories of relief: packed free meals; shelter; and arrangements for isolation camps using RSSB facilities. The data is mind-boggling.

Number of RSSB Centres engaged in the relief work: 372
Total meals delivered in this period across 18 states and union territories of India: 52,723,226 (5 crore, 27 lakhs, 23 thousand, 2 hundred and 26 meals)
Shelter provided to migrants during the same period, with overnight stay, bath, and food in eleven states of India: Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Rajasthan, Chattisgargh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and Jammu & Kashmir
Isolation Camp arrangements at existing RSSB facilities, which were managed by government agencies, provided to the government in seven states: Haryana, Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. This includes sanitary toilet and bathroom facilities for men and women.¹
Scale of largest Covid-19 Isolation Camp arranged: a 4,000-bed facility in Nagpur

What is it, people ask, that enables RSSB to deliver support in such volume and quality, with such timeliness and efficiency? First and foremost, it is love for the power that gives life to all and for the creation born of that one power – love for the Supreme. This is the primary force behind the figures, simple and unadorned. Love for the power of goodness – call it by whatever name you want – is then made fruitful by thousands of hearts and hands. The fact is that the recipients are human beings. It makes no difference whether they are of a particular religion or not of any religion. Each is an individual person, born into the one human family.

Additionally, the culture of Punjab, from where the RSSB Society had its beginnings, may be seen as having three great strengths as a legacy from the 15th-century mystic, Guru Nanak. First is the leadership of the Master, from whom the meaning of mercy and truth is learned. Second is the tradition of langar, the Master’s kitchen and a place of unbounded generosity and solidarity that feeds all who come together to hear the teacher’s message of truth. Third is an embedded tradition of seva of the Master, or selfless service, through which a seeker of truth is privileged to serve his or her fellow human beings.

Time too has played its part. Over the last century the crowds who visit the RSSB Centres have grown steadily, and as a result, the organization has been continuously expanding its capacity to serve visitors with dignity and adequacy. To match the ever-growing numbers, the Society has developed more and more RSSB Centres so that people can come together to learn and to serve.

And lastly, and maybe most important to the context, RSSB can respond to crises with extraordinary results because of the spiritual priorities that inform all the functions of the organization, and its exceptional quality of leadership.

Look around you at Dera Beas and note the diversity of people working together in the relief service. Among the volunteers now in the time of lockdown, while routine activities have been suspended, you find cooks, housewives and mechanics; professors, secretaries and civil servants. Writers, teachers, accountants, retired security guards, business whizzes, and retired management professionals; elderly and young; the wealthy, middle class and poor; and because schools are all closed – from the school located within the township – the school principal, staff, and many students also enrolled. Designated to serve as the packing team for one of the two meals being prepared, some 200 students of all ages signed up to participate. All are volunteers. All see themselves as sevadars, as people serving the Master and the institution. People love to be able to do such service. Some arrive for seva even one or two hours before work starts in the early hours before daybreak to ensure they secure the opportunity. And the hope of all is to secure a place where they will surely see the Master, in case he should come on a tour of the activity.

The way of spirit welcomes all. There is special provision for volunteers who cannot stand for long and cannot work at the customary low-table height of many domestic activities in India. A large section of regular-height tables and chairs provides places and tasks for the elderly and less-mobile to participate. Away from any hustle and bustle, they separate, open, and fold back the small plastic pouches to make them ready for others to fill and pack.

With the spiritual guide as the behind-the-scenes conductor, love in action creates a symphony with its own uplifting tune. Everyone has a part to play and their place in the orchestra. All contribute to the whole. United in the objective of service, the orchestra is greater than the sum of its parts. All want to give their best and all want to please the Master. No part is too small. No part too big. Like spokes in a bicycle wheel, each is integral, none more important, and none less. If a person is disgruntled for some reason, it makes no difference to the music. After all is said and done, we are human beings and we have our ups and downs. All work together and create a symphony of focused action, enthusiasm, and service. And if the conductor, the guide and mentor, turns up in person where the seva is taking place, then delight knows no bounds. After all, it is the conductor who holds the symphony together – who is responsible for its harmony and power.

It is the conductor who makes a symphony of the music. The sevadars are each busy doing their part in the business of love: this is the spirit communicated. We are privileged to be players. Don’t take our service away from us. We’ll be desolate if we lost it. The spirit of seva: the doing of love. Not only does it deliver miracles in the physical world of need and suffering. It builds worshipful space in each person’s inner being, spaces of contentment conducive to spiritual growth.

The choice is ours
Love in action - the response to the present crisis – is not happening only in Punjab or RSSB Centres. Look at the frontline health workers all over the world at present. It is the same humanitarian spirit that drives individuals and communities all over the world to take action at times of need. There are multitudes of people, societies, and organizations that rise in love to respond to national and global crises in the same spirit of service and compassion. Love – spirit’s embodied truth wearing one of its suits of finest clothing – lies at the heart of every human being. The choice is ours, as children of one family, to activate it or not.

The spiritual perspective invites us to recognize our place in the grand scheme of things. From St. Paul’s well-known letter to the Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels but do not have love I am only a resounding cymbal or a clanging bell.” And a saying from the culture of the Sufis advises: “Raise yourself to that level where the Lord himself will say to you ‘Tell me my friend – what is your will?’” From the spiritual perspective, to merge with the Highest, the source of everyone and everything, is the greatest purpose of human life.

As members of the human species we are distinguished from other creatures by our particular power to think, reflect, and choose. We can make informed decisions. Modern life with all its challenges gives us many options. Unlike earlier times, we have access to vast resources of scientific knowledge and we know generally what is good for us and for the material, natural world. Many of us experience an inbuilt longing to worship. If, then, we want to experience more than life’s material dimensions, we can choose to live a life of love in action. If we want to see for ourselves creation in all its spiritual glory, we can search for an adept of spirit who can guide us how to worship what is true. We can choose to train as spiritual lovers with an expanded consciousness, so we can see spirit wherever we look.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to enable deep change. At this moment in the history of humanity the planet’s pause button has been activated. In a manner few could have imagined, humanity’s destructive relationship with the planet has been put on hold. Paused. We are offered a unique chance to reflect as we glimpse our planet-home with sparkling blue skies, birdsong, a quieter world and time to ourselves, which remind us of a less materialistic reality where the air was not polluted, rivers were clean and you could drink from them, forests were abundant, oceans were not filled with plastic, sentient creatures were not bred and slaughtered in their billions as food for humans to eat. And as we hold our breath in the face of many uncertainties, we can see the power of love in action to restore, heal, celebrate, and expand the human capability for goodness.

“Love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.² Whether love is from this earthly side or the heavenly side, in the end it leads us beyond,” says Rumi, the great Persian mystic poet. Caring for God’s creation, respect for our fellow human beings and the living planet that is our earthly home – our human capacity to love beyond the beginnings and ends of the earth – this is programmed into the human heart. It is what and who we are.

Love is a verb not a noun
Not a subject, not an object, not a thing
Not something that just happens to us
Love is the choices we make

Love is the doing of love
The doing of compassion and kindness
The merging of me with the other
The giving of me and mine
Love is the choices I make

Love is the sharing of what life gives to me
Being a part to the whole
Obeying love’s discipline without question
The practice of humility
Being grateful for life’s abundance
Respecting life’s deeper order
Love is the choices I make

Love, it is said, makes the world go round
Love it is said, moves mountains
Life’s first song – love – is all we need
Love is truth and peace and trust
The one who has loved knows God, it is said
The one who knows God, is love
Love is the choices we make

A point of relevance in the Indian national context is that all RSSB Centres provide well-maintained toilet and bathing facilities in quantity sufficient to meet the needs of the very large crowds that may visit the centres.
Jalaluddin Rumi, Masnavi, Vol. I. An astrolabe is an instrument and navigational aid that was used to measure the altitude of stars and planets.

Live Life As Life Lives Itself - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Live Life As Life Lives Itself

A satsang given over forty-five years ago by Mr. H. F. Weekley, then Master’s Representative for the Eastern USA, began with this phrase: “Live life as life lives itself.” The satsang pretty much went over my head at the time. I don’t remember any of it, but the phrase stuck with me over all these years. I remember it from time to time, and each time I do, the meaning of this simple statement becomes deeper and more profound. To me it has always meant that our lives are predetermined. Our past karmas have influenced the events of our current life. The movie of our life has already been made and is simply being played. We cannot influence the events of our lives any more than we can change the events taking place in a movie we are watching.

So how do we react to such a realization? The saying “go with the flow” is applicable. Life will live itself so we must accept that and live our life accordingly, as best we can. Basically, don’t worry. Try to improve matters for yourself, but accept that there are things you cannot change. Maharaj Charan Singh said:

Well, brother, we have to see what keeps us tense. What is there to feel tense about in life? Why not relax? Whatever has to happen, will happen. Why create tension in our mind? Meditation always relaxes you. The more the mind is scattered towards the senses, the more tense you are. The more you are able to withdraw the mind to the eye centre, the more you will feel relaxed within yourself. When you are relaxed within, automatically you relax others also. If you are able to build happiness within, you will radiate happiness wherever you go.

We must accept the events of life. You cannot change the course of the events of life, but you can always adjust to them. Adjusting to the events of life will always make you happy and relaxed. If you swim against the waves, you will drown. If you swim along with the waves, you will get to the shore easily.¹….

If you keep the planning in your own hands, you will live miserably. If you leave it to him to plan your life and go on accepting what comes to you, you will be happy. Because planning is in his hands, and you just have to adjust to the events of life. You are just adjusting, going along with the waves.²

There is really nothing more to add, except to ask ourselves, how do we live our life? What should be our attitude, our perspective, and our general outlook? Actually this is painfully simple. In two short sentences, as recorded in the Bible, Jesus put in a nutshell what our attitude in life should be:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. The second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.³

This is exactly what the master keeps telling us, to keep our spiritual practice as our main focus and priority in life and be kind and loving to others. Treat them as we would want to be treated. In other words, be a mensch, a Yiddish term meaning a real human being. It suggests someone with integrity, an honourable person. How hard is it to be non-judgmental, to be forgiving, to be compassionate? Mark Twain wrote: “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” About anger, a not so uncommon trait we all possess, Mark Twain wrote: “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

We have it in our power to go through life happy or sad, to accept the events in our life and to appreciate that the master is watching out for us. These are difficult times for many people, without a doubt. It is sometimes hard to maintain a joyful outlook on life. After all we are in the process of developing these ideal attitudes. We are a work in process. So, if at times people and events try to rob that joy from your heart, just remember this advice from Mark Twain: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 258
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 260
Gospel According to Mark, 12:30-31

No Better Time - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

No Better Time

Most spiritual paths are an elaboration on a similar theme: we want to go home. In the beginning, we may have only a vague notion of where home is for us. Yet somehow, we still feel a pull. The author Beldon Lane writes: “The longing of the soul, made sharper by the absence of that which it loves … reaches in the darkness for a beloved who comes unannounced.”¹ God is present everywhere, it is said, yet we can’t seem to fathom him in the deepest recess of our inner self.

Typically we cannot see our real self or the real beloved with our senses, and we cannot escape our lives, our karmas, or the chaos of the world as it exists. Times of adversity and prosperity often capture our minds, senses, and emotions and change how we exist in our present lives. Yet, somehow we sense that every moment of our life is a moment in time where we are called upon to make a critical decision: to choose between what will take us closer to the light and love or closer to the darkness. And so we search. Rumi says in Jalal al-Din Rumi:

I have come to pull you to me by the ear –
To seat you in my heart and soul,
To make you lose your heart and self.²

Can it be that this search leads us to find what was always there all along? To that place beyond the veil of darkness, beyond our senses and the experience of our karmas, to that place where we know our true nature, where we understand that he is always present. A place where we are bonded together in love and have a beautiful, blessed friend with whom we can take the journey.

This friend, the Master, is the one who helps create the conditions that enable us to mature spiritually and who takes that journey with us. Sometimes those conditions are in the form of adversity. Adversity comes to all of us at different times in our lives, and yet it has an immensely practical and essential impact on our spiritual growth and transformation. You see, we must pay off all our debts before we return home because we cannot travel the path within with a very heavy load of baggage. The return journey home is very pure and full of light and love, and if we are not prepared, and cannot maintain a state of balance, we may have difficulties handling the journey within.

So how do we keep and maintain a state of balance in the face of all the distractions of our karmas? Maharaj Sawan Singh in Discourses on Sant Mat gives us this counsel:

Satsang of the Satguru and association with him reorient the mind and turn it Godward. Repetition of the holy names helps it withdraw to the eye centre. Contemplation of the form of the Master enables it to stay there and to contact the Divine Melody … which takes it to its place of origin.… As a magnet draws iron filings to it with and irresistible force, so does the word of God draw the mind and soul to itself.³

It is our Master who influences us to be a better person, and focusing on him helps us connect with the love and support that we need going through our life events. Contemplation of him shifts our focus and reminds us of our goal. He has already journeyed to where we hope to go. Living in the presence of the Master is a state of surrender and helps us recognize that everything is from him.

Repetition of the holy names is a most important and essential aspect of the Great Master’s counsel. We can use our simran and bhajan to experience the divine plan in our life. Loving repetition of the names will naturally make us aware of the constant presence of the Master. Through the deepening of our simran, bhajan, and focus on the Master in all we do, our understanding of the role our karmas play in the purification of our consciousness will grow, and we will become more balanced and spiritually stronger. We long to experience without a doubt that he has always been with us and that he is leading us through the doorway to eternity, to our true home. In Living Meditation, it is written, “Each time we let go of our thoughts and go back to simran, we win a heroic victory. We are … returning home to our source.”⁴ When we go fearlessly through our karmas with a focus on our beloved and minds full of simran, we won’t lose heart. The purpose of meditation is to create that love and devotion for the Father within because the relationship of the soul and the Father is that of love.

And as the Master tells us, the essence of our soul is love. True love cannot be had without the Master who has given us the method and the prescription for attaining the concentration needed to reach that love within oneself. Love for the Master is the manifestation of love for the Lord. And the principle means of awakening love for the Lord is through the love of the Master. He has pulled us to him, and he reminds us that this way of love and returning home is not a tea party at our auntie’s house; it is an arduous journey. Maharaj Charan Singh encourages us in Quest for Light:

When the Lord has chosen you for eternal liberation, then what other power can keep you back for long in this creation? It is only a matter of time. All are struggling souls and are carrying their individual burden of karmas … The Master will see you back home. So give up your worries and with love and devotion do your duty every day. Slowly the mind will take interest in the inside and turn away from the outside. Master is always with you and so is his love.⁵

So these times are given to us to ponder and perhaps focus or refocus on our true goal. He offers so much if we take him up on his offer of simran, bhajan, and turning the mind Godward.

Sultan Bahu sums it up perfectly:

A heart among hearts:
the heart that is sublime beyond comprehension.
When your heart advances in contemplation of God,
it will comprehend how there is unity in diversity.
The heart is the essence of divinity in man;
in form and beauty it is the symbol of perfection.
When I contemplated on my true Friend
in the privacy of my inner self,
the temple of my heart was illumined with his light.⁶

Light, love, and the Shabd are what cure the longing of the soul. We turn inward so that we can experience who we and the Master truly are. The darkness will vanish, and the barriers will be removed between us and our beloved. Then we are home, and we know it. As Rumi says: “I will not leave you on the road….Though I have made you run, I am running after you.”⁷

Beldon Lane, The Solace of Fierce Lanscapes Exploring Desert and Mountain Spiritualityp. 73
Rumi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, p.90
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, p. 278
Living Meditation, p. 108
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, p. 232
Sultan Bahu, p. 282
Rumi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, p. 91

Touch of Grace - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Touch of Grace

The whole of creation is saturated with souls. Out of those billions of souls there are a handful of lucky ones. Souls who have been blessed by the Father and who are called back home again. Since times immemorial the Father has sent his Sons, the Sons of God, to this creation. These saints are on a unique mission, coming to gather their own. In one way or another, these chosen souls have associations with a particular saint, causing them to come in contact with him. That contact, when the Master’s soul is touching the soul of his disciple, is the greatest cosmic event imaginable. Once that contact has been established, the disciple starts on his spiritual journey back home.

We don’t know for how many lives we’ve been longing to come into contact with one of the beloved Sons of the Father. What we do know is that once his glance of love has fallen on us, a spiritual relationship starts to develop. The depth and intensity of this spiritual relationship is such that everything in life is being radically transformed. Our whole focus is being redirected from outside to inside. This doesn’t happen overnight, it may take a lifetime, but it does happen. Slowly but gradually, in a most subtle manner, our attention is being drawn inward. To our three-dimensional reality a new dimension is added, the spiritual dimension. That dimension can only be experienced. It is the miracle taking place uninterruptedly, of living with the presence of the Divine. Saints call it the Shabd and these Shabd masters inspire their disciples to become Shabd practitioners.

At initiation the master connects the disciple to the Shabd, the Logos, the Word or the Holy Ghost. And most importantly he implants his Astral Form in our being, to accompany and guide us on our cosmic, spiritual journey back to the Source of creation. This journey is so utterly beyond our comprehension, that all words and thoughts fail us to give even the faintest inkling of what this implies. The wonderful thing, though, is that deep inside us something or somebody, some unspeakable entity knows. It is that spark of divinity that has never been extinguished, that will slowly start to burn with an ever increasing brightness. The Shabd practice is called meditation, but it is nothing like what people consider meditation or mindfulness these days. It goes deeper than a lifelong commitment, although that is also part of this divine bargain. This Shabd meditation becomes the pivot of our life, around which everything else revolves. It becomes so much part and parcel of our whole way of life, that one day we wake up and find it the most natural thing in the world.

Through initiation we have been given back what may best be called is our spiritual birthright. Finally, we can start leading a natural life, that is a life in alignment with the divine. Not for part of the day but for all the twenty-four hours in the day. For this to happen first of all discipline is needed. Besides discipline we need perseverance. Next to perseverance we need patience. More than anything the path of Shabd is a path of patiently waiting, discovering and experiencing that there is an incredible sweetness to this waiting in darkness. Huzur Maharaj Ji refers to it in Spiritual Discourses, Vol. 1, as follows:

If you can take what comes to you through Him, then whatever it is becomes divine in itself: Shame becomes honor, bitterness becomes sweet, and gross darkness clear light.¹

During the 2019 October session at Dera, Baba Ji said a couple of times that we should be grateful that Huzur Maharaj Ji had given us an easy path. We don’t have to stand on one leg or torture the body in any way. Ours is the path of doing nothing. How difficult can that be? We’re being asked to practice an art which is unique in its simplicity and which can be done under all circumstances. It is the art of doing nothing, a practice which is aimed at rising above the mundane affairs of the world. On the surface it seems as if nothing special is happening. But just look a little deeper and look back on what you have left behind you. Then you will see that a steady process of change has taken place over the years.

You have overcome obstacles which initially might have looked unsurmountable. Deeply seated attachments will have lost their power of attraction and in a most natural way you have started to lead a simpler life. The hammering of repetition will have done its work, and the realisation of life’s fleetingness has sunk in thoroughly. A shift of focus has taken place and your outlook on life has become less and less outwardly directed, but more and more inwardly directed. From an outward looking human being, you have been turned into an inward looking human being. Huzur used to explain this so beautifully when he commented on the Gospel of John and referred to the fact that we should “labour for the meat which never perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life.”²

It is seeking that treasure within, for getting which it is worth giving up everything. That is wealth which truly belongs to us, it is our personal treasure and personal property. With accessing that inner treasure comes a sense of contentment and deep gratitude. Dipping into it, it gives us peace of mind. That is the daily miracle, that we’re being cut loose from our attachments and simultaneously we’re being anchored in a state of being, which can only be called otherworldly.

As Great Master says in The Dawn of Light:

The attention has to be brought inside, and when it likes to rest there, like the wanderer coming home, it will find peace within.³

On our own we would never get anywhere, let alone getting to the eye centre. On our inner journey we’re being guided every step of the way by the inner master, which is initially for the greater part an unconscious process. Through the master’s infinite grace a subtle working causes our consciousness to open up. The inner core of our being is touched and becomes more finely attuned. What the disciple starts to realize more and more deeply is that he is really not doing anything. Something else is at work and he becomes a spectator of his own life. He also realizes that he is not walking alone, somehow the feeling of master’s presence is at the back of all his doings. A shift of consciousness has taken place, bringing with it a concentrated focus upon the task in hand, and that is doing our real work, master’s work. The daily Shabd meditation becomes such a source of strength and inspiration, causing such a deep longing to be in touch with the Divine that everything else becomes secondary. It is more than a top priority, it is the lifeline you can’t and won’t let go of, whatever it takes.

When we become initiated and are sent out in the world with a new awareness, we are faced with the formidable task of finding room for our meditation amidst all our activities. The master makes us go through our karmas, so many worldly obligations requiring our attention, that slowly and imperceptibly our meditation is becoming anything but centre stage. We needn’t worry in this respect, we’re paying off our karmas and regular wake up calls are bound to come. They may come in any form, unexpectedly and under any circumstances. We are not to miss these wake up calls, they come directly from him. It is nothing but the master puppeteer pulling the strings, not allowing his disciple to go too far astray.

You’re being filled with a new sense of vigour and determination, and you don’t want to let go of his hand. You may suddenly find that the time for meditation which used to slip through your fingers, has become such a strong foothold in your life. You have always time for it, it is the best portion of your day, not the spare time left after finishing all your worldly obligations. It is the most precious time; you’re really living Life to the fullest. One day all the hard work of meditation will pay itself off. It is the retreat beyond all retreats, it feels like coming home in a dimension you could only dream of. And yet, this coming home is the feeling of being close to the master and the Shabd. That feeling you don’t want to lose for anything in the world. It is the divine love affair which has set your whole being aflame.

In the course of a lifetime the bigger picture slowly unfolds. We have become so utterly engrossed in the creation, with all its temptations and allurements, but also with deep seated fears, especially of the unknown, that the grand purpose for which we have come here, totally eludes us. It is the effect of the lifelong meditation practice though, which makes us gradually aware of being involved in a life-changing process of transformation, the magnitude of which is beyond our comprehension. A complete shift of perspective and reorientation forces us to seek the connection with an inner reality, which is so much more real than the outer reality.

The path of the masters is a living path, with a living master. It is the living master who gives us a new sense of life and direction, teaching us the deeper meaning of life with and without words. We take our breaths for granted, somehow believing that we have an endless store of them. By raising our consciousness the master makes us see how unique and precious the gift of a human life is. That it is out of compassion that the Father has graced us with a human body, which is likened to a temple of the living God.

The true religion of man knows no outer trappings. The binding with the Divine takes place at an inner level, within the temple we carry with us wherever we go. We have been provided for in such a way that under all circumstances, no opportunity to get in touch with that inner reality needs to be lost. The living master becomes a living presence, whose boundless love may flood our being at unexpected moments. There is an unseen director at work giving stage directions, giving you the feeling that your life has been taken over. With that feeling comes a sense of trust, you begin to feel and see his guiding hand in your life’s affairs. This is all part of the relationship with the Divine which is being restored.

Saints have come to this creation on a mission of love. If you’ve had the incredible luck of having been initiated by one of these saints or living masters, you will agree wholeheartedly with the following quote from A Treasury of Mystic Terms, Vol 11:

Mystics say that the nature of God is love, that He is an ocean of love. The experience of this love is deeply blissful and entrancing, and once a soul gets a taste of it, all other pleasures pale by comparison. This automatically detaches the mind from the world and from the creation. Love and bliss are primary attributes of the soul, as well as of God, and the closer a soul becomes to Him, the more is divine bliss experienced.⁴

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. 1; 1st ed. 1964, 1987; p.91
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, pp.82-83
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, letter 64
Treasury of Mystic Terms, Vol. 11, p. 45

Feeding the Flame of Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Feeding the Flame of Love

Guru Arjan Dev Ji begins one of his shabds saying, “How shall I meet the Lord, O Master? Only a saint who has achieved union can show the path.”¹ His question is one that we have all asked at some point in our lives. I doubt we would be disciples if we hadn’t asked that fundamental question. At a crucial moment we realized that to find true meaning in life we needed to experience the divine. Meeting the Lord would be the only thing that would answer our questions and soothe our troubled minds. From that moment on our quest to meet the Lord has been the foundation on which we have built our lives.

Yes, there have been ups and downs. Sometimes we have screamed in despair at the feebleness of our ability to experience him. Many of us have even decided that it is impossible for us to meet the Lord so we have given up trying. At other times we have had a glimpse of contentment, moments of joy. But somehow through it all we have persisted. Is that because of the grace of the master? Is it because of our continuing weak efforts? Or is it, possibly, because we haven’t found anything better than our path? Through the best of times and the worst of times Guru Arjan Dev’s question has continued to percolate in our minds, even if buried under the weight of everyday life. We know that nothing else but realization of the Lord will give us peace of mind and meaning to life. But through all our ups and downs one thing stood firm that we have a guru who never gives up on us.

Great Master wrote, “All true devotees get shabd, which is real life, from the pure guru. He is life in himself, and since he is free from ego, the shabd speaks through him. He has transcended the valley of death. He has realized the life of the Lord which works through the shabd and he himself can give life or spiritual awakening to his disciples.”² What luck that we have been given this opportunity. A relationship with the guru is the greatest gift the Lord can give to anyone. Though we haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it, we have it. If we begin to take steps, baby steps or giant steps, we will definitely experience meaning in our lives and we will also experience the Lord. It doesn’t seem possible that we have this gift. We are ordinary people living ordinary lives. But the satguru saw something in us that we don’t see. He saw our soul ready for liberation. After thousands of lives we have reached the extraordinary moment when we begin our journey home. It is vital that we remember and cherish the gift of Nam that is ours. After lifetimes of struggle our direction has changed. From coming and going, we now stand on the threshold of eternal freedom, ready to merge in the ocean of Shabd, the ocean of love. Is it possible that it is we who have this honour and privilege, we with our anxious minds and our doubts and worries? Can it be we who stand upon the threshold of eternal freedom? It sounds so dramatic, so much bigger and grander than we are. But it is you and I who are at this supreme turning point. We have the gift of Nam and the opportunity to experience the divine. Now it is time to accept his gift, say thank you to him for it, and realize its potential.

Guru Arjan Dev Ji continues by saying, “The unseen is within, and remains invisible because of the veil of ego. Infatuated by maya the whole creation is asleep. How shall we awake from this delusion?” Our minds are so noisy with desires and worries, expectations and disappointments, that we have limited our ability to experience our own divinity. Our every thought is based around our needs and our desires. It is so crowded inside our mind that there is no room for him. This constant mental chatter is ego. But right behind the chatter is the unseen. Behind the veil is peace and contentment. Behind the noise is the sweet sound of the shabd. But Guru Arjan Dev tells us we need to wake up to experience the unseen or the unheard.

Hazur wrote, “The greatest miracle of the mystics is that they change the very attitude of our life, the way of our life. They turn everything upside down in our life.” We have been turned upside down so that everything is being shaken out of us. Our Guru is emptying our mind and leaving us ready and able to wake up from the delusion that happiness comes from me and mine. It doesn’t. Happiness comes from stillness and simran. If we are searching for our divinity, then we can’t look for it in friends and family, or wealth and fame. But if we change our attitude and create an atmosphere where gratitude for nam and a positive life style are strengthened then the possibility of self- discovery will blossom. It is inevitable. Nothing is more powerful than the guru’s nam.

Guru Arjan Dev then continues the shabd saying, “Dwelling in the same house, living together, we know not each other. For lack of the one, the five torment us but that one is not easily reached.” He tells us that the Lord, in the form of the shabd guru, lives inside us. How lovely but terrifying also. It is comforting to be assured that the guru is inside. From the inside he supports our positive efforts and helps us through countless miseries. But it also means he experiences the passions that rumble through us. He hears the noise of our mind. Because of these passions and the discontentment they breed we are left without the experience of the one. If we love him as we say we do then it is crucial that we quiet the noise in our mind so that he does not need to experience it. The effort in stilling our mind is a way of saying thank you to him for his generous gift.

But Guru Arjan Dev is also clear that it is a challenge to experience the shabd. It takes dedication and perseverance. But let’s remember that if we persevere he will do all he can to help us. On the outside we have his satsangs, his darshan and his seva. And it is impossible for us to imagine or understand how he helps us from the inside. Our path stays a mystery to us until we have an inner relationship with him. Until then all we can do is show our gratitude for his continuing gift, both the gift of nam and the gift of his physical presence in our lives.

Guru Arjan Dev continues saying, “Having built the house, he locked himself within and entrusted the key to the guru. Try as one may, never will this treasure be obtained without taking refuge in him.” The Lord is inside us. Every atom of our being is charged with shabd. The guru in his shabd form radiates inside us. He is our very essence. Hidden away, locked away, but there. Our centre is not me and mine but him. But how do we take refuge in him? The saints tell us meditation is a challenge but surrendering to him is even more difficult. But with both challenges we must put in effort. When we accept our destiny without complaint we are taking a baby step towards living in his will. What aspect of the creation isn’t his will? Shabd is in every leaf, every insect, every man. If shabd is the core of all then everything happens by the force of shabd. The shabd is the doer of all things. And in his shabd form he is the doer of all things in our lives. As Baba Jaimal Singh Ji put it, “Believe it firmly, my son: he is himself carrying out the affairs of the world by being in it. Everything he does is for our good.”³ We can accept destiny or cry against our fate. We can take refuge in him or we can fight our destiny. But each time we accept things as his will we deepen our commitment to him. It would be false to say that this is an easy task, it’s not. But what else is worth our time and effort. The sculptor Henry Moore wrote, “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of your day for your whole life. And the most important thing is – it must be something that you cannot possibly do!” So we persevere even if it seems like there are no results to our efforts. We begin to understand that we cannot do it, this stilling of our mind. But if we relax, close our eyes and enjoy the journey then we might find that he will shine through and help simran to flow inside us. The contradiction is that we cannot do it but at the same time we have to put in effort as if we can. What a lovely and mysterious life we lead as disciples of our guru.

Then Guru Arjan Dev Ji writes, “When the Lord wishes to cut away our shackles he grants us the love and company of saints. When in their company, one sings the praises of nam. From then on one is united with the Lord and no difference remains between the two, says Nanak.” Let’s remember that as the guru is inside us there is not a single moment that we aren’t in his company. Yes, it is a pleasure and a joy to be in his physical presence. But if we believe in his teachings then it is clear we are united with him now, at this moment and in all moments.

We don’t often experience that oneness because of the veil of ego. But we can experience that joy the moment we begin to take refuge in him. It’s a journey and often a rocky one with detours and obstacles but there is nothing else in life with the same value. Nothing else will give us the joy and contentment that comes with our persistent effort on to live the path fully. Nothing else will answer our question of how to meet the Lord.

Finally Guru Arjan Dev writes, “Thus is the Lord met, union achieved, delusion dispelled, and the flame merges in the light.” The shabd ends with this grand crescendo, a symphony of joy, an ode to love. And we are the lucky ones who can experience this love and joy now. Let’s feed the flame inside us by our love and dedication to our beloved.

Guru Arjun Dev, Kin bidh mile Gusain, mere Ram Rai, AG p.204; in Light On Sant Mat, 9th ed., 1997, p.204
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 5, 6th ed. 2010, p. 192
Spiritual Letters, 7th ed., 1998; Letter 20, p. 35

Time - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Time

Time has a strange existence. Something we can't touch or feel, or see. We can't talk to it and it doesn't talk to us. Yet it is a teacher, a silent one – not a word heard or said. It engages us without pause, has unlimited patience, to a fault. It has no anger or love, sympathy or apathy, or any attachments. Yet it is a Healer. It watches all that goes on but never interferes or alters any of it. Yet it decides our fate. It gives each one of us a part of itself, but doesn't tell us how much of it we have.

No life exists without Time. Time is a quiet reality of our life – much the same as God. Perhaps both are the same. Time and God are words created by us, to give recognition to the source of Life, or to Life itself, as we live and experience it.

We live, and we call it life. But what is this phenomenon called Time, which brings us into being, in time, for a length of time, to serve time – all without understanding it, yet taking it for granted – not caring for it until it's too late, and we see it slipping away – wanting then to hold on to it, which is something it doesn't allow. Time waits on no one, for no one.

Time is our inseparable companion – it never leaves us. Little realizing its central role in all our thoughts and actions, it constantly finds mention in all that we say and do, simply because everything takes up time, sometimes a little of it, other times more of it. And when the little and more add up, it becomes all of it. Our language is full of Time – if it wouldn't be, there would be no language; we wouldn't be able to communicate. Our dictionaries are full of words which, in some way or the other, are an expression of Time.

Past – present – future; yesterday – today – tomorrow,
was – is – will; early – late, pre- & post-,
busy – free, before – after.
A few examples amongst countless others.

Time also has infinite qualities. Brimming with wisdom, it is all knowing. We express its attributes in many ways.

Time is precious – Time knows all – Time will come –
Time will tell –Time will decide – Time will show the path.

Like a parent, it holds our hand and guides us through the ups and downs of life, coaxing us to learn from our mistakes. But we are obstinate. We don't value what Time teaches us.

We respect and value all that is precious to us – our life, our children, our family, our friends, our wealth – but not Time. We don't have time for Time, even though we depend on it, from the time we take our first breath to the time we breathe our last. We take it for granted, as if it will never end, knowing fully well it will. We witness it all the time, but turn a blind eye where we are concerned. We can't fool Time, but we can fool ourselves. We do it all the time.

If Time is timeless and absolute, it should occupy the most important space in our life. It's quite the opposite, perhaps because we consider only those things precious which are limited. If something is available in abundance, it is of little or no value to us. It becomes valuable only when we need it, but can't have it. We seem to think our Time is unlimited, which is perhaps the reason we neither value it, nor give it the attention it deserves.

There are two aspects to our Being – one Spiritual, the other Physical. One timeless, the other time-bound. Much like a lifetime and a movie of three hours: one real, the other a short-time experience. While we watch the movie, which is nothing but a projection on a blank screen, we enjoy, suffer, laugh, and cry throughout. We experience emotions of love, fear, anger, surprise, joy and pride; but deep inside, we know it's just a movie, and when it's over, we will be back where we belong – to Life. The movie is not real, but we get deeply engaged in its experience. It's quite the same with reality and life. We fail to differentiate one from the other.

Time is limitless, but not unlimited in the dimension of a Lifetime. It sent us into this world for a limited time to experience it, not get lost in it. Time, in our limited lifetime, is precious. Once it's gone, we can't bring it back. We can't stop it, or borrow it, or own it. We can't increase it or decrease it, or push it away. But we can use it – for our benefit or detriment.

In our wisdom, we try to divide time to answer the call of age, duty, and responsibility. Education, work, family, health, and leisure take up a fair share of it, while other activities which benefit us in some way or the other consume what's left of it. Our time is mostly occupied in gratifying the physical aspect of life, which is time-bound. We don't spend any of our life in exploring our roots, our source, our beginning – where we came from.

What is beyond the physical – beyond body, beyond Life, beyond mind – beyond the limitation of Time? Time itself, or God himself? Mystical, spiritual, transcendental, ethereal – these are words we created to express that energy, that eventuality, that truth. And this brings us to another question.

What is Life? Does it exist, or is it merely an experience – an illusion – while reality lies elsewhere? But Life is so real. We are born in a body. We can see, touch, feel, think, decide, interact, and give birth to new life. Superior to all other life forms, we can discriminate, exercise choice, and determine right from wrong. We can do anything and everything. How can we ever think we are not real, that life is just an experience?

We think life is the beginning and end of our existence. Yet we pray to a higher Being, whom we bow to as the Giver. We frequent our places of worship in the quest of connecting with the Truth. We constantly refer to Time and God – have faith in God, Time knows all, leave it to God, let Time decide.

In our subconscious, we believe in the existence of the afterlife, or what lies beyond. So what answer will we give to the Almighty? God sent us here with a plan. We are God's children. We say, “Our Father, thou art in Heaven,” and “Allah Ishwar tero naam, sabko sanmatti de bhagwan”¹ Irrespective of our religious affiliation, we believe in that one Supreme Being, that one Supreme truth.

On the physical front we have Science, which does not rely on emotion, belief, dogma, or heresay. It relies on proof, physical proof. In its quest to understand the creation, it has constantly improved and bettered itself, discovering new frontiers. At some point in time, scientists, while deciphering the electron, came to the conclusion that it didn't really have mass, but behaved as if it did, and this brought to light its illusory nature. This phenomenon has been beautifully expounded by Mystics: “There is no truth in this world; everything we see here is, at best, an honest lie.”

We have to find truth in the time we have in this life. If this time runs out, we have to again come back in Time to seek it. This cycle continues endlessly until we find the truth. Our Time is complete if we find it, incomplete if we don't.

We exhaust all our time in developing life skills; perhaps some of it should be employed in nurturing Time skills before it runs out.

This world is all about Time. How we understand Time, how we treat Time, how we use Time. How attentive we are to Time will make a difference to our future in Time.

Time has taught us that if we seek something, we will find it; or it will find us sooner or later. We only have to want to find it – be it love, happiness, misery, anxiety, or truth. Time will not let us down.

Science is limited by the mind; the mind is limited by the body. And both mind and matter are limited by Time. We are as much a part of, as a result of Time. We have come from Time and we will go back into Time. It depends on how we use our Time here. We can make the best of it, or let it get the best of us. We can get consumed by the illusion or look for Reality.

The choice is ours to make.

This world You gave me
of which I had little clue
To rule it was my dream – so close it always seemed
Of earth and water blue
You said be sure 'tis not true
It’s but a mirage …
Live and love on it, but not pursue

“Your names are Ishwar and Allah. Give wisdom to all, O God.”

Who Is Pushing Our Swing - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Who Is Pushing Our Swing

Who is pushing our swing?
We often get into those moods, thinking how and why certain things are happening to us. Faith then becomes a textbook term, collecting dust. The other day as I browsed my bookshelf, I came across a striking example on the importance of trust.

Think of a swing. “Children love to swing. There is nothing like it. Thrusting your feet toward the sky ... spinning trees. As a child, we would only trust certain people to push our swing. If I were being pushed by people I trusted (like mom or dad), they could do anything they wanted. Twist me, turn me, stop me … I loved it! I loved it because I trusted the person pushing me. They wanted my safety before I even knew what safety was. I was relaxed and carefree. But let a stranger push my swing – like distant relatives or guests, and it was…whoa, hang on! .. Who knew what this newcomer would do? When a stranger pushes your swing, you tense up…. It is no fun when the swing is in the hands of someone you do not know.”¹

A stormy world
We’re living in a stormy world today. A world that is filled with uncertainties of the future. It is not an easy state to be in. But it is at times such as these that we have to reflect and realize: who is pushing our swing? We must put our trust in Him. We cannot grow fearful or doubtful. When we are in his hands, we will find peace even in a storm....because He is pushing our swing! Although we know the swing of our lives is in His hands, we still question.

We should let him swing us. He may lead us through a storm at age thirty so we can endure a hurricane at age fifty. An instrument is only useful if it is in the right shape. A dull axe or a bent screwdriver needs attention, and so do we. A good blacksmith keeps his tools in shape. So does He.

Attuning to our Anchor
Yet, how do we keep that constant remembrance that He is taking care of us? That He is pushing our swing? How do we let faith not become a textbook term, but one that we live each day?

Much like grace on the path, faith is a two-way street. Our meditation will help us strengthen our faith and live according to the teachings. At the same time, as we develop more faith on the path, we will automatically give a higher priority to our meditation. When we are indifferent to our meditation, when we do not make it the most important daily event in our lives, we are losing the opportunity to develop the faith we need to follow the path.

So we need to hold on to our anchor. We can take the example from Indian classical music, in which it is important to align one’s attention with one note, Sa. Myriad beautiful compositions, soul-lifting ragas, exquisite renditions stem from that single attunement. Every performer fine-tunes the attention to that unique note before beginning the concert. And this attunement continues right through the performance. And so it is with us. If we can attune ourselves to that one divine power while we go through our performance of life, then all the noise, chaos and confusion will be outside us. In and through the clamour we will be able to withdraw into an oasis of peace within.

The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, echoed a similar thought:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor, and were asked my advice, I should reply: Create Silence.

We have the ability to access this creative silence within us. No matter what is going on all around us, as long as we are with Him, we are at peace. As long as we remember Him, as long as we know how to keep ourselves in his presence. Hazur would often say: “The Master is closer than our next breath.” The Lord is taking care of us every second of our lives. There is nothing in our lives that he is ignorant of. There is nothing that he is not intimately involved in. We just need to delve inside and feel Him within. He is present everywhere. He is our one friend, whom we can love like no other love. Whom we can count on. Unconditionally.

Max Lucado, On the Anvil: Thoughts on Being Shaped into God's Image, Tyndale House Publ. 1994, p.55

What’s Important in Life? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

What’s Important in Life?

Mark Twain, not known to be religious at all, said something surprisingly profound: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” For satsangis, we have been given the opportunity to “find out why” we were born. Why we have been put on this earth? What is our purpose in life and where will we go when this life ends? This whole path is about discovering the “why” of life. The masters have explained the purpose of life in very clear and precise terms.

The purpose of life is to bring about complete concentration of mind and thereby vacate the entire body. Precisely the same thing happens at death.¹

The singular purpose of our being born as human beings is to find a guru, learn from him the path of devotion within, and then worship the Lord by attaching ourselves to the Word or Nam. Maharaj Sawan Singh explains this clearly:

Just think, human life is very precious and is due to past good karma. It is not granted to us for rearing children or for enjoying ourselves. All these functions are performed even by the lowest animals. The only difference between man and lower creation is that man’s life here is meant for seeing the Lord and reaching the highest spiritual plane, in this life. Every minute of it is worth millions of dollars.²

So it is clear what our purpose in life is, and it is also clear how we achieve that purpose — by meditation. If we can remember how precious this life is, then we will remember how little time we have to reach our goal. To achieve anything in life takes constant effort. Each time we try, even if we fail, is a step forward. Actually we don’t fail; it is a fundamental part of effort. A small child learning to walk falls many times before succeeding. His first efforts will always result in a fall. Mark Twain shrewdly said: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” We need to start without fear. We may need to start hundreds of times if necessary. We must learn to view our failures as positive steps forward because it means we are trying. “The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude towards failure of ‘no fear.’”³

Failures become steppingstones to later success. Thomas Edison, whose most memorable invention was the light bulb, supposedly took 1,000 tries before he developed a successful prototype.

“How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked Edison. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

We will achieve success with our meditation one day but we first have to get started. Then we must embrace the fact that every effort we make moves us closer to our goal. There are no failures on the path, only those who stopped trying. We generally have no idea how close we are to our goal. The masters have given the analogy of digging a tunnel. You could be inches away from breaking through to the other side but would never know it. About giving up, Thomas Edison said: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

So it always seems to boil down to effort and grace. The more effort the more grace, and the greater the chance of success. We must see every day as an opportunity to achieve our goal. If our day doesn’t go as planned, if we didn’t do what we set out to do, then tomorrow we can try again. We should not let our so-called failures discourage us. It is said that the road to success is paved with failures. John F. Kennedy said: “Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.”

We meditate because the master has asked us to. Effort is in our hands. The master has said many times that if we could not achieve success he would not have initiated us. He is our one true friend who believes in us, that we can succeed. We leave you with a quote from Abraham Lincoln about not letting our “friend” down. “I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”

Maharaj Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul, p.140
Isaac Ezekiel, Kabir, The Great Mystic, p. 80
Ralph Heath, Celebrating Failure, NY: Weiser, 2009

Rumi in the Time of COVID-19 - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Rumi in the Time of COVID-19

What did I expect to find in the mystical writings of the 13th-century maestro at this hour? Wasn’t Rumi to be savored in solitude, at peace, when one could be lost in admiration of his exquisite rubaiyat and marvel at the beauty of his Mathnavi? On a quiet, regular day looking out on a verdant patch somewhere? Instead, here I was, under lockdown, not too far from the Sufi heartland, in Kazakhstan, and browsing through Rumi for insights.

Entering the sublime world of Rumi is a welcome change, suspended as I am, between relentless coverage of the pandemic and its projected fearsome economic and sociological after-effects. Contrary to expectations, Rumi’s lyrical and magical words are not just a pleasant diversion, to spirit one away to an enchanting place and then to return to grim reality when the reading is over. Reading Rumi in the time of COVID-19 is a “turning inward,” a journey into the self in the most unusual of circumstances. The outcome is far more tangible and perceptible than one can imagine, for it promises happiness and peace in the midst of a swirling storm.

Eight hundred years may stand between Rumi and us today but his poetry touched a chord then and it touches one now. Rumi was familiar with uncertainty and disruption given the chaotic times he lived in, with the vast Seljuk Empire on its last legs. The threat of the marauding armies of Genghis Khan caused his family to flee his birthplace, Balkh, in Afghanistan when he was twelve. They wandered all over Asia Minor and Arabia before finally settling in Konya in southern Turkey. It is here that, eventually, Rumi’s transformation from a learned scholar and jurist to a true mystic and phenomenal poet occurred.

Rumi’s poetry is timeless and universal, and covers practically everything, what is important and what is not, what to avoid and what to embrace. The mystical Sufi master was a master of the human psyche – of its fears and terrors as well as its joys and ecstasies – of every conceivable virtue and vice. “In every instance a new species rises in the chest – now a demon, now an angel, now a wild animal, now a human friend.”¹ Out of the myriad forms we seem capable of morphing into, Rumi favors the angelic or the good. It alone possesses the power to change us for the better and therefore, to change the distressing into the heartening. Could we hope, then, that there is something positive behind the current upheaval and uncertainty, something heartening behind the distressing? Rumi seems to think so. “[J]oy is hidden beneath sorrow.” After all, “[W]hy would anyone hide treasure in plain sight?”²

For Rumi, all that is good – joy, bliss, peace and love – is hidden, like treasure waiting to be discovered. Love, of course, is the sultan of them all and intrinsic to Rumi’s Sufi way of thinking. “[B]e foolishly in love. Because love is all there is”³ is his refrain. Yet, he does not fail to add that this love must not bind, but set free. “Fall in love in such a way that it frees you from any connecting.”⁴ Rumi’s love is boundless, beyond the limits of person, place, or thing and consequently, sets free. It is present within and therefore appears everywhere. But, he says, the restless mind keeps it out of sight. “Dear mind, such a traveler, always moving, like a fish looking for the sea, while the great heart’s ocean waits, all around and inside it. How can you live outside this love?”⁵

Rumi speaks of this love in hundreds of ways, each more fantastic than the other. It is where candles burn brighter than suns, where drops are really a hundred oceans, where rose gardens burst into laughter and where everyone says “How are you?” and no one says “How aren’t you?” Yet, so often, in the end, he resorts to silence. “Khamush” (silence, in Persian), he declares, this cannot be described any more, only sensed. “Now let silence speak.”⁶

Rumi’s poetry is replete with allegories, imagery and concealed messages, yet it is far from abstruse. Looked at carefully, it points to a way to peace and happiness here and now. For instance, he tells us how not to let our hearts be swamped by fear but to recognize and deal with a deadlier enemy, desire. “There may be fear in the air, but don’t put it in your heart. Be afraid of your desire and its fancies, but never of actual events.”⁷ He asks us not to fear actual events, even alarming and frightening ones. He calls them fantasies of phenomena flowing through our lives. “We seem to be sitting still, but we are actually moving, and the fantasies of phenomena are sliding through us, like ideas through curtains.”⁸

He urges us to be pragmatic and to let events take their course, because they are transient and, like “ideas through curtains,” will soon disappear. “Sometimes you get stuck in the mud like hunted prey. In the end, the thing will happen anyway.”⁹ The virus and its spread, however horrific and prolonged, is an event, and Rumi’s reasoning would be to accept the inexorability of such events. He warns against desire, since desire may or may not be fulfilled, and could result in unhappiness. Whereas about events, he says, they “will happen anyway.” Acceptance frees from the outcome of events and makes the inevitable meaningless, for without desire, the inevitable becomes powerless.

Expressed simply, Rumi’s poetry is a call to look at life through a different lens, to go beyond the I-ness, in which desire rules, to be grateful for what we have, and to turn inward. “If you cannot go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self. They are like shafts of light, always changing, and you change when you explore them.”¹⁰ Rumi’s little glimpses into the self are fascinating and, in these times of lockdown and confinement, spur us on the path of self-discovery. What is it that we will we find? If he is to be believed, then the noise of the outside world will lessen and the “passageways of the self” will light up. He calls it an excursion. “The great excursion starts from exactly where you are,” he says. “You are the world. You have everything you need.”He concludes, “[D]on’t look for the remedy for your troubles outside yourself. You are the medicine. You are the cure for your own sorrow.”¹¹

Eternal, profound and inarguably the essence of Rumi. Why does his poetry resonate even in this sweeping sea of sickness and despair? Because it separates what is within from without. It tells us that, no matter what storms rage outside in the world, they need not affect what is inside, in our hearts. “Look and see: All that is good comes from the heart.”¹² The good in our hearts, too, is a treasure that is obscured and needs to be unearthed. It begins with lightening the load, freeing oneself, and letting go. “Let go of your worries and be completely clear-hearted, like the face of a mirror that contains no images,” he says.¹³ The invisible shackles of anxiety and misgiving then melt away. And the crystal-clear heart is free to enter the world of love and experience joy and peace.

Throughout, in the thousands of verses he expounds, Rumi hardly ever strays from his core message of simplicity. Be simple, kind, generous, grateful, happy; become a child again, he tells us. “Don’t do things to others if you don’t want them done to you.” “Put cotton in your ears. Don’t listen to every word that’s spoken. You may have a clean soul, but even a clean soul can gather rust.”¹⁴ He is the caring parent instructing the child and the best friend trying to steer us away from the pitfalls of life.

Rumi’s advice may almost be too simple to be true, but it carries enormous weight. His was a distinguished lineage derived from eminent religious scholars and jurists, his own father being a renowned theologian and Sufi teacher. As expected, by his late twenties, he was a highly educated, devout scholar, as well as trained in the Sufi way of life. His father’s passing paved the way for him to become the leader of his dervish community and school. Interestingly, he was never referred to as Rumi in his lifetime, but by his formal title, Maulana Rum. Rum or Rumi essentially meant a person from Konya, or the sultanate of Rum, so named because of its Roman influence.

As a Maulana, a scholar, jurist, and esteemed member of the community, he was celebrated and feted with a large following of students and admirers (it is said that his school had ten thousand students). One may think that Rumi had achieved the height of success. Until he found that real joy was beyond everything he had studied and striven for. In classic Rumi style he then declared that conventional means did not help in the journey towards happiness and love. Cleverness and intellect would not take one there.

A voice inside says, You were given the intuition
to shoot an arrow
and then to dig where it landed,
but you shot with all your archery skill.
You were told to draw the bow
with only a fraction of your ability.
Do not exhaust yourself
like the philosophers who strain to shoot
the high arcs of their thought-arrows.¹⁵

It is an unusual piece of advice. To be asked not to try so hard. Rumi says we complicate the search, as we complicate our lives, with our tiresome thinking. Do not exhaust yourself, he says, the way is simple. Simplicity, in thought and action, leads to freedom. Become free and enter the infinite world of love. “Love lit a fire in my chest, and anything that was not love left: intellectual subtlety, philosophy, books, school.”¹⁶

Rumi’s poetry is universal. To him all of humanity is indistinguishable. “All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion. The lamps are different, but the Light is the same.”¹⁷ The current pandemic, too, is universal, and the virus, the great leveler. Unusually we are all at risk irrespective of who and where we are. The idea that we are all human at a basic level has rarely been so widely perceived. It takes us a step closer to understanding why Rumi calls our outer selves, differentiated as they are between culture, color, gender, nationality and so on, as mere shells containing the real substance, the core. “You are a ruby embedded in granite. How long will you pretend it isn’t true?”¹⁸ Elsewhere he says: “You’re like water in a jug, encased in earthenware.”¹⁹ The ruby is hidden in the dusty, hard granite and life-sustaining water in the rough earthen jug. For Rumi our precious, gem-like, and useful qualities lie hidden in the inner self. To discover them is to look within and follow the path of love.

The deep love Rumi describes is synonymous with his feelings for Shams, his friend, philosopher and guide. Much of Rumi’s poetry is a homage to Shams. “I was a tiny bug. Now a mountain. You healed my wounded hunger and anger and made me a poet that sings about joy.”²⁰

It is an extraordinary and well-known story. The young, erudite, celebrated scholar meets Shams, the coarse, disheveled, wandering mystic twice his age, and becomes a madman. Mad in his love of Shams and drunk with the joy of being with him. The story of their meeting and its consequences are legend, but so is the manner in which Rumi composed the imposing volume of poetry in its wake. Thousands upon thousands of verses were neither composed nor penned in solitude nor ever polished and edited, indeed he never even “wrote” them down. Instead they spontaneously flowed out, in public, on narrow and winding streets, in crowded bazaars and around taverns, where they were fortunately written down by companions and students.

Rumi had no use for recognition and emoluments. Neither did he feel the need to take credit for his brilliant verses, directly naming his teacher instead in almost a thousand of his poems. More than forty thousand lines of his poetry are ascribed to Shams and collected in the book titled Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (A Collection of Poems of Shams of Tabriz). When speaking of Shams, he is at times voluble, enumerating Shams’s attributes, of one who dwells in the higher planes. “He doesn’t need horses. He flies without wings. He eats and drinks divine light. He’s the merchant of the universe, but he buys and sells nothing.”²¹ At other times, Rumi chooses to be concise, hinting that their relationship transcends words. “Shams is the way I know God.”²² Ultimately he uses love to describe it all – his friend, their relationship, his longing, and the Supreme One.

Love is a tree
with branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity,
and no trunk.
Have you seen it? The mind cannot.
Your desiring cannot.
The longing you feel for this love comes
from inside you.
When you become the Friend,
your longing will be as the man in the ocean
who holds on to a piece of wood.
Eventually, wood, man, ocean become one swaying being,
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.²³

Rumi’s poetry can be viewed as an extensive compilation of his experiences on the Sufi path of love. Yet, from all accounts, he was as much involved as anyone else in his family and community. The great Islamic scholar and translator Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch said of Rumi: “[Rumi] achieved maturity and greatness in every conceivable way – as a father, as a husband, as a supreme spiritual teacher ... and as the greatest of all mystic poets.”²⁴ What does that say about Rumi’s mysticism and other-worldliness? That it never seemed to conflict with his dealing with everyday life and its complexity. The setting, mood and style of his poetry reflect that – at times sublime and velvety, and then loudly admonishing and hectoring. His allegories never shy away from the ordinary, from haggling traders to burdened donkeys and camels, and rowdy drunks. His verses are not meant for us to escape into another world. They are meant to remind us that we live in a confounding world, with all that is good and bad, and that we live a dizzy life, with all its ups and downs, but always carry the secret of love and joy in our hearts.

So, where does that leave us? What does his poetry, filled with the ecstasy of pure love and the way to it, do for us right now? Rumi’s poetry answers to the need for an unconventional remedy to counter the effects of a novel virus. Its invisibility and rapid spread, the suffering and disruption in its wake, the severe measures to contain it and a looming uncertain future are our new world and its realities. What we need, surrounded as we are by a profusion of predictions and analyses, is an unorthodox approach and a deeper understanding of life.

Rumi’s poetry reaches the pinnacle on both counts.

Simple and direct, it asks us not to fear and to do what is right. It urges us to let go of our worries but also, to change our ingrained attitudes towards the world and towards life. Rumi means for his poetry to change us, to help us go inside in search of happiness and peace. “Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest. Outside in the world it turns cold.”²⁵ When his poetry is here, in our hearts, ensconced and nurtured by our gentle appreciation, we find something deep and timeless. “Listen to the presences inside poems. Let them take you where they will.”²⁶ We let go and let the poems guide us. We begin to feel peace and solace of a different kind. Not something fleeting that needs to be caught and latched on to. But something soothing and calm and unchanging, whose essence happens to be our own selves. “Be silent now. Let your selves become living poetry.”²⁷

To end with Rumi is to change and become. What he says we should become.

Living Poetry.

Bibliography
Barks, Coleman, Rumi: The Big Red Book, Harper One, 2010
Barks, Coleman, Rumi: Bridge to the Soul, Harper One, 2007
Barks, Coleman, A Year with Rumi, Harper One, 2006
Ergin, Nevit O. and Will Johnson, The Forbidden Rumi, Inner Traditions, 2006
Helminski, Kabir (ed), The Pocket Rumi, Shambala Publications, 2001
Helminski, Kabir (ed), The Rumi Collection, Shambala Publications, 1998

Barks, 2006,187
Helminski, 2006,116
Barks, 2007, 76
Barks, 2010, 200
Barks, 2010, 409
Barks, 2007, 8
Ergin,103
Barks, 2006,138
Ergin, 77
Barks, 2010, 129
Ergin, 85
Ergin,120
Helminski, 1998, 49
Ergin, 103
Barks, 2006, 212
Barks, 2010, 440
Helminski, 1998,137-138
Helminski, 2001,18
Ergin, 149
Barks, 2010, 425
Ergin, 21
Barks, 2006, 349
Barks, 2006, 387
Helminski, 1998, Introduction
Helminski, 1998, 57
Barks, 2006,156
Barks, 2007, 65

The Subject Tonight Is Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Subject Tonight Is Love

To talk about love is tricky, because it’s not something you can describe in words. Like God or the Master, love is far beyond the realm of language.

The real discourse on love is the darshan of a true, living Master. Through darshan, the Master, who is the embodiment of love, communicates to all present. He communicates nothing but love, and he uses no words.

It has been said that Sant Mat, this path of the Saints, is caught, not taught. Some part of us catches the essence of the path through the presence of the Master, the company of other satsangis, in our meditation, at satsang, and during seva. No one teaches it to us. We get taught concepts, but as Baba Ji reminds us so often, those concepts are not Sant Mat.

So here, now, we are left to explain the inexplicable, to catch sight of the invisible. The following sentence is attributed to the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi: “Love is invisible, except here, in us.”¹ What does that mean? Let’s consider it from three different perspectives.

First, let’s look from the perspective of true Masters – human beings like ourselves who, through intense effort and the grace and guidance of their own Master, have risen above the limitations of the physical, purified their mind and soul, and merged back into the Father.

Rumi was such a saint. So, when he says, “Love is invisible, except here, in us,” one of his meanings might depend on the word “us.” Perhaps by “us” he means realized souls such as himself, who are, as the Bible says, “the Word made flesh”² – the Shabd in human form. They are thus visible manifestations of that divine energy or love. So, Rumi’s first meaning could be rephrased as, “Love is invisible, except in the form of a true, living Master.”

Who are these Masters? “True” means that they have transcended this physical plane, as well as the higher mental and spiritual planes, to become one with the Lord. His will is their will. They live only to love him and to serve him.

“Living” means they come to this world, take on a human body, and work to rescue a specific group of souls allotted to them from the cycle of birth and rebirth. They are alive at the same time as their disciples are.

They come only for their disciples’ benefit. They gain nothing, and they sacrifice much, as they have to take on a human form, with all its illnesses and problems. They act only out of love – working only in service to their Master and the Lord, and to the souls they are sent to save.

For examples of those who have given everything they have in the service of their disciples, we need look no farther than the Beas Masters: Baba Jaimal Singh, Maharaj Sawan Singh, Maharaj Jagat Singh, Maharaj Charan Singh, and the current Master, Baba Gurinder Singh. The Sant Mat books are full of stories about the first four and their devotion to their Master, their duty, and their sangat. How they worked endlessly to initiate new souls, to inspire the sangat with their discourses, and to improve the facilities at the Dera to serve the increasing numbers of disciples. How, despite serious illness, they continued with their work without thought for themselves. And we witness the same intense love and extraordinary devotion to service in Baba Ji, the same selfless drive to perform the work assigned to him. These Masters are love made visible.

In addition to the work they perform on the physical plane – traveling, speaking, building, initiating – they are working with every disciple within, to help us purify our minds, clear our karmic debts, and grow spiritually. Those processes are normally invisible to us, but sometimes we hear historical accounts or stories from other disciples’ lives that reveal the subtle work that the Masters are constantly performing on our behalf, and the complete understanding they have of our inner state.

There’s a story about a poor farmer in North Africa who became the disciple of the great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi. The disciple was very devout. He used to give away all the food he harvested each day, saving only half a potato for his dinner. Once he learned that a fellow disciple was about to leave on a trip to Spain, where Ibn Arabi lived. The poor farmer asked his friend to visit their Master and bring back some spiritual advice for the farmer, who was feeling that he hadn’t made any spiritual progress in many years.

His friend traveled to Spain and made his way to the town where Ibn Arabi lived. He told the Master about his friend and asked if he had any spiritual advice for him. Ibn Arabi said, “Tell your friend his problem is that he is too attached to the world.”

Too attached to the world?! This was a very devout man who gave away virtually everything he harvested everyday. What was the Master saying?

When the man returned home to North Africa, his friend, the poor farmer, asked eagerly if he had had a chance to meet with their Master. The friend repeated for the farmer exactly what Ibn Arabi had said. The farmer broke into tears, saying, “Every night, when I have my half a potato, I wish it were a whole potato.”³

Living in Spain, Ibn Arabi understood the deepest, subtlest imperfection in one of his disciples, who lived far away in North Africa. He saw that although the poor farmer gave away almost everything physically, he still held on mentally, still desiring that which he had given away. His Master saw the smallest remaining attachment that marred this otherwise pure soul.

The Master knows everything about each of his disciples and what he or she needs in order to develop spiritually.

So, these Masters are extraordinary beings – living in a human body but rooted in the Divine and fully in contact with it. Their role is to live among us and be a magnet that attracts us toward themselves and away from the world.

In Philosophy of the Masters, Maharaj Sawan Singh wrote:

If you wish to see Love, you should meet a lover [true Master]. Then you will discover its unique currents. A lover is like a cup which is overflowing with the Elixir of Love, and by looking at him a desire to follow him is awakened.⁴

So that’s the first way of looking at Rumi’s statement that the Master is love made visible.

A second possible meaning of Rumi’s statement – “Love is invisible, except here, in us” – focuses on us as disciples. If we now take the word “us” to mean followers of a mystic path, then the meaning is very different. But clearly he can’t mean that each of us as we are is as true an expression of love as the Master is.

Instead, perhaps he’s laying out a challenge to each of us. He’s saying, love is invisible, except inside us. He’s telling us that we have that potential within us: not only to see God but to become God.

That is the basic message of the Masters: through initiation by a true, living Master, a disciple can overcome the barrier of the mind, which currently blinds us to our real condition, and become purer, finer, and more subtle through our daily meditation practice, living the Sant Mat way of life, and the Master’s grace. With that increasing purity, the disciple rises above the physical and mental worlds and comes in direct contact with the spiritual realms inside, where love is the law.

In The Dawn of Light, Great Master wrote: “This huge machinery of the universe is worked on the eternal principle of love. So try to bring yourself in harmony with this principle of love.”⁵

But that is not so easy, because of the way we humans are made. In Discourses of Rumi, Rumi describes our situation:

There are three kinds of creatures. First there are the angels, who are pure [spirit]. Worship and service and the remembrance of God are their nature and their food: that they eat and by that they live…. If they obey God’s will, that is not accounted as obedience, for that is their nature, and they cannot be otherwise.

Secondly there are the beasts, who are pure lust, having no [spirit] to prohibit them.

Lastly there remains poor man, who is a compound of [spirit] and lust. He is half angel, half animal…. He is forever in tumult and battle. “He whose [spirit] overcomes his lust is higher than the angels; he whose lust overcomes his [spirit] is lower than the beasts.” …

Now some men have so faithfully followed their [spirit] that they have become entirely angels and pure Light. They are the prophets and saints.…

In some men lust has overcome their [spirit], so that they have taken on entirely the status of animals.

Some again are still struggling. These last are the people who feel within them an agony and anguish, a sorrow and a repining; they are not satisfied with their own manner of life. These are the believers. The saints are waiting for them, to bring them to their own station and to make them as themselves.⁶

So, we’re half angel and half animal, forever in battle within ourselves between those two sides of us. The senses pull us outward; the passions pull us downward. And then that inner pull from the Divine lifts us and inspires us, telling us that we are more than this body and mind; that the world around us is only a shadow; that Reality is just beyond the limits of our vision.

And so it goes on. We can yield to the mind and senses and fall to the level of an animal, as Rumi described. Or we can continue to fight against the downward forces and align ourselves with the upward pull. The Master guarantees that, once we’re initiated, he will ensure that the upward pull will win, through our own efforts at meditation and his endless grace, so that we grow spiritually to achieve the potential that lies within every human being: to love God, to serve God, to become God. We can unite with Love, as Baba Ji puts it. Love will then be visible within us.

A third possible meaning of Rumi’s statement again lays out a challenge, but of a different sort. It asks us not just to do our meditation, but to live the Master’s teachings in our daily life. It asks us to demonstrate love in action. We could rephrase the sentence to read: Love is invisible, except here, in our dealings with others, in how we treat people, and in how we respond to those who harm us or threaten to harm us.

Aldous Huxley, in his book The Perennial Philosophy, which explores the common features of all the great spiritual traditions, writes about the objective of following a spiritual path:

The aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which … they are able to be aware continuously of God in themselves and in all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all … circumstances of daily living [even the most trivial] without hatred, greed, or ego, but consistently with love and understanding.⁷

This is making our love visible. If we’re living the path as the Master wants us to, people can watch us and see that there is something different about the way we interact with others. Our love is visible in our actions. This is what Hazur meant when he said that we can’t just do our daily meditation and then forget about it; we have to carry the path into our daily dealings with other people, act like good human beings, and behave in a way that makes our Master proud.

But can we actually reach that high standard? Can we really meet all circumstances of our life without hatred, greed, or ego, but consistently with love and understanding? For most of us, probably not.

In Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh wrote:

It is true and very true that Christ lived a pure, sublime life. His Sermon on the Mount gives his moral teaching and is the beacon of light for the guidance of humanity. The strength to live up to this teaching he derived from the practice of the Word, the Sound Current.⁸

Great Master is saying that until we have substantial contact with the Word, the Shabd, we can’t fully meet that high standard we described earlier. The passions simply still have too tight a hold on us.

So, do we give up and say, “I’ll act like an idiot until the Shabd has transformed me”? No, we try our hardest to be good human beings, as Baba Ji asks us to – trying to restrain our temper, forgiving others as much as we can, trying to understand others rather than looking at things from only our perspective, and so on. Most important, we continue with our meditation, to the best of our ability, because that’s the arena in which the real transformation will take place.

Speaking of what Dera means, Maharaj Charan Singh once said, “The Dera is just your love, your harmony, your affection, your understanding and your cooperation with one another.”⁹

And talking about whether or not to build a satsang centre, he said, “It is all right, as long as you can retain that atmosphere of meditation, of love and helpfulness and kindness.”¹⁰

What a beautiful list of attributes in those two statements! Holding meditation aside as an essential foundation for all the others, he listed love, harmony, affection, understanding, cooperation, helpfulness, and kindness as guidelines for our behaviour toward each other. What a sweet recipe for a beautiful atmosphere! And they all flow from our meditation practice.

Here’s how Hazur described it:

You see, we must not forget our meditation when we start our worldly activities during the day. Its effect should remain with us. It fills us with certain noble ideas, noble thoughts, noble principles, and we shouldn’t start compromising with them during our daily activities. Our meditation must reflect in all our activities in life. It automatically makes you kind, makes you humble, makes you loving, makes you helpful. You don’t try to cheat anybody, you don’t try to deceive anybody, and you don’t want to hurt anybody. It must reflect in our daily activities – this is our way of life.¹¹

Now it’s easy to understand that we should be kind, loving, helpful, understanding, and cooperative with our friends, family, and co-workers, and also people like shopkeepers and mail carriers. But what about those who seek to harm us, those who hate us, whether it’s an unfriendly neighbour, people from an opposing political party, or terrorists?

In the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible, Christ is quoted as saying:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust…. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.¹²

Hazur commented on this, saying in Light on St. Matthew: “Christ says, why am I giving you such a high philosophy? Because you want to become the children and the beloved of the Father. The Father has all these qualities, so you must also possess them if you want to become his children.”¹³

This is another aspect of love in action.

So, in conclusion, we’ve looked at three different ways in which love becomes visible: first, in the form of a true living Master; second, within us in our meditation; and third, in our actions, when we live according to the teachings of the saints.

Whether it’s visible or invisible, love is the heart of everything.

This path is about love and love only. Anything we can do to strengthen love, develop it, share it, is all to the good, although it’s really a gift in the end. But, somehow, we can help it to grow – by giving. As Hazur said:

In love we always give. If we demand anything, that is no love at all. Love is giving.… And when by giving we can become God, what else is left?¹⁴

Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks), The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting, p.26
Bible, John 1:14
Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak, Love Is the Wine: Talks of a Sufi Master in America; Hohm Press, 2014, pp.18–20
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p.238
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, Letter #4
Discourses of Rumi (tr. A.J. Arberry), pp.89–90
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p.43
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 104
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #143
Ibid., #170
Ibid., Vol. II, #509
Bible, Matthew 5:43–45, 48
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on St. Matthew, p. 36
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #597

2020 Spiritual Hindsight - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

2020 Spiritual Hindsight

When COVID-19 becomes a thing of the past, how will we remember the time we spent in quarantine? The weeks and months we spent isolated from the sangat, our communities, and sometimes even our families? With 2020 hindsight, how will we feel about the year 2020?

Let’s hope we feel blessed rather than burdened. Grateful rather than resentful. Let’s take steps now to create both a present and a future where blessings and gratitude are part of the fabric of each day, part of the attitude we have toward the strangeness of this time. Hazur Maharaj Ji said: “If you can take what comes to you through Him, then whatever it is, it becomes divine in itself; shame becomes honor, bitterness becomes sweet, and gross darkness clear light.”¹

What came was a minuscule virus, many times smaller than the width of a hair. Its presence has made us rethink our lives. Do we see this just as a disastrous plague, or can we view the virus from a higher perspective and discover the gifts of this time?

Perhaps seeing the quarantine, economic havoc, illness and death that rides with COVID-19 as gifts seems nearly impossible. We worry about our children’s education, job security, food supplies, and on and on. But worry and gratitude can’t ride in the same cart together. One pushes the other out, and we know which one we want to sit alongside us during this life’s journey. So how do we go about keeping gratitude with us in the middle of the whirlwind of worry that has been 2020?

As initiates, we understand that we can always take refuge in the Master, in meditation, in simran. We’ve heard that this is a great time to do some extra meditation, to watch more Sant Mat videos, to read the books the Masters have provided. But perhaps we struggle with doing any of that. Perhaps an extra five minutes of meditation is all we can sit through. (That’s okay – the Master will take it!) Perhaps we want to watch Netflix instead of the RSSB YouTube channel or read mysteries instead of spiritual literature.

That’s all right. We’re simply struggling souls, needing to be real while we try to be better. Here we are right now, on the website, reading, thinking about Sant Mat, absorbing the teachings. If we click off and turn to a Bollywood movie or an adventure story, we’re not violating any code of conduct.

We may spend these isolated days trying to corral children, dancing through exercise videos, moving from one Zoom meeting to the next, and cooking, cooking, cooking. Or alone, watching the clock creep forward. Either way, we can repeat simran, those words we’re placing like priceless jewels into the velvet darkness of the eye center. We can practice being grateful for what we have rather than regretting what we’ve lost or never had.

An attitude of gratitude is closely bound to our attempts to surrender. How tightly we’ve held on to our beliefs and opinions and certainties! And what misery that tight grip has often brought us. If instead we can give up trying to solve everything, trying to figure it all out, and let every problem be the Master’s problem – what a relief. What a burden off our shoulders.

The year 2020, with its unique problems, might be the perfect time to let Baba Ji take care of us. Sure, we’ll do our part to help ourselves and each other, but all those things we don’t know how to fix – we can let Him manage those troubles.

Great Master wrote to a disciple in Spiritual Gems: “Your worries and cares are Master’s worries and cares. Leave them to him to deal with. Having become carefree, your business is to cultivate his love.”² The Master’s words of comfort are true for all times – decades ago when he sent them to a faraway disciple as well as today when so many of Baba Ji’s disciples are far away from his physical form. No matter the distance, his message stays true. Imagine! Even in such times as these, we can hand off our worries and be carefree.

We want to know these days are gifts both while we live them and when we reflect on them in hindsight. Leaving our problems at the Master’s feet and turning to the cultivation of his love ensures that we will remember 2020 as a blessed year.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. 1, (1964), p. 94
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter #117

MAN IS A GOD IN RUINS - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Man is a God in Ruins

Every now and then, we find a quote that reminds us of the teachings of the Saints even though the quote is not from Sant Mat Literature. One such quote is from the 19th-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had had a degree in Divinity from Harvard, was a Unitarian minister at one time, studied the Vedas, and translated the poetry of Hafiz.

A man is a God in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.¹

The ideas contained in this quote remind us of the teachings of the early Christian mystics, the Sikh gurus and the modern perfect Masters including Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh and the present master, Baba Ji. They tell us that the soul is part and particle of the Lord. The Lord is within us. In Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikh writings we are told, the body is the living temple of the Lord. But we have let this temple fill with dirt, a place not fit for the Lord to enter.

The singer Lady Gaga was asked, “What was it like to become famous?” Her response was, “I was always famous; people just didn’t realize it yet.”

Likewise, Lord is within us but we just have not realized it yet. The divine presence is within us, and when we scrub away the coverings of this soul, all that is left is divinity – we are gods. The soul is like a diamond trapped in a seam of coal and buried beneath the ground. The diamond does not know that it is not coal. Our soul is trapped in the coverings of mind and body; it is covered in the dirt of ego, pride, anger, attachment, and lust. Our true nature is the same nature as the Lord but we think we are coal; we think that we are our personality, our race, our caste, our education, our job and our family.

Let us think of a great palace, or a wonderful home that has been left to decay for centuries. The walls are crumbling; the ceilings have fallen in; rats, mice, spiders, snakes, and alligators are wandering around. Such a place needs a restorer, a craftsman who can restore the property to its full glory.

Just as a palace in ruins has a restorer, just as a body in ruins needs a doctor, a soul in ruins needs a true living Master or Sant Satguru. In order to restore our soul to its full glory we need to take instruction from one who has achieved this – someone who, in fact, has been sent by the Lord to rescue us from this decrepit condition.

And what is the wood and paint needed to restore these ruins? It is Shabd and Nam.

The Saints teach the practice of Surat Shabd Yoga, or the science of the Sound Current, as a practice that will fully restore the soul to its original glory. They teach a technique of meditation that consists of simran, which is the repetition of five holy names given at the time of initiation, and bhajan, which is the practice of listening to the inner sound, the audible life stream, known as Nam, Shabd or Logos, as it is referred to in the Bible. Simran and bhajan are the soap and water of the cleaning and restoration process.

By following the teachings of the Master we are transformed. The broken-down house full of filth and mold becomes a shining palace. The wreckage of lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride is replaced by chastity, charity, forgiveness, detachment, contentment, and humility.

Emerson describes in Volume VII of his journals the manner in which the Sufi mystic Hafiz tended to his disciples:

Here was a man who occupied himself in nobler chemistry of extracting honor from scamps, temperance from sots (drunkards), energy from beggars, justice from thieves, benevolence from misers. He knew there was sunshine under those moping churlish brows, elegance of manners hidden in the peasant, heart-warming expansion, grand surprises of sentiment in these unchallenged, uncultivated men, and he persevered against all repulses until he drew it forth. Now his orphans are educated, his boors are polished, his palaces are built, his pictures, statues, conservatories, chapels adorn them: he stands the prince among his peers and the prince among princes.

We are scamps, sots, beggars, thieves, boors, and misers and uncultivated people, but the saints know of the sunshine that is under our churlish brows. The saints see us in our ruined state, full of dirt and sin, but they are not repulsed. The doctor does not run from the diseased patient but rather cures him. The saint does not judge us, for he knows our condition and its causes. Rather, the saint has come to restore us to our true destiny.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh describes the process of restoration:

The saints who impart the divine knowledge make us humble and meek by enjoining service with the body, wealth, mind, and soul. The service of the body rids us of our ego and we cease to trample our fellow beings under our feet. The service with the mind, which consists of taking a vegetarian diet and abstaining from alcoholic drinks and leading a chaste life, weans us from carnal appetites, weakens our worldly attachments, and transforms our tamogun qualities of darkness, ignorance, and inertia; and rajogun qualities of activity and restlessness, into the satogun qualities of rhythm, harmony, and truth.²

The Master is the Master craftsman for the restoration of souls, restoring the God in ruins to its full refulgence. But as we can see from Hazur’s quote, we are called into the Master’s service, in this effort. There is an organization called Habitat for Humanity that builds and restores homes for the very poor. But to participate in this program, the resident must put in many hours of labor to assist in the building process. Likewise, Hazur tells us that we must serve with our body, mind, and soul. We have to put into practice the instructions of our Master. What good is the cure if we keep taking the poison. What is the best service we can give? It is to practice our meditation every day for the full two and a half hours. By making this effort, we are sanding the dirt and grime off the walls and floors of our ruin.

The saint works to make us innocent – to free us from our habits, ego and attachments. When we follow their teachings, we will awaken as from a dream.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh, in the same 1964 satsang quoted above, tells us:

It behooves us, therefore, to avail ourselves of this human body to reach our long forgotten destination, to wake up from this deep slumber which night and day keeps us engulfed in this illusory world, to break this magic spell, to come out of this long-laid swoon, to remove our rose-colored glasses and see the reality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” publ.1836
Quoted from a 1964 satsang published in R.S. Greetings magazine, June 1973

The Use of Our Extra Time - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Use of Our Extra Time

Look upon your time as the most precious thing and go on increasing your time for devotion. With full faith in the Master, derive proper benefit from his gifts. His is always with us, and we do not know in how many ways he is helping us.¹

This quote from the Great Master, written over 100 years ago to one of the first initiates in America, could be from Baba Ji to us in our current global pandemic situation. These early overseas satsangis did not or could not see their Master, did not have satsang meetings, had no or very limited interaction with other satsangis, and had no seva.

But unlike us, they also did not have satsang videos to watch, Q&A sessions by the Master to watch and listen to, phone calls and email to commiserate with other satsangis, and many books to read. Their only sources of Sant Mat information were a few letters from the Great Master, which they were permitted to share with others.

The two books that contain these letters, The Dawn of Light and Spiritual Gems, are favourite Sant Mat books for many of us. These letters were written to seekers and satsangis who had no background in the Path or mysticism in general. They clearly describe the essence of the Path, the mystic background of other religions, our priority in life, how to deal with life’s trying situations, and how to adjust our attitude to weather life’s challenges and achieve our objective of God-realization.

Some of the passages from these two books are very relevant to our current situation. We should keep in mind that during the Great Master’s time, satsangis lived through World War I, the 1918 Influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Partition of India.

So there is nothing to worry about the next war or the atom bomb; this very kind of loose, vague talk was indulged in during and at the end of the Great War I, and is also indulged in after floods, earthquakes, famines and plagues. The worry should be about the entry into the eye centre and meeting the Radiant Form of the Master, so that the Master is made a companion on whom reliance can be placed here and hereafter. He who has connected with the Word cannot go amiss in catastrophe or peace. He has a place to go to and goes there, and is not lost.²

The current pandemic situation has caused most of us to greatly reorient our daily lives through mandatory isolation at home. This is a perfect time to spend more time on the spiritual aspect of our lives. We can access a wealth of Sant Mat materials on rssb.org, and watch satsang and Q&A videos on the RSSB YouTube site. More important, we can increase our time for devotion – do our committed 2.5 hours of meditation and more. As the Masters tell us, when we enter the eye centre and reach the Radiant Form of the Master, we will know that He is with us and protecting our soul in all situations.

This world is the plane of struggle. There has never been peace here, nor will there be. Problems of today give place to problems of tomorrow. In a place where the mind and matter are active, there can never be peace. Sorrows and wars of nations or communities, or individuals, shall continue. The soul must seek other planes to find peace. To find peace is the business of the individual. Everybody has to seek it within himself.³

The Saints constantly remind us that we can never find peace and happiness in this ever-changing physical world. We can only find it within ourselves and this can only be accomplished through meditating on the Word and engendering the grace of the Master.

Do not be anxious. The Master is taking care of you every instant. You cannot see it now, but as you advance in your journey, you will see it yourself.⁴

To understand what our Master is doing for us, how He is protecting us, we must go inside. It is easy to talk about how the Master is taking care of us, but at our level these are just words; we must experience it for ourselves, inside.

...whatever good or bad happens to you, through whatever person or object, directly proceeds from our loving Father. All persons and objects are but tools in His hands. If an evil befalls you, think it as His greatest mercy. We have to suffer for our past actions sooner or later.⁵

Everything that happens to us, whether we think it good or bad, “directly proceeds from our loving Father.” We are paying off the karmas we created in previous lives and the Master is helping us go through them.

It is difficult to be happy in calamity, but you will find much change if you look at it from the viewpoint just stated [to reconcile ourselves with what is happening]. Guru Nanak, a great Saint, said: “Misery is medicine and pleasure is disease, because in pleasure the mind scatters and in adversity or misery it contracts.⁶

In summary, in trying environments as we now are experiencing, the Master tells us just to focus on why we are on this Path – God-realization – and take advantage of all the extra time available to us. He knows what we are going through and is taking care of us.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, letter 5
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, letter 72
Spiritual Gems, letter 148
The Dawn of Light, letter 19
The Dawn of Light, letter 4
The Dawn of Light, letter 66

I Will Show You My Form - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

I Will Show You My Form

Hazur Soami Ji Maharaj opens one his shabds with the following couplets,

Listen, dear soul, and let me explain:
Unique and wondrous is my real form,
which no one can perceive until I lend a hand.
Practise meditation and subdue your mind
by holding your sense impulses in check.
Raise your soul – rise up through the sky of Trikuti
and go beyond the top of Sunn.
I will show you my form as Sat Purush, the true Lord,
and then as the Lord of Alakh and Agam.
Beyond them is the stage of Radha Soami,
where I am manifest in my own true form.¹

It is impossible to comment on these lines. They need to be experienced in order to be understood. But they also set out the final destination that we are all searching for. Reaching Alakh and Agam and experiencing the region of Radha Soami is our goal. Even if we have no experience of them now, perhaps we have just enough knowledge of the teachings to know that our goal is to merge into oneness. We also have Soami Ji’s assurance that he will show us the way to our final destination.

We need a goal or an ideal to motivate us towards putting in effort to reach our destination. This ideal also works as a touchstone we can use to check if our behaviour reflects our ideal. These lofty opening couplets of the shabd give us hope of a future beyond our imaginings. But how do we become closer to these pure regions? What do we have to do on our journey? Do we passively wait to merge as the Lord wills it or do we have an active, participatory role to play in our own becoming?

In these couplets Soami Ji also begins to lay out the relationship between effort and grace. He tells us that nothing will happen until he lends a hand. If that is so then can’t we just wait until he pushes us into the experience of these mysterious regions? Why do we have to bother doing anything? But he also tells us that we have to practise meditation and subdue our minds. On one hand we need his helping hand but on the other we need to meditate in order to experience that the Lord is the doer. We are participating in our own becoming by showing our master, by our meditation, that we cherish his commands. There is comfort and contentment that comes with our efforts no matter how feeble they may seem to us. The master doesn’t judge our efforts but accepts them with pleasure. The teachings assure us that his helping hand is always there, but it is the practice of simran that slowly but steadily grounds us in the experience of his grace.

Soami Ji Maharaj continues by saying, “Have patience, keep the company of the Saints and I shall purify you through my grace. I shall not rest till I show you that form – why are you in such a hurry?” He reminds us that there is no hurry to reach our goal. We cannot get there quicker than the Lord wills. He tells us that it is his grace that will take us to our destination – and of most importance, that he will never give up on us and he will continue, no matter where our circumstances lead us, to work towards revealing the true form of the Lord to us. It is the guru’s will that we will reach our goal and there is no force in the creation that can circumvent that power. If the shabd wills something, then it will manifest. It is an irresistible force.

And that power, that will of the Lord, that shabd, our master, has decided that we deserve to experience the truth. That is our destiny. He says that he will purify us through his grace. To be able to have an experience of the purity that is the shabd, the vessel needs to be pure first; otherwise the shabd will stay buried inside us, hidden under layers and layers of “me and mine.” To purify us could mean suffering, ill health, a loss of funds, problems with family or any other experience that will turn our mind from the world to towards him. The journey to purity could be painful and we will need to do all we can to maintain balance and a positive perspective in order to remember that our destiny is to be recipients of his grace.

He is saying then, that karma is grace and grace is karma. He gives us only that which will help him to take us as quickly as possible to the inner regions of bliss and love. Everything that happens to us is his grace. We tend to think of grace as a shower of rose petals or our guru changing our karmas so that we don’t have to suffer too much. But the guru is objective, he sees us for who we are and then does all in his power, by exercising his grace, to lead us at a quick march towards the ocean of love. If this means suffering to purify us, then so be it, it is suffering we will get.

But Baba Ji has also said that we don’t need to feel the pain of the suffering. We can take a painkiller if needed. We must go through the event but we can mitigate the suffering as best we can. We must, no – we need – to go through our karmas, as they help to lighten the weight of our ego bearing down on our mind. If we keep our balance on the karmic highway, then our road runs straighter and our suffering is mitigated. It is simran that will give us the objectivity to see our situation as it is and then accept whatever happens to us as his will. With focus come positivity and a grateful heart. Simran and bhajan are the antidote to pain. They create peace of mind which gives us the strength to bear whatever it is that unfolds in our destiny.

Couple that with Soami Ji’s words, “I will not rest till I show you that form…” These words give us so much comfort and confidence. He never rests from his seva of helping us to our final destination. We have nothing to fear or to be worried about. His love never falters or weakens. It is constant and complete. We are the sole focus of his attention.

Soami Ji Maharaj then says, “I carry your burdens in my own heart, so that you may be free of worries and nurture my love in your heart.” With those words the guru lifts all fear from our mind. We have no burdens and no worries. He is the supreme doer and we are the vessel for his love. Fear, worry, ego and anxiety are illusions. They have no power or permanence except what we give them.

Stress is self-made and not inherent in any situation. Something terrible can happen to us, but if we stay positive and happy in his will, then it can be bearable and not a creator of fear or worry. Usually our reaction or fear about what will happen to us is worse than the event itself. We create the stress and anxiety. We can let go of them and give him our burdens to carry. For him they weigh less than nothing. If we hold on to them, then they weigh more than the universe.

His words are so reassuring. But are we brave enough to trust him? Are we bold enough to let go of fear and worry? Our only experiences have been of suffering coupled with fleeting moments of pleasure. It takes trust and a fearless leap into love to give him our burdens. But if we do let go then we can nurture his love in our hearts. We think it is we who love him, but in truth his shabd inside us is love, and only love. He asks us to nurture that love and let it blossom. It isn’t our love rising up to meet his love, but his love rising up from inside us to merge with his love. If we give him our worries, then all that is left is the shabd inside us and it will purify our hearts. It is simran that gives us the focus to hand over our burdens to him. It gives us the strength to let go. It is the shabd which will then purify us.

He continues by saying, “Give up your misgivings, and be steadfast in your love – a love tempered with faith. I shall myself take you to your ultimate home.” Soami Ji suggests that we have doubts and misgivings about the path. If we had full faith in the master, then Alakh and Agam would be our home. Instead we struggle along, trying to keep the vows and serve our master. All of us have doubts about the path and the master. Without the experience of the shabd it is impossible to be absorbed in him. But doubt can be a tool to spur us to narrowing the gap between our daily behaviour and our commitment to mediation. How can we overcome doubt, only by the continued practice of simran. Simran will bring us the focus that will allow the love inside us to blossom into consciousness.

How do we become steadfast in our love? If we were steadfast we would have no doubts about the guru or about worries in our everyday lives. Being steadfast is being constant and consistent. But as he says, we need faith in order to become constant. As we haven’t yet had the experience of the inner regions, we need faith that our final home exists, faith in the teachings and faith in the guru.

When we first studied the teachings we had a revelation that we had found the truth. The teachings made exquisite sense to us and lifted a burden from our hearts. We had comfort that the teachings of the Saints made sense of the world and gave meaning and direction to our lives.

The comfort we got from the teachings and from the master is the foundation for our faith. The teachings are as potent and vital now as they were when we first encountered them. But as much comfort as we get from the teachings, we get greater comfort and support from our guru. He is our tower of strength, and our continued devotion to him will make our faith stronger and stronger. Then slowly over time our faith will transform into experience. We nurture that faith by meditation which then strengthens our steadfastness.

The very nature of the guru is love and he manifests that love by saying, “I shall myself help you put in the effort, I shall myself take you to your ultimate home.” He will do everything. He will help us in our effort; he will take us to our ultimate home. But we need to let him do his seva. We need to let him love us. We need to let him help us in our effort.

We work with our guru by dedicating ourselves to simran, which will help us to become constant, objective, and receptive to love. By our effort – of which he is actually the doer – our love for him blossoms. Then we cans relax and enjoy the journey to our ultimate home.

Soami Ji promises that he will take us to our final destination. If we have faith in him then we realize that we have nothing to worry about. We even have nothing to hope for, as we have the assurance of the guru that he will be with us until the end. No matter what our destiny holds in store for us, we will get through it with gratitude and comfort. He is our strength and we don’t need anything more than him. Our destiny is the shabd; it is Alakh and Agam. We will reach our goal and we will reach it with pleasure as long as we are bold enough to give him our burdens.

In the final couplet of this shabd Soami Ji Maharaj writes, “Listen to what Radha Soami has to say: all will be worked out as and when the supreme will ordains it.” There is no hurry or worry. With patience and faith, coupled with accepting his help in our effort, we will reach the supreme goal. We can relax and enjoy the journey. As Saint Catherine of Siena said, “The road to heaven is heaven also.” We will then be contented on our journey, thanking him with every breath.

Bachan 33, Shabd 16, in Sar Bachan (Selections), p. 329–331.

Die While Living- RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Die While Living

The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, once described Sant Mat as “a school of practical training in the right way of living.”¹ Another apt description of the path might be the anonymous stanza:

There is more to life than living,
There is more to death than dying,
There is to die while living.

Those two descriptions, however, do not explain the details. They don’t explain the importance of a living Master whose function is to instruct, guide, inspire and be an example of how to follow the philosophy. They don’t explain the key element of karma, the so-called law of cause and effect – the mechanism that keeps us all in the cycle of birth and death and rebirth among the 8,400,000 species on this planet.They don’t explain the details of right living or stress the importance of daily meditation, of contacting the sound current or Shabd, the life-force or God-force animating all living things. They don’t explain the way out of this creation or the positive steps to salvation.

But they do convey the concept and the importance of the teachings of the Masters, who explain that we are here for a purpose, and that there is more to being here than what appears on the surface. We should reflect on this and do a little investigation.

There is more to life than living. Are we born simply to mature, marry, have children, work to feed and comfort our families, grow old and then die? If that is the case, all the animals do this. What makes us so special? We are told by the saints and mystics that we are the top of creation, that we are made in God’s image, that this human form is Hari Mandir – the temple of the living God. We have that extra faculty of discrimination that makes us stand out from the rest of life on this planet. As Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh explains:

While we are alive, we should gather what is our own here and will remain ours hereafter. This wealth is devotion to Nam; attaching the mind and the soul currents to the Audible Life Stream, the Word or Logos. If we fail to do this, we must again enter again the dark dungeon of the world, where we do not know what pain and privation may await us. Our colossal ignorance of the Reality keeps us forever chained to the wheel of transmigration.²

Hazur tells us that we have a purpose other than just to live from day to day and then die. He tells us that we are in the only form which can take that next evolutionary step, which can understand that grand reality; it is only in human form that we can return to the Lord – through love kindled by meditation.

The author Mikhail Naimy has his character Mirdad explain:

You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of man. And what is it to love but for the lover to absorb forever the beloved so that the twain be one.³

How many times have we heard the Masters tell us that? To merge into the Beloved, as the drop merges back into the ocean and becomes the ocean: that is our heritage, that is our right – that should be our destiny. But this is an ambitious goal, not to be taken lightly. This is not a task that we will start and expect to have completed in a few weeks, months or even years. Let’s try to appreciate the size of our problem. We have been in this creation for many, many lifetimes, and we cannot change our long-established habits overnight, pay off all these long-owed debts in a short time. This is the task of a lifetime.

Several years ago, during evening meetings at the Dera, Professor Bhatnager used to tell us the story of the blind man in a maze. This maze had 8,400,000 walls and only one exit. Because he was blind, the man had to feel for the exit by sliding his hand along the wall as he walked. When he finally came to the exit, he got an itch on his head and removed his hand from the wall to scratch that itch. When he put his hand back on the wall, the exit was behind him, and he had no choice but to go around all the 8.4 million walls again.

Professor used to say that we are all like that blind man. We come to this one exit from the creation – this human form – and then we get an itch, and we scratch it. For some people, that itch is family. For some, it’s religion. For some, money. For some, politics, business, art, self-importance, or sports. Whatever the itch, scratching it stops us from taking the single exit from the wheel of transmigration, and so we are doomed to go around again.

Hazur explains:

This form is bestowed upon us for the sole purpose of attaining God-realization. It is the only exit with which the Lord has provided us to escape from this vast prison house of the phenomenal world. But we get so deeply engrossed in worldly activities and sensual pleasures that we completely ignore the purpose of our incarnation; we chase the shadow but lose the substance.⁴

Nobody ever achieves anything in life if they do things by half, if there is no commitment. This applies to all areas of our worldly as well as spiritual interests. We can’t achieve anything in sports, for example, without a serious attitude, a whole-hearted enthusiasm and determination to succeed, plus a lot of hard work on our fitness, mental concentration, tactics, technique, and a total commitment to the goal. Exactly the same goes for commercial aims. If we want to make a lot of money and be influential, we need all the same attributes plus perhaps a little hardness of heart. Then we can and will achieve our goal.

Do we think that this path of spirituality is so easy that we do not need those same positive attributes? The path to spiritual enlightenment requires the same serious attitude and whole-hearted commitment and determination to succeed if we want to understand reality. We must also develop and apply compassion, discipline, love, and devotion to the Master.

To attain the love that is everlasting, the love in which we lose ourselves, we have to control our mind and attain the necessary concentration at the eye focus. This takes enormous commitment. It takes time and attention. The Master tells us that it is our job to reach the eye focus. This third eye, the stepping-off point to the inner worlds, is our first goal in our quest to contact that Shabd through simran and dhyan – repetition and contemplation. We must gradually achieve total concentration at the eye centre. To reach this goal, we must begin to control our mind instead of allowing the mind to control us. Do we want to continue in this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth in the cycle of 84? If we don’t want to go around that maze of creation again, we must follow the method given to us at initiation in order to free ourselves.

But first, we have to convince ourself that controlling the mind and reaching the eye centre are worth attaining; if we do not have a goal, we can never achieve anything.

This path of the Masters, this science of the soul, is more than a concept. It is a path of repeatable experience, a path of becoming. We must go beyond our usual state of mind, as captured in the old proverb, “After all is said and done, more is often said than done.”

It doesn't matter if we cannot read or write or cannot debate the reason for anything. If we have experienced even a momentary glimpse of the inner light or the faintest echo of the inner music, we know more about religion, life, death, the mind and soul than all the educated, intellectual, rich and successful people of the world put together.

Kabir stated:

If you know the One,
Then know that you know all;
If you know not the One,
Then all your knowledge is nothing but fraud.⁵

In the realm of God-realization, intellectual thinking has no relevance. Book knowledge is of the mind, while realization of the true reality is of the soul. Kabir also asked:

What is there to read? What is there to ponder upon? Of what avail is the learning of Vedas and scriptures? And of what is the use of reading and hearing if they lead not to the state of Sahaj (God-realization)?⁶

How can we gain that direct experience, that love which surpasses all knowledge and intellect and makes life really worthwhile? We must start by listening to the instructions of the Master; we must live according to his advice. He tells us that, as in all facets of life, there are basic rules that we must follow. But note that these rules are really only guidelines – progressing on this path is an individual choice. But the four guidelines explained at our initiation are absolutely necessary if we do wish to achieve God-realization, fulfil the purpose of our human birth and leave our lives of pain and misery behind. We must follow the guidelines religiously, so to speak: without deviation, without compromise, 365 days a year for the rest of our lives. These guidelines include eating a lacto-vegetarian diet; living a clean, moral life; abstaining from mind-altering substances, including alcohol, tobacco and marijuana products; and practicing meditation as taught by the Masters for at least two and a half hours each day.

As Maharaj Charan Singh used to emphasize, this path is not to be followed as a novelty or because someone you know is on it. You must understand the science thoroughly – what it expects of you and what it has to offer. It is a serious subject and should not be taken lightly.

The Masters explain that this path is simple, but not necessarily easy. We get nothing for free in this life, and we must pay for what we get. We also have to keep going, never resting on our laurels. We know what we are supposed to be doing and where we are going. We have a guide; we are on the right road; eventually we will get to our destination. But remember, as Will Rogers reportedly said, “Even if you’re on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.” We must sustain our efforts and never give up. A quote attributed to the American president Calvin Coolidge goes something like this:

Nothing in the world will take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.⁷

We can benefit only from the teachings of the saints. Once our restless mind is satisfied, our soul will be able to shed its karmic load and return to its divine source.

As quoted earlier, there is more to life than living and more to death than dying. From the moment of our conception, we are in a queue – hopefully a long one – for death. The question is, when will our number be called? We must start on this path before death catches up with us. We will never start if we put off meditation until we have some free time, are settled in our career, launch our children into adulthood, or are financially secure or retired. That meditation switch that we think we can flick on when we choose might get stuck or broken, or we might never reach that stage in this life at all. If we procrastinate, our death may come before we begin meditating. So, we can’t put it off; we must begin.

We make our own future. If we have improved the spiritual aspect of our lives through practiSing meditation and living according the three other guidelines, then we should have no worries about death.

There is more to death than dying; there is to die while living. And in The Book of Mirdad we read: “Die to live or live to die.”⁸ Hazur explains:

You must withdraw to the eye center, and then you will live forever. Otherwise, you are just living to die. Every time you live, you have to die, so die to live. Learn to die so that you may begin to live, and live forever.⁹

To ability to die while living is the the result of living life with the purpose of attaining self- and God-realization. The Master tells us this is the main object of our life, what we work for, what we hope for. If we have kept up our side of the bargain we made with our Master, this is what he will give to us.

Great Master said:

This life is for working out that fate. If in this life we give ourselves to devotion, we will not come again, but will go back to our Home. This life is for the purpose of ending our coming back into this world.¹⁰

And to further encourage us, Great Master promises:

You will get everything you wish – things more wonderful and remarkable than you ever dreamed of. He who has to give you all is sitting inside, in the Third Eye. He is simply waiting for the cleanliness of your mind and is watching your every action.¹¹

We clean and calm our mind by regular, constant devotion to the Shabd – daily meditation by which we contact the Audible Life Stream within. Through the grace of the Master and hard work, we can progress to the level which the saints talk about in their scriptures and satsangs and “die through Shabd to live forever.” Master Charan Singh Ji quotes Guru Amar Das:

Through Guru’s grace alone, one dies while living,
And having thus died, becomes alive
through the practice of Shabd:
Such a one attains the gates of salvation
and rids himself of ego.
Die through the Shabd
To live forever,
And never again face death;
With the nectar of Nam
Mind is sweetened forever –
By Shabd alone can one attain it.¹²

Quoted in Daryai Lal Kapur, Call of the Great Master, 11th ed., p.193
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, p.181
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.62
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die To Live, p.7
V.K. Sethi, Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, p.158
Ibid., p.59
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/12/persist/
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, p.20
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die To Live, p.164
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 205
Ibid., Letter 171
Maharaj Charan Singh quoting Guru Amar Das, Die To Live, p.32

In a Dark Wood - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

In a Dark Wood

The first lines of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, begin with the words,

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.¹

Because of the pandemic, it can seem like the whole world now finds itself “lost in a dark wood”. We might have once imagined that our material lives were somewhat predictable; we could visit with family and friends, go to work and school, and celebrate together new marriages, and mourn together our loved ones’ deaths. But no longer. Because of Covid 19, there has been a catastrophic loss of human life. People have lost their livelihoods. No one knows when the recovery will occur. As we are asked to shelter in place, and to stay home, we can feel trapped, constrained, and even imprisoned.

The Persian mystic and poet Hafez offers reliable guidance through these troubled times. The difficult world he encountered in the 14th century sounds similar to our own. He wrote:

Hafez, expect no happiness from this turning sphere, for it has a thousand faults, and does us no favors.² I see nothing that could be regarded as stability in this turbulent world. Nothing of real value.³

Perhaps few of us imagined that our own 21st century world could be this unstable, this vulnerable to a pandemic, and so easily lost.

Our failure to predict what our material existence in 2020 would require has some parallels to our inability to accurately imagine what our spiritual lives might be like. When we were initially drawn to the path of Surat Shabd Yoga, we might have imagined and hoped for swift inner progress. We read in the Sar Bachan Poetry about the inner regions of magnificent light and divine music. Soami Ji wrote:

With the lightning flashes and the heavens resounding, the dazzling scene defies description.⁴ How can I describe the splendour of that matchless world illumined by billions upon billions of suns?...Each day songs of joy are sung in his praise.⁵

And yet the experienced reality of our spiritual journey can be quite different. We might be waking (mid-way in our discipleship) only to find that we appear to be in a dark wood. In meditation, after months and years and often decades, we sit in the darkness and listen only to the silence. We might wonder whether we have lost our way. We ask ourselves, what is wrong with us? We wonder where that early enthusiasm has gone when we first set out to find truth, reality and joy. As Hafez observed, “For love that at first seemed easy turned difficult.”⁶

Thank God, we have the masters, and the saints who have traveled this road to God-realization before us. They encourage us. They remind us of our life’s objective. The masters continually urge us to reassess our priorities and our choices. And they offer us the guidance of the mystics who know their way around the ‘dark woods’. The saints know that such a troubling forest is also holy ground. Such a landscape is frequently in our best spiritual interest and designed to move us forward. As Hazur wrote to a disciple: “It is He who sends us happiness and it is He who sends us pain, depending on what is best for us at the time.”⁷

He wrote in another letter:

All existence is checkered with light and shade. Storms do come and blow away but that should not shake us. If we do our daily duty – the spiritual duty – as promised at the time of Initiation, we will have the strength and confidence, and the mind will be calm and undisturbed because of faith in the Satguru. The Satguru always helps and supports us but, if we are regular in bhajan and simran, we can see and feel what the Master is doing for us.⁸

The Satguru sustains and supports us in the midst of the turbulence in our lives. And the masters recommend that we listen to the testimony of the mystics who have also traveled these challenging woods. Hafez is especially eloquent about the many treasures to be gathered when darkness comes close, when we might feel we have lost our way. Gifts like:

We experience a deep sense of loneliness. We are given the gradual awareness that the only companion that we want and need is the Master. He is the one who can give us eternal companionship. Hafez wrote: “Bring me a trace of the dust from my loved one’s door….I have grown old in exile and estrangement.⁹… Life’s joy would be fulfilled if, for just one day, my daily allowance was to be with you. With you, one year would go by like a day. Without you, one moment seems like a whole year.¹⁰ … What need have I of society, when I have you? Why should I want company, when I can be alone with you? Why should I criss-cross the desert, when I know where you dwell?”¹¹

The Master is the one who is always near us. Our eyes don’t see very well in the dark. It is not always possible to know the help we are receiving. But the masters assure us that grace, assistance and love accompany us at all times. We are never alone. Yet we experience the pain of separation. As Hazur explained, “…the greater your sorrow, and the more you miss me when I am gone, the more effort you will make to see me within yourself, and until you achieve that goal your effort may be compared to the anguish of a woman in labor.”¹²

Hafez felt the full anguish. “I sigh for poor Hafez whose heart has been driven insane by your absence.¹³ … “Never will my heart ever become used to separation. Never. Your wound is better than another’s ointment. Your poison better than their antidote.”¹⁴

Hafez understood the benefits of his suffering. “Hafez, do not complain of the pain of absence, for in separation there is union, and in darkness, light.”¹⁵

We do what we can do. We might want to still our minds, using the mind, but that is not possible. (Only the Shabd can bring the mind under control.) We might want to surrender our will, but that can only happen when we are no longer following the dictates of our minds. As satsangs are cancelled and as centers close, we might find that even the seva we used to do has been taken away. But now, there is new seva! Baba Ji himself, in his letter to us all, asked us “to show our support and sensitivity by fulfilling our social responsibilities…to stay where we reside, and to restrain from travel that is not absolutely necessary.”

Every time we wear a mask, every time we socially distance ourselves, every time we wash our hands, we are serving the master and the sangat and our brothers and sisters. Every time we offer selfless assistance and kindness to those in need, we are doing seva. We, of course, always have our most essential seva to work on, and that is our meditation. Hafez, says to his master, “Alas I have not yet sacrificed everything to you. Love’s labors means I still have much to do.”¹⁶

So we do what we can, and offer what we have. But it is important to remember that the service we give to our Master always falls short. Hafez freely confessed his own poverty.

“Destitute, broken, I come to your court for mercy. For apart from you, I have nothing myself. No hold on life other than your affection.¹⁷ … My bewildered heart repeats only your name… If the impoverished lover scatters before you the false coin of his heart, do not chide him. For he has no other money.¹⁸ … My heart had resolved never to be without that friend. But what can we do, my heart and I, now that all our efforts have proven vain?”¹⁹

The answer to that question is that we can, and must seek refuge with the one who can help us through this storm. What was true for Hafez, is true for us. “I have no refuge in this world other than your threshold; nowhere to lay my head except at your door.”²⁰

We know that we don’t know. In a dark wood, we can finally understand that we don’t understand at all. We don’t know where we are, or what is happening to us, or what comes next. As Hafez admits, “Hafez, our existence is an enigma. Our answers only fables and spells.”²¹

Once we are thoroughly bewildered, we then have to trust our guide to take us out of here. As we come to realize our own blindness, we turn to the one who has the vision, the experience and the merciful compassion to free us from all prisons. His grace, his protection, and his assessment of when and how we will move forward is what we rely on.

Perhaps one day, we will finally be able to answer the question, ‘who are we?’ The story is told that “someone once asked an old monk to talk about himself. After a long silence, the old monk responded, My name… used to be… Me. But now…it’s You.”²²

In Persian, the word sabr means patience, resilience and endurance.²³ Humbly, obediently, trustfully, we can move gracefully through shadow and light. Knowing that our Master is with us will give us that patience, resilience, and endurance to weather every storm, and to rest, at last, in his arms.

I confided in the wind all my fond hopes.
Trust in God’s grace, the wind replied.
The evening supplication, the morning prayer
Are the keys to the treasure you are searching for.
Go forth this way and the road will lead you
To the one who is the keeper of your heart.²⁴

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (The inferno), Canto 1, lines 1-3, Dorothy Sayers, tr. (Baltimore: Penguin 1959)
Hafez: Translations and Interpretations, Geoffrey Squires tr., (Oxford, Ohio, Miami Univ. Press, 2014) p. 49
ibid. Pg. 210
Soami Ji (Shiv Dayal Singh), Sar Bachan Poetry, (RSSB, 2002), p. 11
ibid. Pg. 15
Hafez, op.cit, Pg. 3
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat (RSSB, 1974) p. 132
ibid, Pg. 139-40
Hafez, op.cit, p. 142
ibid, p. 274
ibid, p. 368
Maharaj Charan Singh, St. John the Great Mystic (RSSB, 1971) p. 144
Hafez, op.cit, p. 243
ibid, p. 200
ibid, p. 53
ibid, p. 148
ibid, p. 152
ibid, p. 115
ibid, p. 189
ibid, p. 224
ibid, p. 102
Theophane the Monk, Tales of a Magic Monastery (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 18; in Parabola Journal Vol XVIII, 2, May 1993, p. 62
Hafez, op.cit, p. 263
ibid, p. 294

No Social Distancing with the Inner Master - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

No Social Distancing with the Inner Master

Though you are at the other end of the world,
if I am in your heart, then we are together.¹

The flights are canceled; the trains are abandoned; the roads are empty. Dera is closed to visitors. The Master’s satsang schedule has been put on hold, and only he knows when it will resume. We cannot get to the physical Master.

Yet satsangis the world over long to do just that – watch him enter satsang and touch his head to the dais, then sit rock still and turn his beautiful eyes on us. We want to hear his voice and his laugh.

Because we have no idea when we will see him again, we may feel alone or bereft. However, the saints tell us that every single thing that happens – which must include this physical separation – is a gift from the Lord. They tell us that if we can see life this way, then “bitterness becomes sweet.” For now, we absolutely can’t get to Him on the outside, so what do we have left? How do we turn the sorrow of this separation into a sweet gift?²

Perhaps we can start by taking this time to turn social distancing upside down. Yes, we respectfully keep six feet away from other people, wear our masks, and stay safe at home. But none of these rules apply in our meditation. We’re free to get as close to the Master inside as we want, without a mask of any kind, safe in his Radiant Form. We can trade six-feet-apart for closer-than-hands-and-feet, closer than the scent of a rose. We can be in his presence, whether or not we’re with the body Master.

The story is told of a modern philosopher who was studying meditation. He attended a conference in Japan with his spiritual teacher. The conference was held in a soaring skyscraper with windows looking up to the sky and down to the streets far below. The philosopher, his master, and many colleagues were gathered, ready to listen to words of wisdom by several renowned speakers.

Suddenly the building began to sway back and forth, windows rattled loudly, and tables starting slipping sideways. Earthquake! Horrified, people ran to the doors in a panic, pushing to get to the stairways and down to safe ground.

The philosopher, forgetting everything else, also leapt from his seat and struggled through the crowd.

Then the trembling stopped. The skyscraper was still, the windows quiet.

All at once, the philosopher realized that, in his panic, he’d left his elderly teacher alone. Ashamed, he returned to the room everyone had abandoned out of fear – everyone except the teacher, who was sitting calmly, waiting with a serene face.

Astonished, the philosopher gasped, “Why didn’t you run away? How could you be so peaceful when the rest of us were so terrified? How could you just sit here?”

The wise man replied, “Everyone else ran outside. I ran in.”

Isn’t it time to run in? To find real refuge? To make safe at home mean something greater than a pandemic mandate? By running inside, by letting go of our fear, we develop trust and nurture surrender. After all, doesn’t our greatest fear arise from simply not knowing what will happen with our families and their health, the economy, our children’s education? The world will be reshaped in some fashion or another. Not knowing what that will look like creates anxiety. But, truth is, we never knew. Life has always been a surprise waiting to happen.

We can use this unique time as an opportunity to replace worry, speculation, and information overload with simran, surrender, and stillness – with an openness to possibility rather than fear of uncertainty.

Let’s begin by eliminating any distance between ourselves and our inner Master.

Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, Nobody, Son of Nobody (tr. Vraje Abramian), Hohm Press, Prescott, AZ 2001, #319, p. 64
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. 1, 5th ed.,1987, p. 91

The Master’s Purse - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Master’s Purse

Jesus of Nazareth was once walking through a town accompanied by his disciples. When people started heckling him with unkind words, he responded by praying for their happiness and well-being. Having observed this, one of his disciples asked him, “Master, why are you praying for these people? Are you not offended by their words?” And to this Jesus replied, “I can only spend from what I have in my purse.”¹

True mystics are the perfume of God on earth. They are the fragrance of genuine humility and loving compassion, coming amongst us to wake us up from the dream of physical existence to realize the Truth. To be in the presence of a true Master is to know peace and to see love in action.

However, sometimes the teachings of these loving messengers of truth are either misunderstood or misinterpreted and considered to be a threat. This has happened several times throughout history. Jesus Christ, Hazrat Mansur, Sarmad, Guru Arjan Dev, and Guru Tegh Bahadur were all persecuted by those who feared their message. Looking back, it is difficult to understand why anyone would hurt such compassionate and humane beings whose only purpose on earth is to redeem helpless souls and bring light and love into the world.

Having superior intelligence and the exclusive capacity to discriminate, one would think human beings would have learned from past mistakes. But centuries later, little has changed. Critics still slander, judge and condemn while the mystics, true to their nature, still respond with the same loving kindness.

A well-known story is told of a Zen Master who saw a scorpion drowning in a lake. As the Master reached out to try and save it, the scorpion stung the Master and fell back into the water. The Master tried a second time to save the scorpion, but again it stung him. A disciple who was observing the whole scene asked the Master, “Why are you bothering to save the creature when you know it will sting you?” The Master replied, it is in the nature of the scorpion to sting, and it is in my nature to help. Then, taking a leaf, the Master lifted the scorpion out of the water and saved its life.²

So how do the Sant Mat Masters respond to their critics? What are the contents of their purse?

For years, critics would say, “Why does a spiritual organization need to purchase so much land? Why is there such an ambition to ‘grow’ RSSB? Why not focus on the original purpose of the path?”

During the mastership of Hazur Maharaj Ji, when satsangs were held all over India, the sangat was relatively small. The number of people who came to satsang ranged from 15,000 – 100,000. So in those days, RSSB would rent venues to hold satsangs.

Over the last 25 years, as the sangat was growing, RSSB started building its own properties, setting up facilities that could cater to large-scale crowds. Using the headquarters at Dera Beas as a reference, every center would have the same standardized model which consisted of large sheds that could be used for sangat accommodation at night and then as a satsang venue in the morning; kitchen facilities equipped to cook large quantities of food, ample toilet and bath facilities, extensive onsite parking facilities and first aid services. Special care was taken for all these provisions to be situated within the boundaries of the Society’s own gated property, so as not to cause any disturbance to other occupants in the vicinity.

As and when these properties started taking shape, the Society received many generous offers to rent their premises out for public events and local fairs, etc. But RSSB rejected these proposals keeping their objective in view: to provide convenient access for the sangat to attend satsang – the starting point of the spiritual quest – with a secondary purpose to provide potential support for disaster relief.

One might ask, developing such huge infrastructures requires administration and management – where does RSSB get the hundreds and thousands of sevadars who serve the Master’s sangat with discipline and dedication?

Sevadars are the Master’s spiritual children who have been attending the training school of selfless service for years. Seva or selfless service is a platform that allows every disciple to practice being a good human being. It is an exercise that helps clean the vessel of the mind. Outer seva cultivates humility in the heart of the disciple, which in turn facilitates the inner practice and the real seva – meditation. As the Sufi mystic Hakim Sana’i wrote: “The road your self must journey on lies in polishing the mirror of your heart.”³

The happiness and internal satisfaction that one gets from giving oneself without expectation of praise or reward, cannot be compared to anything else in the world. No amount of money can buy this feeling that arises from every individual’s own personal experience. And it is this feeling that keeps every sevadar coming back for more.

Today, the sangat attendance during the Master’s designated satsang programs all across India ranges anywhere from 40,000 in Hyderabad and Jamshedpur to 400,000 in Indore. And all the centers are well within their capacity of accommodating their visiting sangat and providing them with the comfort and convenience of all the basic needs, which allows them to focus on their spiritual needs.

And with such infrastructures set up all across the country, tremendous support was available to the local governments and to the flood of struggling humanity during the Covid-19 pandemic.

About 250 of RSSB’s centers all across the country were converted into shelters and isolation facilities where stranded migrant workers were warmly welcomed and cared for by loving sevadars, like valued guests in their own home.

Extensive arrangements were also made by RSSB to prepare food for anyone hungry and needy. The Society provided the ingredients, prepared and provided the food, and distribution was arranged through local administrations. So far, more than 24 million food packets have been dispensed over a 30-day period, across 19 states throughout the country. And more than 22,000 sevadars volunteer daily to accomplish this gigantic effort.

No one, even within the RSSB management, could see the big picture. This was the vision of the RSSB Masters; for every state to have a shelter that could service both the needs of the spirit and the body, as and when required, to benefit all the children of the Supreme Father, regardless of status, community, or background. Today, we see the fruit of their foresight which has taken decades to develop. As Baba Ji said in a television interview with Prime Minister Modi, “In future also, whatever we have belongs to the sangat and for the sangat our doors shall always remain open.”

Although the primary duty of a true Master is to connect souls to the Shabd and then take them out of this world back to their original home, they also have another purpose. As we read in The Path of the Masters, the Masters’ mission is …

... to bring light and love into the world, so that all men, not simply his disciples alone, but the whole world may profit. This is a part of his secret work. No one can follow him into the chambers of his retreat and see all the great work that he is doing. While his specific work is for his disciples, he works also for all mankind. There is not a living being in all the world who does not receive benefit from the Master.⁴

The Great Master once said that a true human being has a feeling of sympathy and a loving heart for mankind.⁵ True Masters epitomize the best of all human qualities. They are the light of the world and although they use language to communicate their teachings, it is their actions that speak. It is their actions that offer us a peek at the contents of their purse – superhuman love and compassion. The 19th-century Tibetan Buddhist master Patrul Rinpoche, said this about the Master:

Like a navigator, he unfailingly charts out for us the route to liberation and omniscience. Like a downpour of nectar, he extinguishes the blaze of negative actions and emotions. Like the sun and the moon, he radiates the light of Dharma and disperses the thick darkness of ignorance. Like the earth, he patiently bears all ingratitude and discouragement, and encompasses in the breadth of his mind the vastness of view and action. Like the wish-granting tree, he is the source of all help in this life and all happiness in the next.⁶

An Answer of Jesus, paraphrased in The Way of the Sufi, Idries Shah p. 69
Zen 2.0 Eastern Solutions for the Western World, Javier Guillem (paraphrased)
The Walled Garden of Truth: The Hadiqa; tr. David L. Pendlebury. Quoted in The Spiritual Guide, Volume 2, p.209
The Path of the Masters, Julian Johnson, p. 207
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, page 119
The Words of My Perfect Teacher, by Kunzang Lama’i Shelung; tr.by Padmakara Translation Group, ed. Kerry Brown and Sima Sharma. Quoted in The Spiritual Guide, Volume 2, p.67

Wake Up to Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Wake Up to Love

Soami Ji, the great Saint of Agra, used different voices in his poems to demonstrate the essentials of the mystic path. He did this through poems of love and longing for his own Master or the Lord, with dialogues between disciple and Master or between mind and soul. Some of his poems are “warnings” or “wake-up calls.” He adopts these different positions to show that the Lord is everywhere and in everything. The Lord has no boundaries. It is all him. He is the dog who bites and the man who is bitten.

Even though he had different emphases, every one of Soami Ji’s poems focuses solely on spirituality. He stated repeatedly, as all the masters have done, that we should go on until our last breath with meditation, seva, and satsang. Even if we are too old and frail to get out of a chair, we can still carry on with our meditation.

Ultimately, we will be able to experience reality for ourselves instead of hearing about it or reading about it. In the end, after all the talk and work, our words and emotions will be channeled into devotion – into “the ‘actionless action’ of sitting still in body, with mind focused and listening to the inner sound.”¹ We do this until we realize the radiant form of our Master, which is projected from the Shabd. The beauty of this is described as being so compelling that we can actually become absorbed in that light and move on within it to merge in the Lord.

The following opening of a shabd is a wake-up call in which Soami Ji addresses us ordinary human beings who are just starting out on the meditative path. He says:

None of your companions are truly your well-wishers,
you are surrounded by thieves and you are fast asleep.²

Can this be true? It’s a difficult statement to read. Soami Ji is reminding us that all our relationships are actually based on selfishness.

Until we lose that I-ness, that ego, that selfishness, what else is there for us? At this stage, we are only aware of our sense of individuality, which is a consequence of past deeds, both good and bad. Like the saints, we come to give to some, take from some, exchange goods and services, be friends and foes. Being human, we also have a huge capacity for devotion, which we direct outward and thereby become unduly attached to ideas, things, people, and animals. The Master doesn’t judge us for this, though. Of course, the mind tricks us and uses this very capacity for love against us because our attachments, our beloveds, can bring us back to this world.

Part of the great delusion of maya is that we humans seek permanent happiness in this world, but it does not exist here. We may find some form of satisfaction, but not for long. Although we are the highest species in this creation, gifted with the faculties of discrimination and introspection, our minds wander through the universe and we believe it’s all real. However, Soami Ji says we are “fast asleep”; that this so-called reality is a dream, in that it does not endure.

Everything in the three worlds – physical, astral, and causal – is made possible by the interplay of three attributes, or gunas: satogun, the quality of goodness, peace, beauty, rhythm, and harmony; rajogun, the quality of action, achievement, passion, and pride; and tamogun, the quality of darkness, inertia, ignorance, and decay. Those three attributes are present in this creation in varying degrees, so it is unavoidable that everything arises, comes into being, and then fades away, including our most passionate relationships. We can see that the foundations of matter are unstable and constantly changing. Both scientists and mystics agree that “reality” is an illusion, impermanent; because this creation had a beginning, it also will have an end.

Our greatest strength and potentially our greatest weakness is our human capacity for devotion and our belief that worldly loves can bring us happiness. Unless we find a way to attach ourselves to something lasting and true, our capacity for devotion becomes merely the passion of attachment. People sometimes work themselves to death for their families because the family and social relationships confirm the identity of each individual. Most people are probably not even thinking consciously about themselves but about some issue or problem with their beloveds. There is no doubt we do have happy times with our families and friends, but that pleasure is momentary. As Maharaj Sawan Singh stated:

In a family, the members meet as travellers in an inn, some coming and some going, at their own time. The meeting and parting are determined by karma of individuals – one comes as father, another as mother, another as son or daughter and others as near relatives. Karma determines friends and foes and karma has cast the mould of life. Everybody is running his own race.³

He also referred to our loved ones as “beloved thugs.” A thief or robber simply steals from us, but beloved thugs beguile us so that we don’t even know we have been robbed. Soami Ji also says that we are surrounded by thieves and are fast asleep. The greatest robberies are subtle; it’s not our money and possessions that are stolen, but our time and attention. Our attention is scattered out through the nine “gates” of the body via the senses, whether we are doing good deeds or bad. The Shabd, the enlivening consciousness that sustains us, is being frittered away as the mind, drawn by the senses, drags down the soul with it. This process sounds somewhat mechanical, but because we are dealing with realities that words cannot express, we have to settle for metaphors.

An American mathematician and philosopher once wrote:

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.⁴

This is a great way of describing our karma-created selves, both physical and mental, while also hinting at the fact that we are immersed in the ever-flowing stream of Shabd. God in action is flowing through and around us; it is us, but we’re not aware of it.

The Masters remind us that we cannot run to the jungle to become hermits or cut ourselves off from other humans. We are social beings by nature. In the jungle, we would still have our busy thoughts, busy like bees around a hive (good thoughts) or like flies around dung (negative thoughts). Thoughts are the mind’s watchmen at the gate of our attention. They keep us unaware of the stillness and peace within ourselves until we reverse our attention from “out there” to within our own bodies at the eye centre. Simran is the hook by which we can catch the Shabd.

In his shabd Soami Ji continues:

Wake up to love in the company of the Saints.
Then let the Master dye you
in a colour beyond all colours –
that of the purity of Nam.⁵

“Wake up to love,” Soami Ji says, from the dark dream of trouble and strife. When we wake up to the reality, all we see is love. “Wake up to love” is a beautiful phrase. So many teachers of enlightenment say we must wake up, but they don’t tell us what we are waking up to. Urging us to wake up to enlightenment doesn’t really tell us anything, but “wake up to love” gives us a sense of where we are going – the embrace of the only lasting love, in the company of the saints. Saints are the architects of love. Just as the Lord has designed his creation out of love, his saints, the Masters, refashion us into our original forms of love. As Paltu Sahib says, “Love alone counts in the court of the Lord.”⁶

This everlasting love is accessible to us. We wake up to love over time as we sit for our meditation and repeat simran throughout the day. Eventually, we will become so focussed on and attached to our spiritual guide that we will become aware of his real form, the radiant form, and merge with him. Then, we will see the Creator in his creation, and the whole world will become our family. This love, which the physical form of our Master initially provokes in us, comes from him. We don’t generate it ourselves. It is a gift.

There is an interesting exchange of the Master and disciple recounted In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III. A questioner asks:

Maharaj Ji, it seems clear that the lover needs the Beloved. Does the Beloved have any need of the lover?

And the Master replied:

Yes, but who gives the love to the lover? It is the Beloved who gives love to the lover. The lover thinks he loves the Beloved. The pull in the lover’s heart comes from the Beloved always. It gives the feeling to the lover that he is in love with the Beloved. Actually it is the Beloved who has put that pull in the lover’s heart.⁷

And the Master continues:

Actually, he’s the one who is pulling us from inside and he’s the one who is making us receptive to that pull. He is the doer. He is the puller. We feel that we love when actually he is the one who is loving us, who is pulling us, who is creating that feeling of separation in us.⁸

Love starts with the Beloved. Our capacity to absorb the love of the Lord grows through our spiritual practice. But what happens if we don’t do our spiritual practice? Nothing changes without spiritual practice. Without meditation, there is no inner transformation. Spiritual love doesn’t grow, though emotional reactions might. If we don’t do our meditation, we may simply be reborn.

And if we are doing our spiritual practice, that love will grow, but slowly, so that our minds can adjust to the transformation taking place within us and be purified gradually. It’s a matter of keeping a balance; slow and steady wins the race. What matters is not how we begin on the path but how we finish. Think of all the dacoits and villains who have come across a Master, been initiated, done the work, and been transformed into saints.

It is our inner attachment to our meditation and the Master, the desire to be with him, that will draw us away from all the myriad desires that have been agitating us life after life. Once we have been given the gift of Nam, our destiny – which cannot be avoided but only delayed – is for the mind to finally take control our senses and for our soul to dominate the mind. Ultimately, we will achieve self-realization and then God-realization.

Today, our Master, Baba Gurinder Singh, is as urgent as Soami Ji was in his time. We don’t have to wait until we think we’re a better person, or more deserving. No change can take place without action: we must wake up to love, and we must do it now.

Sar Bachan Poetry, Translators Note, p. xvi
Soami Shiv Dayal Singh, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.135
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, ltr. 107
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.96
Soami Shiv Dayal Singh, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.135
Isaac Ezekiel, Sant Paltu,p. 27
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #520
Ibid

The Server or the Served - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Server or the Served

In response to a question, Baba Ji once said that in past ages, the disciple went to the Master and asked him what they should do. In this age, the disciples want the Master to come to them and they want to tell the Master what to do.

At first this may sound a bit shocking, but let us think about it. Wherever Baba Ji goes, he is asked, please come to Holland, come to New York, come to Manchester, come to every place. He has made the effort to come to this place, yet we tell him it is not enough. Baba Ji is telling us that in the old days, disciples walked for days, even months to arrive at the feet of the Master. Now we are saying that rather than pay the airfare, or bus ticket, he should come to us. Because of his love for his disciples, and passion for his seva, he accedes to our requests and travels everywhere. He can’t resist.

Baba Ji also mentioned that in the old days, the disciples asked what they should do, but now we want to tell the Master what to do.

How do we tell the Master what to do? Bless me, bless my family, cure my illness, help me pass my exams. Give us more photos, give us recordings, etc. Or, I can’t make the effort, it is your fault, you have to make the effort for me. How fortunate we are that the Master is so kind in his responses. He has no worries about how we treat him but rather he worries about how we treat ourselves. He worries that our failure to grasp the urgency of practicing the proper lifestyle and attending to our meditation will result in delay of our progress and perhaps lead to more suffering. Thus he pleads with us to listen to the teachings and put them into practice. No matter how worldly our question or request, he brings it back to the spiritual.

To sit at the feet of a living saint is great good fortune beyond measure. When we sit at the feet of a saint we are sitting at the feet of all the saints that have come before. But in our childlike state we do not know what we have. If you ask a little child if he would rather have diamonds or cookies, what would he choose? Not truly understanding what the master has to offer, we ask for cookies and cake. Photos, recordings, health, prosperity, these are the cookies. Will a diet of cookies help us lose our karmic weight? Or, rather is it the diamonds that we can use to pay off our karmic load?

The saints tell us that we do not know what is good for us. Then how can we ask for anything but the grace to make our effort, to ask for Him. A poor dog in a tiny cage in a shelter prays for someone to come and take him home. The first person comes in and rejects the dog. The dog thinks, “God, why are you forsaking me?” The dog did not know that this person would have kept him tied to a tree in the bitter cold and pay it no attention. A second person came and rejected the dog and the dog thought, “God, why are you forsaking me?” Little did the dog know that this was a person who only wanted a guard dog at night and so would keep him caged all day. Then a happy boy and girl came and begged their parents, “Please let us take this dog home.” The little dog lived in a house full of love and happiness. The grace of the Lord was always there for this poor dog; he just could not see it. We sometimes bemoan what comes our way but we do not see the bigger picture. So perhaps it is best just to pray to live in His will.

But this brings up the question, do we strive to serve the Master or do we constantly demand that he serve us? Are we the server of the one to be served?

Of course the Master is only service, it is all he knows how to do. His life is totally dedicated to his disciples. To paraphrase Baba Ji in an evening meeting at Dera: “I am the only one who gets up in the morning and does not have the choice to do seva.”

He is doing everything for us at every moment. He cannot choose not to serve his disciples. Yet whenever we are not living up to the teachings, whenever we miss our meditation we are choosing not to serve him.

In Philosophy of the Masters, Great Master wrote:

The Lord’s will and man’s free will are mentioned many times in the writings of the Gurus. If by the Lord’s will it is meant that everything that happens is bound to happen and that man’s efforts are of no avail whatever, then what was the use of the Gurus incarnating themselves again and again to make spiritual discourses and putting out scriptural writings? The Gurus say that it is necessary for us to make our own efforts, but these should be made in accordance with the will of the Lord.¹

We ask our questions but in our hearts we already know the answer. It is mediation, meditation, meditation, with some seva as well. Great Master tells us that if our efforts were to no avail, why would the Saints make the effort? Baba Ji makes the effort to come and begs us to do our part. In the game of serve or be served, we will never win the contest with the Master. He will always give us a hundred, a thousand, a million times more than we can possibly give. But serve we must, give we must. This is being the servant-disciple.

There is no harm in asking the master to bless us. But the saints tell us to bless ourselves. How do we bless ourselves? By putting the words of the Master into practice.

Whatever we ask for, the Master is giving us so much more. We ask Him to shower His grace but are actually standing in a waterfall of grace. When such grace is flowing, why hold our cup upside down waiting for a cup of tea. Rather, in our meditation we turn our cup over and it overflows with grace.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 4, p. 78.

Infinity and Beyond! - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Infinity and Beyond!

Baba Ji has explained that the meaning of the term ‘Puran Guru’, which we have usually translated into English as perfect Master, is more accurately translated as “complete” or “whole” Master.

The most well-known use of this Sanskrit term occurs in the “Shanthi Mantra,” the invocation that precedes the famous Isavasya Upanishad. In it, Pūrṇa (wholeness) is described as the Reality behind every single entity we perceive – whether a human being, an animal, an insect, a plant, a stone, a dust particle – whatever. And what is this reality that is described as ‘Pūrṇa’ or whole? It is a state of completeness, of undifferentiated infinity. It cannot be reduced. One can call it God. If you take away the Whole from the Whole, you are still left with the Whole. This of course defies logic – if you take away everything from anything, how can you be left with anything?

However, there is one entity that does follow this rule – infinity. If we take away infinity from infinity, we are still left with infinity! What the “Shanthi Mantra” is telling us is that each one of us is actually infinite, not the finite being confined to space and time that we perceive ourselves as, but that our true essence or reality is infinite. We could say that this is the Shabd. This is not an unscientific assertion. Albert Einstein conveyed the same thought in a powerful way:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. …Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.¹

Through the above definition of a “human being,” Einstein is grappling with the question that Baba Ji has called central to all our quests – the answer to the all-important question, “Who am I?” Einstein echoes what Sant Mat, the Upanishads and other spiritual texts convey to us – we are not just a part of the universe, but actually the whole, the entire. The critical thing is to realize it. As Baba Ji has pointed out, as long as ‘self’ dominates and we focus on ‘what about me?’ to the exclusion of others, we have not taken even the first step towards realizing our wholeness. We need to broaden our outlook to include more and more of the others – and finally identify ourselves with the totality, the whole One who includes all within himself. It is in that sense that Baba Ji has stressed that we are all potential ‘Puran Gurus’ – for the ‘Puran’ factor is already present in each one of us. The playwright and philosopher George Bernard Shaw put the same thing this way:

When you are asked, ‘Where is God? Who is God?’, stand up and say, ‘I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends’.²

But ultimately, however hard we may try to accomplish the above goal, we can never really achieve it on our own. It is good to set it up as an ideal worth striving for, but it falls in the same category as humility and nishkama karma. As Baba Ji has explained, states such as humility, nishkama or complete selflessness cannot really be achieved. When they come, they come – purely as a gift from the Lord. The route to getting this gift lies through meditation. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said, our meditation provokes the grace of the Master.³ ‘Provoke’ is a word normally used in a somewhat negative sense – e.g., we are provoked, or goaded into losing our temper. We need not have lost our temper, but the weakness called ‘anger’ present in us forced us to lose our temper. Maharaj Ji uses the same word in a positive sense. The Master, too, has a weakness – love. When we stick to our meditation despite getting no results, his love cannot help but reward us with his grace. Our effort does not make us deserving of the grace, and yet results in it because of the Master being all love.

Therefore, a Puran Guru plays a critical role in converting our failures into success. Baba Ji has often reminded us not to translate this phrase as ‘perfect’ Master, because we then confuse spiritual completeness with physical perfection. For example, when he falls ill, we have doubts and wonder how could the master become ill? When he makes mundane mistakes, we are surprised. By doing so, we are confusing the body guru with the real guru, which is shabd, and shabd alone.

When a Puran Guru functions at the level of body and/or mind, he does so just like any of us. He can get tired while travelling, he could trip and fall, he can fall ill. He is setting an example for all of us – how to function in this imperfect world using an imperfect body and an imperfect mind. We often look up to him for ‘perfect’ answers. The important thing to notice is his reaction – how different it is when compared to how we react when we feel things have gone ‘wrong’. He never regards anything as having gone wrong, and so it doesn’t affect him in the least. Why? Because he lives in the Lord’s Will. He doesn’t brood or dwell over the ups and downs of life. In other words, he doesn’t get affected by the so-called failures or human imperfections of life as we do. That is because he identifies himself with the whole, not the parts. What happens to the ‘parts’ – the body and the ego – does not bother him in the least. This is a consequence of the completeness he feels within himself – he is at one with the shabd within. Therefore, it is better to call such a person a complete or whole Master, rather than a perfect Master.

The New York Times, 29 March 1972
George Bernard Shaw, “The New Theology” in The Religious Speeches of Bernard Shaw, ed. Warren S. Smith (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963; Vol. 43, p. 192
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 466

You Ask for a Message - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

You Ask for a Message

Someone once asked the Great Master to send him a special message. And the Master replied:

You ask for a message. The message is that you develop the power to withdraw your attention, at will, from the outward objects and from the physical body, and concentrate it in the eye focus.¹

Here, in this letter preserved in Spiritual Gems, the Master is reminding us of what we need to do to walk on this path. His advice is the foundation of the inner path. It is a simple instruction, yet many of us find it very difficult to do. Nevertheless, we know that if we don’t take the Master’s message seriously, we won’t be able to progress or achieve anything worthwhile in this life. ‘Withdraw your attention at will from the outside world and concentrate it at the eye focus,’ the Master said. It sounds so simple.

We are reminded of the story of the Punjabi saint Bulleh Shah and his master, Inayat Shah, who was a gardener. Bulleh Shah was watching Inayat Shah as he planted onion seedlings. Inayat Shah asked him who he was, and why he had come.

Bullah replied, “Sir, my name is Bullah and I wish to know how I can realize God.” Inayat Shah said, “Why do you look down? Get up and look at me.” As soon as Bullah raised his head and looked at Inayat Shah, the Master again cast His glance, full of love, shaking Bullah to his very depths. He said, “O Bullah, what problem is there in finding God? One’s attention only needs to be uprooted from here and planted there.” This was enough for Bulleh Shah. He got what he wished for.

Inayat Shah had distilled the essence of spirituality in these few words. He conveyed to Bulleh Shah that the secret of spiritual progress lay in detaching his mind from the world outside and attaching it to God within.²

This story of Bulleh Shah puts things very simply – and makes it sound so easy – move your mind from here – to there! But we know it is a lifetime struggle to control the mind and detach it from our worldly concerns, our habits of ruminating and worrying – our favorite distractions, which we invite into our consciousness without thinking of the consequences. But we have to keep at it, to keep making effort to make that slight shift within, and eventually we will succeed. Our habits and attachments will keep pulling us outward, but we have to exert all our willpower to reverse the direction of our mind.

There are probably numerous reasons that we don’t seriously take on this challenge. Perhaps we have a fear of the unknown that makes us hesitate. Or we have gotten into a habit of minimal effort – a routine where we do just enough to dismiss any feelings of guilt, but we don’t really apply ourselves. Or, we might know it is important to put in our effort, but we’ve given up – we’ve gotten hardened and turn our backs to the Master. But the point is that we have to apply ourselves with all our might – as the Bible says, “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might.” Hazur said we have to be honest in our meditation.

In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur Maharaj Ji spells out the challenge:

It is a constant struggle with the mind. It is not so easy to control our mind when we have given it such free rein. It has been spreading into the whole world all of our life, not only in this life but also in previous lives. It has got into the habit of running out and not staying at all in its own place. So naturally, it takes time to curb it, to bring it back, to withdraw the consciousness to the eye centre. It takes time. We want to achieve this in a day or two, but we have to make a regular habit of doing it. When we form a habit of something, automatically we succeed.³

Hazur continued with the example of a child who starts trying to climb the stairs. He struggles very hard; sometimes he falls and may scrape his head, hands, and feet; he again tries and again falls, but he does not stop trying.

You see, we have all come down from the same staircase. We have come down so many steps that we do not feel that we have come from that staircase. At first, in trying to go back up, the very first step seemed like a mountain for us, but now we do not feel those steps at all. How? By regular practice. Once we have made a habit of climbing, now we climb without even being conscious of it. So we have to make a regular habit of concentrating our mind. That is why saints suggest punctuality and regularity in meditation.

Here the Master is reinforcing the importance of consistency and perseverance in our efforts – we can’t stop trying. And in order to keep trying we have to have faith that we can succeed. We have to have the persistence of a baby learning to walk.

Hazur says that our mind and attachments will always try to draw us outward. But there is a much greater pull right from within us, which will drive our attention within. He uses a forceful metaphor:

When you water a tree and a storm comes with great speed, it uproots it from the ground. So all these group meetings, this hour of discussion, the company of the saints and satsang, this atmosphere of love and devotion – all this is like watering the tree. And when that storm comes, that severe storm that is Shabd or Nam, our roots are loosened, and we are off – detached while living our life in this world.⁴

This is how Hazur has amplified the message of Inayat Shah. He gives us a practical method, of how we can move our attention toward the Lord. Through satsangs, books, recordings of question and answers, seva – by being enveloped in the atmosphere of love and devotion. These are all means to help to pull our mind away from the world and take us within – to loosen the roots of our attachments. He wants us to help us change the focus of our attention! He is showering his love and grace – all we need to do is to exert just a minimum of effort. We need to respond to his inner pull and not turn our backs. Hazur says:

Actually it is the Lord who pulls us from within. We are so tied down with the attachments of this creation that it becomes difficult for us to take even one step. We are so engrossed in this creation, so attached to this creation. Our roots have gone so deep into this creation that it is not so easy to uproot them. So even our one step is a great step. Without his grace, we can never get out of this creation. So even our one step is sufficient for him to pull us.⁵

Here Hazur is explaining why it is so difficult. Because our roots have gone so deep into the world. But, he is consoling us: Just a minimum of effort will create the momentum we need and provoke his grace. “Even our one step is sufficient for him to pull us.”

Now, the Great Master, in this same letter we read from earlier, describes what we will encounter when we go within. He writes:

Enter the astral world, make contact with the Astral Form of the Master, become very intimate with him, make him your companion, catch the sound current, cross the mind planes, and reach your eternal spiritual home in Sach Khand – so that your wanderings in the worlds of mind and matter may end. Do it now, while alive. This is the purpose of human life.

He is saying that when we go within, we will enter the astral world, and there we will see the radiant form of our Master – this is his true form, his Shabd form. His physical form is temporary – it draws us to the spiritual path, to seek his company, but ultimately we have to attach ourselves to his Shabd form. He describes how we do this. We have to become “intimate” with him – this is lovely, he is saying that the master’s love for us is so strong, so deep, so overwhelming, that we can develop a true intimacy with him – not the kind of physical intimacy we may experience with people we meet in this world, with our friends and family, but a true spiritual intimacy ... No language is needed to express this spiritual love. Just devotion. He says: “make him your companion” – he is our true lover. Our reliable friend. Our companion on this journey through life.

How can we realize that he is our everlasting companion? He has said that “our practice will lead us to the real master within, where there is no separation.” As Great Master wrote in another letter:

If you reply that you want to come to India for seeing your Guru, then it should be noted that the physical frame is not the real form of the Guru. It is a mere dress he has put on in this world and which will be put off here. The true form of the Guru is holy Sound, and in that form the Guru permeates every hair on your body and is seated within you. When you go above the eyes, then the Guru will meet you in his Radiant Form, and when you reach Trikuti, the Guru will accompany you in his Sound Form, even up to Sach Khand. Fly upwards upon the wings of faith and love, so you may talk to him every day and be with him always. This will come gradually, so you need not despair. Perform your devotion regularly, and one day all these powers shall be yours and you shall reach your true home.⁶

“Fly upwards upon the wings of faith and love so that you may talk to him every day and be with him always.” That’s the entire inner path in a nutshell. When we experience the sound current, then the Shabd, our true and intimate companion, will meet us and guide us back to our eternal home.

Yet, the Great Master warns us to buckle down and make effort. In the first letter quoted earlier, he says:

If progress in this line has not been made, life has been spent in vain.

This is his message. If we don’t do this now, we have wasted our life. He’s given us the key, the instruction, the message. But we have to put it to use. If we don’t, we’re like the student who registers for a course in college, but when the final exam rolls around, she realizes she never attended class or read the textbook. What a nightmare!

If we don’t do our meditation, live the Sant Mat way of life, and keep our simran in mind, then it’s “we” who have wasted our lives. We have created our own nightmare. He’s given us all the tools and guidance we need to journey on this path. It is our responsibility to act on it.

Great Master spells out the importance of choosing the spiritual life over worldly gain and success. In the same letter, he says:

It is not difficult to acquire worldly fame, wealth, kingdom, and miraculous power, but it is difficult to turn away one’s attention from these and go inside to catch the sound current.

Here the master is reminding us of our priorities: We work very hard to achieve in our profession, to satisfy our ambitions, but he’s saying that all this is easy when compared to detaching our mind from this web of worldly involvement and turning it to the sound current. Yet that is our real purpose! It is the struggle of a lifetime, as Hazur often said.

As we get older, we know how the mind tenaciously holds on to everything external to our essential nature – like a snake that curls around a tree – it can strangle it. The mind needs to be hacked away. Hazur points us to a beautiful example given by Guru Nanak, of the sandalwood tree – it has a good fragrance, and it’s very cooling. As Hazur explained:

Snakes have a lot of poison in them, and the effect is very hot. So they always coil around the sandalwood because they like the coolness and the fragrance of the tree. Now, if you want to take a branch of the tree, how can you go near it, because the snake is there? So Guru Nanak says that if you take a sword in your hand and cut the snake into pieces, then the whole tree is yours.

So this human body is like a sandalwood tree. The fragrance of the Lord is there within us, always, and this life is the most precious opportunity given to us, but the snake-mind has coiled around it. So unless the mind is captured and subdued, you cannot get what the Lord has kept within every one of us.

So Guru Nanak says: Go to a mystic; he will give you the sword of Nam. Cut that snake of your mind with your sword of Nam, and then whatever treasure the Lord has kept within you is all yours. There’s no other way to capture the mind, to subdue the mind, to fight with these passions, without the help of meditation, because it is the mind which runs to the senses. Right from the eye centre, the senses are pulling you to their own level.⁷

Hazur reminds us:

It’s a constant struggle with the mind. It’s not a question of one year or two; it’s a constant struggle with the mind. Unfortunately, we are not aware of how many ages the mind has been running out, and how much effort and time it will take to withdraw from all that and come to the eye centre. But it is worth the game. We have to cut our roots that keep us in this world.⁸

And we can do it, Hazur is saying, we just have to make that effort, with faith that success is possible. The Lord has put us here in this world but he has given us the means to rise above it. We just have to play the game.

Now Hazur uses the analogy of cutting away, not just for the snake-mind that is coiled around our soul, but for the roots of our attachments to this world.

Connecting with shabd is giving you an axe. Now cut the roots of the tree. If you won’t use the axe, then what is the use? A farmer takes an axe to pull out a tree, to cut its roots, but if he doesn’t want to use the axe, doesn’t want to labour, doesn’t want to work hard, how can he cut the tree and cut the roots of the tree? He has to work. He has to use the axe.

So mystics equip us to fight with our mind, fight with our attachments to the creation, and we have to play our part. … The soldier can’t tell his general to come and fight in the front lines for him. We have to do our part. Meditation will help you to uproot yourselves from this creation.⁹

Now the Great Master, in his original letter, again outlines the kind of discipline we need on this path; it is the secret of progress. He says:

Love, faith, and perseverance make the path easy and possible to attain the unattainable.

By persevering we will develop faith, and that faith will allow us to persevere. And it is love that powers us all the way so we can “attain the unattainable.” Through worldly means, our goal is unattainable, but through the love and grace of the master everything can be attained. For example, sometimes the master gives us a seva to do that we know is way beyond our capacity. Yet with his grace we can do it. He has confidence in us, and if we rely on him, we can accomplish anything! We can even move mountains. Hazur once said:

With your faith you can move the Creator of the mountains, what to say of mountains. Who created the universe? Who created the mountains? The Lord. By your faith in him, you can move him. You can become him. If you become him, you can move anything.¹⁰

He is saying that by catching hold of the Shabd, we become Him, and then we have all the power of the Lord. So, with love, faith and perseverance, we can easily follow the path and attain the unattainable. We may think we’ll never be able to control the mind, but over and over he demonstrates to us that his love will see us home. We won’t be able to control the mind forcibly, with austerities, mental disciplines, and other extreme measures, but we will if we look to him, follow his instructions to meditate, and stick to the vows.

Now Great Master comes back to the foundation of the entire path, as he has advised us at the beginning of the original letter:

I shall be glad to hear how far you have succeeded in making your attention steady in the eye focus and how far your body becomes unconscious.

And that is the whole point – that when we take our attention to the eye focus, all our worldly concerns, our obsessions and attachments – all will recede into the background, and only He will exist for us –

To conclude, let us repeat the message Great Master sent at the beginning of his letter:

The message is that you develop the power to withdraw your attention, at will, from the outward objects and from the physical body, and concentrate it in the eye focus.

He encourages us by saying:

Love, faith, and perseverance make the path easy and possible to attain the unattainable.

Do it now, while alive. This is the purpose of human life.

Spiritual Gems, ltr #89
J.R. Puri & T.R. Shangari, Bulleh Shah, RSSB, 2010, p.9
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #382
Ibid
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #483
Spiritual Gems, ltr #141
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #156
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #393
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #546
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #176

Blind Faith - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Blind Faith

A comedian was reminiscing about his hard scrabble past, how he was sleeping in a car during his formative years of trying to make a career in stand-up clubs, and how with a lot of “praying to God,” hard work and luck, he finally became a success. At the end of his motivational story, he said that he never gave up no matter what, because he knew “God is always coming, he’s never too late.” At his most discouraging and frustrated moment of never giving up is when he learned that faith was everything. In his darkest hour, he never gave up.

Like the comedian, when doing our meditation, we have to be brave and never give up the fight with the mind, as Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

Ours is a lifelong battle. Face the onslaughts of the mind like a brave warrior. Do not lay down your arms before the enemy. Help will come when you make up your mind to resist the evil thoughts.¹

“Evil” thoughts run the gamut of A-Z and seem to come out of nowhere; doubts are especially unnerving. Baba Ji has said that it’s natural in the course of our lives as satsangis to have doubts, but not to give them any energy. If you do, the mind can find the tiniest crack to get a toehold of control, planting doubt like a seed waiting for the nourishment of self-pity or perceived failure to grow steadily bigger. It flourishes with negativity and spawns despair. It makes us question our faith. We must be brave and resist by fighting those thoughts with the sword of simran, our plea for help that will be answered, as the Master assures us.

In mountain climbing, you have to have faith in your own ability, your partner’s ability for safety, and your equipment. Once you start the ascent, you have to be able to count on the unknown to exist – a crevice or a knob of rock to hang on to – you don’t know if it’s there, yet you reach out with limb and blind faith. You have to have trust in your partner who you’re tied to, to be able to help if needed, in a real life-and-death situation. Yet, people climb on and on, for the thrill, the accomplishment, and perhaps unknowingly, for the experience of faith in action.

As human beings seeking spiritual fulfilment, we come to this Path because we are pulled to the Source by a nameless unforeseen power that eventually we recognize as Love. We reach out for this Love by doing our daily meditation, while the rest of the world sleeps or springs into action. It’s not easy to swim against the tide, yet we persist because we have Faith. Faith that if we persevere, our efforts will merge us into the source of Love. So, we climb on, because once starting the ascent, there’s no turning around. Even in the darkest hour when we feel utterly useless in the battle with the mind, we must not give up because our destiny is to succeed. It is not an “if” but “when” we succeed. All doubts succumb to the realization that we are always tied to our Master, as He says:

It is only a question of time. The battle with the mind has to be won. Many blows will be given and many received but with the Master and the Lord on our side, victory is assured.²

As the song goes, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.” Have faith that the Master indeed has us in his hands where we are safe from peril, and he will never let us go. For our part, we must give him our daily effort of simran and bhajan, to hone our skill of climbing the heights to our goal, the summit, our true spiritual home. Faith will move us up the indomitable mountainside tethered to our Master, and Love in the form of the Shabd will be our victory.

Quest for Light, Letter 46
Quest for Light, Letter 190

Letting Go - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Letting Go

Spiritual awakening is the game of realizing we’re not who we think we are and remembering who we really are. In truth, we’re not a separate self. We are part of God, a divine loving consciousness that creates, supports, and permeates all.

Our human dilemma is that unless we dedicate our lives to letting go of this illusion of a separate personal self, we can’t experience the bliss of our divine nature. Instead, we spend all our time building a false personal self which we define as “us.” However, this “us” in reality is just a collection of thoughts about who we think we are. Then we spend our lives defending and fighting to satisfy and maintain this false solidity, our made-up self, our ego. We do this by manipulating everyone and everything in the world, trying to make life go our way instead of God’s way. A quote attributed to the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury describes the effects of living this way:

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together.

Living in this quandary, if we are smart, we start to wake up and ask ourselves: Why continue to play this ego game we can never win? Why devote our life to this personal mind – constantly trying to satisfy, protect, and improve it – when that won’t solve our core issue, which is our misery caused by being separate from God? It’s like putting lipstick on a pig. We reach a point where we realize we are trapped by this personal mind and we want to be free. At that point we’ll get serious about the path because it’s the only sane choice we have.

The Masters tell us that there is great freedom in dying to the limited self and resigning our position of running the world. Saints tell us that only when we let go of everything and everyone and still our mind through meditation will we be able to tune into the current of Shabd, which will lead us back to God. This divine current is the life-giving, intelligent power of God that is both audible as sound and visible as light. It's not easy to explain what Shabd is because it is beyond the capacity of language. Soami Ji says, “It is all love.”¹ Julian Johnson, in his book The Path of the Masters, describes the Shabd this way:

When any man speaks in this world, he simply sets in motion atmospheric vibrations. But when God speaks, he not only sets in motion etheric vibrations, but he himself moves in and through those vibrations. In truth it is God himself that vibrates all through infinite space. God is not static, latent: he is superlatively dynamic. When he speaks, everything in existence vibrates, and that is the Sound, the Shabd; and it can be heard by the inner ear, which has been trained to hear it. It is the divine energy in process of manifestation which is the Holy Shabd. It is in fact the only way in which the Supreme One can be seen and heard – this mighty, luminous and musical wave, creating and enchanting.²

Unfortunately, most of us don’t experience the flow and pull of Shabd because our attention is so riveted on this physical dimension of people, objects, and places. The saints emphasize that unless we drop our obsessive attachment to our wants, preferences and judgments, we’ll remain stuck in this gross material realm. The question is, are we willing to do what it takes to let go of our personal ego, so we can experience the delight of Nam?

Most of us say we want to know God, but that’s really not true. God is pulling us to him, while we are busy pushing him away. This constant push and pull is all part of the great cosmic game of love. Luckily for us, God has given us the company of saints to liberate us and break us out of our self-delusion that keeps us away from him. Fundamental to their teachings is the practice of meditation, in which we learn to surrender, minute by minute, to the divine will. Through meditation, our love for our body, mind, and the world fades out and is superseded by love for the Creator. Little by little, as we let go and become more inner-directed, we gain access to the divine melody inside. Shabd is the rocket fuel that takes us to God. Saints tell us that the bliss we begin to experience from Shabd is so elevating that once we taste it, nothing else compares to it. A person who owns precious jewels will not value worthless trinkets.

Mystics point out there are two stages in our spiritual journey, and both require constant practice in letting go and surrendering to the divine. The first stage is understanding that we are not our personal ego-mind; rather, we are that greater awareness that is looking out at the world through the filter of the ego-mind. The first task is to be willing to stop playing the game of the personal ego and instead withdraw our soul-consciousness to the eye center. Then the second stage begins when we become aware of the pull of the Shabd and develop the capacity to merge into it and become one with God.

In closing, a contemporary spiritual teacher describes this process of surrender:

Ever since you first tasted the elixir of nobodyness, maybe in the midst of meditating, you have lost your hunger for somebodyness. Mainstream culture conditioned you to construct a persona and defend it with all your might. The endless self-improvement project, fueled by self-loathing and foiled by the realities of the human condition, has only reinforced the illusion that you are separate from your source – God. But a combination of spiritual practice and tragic losses ended that game. You, for one, are relieved to surrender…. Who knew that dissolving would be so sweet?³

Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17th ed., 2012; p. 383
Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17th ed., 2012; p. 378
Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics; Amazon, soundstrue, 2019, p.61

The Link between Love and Obedience - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Link between Love and Obedience

Although in some places, the restrictions to movement are being lifted following the strict lockdowns, yet we need to continue our vigilance and not become lazy or complacent. Probably, until there is a vaccine the virus will continue to affect us either individually or as a society. But we hope that sometime soon satsang and seva will start again.

Great Master gave us this helpful advice:

The soul that lives within the orders of the Master, and regularly engages in bhajan with love and faith, does a kind of service for him. The Master has taken upon himself the burden of carrying all the souls, to whom he has revealed the path, to the Father’s abode. So if a soul earnestly tries to tread the path, it lessens the burden of the Master.¹

Even with the small gesture of being vigilant in preventing the spread of coronavirus we are lightening the load of the Master. Every time we do as he asks we are making his life easier. We can’t imagine what he does for us or even who he is. Even with our ignorance of the grandeur of the master, it will still give us contentment and satisfaction to know we are perhaps easing his burden.

And more important, if we are doing our bhajan with love and faith, we are doing a service for him. Great Master doesn’t say doing our bhajan with success and one-pointedness but with love and faith. By meditating as a way of showing him that we care for him and respect him, as a way of saying thank-you to him for the gift of Nam, we are then expressing our faith and our love. Meditation is the action of love and of gratitude. It isn’t only a way to gain focus and concentration but also a way to change the very atmosphere of our mind by simply doing something we might not be very good at, but something that pleases the Master. Even if it seems that there are no results from our efforts, let’s not be frustrated. By persisting we are helping him and showing him our love and care.

Doesn’t peace of mind and contentment come from doing the right thing? The moment we do something that we know is counter to our values we become anxious and agitated. When our mind is relaxed and contented then our bhajan is usually more satisfying. It is easier to concentrate when our mental atmosphere is tranquil. But let’s be very clear – the results of our effort are in his hands. By persisting in something that we find challenging, we strengthen our faith. With stronger faith our effort increases, with greater effort our faith is strengthened. This wonderful cycle leads us upward and inward and pleases him.

How lucky we are. No matter how concentrated our meditation, the Master accepts every small effort we make. What’s more, he accepts our small efforts with pleasure. He is more intent on fulfilling his seva of taking us to our Father’s abode than we are in fulfilling our vow. He loves us in spite of us. No matter how we stray or falter along the way his love is consistent and encouraging. He never leaves us stranded but is our greatest well-wisher. Let’s do everything we can to lessen the burdens of our beloved by strengthening our commitment to the path.

The secret to living in the Lord’s will is that we try to be obedient to the Master’s instructions. Normally these have to do with the spiritual practice, but sometimes he gives us the opportunity to obey in worldly situations that cultivate our ability to surrender and submit our ego to another. As Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote:

Obedience will come only when there is love within us, for without love obedience can never come. Love always helps us in merging our will with the other person’s will. We take our self out of ourselves and become the other person. Love helps in that. Without love there can be absolutely no obedience. So, when love comes, all these qualities rise in us like cream on the milk. We do not have to fight for these qualities in ourselves. When that love for the master, for the Lord, comes within us, all other qualities just come automatically within us. If these qualities have not come within us, we can presume that we have absolutely no love for the master and the Lord. When that love takes its place within us, all other things are driven out. Then there is obedience, there is submission, there is understanding. All good qualities automatically take shape.²

Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, letter 5
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #280

On Realizing Real Reality - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

On Realizing Real Reality

However wonderful or dreadful we find the world, our so-called reality, deep down we know it is nothing but an illusion. This is what mystics tell us, from their experience. They say there is a more real reality, one that transcends the miseries of the radical change this pandemic is forcing on us. They say we can know this realer reality for ourselves, in ourselves. The sudden and drastic global emergency is pushing us to find, to make real, to realize the real reality of love. In this way the virus is a blessing!

Our reality, the world – or rather our perception of it – has many powerful effects on us, effects that impel us to think it real, effects that have us react. As Baba Ji says, we are always reacting to what we think is happening. If it hurts this much, if it makes me angry like this, if it seduces me so often, if it frightens me so profoundly, if it kills so many, if it distracts me from my meditation so quickly, then it must be real. We touch it, feel it, smell it and cannot stop looking at it.

We humans are in crisis (nothing new there)! There are moments in this pandemic when it is like being inside a cataclysmic disaster movie. Just as in the cinema, we think we’ll get to the end soon, once Superman has rescued the planet. The lights will go up. Surely, we can soon go home to normal reality?

But just as this world is illusory, so there is no way back to any “normal”. Anyway, that’s the last thing we want: was it “normal” that we humans were bringing life on this planet ever closer to annihilation? Although the crisis is holding us sharp against the edges of our illusion, it also brings us face to face with the opportunity – and the hunger – to find the realer reality inside, to meditate.

Mystics know what and where the real reality is. How they know mystifies us, it is simply and clearly mysterious, that’s why we call them mystics. They tell us the realer reality is inside us and that we can find it, know it, for ourselves in this very lifetime. All we have to do is meditate, thereby letting go of the illusion!

Western philosophers tell us that reality is everything we, or anyone else, knows to be true. Everything you know to be true. Everything I know. Everything we know. All that knowing! It’s all in the mind.

The point is that the world I live in is inseparable from my mind. The world could be said to exist in our minds, certainly because of our minds. In other words: the existence of something we think is physical, depends, in some inexplicable way, on a mind knowing it to exist. This is illusion. The relationship between each one of us and what is “out there” is illusion.

There is a realer reality that we can and will realize! It is beyond time and space. Its fundamental ingredient is love – the love our Satguru lives in and blesses us with. He is there (and here) to have us realize the unchanging truth of Shabd inside. This is the ultimate relationship of love, ultimate because it exists beyond time and space. It is infinite.

Our worldly relationships, whether with people, ideas, ambitions or fantasies, are echoes of this divine partnership. The objects of our attention, the concepts we conceive, the things we love, think and worry about, are made and kept real through our obsessive thinking. We think in language; the language of the world is our simran of the world, of space, of time.

The reality of Covid-19 is inseparable from our minds. We react to our knowledge that hundreds of thousands have died and will continue to die from it. Science looks for an answer as to the how and why. To stop it from spreading we have all had to go into lockdown. Like a demented train, whose brakes have failed, the virus is heading directly for the structure of our everyday lives in ways we find hard to understand. Is it a punishment for crimes we are ignorant of having committed? Are we being taught some difficult lesson?

Punishment is meted out by a judge and jury, not by the Lord. What happens to us is not a punishment, but the result of what we’ve done before. That may sound like hair-splitting but no; there is a subtle but important difference between punishment and karmic result. The universe of space and time could not exist without karma. Karma is the unstoppable result of what has happened before. Punishment – like being sent to prison – is what society does to keep us in order. Karma offers us a lesson that can bring us back to the classroom of love.

There is a crucial difference between knowledge gained from inside by introspection, and from outside through observing the results of the mind’s working. Outside is science, bound with uncertainty: the closer you look, as Heisenberg realized, the more uncertain becomes your knowing, while introspection is direct and what it sees is certain, because it is a direct knowing. The word ‘gnosis’ shares the same root as ‘knowledge’ – it means an intimate, inside knowing of mystical truths. Gnosis is certain. It is the absence of self. We can be gnostics.

There is a science of gnosis. Our master suggests that we might find the truth inside, so we go into the private laboratory of our humanity and perform the experiment of meditation. If we perform it as the master instructs, we will go inside where we can see and touch and hold the truth. This inside knowledge is not of the story we keep on telling ourselves about ourselves, not that fiction. No, it is knowledge as union, as being one, as Shabd. Knowledge that absorbs all the uncertainty, anguish, and fear of being out in the land of plague.

We sometimes describe a master as being a fully realized soul. He has made his soul, the Shabd, fully real. However globally horrific the pandemic may be in our worlds, it is simply another – albeit extreme – outgrowth of time and space. It is a most- engrossing story, but that’s it, no more than a story. The master’s realer reality of love enables a powerful and practical compassion for the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been directly hurt. He shows us that the pestilence brings us an opportunity to realize a realer reality.

The Goal Ever Recedes - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Goal Ever Recedes

In one of the videos of Questions and Answers recently released, the Master was asked how anyone can be truly objective if they are not the Master himself. And Baba Ji reminded us that we are all prospective Masters. We are all working towards that level of consciousness. The questioner responded: “Yes, but we’re all a million miles away from it.”

The questioner’s response mirrored what most of us feel regarding our struggle in meditation. Therefore, what Baba Ji then said to her is very relevant to all of us. He used the analogy of a mountain climber – if the climber focuses his or her attention on the peak, yes, the goal seems very far away. But if we focus instead on the mountain guide and the immediate task that he has assigned to us, then it looks entirely doable. And because the guide has traversed the path before and already knows the way, just focusing on the immediate task will take us to our goal. As we don’t know the way to the peak, it is pointless on our part to keep looking at it and wondering when and how we will cover the million miles separating us from it. That only demoralizes us.

It is the nature of our goal that is the cause of our frustration. Each one of us refers to it in different ways. For some, the immediate goal is seeing the light within, for others hearing the sound. For some, it is vacating the body, for some others it is reaching the eye center. For some it is seeing the radiant form, for some others it is measured in terms of the “stages” that have been explained at the time of initiation. Then, of course, there are those who think of the ultimate goal like Sach Khand, which only makes us feel that we are billions, not just millions of miles away.

What Baba Ji is telling us is: Don’t even look at the peak (i.e., don’t think of these goals) while you are climbing (i.e., doing your meditation). Our real goal has nothing to do with what are called “peak experiences.”

To understand this better, let us delve a little deeper into the nature of the goals enumerated above. None of these are in our physical domain. They belong to the nonphysical spiritual planes called gagan (heaven) and akash (ether). Both can be translated as ‘sky’. What characterizes the sky is that we can never reach it – the more we move towards it, the more it moves away. It is a fundamental characteristic of anything and everything that falls in the category of the infinite – it can never be reached. If it can be reached, it is not infinite – by definition.

All spiritual goals have therefore to be viewed through a prism unhindered by the limitations of the physical world that we are used to. Mahatma Gandhi put it very beautifully:

The goal ever recedes from us. The greater the progress, the greater the recognition of our unworthiness. Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory. ¹

In a materialistic endeavor, the goal is always finite in nature, however large or ambitious the project – a billion dollars, a vast empire, an excellent starting salary, a quick double promotion, having a baby, buying the most recent gadget, and the like. It can be reached, and reaching it results in satisfaction – and a sense of accomplishment, which often inflames our ego. But in a spiritual endeavor, the goal is to eliminate rather than inflame the ego. Therefore, as Gandhi says, progress has to be accompanied by a progressively increasing “recognition of our unworthiness.” Not only that, there is no point that the goal can be “reached,” for it “ever recedes from us.” Imagine running a race where, every time we are nearly at the goalpost, it gets shifted further and further away! What frustration would result!

And yet, Gandhi says, true spiritual endeavour results in satisfaction rather than frustration, because it is linked not to the attainment but to the effort. “Full effort is full victory.” That is why Baba Ji often asks us not to think of whether we have succeeded or failed in our mediation, but to focus on the question: Have we been sincere enough to put in the best effort possible?

This process slowly results in our recognizing that the process itself is our goal. We don’t have to look at the peak at all as our goal, for then we will inevitably start feeling we are a million miles away, as the questioner had put it. We just have to do what the one who is guiding us to the peak has asked us to do, in whatever part of the mountain we are placed at right now. Therefore, Gandhi’s maxim was: “One step at a time is enough for me.”² Looking for “peak experiences” – light, sound, whatever – is the wrong way of defining a truly spiritual goal. The “next one step” has to be our goal, nothing else.

For us, the next step has been very clearly defined by our mountain guide, the one who has already reached the peak: take out two hours of your time every day to make the effort at simran, then another half hour at trying to listen to the sound, and the rest of the day at trying to be a good human being. That is the process as well as the goal. Full effort is the equivalent of full victory – cause for a daily grand celebration.

And the guide acts as a living example of what we need to do and be. He never feels “I have reached the goal.” He always looks at himself as a struggling soul, like the rest of us. To him, his guide has ascended the peak, and he is still a “work in progress.” What better proof that on our path, the process itself is the goal?

“M.K.Gandhi in Young India,” 9-3-22, 141, cited in http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/sfgandhi/two.htm
M.K.Gandhi, My Non-Violence, Chapter 2.

It’s About Time - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

It’s About Time

Illusion has four dimensions: the three that mark out space and the fourth that is time. Time presents a big challenge in our meditation. By uttering the words of simran, one after another, silently, we are passing through time as we try to transcend time. Simran is a marking out of time on our way to Shabd, which is, after all, timeless: it has no beginning and no end. To do simran as the Master wants us to, requires all our attention and deliberation. They must be unstitched from illusion, from our story.

Meditation is a confrontation with our passage through time. It is the practice of being, being in time so that we can know our being beyond time. Our death is the end of our time. When we die, we’ve run out of time, we have none left. If your karmic balance sheet so determines it, the karmic entity that is the core of you will immediately either be engulfed in its next dollop of time or be dissolved into the sea of Shabd.

Governments around the world have adopted lockdown regimes in an attempt to control the spread of the pandemic. We have all had to change our lifestyles. We must keep one or two meters apart. We must not gather in groups larger than some small number. We have to queue to buy our everyday food. We are encouraged to wear face-coverings. Significant changes!

The word “pandemic” is from the Greek “pan” meaning “all” and “demos” meaning “people.” This coronavirus pandemic is affecting all the people, all the time, one way or another. Most of us have had to “self-isolate” at some point in our encounter with the life-threatening phenomenon. Which is precisely what we have to do anyway, as meditators: isolate ourselves for two and a half hours a day. We have the power to put the illusion of time on hold for two and a half hours. We have been granted a license to meditate.

Change is the manifestation of time. The movement of the hands of a clock or watch seem to show us something real. You ask me what time it is; I look at my watch and report back. It’s nine or whatever o’clock. Seems real! But it is no more than a shared convenience.

It’s easy to see how abstract and illusory time is. Before the railways were built in the UK, there was no standard time; every town or locality had its own, often many minutes different from London time. With the introduction of the main line between London and Bristol in 1840, there was a danger of trains colliding because they were operating according to conflicting time zones. It became essential that all the stations on the line observed their clocks to be saying nine o’clock at the same moment; so uniform railway time was introduced. This shared convenience then spread around the world giving us Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time, Indian Standard Time and so on.

Time is a concept, conceived by man. However illusory time may be, we must still operate within it. Indeed, from a mystical point of view, the time we have on earth is a gift and a blessing. Paradoxically, we need to be in time to meditate. We have to be slaves of time before we can be liberated from it.

As Aldous Huxley wrote:

Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spiritual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower self in order that he may become identified with that higher Self within him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.¹

For “divine ground” we can take Huxley to mean Shabd. He can be a human with his own worldly story whilst he is also timeless love, eternal realization. His worldly manifestation demonstrates how we too can live in this calamitous quagmire but not be part of it. The time we are given is a finite resource in which we can become the infinite ocean.

We are advised to sit for our meditation in the early hours of the day and at the same time every day, such is the habit-loving mind. This way we sit with our minds relatively clear of the complex storytelling they love, the story of ourselves. (Stories are also a manifestation of time – there is no story if there is no time.)

The bigger, longer story is history, the study of and telling of the past. We are part of that. The history of the pandemic is, no doubt, already being written, telling how the world has changed dramatically in the last few months. The shared convenience of how we relate one with another has been seriously disrupted: we now cannot hug and must keep at least one meter apart. Many of the worldly pleasures we once sought comfort from are denied to us now that we are in lockdown.

The only refuge is within us, beyond time. The only exit is simran.

All of which encourages us to sit and engage the mystical secret weapon, the magic story interrupter that is simran. We humans have been streaming our stories since the beginning of humanity. As with Netflix, we can put the story on “hold” by pressing the simran button as we extract ourselves from our many attachments and entertainments.

Simran is the passage that leads from time to love, from being involved with everything to just being, from isolation to redemption. While we are in time, simran is all there is. As soon as we are out of time, love is all there is. The connection between our timely existence and our eternal selves is the Satguru.

It is definitely about time we got on with our meditation.

Aldous Huxley, Perennial Philosophy, Chatto & Windus, 1946, p. 162

Why Do Fools Fall in Love? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

There was a popular doo-wop song in 1956 called “Why do fools fall in love?” Some of the lyrics go like this:

Why do fools fall in love?
Why does my heart skip this crazy beat?
Because it knows it will reach defeat.
Tell me why, why do fools fall in love?

Love is one of those things in life that cannot be adequately described, much like the sweetness of sugar or the feelings conjured up by a captivating song. Yet there is no end to the number of writers, poets, and mystics who have tried to do just that – tried to describe love. So why is love so important that such efforts are made to describe that which cannot be described but must be experienced to be understood? It must be important. They say the only thing we take with us at the time of death is our love, that love is the only currency accepted in heaven. There is simply nothing of greater value. Great Master explained:

At satsang one day the Master made the statement that going inside and advancing to higher regions depended more on love than upon anything else. A satsangi asked, “Can that love be developed in every disciple?” The Master’s reply was very significant and should be remembered. He said, “No, that love is the gift of the Master.” Then the satsangi asked, “Will the disciple always get it?” The Master said, “Why not, if he works for it? Everyone else pays wages earned, and so if anyone works for the Master, he must draw the wages due him.” It is also highly important to bear in mind that “working for the Master” means primarily to purify your mind and to sit for simran, dhyan, and bhajan. That is really the Master’s work. You are doing him the greatest service when you prepare yourself for going inside.¹

For those of us following (or trying to follow) a spiritual path, we understand the value of love and the need to develop love in our spiritual pursuits. After all God is said to be love. This makes love the strongest force in existence. How do we get, or rather become love? Great Master explained that it is through our meditation, our spiritual practice, but that is an ongoing effort that often does not manifest noticeable results quickly. It is a process.

So what about love in our daily (and generally mundane) lives? How does love help us go through the routine of our daily lives? What can we do to help nurture the feeling of love? What does love even feel like when our minds are focused on going through our daily nonspiritual routines? Here are a few reflections on love:

If we are fortunate to fall in love with someone special:
“When you fall in love, you have to be selfless, you cannot think of yourself. You don’t think of your own benefits, but only their happiness. You constantly think of bringing a smile to their face at any cost, even putting your own needs aside. You just focus on making them smile.”²

“For the lover, love is a 24-hour sickness. He doesn’t have a specific time to love, or to think about the Beloved. He is in love 24 hours, no matter what he’s doing, wherever he is.” (Hazur Maharaj Ji)³

The power we feel from love: We are most alive when we're in love. (John Updike)

The essence of love: Love in its essence is spiritual fire. (Seneca)

Open yourself to love: Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. (Rumi)

The lightness of love: I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

When we reflect on it, why would we want to feel anything except love throughout the day? I liked the quote from Rumi – that we should seek the barriers we have built blocking love and remove them. When we feel love within us, our heart sprouts wings, we feel light and happy. All virtues spring from love. We automatically feel compassion and tolerance, and an all-over good feeling. Without love, all the negative tendencies start to take root. Dr. King expressed this well when he said that hate (or any other negative tendency) is too heavy a burden to carry; he decided to stick with love. Love weighs nothing, rather it lifts us up.

Oscar Wilde famously said: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” We all know how annoying it can be when we lash out at someone and they reply with a loving response. Let us reverse this situation. Mark Twain said: “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

If we can find a place in our heart for love to permanently reside, we will live a happier and more productive life. It is such a simple concept and should not be hard to achieve with a little remembrance and practice. As Great Master said, love is a gift from the master, given as wages for our spiritual practice. The more we meditate, the more love we receive. The more love we receive, the more loving we will become. We can practice being loving just as we practise our meditation. Practice always yields results. Let’s take the high road and let the others fight it out in the mud. Soami Ji expressed the results of love as it filled his heart:

When the sea of love surged in my heart
the fortress of doubts was swept away.
Lust and anger abandoned their home,
worldly hopes and desires left my body.
All greed and attachment were tossed away,
passion and indulgence were cast out
from my mind.
A healthy sense of discrimination now rules
over my body and mind
and peace prevails.⁴

With a Great Master in India, p.157
Unattributed post on a website
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol.II, #513
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry, p.39

Through the Eyes of Animals - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Through the Eyes of Animals

We so-called humans are a species of animal, distinguished by – and burdened with – self-awareness. But animals none the less. However much we regard ourselves as rational beings, we are driven by, slaves of, our instincts, habits, and passions.

We humans, unlike a lion say, are burdened with self-awareness because it is the source of abstraction, thought, patterns, talk, money, fear, lust, greed, anger – everything that has led us uniquely as a species to nearly destroy our own habitat. But we are distinguished and blessed by self-awareness when it leads to our spirituality.

With little self-awareness, a lion is king of the jungle – he is no more and no less than a lion. You and I are both less than human and potentially more than animal. In his 1928 poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote:

We are sick with desire,
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.¹

We are immortal souls tied to the bodies of dying animals. In trying to clarify what is a human being, René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, expressed the bleakness of the rational view of our humanity when he deduced: “Cogito ergo sum, or I am thinking therefore I exist.”² He was saying we are no more than thinking machines, and that the language of our thinking defines who and what we seem to be.

The mystics would say: “I repeat the five names, therefore I am.” The language of simran enables us to be what we really are – Shabd. It is the language of love.

We sit here, looking through the eyes of animals, but the ‘we’ that looks is a constant murmur trying to make sense of itself in the past, future, and somewhere else.

We are at sea in the ship of relation, defined by the language of our worldly simran, the constant chatter in our heads about family, ideas, work, country, ambitions, money, love, friends, poems, frustrations, breakfast, the stuff and the froth of life. We are becoming, always becoming, never arriving, always retelling the stories that make up these selves of ours.

The Great Master wrote that

[in man’s] long wandering he has almost lost his capital and is bankrupt now, too weak to stand unaided on his legs. He was soul at one time when he was in intimate touch with the Word. That was long, long ago when he was in the spiritual regions. When the soul lost touch with the Word and associated with the mind in the mental planes, the jewel was thrown away and the imitation grasped.³

This imitation is the self as it strives to be a hero, to invent the impossible myth of our success. We want to be noble, to know exactly what is going on, to rise above the petty struggles of being who, and what, we are not.

Simran is nothing but the practice of the art of dying. Nothing else exists but the word being repeated at that moment. Literally nothing. This is death. When nothing else exists but the name of the Lord being repeated in that moment, then the self does not exist.

Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

It is very strange. Every day we sit in meditation and prepare ourselves for death, but when that particular time comes, those who have not died while living start crying and protesting and weeping, and say they don’t want to die. The purpose of meditating every day is to prepare for that time, to meet that eventuality, to go back home. It is all a preparation, nothing else. When the Lord gives the opportunity now to leave the body and to materialize the effect of meditation, then we should make use of it.⁴

I am my attention. I am nothing else. I am not my history, nor my possessions, nor my family, nor my job, nor my qualities or defects. I am just this attention that flits about like a demented butterfly. It flits so furiously that it cannot know itself, cannot stop to see itself, dare not be calm to understand its nature.

Rumi wrote:

Your fear of death is really fear of yourself:
see what it is from which you are fleeing!⁵

Winston Churchill said that success is the enthusiasm we find between failures. From our animal point of view we’re in dire straits, failing every day. As William Law, the eighteenth-century English divine (cleric), put it:

Only let your present and past distress make you feel and acknowledge this twofold great truth: first, that in and of yourself you are nothing but darkness, vanity, and misery; secondly that of yourself you can no more help yourself to light and comfort than you can create an angel.⁶

When you are dreaming a dream, however surreal it is in hindsight, it’s as real as this apparent reality. Dreams within dreams within dreams. Baba Jaimal Singh wrote:

Always look upon this world as if it is a dream, and believe it firmly. Our relatives also are part of the dream-world and are therefore unreal. Take the ego out of yourself and remember only the Satguru and the words of the Satguru…. When everything—body, mind, wealth—everything belongs to Satguru, then all the worldly goods as well as relations also belong to Satguru. I am nothing. Always remember these words.⁷

We are hot air balloons, held up in the blue sky of our lives by nothing but hot air, unable to steer a course as the winds of karma blow us hither and thither. When the burner runs out of gas, when the story comes to an end, the balloon crashes to earth with a horrible crunch.

We sit here, looking through the eyes of animals, but the ‘we’ that looks is a constant murmur trying to make sense of itself in the past, future, and somewhere else.

What to do? We must merge the murmur and let go of the froth. And to do that we need someone who has done it before. We need love. We need to speak the language of the love that we have inside ourselves.

We need to be real, in the here and now, right in the middle of the drama of our own personal soap operas. Not to act spiritual, but to be here now. Love is the key to the lock of our cages.

Hazur wrote:

The relationship of the soul and the Father is that of love, and there’s no higher relationship than that. Since you can’t see the Father and have no opportunity to be with Him so that you can get attached to Him and fall in love with Him, you must love His sons. Thus we are attached to His sons and this is actually our attachment, love and devotion to the Father. Because we go where our attachments are, so along with the Father’s sons we merge back into the Father. So there’s no higher relationship than between the disciple and his Master.⁸

Love evades all sensible talk and description and yet is the subject of most poetry and songs. E. E. cummings, the American poet, wrote:

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail⁹

The Great Master wrote:

Love is an innate quality of the heart. It is only through love that the sublimity of the truth is known, because without it man would be in anguish.¹⁰

He also wrote:

Every person cannot be called a human being in the strict sense of the term. Only those persons are human beings who have the spark of love developed in them.¹¹

One of the qualities of love is the delicious way it dissolves the self. Love merges the murmur with the subject of the murmuring, the beloved. There are no limits to the soul in love – it is the ocean.

Jalaluddin Rumi, the Persian Sufi, wrote: Love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.¹² An astrolabe was a medieval instrument for demonstrating how the planets revolved around the sun. Love is the best exponent of the mysteries of God.

We sit here, looking through the eyes of animals, but the ‘we’ that looks is a constant murmur trying to make sense of itself in the past, future and somewhere else.

What to do? We must merge the murmur and let go of the froth. And to do that we need someone who has done it before. We need love. We need to speak the language of the love we have inside ourselves.

The something of our animal nature becomes the nothing of the lover human which merges with the beloved to become everything. He gives us the longing, the hunger, the desperation to lift us from our animal unconsciousness to the realization of our true God-nature.

As Fakhruddin Iraqi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic, put it:

You are nothing when you wed the One;
but, when you truly become nothing,
you are everything.¹³

We need to become real human beings to have good relationships with who we are now, in reality. It’s not tea at auntie’s house, however.

The Great Master said:

Love is another name for attaching the heart to the Beloved. It is not child’s play. Only those of sterling worth, who are free from the ties of the world, and who are fearless, can become lovers. It is the work of one who is free from all worldly desires and who is able to keep his mind clear of the dirt of duality. When the leaven of love begins to act then a lover cannot turn his attention toward any object except the Beloved.¹⁴

But Baba Ji has said that we keep a “house full” sign over our hearts. We’re too busy trying to be rational human beings.

Again, to quote the Great Master:

It is difficult to swim across the ocean of the world or to bathe in it at all. Bathing is always done on the beach. The perfect man is like the beach of the ocean of life.¹⁵

Meditation is the only answer, meditation is where we bathe on the beach of his ocean of love. To let go of self we must, ironically, exercise self-discipline through the purposeful utterance of the language of our spirituality – simran. One word after another, building that association, brick by verbal brick.

As Great Master wrote:

Ordinary people are in utter darkness. On closing the eyes there is nothing but darkness. In addition, the darkness of ignorance pervades everywhere. The person who can dispel this darkness is the Guru. ‘Gu’ means darkness and ‘ru’ means light: one who can light up the darkness, one who can take us from utter darkness to the light of the truth.¹⁶

We sit here, looking through the eyes of animals, but the ‘we’ that looks is a constant murmur trying to make sense of itself in the past, future and somewhere else.

The paradox is that our mystical apprenticeship can only be worked while we live, work, dream, breathe, worry, fail, fail again and fail better in the world of time and space, bearing the grief, frustration, stress, and disappointment that goes with our worldly animal selves.

Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth-century German mystic, wrote:

Whoever at some point
is seriously wounded by true love
will never become healthy again
unless he kisses that same mouth
by which his soul was wounded.¹⁷

Hermes Trismegistus, to whom ancient Egyptian mystical writings are attributed, wrote:

It is hard for us to forsake the familiar things around us, and turn back to the old home whence we came. Things seen delight us, and things unseen give rise to disbelief.¹⁸

We sit here, looking through the eyes of animals, but the ‘we’ that looks is a constant murmur trying to make sense of itself in the past, future and somewhere else.

The Great Master wrote:

It is difficult to swim across the ocean of the world or to bathe in it at all. Bathing is always done on the beach. The perfect man is like the beach of the ocean of life.¹⁹

The Master is the beach, safe from sharks and drowning, from which we can learn to swim through the deeps of karma to the end of the story, to that moment when he sweeps us up in his arms.

W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” in The Tower (1928); Scribner, 2004; p. 2
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1986
Spiritual Gems, letter 105
Die to Live, #137
The Selected Poems of Rumi, “The Beauty of Death,” tr. R.A. Nicholson, Dover, 1998, p. 19
William Law, A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life, 1729, p. XXIII
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, ed.3, 1976, Letter 93, p.97
Maharaj Charan Singh, Audio recording of questions & answers, March 12, 1986
E. E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems, Grove Press, 1954
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, 6th ed. p. 118
Ibid, p. 119
Jalaluddin Rumi, The Masnavi, Oxford University Press, 2004
Fakhsruddin Iraqi, Luma’at or Divine Flashes, tr. Chittick & Wilson; Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1982
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, 2009; p.197
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 2010, p. 240
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 2010, p. 227
Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Paulist Press, 2008; 79–80.
The Divine Pymander: The Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus, Create Space 2008
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. V, 2010, p. 240

You’ve Got a Friend - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

You’ve Got a Friend

In the early nineteen seventies, there was a song written by Carole King that contains the beautiful verse, “You just call out my name and you know, wherever I am, I’ll come running to you … to see you again, and I’ll be there. You’ve got a friend.” And so do we. We have the Master.

The Master may initially appear to each disciple differently. Some regard him as a father, teacher, brother, guru, but to all he is a friend. Until we can see the true form of the Master – the Shabd form – perhaps, during these troubled and unsettling worldly times, we can consider him as our best friend. There is a beautiful word in Sanskrit, “kalyanamitra” that translates as “beautiful, blessed or virtuous friend.” This word captures the nature and essence of our relationship to the Master. A blessed friend is one who encourages us to be a better human being, helps us to create the conditions in our life necessary for our spiritual growth, and gives us the method to achieve this goal. A true Master, our friend, embodies qualities that we aspire to attain. He is there to let us know that he sees in us a potential that we may not even recognize in ourselves.

This virtuous friend of ours pushes us toward our better self – toward love, gratitude, and devotion. The Tibetan master Patrul Rinpoche says of the friend that, “He is the great ship carrying us beyond the seas of samsaric existence. The true unfailing navigator of the sublime path.… The sun and moon dispelling the darkness of ignorance.”¹ He suggests that spiritual practice bears little fruit without the company of our spiritual best friend.

The friendship with our Master stands apart from the many “friendships” we may have enjoyed throughout our life in that it is not dependent upon exclusivity; the Master has millions of disciples. It is not necessarily dependent upon physical proximity, although it is wonderful to be in the presence of the Master. The mere thought of the Master lifts up our hearts. How can we come into and remain in his company?

The growth of our friendship with the Master is dependent upon our persistent adherence to his teachings and to the practice of calling out his name – by doing our simran and our meditation. Cultivating our relationship with the Master is the only way to erase the loneliness, isolation, or pain that comes with being in the world.

The Master delights in disciples who do their practice with utmost sincerity. Often, it is said, that if a disciple takes one step towards him, he will “come running” to the disciple. Our best friend never delays or withholds the gift of friendship, but this friendship is grown and cultivated by our holding up our part. He, out of compassion, has chosen us as disciples, given us initiation, and shown us the way to eternal liberation, and only asks that we practise.

Much has been written about the practice of meditation. But sometimes we need to ask ourselves, “Am I just showing up,” or do I have the ability to adjust my course and see it as an avenue to pursue a deep, lasting friendship with the Master? Shantideva says, “Even for the sake of one’s life, one should never abandon one’s kalyanamatra.”² Being together with the Master does not rely on being together physically, it does not matter if he is on one end of the world and we are on the other, because as the song says, “Winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is call,” and he will be there.

Buddhism: Path to Nirvana, p. 156
Buddhism: Path to Nirvana, p. 185

The Nectar Within - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Nectar Within

Drinking cold orange juice squeezed from a backyard tree is a rare treat in this world. In that moment, life is beautiful. Then a post appears on Facebook. It’s the ultimate cosmos photo taken from the Hubble Telescope in deep space. Millions of galaxies with billions of planets spinning around appearing like tiny specks in the darkness – and where are we? Where is Earth? Oh, we can’t see it. It’s too small.

The planet is small and we are even smaller. Yet, the saints, messengers of the Creator, arrive here to remind us of our soul-stature, to love us and to show us how to love. All the while, the memories of our true Home have been erased. Who are we and where have we come from? The Creator and the saints know and teach us the meditation of Nam. The saints hold our lives like limp balloons and inflate us with their breath of love. While duality spins around us, they hold us in the eye of the storm, protecting us as a mother cherishes her newborn child.

Is this existence real? Well, it’s the story of a rose with soft petals above and stinging thorns below – while the bouquet of scented blossoms fills the air. It hasn’t always been this way. In the Golden and Silver Ages, life here was exquisite with no worries or cares. Now we have gravitated to the Iron Age where greed and anger prevail and man feeds from the slough of despair. Truly though, this is the best of times because now the saints have entered the realm. Their mission is to ring the eternal bell within us to remind us of our long-ago origins.

Human life is the gift of the Creator to shape us into a substance that can feel love and, at the same time, endure the pain that separation from that love creates. He has given us the chance to dive into Experience with no memory of our regal past. From an ocean of Sound, we are now a crashing wave on the shore of life. From Oneness we experience duality. Eventually, we discover that duality is lacking and Oneness is once more treasured. Inside these bodies hides our Creator, our Shabd-dhun and the entire creation – a creation so vast that no mind can envision its entirety. When we peek into the stillness of the eye, the Creator reveals the true tale. We begin to remember. We go and we go. Until one day, we go no more.

Rumi says, “Our journey is to the rose garden of union.”¹

The true disciple is thankful for this wonderful experience, O Lord. His heart is filled with gratitude as he gazes through the ages of his earthly lives. Turning now, he glances homeward to you. The journey of reunion has begun.

Nicholson, R., ed. Collected Poetical Works of Rumi, II; Delphi Classics, 2015.

Ode to Joy - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Ode to Joy

A while back, every musician in the UK was invited to join the National Youth Orchestra, pick up their instrument and share a massed performance of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” as a gesture of community and solidarity dedicated to the people in society who might be in need of a musical pick-me-up. This was one of the countless worldwide spontaneous surges of empathy with the challenge that humanity is currently facing.

Aren’t we all in need of a “musical pick-me-up,” a divine musical pick-me-up? If the music of this world can lift up our hearts, how much more can the eternal Music do so? Music and joy. We are not talking here of the transient joy that we may feel when the script of our lives includes “good times,” but of the ineffable, permanent joy that fills the heart which is seeking the Divine. “Joy,” says Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” For Mother Teresa, “joy is prayer; joy is strength; joy is love,” and as our masters, like all mystics, repeatedly remind us, God is love, and therefore God is joy.

The message of the mystics, of the lovers of God, is a message of joy. The spiritual path is a path of joy. Hazur Maharaj Ji assures us that Sant Mat is a path “of joy, success, and eternal bliss.”¹ These realized souls know that in each one of us there is a treasure. This treasure cannot be described in words, because how can you describe a light that is more radiant than a million suns and moons? A sound so utterly captivating that it takes your breath and your self away? An intensity of love that obliterates all feeling of separateness and impurity? A presence so enthralling, so energizing, and so enveloping that you merge into an ocean of bliss beyond time and space? These lovers show us the path that leads to that treasure because the One who is that light, that sound, that love, that presence and bliss has sent them for this very purpose. Their mission is to bring us to the realization that this treasure is not only within us, it is who and what we are in reality. The drop is of the same essence as the Ocean.

The Master tells us that this joy is not to be found in the outside world, but within us, in the stillness of meditation, when we are in communion with our Creator. And perhaps this is what the unknown psalmist in the Bible refers to when he marvels with gratitude:

Lord, lift up the light
of your countenance upon us.
You have given more joy to my heart
than they have,
whose grain and wine are increased.²

In order to taste this spiritual joy, compared to which all the worldly designs and inventions are insignificant and valueless, we need to train our mind to let go of our worries, of our preoccupation with family and friends, with past and future, with worldly affairs. We need to concentrate at the eye centre, absorb ourselves in the simran that our master has taught us, absorb ourselves in the inner presence of the master and tune in to the voice of God within. We need to attach ourselves to the Word and thereby detach ourselves from the world. As our concentration increases, as our consciousness leaves the body and rises into the realms of superconsciousness, we will get more peace and greater joy, because our soul is getting nourished and regaining its original freedom.

In the Diwan-i Shams-i-Tabrizi, Rumi assures us:

If you can manage to detach yourself
from the worries of the world,
you will feel joy and pleasure
in the garden of eternity.³

Yes, we all have our worries in this world, in one way or another, but as Hazur urges us:

We have to rise above all these things... Even one in the weakest state of health can do simran and bhajan... One day we all have to leave this world when our time here is finished, and will have to leave all the loves and attachments behind. Please keep in mind that this precious gift of human life has been conferred upon us by the Lord for the sole purpose of giving us the opportunity to return to our true home of everlasting peace and bliss.⁴

Can there be greater comfort for us than the reply he gives in the following letter?

You have been given the passport to go back to your own Home where your Supreme Father is waiting to receive you. What greater joy, blessing or bliss can one have in this world of misery and suffering? In fact, no other person should be so happy in this world as an initiate who is on the path. He should always keep his final goal in sight – the treasures, the joys and the bliss that await him in his true home... Keep your thoughts in simran and bhajan and see what happiness you will find within yourself. Do not worry about anything in this life, which is all an unpleasant dream.⁵

In The Way of Illumination, Hazrat Inayat Khan relates that once he was with a man who was in the habit of meditating and while they were sitting near the fire and talking about things, his companion went into the silence, and he had to sit quietly until his friend opened his eyes. He then asked him, “It is beautiful, is it not?” to which the friend replied, “It is never enough.” Inayat Khan concludes, “Those who experience the joy of meditation, for them there is nothing in this world that is more interesting and enjoyable. They experience the inner peace and joy that cannnot be explained in words; they touch perfection, or the spirit of light, of life and of love – all is there...”⁶

Right now, with so many of us experiencing the pain of being physically separated from our Master, Hazur’s words, as he explains the passage in Saint John where Jesus prepares his disciples for the next phase of their spiritual development, may reach deeper places in our hearts:

I am so much in love with you that my love will always be pulling you to my level... Your happiness will know no bounds when you meet me within yourself. Then you will absolutely forget all your trials and sorrows. You will be so filled with love, joy, and indescribable happiness that there will be no room for anything else.⁷

If we are in need of a musical pick-me-up, aren’t we all musicians too? Someone has written that “every man is a golden instrument of the divine orchestra from which arises the melody of the Spirit.” By giving us this human form, the Creator has chosen us to be His instruments. It is up to us to pick up our instrument, our consciousness, to tune it perfectly and play His music, His Ode to Joy.

Quest for Light, letter 310
Bible, Psalms 4:7–8
Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch & M. Mokri, Odes mystiques 959, p.275
Quest for Light, letter 106
Quest for Light, letter 340
Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Inner Life, p. 97, in The Sufi Message: The Way of Illumination. Barrie Books, London, 1960
Light on St John, Discourse on John 16, p. 266

Kill the Buddha - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Kill the Buddha

The Buddhist saying, “Kill the Buddha” (Chinese: sha fo) has been current in RS culture since it was used some years ago in an iconoclastic satsang given at the Dera by a Westerner, who adapted it to “kill the master.” Baba Ji has often mentioned the saying and the meaning that underlies it.

“Kill the Buddha” is part of a famous saying credited to the ninth-century mystic Linji Yixuan, Chinese founder of the Linji (Japanese: Rinzai) school of Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhism. The fuller saying runs: “If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha (sha fo); if you meet a (Buddhist) patriarch, slay the patriarch; if you meet a luohan (enlightened one), kill the luohan; if you meet your parents, kill your parents.… In this way, you will attain liberation.”¹

Linji is well known for having used shock treatment in order to surprise the minds of his disciples into the realization of spiritual truths. His methods included sudden shouts or exclamations into a student’s ear, physical blows, and nonsensical or unrelated responses to questions. The point of this particular saying is to bring about the understanding that every person is complete in himself and is already a potential buddha, so there is no need to rely upon or unduly revere any other person. All such reliance lies in the mind, and is a source of weakness to be overcome. Truth is found by focusing within oneself and by self-realization, which cannot be given by anyone else.

The Linji school became the most popular and widespread of the five schools of Chan Buddhism. It was also the inspiration behind the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, where the saying was used as a koan, in forms such as, “If you meet demons, kill the demons; if you meet buddhas, kill the buddhas,” sometimes adding “then for the first time you will see clearly.” In other words, whatever you encounter, inside or out, eliminate it, because it is blocking the way to deeper realization.

Linji Yixuan makes the point very clearly. He also introduces the notion that enlightenment involves living an ordinary life and doing nothing – something that is actually quite out of the ordinary:

Followers of the Way, if you want insight into the Dharma as it really is, do not be taken in by the deluded views of others. Whatever you encounter, whether within or without, kill it at once. If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha (sha fo); if you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch; if you meet a luohan, kill the luohan; if you meet your parents, kill your parents; if you meet your family, kill your family. In this way, you will gain liberation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.… I have no trick to give people. I merely cure disease and set people free.… My views are few. I merely put on clothing and eat meals as usual, and pass my time without doing anything. You people coming from the various directions have all made up your minds to seek the Buddha, seek the Dharma, seek emancipation, and seek to leave the three worlds. Crazy people! If you want to leave the three worlds, where can you go? ‘Buddha’ and ‘patriarchs’ are terms of praise and also bondage. Do you want to know where the three worlds are? They are right in your mind, which is now listening to the Dharma.²

He is saying that we already have whatever we are seeking. All we have to do is to realize it. Further elucidating the saying, the Chan Buddhist Master Sheng-yen (1930–2009) observes:

Obviously, Linji is not advocating that one should actually kill buddhas, parents, and teachers; but what is the point of such a seemingly violent attitude? Can this really be considered a method of practice conducive to Buddhist enlightenment and compassion? Indeed it can. Linji’s point is that we must ‘slay’ these things as objects of attachment or self-expectation. We must be relentlessly self-reliant (zixin) and cut off all conditional thoughts in our minds until there is nothing further to cut off. When all such discriminations – all such naïve views that shape the small self and its world – are exhausted, we will truly be ‘ordinary, with nothing to do’.²

Adapted from the entry “Kill the Buddha,” in A Treasury of Mystic Terms, vol. 16 (Science of the Soul Research Centre, New Delhi, 2019)

Linji yulu (‘Record of Linji’), Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo (ed. Takakusu Junjiro & Watanabe Kaigokyu; Taisho Issaikyo Kankokai, Tokyo, 1924–32; tripitaka.cbeta.org, ret. April 2017), vol. 47, text 1985:500b
Master Sheng-yen, Hoofprint of the Ox (Oxford University Press, New York, 2002) p.119

A Life with Purpose - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Life with Purpose

Everything in the creation has been designed with a specific purpose – nature is never extravagant. The Creator has defined a precise role for each and every living thing. Even the tiniest little insects foraging around in rotting vegetation have a specific place in the universe; if they were not there then something would be out of balance. Like an intricate motif in a beautiful pattern, they too are part of an even grander design.

All beings exist as an essential part of the whole. Unbeknownst to them they are all part of a divine dance, players on the grand stage of eternity, working in harmony to fulfill the Creator’s grand design. In nature we call this automatic or instinctive working together for mutual benefit an “ecosystem.” From our perspective as human beings we observe the intricate mechanisms of nature, and we see how each plays an essential part in supporting and existing within the whole.

There is a popular saying, “as the microcosm, so the macrocosm,” which may have originated with the ancient Greeks. It means that every part of the universe reflects the entire universe. It implies that at whatever scale we observe activity in the universe, whether material, mental or spiritual, everything is working according to the Creator’s divine plan or divine order. So long as each part acts in accordance with its true purpose, there is harmony and peace within the structure. But if an individual participant goes against this natural order, then imbalance occurs, and this is felt acutely by that individual and also at some scale within the whole system.

In this universe, all creatures lower than human beings are working precisely in accordance with their natural purpose. Through the impetus of their basic instincts, each creature is playing its part beautifully. A butterfly is perfectly a butterfly and an elephant perfectly an elephant. They behave as one would expect, as they operate within the parameters of their physical and mental capabilities.

But what of man? Depending on one’s perspective, human beings are either blessed, or cursed, with the great gift of self-awareness. Rather than seeking to play our part within the grand ecosystem as devised by the Creator, we instead seek to express our own individuality and have everything spin around us in our very own “EGO-system.”

Driven by the sense of separation that this awareness of self can cause, we strive to bend and warp everything around us to our individual will. In so doing, we disrupt the world in which we exist, causing imbalance and disruption to all living things. We see the effect of this every day in our news headlines: war, famine, pollution, and economic failure – the list goes on.

Look at trees for example. As plants they are at the lower spectrum of creation, and yet they can work together practicing cooperation rather than competition. They trade nutrients and take care of their sick neighbours. Human beings are at the higher end of the spectrum of created beings, and what do we do – quite the opposite! We practice competition with our neighbours and rarely practice cooperation.

Outwardly we may not even feel the disharmony we create around us, but certainly inwardly we all feel it. Empowered by our superior intellect and our ability to make choices, we have wandered far from the confines of the natural order of things, and as a consequence deviate far from behaving even like a good human being – much less a perfect one. Under the strong influence of the negative tendencies of the mind, we have become mentally scattered, our attention continuously drawn downward and outward by the senses. The further we wander from our true purpose, the more depressed and unhappy we feel.

So in God’s divine plan, what is our true purpose? The eighteenth-century Indian mystic Dariya Sahib describes our situation as follows:

Rare indeed is the human birth in this world;
With great fortune it is obtained,
Its purpose being the attainment of salvation.
After going round the cycle of eighty-four [lakhs of species]
One obtains a wise Guru in the world who can impart wisdom.¹

Such “wise Gurus” or Saints have proclaimed the same throughout the ages, no matter from which country they belonged to, or which religious heritage. They tell us that we humans have a supreme purpose. Above all creatures in this universe, the Lord has blessed us with the opportunity to reunite with him and leave the wheel of transmigration.

These Saints also tell us that the kingdom of God is within us. The Lord God, the supreme Creator, cannot be found outside by one who has not realized him within. The human body of ours is the mansion of the Lord, the temple of the living God. Those who seek him outside wander in illusion.

This body is more than flesh and bones. Its true wonder lies in our capacity to bring our consciousness within ourselves and to know that we are neither body nor mind, but of the same essence as the Creator. Our soul is a drop from that ocean of love that we call God.

To merge back in that ocean and experience divine communion, we do not need to go to temples built by the hand of man. Instead we are already in the holy of holies, this body – hari mandir – the house of God, fashioned by the Lord himself.

Sadly we are largely unaware of our true potential. In every life – in all forms – we have struggled to live and sustain ourselves; we have had family and we have had to fight for our existence. Although these activities are still very much a part of our human lives, when viewed with the Saints’ perspective, we too can see that they are certainly not the main purpose of human life. The Saints unequivocally proclaim that the primary objective of human life is to return to our true home and become one with the Father. This is the “real work” for which we have come to this world. Everything else we do is just working through our karmas – settling old debits and creating new credits.

Hazur Maharaj Ji used to say that the human body is the top rung of the ladder of creation. From here, through our actions, we can either drop down to the lower species or we can rise up and go back to the Lord and escape forever from the cycle of birth and death.

So what is this path and where can we find it? Through science we have learned much about this creation as well as the body which we inhabit. Even the keenest minds in science are awestruck when they consider the immensity and complexity of the creation. Many of today’s greatest scientists are beginning to think that the larger part of the creation – about 95% – is what they call “dark” matter and “dark” energy – so-called “dark” as it remains unseen and unknown to them. And of the 5% they might “know” – well, even that is a constantly moving feast of speculation, discovery and re-evaluation.

In any case, this all relates to the external world and therefore the external “us,” our limited physical reality. But the true Masters wish to draw our attention away from this illusory identity and instead re-orient us towards our true selves, our inner reality, and through this to access the kingdom of God within us.

This is the field of activity of which only the Saints know. These divine messengers of the Lord, his beloved sons and daughters, are experts in this field – having themselves fully traversed the inner path and merged back into the Creator. They speak of what they know. Theirs is no idle speculation or collection of ancient texts and sayings. They come to our level and enjoin us to seek within ourselves and know through direct experience what lies within. Of this Great Master writes:

Your wildest dreams or imaginings cannot picture the grandeur of what lies within. But the treasure is yours and is there for you. You can have it whenever you go there. Take it from me, and once and for all, that everything, including the Creator, is within you, and whosoever has attained it has attained it by going inside the eye focus.²

To know how we should apply ourselves in order to achieve this noble objective, we should first understand what lies within us. As the Creator has designated a specific purpose for all creatures, he has also perfectly equipped them in order that they can fulfill that purpose – likewise within man. Whereas modern marketing seeks to constantly remind us that we are deficient in some way, and that only with the acquisition of their product will be truly happy and fulfilled, the Masters on the other hand see absolutely no deficiency in us. They say we are all fully and equally equipped and have the potential to realize the greatest purpose given to any being in this creation, which is to realize our true nature, that we are in essence nothing but love.

Another name for God is love. All scriptures express this same truth in one way or another: that God is love and love is God. The Creator is not separate from His creation; He exists at the heart of all living things and is the life force that animates them. He is the powerhouse at the centre of every part and parcel of the creation, projecting himself outwards as the myriad forms that dance before our eyes.

In this dynamic creative form, the Lord is known by many names, for example Shabd, Kalma, Tao and so many others. He is the “Word” of the Bible that created “all things;” the divine utterance that brought forth all that we see. This same power continues to flow from the Creator sustaining this whole creation. In man alone can this power be known. Under proper guidance by a true Master, we human beings can consciously contact the Creator within ourselves by directly experiencing this life force, or audible lifestream, as it manifests within us as a glorious melody and effulgent light.

If this is so, then why can’t we all see this? The reason is that we have become immersed and attached to this world through three basic activities: seeing, speaking, and listening. And it is through the process of meditation as taught by the Master that we learn to reorient these three faculties, turning them inward, and in so doing we are able to withdraw our wayward attention from the material world and bring it within ourselves.

At the time of initiation, we’re given five holy names to repeat silently within ourselves. It is by utilizing this simran that we occupy the speech faculty of the mind. Through inner contemplation, dhyan, our seeing faculty is engaged. And thirdly, when the simran and dhyan are complete, the Shabd manifests within us and we can focus solely on listening to the divine melody within.

Through this tried and tested technique of meditation, the scattered mind is drawn back to its natural seat in the forehead, the tenth door, tisra til – single or third eye. By drawing the three faculties together they collect at a single point. This point is the door to the Father’s house, and on crossing its threshold, we awaken to the glory of the spiritual worlds within us. Here our soul again knows that inexpressible love from which it originated. On finding this supreme bliss within ourselves, we become instantly detached from the base allurements of the world and instead become deeply attached to the Lord within.

However, escaping from the bonds that we have created around us is not so easy. We have been caught for so many lives in this seemingly endless play of the world, and this vast catalogue of our experiences has marked us, scarred us. So deep have these impressions become that the Shabd – the sound and light within us – has become totally imperceptible. Without the clarity of inner vision, we instead stumble around in the darkness, falling constantly, totally forgetting our true home and so becoming even more entangled in the world and totally losing sight of our true purpose.

Through our spiritual short-sightedness, we have acted – and do act – in ways that are often not in our own best interest. As a result of this, there can be significant consequences that we have to suffer. In the Bible it says:

Be not be deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.³

Whether we call it karma, the law of cause and effect, or sowing and reaping, this law is unerring, and we are all dominated by it. Under its sway, all forms lower than man are in their bodies simply paying off karma. They do not create it; they only behave automatically or instinctively. They have no choice, and they go through their destiny under the direct influence of their karmas. This being so, when did they sow these seeds for which they are now reaping such bitter fruits? The answer is significant for us, it is this form in which we now reside – the human form.

The human form alone is the one in which karmas are both created and received. It is here in this body that we sow the seeds for our future. When we make the wrong choices and perform negative actions, we are unknowingly preparing for ourselves a long journey back into the creation and the wheel of transmigration.

Alternatively we can follow the guidance on “right living” that the Saints entreat us to follow. They beseech us to adopt four simple principles (or vows) in order that the choices we make and the actions we perform enable us to realize our potential – release us from material bondage – and set our soul free to return to our original home.

We have already discussed our great potential; accordingly the Lord has imbued us with the latent power to achieve all that it entails. What the Master asks us to do is within our easy reach; it is not anything extreme. We are simply advised to diligently commit to living the life of a good human being. This entails adopting a lifestyle based on four simple principles. These are the simple instructions of “How to Get Started” in using this human form for its true purpose. Yes, we have heard them all before, and we all feel we know them by rote, but much like when we find that we’re not getting the best out of piece of home tech, a re-reading of the first part of the User Manual may reveal where we are going wrong, and some small adjustment may enable us to optimize its performance. So here they are.

Firstly, we need to adopt and adhere to a lacto-vegetarian diet, abstaining from eating meat, fish, fowl, or eggs (whether fertile or infertile) or anything derived from them. Additionally, we shouldn’t be part of any chain of activity that goes against this principle.

Secondly, the Master’s guidance is that we should abstain from alcohol, narcotic drugs, tobacco products, or any addictive substances, for that matter. In our sober state, we are already experiencing the huge challenge of overcoming the negative influence of our mind and senses – and that is struggle enough! To add to our burden and hand over what little self-control we have, is to say the least, counter-productive, as well as evidently foolish! We will need every ounce of will power to check and reverse the downward and outward flow of our attention. Constant vigilance will be required in order that we make each step on the path count towards reaching our objective.

So far, all well and good, and we can hopefully put a big check-mark against these first two vows and feel confident that we are on track. Then we come to the next and more far-reaching third vow, that we should lead a clean and morally upright life, earning our own livelihood by fair and honest means, and where possible, not being a burden to our fellow man or society at large. In short, our lives should be the expression of what all good humans should be. This vow is all-encompassing; critically applying this principle to our daily lives is to shine a bright light on all our doings, it can bring to light much of what we have hidden in the shadows and invites us to reshape our lives so that we may be fit to sit once again in the Hall of our Father.

To follow this to the letter can be a great challenge. However, if we simply approach every situation, and the people in our lives in a truly kind, giving and loving manner, then as a natural consequence, good will follow. Living our lives in this way we are working with the Creator and trying to express his presence in our lives through each and every one of our actions.

Following these first three vows, we start to build a loving environment around ourselves which creates the foundation for our most critical activity. With dedicated effort we need to commit to daily attending to our meditation for at least 2.5 hours. This is just 10% of the time we have in the day; it is so little to give when we are to receive so much. Throughout countless lives, 24/7, we have been committing actions and thereby have accrued karmas, and these debits and credits are what now block our way. They are the cause of the deep separation we feel from our Creator and they have to be eradicated if we are to merge back and have union with Him.

Meditation is the supreme action. Actions in the material world simply beget equal reactions. It’s a poor deal, you give one – you get one. Whereas in meditation we do what pleases our Master most, and our small faltering steps towards him bring him running towards us. He guarantees that if we play our small part in effecting our salvation, then he will not withhold his mercy and grace, and through this, we will one day find ourselves with him in our eternal home, a place of boundless love, joy and bliss.

Hazur reminds us:

As Christ said, the harvest is ready. The harvest is always ready, but we have to lift our consciousness to that level where we can collect that harvest … Just change your way of life according to the teachings and attend to meditation. That is all that is required. From meditation, love will come, submission will come, humility will come. Everything will come.⁴

K.N. Upadhyaya, Dariya Sahib: Saint of Bihar, Beas: RSSB, 2006, p. 122
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Beas: RSSB, 2004, #147
Holy Bible, KJV, Galatians 6:7-9
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Beas: RSSB, 1999, #353

Giving Up Old Ways of Thinking - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Giving Up Old Ways of Thinking

We are all born with a unique set of karmas that we must go through in this lifetime. Some seem to do it with ease, and others hold on to grudges, losses, and pain forever. One wonders, amid all the changes taking place in the world, “Are there things, concepts, behaviours that I can let go of, that I no longer need in my life?” There have been countless self-help books written about “decluttering our lives.” These books are flying off the bookshelves with massive sales. It is as if the more chaotic life becomes, the more we need to make sense of it and organize the chaos. Decluttering our physical spaces may be a metaphor for the cleaning of our inner spaces. The events of this year have perhaps allowed us to look closely at the habits of our lives, our relationship with the Master, and the path, in a new light.

The Master has gone to great lengths to urge us to rid ourselves of the clutter we have built up relative to the path. To bring our attention back to the simplicity of the teachings, he has repeatedly tried to steer us away from rituals and behaviours that distance us from the inner reality. Yet, it is our nature to grasp onto one myth and then another.

There is a story of a Buddhist monk trying to illustrate to his disciple the uselessness of clinging to concepts and grasping dogma on the path, and the burden he shoulders in doing so. In essence, the story revolves around the disciples’ need to cross a river. The disciple built a raft out of “grass, twigs, and leaves.” Upon reaching the other side of the river, the disciple decided that since it had carried him across the river, he would carry the raft on his shoulders for the rest of the journey, even though the raft had served its purpose. So, he took on the burden of carrying the raft upon his shoulders. The Buddha concluded, “So I have shown you how the dharma (teachings) is similar to a raft, for a purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.”¹

Grasping and holding on to what we think is real and permanent is a barrier to our growth and experience on the path. We have heard that this world is an illusion, and yet we can reach out and touch our spouse, our child, our automobile, a cup, and they all seem real.

Because we tend to see the world as being fixed and permanent despite the experience that it is not, we become unhappy with its loss. We have been thrust into a world where everything is changing. We have been forced to change habits (some have lost jobs, children can’t go to school, we can’t even go shopping). We have been asked to stay away from touching others, and even to wear masks. The loss of our old ways of being has presented us with new challenges. Some of us may long to go back to the way things were. Some may see it as an opportunity.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own.”² What are we holding on to, when it is a law of the universe that everything changes?

We only have to look at our bodies to understand this. We know that we are growing old, our bodies are full of pain and disease, our eyes are growing dim, yet we struggle to stem the tide with one “fix” after another. Is it time to take stock and stop trying to hold on to what our life has been thus far? Is it taking up too much of our day to attempt to reverse the aging process? Have we become so self-absorbed, with our wrinkles and loss of our spry step, that we cannot accept that there is a purpose to our aging? Baba Ji once said that aging naturally is beautiful. So, in some manner, has he permitted us to let go of our image of ourselves as a physical presence with good teeth, ears, eyes, hair? Our ego sure seems to try and resist this notion of aging. Yet, does our holding on to an image of a younger self add to our mental load and burden?

If we let go of our minds’ ceaseless activity, our worries over the past, our emotions, and preoccupations with the self, what do we really lose? Holding on to these things is the very thing that keeps us from the remembrance of the Divine. We remain stuck in the thinking that everything here is real and we stay attached to its presence in our lives. What is the answer to this constant grasping, this trying to hold on to what was? If, as it is said, that the life of a human being has the purpose of discovering the Divine, how do we become spiritually mature enough to identify and let go of what has held us back?

Of course, the answer is meditation. But like every other aspect of our lives, we may have decided that just “showing up” and sitting on our cushions is enough. We may have become stuck and feel we aren’t making any progress. There is an old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, in the same way, day after day, and expecting a different outcome. So perhaps overcoming this inertia that keeps us from profoundly and genuinely exploring our meditation is part of letting go of our concept of what effort is. The pursuit of wisdom lies in the ability to adjust course and continually look with fresh eyes at an old habit.

To truly declutter, our lives should revolve around our meditation. In Concepts and Illusions, it is said, “Bees, when caught in a storm in the fields, take up little stones to keep their balance in the air and not be easily carried away by the storm.”³ Our anchor in any storm is meditation and the Master. Through meditation, we can realize that everything here is temporary and maintain our balance and correct our course as needed. Meditation trains us to assume the perspective of accepting what is happening in our life. It lets us experience that the inner world we seek is the rock that we can stand on while everything around us is confusing and seemingly out of control. Meditation helps us to stop grasping and trying to keep things from changing around us and accepting what is. It is the only pathway to letting go.

Peter of Celles, in Thomas Merton’s book Contemplative Prayer, says:

God works in us while we rest in him. Beyond all grasping is this work of the Creator… This rest, in its effect, shines forth as more productive than any work.⁴

This is just another way to assure us that letting go of our judgments, our opinions, our concepts of “how things should be,” our indecision and our anxieties, while not an easy thing to do, is our way to the peace, balance, and rest that taking shelter in the Master and meditation provides for us.

The Spiritual Guide, Vol. 2, p. 31
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, quoted in Concepts and Illusions, p.124
Concepts and Illusions, p.138
Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p.59

All Clear! - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

All Clear!

We all would agree that in order to give some structure to our life, we must have goals and priorities. Goals and planning can be as long-term as retirement goals for someone who is just entering the workforce, to as short-term as “what do I want to eat for my next meal?” Then, in order to achieve that goal, we need to prioritize our tasks and finally act. Without these three necessary aspects – goal, priority, action – our life would be very chaotic, confusing and unproductive.

A common force which supports all three tenets is “clear thinking.”

Since thoughts are creations of the mind, clear thinking comes from a clear mind. An analogy we frequently hear in discourses is that one cannot see one’s face in muddy, disturbed water. If the water is still, the mud settles at the bottom and we can see a clear reflection. In essence, just as still water is clear water, a still and motionless mind brings about clarity to our thinking process.

Lack of clear thinking causes us to react to one situation after another, creating more pain and suffering. Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh Ji points out:

Why do we lose our temper? Because we do not reflect. Why do people fall prey to the attack of lust? Because they do not think. Why do people commit suicide at the loss of property or wealth? Because they do not think. Vichar, clear thinking, is 90 percent abhyas (practice). Clear thinking is a blessing. It can easily be attained by a little practice.¹

He is essentially stating that clear thinking, like any other skill, can be learned by practice! So we need to have absolute clarity at each step of the above-mentioned life structure, as to:

What is our goal in life?
How do we prioritize in order to always keep it in focus (or) not lose sight of it, while attending to other obligations and responsibilities (keep a balance)?
How do we execute it (take action)?

Goal: Some believers of destiny might argue – out of complacency – that if everything is predestined, then why must we have a goal or even take any action? However, on a practical level, we do – and must – have a life purpose in order to give meaning to life and to have some sense of a secure future – regardless of its unpredictability.

The common underlying goal or purpose of life is to achieve happiness. We may adopt different means to that end. Clarity of thought comes into play here because we must strive to seek what brings everlasting happiness, rather than short-lived bursts of pleasure. Saints tell us from their experience that permanent happiness comes from searching for and realizing our true Self, which is the essence of the Divine, and ultimately merging in our Source.

Priorities: Life is full of distractions. Once we have clearly defined our goal, the next challenge is to always keep it in focus and build our routine around working towards it. There will be many storms in this life. The goal becomes our anchor. Life’s necessary obligations and responsibilities must be tended to, and amidst all the squalls, we can’t lose sight of our goal. The path of self-realization is also called the path of the valiant for this very reason. In a battle, there is chaos, commotion, pandemonium, and so forth, but a brave soldier is one who is focused on his duty.

Action: Without acting upon what we have set out to achieve, theoretical goal-setting and priorities become meaningless. Taking Sardar Bahadur Ji’s advice, let us practise clear thinking by trying to still our mind. It is by action that we have created our destiny. It is by action that we can create a future. There is very little that we can control in life and in this world, but we can control how we handle the situations we encounter. A positive action born of clear thinking is like a seed that can become a giant tree of positivity, for us and for those around us.

As the saying goes, “I am not what happens to me; I am what I choose to become.”

Science of the Soul, p. 189, #18.

True Protection from Life’s Pandemics - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

True Protection from Life’s Pandemics

The onset of the Covid pandemic has created much turmoil, difficulties, and challenges in the world. Some people have experienced economic hardship whilst others endure poor health and the loss of their loved ones. In some cases, the virus has restricted our physical movements, keeping us away from work, family, and friends. When we experience these trials in our lives, there is a tendency to feel discouraged, lonely, and abandoned. However, the prevailing circumstances also provide us with a unique opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to the teachings of the Saints.

The world has always experienced pandemics, problems, and strife. During the Great Master’s time, Rai Sahib Munshi Ram wrote that in more than 90 percent of the letters received by the Great Master, there were complaints about illness, poverty, or the death of a relative or dear one. The reply to those letters was that whatever happens in our lives is due to our past actions and that we must go within to experience the grace, mercy and protection of the Master.¹

Saints remind us that the Master’s Shabd form is always with us and is protecting us at every moment.² Hazur Maharaj Ji expanded on the protection that we receive from the Master on the path of spirituality. He said that the true protection given by the Master is to take charge of the soul so that it can shine and go back to the Father. The Master takes care of our soul so that it does not have to return to this creation.³ We are therefore so fortunate and blessed to be receiving the protection of the Master in the midst of the strife and pandemic in this creation.

It is due to the grace of the Lord that saints come into the creation to remind us that this world is not our true home. Saints provide us with the key to escape from this creation so that we can return to Sach Khand, our true home. Comforted by the inner protection of the Shabd Master, we must endeavour to put in our best effort in all worldly trials and difficulties. Hazur Maharaj Ji said that:

There are always ups and downs in life. Things never remain the same and we should try to face these moments of trial with patience and courage, keeping full faith in Him. Our destiny is already marked out according to our past actions and we have to undergo this in any case. It is our duty to make an effort to overcome our difficulties and solve our problems.⁴

We can draw strength and inspiration from these comforting words of Hazur Maharaj Ji. He lovingly advised us that the solution to the pandemics and strife in our lives lies in taking hold of the master’s inner protection, attending to our meditation, and devoting ourselves to the practice of Shabd. Our refuge lies in finding solace in the Shabd and putting in our best efforts to improve our situation in life. The Great Master also highlighted the importance of seeking the inner protection of the Shabd, irrespective of our circumstances in life. He said:

In whatever walk or circumstances of life we find ourselves placed, we should endeavour our best to earn our living honestly, discharge our duties faithfully, live a healthy moral life, willingly put up with our fate, and devote ourselves to the practice of Shabd, so that our past account is settled and our future is along the path of the Sound Current, which leads us to our spiritual home.⁵

Our current circumstance in life can be compared to an old kettle that has never been cleaned; the layers of dirt grow around it and make it appear to be dirty.⁶ When the kettle is thoroughly cleaned, its true quality and brightness will appear again. Its beauty was there all along but it was simply hidden and concealed. In this analogy, the dirt around the kettle represents our karma from past actions. The scrubbing is our meditation and the detergent that we use to scrub is the Shabd. We can overcome our karmas with the inner protection of the Master and utilize the Shabd to scrub them away. It is by the grace of the Master that we have been given a strong detergent to scrub our soul. Once we have cleansed ourselves our divinity will shine. Soami Ji explained this process of receiving the Master’s inner protection to overcome the effects of our karma and return to our true home. He wrote:

My friend, apply yourself to the practice of Shabd and defeat Kal with the might of Shabd. Reach the harbour of Shabd in your own heart and see your beloved, whose real form is Shabd – nothing but Shabd. Shabd will repeal the decree of karma. Guru’s Shabd will unite you with the primal Shabd.⁷

So let us make the most of this current birth by being receptive to the gracious and loving inner protection afforded by the Master. Let us attend to our meditation to develop the strength to rise above the effect of any pandemic in life so that our soul may reach divine attainment and merge with its Shabd source.

With the Three Masters, vol. 1, p. 12
Spiritual Letters, letter 24
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 1, #554
Quest for Light, letter 229
Glimpses of the Great Master, p. 194
Concepts & Illusions: A Perspective, p. 89
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 9, Shabd 5, p. 91

The Ultimate Act of Courage - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Ultimate Act of Courage

The subject of this talk is the ultimate act of courage and it is based on a question that was asked of Hazur Maharaji many years ago when the Master was asked:

What kind of heroism is required – talking about courage – what kind of heroism is required then, in our meditation?

The answer was a surprise. He said:

…..We should try to be as regular and punctual as much as we can. As a matter of routine, as a matter of duty and attend to our meditation without any excitement to see anything. It should become a part of ourselves. It should become a part of our daily duty. Then, automatically, it will start reflecting in our daily life.¹

So why was this a surprise? We know that meditation is the answer to most questions, but how is it that our meditation is an act of courage?

We may think about a soldier going into battle,
Or an explorer climbing Mount Everest,
Or maybe a person who is terminally ill facing death boldly.

A soldier who fights bravely is given a medal for his courage, and one who makes the ultimate sacrifice, who dies in battle, is given a special medal. An explorer who conquers Mount Everest is given a place in history for his courageous accomplishment. And a terminally ill person who succumbs after facing death with equanimity is eulogized as having shown great courage.

So if we are doing our simran and bhajan regularly and punctually with love and devotion how could that be such an act of courage? Because:

We are that soldier, but we are fighting the most formidable and insidious of all enemies: the mind.
We are the explorer attempting to climb the most difficult of all mountains: the mountain of light within this body.
We are that terminally ill patient facing death, not just the death of the body but the death of the self, the ego and our separate existence which has been the cause of all of our suffering.

The Soldier
With regard to being a soldier Hazur was asked:

Q. Could you explain if there's any difference between being a warrior on the path and being a satsangi?

A. Being a warrior on the path is just a way of expressing the idea that you have to fight with the mind, with your senses, just as a warrior fights with the enemy, and he's not frightened, even of his death. No matter how much hardship he has to go through, he wants to fight, he looks ahead. Similarly, our attitude should be to fight with the mind, fight with our senses, fight with our weaknesses like a warrior. That's only a way of expression.

Q. So there's no distinction, then, between a warrior and a satsangi?

A. Every satsangi is a warrior.²

In response to another question about satsangis living the life of a warrior, he says:

A warrior is never frightened of death, and he sacrifices so many things. He doesn't look back at all. He never worries: What will happen to my wife, what will happen to my son, and if I'm killed, how will they live? His only aim is to fight and conquer and be victorious. Similarly, our aim in meditation should be to be like a warrior. We shouldn't worry: If I leave this creation what will happen to my children, what will happen to my wife? I've collected so much wealth — what will happen to it? We must absolutely pull our mind from all these things and be prepared to sacrifice anything to achieve our end.³

And in response to another question about meditation, he says:

The general equips his soldiers to fight the enemy, and he wants each soldier to fight. He is at the back to guide him, to equip him, to give him his ammunition, to look after all his needs, but the soldier has to fight. The soldier can't tell his general to come and fight in the front lines for him. We have to do our part. We have to play our part. And we are equipped to play our part — we have to fight with our enemy, our mind, which is attached to this creation.⁴

When a boxer is described as having a “lot of heart” it means that he never gives up. He may get knocked down, but he keeps getting up to fight again. He may be bloody, but he doesn’t stop. He gives it everything he has and even if he loses the fight, he is still respected for his courage and persistence.

We should approach our meditation with a “lot of heart.” The mind is so powerful, and it constantly “beats us up,” but if we approach our meditation with a “lot of heart,” we will keep coming back with our simran and dhyan. We’ll lose so many battles, but each time our will gets stronger. Our desire to reach the eye center and be with the Master increases.

We need to understand the virtue of failure. If we fail, it means we tried; and if we have tried, it means we have grown. That’s why the Great Master said, “Bring me your failures.”⁵ Does the child who is learning to walk fail when he falls down? It’s part of the process that leads to success. So many of the great and famous people embrace failure as the key to their success.

There was a basketball player who made it to the NBA, yet he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career. He lost over 300 games. Twenty-six times he was trusted to take the game-winning shot, and he missed. His name is Michael Jordan and he said,

I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.⁶

There is the story that Thomas Edison went through 10,000 experiments before he built a battery that worked. So a reporter asked him how it felt to fail 10,000 times in his efforts. “Failed?” replied Edison, “I have not failed 10,000 times – I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”⁷ So if we keep at it, eventually the mind will become motionless and we will accomplish our goal. Ultimately, we are destined to succeed.

In the meantime we have to recognize that the mind is our mortal enemy because it causes us so much pain and suffering, and it stands between us and someone we love. Shouldn’t we be angry with the mind for all its tricks, for keeping us enslaved in the world, for all the suffering it has caused us, and for keeping us away from the one we want to be with within? We have become conscious that this mind is no friend of ours. So, enough is enough! Isn’t it time to say that “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore?”

Hazur wrote:

Do not feel helpless or desperate, but keep up the struggle and be brave like a soldier. Tell the mind that you are not going to yield to it any more, that you are going to lead a new life altogether.⁸

So as practitioners of meditation we need to say “no” to the mind when it desires anything that can set us back. We avoid the biggest setbacks by living a healthy moral lifestyle and by avoiding meat, fish and eggs, drugs and alcohol. The meditation that we practice is saying “no” to the mind at the very root – the level of thought – because the mind wants to think of something else, and we’re replacing those thoughts with simran. So we start doing simran, then we forget simran and start thinking about worldly things. Then again, we bring our mind back to simran. We just keep bringing it back – over and over again.

It's a constant struggle, because the mind wants to go back to its old habits, but with simran and dhyan we are reprogramming the mind with a new and much more beneficial habit. Great Master said:

The mind is our only enemy in this world … do not lose heart but keep on meditating. Simran is very powerful. When perfected, it has the power to stop a moving train.⁹

The mind is an opportunist. It waits for a moment of weakness when we let down our guard. So a satsangi needs to remain alert in every moment of every day. It would be much easier if the need to act and to be conscious was limited to one day or one moment. But for a satsangi the act of courage is done every day:

Attending to our simran and bhajan regularly and punctually.

The Explorer
We are also the explorer. Just as the great explorers sought to scale the highest mountains, we are seeking to climb through the mountain of this body to the apex behind the eyes. An explorer goes where few others fear to tread. He seeks to find a brave new world on the outside just as we seek to enter the world of spirit on the inside.

What distinguishes the great explorers and adventurers of the world from others? An unshakeable faith and an indomitable will. Without faith in their enterprise their work would be impossible. Without faith they would never have been able to suffer all the difficulties and hardships along the way.

In the same way, complete faith in the Master is a prerequisite for achieving spiritual progress. We begin with just a little bit of faith and trust in the Master and his teachings, which gives us the courage to do our simran and bhajan regularly and punctually. Baba Ji always says, “just do it.” He wants us to just dive in and get started. We need to put aside all our reservations and get down to it. “Complete faith” will only come from internal experience. Christ said:

If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.¹⁰

He is saying that if you can develop just a little faith in the Master like the amount of a mustard seed, you will get so much power within yourself that you can even move mountains from one place to another.

The Terminally Ill: Dying to Live
We are all terminally ill. We must all face death. Nobody escapes it. The fear of the unknown, and the terror of death, overshadow practically everything we do in our lives. To help us cope with the fear of death, we close our eyes to reality and take false comfort in certain illusions. The rituals of our religions also give us false hope.

The mind is capable of making us ignore our death even though we see our friends and relatives pass from this world. Intellectually we know it will happen, but we act as though we are here forever. We remain in denial, as illustrated by the famous quip:

It’s not that I’m afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.¹¹

The world sees death as an accident, a fluke, a tragedy, something that’s unnatural, a failure, something that’s not supposed to happen. For most people the idea of death is depressing. We find it hard to accept as we hold onto a notion that maybe there’s some way of fixing it, of putting it off, or hoping that one has some way to survive bodily dissolution. We can fix so many things in life and we can solve so many problems, but so far nobody has been able to solve the problem of death. When someone we love dies, we say, “We lost them,” as though they were ours to lose, because we live in the illusory belief that we belong to each other and that our relationships don’t come to an end. But Hazur says:

We must accept facts; the relationship is a karmic adjustment of the accounts. Somebody is a wife, somebody is a daughter – they come and go on the stage, as you hear every day in satsang. We must accept a death scene when it comes, that this drama has finished now. There's no use crying over spilt milk. We must accept facts and face life as it comes.¹²

We are taught the practice of "dying while living." By withdrawing our consciousness to the third eye and listening to the music of the Sound Current, the Audible Life Stream, our mind and soul together rise out of the tomb of this body and become free from it. By the grace of the Master, we cut our attachments with the world and forget all of its troubles and miseries. Hazur said:

You must withdraw to the eye center, and then you will live forever. Otherwise, you are just living to die. Every time you live, you have to die, so die to live. Learn to die so that you may begin to live, and live forever.¹³

Great Master wrote:

One of the benefits of the teachings of the Saints is that a disciple crosses the gate of death in a state of happiness and thus conquers it…. He loses all fear of death, for every day he crosses its gate.¹⁴

Of course it takes great courage to die while living, to let go of our hold on the world, to leave the self behind and to submit to the spiritual experience. But once we have crossed through the gate, the Master says there is no fear:

No fear of death because we have already died.
No fear of the unknown, because we have pierced the veil and see what lies on the other side.
No fear of losing what we have, because we realize that we have nothing.

This is freedom! As Janis Joplin sang: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”¹⁵

Sant Namdev wrote:

Through the Word of my Guru
I have realized my true self.
While still living, I have learned to die.
Now I have no fear of death.¹⁶

Namdev explains that by going within and hearing the Shabd we realize our true self and achieve a state of fearlessness. There is the story of the warlord who everyone feared. When he came into a village, everyone tried to leave. Those who stayed always bowed their heads out of fear for their lives. So one day as he rode into a village with his army, he noticed a beautiful temple. He entered the temple and he saw the head monk sitting very quietly in meditation. The warlord became disturbed that this monk did not bow down to him. So he pulled his sword and approached the monk. He said, “ Do you realize that I can thrust this sword right through you without batting an eye?” And the monk replied: “And do you realize that I can have a sword thrust right through me without batting an eye?”

If we study the life of any great mystic, we can see that they have achieved this state of fearlessness. Many of them were even put to death, which they faced with acceptance and equanimity. Once we achieve that state of fearlessness, there is no need for courage because courage is only needed to act in the face of fear. At that point there is only one motivation: love.

To conclude: what is it that gives us the strength and the courage to travel the spiritual path? Where does it come from? It comes from the Master. He has planted the seed of love in us. It is that seed – that pull from within – that gives us the desire and the strength to devote ourselves to our practice. This is his grace without which, as Hazur says, we could never even think of the Lord. When the love for the Master grows, it gives us the courage to do battle against the greatest of enemies, the mind, to climb up through the mountain of light within the body and to die while living, to annihilate the ego and to let go of our separateness so that we can be with our beloved. It is all by performing the ultimate act of courage:

Simran and bhajan done regularly and punctually with love and devotion.

Audio-recording, March 31, 1984
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol 2. Beas: RSSB, 2010. #550.
Ibid, #549
Ibid, #546
Ibid, #541 (quoting Maharaj Sawan Singh)
Jeff Stibel, “Michael Jordan: A Profile in Failure” in CSQ Magazine; August 29, 2017
Erica R. Hendry, “7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison,” SmithsonianMag.com, November 20, 2013
Maharaj Charan Singh. Quest for Light. Beas: RSSB, 2002; #455
Rai Sahib Munshi Ram, With the Three Masters, Vol. 1. Beas: RSSB, 2019; p. 363
Matthew 17:20, Holy Bible, KJV
Woody Allen, Death, A Comedy in One Act, New York: Samuel French, Inc. 1975.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol 3, #469.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Beas: RSSB, 1999; p. 135.
Huzur Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, Beas: RSSB, 1989; p. 63
Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee,” performed by Janis Joplin in 1971
J.R. Puri and V.K. Sethi. Sant Namdev, Beas: RSSB, 2004; p. 84

Shifting Our Consciousness - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Shifting Our Consciousness

We tend to think of the spiritual path as a linear journey toward a distant goal. But we don’t actually “go” anywhere. In the words of a contemporary Sufi teacher: “The spiritual journey is a closed circle of love in which we slowly come closer to the center of ourself, which is always present. In this journey there is no ‘progress’ but a shifting of consciousness that unveils our own essential nature.”¹

Our essential nature is Shabd, the universal, dynamic power of love that is God. The traveler on the path, the path itself, and the destination are all one.

We’re engaged in “a shifting of consciousness,” one that reveals the truth of ourselves, the truth of the Master, and the truth of the Shabd – which are all the same truth. This shift is not accomplished by willpower; it happens naturally as our ego dissolves and as we become detached from the world. And that happens through attending to our meditation and going through our karmas

Meditation enables us to transform, and that transformation takes place in spite of ourselves. “Through meditation our own attitude changes towards everybody, and we feel that bliss and happiness within ourselves,”² Hazur said.

That is the measurement we can make, by which we feel that we are progressing in meditation.… We don’t get so easily upset. We take life easier and accept God’s will as life comes. So our life changes in that way – that advantage you can feel, but you can’t say how much [progress] you have already covered and how much is left.³

We’re a bit like mud. Mud may be dirty, but it is soft and malleable. If we continue making the effort to meditate, we too become soft and malleable, even if we don’t look very clean. In fact, this business of self- and God-realization is very messy. Our so-called failures, our mistakes and shortcomings, make up the compost that erodes our ego, punctures our self-importance, and enables us to learn and grow. We come to realize that this isn’t our game; it’s the Lord’s game – his custom-designed plan to help us work off our karmas as efficiently as possible and merge with the Creator.

Our part in this process is getting out of our own way. We do this by training our minds, which is another way of saying shifting our perspective or shifting our consciousness. Hazur says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III:

We have to face situations at every step in this life, and at every step … we have to explain to our mind to accept whatever comes in our fate smilingly, cheerfully – why grumble? It’s a constant training of the mind…. If we always feel perturbed with every little thing, then how can we concentrate, how can we meditate? … We have to forget; we have to forgive; we have to train our mind to take things easily, lightly, to laugh them away, ignore them. This is all training the mind.”⁴

We tend to do the opposite: We take ourselves and the events of our lives very seriously, and we evaluate what happens to us according to what we think should happen or how we think our lives ought to be. This mismatch between our expectations and reality gives us continual opportunities to shift our perspective and “see things rightly,” as Hazur used to say – to realize that everything that happens in our life is for our ultimate benefit.

We tend to see events in our life as good or bad. But, as Hazur once said, if we just see the world and our lives “as a creation of the Creator, as a whole, then nothing is good or bad here at all.… There is nothing wrong with the creation. But we have our own angle through which we see it.”⁵

So again, he’s referring to our angle of vision, our perspective. How can we change it?

Meditation is nothing but training our mind to accept or to live in the Lord’s will. That is the object of meditation: to surrender to him, to keep us in any way he likes…. If we leave it to the Father, if we live in his will, he knows best what to give us. We just prepare ourselves to accept what he gives. Then what is there to worry about? The purpose of meditation is just for that. The purpose of meditation is to train ourselves to adopt that attitude.⁶

Hazur often used the analogy of the potter working with a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel. The Lord is the potter, and the disciple is the lump of clay that he is trying to shape. As the clay spins on the wheel, the potter supports it from within, with one hand applying firm, steady pressure, while his other hand shapes the clay from outside with pats, slaps, and harder pressure. In this analogy, on the outside we might feel as if we’re getting pounded or slapped around – this is us undergoing our karmas, which we ourselves have created in previous lives. But once we’re initiated, there is always that firm, steady hand of the Master supporting us from within, while we are undergoing the ups and downs of life.

We have a choice: What do we focus on? Do we focus on the slaps and poundings we receive while paying off our karmic debts, or on that inner support? After all, Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to his disciple, the Great Master: “The Satguru, in his Shabd-form, is always by your side…. Every moment he is calling us within and showering us with his protection and grace.”⁷ And the Great Master wrote, “The inner Master gives all the grace and help that the disciple is capable of receiving.”⁸

So, if we have to do anything on this path, it is to increase our capacity to receive whatever the Master wants to give us – that is, to live in the Lord’s will. Meditation is the only thing that makes that possible. Not “good” meditation, not concentrated meditation, just plain old “whatever” meditation. Just showing up, every day, and then continuing throughout the day repeating the names as often as we can, until they become like background music, always streaming through our minds in one continuous loop.

One of our problems is that even if we intellectually believe that the Master is supporting us, we don’t always feel it. This is a matter of faith. How do we have faith in what we’ve never seen? The Master tells us that we can have real faith only when we see his inner form, when we realize who the Master really is and what he does for us. Until then, our faith is shaky at best.

We can’t talk about faith without talking about doubt. It’s natural to have doubt – it’s part of being human, part of having a mind. As our experience grows in meditation, we gain direct perception, and then our doubts are dispelled. In the meantime, we have to accept doubt as part of the human condition.

So, until we have direct perception of the truth, and if doubt is part of the human condition, how can we trust the Master and how can we have faith in the path?

One honest, desperate initiate told Hazur that she wasn’t able to trust anyone, not even the Master. He replied: “Have trust in meditation, and other things will automatically be taken care of.”⁹

Having trust in meditation is no mystical sleight-of-hand; it’s just doing it, like flossing our teeth every night because our dentist told us that it’s good for our teeth. We want to keep our teeth, so we figure: Okay, I’ll do it. It is not blasphemy to say that we can approach our meditation in a similarly mundane way: Just do it, however you can manage it, and the rest automatically will be taken care of.

C.S. Lewis, a 20th-century British writer who converted to Christianity as an adult after having been an atheist, had something to say about this dilemma of trust and faith, which is both a human and a spiritual problem:

Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they can get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian [in our case, a disciple] or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.¹⁰

Telling our moods “where they can get off” is training the mind. We have to ground our beliefs in action, in spite of our changing moods. Faith is the bridge between our vacillating minds and the propositions we have accepted as true. But we must walk on that bridge of faith – that is, we must do something. The action that will take us to the safety of the shore – to the conviction that comes from experience, which is the only thing that can confirm our beliefs – is meditation.

Faith is the scaffolding that can support us until we have direct experience of the truth of this path. Real faith comes with experience, through meditation; until then the mind is shaky. First, Hazur tells us: “we have to build intellectual faith in the philosophy. And in the light of the philosophy, we have to weigh the master. And then real faith will come only when you practice.”¹¹

The Masters tell us that if we meditate, we do start seeing signs that we are headed in the right direction. We start feeling that something is happening, even if we don’t know what, and that strengthens our faith so that we can continue on the path. We may not have reached our destination, but we have glimmers of some presence within. But without action, we can never gain the experience that will corroborate our faith.

It’s very interesting that faith – which we think of as a feeling – actually has to start with the mind. Hazur writes:

Without faith in the mind you cannot experience faith of the soul. This emotion, this faith, it has to start with the mind. Soul always has faith in the Father. Soul is always yearning to become one with the Father. Soul is full with love and devotion for the Father. It is the mind which is holding it back. So faith, to begin with, has to start with the mind.¹²

Faith starts with the mind, and yet there is something else that pulls us within. To one initiate Hazur wrote:

I do not wonder if the idea of future prospects sometimes fills you with anxiety. It is but natural as long as we depend entirely on our own resources. But in this matter, too, while following the path which prudence and experience dictates, you should depend upon the Master and not neglect any inner promptings that come to you unsought and without any effort.¹³

This is an invitation to depend on the Master and “not neglect any inner promptings.” Perhaps these promptings are from the Shabd form of the Master himself, pulling us toward him inside, away from our worldly fears and attachments.

A child is carefree when she knows that her parents are taking care of her every moment. How much energy might we feel, how much gratitude, how much trust, if we stopped depending entirely on our own resources? If we just got out of our own way – dropped our guilt, insecurities, and fears – and let ourselves depend on the Lord and Master as a child depends on its mother?

Professor Bhatnagar, who used to give satsang to the Westerners visiting Dera in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, said in 1975, about fighting with the mind:

Try to take your thoughts away from undesirable ideas and bring them back to the Master. See, the mind can only think of one thing: either of lustful [worldly] thoughts or of the Master. Don’t try to fight it out…. By fighting alone and neglecting the Master, you’ll never be able to win.¹⁴

Someone once asked Baba Ji how he coped with the burden of having to bring all of Hazur’s initiates back to Sach Khand. He rolled his eyes and shrugged, shaking his head as if to say: Are you kidding me? He basically said: It’s not my problem. It’s his problem, meaning Hazur’s problem. He didn’t even address the concept of him having to do that on his own. He made it clear that it was barely his business. He put it all on Hazur, and he didn’t have a shadow of a doubt that’s where the responsibility belonged. That was an unforgettable example of true humility, of leaving everything to the Lord, of trusting his Master completely, without reservation.

Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to the Great Master: “My Son, you are not separate from my form. This is an amazing play that cannot be understood without the perfect Satguru – merely in order to transact the affairs of the world he appears as a separate body.”¹⁵

We’re already one with our Master, one with the Shabd, one with the Lord – we’re just too filled with our own karmas, desires, and attachments to realize it. But we could actually live as if this oneness were an everyday reality. “By simran and bhajan we learn to put faith in a higher power, then the burden is shared, and that makes us feel lighter,” Hazur wrote.¹⁶

No one is asking us for blind faith. Blind faith isn’t honest; it’s not based on truth, just on suppression of doubt. It’s through our meditation, through simran and bhajan, that we learn to put faith in a higher power, to lean on the Master within. It’s a process, not something that happens overnight. We weigh the Master, as he has advised us to do, and make some judgments about whether he is trustworthy. Sant Mat is not a religion; it’s not a cult. We learn through experience, through observation, whether the Master is trustworthy. He does not want us to worship him.

Trust is a delicate thing. It’s intimate. It’s not easy to let go of our defenses and open ourselves to anyone, what to say of the Master. It happens over a lifetime. Our part is to attend to our meditation and be a good human being. That’s how we can begin to place our trust in him and experience for ourselves what he is doing for us. Eventually, trust will turn into love.

In The Dawn of Light, Maharaj Sawan Singh is quoted: “The wavering and faintness in the faith, which you say at times overtake you, will cease when you have seen the Master in his glory in the focus of the eyes, that is, when the spiritual currents concentrate behind the eyes, where the Master in his resplendent form is waiting to receive you. Strive to reach that point.” And then he says, and for most of us this is the most important advice: “Until that time, go on strengthening your trust in his mercy.”¹⁷

Every day we choose to do our meditation or not. And while we are strengthening our trust in that way, we can also take the position, take it as a working hypothesis, that the Master’s mercy is trustworthy. We shouldn’t trust because we are told to, but simply, as Hazur has written, “not neglect any inner promptings that come to [us] unsought and without any effort.”

We’ve all experienced the relief that comes when we’re struggling to carry a heavy load, and someone comes along and gives us a helping hand. What a relief it is to share the weight of that burden. Emotionally, too, we feel relief when we unburden our hearts to a friend or a family member. The only reason we wouldn’t accept that person’s help would be our own pride – maybe we’re embarrassed; we don’t want to be seen as weak or imperfect.

But the whole reason we asked for initiation was to receive help. We want to shed our limited perspective and merge with the Shabd, to lose ourself in God’s love. We’ve staked our lives on the hunch, on the inner prompting, that such a thing is possible, that there’s a purpose to our lives, something more than physical existence, something more than just eating, sleeping, procreating, and earning a living.

Once several years ago someone asked Baba Ji why she felt so stuck and lonely and separate from him. He looked at her with great sadness and said that he felt like someone who was throwing out life preservers to a crowd of drowning people, and not one of them would grab hold of the preserver – they just kept thrashing about, yelling for help while ignoring the lifeline being thrown to them. All we have to do is grab that lifeline and hold on for dear life. Our grabbing hold and then holding on is our simran and bhajan, our meditation.

We can accomplish so much when we know we’re not alone. The more we lean on him, the lighter we feel. The more we turn to him for help and trust him, the more we feel that we can do what is required of us.

Hazur said once: “What more do we want if we can trust ourself to the Lord? What more do we want? If he can take care of us? If he can absolve us from all our planning, all our thinking, and he takes the destiny in his own hand – what else do we want in life? This is the most fortunate person.” His questioner then asked: “Is this what he is doing?” Hazur answered: “That is what we should accept.”¹⁸

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Face Before I Was Born, p.142
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 343
Ibid.
Ibid., Vol. III, p.206, #265
Ibid., Vol. I, p.43, #43
Ibid., Vol.II, p.117–18, #165
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, p.50, letter 30
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, p.322, letter 200
Maharaj Charan Singh, transcript of recorded session, 14 October 1986, Delhi
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.140
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #174
Ibid., p.126
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, p.239, letter 195
Professor Bhatnagar, transcript of recorded session, 6 January 1975
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, p.82, letter 47
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, letter 21
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, letter 23
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol.3, #292 (last part on audio-recording only)

Is The Lord Lonely? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Is The Lord Lonely?

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Ji: “Is the Lord lonely? And the Master replied: “Maybe that’s why he’s calling us.”¹

So the truth of the matter is: He is calling us back to him. What an extraordinary thing! It’s not just we who are yearning for God – it’s he who’s yearning for us. As a philosopher once wrote, “God is in search of man. God challenges us, and we have to respond.”

Let’s explore this subject more deeply. God is the primal source of light and love. We are particles of that light, but we have become separated from our source. We have become attached to matter; our light is obscured by our karmas – by our desires and fears, by our habits, by our ego. We are lost in the darkness of spiritual ignorance and we need to come in contact with the source of light once again, to rekindle the flame that is within our hearts.

Our longing to return to the Lord, to go within and experience the Master in all his refulgence, is our response, from deep within ourselves, to the pull of the Lord. The primal source of love and light pulls the spark of our soul back to the source. He plants the loneliness for Him within us. Hazur said:

That loneliness cannot leave you. It’s the yearning of the soul to become one with the Father. You cannot overcome that loneliness.²

It is he who has put this love within us and then we express that love back to him. As Hazur Maharaj Ji used to say – He worships himself through us. Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Ji if the Lord needs our love.

Yes, but who gives the love to the lover? It is the Beloved who gives love to the lover. The lover thinks he loves the Beloved. But the pull in the lover’s heart comes from the Beloved, always. It gives the feeling to the lover that he is in love with the Beloved. Actually, it is the Beloved who has put that pull in the lover’s heart. Without that need, why should the Beloved give that pull to the lover? Why should he create the seed of love in the lover’s heart? The Beloved must be needing that love.³

So He needs to love us and He needs us to love him. As our soul is of his essence, it naturally feels a pull towards him. There is a magnetic pull from the whole to the part and the part to the whole. It is a great Circle of Love.

The longing within us grows until it lights a fire and we become desperate to find him within. We need to nurture that intense longing, and help that love to grow and grow. Meditation is the essential ingredient, supported by seva and satsang.

The Master is the key to the process. We need the Master to put us on the path back to union with our source. The Master pulls us with his unconditional love. He fills us with hope and inspiration. He is patient. When we are around him we feel saturated with love. He reflects to us our most positive selves – He is always telling us that we are worthy of meeting the Lord – notwithstanding our human weaknesses.

Being with the Master physically is a reminder of the Lord’s great compassion for us, as he has sent the Master to pull us out of the illusion of this worldly life and reveal our true potential as spiritual beings. Being with him is a validation of the true purpose of our lives. He is a mirror of what we really are.

When we first learned of the Master, when he revealed himself to us and brought us to his feet – that was a true miracle. We could shed the dark coverings of fear and despair, get off the karmic treadmill, and start to move towards the light. We need to remind ourselves of this miracle all through our lives, as our mind takes things for granted.

The Master is sent by God, the Father, for those souls that are yearning to be released from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. Those souls that the Father is pulling home, to himself. He yearns for us to be united with him just as we yearn to be one with him.

The Master is the bearer of truth. He shows us our true state in life – how we live in self-deception, in illusion over what is real and true or false; how we can’t choose the correct priorities in life. This is because we are slaves to the mind, and the mind will always lead us along the path of least resistance, towards the senses, into more and more attachment with this world. Without the Master’s intervention, we would be tied to the creation forever.

So the Master teaches us that if we follow his instructions, we can be freed from those attachments. We can break the chains that are holding us back – and experience true love.

The Master is like the Pied Piper of the medieval legend, who leads children away from their parents and their normal lives, by the attraction of his music. So once we come into his magnetic field, into the orbit of the Shabd, which is the true form of the Master, the orientation of our mind changes. We begin to hear his music rather than the noise and music of the world. We become detached from the values that used to mean so much to us – and adopt the spiritual values he teaches.

So the miracle is not just that we have been chosen by the Master – it is that, at the most profound level, the saints change our very attitude to life. They detach us from the creation and attach us to the creator. Maharaj Ji said:

That is the greatest miracle they can perform. Our whole attitude and approach to life changes. Things for which we used to take credit and boast about, we feel ashamed of doing when we come into their company.

As Christ said, “I have come to make people blind, and give eyes to those who do not see.” That is the miracle they come to perform. Those who see only the world, see only the creation, are attached only to the creation – I have come to make them blind, meaning I have come to detach them from this creation. And I want to give them those eyes which should see only the Father…

We are awakened from deep slumber by the mystics – that is the miracle they perform. And this miracle is individual with every disciple. He feels that miracle within himself.⁴

What a powerful statement – that the Master has awakened us from the deep slumber of life, of illusion, so we no longer have to live in a dream. We can live in reality! The Master shows us the truth.

Hazur Maharaj Ji described the way the Master does this: He is like a gardener who transplants a tree from one place to another. And he makes it sound very simple – he pulls us out by the roots from one place and plants us some place else, where the soil is more nourishing.

On our own we can never overcome our old ways of thinking, our customary habits. We are like a train running along the track automatically, and we need someone to switch us over to another track. We need an outside force to reach into our lives, into our minds, and change the direction of our thinking. That is grace. And that is why the Father, in his mercy, has sent the Master.

He may use different methods depending on our personalities, but the main thing is that he has to “shake us by the roots.” As Maharaj Ji explained:

If a tree has many deep roots in the ground, and you want to uproot that tree, you need a very strong wind. You also need to moisten the roots to loosen them so that a strong wind can easily do its work. We have so many roots in this creation, with all our past karmas. We are so engrossed in the pleasures of this world that unless the saints shake us from the roots, we’ll never be able to uproot ourselves from this creation. So they sometimes use very drastic steps. Their approach is very, very strict, I would say, because they want to uproot us from this creation and take us back to the Father.⁵

It is difficult for us to face the truth. We are comfortable in our own illusions, so it’s the master’s role to show us the truth – how to give up our negative behaviour and live with our eyes – and our entire way of life – focused on our destination. This could be painful for us, but the master is not here to take us from one illusion to another, as Baba Ji has often said.

The ideal master was described quite forcefully by a Jewish mystic:

Whenever a new hasid (disciple) came to him, he instantly took his soul out of him, cleansed it of all stain and rust, and put it back into him, restored to the state it had been in the hour he was born.⁶

Soami Ji explains how the master does this:

Go to the Guru’s ghaat (laundry), O mind,
and have the garment of the soul washed clean.
Using the soap of seva, wash it with darshan,
and then immerse it in the water of love.
Using the detergent of his words,
burn the fire of longing under the boiler of love.
The soul is scrubbed clean in the stream of bhakti
that flows there day and night.⁷

So Soami Ji is saying that when we come on the path, our soul must be scrubbed clean. We have to do our part. We have to engage in seva and attend satsang; we must pay attention to the Guru’s instructions and cultivate devotion through meditation.

Our initiation is a milestone in that it signifies our intention to change the direction of our lives. It is like being born anew – being uprooted from there and replanted here. But nothing happens if we don’t follow the Master’s instructions. When we come under his protection, we are beginning the process. But initiation is just the first step. Now we must engage in the process and do it. This means that we have to seriously and sincerely mould our lives according to the teachings.

Maharaj Ji used to say that he cuts away our roots, our chains, with the sword of Nam, of meditation. He often emphasized the importance of meditation to cut these roots which pull us back to this creation again and again. Sometimes he likened our meditation to an axe – an axe is the only thing that will cut away roots that are thick and go deep in the ground. So we have this powerful tool, but we have to use it. Maharaj Ji said:

Connecting you with shabd is giving you an axe. Now cut the roots of the tree. If you won’t use the axe, what is the use? A farmer takes an axe to pull out a tree, to cut its roots, but if he doesn’t want to use the axe, doesn’t want to labour, doesn’t want to work hard, how can he cut the tree and cut the roots of that tree? He has to work, he has to use the axe. He is well equipped to do so.

The mystics equip us to fight with our mind, fight with our attachments to the creation, but we have to play our part. The general equips his soldiers to fight the enemy, and he wants each soldier to fight. He is at the back to guide him, to equip him, to give him his ammunition, to look after all his needs, but the soldier has to fight. The soldier can’t tell his general to come and fight in the front lines for him. We have to play our part. –- We have to fight with our enemy, our mind, which is attached to this creation. So naturally, meditation will help you to uproot yourselves from this creation.⁸

Maharaj Ji is reminding us that he puts us on the path, but we have to fight the battle with our mind. We have to respond to His pull.

And, as he often reminds us, we should never be calculated – we can’t think that because I’ve meditated two hours or two years, or twenty years, I deserve so much spiritual advancement. We are not to think of results – just do it to please him. We need to be sincere and honest and humble and patient. As Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote to a disciple:

There is a time for everything. Our duty is only to make continued and sincere efforts, and when the proper time comes and the Lord so ordains, the great gift comes to us.⁹

What does he mean when he says we need to make “continued and sincere efforts?” What is sincerity in meditation? It means honesty of mind, that we approach our practice with earnest devotion. We have to be true to our intent, true to our purpose; mould our lives so that everything we do points us in the direction of our destination. As Baba Ji often says, every action leads to its logical conclusion. Regrettably, however, we often prefer to live in our own illusions – we delude ourselves, and make constant excuses for not living up to our commitment – so we have to constantly rededicate ourselves to stay on track. Otherwise we take the easy way out or become complacent.

A satsangi once asked the master: “Could you explain what it means for us to be honest in our meditation?” He replied:

We have to be sincere with ourselves. We must live with ourselves rather than living for others. We have to put in honest and sincere efforts, and then leave the result to the Lord.¹⁰

The result is the great gift that will come to us when we are ready.

In other words, we need to make the effort sincerely, but the results, the outcome, is not in our hands. Only he knows the right time – it is when the Lord ordains – He knows what is best for us spiritually --- he doesn’t withhold his grace, but we may not always see how it is operating in our lives. He advises us to be patient. He knows when and how to give us the “great gift” of God-realization. We can never earn it except by humbly living as he has asked us to. When he wills it, he will pull us to him. It is all his will. As Maharaj Ji counselled:

He is the helmsman of your life now, and he has only your happiness and best interest at heart. By his mercy, he is bringing you to Him as swiftly as possible to give you all He has.¹¹

It is all his gift.

Truth be told, sometimes we do get discouraged over time; but this is because we have too many expectations of ourselves. At first we are very idealistic and expect to make spiritual progress quickly. We don’t realize just how governed we are by our ego, our attachments, our desires. Instead of accepting ourselves and simply doing what he asks of us, starting from where we are, we become impatient and start analyzing ourselves and criticizing our efforts. We become too self-critical. Monitoring our actions and objective stock-taking can be helpful if it propels us to continue. But we often overdo it. This can become a negative indulgence – a form of self-pity.

Our goal may be to improve our efforts, but in fact, we often end up creating mental blocks and getting discouraged. Did I do enough meditation today? Did I have the right attitude? Why don’t I remember to do simran during the day, all day, why do I have all these bad habits? blah blah blah. And so – instead of thinking about the master, we are thinking about ourselves! How clever our mind is, to keep us off-track.

A Jewish mystic once counselled a man who was complaining about his lack of devotion and his failure to live the spiritual life. The master said:

He who has done ill and talks about it, and thinks about it all the time, does not remove that evil deed from his thoughts. He will certainly not be able to repent, for his spirit will grow coarse, and his heart will become stubborn. He may even be assailed by gloom and depression.

So the Master asked his disciple: What do you want to do? Rake the dirt this way, rake the dirt that way – it will always be dirt ! Have you sinned, or have you not sinned? – what difference does it make? In the time you are brooding over yourself, you could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven. You have done wrong? Then counteract it by doing right.¹²

We all do something wrong. But, the master is saying, don’t brood, just don’t do it again. Don’t get caught in a spiral of negativity, but take a positive step. Instead of wasting time and making yourself depressed in self-pity, string pearls for the delight of heaven – For us this means: Attend to your meditation! Make your simran a string of pearls for the delight of the master.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once said:

Anything you do to achieve your goal is not a waste – it’s a step forward... When we are trying to go back to the Father, all that we do to achieve that end is to our credit… Even when we fall, that’s not a waste…. Every step we take is a step forward.¹³

We need to remember this: That every step we take is a step forward. How many times has the Master said that if we take just one step towards him, he will take 100 steps towards us! He said that even our one step is sufficient for him to pull us.

How do we take those steps to him, to evoke his love, his grace? The Master talks of using every action of our day as a vehicle to prepare us for our next meditation – to create an atmosphere of purity twenty-four hours of the day. He said:

Whatever makes your mind pure is your meditation – good living, the right type of living, living by the teachings, having good relations with everybody, having a sympathetic nature – and also giving your time to meditation. That is all meditation, you see. Meditation is not just closing yourself in a room for a couple of hours and then forgetting where God is and where you are. That is not meditation at all. We have to live in meditation day and night. That is real meditation.¹⁴

Living in meditation day and night means being conscious of the Master all the time. Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

Why not always remain in the presence of the master? Be where the master is always there with you. Be in his presence always and always remain happy. We must bring ourselves to that level where we can always be with our master. Naturally if that gives you happiness, you’ll remain happy. You know the way, you know the path, you know the route, you know the destination, so you have to work for it. Happiness comes from within, it doesn’t come from anywhere outside at all. Happiness is always within. We have to help it to grow, grow, and grow from within, by meditation.¹⁵

To conclude, let us take solace in the words of Rumi:

O heart! Sit by one who knows the inner sound.
Take shelter under the tree that has fresh flowers.
Do not loiter aimlessly in this market of merchants,
But sit at the shop which deals in honey.¹⁶

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, # 27
Ibid
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #520
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #536
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #538
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim; NY: Schocken Books, 1975; p. 309
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections); RSSB, 1997; p. 203.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #546
Light on Sant Mat, Letter #96
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #454
Die to Live, 7th edition; introduction to section “Effects of Meditation,” p. 206
Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man; Princeton Univ. Press, NJ, 2016: pp. 78–79
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #476
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #508
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #547
Jalaluddin Rumi, quoted in Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 5; 2010 ed., p. 254

Just Relax - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Just Relax

Masters urge us to do the work of meditation, but they also tell us to just relax. This feels like one of those mixed messages of the Saints. Put in effort, but relax – empty the mind, quiet your thoughts – sit there quietly and just relax! Just relax!!

Many of us find it difficult to really relax. Instead we run around frantically, are tense and anxious, always ready to doubt. The mind continually raises doubts, making it really hard to quiet and tame our mind in meditation. This is a big challenge for most of us. As we attempt to take to heart this advice to just relax, we are also admonished to work hard at meditation. This seems both confusing and contradictory.

Maharaj Charan Singh, in Legacy of Love, explains very beautifully that the mystics turn everything upside down in our attitudes toward life and that this is a wonderful miracle.

The greatest miracle of the mystics is that they change the very attitude of our life, the way of our life. They turn everything upside down in our life. That is the greatest miracle the saints come to perform in our lives.¹

The saints reinforce the message many, many times that the Master is sent here to help and support us. He is not here to judge us. Every human is imperfect; that’s why we are here in this imperfect world. Being imperfect, we typically don’t like to be told our shortcomings. That could be much too discouraging! The Master is not here to discourage or to embarrass us. In fact, he might turn an exchange into a joke rather than run the risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Masters have a keen sense of responding with humor to put us at ease, as well as being serious and not taking anyone’s question or concerns lightly. Their love is boundless and is demonstrated in so many ways. Such unconditional love gives us a feeling of security and thankfulness that we have such a kind Master.

Spending time with a Master is a unique experience. He helps us understand this spiritual path and instills in us the desire to go home. We see love in action when we are with the Master. We see how he helps and guides us. How he treats everyone. It doesn’t matter to him whether someone is rich or poor, educated or not, white or black. What matters is love. Why else would a Master devote his life to the seva he has been given – to bring home those marked souls? Saints reach out to everyone. Before the covid-19 pandemic, both Baba Ji and Hazur Maharaj ji traveled the world to meet their disciples. Such travel is rigorous and demanding, so why do they do it? Out of love and concern for the sangat and their disciples. He is ever encouraging and wants us all to succeed. He wants us to have a safe journey home – to the Lord.

More recently the Guru has reached out to us in these times of turmoil through the Internet – specifically, the official RSSB websites and YouTube channels. Even though the Master previously disavowed the use of media to communicate the spiritual message, he relented in these troubled times and now speaks to us through essays and satsangs on the website, and question-answer discussions and satsangs on YouTube. A year ago this would have been unimaginable. But these days the world has been turned upside down.

These uncertain times make it clear that none of us has much time in this world. Death is around the corner and no one can escape it. To think that we have unlimited time here is a deception of the mind. That and other deceptions allow our attention to wander in this world, until we realize that the only way to escape the illusion of everything here and to attain real happiness is to devote ourselves to the Lord. The only way to be in touch with the Lord is to turn our attention inward through meditation. Everything outside will eventually fade. Only our effort to reach the Lord inside will reveal our eternal treasure.

On some level we know being here in this human body is very temporary and something much more beautiful and profound awaits us. The Master is with us, always guiding us in this life. Sometimes we think we have to be with the physical form to feel this, yet Hazur says in Legacy of Love that is not the case.

Some people being far away may be nearer to the Master than people nearer to him. This ‘nearness’ and ‘far away’ doesn’t make any difference at all. How much love people have in their heart, that makes them near or far away – it is not the physical nearness that matters.²

Saints give us everything we need to succeed on this spiritual path. Perhaps that’s why they urge us to just relax. When we relax into our simran, eventually the sound will follow. In doing so, then everything can come in its own natural way. Even the effort we put in can be done in a relaxed manner without tension or expectation.

The need for effort has been explained using an analogy of disciples who are swimming in the ocean close to the shore, while the Master is sitting in a boat farther away. The Master tells the disciples to swim to the shore to save themselves. But instead, the disciples want to swim to the boat, to the Master. The Master keeps explaining that the shore is closer and safer, so they should just swim to the shore. The Master might even joke that he will use his oar to push the disciples away if they try swimming to his boat. The point of this analogy is very clear and simple. We have to “swim” in the way the Master instructs us. He teaches us that our destination is the “shore, the inner shabd. The outer Master is not the destination but the means to help us reach our destination. We do that by turning our attention inward through meditation.

Saints tell us they will do everything. But we are reminded, prodded, and cajoled that it’s our responsibility to put in effort. In doing so, we should not labor under the illusion that we can control the results, nor should we expect any progress just because we put in effort. In fact, expectations are a hindrance in meditation. But if we can let go of our desire for control and subdue any expectations we may have for results from meditation, then we open ourselves to the Lord’s love and His helping hand.

Masters are very clear that the one action they want most from us is sincere effort in our meditation. If we relax, then we can begin to surrender to his will and let him take over. Isn’t that what we committed to when we asked for initiation? We acknowledged that we needed help. When we learn to trust and let go, then the reality that is our true self can come to the surface. Masters explain that love is at our core. It comes naturally. It’s there in everyone. When we let go we will see that love is the essence of our being and frees us from everything else in this world.

In Sant Mat we are told there are no limits. Anything is possible. So, if in spirituality there are no limitations, then there are only opportunities – the opportunity to relax, the opportunity to let go, and the opportunity to let the Lord allow us to see the light and hear the sound.

The Master wants us to succeed. Our job is simple – show up, make the effort to sit in meditation and appreciate everything that the Lord does for us. Then we can just relax into the meditation and trust him to do the rest to bring us home to the Lord. He’s waiting for us. Just Relax.

From recording of question & answer session, March 4, 1983
From recording of question & answer session, October 14, 1987

Become So Beautiful that God Can No Longer Resist You - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Become So Beautiful that God Can No Longer Resist You

We are living in challenging times. However, the saints point out that natural catastrophes, pandemics like COVID-19, as well as the suffering caused by human selfishness, pride, exploitation, and tyranny are nothing new in this world. In fact, our precarious existence here – fraught with instability, uncertainty, strife, and sorrows – results in misery not just in this life but for countless other lives as well. Saint Farid points this out when he writes: “I thought I was the only one in pain, O Farid, but the whole world is suffering. When I reached up high, I found the fire of suffering in every being.”¹

Mystics emphasize that if in this world we experience 10,000 pleasures, they’ll always be followed by 10,000 sorrows. The Buddha strongly advised those heavily invested in finding lasting happiness in the world to remember five truths: “I will lose my youth; I am not beyond aging. I will lose my health; I am not beyond sickness. I will lose everything (power, wealth, position) and everyone I value; I am not beyond loss. And I will lose the very one I call myself, this body; I am not beyond death. The only things I will keep are my actions; I cannot escape their consequences.”²

Fortunately, as human beings, we’re not limited to this calamitous life of duality. We all have the innate potential to gain self-control and change our focus away from looking for lasting happiness in this ephemeral world, where it can’t be found, to looking within. The saints tell us that as we do this, we will mature spiritually and experience ever-increasing states of bliss, awe, and wonder – until eventually all distinctions between us and God disappear, and we become One.

The purpose of this path is to empower us to accomplish this. Hafiz points out the goal of spirituality:

Listen: this world is the lunatic’s sphere,
Don’t always agree it’s real,
Even with my feet upon it
And the postman knowing my door
My address is somewhere else.³

The saints tell us that it is up to each one of us to set our own priorities. There are basically three types of human beings in this world. The first lives only to serve their own egos; the second strives to transcend their egos and become one with the Lord; and the third vacillates in between.

It is only the second type of person who is a true spiritual warrior and succeeds on this path. That one – with courage, love, faith, devotion, and strong individual effort – wins the struggle to subdue the mind and contacts Nam at the eye center. They alone know the beauty, peace, and joy that is always available no matter what’s happening in this world.

However, those of us initiates who are the third type remain suffering in this delusion because we vacillate, often preferring our own personal desires and judgments over our Guru’s teachings. Why don’t we stop and do ourselves a favor and change? The masters promise that if we embrace, prioritize, and act on their message, we’ll definitely weather this world’s ups and downs more easily, even if we haven’t yet mastered going within.

And for those of us who have made this path their priority but feel disheartened because we haven’t reached the eye center and gone within, both Hazur Maharaj Ji and Baba Ji emphasize that it’s a big mistake to try to evaluate our spiritual growth in terms of what we think we’ve seen or heard “inside.” We won’t have so-called inner experiences if we’re too immature and full of ego to value, digest, and assimilate them without becoming proud, side-tracked, or tempted to use them for personal gain. In fact, we might not know where we stand spiritually until the time of our physical death.

The R.S. masters emphasize that our Guru’s purpose is not for us to remain as we are, slaves to our own mind, and yet still have spiritual powers and experiences. Their job is to work with us and guide us so that we transform ourselves into spiritual warriors who are so beautiful that the most beautiful One of all, the Lord, can no longer resist us. Then we’ll return to the supreme state of oneness with God without falling back into new physical bodies or having long intermittent stops in illusory realms along the way.

The masters have given us a challenge: to do our best to live the Sant Mat way of life, meditate as directed, learn from our mistakes without constantly repeating them, and accept all situations as opportunities to live in God’s will. They stress that the only way we can evaluate our own spiritual growth is by how well we consistently do this, not by how many sights and sounds we experience within.

They also encourage us to relax, be patient, find our own personal balance based on understanding our own strengths and weaknesses, and make the most of our time here with firm faith that if we do our part, Nam and our Guru will do the rest. We will achieve self- and God-realization and experience the wisdom, love, and compassion that are our spiritual heritage. There are no failures in Sant Mat.

Both Baba Ji and Hazur emphasize that we should carry no guilt and never fall prey to self-pity. Both are very damaging. At the end of the day, all we can do to attain liberation is try our best. We have no capacity to even think of the Lord much less completely realize him on our own. That happens through his grace. What’s important is that we have no regrets at our time of death. We want to be able to look our Guru in the eyes and say, “Do with me what you will, but I want you to know, I gave Sant Mat my best shot. I left nothing on the table.”

T.R. Shangari, Sheikh Farid, The Great Sufi Mystic, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, p. 207
Upajjhatthana Sutta: Subjects for Contemplation, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 1997
Daniel Ladinsky (translator), “Then Winks,” in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, Penguin Compass, 1999, p. 229

The More We Know, The Less We Understand - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The More We Know, The Less We Understand

In the book One being One, right at the beginning, there is a quotation from the 1926 book Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne. Winnie the Pooh – or Pooh for short – is the stuffed toy bear belonging to Christopher Robin, and the book concerns their adventures, together with a collection of other stuffed toy animals: Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl, Kanga, baby Ru, and Eeyore the perennially miserable donkey. This is a conversation between Pooh, ‘a bear of very little brain’ as Pooh calls himself, and Piglet.

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh, thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has a Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has a Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “That’s why he never understands anything.”

It has been said that “rabbit likes to take charge and come up with elaborate plans…. As detailed as his plans are, they often miss certain key points and go wrong.”¹

In other words, Rabbit’s brain, or rather his mind, his intellect, doesn’t always give him good advice, and what he thinks he understands – perhaps more often than not – is wrong.

Isn’t this what our Masters say about our understanding of this path that we follow and our connection with God? Our mind gets in the way. Great Master explains:

Worldly learning scatters the mind. Simple-minded folks go in easily. The hill people of this country are such, and in several cases their souls went in at once, as soon as the secret of concentration was imparted to them.²

Simple-minded folks, like the hill people of India, understand things because their minds are not cluttered with concepts and illusions garnered from too much education and living and working in a world where intellect is king – like many of us. If you tell a simple person to sit down, close their eyes, and repeat five words, that is what they do. Tell an intellectual, and he gets lost in asking questions about when to sit, where to sit, how to sit, the speed of repetition, and exactly how to pronounce the words. And doesn’t Master say: don’t analyze these things. Just do it!

Many of us who are following the path of the Masters, Surat Shabd Yoga, may smile when we hear Pooh Bear’s conclusion that Rabbit doesn’t understand anything because he has a brain – because we recognize that even after decades of reading every Sant Mat book and analyzing every aspect of the path with our minds, we don’t really understand the path at all. And we may in fact be even more confused, now that Baba Ji has been saying that what we read in the books is not how it really is. It is just a way of explaining the unexplainable.

The Masters are challenged to explain – in words that we can understand – what we have never experienced in this physical creation. We have to experience the inner to understand the inner.

We must go within by means of meditation to learn who we truly are: soul, not body, not mind – self-realization. And to really know without a shadow of doubt that we are already one with God – God-realization.

Self-realization before God realization. The twin goals of this path, learning step-by-step the truth of the Divinity of our soul.

We might then ask if we have to wait until we go within to experience the reality of the teachings and be able to develop true faith. In fact, as we walk the path, even before we enter the spiritual realms at the eye center, we get inklings of the understanding that we seek.

In the book One Being One, a second quotation is given right after Winnie the Pooh’s. These words come from the former president of India and renowned philosopher, S. Radhakrishnan, who says:

Off and on, in some rare moments of our spiritual life, the soul becomes aware of the presence of the Divine. A strange awe and delight invade the life of the soul, and it becomes convinced of the absoluteness of the Divine, which inspires and moulds every detail of our life.³

Perhaps here Radhakrishnan is talking about inner experiences, but even in the physical creation, as we go through our lives, moments arise when we feel the Master’s presence, proof positive that the Master is within us at the eye center and he knows what we are feeling; knows our secret longings. And this understanding that he allows us can change our lives.

Many of us want a dramatic sign to know for sure that he is there – to feel his presence in our lives.

The signs are there – but have we noticed? Or are we like the man who, in a heavy rainstorm, sat on his roof to escape the rising flood waters. While praying to God to come and save him, he then refused to get into a canoe, a police boat and a helicopter that came to do just that – save his life. What happened? He drowned. Are we aware of signs of the Divine permeating every aspect of our lives?

Maharaj Sawan Singh says: “Sat Guru is always present with you in Shabd form. He sees, he knows and responds.”⁴

Shabd that power that is light and sound – that created everything in the universe and beyond – that Shabd is the true form of the Master, and he is with us always. He sees us, he knows what is going on in our lives, and he responds. Let us remember him as he remembers us. And when we cry to him, let us be receptive to his response. He is there waiting for us to pay attention to him, to let him into our lives.

Sant Tukaram says in a poem called “My Companion”:

With love you lead me by the hand
And stay with me wherever I go.
Your support alone keeps me treading
the path of life.⁵

With the Master as our constant companion, with him holding our hand as we tread the path of life, there will be no more loneliness, no more belief that we are doing this path of life on our own. This is the experience that the Masters have and they want us to have it too.

In the book from Self to Shabd, a questioner asks the Master if he is lonely, and he replies:

In oneness there is no loneliness, just peace and happiness.… Only in duality is there loneliness and suffering. I am quite happy. I am not lonely at all.⁶

The illusion of duality, of separation, is what makes us feel lonely, makes us feel that there is something missing. The Master is saying that for him, there is no separation; he is One with the Lord, with the Shabd.

He is “one being one,” like the title of the book. But for us, living in the illusion of duality with our attention focused outwards towards the physical creation, we are unable to identify with the master’s experience. We look in the mirror at this body and we see an individual separated from the master; we see two, being two – duality – not oneness.

Hence, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj advises us: “You have to think, I am not this body but I am that formless, nameless knowledge dwelling in this body; that I am.”⁷

We are not this body; we are not this mind. We are Shabd; only the veil of mind and maya – and the layer of karmas that are still to be undergone – hide this truth from us.

In Soami Ji’s shabd “Come, My Friend, to Your True Home,” we read:

Come, live at the eye centre;
experience oneness here through concentration.
Here duality is transcended.⁸

Know the reality of oneness through experience, Soami Ji says; come to the eye center through the practice of our meditation; through concentration. Experience the oneness, become one with love, be love itself; no duality, no lover and beloved. Just one being. Eternal unalterable love and bliss.

Love is the nature of Shabd, of the Master, of the inner formless Shabd Master. Remember the words of Maharaj Charan Singh as quoted in the pictorial book about his life, Legacy of Love, “May your love of the Form culminate in the Love of the Formless.”⁹

In duality, we fall in love with the body Master who initiates us and teaches us everything about the path and – with his encouragement and our effort in meditation – we go within and merge with his radiant Shabd form. Oneness. One Being One. One being Love.

This Oneness is our goal, this experience of eternal love and happiness, glimpses of which we get from the Master as a gift from him to keep us going on the path. Moments when we feel happy for no apparent reason, suffused with a kind of joy that is not connected to anything outside ourselves. How can we experience this sense of Oneness more? By keeping him in our remembrance.

Live at the eye center, Soami Ji said. How do we do that?

The Masters say that meditation is not just sitting for the requisite two and one-half hours and then forgetting all about the path and the Master for the rest of the day.

We are probably familiar with Maharaj Jagat Singh’s words in A Spiritual Bouquet, # 9:

The secret of success in the path is “bhajan, more bhajan, and still more bhajan” (practice, more practice and still more practice). With bhajan only for three hours, the scale will always weigh heavily on the worldly side. You ought to become wholly and solely God-minded. Throughout the day, no matter in what occupation you are engaged, the soul and the mind must constantly look up to Him at the eye centre.¹⁰

If we want to go within and achieve self- and God-realization, three hours of meditation are not enough; we must also do simran all day long when our mind is not occupied.

Then he adds:

All the twenty-four hours of the day, there must be yearning to meet the Lord, a continuous pang of separation from Him. Nay, every moment, whether eating, drinking, walking, awake or asleep, you must have His Name on your lips and His form before your eyes.

If we want to go beyond duality to Oneness in this very lifetime, to never be born again, there must be longing to end the pain of separation to motivate us. To satisfy this longing, our attention must be on the Master one way or another all through the day and night from the moment we are initiated until we die.

If the Lord has bestowed upon us the grace to recognize the feeling of emptiness, the something lacking within us, for what it is – the soul’s longing to return to its source – and to realize that no matter what we do in this world, where we go, what we buy, we are always dissatisfied – then we already have the longing to end the “pang of separation;” and as the pain of that separation increases, as it must – because there is no solution outside in the world – constant remembrance of him will occur automatically.

But why wait? Why wait for the pain of separation to increase? Why not begin now, with the promise of happiness and bliss in being One with him in this very lifetime motivating us to sit every day?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(Winnie-the-Pooh)
Spiritual Gems, letter 122
S. Radhakrishnan, The Genius of India, in Tagore Centenary Volume, Part 2, p.8
Spiritual Gems, letter 189
Tukaram, The Ceaseless Song of Devotion, 2004, 3rd edition, p. 105
Quoted in from Self to Shabd, p. 7
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,The Ultimate Medicine, quoted in from self to Shabd, p.13
Soami Ji Maharaj, “Dham Apne Chalo Bhai,” in Spiritual Discourses II, p. 304
Legacy of Love, p. 547
The Science of the Soul, 8th ed, p.196

The Intricate Game of Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Intricate Game of Love

What would it mean to say, “God, I’m placing my life in your hands – God, you decide what is best for me”? Hafiz reminds us that in our confusion with our mind and ego, reality is something quite different from what we may think:

From man’s perspective in this intricate game of love,
It is easy to become confused and think
you are the do-er.
But from God’s infinite certainty, he always knows
that he is the only one
who should ever be put on trial.¹

The last line of Hafiz’s verse indicates that God is the creator, and if there is anyone who should be held accountable, then God knows in his “infinite certainty” that the Lord God is the one. Is Hafiz excusing us from being accountable for our actions? Many of us would like to be immune from the karmic liability of our actions, but Hafiz may be speaking to something much greater than our karma: the game of love and who really is the “do-er” in this game.

Maharaj Charan Singh says:

People hardly pray to him for his grace, for his blessings.… We are asking the Lord to fulfill our desires…. Unless we completely surrender ourselves to him, driving all these desires out of our mind, we cannot achieve our destination, because he will always give us what we want. We will have to surrender to him. When we just want him from him, then only we can merge back into him.²

What does it mean to surrender, to free ourselves from doing and just be, to let go and place our life in his hands? All Masters explain that surrender is essential on our spiritual journey. The reward of surrender is self-realization and ultimately God-realization. Hazur Maharaj Ji explains:

What is surrendering to the will of the Master? ... Surrendering to the will of the Master means helping ourselves to rise above the realm of mind and maya, helping our soul to leave the mind. When we make the soul whole and pure, then we are surrendering to the will of the Father.³

Helping our soul can only be accomplished by one method and that is meditation. The technique of this meditation is explained to us at the time of initiation. Then, Great Master emphasizes, “The soul is conscious.... It can be really happy only on uniting with super-consciousness.”⁴

This consciousness is Love, the Shabd. To surrender to the Will of the Lord is to fall in love with the inner Master and merge into that divine melody, the Word or Shabd. The method is meditation. But surrender is difficult both in concept and in practice as long as our ego dominates. Maharaj Charan Singh further explains:

We feel that we have surrendered, even in physical love, when we submerge our will into the will of the other person. We try to merge our happiness into the happiness of the other person. We always try to do what pleases the other person and never try to assert ourself or to adjust the other person to us.… Spiritual love is the same. We have to surrender ourself to the Master. It means that we have to take our ego out of us and blend our whole heart with his heart.… That can be done only by meditation.⁵

Baba Ji reminds us in his satsangs and question-and-answer sessions that we are afraid of the unknown, and until we experience this love which lies beyond the mind and ego, surrender is just a concept. In truth, surrender is a profound state of being beyond what we can imagine. Maharaj Charan Singh continues:

When you absolutely blend yourself into the love of another person, then you forget what you are. Then you know that you are nothing.… Similarly, we have to forget by meditation that we are anything and know that everything is the Master.⁶

Maharaj Charan Singh is telling us that by this meditation technique we begin to surrender and blend ourselves into the love of another, i.e., the Word, Shabd, holy spirit, audible life stream. When we truly turn to the inner Master for everything in our life, the process of surrender begins to integrate into our everyday life. We begin to experience that divine Love and become conscious, on our way to the Super-conscious.

“The Only One,” in I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz, by Daniel Ladinsky, 2006
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #481
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #276
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 4, 6th ed., 2014, p. 278
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #277
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #295

What Attitude! - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

What Attitude!

Try not to get worried,
try not to turn on to problems that upset you,
Don’t you know everything’s alright?
Yes, everything’s fine …
Let the world turn without you tonight …
Close your eyes…
think of nothing tonight.
_{Jesus Christ Superstar, “Everything’s Alright”}

These lyrics from the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” written over fifty years ago, depicted an ancient world in political and spiritual turmoil. It reminds us that where the world is concerned, nothing really changes. The most powerful line in this song is when Christ responds in a verse, “Look at the good things you’ve got, think while you still have me, move while you still see me, you’ll be sorry when I’m gone.” Christ's warning invites the disciples to switch their attitude of fear and negativity to one of gratitude, acceptance, and balance amid the turmoil. "Let the world turn without you tonight."

Cultivating the right attitude to maintain inner happiness through the ups and downs of life is an essential ally of spiritual transformation. Nurturing this quality within ourselves builds a strong foundation on our spiritual journey. It would be wonderful if we could wake up one day and possess a “good” attitude towards everything in our life.

First of all, the gift of the right attitude toward God, the path, our families, our work and others is not one that can be purchased. This gift is only acquired through patient, persistent, daily practice. In Buddhism, it is said that the unshakable deliverance of the mind in cultivating “right attitude” is greater than all worldly honours and fame.

But at no point on this journey called life can we quickly annihilate the thing called mind, switch how we think and feel about things we experience, and once and for all develop a good or right attitude. Because we are human, we are always vulnerable to being caught up in illusion and responding in a manner that is not in our best interest. We typically and very humanly react from a narrow intellectual and emotional perspective.

Even though it seems that seeing “reality” should be a straightforward matter, we may have discovered that as the author David Brooks says: “Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self – your own need and wishes – out of the way, so that you can see the thing you are looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests.”¹

Then there is the emotional nature of being human. Developing emotional intelligence helps us know what to feel in certain situations and learn to see things in a balanced manner and respond from that place of balance.

We can’t turn on a dime, as the saying goes, and develop the kind of attitude that will help us in our transformation on the path home. It takes practice and effort. For some of us, the first step is to recognize our attitude towards things that come before us. Where can we begin? First, we can realize that our relationship with the Master is purely spiritual and exists for our soul's life and growth. Secondly, what is painful now when approached with the proper attitude will, in the end, bring joy.

Maharaj Charan Singh puts the correct spin on this when he says:

Well, if one is a satsangi, then there’s nothing to worry about.… But when we say our destiny is set, the events of life are already chalked out and we just have to go through that, good or bad, then what is there to worry about? It’s not going to change the events of life. If we have that attitude, then why worry?²

Hazur is suggesting to us a state of mind, an attitude, which may help us on the path. Yet, we are prone to get stuck in our anger, jealousy, envy, worry, and in doing so, cling to things of this phenomenal world and forget the truth that we are seeking. We allow our thoughts and perceptions to drag us down, and this becomes apparent in our attitude of non-acceptance.

Since we created our karmas, our challenge is to build better and nobler mansions for our souls. How does this happen? Hazur says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II:

The purpose of meditation is just for that. The purpose of meditation is to train ourselves to adopt that attitude. It’s not easy; it’s a lifelong struggle, no doubt. But that is the purpose of meditation – to develop that attitude of accepting things as they come.³

The Dominican fourteenth-century friar known as Meister Eckhart suggested that we must die to ourselves and receive everything as from God and remain in unruffled patience with all men. This attitude will support our quest, but it takes commitment.

A disciple asked Hazur:

So, it’s a matter of clearing away everything in life that is unnecessary, of making that choice?

Hazur answered:

No, it’s a matter of changing the attitude of your mind. You have to do your worldly work; you have to discharge your responsibilities, your obligations. But your attitude of mind can be one-pointed, focused within. Then you don’t forget your goal, your destination.⁴

And we can have that attitude and bent of mind only if we attend to meditation. Only with the help of meditation will we be able to build peace within ourselves. This path of devotion requires adjustment of our entire way of life. In Many Voices, One Song, it says:

… a way that includes development of the attitude and practices that support devotion.… When disciples practise meditation and mould their lives according to these qualities, a virtuous circle is created – a positive attitude leads to a way of life that supports meditation, which in turn generates a positive attitude and way of life that leads to more focused meditation.⁵

Hazur says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II:

That habit of attending to meditation also creates an attitude of our mind.… We have to change the attitude of our mind by meditation. Now the attitude of our mind is outward – downward and outward. Then the attitude of the mind becomes inward, upward. We have to change our attitude of mind.⁶

The Master tells us that we can do it. “Everything is alright … let the world turn without you tonight.” Let our world turn around our meditation. As Master says, when you attend to your meditation, everything will come from within, and the mind will automatically be moulded in his light, and your whole approach will change.

David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Universe, p. 197
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 162
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 165
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 217
Many Voices, One Song, p. 103
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 497

Spiritual Loneliness - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Spiritual Loneliness

About twelve years ago, some extraordinary letters came to light. These were letters written by the much-loved Mother Teresa of Calcutta, also known as the “saint of the gutters.” She wrote these letters to people who came to her for “confession.” These letters allow deep insight into the spiritual life of this extraordinary woman.

There was a familiar weariness to her writing, and it seems that the Teresa of these letters actually lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. Shortly after beginning her life’s work, she felt that something in her relationship with God had suddenly altered. We read, in more than forty letters spanning a period of 50 years, that she experienced dryness, darkness, loneliness, and even mental torture. She compares this experience to hell and, at one point, says it had driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. For most of her 50 years in service to him, we read how she was unable to come to terms with what she saw as a serious lack of spirituality within herself.

To read about her spiritual struggle is particularly sad, in light of her devotion to God and the devoted service she rendered to humanity on his behalf. Yet her experience is a relatively familiar one, one that affects many devotees or disciples on the spiritual journey. Whether the experience is brief and only just touches us, or whether that experience is deeper and far more intense, as with some of the saints and mystics we read about – nonetheless it affects us in some way or another. Sometimes we have a gentle touch of this experience and sometimes it is a devastating and inconsolable experience of grief and inner loneliness, as in the case of Teresa.

There have been many names given to describe this characteristic stage in the growth of spiritual devotees, such as “spiritual loneliness,” “spiritual darkness” and, in the extreme cases of the European saints and mystics, it has also been known as “the dark night of the soul.” According to the saints and mystics, this kind of experience can strike at any time and can last for any length of time. The length of its duration and spiritual impact depends entirely on the Lord’s will and what He needs to accomplish in that person’s life.

Those disciples, in their grief and inner loneliness, then consciously struggle for the light and divine love of God once again. So we can say that it is this experience of spiritual loneliness that inevitably becomes the catalyst or turning point for spiritual progress, because this struggle also creates such a yearning and longing within us for the Lord that we are automatically drawn closer to Him. However, when undergoing this kind of experience, whether extreme or otherwise, the disciple is at first usually unable to understand why this is happening and therefore remains caught up in the misery of overwhelming loneliness.

But this is when the sweet advice of the mystic Hafiz is so valuable, for he says:

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.¹

Here Hafiz is advising us to adopt an unusual approach to our experience, one of positivity. Rather than seeing it as a kind of punishment from God, we should accept it instead and allow it “to ferment and season us” in such a way that the deeper it cuts both mentally and emotionally, the more profound the experience. According to Hafiz, there is nothing on this earth, human or spiritual, that has the ability to inspire within us that kind of love, longing, and yearning for the Lord. Hafiz then shares something very special from his own personal experience:

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender
and my need of God is absolutely clear.

Here he has come to realize, through this experience, his all-out need for the Lord, which has now inspired within him a longing and yearning of such depth that the moment he thinks of God his eyes become soft; and when he speaks, his voice becomes tender. Hafiz was fortunate enough to recognize and embrace what was happening to him at that moment in time, thereby embracing that ultimate experience of love and yearning for the Lord, for his Master.

Sadly, we struggle to see with that same kind of clarity, because the veil of illusion clouds our mind, and so we suffer in that loneliness, that ignorance, and find it difficult to see anything good in our situation. Yet here Hafiz once again says something that is awe-inspiring. He says:

I wish I could show you,
when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being
above the eyes.²

These words are profound, because this is the desire of all true living Masters – to show us the blazing or “astonishing light” that is constantly burning at our eye center – precisely when we are feeling so wretched, so worn down, and so positively unspiritual. The saints and mystics through their teachings assure us that this light is always there, has always been there, and will continue to be there. They remind us that through the practice of our daily meditation – that of simran, dhyan and bhajan – we will in time come to discover this astonishing light within ourselves at the eye center, that most sacred holy of holies where we make contact with the Shabd or audible life stream, which liberates our soul from its enslavement by the mind and senses, thereby freeing it to reunite with the Lord.

We now know primarily from the teachings of the saints and mystics that going through a period of spiritual loneliness boosts inner progress. According to Hazur Maharaj Ji, there could also be certain factors which may trigger this sudden experience.

He states four possibilities:

Sometimes a strong layer of karma comes
Sometimes ego enters our mind
Sometimes attachments enter our minds
Sometimes our minds are pulled back to the senses.³

His advice in such cases is that we continue attending to our meditation, because “if the grace was there before it will return once again.”⁴ Then Hazur speaks of what he calls “one other extra hidden factor.” He says “there is hidden pleasure in the pain.” He goes on to explain what he means by giving an example from the teachings of Christ. Jesus said:

A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.⁵

Hazur explained how this applies to us in Die to Live:

If a woman is frightened of the pain of childbirth, she will never have the pleasure of delivering a child, because that pain carries the pleasure. To receive pleasure, she needs to first undergo the agony associated with childbirth. It is the same way with us. We have to pass through that agony of separation from the Father before we can achieve the happiness of union.⁶

Hazur was once asked:

Does every soul have to go through a period of intense longing before it reaches the Father?

Once more Hazur replies:

It’s not a question of having to, as that feeling is always there. The soul is always yearning to go back to its own Source, to the Father. But we don’t feel that longing now due to our load of karmas and our tendency towards the senses.⁷

Hazur Maharaj Ji pointed out that it is only by the grace of the Lord that we are able to achieve anything on this path at all. Otherwise our karmas keep us back. He said:

Without grace nothing can happen. Only by his grace will we come into a certain atmosphere where we can work our way up. And without his grace, we would never even know that the Lord exists.⁸

We’re always talking about grace, and we’re always asking the Master to “shower his grace on us,” but do we really understand what it is that we are asking for? And more important – do we even recognize grace when it comes? More often than not, grace comes in ways that we don’t expect, or which we are not even willing to acknowledge, for often the grace we receive can be painful and seemingly hard to bear.

The philosopher Paul Brunton said:

Grace does not necessarily follow the lines set by human expectation, prayer, or desire. … Grace needs a prepared mind to receive it, a self-controlled life to accept it, an aspiring heart to attract it. It is grace which inspires our best moves, and which enables us to make them. … Grace is the medicine that enables us to subjugate our ego and to enjoy the pleasures and delights of spiritual progress. The grace of God is no respecter of persons or places. It comes to the heart that desires it most whether that heart be in the body of a king or of a commoner, a man of action or a recluse.⁹

So even those pangs of loneliness or the perception of separation is the Master’s grace, but to identify it in that light, we need – as with Hafiz – a prepared mind to receive it and an aspiring heart to attract it.

The jolt and painful feeling of separation may not be the sort of thing that we would expect to happen to us on the spiritual journey, nor perhaps the preferred way in which we would like for the Master to “shower his grace on us,” but in time and in hindsight, we will see things with a greater clarity. And we will be grateful for this experience, because it is humbling to say the least, and it brings us to our knees before him. This is a necessary part of our spiritual development because we have grown so accustomed to thinking that our spirituality is about our meditation, our love for the Master, our efforts, and our yearning for him, that it becomes all about “ourselves” and not about the grace of the Master.

But the fact is, for us to be able to actually meditate, love the Master, and yearn for him, something would have had to be placed deep within us by the Lord himself to trigger these responses and create the pull of love, yearning, and the desire to return home again.

Hazur Maharaj Ji explains:

Who makes us yearn? It’s not our meditation. It is the Father himself. He uproots us from here and takes us to his own level. Practically, we do nothing. You can take credit that you sit for two hours or three hours, but there is something which makes you sit. It’s not you. Left to you, you would not even sit for five minutes. So, if you see this from the higher point of view, it’s definitely the Father who is pulling us up to his own level. It’s not our efforts at all.¹⁰

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and what we don’t realize is that every time we think about our poor meditation, our lack of spiritual joy on the path, or our lack of love for the Master, we are already living in a state of grace, because our thoughts are turned towards this loss, which in turn makes us yearn to experience these things – which in turn makes us think of him.

The Lord is all-knowing and works in ways that we cannot fathom until he chooses the particular moment in our lives to enlighten us. But his fundamental reasoning is always to bring us closer to him, to break down those barriers of mind and illusion, and take us home again.

To repeat what Hafiz says to us:

I wish I could show you
when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being
above the eyes.

Here Hafiz is reassuring us that even though things may appear dark and hopeless at times, the light of our soul, which has never gone out, is still blazing away at the eye center, dulled only by the layers of our karma.

So if we are able to remember these words of Hafiz and then grasp hold of that vision of our soul, glowing in all its perfection, we will discover that there is a beacon of light shining in the surrounding darkness of our lives, enabling us to glimpse through our karmic shadows the glory of what is yet to come. It is in that brief glimpse that we perfectly come to understand exactly what we need to acknowledge, which is, once more and finally, in those words of Hafiz:

My need of God is absolutely clear.

The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, tr. Daniel Ladinsky
The Gift, Poems by Hafiz, tr. Daniel Ladinsky
Die to Live, # 329
Ibid
Bible, John 16:21–22
Die to Live, # 288
Die to Live, # 289
The Master Answers, # 120
Paul Brunton, The Gift of Grace: Awakening to Its Presence, Notebooks, ed. Sam Cohen; Larson Publications, 2011
Die to Live, # 377

The Importance of the Master - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Importance of the Master

We all struggle to understand who and what we are, saying to ourselves, “Why am I me and not somebody else?” When things apparently go wrong, we look up and ask the sky, “Why me?” The origin of our life is lost in our past lives, and as human beings we live at the sharp end of our accumulated karmas. The reason for our birth in this life is a mystery – we don’t know why we have been born in a particular town or country, speak the language we do or have our skin colour. We don’t know why we are intelligent, sick, tall, or carrying inherited illnesses.

If it is ordained by the Lord that we meet a true or spiritually evolved Master, then a mystery begins to unfold, and all that we thought we were becomes less and less important. In a very real sense we were lost, and then we were found by the Master. We have no idea why we are in the Lord’s play or, indeed, what parts we are due to play and why that is so. A myriad of associations occur in our lives, and the reasons for them appear to be beyond explanation – other than that it is all due to our karma!

The book Ramcharitmanas, Love and Devotion explores texts written by Goswami Tulsidas which, in turn, discuss the epic Ramayana written by Maharishi Valmiki. The Ramayana describes how the Lord took birth in human form as Ram and grew up to be a prince who married Sita. In one sense, Ram can be thought of as the quintessential Master – a template for all Masters. For our purpose, we’re assuming that what is written about Ram is appropriate to all true Masters and reflects their oneness with the divine.

In the story, after the wedding of Ram and Sita, King Janak (Sita’s father) addresses Ram:

You, O Ram, are the all-pervading Absolute,
the imperceptible and imperishable.
You are the embodiment of consciousness and bliss,
endowed with and yet devoid of all attributes.¹
You are the One
who cannot be grasped by the mind or speech.
No one can know you by reasoning –
they all merely try to guess.
The Vedas sing your glory by saying
‘not this, not this,’
while you remain ever the same
in all three phases of time
(past, present and future).²

Having praised Ram, King Janak then goes on to make a personal plea:

Knowing that you are pleased by the slightest devotion,
I boldly ask you again and again,
with folded hands,
that never for a moment may my mind
delude me into deserting your feet.

Thus the mystery of the Master was described many years ago, and the cry of a disciple to be with him was recorded. The greatness of the Master is beyond the purview of our minds, beyond calculation and beyond reasoning. Devotion, devotion, and more devotion is what the Master cherishes.

It is our privilege to have the opportunity to become a devotee of a Master, to grow in humility, to let go of illusions we hold about ourselves, and to aspire to keep our minds always at the feet of the Master. From a spiritual perspective we have been asleep, and the Master is now waking us up. But because our sleep is so deep, we know nothing and we are ignorant of our spiritual needs. His tools for awakening us are a sublime mystery, and we have to take it on trust that Baba Ji is doing only what is best for us. We don’t know how ignorant we are of what is on offer.

The Persian Sufi poet Hakim Sana’i wrote:

The road your self must journey on
lies in polishing the mirror of your heart.³

We are on a journey from delusion to reality. This is a journey to discover our real self, so that we may become one with the Lord through the agency of a physical Master. The soul has the opportunity to merge with the Lord and to have no separate identity. To do that, we have to work hard to clean our heart of all concepts and illusions, so it may be free of what we thought we were. We have to stop thinking. We have to untie the knot that joins our soul (our spiritual heart) to our mind.

The Anatolian Turkish Sufi poet Yunus Emre said:

I was a dead tree fallen onto the path,
when a master threw me a glance
and brought me to life.⁴

The true spiritual Master brings us into his presence in ways that we cannot comprehend. Words can only be pointers to the truth. At the beginning of our journey we were spiritually inactive, dead to what is beyond maya (illusion), and unaware of our true reality. We only knew maya and were deluded into believing that illusion to be reality, when in fact it is only a dream.

It is not as if we chose to be on a spiritual path with a particular Master, for we were all like dead trees before we fell onto this path. The Master doesn’t need words or even actions to give us spiritual life; he just needs to ignite a spark within us. Others may not feel that pull, even if they are in his physical presence. After all, when an arrow is fired it hits only one target, and all others around are unaffected by it.

The Taoist master Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) explains:

The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve got the fish, you can forget the trap. …Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?⁵

We need words to understand the path of Sant Mat, but once the vows have been explained to us, we no longer need words. Sant Mat is a path of action; we have to act in order to be in the company of our Master within. The vows are easy to remember and to put into action. We can have a continuing dialogue with our Master on the inside, where no words are necessary.

Sheikh Farid said:

Why wander through the woods, O Farid,
crushing the thorns under your feet?
The Lord abides within you;
why search for Him in the woods?⁶

This advice can be translated to: Why wander through the world trying to wake the mind up, to find what is beyond it? The Lord abides within you.

The Lord is not to be found in family, friends, work, property, and so on. All of them will only bring us impermanence, and ups and downs. Farid is telling us to “look within,” to conduct our search where reality is to be found.

The Taoist text Huahujing (Hua Hu Ching) says:

The Masters transmit their spiritual and mental energy directly and nonverbally to their students, and in this way awaken their internal subtle energy. If a student develops his intuition well, he is able to absorb the master’s energy and will reach enlightenment through his master.⁷

The Master provides the antidote to our tendency to imitate so many people we have encountered in our lives, in order for us to become who we truly are. Ever since we were born, we have been filling in the gaps in our personal identity picture in order to become more real. Doing the simran that the Master provides us with conquers the repetition of the world which is so deeply embedded in us.

Many years ago at Dera, when the evening meeting for westerners was held in a tent, so many little birds would gather on the spars of the structure, and they squawked and jostled each other for a space, for a perch to sit upon. They were very disruptive to one another and to the sangat; the noise of their chatter was very distracting. But by the end of the session, they were all lined up on a single spar nestling against one another, not making any noise at all. From day to day, the transition of these birds from living in disharmony to living in harmony became more apparent. Many of us will identify with that type of transition in our personal lives – in seva, at work, and in the family. Changes are thrust upon us sometimes, and gradually we are forced to grope our way towards stillness, towards acceptance. Baba Ji told us that he “accepts,” and that if he can do it, so can we.

When we are initiated into Sant Mat, we are instructed to:

Be lacto-vegetarian; eat no meat, fish or eggs, or any derivatives of them.
Avoid, at all costs, alcohol, tobacco, and mind-altering drugs including marijuana and related cannabinoid products like CBD (cannabidiol).
Live a moral life, restricting ourselves to our partner in legal marriage.

This way of life is a precursor to being able to carry out our meditation, the ultimate seva, which should be for at least two and one-half hours per day. This includes doing simran (repetition of the five holy names), whenever our minds are still. We can hunt for the opportunity to do simran in our daily lives. After all, most of what we think about all day long only exists in our mind, because we have nothing better to think about. So, if we can decide, on an ongoing basis, to make simran our only priority, then we should be able to do this 90 percent of our time.

If we can get the practice right, then we have everything. We are with the Master when we are doing meditation or are physically in his presence. As Jesus said:

For where two or three are gathered in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.⁸

The Master has the antidote to our habit of doing repetition of the attributes of the world. What he is transmitting to us is happening automatically, but we have to let go and be receptive to his presence. We cannot avoid our karma, but surely if we do our utmost to serve the Master by placing ourselves in his hands, then our transition from spiritual darkness to the light can be completed.

This practice is totally mobile and free of charge. No devices, subscriptions, or wires are needed. We just have to log-on to our practice. Make it our only priority. We can take our presence to our Master everywhere we go, and nobody else needs to know that we are connected.

In the Adi Granth, Guru Arjan Dev is quoted:

As cold is dispelled by fire,
sins are driven out in the society
of the saints (satsang).⁹

The Masters apply loving pressure to our understanding of our self and our viewpoint of the world until our egotistical sense of “me and mine” evaporates. Then the “spiritual caterpillar” in our cocoon emerges transformed into a beautiful butterfly.

Rumi speaks of the hidden workings of the master by saying:

O Image who passes through the heart,
you are neither image, nor jinn (genie), nor man.
I seek your footprints, but you tread neither
upon the earth nor the heavens.¹⁰

Gradually we are transformed by our association with our Master. The way the Master does this to us is a secret that cannot be fathomed. Poetry is the closest metaphor for describing the process. He moves into us, into our heart, into our being, and awakens the love that is dormant within us all.

Rumi completes his poem above by expressing the secret touch of the Master:

I have never seen anything like your Image;
it kisses, but it has no mouth!

What the Master does to us is done with the utmost secrecy. He is both absent and omnipresent. He moves without revealing himself to us. His true form is Shabd, and so he kisses our soul and we know nothing of his ways. He is waking up the dormant love that is in us.

The Sufi poet and storyteller, Sheikh Sa’di, explains:

Lo, I am standing here engaged in your service:
what does it matter to me whether or not
it is acceptable?¹¹

Everything is the Master and we cannot consider ourselves to be worthy of his grace. However, worthy or not, if the Master accepts us, then our worthiness does not matter. But even though he does everything, we still have to do our work. We cannot take time off from our devotion to Him or take his grace for granted. Only the Master can decide what is acceptable; it need not be our concern. Sheikh Sa’di continues by hoping that the generosity of the murshid (master) will overcome the quality of his service:

We have rendered no service, but still we cherish the hope
that by reason of your noble disposition and character,
you will exercise magnanimity towards us.

Disciples cannot claim to have achieved or to be worth anything. We can only rely upon the grace of the Master for any spiritual progress. He is doing everything. Eknath Easwaran, a modern Indian spiritual teacher, author, and interpreter of spiritual texts, explains in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita about maya and how to weaken it:

Mind can operate only in a world of differences. It has to have separate people and different things to like and dislike; otherwise, there isn’t any mind. Where there is no anger, no fear, no greed, no separateness, the mind just goes to sleep; it cannot operate at all. There is nothing to get excited about, nothing to take notice of; there is only pure joy, which is something the mind simply cannot experience. The more you can still the mind, which is the whole purpose of meditation, the more you will be able to see beneath the surface level of life and remember its unity. Everything that quiets the mind helps to weaken the spell of maya, just as everything that agitates the mind works to strengthen the spell of maya.¹²

So, let us stop thinking! By putting our consciousness in the hands of our beloved, we can go home.

Note that Ram is both human and divine at the same time.
AVM (Rtd) V.P. Misra and Vibha Lavania, Ramcharitmanas, Love & Devotion, RSSB: Beas, 2019, p. 83
Beverly Chapman (ed.), The Spiritual Guide, Perspectives and Traditions, Vol. 2, Beas: RSSB, 2017, p. 209
Ibid, p. 230
Ibid, Vol. 1, p. 159
Dr. T.R. Shangari, Sheikh Farid: The Great Sufi Mystic, Beas: RSSB, 2015, p. 181
The Spiritual Guide, Vol. 1, p. 160
Holy Bible, KJV, Matthew 18:20
The Spiritual Guide, Vol. 2, p. 312 (quoting AG 914: 17-18)
Ibid, p. 249
Ibid, p. 221
Ramcharitmanas, Love & Devotion, p. 214

Rest Awhile - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Rest Awhile

When anyone asked Hazur about their struggles in meditation, his answer to their plight could generally be boiled down to two words: “more meditation.” On one of the Q&A sessions on the website, a woman recounts all her difficulties slogging through meditation, and Hazur said he could share a very secret answer with her – “meditation” – and everyone cracked up laughing.

This is the consistent advice from the Masters. It seems to be the consistent advice from spiritual teachers the world over. From the early Christian mystics known as the “Desert Fathers” we read:

A monk came to Abba Sisoes and said:
“What should I do Abba,
for I have fallen from grace?”
And he replied, “Get up again.”
The monk came back shortly after and said:
“What shall I do now, for I have fallen again?”
And the old man said to him,
“Just get up again.
Never cease getting back up again!”¹

In other words, the only solution to distracted, discouraging meditation is more meditation. For monks in early Christian monasteries, studying, repeating and pondering sayings such as this one was part of their daily spiritual discipline. Hundreds of these sayings were gathered into manuals of instruction for the monks. Each day, along with their times of prayer and silent, inner contemplation, they would take one such saying to memorize in the morning and then to repeat and muse over all day. We can imagine ourselves when meditation has been difficult remembering over and over, “Just get up again. Never cease getting back up again!”

Yet, when we are exhausted from battling an enemy who simply doesn’t give an inch, how do we find the enthusiasm to take up the only solution the Masters offer: more meditation? We might find a helpful suggestion in another of the sayings the monks studied and repeated. This one comes from the early Christian mystic, John of Dalyutha:

If you are tired and worn out
by your labours for your Lord,
place your head upon his knee and rest awhile.
Recline upon his breast,
breathe in the fragrant spirit of life,
and allow life to permeate your being.
Rest upon him, for he is a table of refreshment
that will serve you the food of the divine Father.²

John of Dalyutha’s advice sounds different, but is actually the same as that given by our Masters: “If you are tired and worn out by your labours for your Lord” – that is, meditation – do more meditation. For how else can we, metaphorically, place our head upon the Lord’s knee other than through meditation? Isn’t meditation throwing our exhausted and weary selves on his mercy and “reclining upon his breast?”

Sometimes, when our two and a half hours of meditation has been a vivid and convincing illustration of what the saints mean when they say we are mere slaves – slaves of the mind, willingly dancing to its tune – and we’re feeling dry, desolate and discouraged, it might help to hold on to the image of meditation as a place of rest and refuge. The idea behind the monks devoting an entire day to pondering over one saying was to go deeper and deeper into its meaning, seeing how it applied directly to their own struggles on the spiritual path.

So we might wonder: Why do the Masters tell us that the only solution to dry, uninspired meditation is more meditation? Why do they say the only solution to restless, jumpy, let-me-out-of-here meditation is more meditation? Because, as John of Dalyutha puts it, it is in that meditation practice that we can “breathe in the fragrant spirit of life.”

Caught in the vast and tangled net of the world, driven by our karmic script, and reacting to every sensory input, we’re not alive. As slaves of the mind, we are like the walking dead. All day we play the part we’ve been assigned in the drama of the ever-changing world around us, but our time of meditation is – or can be – a time to “rest awhile” and allow “life” to permeate our being. It is in meditation that we can be nourished. As John of Dalyutha puts it, if we want to enjoy the divine food at that “table of refreshment,” we have to “rest upon him.”

The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent, from the Desert Fathers and other Early Christian Contemplatives. McGuckin, John Anthony, translator. Boston: Shambhala Press: 2003, p. 46
The Book of Mystical Chapters, p. 25

Our Insignificant Sevadar - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Our Insignificant Sevadar

In a recent question-and-answer session, Baba Ji referred to himself as an “insignificant sevadar.” Was he kidding? He has often said, “I am just a sevadar,” and that is something we might be able to accept, but an insignificant sevadar? We are aware of the long hours he spends every day to carry out the tasks needed to keep the Dera running and expanding; to sort out major issues and problems at other centres as well; to look after the sangat worldwide with seemingly inexhaustible energy. Without him, how could Naam Daan (initiation) ever take place, how could prashad be distributed, how could we have darshan, and how could there be these lovely question-and-answer sessions? With all of these tasks that he is performing, how could he call himself insignificant?

Saints never say anything they do not mean (except, of course, when they are joking). So, he did mean it when he said he was just an insignificant sevadar. He truly, deep down within himself, regards himself as just a sevadar, the same as all other sevadars. Seva means “selfless service.” As this phrase indicates, there are two aspects to it – the “self” of the sevadar that has to be eliminated, and the “other” who is being served. This word seva is used extensively all over India, but most of the time it is only the second aspect that is emphasized – i.e., the benefits being provided to others. In Sant Mat, the first aspect should get priority. Eliminating the “self” from the picture is the more important and more difficult part of performing seva.

When seva is being provided by organizations as large as RSSB, it becomes necessary to have a system in which some people perform what may look like “more important” tasks. Therefore, the challenge for a sevadar who is performing a “significant” seva is – can I do it without feeling significant or important? The more insignificant we can feel, the more our inner being is made ready to perform even more significant sevas without the ego overpowering us. A young woman once asked the Master for seva, saying any seva would do. Baba Ji advised her: why not aim high, like the seva of a satsang speaker, or, as he has often joked, why not even ask to occupy the Master’s chair? If we keep the “selfless” aspect of seva foremost in our minds – irrespective of how much importance others may give it – this will gradually increase our ability to perform selfless service. We need to shift our attention away from worldly accomplishments and accolades. This is best accomplished through meditation, by attaching our attention to the Shabd.

Being attached to the Shabd is the goal of this path. Living in the Will of the Shabd is the fundamental criterion when one Master selects someone else to occupy his chair. This Shabd is within each one of us, but we never put in the required effort to listen to it, preferring to listen to the mind instead. To be able to listen to the Shabd, we have to become truly humble. Baba Ji has said that meditation is, above all, a humbling experience. When we struggle to keep our mind in simran and realize how impossible such a seemingly “simple task” is, we are naturally moving towards humility. Only when sufficient humility is developed do we begin hearing the true Shabd within. At this point, we start switching our allegiance from the mind to the Shabd. Finally, we will surrender to the Shabd. At that point, we will lose our individual identity, as it will no longer be important to us. As Sant Kabir has explained, real love occurs only when the disciple completely loses his or her identity in that of the true guru, the Shabd.

As Baba Ji has said, we grow up in this world by creating an identity, and then on the spiritual path, we grow up by discarding it. Once our identity is fully discarded, it doesn’t matter what task we are assigned – we do it with the same zest and humility, all in the name of the Master. The ultimate goal of each initiate is to become such an “insignificant sevadar” – when everything is done as commanded by the Shabd, the “I” being entirely absent. In this sense, as Baba Ji has said many times, we are all prospective Masters. While we may feel we are a million miles from that goal, Baba Ji advises that we should not look at the situation that way, but from a different perspective. He once gave the example of a very tall mountain that we are trying to climb. If our attention is always on the peak, we will feel “oh, the task is so difficult, how could I ever reach there?” But if we instead focus our attention on the instructions of the mountain guide who knows how to reach the peak, and just follow those instructions fully, we will accomplish our goal – without feeling proud. We will understand the value of carefully adhering to the guide’s instructions, and we will know that without the guide, we could never attain our goal of reaching the peak.

In Indian mythology, Lord Krishna’s mother was given the name Yashoda. It is a highly symbolic way of conveying a deep mystic truth. Yash means fame or glory; da means to give away, to donate. The greatest danger of our ego strangling our spiritual progress lies in situations in which we get name and fame. If we can develop the ability to donate that praise to the Lord or guru, the way Baba Ji is doing, then the Lord is “born” within us. The symbolism of Krishna being born to Yashoda is therefore a reference to the internal condition of a true guru – the Lord is born in him because he gives away the glory associated with his actions to his own guru. “Being born” in this context is just a way of conveying what God-realization is. The Lord is already there within us. He doesn’t have to be born anew. It is just a question of realizing his presence. Therefore, Baba Ji tells us “Aren’t you all prospective Masters?” The reference here is not to “occupy the chair” but to becoming a truly insignificant sevadar – giving all credit to one’s guru, becoming totally humble, and thereby realizing God.

Doing seva (any selfless service), even just wanting to do seva, is a highly desirable trait in any satsangi. But just as in any worldly task, it carries with it the danger of the ego rearing its ugly head – “I rolled 120 chapattis in an hour; no one else came anywhere near that figure”; “I gave such an inspiring satsang”; “I have reorganized the centre’s activities so efficiently”… The possibilities for enhancing our egos are endless! Such forays of the mind are natural and inevitable. It happens to everyone. Baba Ji often explains this by saying, “There is the ideal and there is the practical.” Ideally, the ego should not take over while we are doing seva. But in practice it often does. The only way to overcome this problem is to keep doing the seva and simultaneously keep a constant watch on our thoughts. As the saying goes, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

If we can perform our seva well and donate to God whatever praise we receive or feel, we will be prepared for anything and everything – even becoming a guru, i.e, a truly “insignificant” sevadar.

Whole Again - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Whole Again

These days we feel that the world around us is breaking into pieces, that our lives are shattered and completely falling apart. Major change creates new realities and we need to adjust to them. It is a familiar human story. A debilitating sickness, loss of financial stability, loss of social standing: all of these changes create an impression that everything is shattered because we feel shattered, shaken, traumatized. Suffering has always accompanied human beings, and human beings have always been in search of cures and wellness. After healing a person from a debilitating illness, Jesus told him: “Behold, you are made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto you.”¹

There is a deep message in this simple statement. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh explained to us that becoming whole entails piecing our scattered attention together and focusing it one-pointedly inside. We fall apart in every sense of the word when we lose our focus, our concentration. Wholeness describes the most desirable state of our attention: focused and oriented inward. When it is scattered outward, we are broken, shattered. Hazur explained:

Now you are in the process of becoming whole, provided you “sin no more.” You must not compromise with the four principles of Sant Mat. You must build your treasure in heaven on these principles.²

The principles, the vows we take at initiation, are about restoring our wholeness – that is, keeping our focus whole, or one-pointed, rather than scattered. Vegetarian food has a calming effect on the mind and makes it less reactive. That supports our goal of becoming whole again. Abstinence from mind-altering substances helps us to stay focused. Leading a pure moral life likewise keeps us from scattering our energies and from reaping the binding consequences that anti-social and unkind acts bring. And certainly meditation, built upon these three pillars, aims at steadying our focus in a way that shields us from the countless negative tendencies that bombard us inside and outside.

Our lack of concentration makes us easy prey for the senses. The senses prompt us to act against our best interests, and we remain imprisoned within the four walls of our own misguided will and desires. A slave, a prisoner, is in a constant state of lockdown and cannot leave at will: “Then the sins become our master and we become the slave… a victim of birth and death, which is a ‘worse thing.’”³

The true meaning of the words Jesus said to the man whom he had healed is not about the temporary relief from a physical ailment. As Hazur explained:

If Jesus and other Masters cured only physical ills, they would be no more than great physicians, because the physical body is perishable.… The physical body was never meant to endure forever. But the soul is immortal and can never be happy until it returns to its source, the Father in heaven. This is what Masters do for us, and therein lies their greatness.⁴

Jesus encouraged the healed person to pursue true wholeness that cannot be disrupted again. It is easy to feel whole and well when everything in our lives runs smoothly, when our discomforts or suffering are magically removed. But again, change happens. An unforeseen, shocking change such as a pandemic occurs, and our little world falls to pieces again. We feel we can never piece it back together.

Perhaps we can’t because we were not the ones who pieced together the so-called “normal life” that we now wish to return to. We did not piece together the circumstances that brought us into this physical body among the particular people and events that we were destined to interact with. We participated very little or not at all in our making, and we certainly will not be consulted in the process of our breaking. Why does the ego take credit for the good things and blame God, chance, or fortune for what it does not like?

It is because favorable circumstances build ego, while unfavorable circumstances tear it down. This body-building, ego-building gym – our physical world – has functioned like this forever. Making and breaking bodies, egos, buildings, cities, empires, etc., has been happening forever. We look at ancient ruins with curiosity, but do we feel the agony of the shattered lives that those now-fragmented buildings once housed?

Spiritual masters come to take us out of this infinite cycle of making and breaking. They do not come to put us physically back together again. They are interested in permanent, not temporary, fixes – cures and wholeness.

When they promise to make us whole again, to make us well again, they do not mean the kind of wholeness or wellness that will set us up for breaking and falling apart all over again. The true meaning of wholeness cannot be explained but must be experienced. Hazur explains that the soul is covered with negative emotions, thoughts, and impressions, called “mind,” which cause the soul’s lack of wholeness and wellness. He then explains:

To “become whole” is the same as “know thyself,” because the real self is the soul. So long as the mind dominates the soul, we do not know our “self.” To become perfect, pure, whole – all mean the same thing.⁵

He also explains that becoming whole means to separate the soul from the mind, to untie the knot that currently binds them together. We keep confusing our mind-body with our soul, taking them to be one inseparable whole. But the body, mind, and soul that look like a unified whole on the outside are a house divided against itself on the inside. They rarely coexist harmoniously. They pull in different directions. Knowing ourselves means untying the knot that binds them, which allows us to realize that the soul in us has a separate life and destiny.

Know thyself
“Know thyself” is a phrase made famous by the 5th-century BCE Athenian philosopher Socrates. He used a sweet and vivid expression for the process of withdrawing the soul from the mind-body. He spoke of a state when the soul stays “itself by itself” – completely separated from the urges, needs, thoughts, desires, and obsessions of the body to which the reactive mind is a slave. True purity for Socrates was to become conscious of the soul as a separate entity from those forces that distract and enslave it. He called this process “the practice of dying”:

For the crowd is not aware how the true philosophers practice dying. … For death is nothing other than separation of the soul from the body, and this indeed is to die, namely, for the body, separated from the soul, to become itself by itself, and for the soul, separated from the body, to become itself by itself.⁶

Dominated by negativity, the mind is ignorant of our soul’s destiny to be free, to go beyond the mind and the illusory weblike prison it constantly weaves around itself. Masters of all times speak with urgency about the forgetfulness that plagues us and keeps us entangled in matters of secondary importance.

In Socrates’ time, shortly before the downfall of Athens, its citizens considered themselves the greatest and best of all humankind. Socrates urged them to reorient their priorities from temporary greatness to true, everlasting greatness:

You are a citizen of the greatest state, the most famous for wisdom and power, but yet, you are not ashamed to care exclusively for chasing wealth, reputation and honour while neither caring for nor valuing mindfulness, Truth and the attainment of the best possible state for your souls.⁷

A homeless, uneducated peasant in mid-19th century Russia sounds very much like Socrates and Hazur when he says:

The fact is that we are alienated from ourselves and have little desire really to know ourselves; we run in order to avoid meeting ourselves and we exchange truth for trinkets while we say, “I would like to have time for prayer and the spiritual life but the cares and difficulties of this life demand all my time and energies.” And what is more important and necessary, the eternal life of the soul or the temporary life of the body about which man worries so much? It is this choice which man makes that either leads him to wisdom or keeps him in ignorance.⁸

This simple peasant who told of his inspiring experiences with “ceaseless prayer” (a form of simran) wanted to remain anonymous. Wisely so, because the wisdom that he attained has no name and no time frame. It is part of a tradition that has existed since humanity has existed. This tradition keeps raising the basic question that every human being in search of the true meaning of human life has to confront: Do we value more highly the temporary well-being of the body or the eternal well-being and freedom of our vital energy, the soul? Every spiritual master comes to urge us to put eternal well-being first. Socrates said:

If the soul is immortal, it requires diligent care not just during this span of time which we call life, but for all time to come. And it appears that the risk even at present would be tremendous if we neglect to care for our soul.⁹

How to cure the darkness?
The darkness of ignorance that forces us to focus primarily on physical survival and on the concerns of the body is a timeless theme in the message of mystics. Soami Ji speaks of the soul’s plight – plunged in darkness, unaware of what is going on – and how skewed its priorities are:

Heavy, intense darkness prevails in the world
and the body is a storehouse of shadows.
Whether they are awake or asleep,
I see people helplessly caught in the maze
of the creation.
Through ignorance of its own real home,
the soul is living here like a homeless wanderer,
stumbling through different life forms,
tossed about in the cycle of birth and death.¹⁰

How to cure the darkness of one’s ignorance? That is what all spiritual teachers explain across time and space. We don’t even know what we are ignorant of – this is what Socrates called the soul’s greatest plight and affliction. But there is a way out of our darkness. When the 19th-century Russian peasant, whose wisdom was recounted in the book The Way of the Pilgrim, was asked how he arrived at profound insights and unending inner joy, he responded: “For the most part my ignorance has been enlightened by interior prayer, which is the result of God’s grace and the teachings of my late elder.”¹¹

Ceaseless prayer, ceaseless attention directed to the Divine under the guidance of a spiritual master, is the secret to breaking the long-standing spell that has frozen our spiritual evolution and bound us to matter that can never fulfill the soul’s craving for freedom and intense, divine love. Ceaseless simran and meditation under the guidance of a master is the time-tested formula that has worked for countless lovers of the light in their struggle against their own interior darkness. The prayer of the heart is a result of continuous practice and divine grace.

That interior prayer of the heart has been practiced at all times by individuals across continents and lands. The 17th-century Sufi mystic Sultan Bahu sings the praises of this prayer of the heart:

Everyone recites the Kalma with his lips;
rare is the person who recites it from the heart.
When the Kalma comes from the heart,
the spoken word has no value.
Only mystics know this Kalma of the heart.¹²

Kalma of the heart is also known as the melody that resounds within every human being without pause. This ceaseless melody can make broken and distraught human beings whole and well again. It alone can dispel our inner darkness. In Sant Mat, it is called the Shabd.

Hazur used the verse from Matthew – “but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come”¹³ – to emphasize that “to sin against the Holy Ghost can never be forgiven.”¹⁴ That means that we can’t bypass meditation, the Sant Mat way of ceaseless prayer. We may do other types of seva, but in the end we must do our meditation practice.

Meditation is the vessel in which the soul becomes conscious of its natural attunement to the Shabd. This spiritual awakening cures our ignorance and forgetfulness. It is the only way to mend what has been broken for ages and to restore the soul’s memory of its true reality. Hazur has said:

If you turn your back to meditation, you can never be forgiven – forgiven for what stands between you and the Father…. Unless we are forgiven for those karmas which we have done in past lives, the soul can never go back to the Father.… If you have medicine but don’t use it, how can your illness go? Friendship with the doctor won’t eliminate your illness; you have to use the medicine, howsoever bitter it is.¹⁵

To become whole, then, is first to realize fully one’s broken state and then to repent through meditation for the darkness that lies between us and the light.

This repentance is different from self-analysis and guilt. It is the act of surrendering our brokenness and darkness to the light – exposing them to the light – so that the light can pierce our darkness and heal the deep traumas of countless births. This act of surrendering our weakness, our helplessness, our illness takes determination, because it forces us to enter the space of vulnerability and uncertainty, to lay ourselves completely bare before the Infinite, which already knows all our secrets anyway. It means giving up the sense of control that is the backbone of the ego. When we read the songs of mystics and saints, we see how completely aware they are of their own helplessness, setting an example for us to follow. They courageously expose the weakness and darkness for all to see:

My evil mind doesn’t feel the separation –
please grant it the gift of love.
It puts no faith in what is true and permanent,
but hankers after ephemeral pleasures.
It craves indulgence in carnal passion
and has no taste for the nectar of Surat Shabd.¹⁶

The mystics consciously and lovingly confront their faults and weaknesses without dissecting them or falling into guilt and regrets. Instead, they reorient their repentance toward love for the One, who never judges or finds fault. Their helplessness is not passive, but receptive. It is informed by the knowledge of where to seek help and from where help will come. The mystics know that the most reliable help comes from within. Therefore, they move forward with spiritual maturity – seeking the light while staring bravely without fear or judgment into their own darkness and the darkness that surrounds them. Saints and mystics do not reject the darkness; they move through it. We all have to move through it. Love for the light sustains us as we stumble and fall while groping through the darkness.

Mystics also avoid the trap of what some psychologists call “spiritual bypassing”: covering up unresolved psychological issues (for example, insecurity and immaturity) with false piousness, arrogance, and judgment of others. Saints and enlightened teachers seem down-to-earth and ordinary, but they are extraordinary in that they are not afraid of their own darkness or the darkness they see in others. They even hide the weaknesses of others sometimes by claiming them as their own. They can do that because they have confidence in the power that will dispel that darkness. They have no ego that wants to hide its darkness behind a bright façade.

Mystics know the helplessness of the soul; they know how difficult it is and how long it takes to remove the darkness, so they are patient and non-judgmental. They know that everything happens according to the will of the One who has unrolled the movie of the creation and keeps it unfolding. That is what allows those human beings who are now whole to fully lean upon the only real pillar of strength, the Shabd, the source of freedom, wholeness, and divine love:

If you go on attending to the meditation, if you don’t sin against the Holy Ghost, then love and devotion will develop, and will be strengthened.¹⁷ … The purpose of meditation is to be with the Master always.¹⁸

The more focused we are, the more our awareness expands, the more we realize that even a pandemic of global magnitude is a blip on the screen of endless time. We realize the soul’s need to stay as much as possible “itself by itself,” absorbed in the radiance and purity of its true self, the Shabd.

The pandemic, or any crisis for that matter, can intensify our efforts to stay focused on what truly matters, both in life and in death. Through spiritual focus, we will be able to make better decisions as new challenges present themselves. We will act with the big picture in mind rather than react to the random chaotic provocations that scatter and unsettle us. We will be able to remain whole while everything around us appears to be falling apart.

That wholeness, that wellness, will come from concentration, the kind that we practice in meditation. All is well, we are whole – this feeling comes only with regular and punctual effort at meditation, which connects us to the source of wellness, the Spirit within. This alone can carry us through chaos and the anxiety-provoking, distracting events in our fleeting lives.

Bible (King James Version), John 5:14
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, 1994, p. 66
Ibid., pp. 65-66
Ibid., p. 68
Ibid., p. 66
Iamblichus, Protr., Chapter 13, p. 90, ed. Edouard des Places, 1989; cf. Plato, Phaedo 64
Plato, Apology 29E
The Way of a Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way, Doubleday: 1992, p. 74
Iamblichus, Protr. 99; Plato, Phaedo 107C
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 125
The Way of the Pilgrim, p. 74
J.R. Puri & K.S Khak, Sultan Bahu, 1997; Bait 101, p. 300
Bible (King James Version) Matthew 12:32
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die To Live, 1999, p. 46
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die To Live, 1999, p. 46
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 333
Die To Live, 1999, p. 49
Ibid., p. 52

The Value of Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Value of Life

Life is valuable – this is a universal human belief that applies to our own lives as well as to those of others. We all do our utmost to stay alive and to prolong our lives. We put a lot of effort into keeping our bodies healthy and trying to heal them when we suffer from a disease. To stay healthy, we put endless energy into our diet, take vitamins and food supplements, play sports, go to the gym, and we even have organs and joints replaced, all for the purpose of staying alive and fit. But we all know that this life is temporary, and there are higher values than merely living and surviving.

Basically, the only certainty we have is that this life is going to end. Saints keep telling us that this life is short, that we are only here to play a role in the karmic stage play that has been assigned to us by the Lord. Apart from that role, this life and all that we see here is of very little value. It is all a dream.

So if life is temporary and only a dream, what is of any real value? Maharaj Sawan Singh writes:

Love is the richest of all treasures. Without it there is nothing and with it there is everything. He who does not have love in his heart is not entitled to call himself a human being … Wherever there is love there is life. Where there is no love, life is worthless. Actually, a man is not a true man unless he has within him the divine spark of love. God, in the form of love, is within everybody.¹

So it is love that gives value to life:

Love that is given to us by the Lord and that permeates everyone and everything in this creation,
Love that gives warmth to our lives, without which our existence would be cold and barren,
Love that radiates through our heart and soul,
Love that is an aspect of the Shabd and that makes us aware of our yearning to return to our origin, to the ocean of divine essence from where we originated and to which we will return when our stage play is over and our roles have been played.

Less killing, less karma
At the same time, the value of life is a universally recognized fact that has become part of the constitution of every civilized nation. It is also expressed in the well-known words from the Bible “Thou shalt not kill,” which applies to human beings as well as animals and plants. Given the fact that we have to take life in order to survive, we can minimize the harm we cause by taking life only from the most simple life forms, ranging from plants as the lowest to animals as the highest – in other words, by following a vegetarian diet.

The words “Thou shalt not kill” are reinforced by the words “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” i.e., respect another person’s life as you respect your own. And it is a reminder that we do need to respect our own life! After all, even when life gets unbearably painful or unpleasant, we should not neglect our bodies, let alone end our lives, whether by means of suicide or euthanasia. Life is a gift from the Lord, and it is the Lord who decides when a life will start and when it will end, despite the modern societal trend of “makeable man,” which tries to shift our perspective away from the notion that it is only the Lord who gives and takes life.

If we consider our own lives from the perspective of karma, life as a human being is a valuable opportunity to pay off any remaining outstanding karmic accounts and thus rise on the ladder towards our final destination. As human beings, we have been gifted with the sense of discrimination, and we have been given the possibility of choice, however limited the scope of our choices may be. Depending on the choices we make, we can either rise or fall, pay off karma or create new karma, and thus make use of the value of this life to rise towards our final destination.

Society imposes limits
If we consider the value of life from a societal perspective, we soon see that totally different aspects play a role. Take the medical world, for instance: many workers are motivated by compassion and love for humanity, but due to limited resources they often have to make choices about whom to help. A recent example is the Covid-19 pandemic, with more critically ill patients requiring urgent treatment than the available capacity to help. What criteria are used to decide who will get the treatments and who will not? Would you give priority to an older, weaker person who will certainly die without the treatment, or would you choose a younger person who has more years of life ahead of him?

Health insurance companies are often faced with similar issues. Costs for medicines for curing a rare disease can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per treatment, whereas the available funds are also needed to cover the milder diseases of larger numbers of patients. To support their decision-making process, the medical world uses a formula known as the “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” (QALY), in which a year of perfect health is considered to have a higher value than a year of life spent in a coma. In Western countries the value allocated to one year of life of reasonable quality is in the range of USD 100,000, whereas in countries with a lower GDP, the value would be half that amount or even less.

Relief workers handing out food packages in areas struck by famine, or teams that try to help drowning refugees, are also forced to make choices. Obviously, making those choices is extremely difficult, but given the constraints within which relief workers provide their help, they can only do their best. Beyond that, from a worldly perspective, the ultimate responsibility lies with society at large, and from a spiritual perspective, it is a matter of karma and destiny.

Unlimited value through love
Despite all the shortcomings of modern society, fortunately there is still a great deal of compassion and willingness to help. That willingness stands as proof of the realization of the value of life, and it is an intrinsic part of living life as a good human being. It is inspired by the love that radiates into our lives, and through sharing that love, we make our own lives valuable.

In the RSSB-produced video “Life Is Precious,” which focuses on the healthcare provided free of charge at a number of hospitals throughout India, Maharaj Charan Singh says:

If we can do anything to help anybody, we should. That is our duty. We are meant to help each other. Humans are meant to help humans. Who else will help? Birds and lions won’t come to help you. You have to help each other.²

The video emphasizes that we should do whatever we can to help others. If we have the time and resources, rather than using them solely for ourselves or leaving them unutilized, why not use them for others? From that perspective, there are virtually no limits. We are drawing on an infinite source of energy, and we have the privilege of sharing that energy. We are just a medium to share boundless love and energy, of which there is more than enough.

“Life Is Precious” documents an outstanding example of help being provided to others. But there are plenty of other examples throughout the world. Think of the humanitarian aid funds and initiatives that are set up after natural disasters, famines, wars, refugee crises, etc. Think also of the healthcare workers who, even though humanitarian concern may be an aspect of their professional duties and they are being paid for their efforts, risk their health or even their lives to help others in this current time of Covid-19.

Elsewhere Maharaj Charan Singh says:

We should help others – not only human beings, but even the lower creation. We should help them by not killing them and by being merciful to them, by not eating them, and in so many other ways we can help.³

If we believe that life – i.e., the force that keeps us alive, call it the spirit or Shabd – is a direct expression of the divine energy, then this entire universe is filled with one and the same life force. We are all part of that same force, of that same ocean. Being part of that same force, that same ocean of life and love, entirely rejects the idea of separation – of you and me, me and my neighbour, human being or animal or plant. That idea of separation is the illusionary dream we are living in, and which we need to rise above.

As it is said, “a drop is just a drop as long as it believes it is separate from the sea.”⁴ The moment the drop realizes it is not separate from the waves of that ocean of life and love, then it will realize that we are all one. Then automatically you will love your neighbour as yourself, and not only the person next door, but every living being – be it a human of any caste, colour or creed – or any mammal, bird, insect, plant. With that realization, the thought of killing wouldn’t even enter your mind. It would only instill immense respect for the value of life in this entire creation – a creation in which everything is filled with that invaluable life force of love in which we are all one.

Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 113-114
Video: Life Is Precious on www.rssb.org
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #206
Dara Shikoh, The Compass of Truth, quoted in Scott Kugle, Sufi Meditation and Contemplation, Omega Publications, 2012

Following Instructions - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Following Instructions

If one were to withdraw his mind from sensual pleasures and attach himself to the Sound Current, he would go back to Sach Khand. Then there would be no more coming and going. All this is within one’s self, and whoever ‘goes in’ according to the instructions of a Master reaches his Home.¹

There’s no room for misinterpretation in Maharaj Jagat Singh’s clear statement of consequence. Yet despite this message being conveyed by the Saints continually over time – that “if” a course of action is followed, “then” the consequence will be certain – we fail to follow it through. And then wonder why we haven’t realized Sach Khand within.

It’s not as if “the instructions of a Master” are difficult to follow. They’re easier to follow and understand than tying a shoelace. Although an ideal posture is suggested, an initiate just needs to sit completely still in any comfortable position and repeat five names for two hours, followed by half an hour of receptivity to the Sound Current. It’s called simran and bhajan.

If we tie a shoelace too loose we can expect it to come undone within short order. It will no longer be tied. By the same token, if we fail to repeat our simran with the one-pointed concentration that’s required or skimp on the specified duration, that Sound Current will prove elusive. It’s as simple as that.

These days we’re able to view YouTube videos online for every conceivable task, including how to tie a shoelace. Imagine an explanatory video showing the step-by-step instructions explaining how to realize the Lord within. It would simply show a person sitting in a comfortable position, eyes closed, silently repeating five names for two hours. That’s it.

We can go on asking questions about techniques or trying to do calculations about this or that – delving into why certain events might, or might not, be happening in our lives. We can do as much as we can to avoid the simplicity of the situation we are in. But ultimately the only way to achieve our objective is to sit. And do our very best to concentrate on our simran, with all the effort we can muster.

When we express our frustrations, a cursory examination of the explanations given by the saints reminds us that the nature of the mind is to resist following the instructions. For countless lifetimes the mind has enjoyed wandering around with thoughts all over the place. We cannot expect it to suddenly turn away from these habits and relish and embrace the idea of what appears to be the dry repetition of five names over and over again.

But anyone proficient in their specialist field, for example a world-renowned sportsperson or an accomplished musician, will relate that their achievement comes from constant practice of technique, following a regular routine, day after day, performing the same task over and over again until perfection in concentration is achieved.

Similarly the saints explain that the only antidote to the natural tendency of a wandering mind during simran is to constantly and unceasingly put in the effort and practice of repetition.

Maharaj Jagat Singh puts it bluntly:

Always keep your mind in simran. Does it cost anything? Just go on repeating the Holy Names as the small boys repeat “one, two, three, four.” Simran is a great force. By simran alone you develop strong willpower. Simran should be done patiently and vigorously, without a break. It should be incessant, unceasing, continuous, and constant.²

Always keeping your mind in simran doesn’t only mean at the time of meditation. The saints encourage us to use any spare time when we are not concentrating on our work or other pursuits to engage in repetition, so it becomes a deeply ingrained habit to occupy our mind.

Smartphones can now record how much time we spend on screen time. A weekly notification advises the average daily time we’ve spent looking at the device. Imagine if there were an App that could record how much time we spend on repetition of the five holy names each day, if a Fitbit wristwatch could tell us the amount of concentration during our meditation as well as our nightly sleep patterns. But these would simply be a distraction. As Baba Ji often tells us, we shouldn’t calculate or analyze these things. We know whether we’re putting all the effort we can muster into something. We really don’t need any more distractions or diversions. We just need to sit and do it.

One of the three-part slogans put out by a government to encourage its population to be Covid-aware included the phrase “Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives.” As seekers of the Lord, we need to “Stay Alert. Control the Mind. Realize the Lord.” Staying alert means being aware of the tricks of the mind. Controlling the mind means constantly practicing simran. Realizing the Lord means giving that time for bhajan – receptivity to the sound current.

Maharaj Jagat Singh, replying to a point raised by a satsangi who said that “my mind does not allow me to sit in bhajan, and when I sit it makes me forget simran,” explained:

Well, what else should it do? It is doing its duty most faithfully. Should you not do yours? Attack it with full force. At this stage it is a fierce battle between mind and soul. Never give any quarter to the mind.³

Science of the Soul, p. 69
Science of the Soul, p. 201
Science of the Soul, p. 201

The Best of Times - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Best of Times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…¹

These familiar words from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens seem to echo the mood of many people today. It reflects a time of transition, of insecurity, of confusion. No one knows what’s happening! Dickens was writing eloquently of the time of the French revolution in the late 18th century. We are living about 250 years later. And in our times no one knows what the future holds either. From the global pandemic of Covid-19, to the suffering of migrants and refugees fleeing war and famine – running from one country to another – to environmental disasters like massive flooding and forest fires, we are being constantly reminded that we human beings have no control over current or future events. As much as we like to think that we are modern and civilized beings, with our highly developed analytic minds – with instantaneous internet connections, smartphones, and streaming video – we are really totally helpless in the face of the flow of events, the flow of history. We have no control.

The Chinese mystics write about wu-wei, the art of doing everything while doing nothing. Expressed otherwise, it means that one needs to adapt to the flow of events rather than putting oneself forward and trying to control events. We need to let go. It is similar to karmaless action (nishkam karma), as if we take motive out of it, then we are not acting, but all action and life just flow in their natural currents.

Many Chinese texts advise us to hold on to the pivot of Dao (the unchanging and eternal divine spiritual power), while allowing the flow of changing events to continue around us. If we do so, we will be unaffected by the changes and the transformations.

The Huainanzi, an early Daoist text from the 2nd century BCE, explains how the sage or mystic deals with the changes and transformations encountered in life:

The myriad things have their creator,
Yet he (the sage) alone knows to abide by the root;
The events of the world have a source
out of which they come,
Yet he alone knows to abide by the gateway
(to the inner realms).²

The Huainanzi urges us to live peacefully and respond appropriately to the world around us, “and to observe and match changes as they arise. As easy as turning a ball in the palm of one’s hand, it enables one to find personal happiness.”³ Rolling the ball in our hand is easy. If we relax and don’t hold on too tightly, we will be able to drop our obsession with the external world. The Dao puts us in touch with our intrinsic nature, our inner equilibrium. This is the stillness that allows us to hold on to the pivot and be in tune with the Dao, our inner nature, thus allowing ourselves to rise above any worry and anxiety, pleasure and pain.

Baba Ji and, indeed, all the previous R.S. masters, have urged us to stop reacting to events or people and to focus on the master and his teaching – to give up our calculating nature, to take our minds out of it all. It is his miracle of love that he has made us aware of the true state of the world, the instability of human life, so that we can be free to take our mind to the true reality of the Shabd.

Dickens, when he says that this is both the best and worst of times, a time of both light and darkness, a time of wisdom and disbelief, of foolishness, is echoing the Master when he tells us that whatever we experience or see in life depends on our perspective. We normally live in the duality of pleasure and pain, and we ricochet between both types of experience, as we believe that they are both real – it is just a matter of perspective and the attitude we adopt. The glass is both half-empty and half-full; it is just the way we look at it. Both perspectives are true, so it boils down to our choice. The glass is symbolic of our attitude to life. How do we want to live our lives? Do we want to see the negative and focus on the frightening? Or do we want to stay in the Master’s “comfort-zone” – the inner space where we can be with the Master and nothing interferes? Of course, we need to navigate through life, through the muck as well as the fields of wildflowers, but if we try, we can cultivate a positive attitude no matter what the external situation, and that will free us from the tentacles of despair and confusion.

Hazur Maharaj Ji advised us:

We have to go along with the waves of destiny. You can never change the events of life, no matter how much you plan, no matter how much you pray. But you can always adjust to the events of life. Adjusting to the events of life will give you happiness; events will never adjust to your liking.⁴

We cannot change the cycle of our life, the cycle of our karmas. We have to swim along with the waves; we cannot swim across the waves. So we have to accept the facts of life as they come. The very fact that we have to go along with the waves automatically makes us happy – there is no other way. We have to accept the facts.⁵

There really is no absolute, objective reality. What we experience depends on our angle of perception. This is illustrated by a famous “visual illusions” exercise that shows a black and white image of a wine glass.⁶ It appears to be an outline of a wine glass, but if you look at it long enough, or change your focus a little, you’ll see the profiles of two people facing each other instead of the edges of the glass. The edges of the glass become the outline of a face. This is an exercise in visual perception but symbolic of the deeper truth the Master is teaching us, that we can see things from different perspectives. We can choose how we want to see our lives. As he says, we will experience disease, illness, heartbreak, but what we make of life is up to us. There will be happiness and joy and fulfillment also. And he is with us to help us.

By attending to our meditation, we gain the strength to overcome the negative pull of the “mind of sadness” – that aspect of our mind that wants to keep us scared, sad, lonely, unloved, that is locked into negativity. We have to make effort to keep ourselves in the mind-zone of joy – and make that our very familiar “comfort-zone.”

Maharaj Ji also emphasized that if we didn’t experience some pain and difficulties during our lifetimes, we would never turn to the Lord at all. We need to feel the need, the pull, to seek him out. So the pandemic, the environmental disasters, and the social upheavals we are going through can also be a blessing in disguise. They can act to turn us to the Lord, for his succour – to open our hearts to him to receive his grace and blessing. Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

Well, brother, no doubt mystics try to depict the darkness of this creation. But for that, we wouldn’t want to escape from it, we wouldn’t want to go back to the Father. But as I said a few days ago, why curse the darkness? Light the candle, and then there will be no darkness. No doubt the world is unhappy. We see misery all around us, but we can build our own happiness within ourselves, and then wherever you go you radiate happiness. Happiness is within. …

And the moment comes in everyone’s life when we do realize that nothing belongs to us, and we don’t belong to anybody at all. So unless we belong to the One to whom we really belong and who belongs to us, we can never be happy. And that One is the Father, the Lord.⁷

Maharaj Ji reassures us:

We become happy by accepting what the Lord gives us, being content with what we have and by attending to meditation. You see, the more our mind is scattered in this creation, the more unhappy we are. The more our mind is one-pointed at the eye centre, the happier we are. The more it is scattered outside, the more unhappy we are. So we have to see that our mind doesn’t scatter out into the world. The more it is concentrated at the eye centre, the more happiness and bliss you will feel. No matter what situation you are going through, you will feel that bliss and happiness within yourself.⁸

So we can truly say that it is “the best of times,” a time of hope and love, in the refuge and protection of the master.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Global Classics edition, p. 9 (opening page)
D. C. Lau & Roger Ames, Yuan Dao, p. 93
D. C. Lau & Roger Ames, Yuan Dao, p. 8
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 259
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 268
There are numerous such exercises; you can do an internet search for “Visual Illusions.”
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, # 422
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 545

Escaping the Sword of Damocles - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Escaping the Sword of Damocles

The story is told that more than 2,300 years ago in what is now southern Italy, a cruel king named Dionysius ruled in great splendor. As decadent leaders have done throughout time, he surrounded himself with fine luxuries. His dining couches were draped in gold fabrics, his silver dishes filled with exotic foods of all types, laid before him by servants chosen for their physical beauty. A kingdom of citizens and armies obeyed his every command. He appeared to truly “have it all.”

Among his court attendants was a man with a flattering tongue, Damocles. This courtier was often heard praising the luxurious life his king had created. His royal palace was so grand, his armies so vast, his storehouses so bursting with riches.

One day, Dionysius – perhaps tiring of the endless pandering – suggested that he and Damocles trade places, which Damocles eagerly agreed to do. Damocles sat among the rich foods, waited upon by the beautiful servants, indulged by everyone at court. What was there not to like?

But then Dionysius ordered that a sharp sword be suspended by a single horsehair above the head of Damocles. Suddenly, the delicious foods, scented ointments, and exquisite surroundings lost their appeal. He begged to be allowed to return to his former position as a man of no importance.

What can we take from the story of the sword of Damocles? Traditionally, this tale is referred to when we speak of an impending threat or that death is hanging by a thread above us all, or sometimes to remind us that happiness cannot be found in material possessions.

Baba Ji often teaches us that we should live life happily and not in fear, that we should learn from our mistakes and be relaxed. He emphasizes that we have to live in the present, and if we take the right actions in the present, we have nothing to fear in the future.

Yet we often struggle to follow his advice. Who can claim not to be afraid of anything – not poverty or loss of family or a diseased old age? Who hasn’t done or said something they deeply regret? But Baba Ji is urging us to let this go, to build a future free of any fear. When we follow the advice he often gives to become good human beings, we naturally create a more relaxed, positive life in both the present and the future. The past loses its power to hang over us like the sword that Damocles was constantly aware and afraid of. The future becomes a product of our present actions.

When we take refuge in the Master and his teachings, we step out from underneath the dangling sword of despair and dismay. How Damocles must have wished he could gently rise from his cushy seat and tiptoe away, past the luxuries and enticements around him! To see blue sky above his head rather than a murderous sword!

But we can do just that. Slip away from all that the world has placed at our feet and the constant threat looming above us and take refuge in the Master. We can begin to see our mistakes as guideposts on the road to becoming better human beings rather than ravines where we’ve crashed and burned. Give up fear! Gain confidence and contentment.

Again and again, Baba Ji encourages us to be objective and to respond rather than react. As we follow his advice, we find a freedom that reduces our fear of the world’s weapons. In addition, the number of messes we create and then step into naturally lessens.

And we become ready to steal away from a room where a sword hangs suspended and slip, free from fear, into the presence of our Master.

A Way of Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Way of Life

Every morning when we first open our eyes and greet the new day, each of us is faced with a challenge and an opportunity. How do we make the best use of this precious day the Lord has given us?

As satsangis we have just one criterion to consider as we make our way through the many decisions, choices, and ebb and flow of our daily lives: Will the action we take bring us closer to our Master or push us farther away from Him? Every decision we consider throughout our day can be measured against this litmus test.

As disciples of a true living Master, we have simple and clear instructions for this journey of life. Soami Ji writes:

Leaving everything else aside, one must implicitly obey the Satguru of his own time, and faithfully follow his instructions. This will lead him to success. This is the long and short of everything.¹

The short version of the instructions of the Guru can be summed up in just a few words – do your meditation and live a Sant Mat way of life.

The Masters are expert in the art of simplifying life. They peel away the outer layers of distraction and diversion to reveal the essence and core of what is important in our lives.

We have waited a very long time to be in this auspicious position: to have a human birth, to learn about the path of Sant Mat, and to be in the presence of a living Master. If we are serious about making the best use of this invaluable opportunity, then we need to focus on the work that is required of us. In Words Divine, Baba Jaimal Singh Ji tells us:

Meditation is our real work. This will always be with us, as it is the gift of the Master. It will grow; it will not diminish.²

As we tread this path we fully engage in an epic struggle with the mind. In order to tame its powerful influences, Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh gives us this advice:

Nothing should stand in the way of your meditation, and no disciple should plunge so deeply into worldly affairs as to enable them to interfere with his bhajan or affect his mental poise.³

To effectively manage our busy lives and to navigate through the endless distractions and temptations of the world we live in is a demanding challenge. This is a fundamental reason why Baba Ji often stresses the necessity of having a clear objective in life.

As we begin each day, we should thoughtfully consider our objective and orient our day toward that goal in the most beneficial way. If our objective is to follow the directions that the Master has given us – to do our meditation and lead a Sant Mat way of life – then life becomes very simple. Again, in Words Divine we read:

Everything is secondary to meditation.
Where meditation is,
other things will come of their own.⁴

That is a simple formula for attaining our purpose, but in order to accomplish any aim in life, sustained and focused effort is required every step along the way.

Once our objective is clearly formed and accepted in our mind, we need to build our lives around realizing that objective. We should nurture those behaviors which support and advance us toward our goal, and abandon those which distract or derail us from our mission. When we look honestly at our life and lifestyle, it is obvious which belong in each category.

There are a million different ways we can spend the irreplaceable hours we have been allotted for this day. Many of them would add no true benefit to our spiritual life and would move us away from our goal, not toward it.

So with deliberate intent, we should build a solid foundation on which to live our life. The base of that foundation is the protective structure of the four vows. Adhering to those principles will envelop us in an atmosphere conducive to our practice of meditation.

Hazur Maharaj Ji tells us:

Sant Mat is not only meditation – it is a way of life. We have to mold ourself in that way of life where we are always with our Master in all the activities of our life. We don’t forget him at anytime, anywhere.⁵

The Master loves us in a way that is incomprehensible to the human mind. He has given us a gift we can’t possibly fathom or adequately appreciate. But we are not along for a free ride. We have a part to play, and our part is to give our honest and genuine effort to abide by His guidance and follow His instructions.

It is wonderful to spend time with our beloved Guru, do seva, watch the beautiful videos and questions and answer sessions, read Sant Mat books, etc. But the most important question to ask ourselves is: Have I put in an honest and sincere effort to do my meditation today?

In Light on Sant Mat we read what Hazur Maharaj Ji has taught us:

First comes the grace of God, then the kindness and mercy of the Guru who initiates us into the mysteries of Nam and, finally, our own unceasing efforts to tread the path and follow the instructions.⁶

In a letter to a disciple, Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote:

You are quite right when you say that the Master rewards disciples according to the amount of effort they put in with the proper attitude. The more we strive on the path, the more help we receive from the Master. Those who do not make an effort of their own have no idea of the blessings that are being showered on us every day of our life. The rewards that are received by a disciple are far greater than one could ever expect or even dream of, and this realization comes only when we are doing our part of the duty. Then our heart is full of gratitude to the Master.⁷

That our heart becomes filled with gratitude to the Master is a natural progression as we become increasingly aware of the blessings being showered on us by Him every moment of our lives. It is not an intellectual calculation, but rather a softening of the heart, as we awaken to the realization that we are under the watchful and benevolent eye of the Master, and that He has only our happiness and best interest at heart.

The Masters have made clear how we can express our appreciation to the One who is showing us such love and attention. When Hazur Maharaj Ji was asked if there was any gift we could give him, he said:

The best gift you can give your Master
is the gift of meditation.
Nothing else matters.⁸

And during one of the evening meetings, a satsangi asked Hazur this question:

What should be our approach to meditation?

He answered the following:

Our approach to meditation should be that of gratitude. The Lord has given us the opportunity of this human form and then the environment in which to attend to meditation. So we should always approach meditation with gratitude.⁹

Sometimes we may find that even when we do put in our sincere effort, we still feel disillusioned or disappointed that we are letting the Master down by not making the progress we think we should be making. But this fear of displeasing Him in this way has no place in the teachings of the Masters. The Master loves our effort, our sincere attempt to express our love and thankfulness for having taken up His abode in our hearts and souls.

In Spiritual Perspectives we read:

As Maharaj Ji [Maharaj Sawan Singh] used to say, in Sant Mat there are no failures, because you are trying to follow it. A child who is learning to run, well, he falls, he gets bruises, he gets up again, he tries again, tries again and starts running. If he is always frightened of falling, he will never even learn to walk. So even if we lose in this battle of love, we win.¹⁰

In the eyes of the Master, we are that child, tottering along in our fragile little human body. We are constantly being bumped and bruised and knocked off balance by the vicissitudes of life. Left to our own devices we would be completely overcome. But we need not have any fear of falling or of failing. The Master assures us there are no failures in Sant Mat. He just asks that no matter what our circumstances, we do our best to follow his teachings and practise the Sant Mat way of life. When we are sincere, his loving presence is always near, and his guidance and support are close at hand.

Hazur Maharaj Ji writes:

Give up all feeling of depression and live a joyous life, fully relaxed and thanking the Lord for the great gift he has conferred on you. Keep your thoughts in simran and bhajan and see what happiness you will find within yourself. Do not worry about anything in this life, which is all an unpleasant dream. The real life lies beyond, where your Master awaits you.¹¹

Sar Bachan, p.79
Words Divine, p. 53
Science of the Soul, letter 9, p. 116
Words Divine, p. 15
Legacy of Love, p. 96
Light on Sant Mat, p.60
Quest for Light, letter 114
Legacy of Love, Preface
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. III, # 534
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. III, # 484
Quest for Light, letter 340

Opening the Heart - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Opening the Heart

In the nineteenth century, the great saint Tulsi Sahib counselled his disciples:

Cleanse the chamber of your heart so your Beloved can enter.

These lines are probably familiar to most of us – the Master often bases his satsang on this ghazal (poem), in which Tulsi Sahib urges us to empty our hearts of desires and attachments. This includes our bad habits, everything we are carrying from the past, our expectations and worries for the future. We have hung a “No Vacancy” sign on our hearts, but we need to empty ourselves in order to welcome the presence of the Lord, our Master. We need to create that “vacancy.”

And just as we truly want to welcome the Lord into our hearts, he longs to be seated there even more. The Master is just waiting for us to knock, to turn our mind towards him.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once commented that the Lord is the one who pulls us to love him. Someone asked Hazur:

Maharaj Ji, it seems clear that the lover needs the Beloved. But does the Beloved have any need of the lover?

And Hazur answered:

Yes, but who gives that love to the lover? It is the Beloved who gives love to the lover. The lover thinks that he loves the Beloved. But the pull in the lover’s heart comes from the Beloved, always. It gives the feeling to the lover that he is in love with the Beloved. Actually, it is the Beloved who has put that pull in the lover’s heart. The Beloved must be needing that love.¹

So he needs our love as much as we need his love. It is a circle of love and we are within it. He is waiting for us, patiently, to welcome him into our hearts. He needs to love us as much as we long for his love, so let us prepare ourselves to receive him.

How can we do this?

We have to follow his teachings – we have to live the Sant Mat way of life and control our minds through meditation. In this way we will rid our hearts of anything that drags us down, that pollutes or corrupts us.That is how we will make room for him to be seated there.

If we are so full of ourselves, where is there room for him? We know that if our home is dirty and full of junk – with old newspapers piled high and dirty dishes in the sink – we would be embarrassed to have our friends or family visit us until we clean up. Wouldn’t we want to prepare our hearts and minds at least that much, so our Beloved, the Lord himself, would be comfortable there?

Hazur Maharaj Ji spoke about how we can live in the divine presence all the time – by training our minds to obey the Master, living the Sant Mat way of life, attending satsang, and doing seva. He always emphasized that service with body and mind are the best way to channel the mind towards the ultimate service – meditation. Selfless service will allow us to live with an awareness of the One whom we wish to emulate, and it will keep our minds focused on him and not scattered in the world. Hazur once said:

Of course, the best service is bhajan – meditation – but there are other services also, which are strong means leading to bhajan. To train the mind to live in the will of the Father is also a service.

We have to face situations at every step in this life, and at every step in this life we have to explain to our mind to accept whatever comes in our fate smilingly, cheerfully – why grumble?

It’s a constant training of the mind. This is also doing service, because that will help us in meditation. If we always feel perturbed with every little thing, then how can we concentrate, how can we meditate? If we make every little thing an issue the size of the Himalayas, how can we concentrate? We have to forget; we have to forgive; we have to train our mind to take things easily, lightly, to laugh them away, to ignore them. This is all training the mind.²

So Hazur is telling us that by living in a balanced way, taking things lightly and going through life happily, accepting what comes to us as our destiny – the result of karmas we have created in the past – this in itself is training our minds – and this training of our mind is the first step in controlling our mind.

Very often the master gives us practical advice, hints on how to overcome our weaknesses and live in accord with his teachings. He tells us not to focus on the negative, but simply to dilute it with the positive – it is like diluting red dye in a glass of water. The more water we add, the more the dye will be diluted, until eventually the water becomes pure and transparent. So we need to dwell on what positive actions we can take, not mull over our failings – and not ruminate over everything that happens to us. We need to dilute the negative with the positive.

We have to take positive steps towards the Master at every moment. Maharaj Ji often reassured us that anything we do to achieve our goal is not a waste – it’s a step forward. He said:

When a child is born, ultimately he starts walking and running. Every step he takes right from birth is a step forward. He learns to sit; he learns to stand; he learns to lean. Ultimately he carries his own weight on his legs; then he starts walking; and then he falls so many times.

Even a fall is a step forward for him, and then ultimately he achieves his goal of running. So the whole process is to his credit. Similarly, when we are trying to go back to the Father, all that we do to achieve that end is to our credit. That’s not a waste. Every step we take is a step forward.³

Every step we take is a step forward. We just need to take those steps. We have nothing to worry about, as he is there to help us and catch us if we fall. He says that we just need to have a positive attitude. Attend to our meditation and live the Sant Mat way of life. Take a positive step. Hazur says: “Why not prepare yourself to face the present and face the future – by meditation.”⁴

Our meditation will protect us. It will create a protective barrier against the distractions of the world. It will cleanse our heart of all the negativity that collects there. Hazur spoke about why regularity in meditation is so important. He said:

If you are tied to a strong chain, you can move only within a limited area. So if we are tied to our meditation every day, no matter how much we’re involved in other things, we will always remain within the circle. If the chain is broken, then of course you are absolutely gone – you’re involved. So the chain of meditation should not be broken. Meditation must be attended to every day – and then, no matter how much you involve yourself in other activities, you’ll never be allowed to go astray at all. You’ll never be allowed to get so involved that you forget your real path, because your chain is very strong.⁵

Our life is like a fast-flowing river, and we are trying to swim against the current towards the opposite shore. If we don’t put in the effort to control the mind and swim upstream, we will be dragged downstream, away from our destination – perhaps over violent waterfalls to the rocks below and certain death. It is a matter of life and death for us to control our minds. We don’t know what awaits us in life; we don’t know what our destiny holds. So we have to be prepared for any and all eventualities by having our minds focused on the master and the Lord. Here is a true story from a Jewish Hasidic master that illustrates this:

A man was travelling in a horse-drawn carriage with his master. The road led down a steep hill, and the horses became frightened. They ran for all they were worth and could not be reined in. The disciple looked out of the carriage and shuddered, but when he glanced at his master, much to his surprise, he saw that his master’s face remained calm and composed. “How is it that you are not afraid of the danger we are in?” he asked.

“Whoever is aware of the real danger at every instant,” the master replied, “is not terrified by any danger of the moment.”⁶

The main message of this story is that we are always facing danger. We don’t know when death will come, so we need to remember God at all times. But on a deeper level of meaning, the story uses the metaphor of horses running out of control for our mind, which is always running frightened and wild. There is “danger at every moment” – at all moments, when our mind is uncontrolled. Indeed, even in the worldly disciplines, an uncontrolled mind means the dissipation of energy and an indulgence in destructive behavior. That kind of mind never helps us.

A story from Rabbi Dov Ber, another Hasidic master, presents a radical way of looking at the problem of controlling our mind:

Once a disciple complained to his Master: “Master, I can understand why I am responsible for my actions, even for my words. That is within my power. But my thoughts? How can I be punished for my thoughts when they enter my mind of their own accord? Can a person control his mind?”

His master listened quietly and responded: “Just go visit Rav Zev, my devoted disciple who lives in a remote village in the mountains. Only he can answer your question.”

So the disciple made the trip in the dead of winter. After travelling for two weeks along the snowbound roads, he finally reached Zev’s village late at night. He could see a light shining in the window of Zev’s study; Zev himself was studying his holy books.

The traveller knocked, and continued knocking, but there was no response. He was completely ignored. He pounded on the door, but Zev, just a few steps away, continued his studies, oblivious to his cries. And the traveller was very cold.

It was almost morning when Zev rose from his seat, opened the door, and warmly greeted his visitor. He sat him by the fire, prepared a hot glass of tea, and asked after the health of their master. He then led his guest – still speechless with cold and disbelief – to the best room in the house to rest his exhausted body. For several days, Zev attended to all his needs, and the visitor was a model guest, never mentioning his terrible experience on the night of his arrival.

But after about a week, the traveller felt it was time to go home, and just before leaving, he posed his burning question. “Why,” he asked, “should I be responsible for my thoughts, when I have no control over my mind?”

The rabbi replied simply: "Tell me, my friend, is a man any less a master of his own self than he is of his home? You see, I gave you my answer on the very night you arrived.”

“In my home, I am the boss. Whomever I wish to admit – I allow in, when I’m ready. Whomever I do not wish to admit, I do not permit to enter.”⁷

So we need to ask ourselves: Are we the boss of our mind? Or do we just let any thought or desire enter freely, at any time? Don’t we take steps to protect our homes from robbers and thieves? We don’t give entry to just anyone. So why aren’t we as firm and strong with our mind? When we sit in meditation, how hard do we really try to control our thoughts and keep our attention in simran, directing our mind towards our Master? The master says we should be like soldier-saints. But do we just lay down our arms and surrender to whatever thoughts come knocking on our door? This story illustrates that we can indeed be the boss of our minds – if we choose to. We need to be proactive. We cannot blame outside conditions for our lack of mental discipline. It’s a struggle, but we can’t give up.

Hazur once used the same metaphor, saying that we need to assert ourselves as master of our house and bind the strongman – the mind – which is preventing us from accessing the treasure of Nam that lies within us. He said:

Christ has referred to the mind as a strongman, meaning something within us which is very powerful. And he also has told us how to bind the strongman. Then you are the master of that house. That house is the body, and that strongman, the mind, is within this body. So if we want to get the treasure of Nam, the treasure of the Lord, from the body, we have to bind the strongman – the mind. And you can bind the strongman only by meditation. Unless the mind is bound, we cannot get the treasure that the Lord has kept within this body.⁸

Hazur’s main point here is that at the time of meditation, we have to be strong. We should not allow anything to interfere. When the mind drifts away, we should keep bringing it back to simran. And never give up. That is a positive step. As Maharaj Ji often said: Instead of cursing the darkness, we should light a candle.

And it’s not as if we’re alone on this journey. The Master has made it very clear that if we take one step towards him, he will take one hundred steps towards us. True, we need to take that one step, but he’s ready to help us! Hazur emphasizes that when we take that step, his grace will take us the rest of the way. He said:

You must take that one step. We are more anxiously waiting for his hundred steps rather than our one step.

We are so tied down with the attachments of this creation that it becomes difficult for us to take even one step. We are so engrossed in this creation, so attached to this creation. Our roots have gone so deep into this creation that it is not so easy to uproot them. So even our one step is a great step. Without his grace, we can never get out of this creation. Our one step is sufficient for him to pull us.⁹

The Master gives us so much motivation and encouragement! He’s doing everything he can to help us along the way. That is his grace. Hazur said:

When we try to follow the path, he gives us strength to follow the path. He strengthens our faith; he strengthens our love with the help of meditation and by our following that path. He is the one who’s pulling us from within. We sometimes think that we worship him or that we are in love with him. Actually, he is in love with us. But for that, we would never be in love with him at all.¹⁰

One could say that building our faith in the Master and the path is a process: At first, we may have immediate faith in the Master – that the path he is showing us is true – so we respond to the pull he has placed within us. But we still have to satisfy our intellect, so that we can follow the path consistently without getting waylaid by doubts and over-analysis. It is natural to have doubts, but if we persist with our meditation we will get the faith and confidence to continue on the path. Meditation will give us the love that we yearn to be filled with. Hazur said:

You see, faith actually is built by meditation, faith comes by meditation, faith comes by experience. Otherwise the mind always remains shaky. Meditation will be able to create that faith. It generates faith, it strengthens faith. Faith grows by meditation.¹¹

So meditation will strengthen our love. It will give us the personal experience that can never be shaken. And if we continue with our meditation, Hazur said, then it becomes a permanent intoxication. “Personal experience creates depth in our faith, and that we can get only with meditation.”¹²

Of course, it is because we have faith in the physical Master that we come on the path in the first place and make the effort to obey him. It is faith in the Master that will encourage and inspire us to do our meditation and eventually raise our consciousness to the level where we can see him in his true form as Shabd. We can look forward to the time when we will find the Lord, and only the Lord, seated in our hearts. We will become him.

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Ji what Christ meant when he said that if we had faith we could move mountains. Hazur answered:

Well, brother, with your faith you can move the Creator of the mountains, what to say of mountains. Who created the universe? Who created the mountains? The Lord. By your faith in him, you can move him. You can become him. If you become him, you can move anything.¹³

Here Hazur is telling us that we should set no limits on ourselves, on what we can achieve with his grace. We only need to nurture our faith in him.

On a practical everyday level, we have to live our lives with maturity – spiritual maturity, as Baba Ji has called it. Maturity means that despite all obstacles and challenges, we will sustain our beliefs and continue with our meditation. We will adhere to our values and focused lifestyle. Our faith will allow us to accept the events of our life. At each stage, there are different hurdles to overcome – career, marriage, parenting children, then dealing with illness, old age – eventually facing death. We can meet this challenge through the faith that comes from continuing on the path and attending to meditation.

All the saints have told us the same thing. In one of his shabds, Soami Ji advised us to patiently continue with our meditation, and eventually our mind will be controlled. Simran will bring us in contact with the Shabd, and the Shabd – the creative power of God in dynamic action – will purify and control our mind. Soami Ji said:

If you do this punctually every day,
the evil tendencies of your mind will be quelled.
If you control the monster of the mind
using the proper technique,
You will get attuned to the melody of Shabd.¹⁴

We need to be disciplined, Soami Ji continues:

Carry on this practice daily, without a break;
Attend the Master’s satsang and keep his company.
Your attachment to the world will disappear,
and you will begin to enjoy inner communion.
Every moment you will enjoy the nectar of Shabd
and live forever in the Lord’s palace.

So Soami Ji is saying that the process will become automatic if we attend satsang and do our meditation regularly. And ultimately, Soami Ji advises us to strengthen our faith in the Lord’s will:

Put your faith in the Lord’s will –
not in your labor, not in your effort.
Submit yourself to Radha Soami now –
One day he will fulfill your heart’s desire.¹⁵

Here Soami Ji is reminding us very clearly about something that every Master has emphasized – that ultimately it is not how much we meditate that will clear our karmas, that will cleanse our hearts. No, this power lies in the Lord’s grace.

It’s perhaps a subtle relationship between grace and effort: We can invoke his grace through our efforts, and we can make ourselves receptive to the grace through our efforts. But ultimately it is not our labor, our efforts, which will see us home. It is his grace.

If we think that we are doing everything, then we are building up our ego.

We live in the illusion that we have control over our lives, even over our meditation. We need to give up that illusion. We need to submit to the Beloved, our Master, and humbly do what he instructs, and then the Lord will fulfill our heart’s desire. He will enter the chamber of our heart. The Lord will manifest within us, if he is truly our heart’s desire!

The Master has given us so much encouragement, so many props to help us in this drama of life. Think of what is going on now all over the world! Although in-person satsangs have been suspended in most countries due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he has given us so many other means of support. The Master may not be physically available to most of us at this time, but he reaches out with the videos of Hazur Maharaj Ji giving satsang, as well as the online video satsangs and the written satsangs and essays by our brothers and sisters, which have been made available during this period of social isolation. The question-answer sessions with Baba Ji, which are being translated into more than a dozen languages, are an unforeseen boon, as are the shabads being beautifully sung by fellow satsangis. Of course, there is the ever-increasing treasury of the audio recordings of the question-answer sessions that were held with Hazur Maharaj Ji during the 1980s. And we have the Sant Mat books to help train our minds and feed them with positive thoughts – some books are old favorites, and there are even some new ones.

The Master brings us to his feet in so many ways, appropriate to the difficult times we live in. All these means bring us to an understanding of the importance of maintaining the atmosphere of meditation all twenty-four hours – of finding inner and outer harmony anywhere we might be. By following his instructions and adhering to our meditation and way of life, we will continue to draw inspiration to continue on the path throughout our life.

One of the Master’s greatest gifts is seva. Perhaps during this period there is not much opportunity for institutional seva, or seva at satsang centres, but we can certainly reach out to help one another – family, friends, and strangers – whomever we might encounter. Acting with kindness and compassion sustains our quality of life and will help us to absorb the quality of humility that the Master embodies. We begin to serve others rather than ourselves, and thus we bend our will to his will. When seva is done with love, it will lead to meditation.

The Master always emphasizes that everything we are to get, we will get through meditation. Meditation will give us purity of mind. By listening to the Shabd, our mind becomes pure and we can develop a positive attitude. And he advises us to continue with our simran all twenty-four hours of the day when we are not otherwise occupied. In that way, our minds will be channeled toward him and we will not pick up the negative noise of the world with which we normally fill our heart. In fact, the Master always advises us that our whole day should be a preparation for our next meditation session. Everything we do or think should lead us in that direction, not away from it. That is our act of love. Hazur once said, so succinctly:

For the lover, love is a twenty-four hour sickness. He doesn’t have a specific time to love, or to think about the Beloved. He is in love twenty-four hours, no matter what he’s doing, wherever he is.¹⁶

So if we feel lacking in love, we just need to take the first step to access his love. We need to persevere in our efforts, have faith, be positive, be steadfast on the path, and “keep the company of the saints.” This doesn’t only mean the physical company; rather, it means that we need to keep him in our mind at all times. We have to live in His presence.

So let us not forget that the Lord has marked us – that the Master has come for us and won’t let us go astray. As Hazur Maharaj Ji often said, the Lord worships himself through us. This means that he is pulling us to him. He has planted the seed of love in us that makes us want to love him. In fact, we can’t help loving him, as it is his love that is within us, that seeks to merge back into him. All we can feel is gratitude. Hazur once said:

To love is nothing but giving thanks. It is all his grace that he gives us his love, he gives us his devotion, and our words are too inadequate to express that feeling, that depth, that gratefulness to the Father.¹⁷

So let us respond to his pull and cleanse our hearts. Let us make the effort to still our minds, so our Beloved can manifest within. And let us maintain our faith in him, in his great generosity, and live a happy life – a life of gratitude and love.

Spiritual Perspectives, III, #520
Spiritual Perspectives, III, #265
Spiritual Perspectives, III, #476
Spiritual Perspectives, III, #481
Spiritual Perspectives, III, #218
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vols 1&2 in one vol., p. 304
Based on Yanki Tauber, Once Upon A Chassid, www.chabad.org
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #397
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #580
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #499
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #173
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #182
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #176
Bachan 33, Shabd 5, in Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 313
Ibid, p. 315
Spiritual Perspectives, II, #513
Spiritual Perspectives, III, #535

Fraternity and Social Friendship - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Fraternity and Social Friendship

This essay consists of extracts taken from the 92-page Encyclical Letter “Fratelli Tutti” (All Brothers) written by Pope Francis and published in October 2020, based on the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Pope’s namesake. In his letter, Pope Francis seeks to promote Saint Francis’s teachings, which encourage a universal aspiration toward fraternity and social friendship. The letter was written during the Covid-19 pandemic, which, the Pope reveals, "unexpectedly erupted" as he was writing this letter. He writes that the global health emergency has helped demonstrate that "no one can face life in isolation," and that the time has come to live together as a “single human family" in which we are "all brothers and sisters." You can find the entire letter “Fratelli Tutti” online through a Google search or on the Vatican’s website: www.vatican.va

Of the many counsels Saint Francis of Assisi offered to his brothers and sisters in how to live their lives, there was one in which he calls for a love that transcends the barriers of geography and distance. In his simple and direct way, Saint Francis expressed the essence of a fraternal openness that allows us to acknowledge, appreciate, and love each person, regardless of physical proximity – regardless of where he or she was born or currently lives.

There is an episode in the life of Saint Francis that shows his openness of heart, which knew no bounds and transcended differences of origin, nationality, colour, or religion. It was his visit to Sultan Malik-al-Kamil, in Egypt, which entailed considerable hardship, given Francis’s poverty, his scarce resources, the great distances to be travelled, and their differences of language, culture, and religion. That journey, undertaken at the time of the Crusades, further demonstrated the breadth and grandeur of his love, which sought to embrace everyone. Francis’s fidelity to his Lord was commensurate with his love for his brothers and sisters. Unconcerned for the hardships and dangers involved, Francis went to meet the Sultan with the same attitude that he instilled in his disciples: if they found themselves “among the Saracens and other nonbelievers,” without renouncing their own identity they were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject (humble) to every human creature for God’s sake.”

In the context of the times, this was an extraordinary recommendation. We are impressed that some eight hundred years ago, Saint Francis urged that all forms of hostility or conflict be avoided and that a humble and fraternal “subjection” be shown to those who did not share his faith. Yet Francis was able to welcome true peace into his heart and free himself of the desire to wield power over others. He became one of the poor and sought to live in harmony with all.

As I was writing this letter, the Covid-19 pandemic unexpectedly erupted, exposing our false securities. Aside from the different ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident. For all our hyper-connectivity, we witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.

It is my desire that by acknowledging the dignity of each human person, we can contribute to the rebirth of a universal aspiration to fraternity. Fraternity between all men and women. Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation. We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together!

For decades it seemed that the world had learned a lesson from its many wars and disasters, and was slowly moving towards various forms of integration. Europe, after centuries of wars fought on the continent, has envisioned a “European Union” with a future based on the capacity to work together in bridging divisions and in fostering peace and fellowship between all the peoples of this continent.

However, these days there seems to be signs of a certain regression. Ancient conflicts thought long-buried are breaking out anew, while instances of a myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise. In some countries, a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies is creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests. Once more we are being reminded that each new generation must take up the struggles and attainments of past generations, while setting its sights even higher. This is the path. Goodness – together with love, justice, and solidarity – are not achieved once and for all; they have to be realized each day. It is not possible to settle for what was achieved in the past and complacently enjoy it, as if we could somehow disregard the fact that many of our brothers and sisters still endure situations that cry out for our attention. Expression of vicious attitudes that we thought long past, such as racism, which retreats underground only to keep re-emerging. Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.

A worldwide tragedy like the Covid-19 pandemic has momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all. Once more we realized that no one is saved alone; we can only be saved together. Amid this storm, the facade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about appearances, has fallen away, revealing once more the ineluctable and blessed awareness that we are part of one another, that we are brothers and sisters of one another. The pain, uncertainty and fear, and the realization of our own limitations brought on by the pandemic have only made it all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organization of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence.

If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. I do not want to speak of divine retribution, nor would it be sufficient to say that the harm we do to nature is itself the punishment for our offences. The world is itself crying out in rebellion.

All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life.” Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will no longer think in terms of “them” and “those” but only of “us.” If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once and for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands, and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

Oddly enough, while closed and intolerant attitudes towards others are on the rise, distances are otherwise shrinking or disappearing to the point that the right to privacy scarcely exists. Everything has become a kind of spectacle to be examined and inspected, and people’s lives are now under constant surveillance. Digital communication wants to bring everything out into the open; people’s lives are combed over, laid bare and bandied about, often anonymously. Respect for others disintegrates, and even as we dismiss, ignore, or keep others distant, we can shamelessly peer into every detail of their lives. Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity; instead, it tends to disguise and expand the very individualism that finds expression in xenophobia and in contempt for the vulnerable.

The ability to sit down and listen to others, typical of interpersonal encounters, is paradigmatic of the welcoming attitude shown by those who transcend narcissism and accept others, caring for them and welcoming them into their lives. Yet today’s world is largely a “deaf world,” at times; the frantic pace of the modern world prevents us from listening attentively to what another person is saying. We must not lose our ability to “listen.” Saint Francis heard the voice of God, he heard the voice of the poor, he heard the voice of the infirm, and he heard the voice of nature. He made of them a way of life.

Together, we can seek the truth in dialogue, in relaxed conversation or in passionate debate. The flood of information at our fingertips does not make for greater wisdom. Wisdom is not born of quick searches on the internet nor is it a mass of unverified data. That is not the way to grow in the encounter with truth. Conversations revolve only around the latest data; they become merely horizontal and cumulative. We fail to keep our attention focused, to penetrate to the heart of matters, and to recognize what is essential to give meaning to our lives. Freedom thus becomes an illusion that we are peddled, easily confused with the ability to navigate the internet. The process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits that are free and open to authentic encounters.

God continues to sow abundant seeds of goodness in our human family. The recent pandemic enabled us to recognize and appreciate once more all those around us who, in the midst of fear, responded by putting their lives on the line. We began to realize that our lives are interwoven with and sustained by ordinary people valiantly shaping the decisive events of our shared history: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caretakers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests and religious leaders. They understood that no one is saved alone.

I invite everyone to renewed hope, for hope speaks to us of something deeply rooted in every human heart, independently of our circumstances and historical conditioning. Hope speaks to us of a thirst, an aspiration, a longing for a life of fulfillment, a desire to achieve great things, things that fill our heart and lift our spirit to lofty realities like truth, goodness and beauty, justice and love. Hope is bold; it can look beyond personal convenience, the petty securities and compensations which limit our horizon, and it can open us up to grand ideals that make life more beautiful and worthwhile. Let us continue, then, to advance along the paths of hope.

The ancient commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) was usually understood as referring to one’s fellow citizens, yet the boundaries gradually expanded, especially in the Judaism that developed outside of the land of Israel. We encounter the command not to do to others what you would not want them to do to you (cf. Tobit 4:15). In the first century before Christ, Rabbi Hillel stated: “This is the entire Torah. Everything else is commentary.” The desire to imitate God’s own way of acting gradually replaced the tendency to think only of those nearest us: “The compassion of man is for his neighbour, but the compassion of the Lord is for all living beings.”

Each day offers us a new opportunity, a new possibility. We should not expect everything from those who govern us, for that would be childish. We have the space we need for co-responsibility in creating and putting into place new processes and changes. Let us take an active part in renewing and supporting our troubled societies. Today we have a great opportunity to express our innate sense of fraternity, to be “Good Samaritans” who bear the pain of other people’s troubles rather than fomenting greater hatred and resentment.

In the depths of every heart, love creates bonds and expands existence, for it draws people out of themselves and towards others. Since we were made for love, in each one of us “a law of ecstasy” seems to operate: “the lover ‘goes beyond’ the self to find a fuller existence in another.” For this reason, “man always has to take up the challenge of moving beyond himself.” Our relationships, if healthy and authentic, open us to others who expand and enrich us. Nowadays, our noblest social instincts can easily be thwarted by self-centered “chats” that only give the impression of being deep relationships. The spiritual stature of a person’s life is measured by love, which in the end remains the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof.

In order to truly love we must be able to truly forgive. Those who truly forgive do not necessarily forget. Instead, they choose not to yield to the same destructive force that caused them so much suffering. They break the vicious cycle; they halt the advance of the forces of destruction. Free and heartfelt forgiveness is something noble, a reflection of God’s own infinite ability to forgive. We cannot experience God unless we experience love because God is Love.

Glimpses of the Divine - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Glimpses of the Divine

Initiation by a living master marks the beginning of a tremendous spiritual adventure. From times immemorial, the soul, our real Self, has been waiting for this moment to occur. It is the awakening from an age-old slumber. As we progress our consciousness expands, encompassing everything.

Being allowed to engage in Shabd meditation is said to be the greatest gift which can be bestowed on a human being. The living master is not only the unparalleled spiritual teacher, he is also the personal inner guide of the Shabd practitioner. Progress on this spiritual path is not measured by achievements or results. Far from it – it is infinitely more subtle and is linked with the experience of love. And that love hasn’t anything to do with physical love, because it falls outside the parameters of the physical.

Expanding consciousness automatically implies becoming aware of changes in our mind-set and in our attitude towards things and circumstances. In short, our whole being is undergoing a complete and radical transformation. It is a life-changing process that does not take place overnight but over the course of a lifetime – most probably many lifetimes. The spiritual teacher, untiring in his generosity, has come to this earthly plane “to bear witness to the Light” – to share the spiritual teachings with us.¹ In the way the master speaks about the Father, his love for the Father, his love for the Lord, shines through. We are being urged to live in His will, to accept whatever comes our way. As we are fallible human beings, this is a “mission impossible,” and yet it is the ultimate challenge we’re faced with in life. Our destiny is fixed; karma has to be gone through and paid off. The karmic load will be lightened, however, once we start gaining some mastery over the inclinations of our mind. Our receptivity to the master’s teachings increases through the regular daily meditation practice. Through our master, we start getting a glimpse of the Divine.

In the Gospel of John there are many references to bearing witness to the truth and the light. Hazur Maharaj Ji gives deep insight into the truth of these statements. In Light on Saint John he comments:

Saint John is explaining to us that the Saints, the Masters come as a witness to the existence of the Light so that “all men through him might believe,” that is, might experience that Light that God has kept within us.²

The masters share with us a divine intimacy. Through their teachings, through the seemingly simple way in which they express themselves, they touch the spiritual core of our being. Automatically, love for these teachings is evoked within us. On the surface there is the physical teacher but on an inner level, an opening up to the inner master, the Shabd master, is simultaneously taking place as well. Often Baba Ji repeats that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the physical. Again, initiation is the start of an incredible cosmic inner journey. By walking the path, by engaging in meditation, a disciple of a living master will experience his consciousness being raised. A clarity of vision takes possession of our life, and we begin to see as if with new eyes, with a fresh awareness of an inner reality, the effect of an inner transformation. This goes hand in hand with an ever-increasing sense of gratitude, a renewed determination to stick to our side of the spiritual bargain, to never slacken in our daily spiritual discipline. We also may experience a glimpse of the Divine when we are in the presence of the living master.

In our meditation there are also these moments of divine inspiration – not to be shouted from the rooftops, but to be cherished as precious inner treasures. There are no words to describe what the inner master, the Shabd master, is doing for us. So much is kept hidden from us, because protection by the master from being carried away by inner experiences is necessary. Our part is to be patient and to appreciate and digest what is being given to us out of the Lord’s boundless love. For this whole life of ours is a gift from the Lord; everything – down to every breath we take – is prashad. Just look around you and let this realization sink in.

The importance of satsang cannot be over-emphasized. Huzur uses a powerful metaphor in Die to Live to drive this point home. First of all, he compares initiation to planting the seed of Nam, at the same time giving the reassurance that this seed must sprout. This seed will grow into a crop:

The seed of Nam is planted within every initiate, and it must sprout. We are advised to protect this crop and preserve the sanctity of this treasure. A crop in an open field will certainly grow without protection, but it remains vulnerable and is easily plundered. We must, therefore, surround our crop, which we grow through meditation, with the fence of satsang, the company of the Masters and the Saints and their devotees. Satsang provides an impregnable shield against robbers and thieves who may wish to have us squander that spiritual wealth.³

We cannot do without the protection given by satsang, whether it is a satsang given by the living master or a satsang given by a fellow satsangi doing seva as a speaker. Satsang is always by the master; it is a unique opportunity to share the teachings, to experience the power of the gathering of the support group and to imbibe the spiritual atmosphere. In satsang we may be inspired by the words of the speaker and feel a spiritual uplift. There is even more to satsang than this, and that is the feeling of closeness to the Shabd master. The outer satsang is accompanied by an inner satsang as it were. Our relationship with the Divine gets strengthened and a deep longing for our master suffuses our whole being.

In these times of Coronavirus restrictions, when physical satsang cannot be held or is only held under very special circumstances, the present master has revisited his intention to never have online satsang. It is an incredible blessing for us to be able to listen to Q & A sessions with the master. These are magical sessions giving viewers the feeling of being in direct contact with their master. But here, too, there is more than the eye can see. The Satguru’s love for the Lord is such that we are automatically affected. Deeper and deeper we realize how a completely new understanding of the Divine is being revealed within us. A relationship which was initially a mere theoretical concept is becoming something real, something which has come alive within us. Through the master’s teachings, through his love for the Lord, we also get a glimpse of the Divine.

The living master will always refer to his own master, his predecessor, as the one who is doing everything. He keeps his own greatness hidden and emphasizes that he is only doing his master’s work. He is truly in the service of his Satguru. His humility is such that he puts himself on a level with his disciples, asking them to work and walk with him. The effect of this exhortation is such that any thought of the disciple being the doer simply vanishes. The utter humility that the Satguru displays engenders in the disciple a feeling of longing to imbibe that quality. Deeper and deeper the Shabd master touches the innermost recesses of our being. The pull from within is irresistible and, from being a wayward child, we become an obedient child. Pleasing the master, as his teaching of love for the Father sinks in, takes priority over everything else in life. Our attention is being turned within, in a wonderful mystic exchange with the master’s energy. It is up to the disciple to grasp any opportunity to increase his receptivity to love for the Divine.

The practice of simran, the repetition of the holy names given by the master at initiation, becomes our companion and contains a sweetness, filling us with joy. Working and walking together, side by side, is fulfilling life’s purpose. A sense of profound contentment and gratitude comes over us, and more and more a feeling of letting go gradually takes precedence over everything else. To the extent that our attention becomes more focused within, worldly attractions gradually lose most of their impact. There is still the zest for life, but infused with a spiritual awareness, casting a glance of spirituality over everything we do. Following in his footsteps is not a mere phrase any longer – we experience his presence behind everything.

Living in the presence of the Shabd master is not some fancy thought, but a silent awareness of the spiritual dimension. In a way we could never ever have imagined, life has changed. Our focus has shifted from outside to inside. A lifelong experiment with the Truth has turned out to be worth every effort, however small. Regularity works wonders; the hard work of meditation is to be continued. We’re on our way to our final destination. The Satguru urges and spurs us on, showing us that we can do it. And with his help we can do it.

In The Treasury of Mystic Terms we find our relationship with the Divine expressed as an inner place of refuge and solitude where God is to be found. The saint Francis de Sales counsels:

Remember to retire often … into the solitude of your heart while you are outwardly engaged in work with others. This spiritual solitude can be preserved no matter how many people there are about you, for they are only about your body and not about your heart which can remain alone with God.⁴

The Shabd practitioner has been given a method of meditation which comes directly from the Divine. This practice is ideally suited for kalyuga, the present cosmic life cycle, in which people live a relatively short span of time; it can be done under any circumstances. Besides – and that is beyond our comprehension – it has also been the meditation practice of the Satgurus themselves. What they teach they have practised and experienced themselves. In Light on Saint John, the deeply mystic teachings of the Bible are explained by Maharaj Charan Singh.

The Bible says, John the Baptist was with God. One who is with God is no less than God. He came from God, and he and God are one and the same. A drop in the ocean is the ocean itself.⁵

John the Baptist was Christ’s predecessor, just as Maharaj Charan Singh was the predecessor of Baba Gurinder Singh. Of course, masters will always refer to themselves as servants of the Lord. But their real status can never be communicated in language. The path of the masters is a path of spiritual love; it is the path of bhakti. The practice of meditation, for which this human birth has been given to us, provides ideal circumstances and will give us the foundation to build a lasting relationship with our master, and consequently with the Divine.

Bible, Gospel of John 1: 7,8
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, p. 17
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, p. 54
Francis de Sales, Devout Life 2:12; in The Treasury of Mystic Terms, Part III, Vol. 11, p. 32
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, p. 17

The Importance of Faith during the Covid-19 Pandemic - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Importance of Faith during the Covid-19 Pandemic

In an era of analytics, machine learning, and algorithms, and of using technology to pinpoint exactitude in a manner so far unheard of, Covid-19 brought in uncertainty, chaos, and disruption in a way unprecedented in its devastation of life and livelihood.

While over time, researchers figured out what is the cause of the virus and how it spreads, for a long time it was completely the “silent stalker,” much as we think of “bad karma.” Where it came from, how it evolved, and whom it was going to hit was as much an unknown as the gods themselves.

The numbers are staggering. People affected: 60 million and counting. Deaths: 1.4 million and mounting each day. Countries and continents shut down. Lockdowns are like wartime curfews. No movement is allowed at all except for essential services. Although we expected this to be short lived, like SARS and Zika, the months went by, and lockdowns and isolation have remained the norm.

The increasing feeling of loneliness and isolation from the loss of social interaction – not being able to meet family, friends, and colleagues; from the fear of catching the virus even with the best of precautions, and also from serious financial uncertainty, have led to massive psychological and mental stress. Are we equipped to face the unknown? The answer to that question takes us to the basic foundations of faith.

Do we have faith? Do we believe in the Almighty? As the Bible says: “Thy Will be done.”¹ Do we believe His Will will be done, and do we have the faith to believe and accept his constant care and love?

Faith, it is said, can move mountains. Is this pandemic the mountain? The belief in faith is the biggest single weapon in our arsenal which can take us through these times. The faith that we need to have is an unshakeable faith in the Almighty, which helps us face all difficulties and troubles with a deeper spiritual strength. The dictionary definition of faith is: “a strong belief or trust in someone or something; belief in the existence of God; strong religious feelings or beliefs.” As F. F. Bosworth, an early 20th-century American evangelist, once said: “Faith begins where the will of God is known.”²

Either we are privy to the mind of God or, by his grace, we evolve to a spiritual level where his mind and our mind have merged and we have become one with Him. This is the purpose of meditation. Individuals who have reached this stage of spiritual evolution by meditation and his grace are unlikely to be adversely affected by Covid or by other worldly drama.

As Maharaj Charan Singh said in response to a question about faith:

You see, faith actually is built by meditation, faith comes by meditation, faith comes by experience. Otherwise the mind always remains shaky. Meditation will be able to create that faith. It generates faith, it creates faith, it strengthens faith. Faith grows by meditation.³

As we examine the concept of faith, we can look at three different types of individuals. The first may not have undergone a deep spiritual evolution but may have a strong faith in the heavenly design for our destiny. They just believe that whatever happens reflects the will of the Creator and can't be altered by anyone. They accept that everything that happens is happening according to the deeper scope of destiny, for their good, and happens by the will of God. Such individuals may not be as steadfast as those with direct understanding of the Lord's will, but they manage to weather the storms with equanimity.

Then there are those who have no concept or conviction of divine design or God's will. They think of God only when in trouble and question his wisdom and intention when visited by adversity of any kind. They pray to Him for relief immediately. They never consider the possibility that they create their own destiny by their actions. They have little interest in changing themselves as they always perceive the problem as having been created outside of themselves.

Finally, a third group are those with no concept of divinity or a Creator. They see problems only from a physical or material point of view. They hold others responsible for their inconvenience, be they scientists, doctors, or the government, and accuse others of incompetence. Expecting quick resolutions to all problems, this group is the most vulnerable when faced with any uncertainty or unknown. If the situation doesn't change or improve, they feel frustrated and helpless and may go into depression.

The next influencer and, arguably, in many the cause of acute activity and anxiety is ubiquitous social media and the access to information available through the internet. Based on algorithms, technology companies seek to shape what you see and what you hear and the choices you make, constantly mining data that is available and is being generated at an estimated pace of 1.7 MB per person per day. While much of it adds to our knowledge and growth, in many people this can be a source of confusion and chaos – facts vs faith; knowledge vs intuition; and the battle rages. However, it is a losing battle for technology. The fluidity of nature is not an exact science, is not binary and quickly realizes the limitlessness of the Infinite. And it concludes that, in contrast, the world and God’s bounty, piety, and will are infinite; and even with all the learning, the horizons remain what they really are and what they always will be – just horizons.

It is faith that puts to rest these questions that plague the mind. A triumph of soul over mind is a constant battle, and that war is the only war we have to win. Hazur Maharaj Ji responded to a question about the importance of faith:

Actual faith comes by experience, and faith comes from within, it doesn’t come from outside at all. The faith which we build by seeing other people doesn’t have much depth at all; it’s very shaky. The faith that comes from within by meditation – which strengthens our faith, rather it creates faith – that is unshakeable faith. Faith is very essential before we can put forth an earnest effort to practice.⁴

And in Quest for Light, he wrote to a disciple:

Faith is the foundation on which the whole superstructure of religion and spiritual progress stands. It is the root of the tree of godliness. Without faith there can be no achievement in any worldly art or spiritual matter. Faith is the most precious of gifts that the Lord can confer on a devotee. If one has little meditation to his credit but has full faith and love, his future is assured.⁵

However, faith does not come so easily. The analytical nature of the mind encourages us to question, to have faith only in that which can be proven. In fact, Sant Mat and the RSSB way of life ask us to explore the teachings, so that we might experience the truth within ourselves. True faith, therefore, is not blind. Faith is based on our experience, which we receive through sincere practice. We have faith, therefore, when we courageously dedicate ourselves to proving truths beyond our grasp, following the lead of our Master.

To quote Saint Augustine, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” ⁶ It is our deep faith that will keep us steady and steadfast with the conviction that we will overcome this and all future pandemics.

Bible, Matthew 6:10
https://www.quotes.net/quote/64759
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Beas: Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Punjab, 2011, Q 173
Ibid, Q 174
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, Beas: Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Punjab, 2002, Letter #12
Saint Augustine, Creeds of Faith and Inspiration, quoted in Spiritual Link Magazine, RSSB,February 2011, “Having Faith” (https://rssb.org/2011-02-09.html)

Carrying Satsang into Our Daily Lives Download | Print

Carrying Satsang into Our Daily Lives

In the “Mool Mantra,” a short precept that precedes the Jap Ji, Guru Nanak praises the Lord and describes His attributes. He says:

There is but one God; true is His Name. He is the Creator, without fear, without enmity and of timeless form. Unborn and self-existent, He is realized through the Guru’s grace.¹

Although it is impossible to adequately describe the true nature of God in any human language, Guru Nanak reveals that He can be realized through the grace of the Master. It is only through the Master’s grace that we learn about the melody of Shabd, which will enable us to leave the earthly plane and return to our true home.² The Great Master said that the Guru’s grace is needed on every step of the inner journey to our true home.³

One of the many ways in which the Master has graced us is through the creation of satsang properties around the world. These properties were acquired so that the sangat can perform seva and attend satsang. Satsang and seva offer us an abode where the atmosphere of the Master’s presence uplifts our spirits and bolsters our determination to travel the inner path of Shabd.⁴

Unfortunately, many satsang facilities around the world remain temporarily closed as a result of the Covid pandemic. Naturally, many will be disappointed with the temporary closure of our satsang centres. However, in our feeling of disappointment we can draw inspiration from the comforting words of Hazur Maharaj Ji, so that we may channel this disappointment towards our meditation and spiritual growth. Hazur Maharaj Ji, when explaining what the Dera is, said that the Dera is not a place made of bricks, mortar, and other material things. He said that:

Dera is just your love, your harmony, your affection, your understanding and cooperation with each other. That is Dera.⁵

Hazur’s loving message is that our real satsang centre is not a physical place of bricks and mortar. Rather, it is a spirit of love, harmony and care for each other. It is for us to carry this spirit into our everyday activities, even though our physical facilities may remain closed and inaccessible. Hazur emphasized the importance of our efforts to carry the atmosphere of the Dera with us. He said that:

You have to build your own Dera around you. You have to live in your own Dera. You have to carry your Dera with you wherever you are, and that is within you. You have to build up that atmosphere, that environment in which you have to live. Everybody has to carry one’s own fort with him – that is the Dera. That is all within you, not outside in brick and mortar.⁶

A practical way to build and carry the atmosphere of love required for our meditation is to try to live with ourselves and to love our own company. Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

You see, our problem is that we always love the company of others; we don’t love our own company at all. If you sit in a room for five minutes, you will either switch on the television, call somebody, or start reading a newspaper or some magazine, because you are not in the habit of living with yourself; and when you try to live with yourself, you think “I am bored.” We don’t try to live with ourselves at all. We must learn to live with ourselves, independent of anything in this world. When you get into that habit, then it becomes very easy to build that atmosphere in which we have to live.⁷

Our Master graciously provides us with the means to create the atmosphere referred to by Hazur Maharaj Ji. We have been given many inspirational spiritual books, magazines, satsangs, and questions and answers. In this time when satsang centres are closed, we have these inspirational spiritual materials at our disposal to assist us in turning our attention inwards and performing our most important seva – attending to our meditation.

In the final verse of the Jap Ji, Guru Nanak reveals the good fortune of those who, with the Master’s grace, make the resolute effort of building their inner satsang of love and harmony so that they can attend to meditation and realize God. It says that:

Those who have meditated on the Name with resolute devotion have departed, fulfilling the purpose of life. Their faces are radiant with bliss, O Nanak, and many are liberated with them.⁸

Jap Ji: A Perspective, p. 73
Ibid
Call of the Great Master, p. 188
A Wake Up Call: Beyond Concepts & Illusions, p. 137
Equilibrium of Love, Introduction, p. 1
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 3, #137
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 3, #138
Jap Ji: A Perspective, p. 71

Love One Another Download | Print

Love One Another

In Philosophy of the Masters, Great Master narrated the following story:

When Saint John became so old that he was not able to walk and was able to speak only with great difficulty, another follower of Christ took him to a gathering of children to deliver a sermon. He raised his head and said: “Little children, love one another.” Once again he said this and then repeated it a third time, after which he was silent.

At that the people closest to him said: “Good man, haven’t you anything more important to say to these children?” To this he replied: “I give this advice over and over again, because of all the qualities, that of love is the greatest need of mankind. If you would love each other and the current of love would fill your minds, you would possess all other good qualities. Love, and all things shall be added unto you.¹

In essence, this is the message of all mystics and saints: to love one another and to fill our mind and heart with the current of love. Nothing is more important than moulding our lives on the basis of these two commandments, because love is our greatest need and love is the only thing that truly gives value and meaning to a human life.

As Saint Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.

And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.²

Again, the Great Master says:

Love is the richest of all treasures. Without it there is nothing and with it there is everything. He who does not have love in his heart is not entitled to call himself a human being. …Wherever there is love there is life. Where there is no love, life is worthless.³

To fill our heart and mind with love – therein lies not only our need, it is for that purpose this human life has been given to us, as beautifully expressed in The Book of Mirdad, where the master says to his disciples:

Love is the law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of man. And what is it to love but for the lover to absorb forever the beloved so that the twain be one?⁴

Love is the law of God. Great Master explained this in the following way:

The world is beautiful and we are naturally attracted towards it, because the Creator of both man and the world is the same God, who is love. God has filled both man and the world with currents of love, and the world is supported by love. Love’s magnetic power is at work throughout the entire world. The sun, moon, earth, stars, sky – all are sending out currents of love to others.⁵

So the sweet scent of love permeates all nature, the entire universe. It’s the binding force, not only between all that lives, but it is the power that gives life to all forms. In Call of the Great Master, Daryai Lal Kapur quotes Great Master in a satsang, saying:

Look at the human body. How skilfully the five tattwas (elements), namely earth, water, fire, air and ether – antagonistic to each other in their nature – have been mixed together to form the human body. Earth is destroyed by water, water is dried up by fire, fire is consumed by air, and air is swallowed by ether. But how skilfully these five enemies of each other unite in a love embrace to run the body!⁶

Isn’t it amazing that although divine love is present in every little particle of the universe and in every cell of our body and our entire being, our mind and heart are not filled with it, as Saint John tells us? As a result, we live in conflict with ourselves and others, causing suffering in all sorts of ways. How is this possible?

According to all mystics and saints, this is because we have a very limited consciousness. Our consciousness is limited because our mind is so strongly oriented to worldly things and attached to what is visible and tangible. It is full of impressions that we have been collecting since we have started living in this creation. If we could withdraw our attention from the world and focus it on God, and if our mind could be cleansed and purified of its impressions, our consciousness would expand. Then divine love would reveal itself in our hearts and flow unconditionally and automatically towards all and everyone. Great Master clarifies this in the following way.

Love is a soul quality and is inherent in all of us, but not everyone can avail himself of it. …As soon as the soul is freed from the filth and attachments of the world, real love automatically makes its appearance.⁷

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh further explains:

There is such a great load on the soul that its love is crushed under that weight. …So we have to lift the weight of the senses, of the mind, of karmas or sins, before we can experience that love. And we feel real love when we go beyond the realm of mind and maya, when there are no coverings on the soul, when the soul shines, when it knows itself. Then it experiences the real love for its own Father, for its own origin. Love has the quality of merging into another being, becoming another being. Ultimately, we lose our own identity and individuality and become one with the Father.⁸

The moment we become one with the Father, our heart and mind will be completely filled with love – love that will flow unconditionally and automatically towards all and everyone, because then we will see the divine in all. That will be the end of all suffering.

So the question is how to free ourselves of this weight on our soul, which limits our consciousness, so that we might realize who and what we really are – and so that divine love can fill our heart, our mind and our whole being to the brim.

…the only way to experience that love is to withdraw it from the senses by simran and dhyan and attach it to the divine melody within.⁹

The key lies in shifting our focus of love and attention. Instead of focusing on worldly things, we should focus on the Word, the divine within – remembering God continuously through inner repetition of his name (simran) and contemplating on the form of the Master (dhyan). Why do we contemplate on the Master instead of God? Great Master explains:

We have not seen the Lord, and we do not know how to love him. …A Master is a lover of God. In him there are boundless currents of true love. He is the physical form of that love. To love him is to find the most important medium for developing love for God, because he is a manifestation of God, and his heart is full of love for Him. His face shines with the light and energy of God. By seeing him, love and longing for God increases. To love such a person is to love God himself, because by loving him we always remember our Lord.¹⁰

Then Great Master continues by quoting Maulana Rum, saying:

If you are searching for the reality of God, look at the face of your Master, and by looking at God through the lustre of the Master’s forehead, you will fall in love with Him [God].¹¹

When we fall in love with God and express that love by practicing meditation, living a Sant Mat way of life and being a good human being, loving and kind to all, God responds to that love in abundance so it grows and grows. It is that love that will cleanse our heart and purify our mind. It is that love that will free us from our ego and help us to surrender to the divine, so we might become one with Him.

Of course, this will not happen without a struggle. We need to realize that there will be a struggle, since we have difficulties in shifting this love and attention from the world to the Word. We have difficulties in letting go of all our worldly attachments. The beauty is that this struggle in itself is purifying. It will bring us to that point that we give up, bow our head for our Beloved, and surrender our all. In his evocative and distinctive poetic style, the early 20th-century Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran spoke about this path of love, this path of the Master, and love’s purifying process:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind
lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses
your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them
in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know
the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge
become a fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace
and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness
and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh,
but not all of your laughter, and weep,
but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,”
but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires,
let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody
to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks
for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate on love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart
and a song of praise upon your lips.¹²

This is the path of love we are all invited to follow, so we may truly learn to love the Master and thus God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul, and from there to love all that lives. Then the purpose of life can be fulfilled and our journey through the creation will end. How fortunate we are! How grateful we can be. Let’s reflect on this and make best use of this life by shifting our focus from the world to the Word, and by fanning this love for God with the help and support of our beloved Master.

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, Beas: RSSB, 2009, p. 118
New American Bible, Corinthians 13:1-3
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, pp. 113–114
Mikael Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, London: Watkins Publishing, 2002, p. 62
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, p. 114
Daryai Lal Kapur (quoting a satsang by Great Master), Call of the Great Master, Beas: RSSB, 2005, p. 57
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, p. 119
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 3, Beas: RSSB, 2010, p. 386
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 3, p. 386
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, pp. 144, 146–147
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, p. 147
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923, 2019, pp. 18–21

Only Do Good Things Download | Print

Only Do Good Things

The mystics tell us that spirituality is very simple to understand and extremely difficult to practise. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said many times, “Sant Mat is very easy to explain, but very hard to follow.” The following Buddhist story illustrates this point:

Long ago in China there was a monk they called ‘Birdsnest’ who lived and meditated in a tree. He stayed there for many, many years – meditating daily. Eventually he became a wise man, a Buddhist master. Local people came to him from far and wide for advice.  They liked him and spread the word about him and he became famous for his kindness and thoughtful wisdom.

One day even the eighty-year-old governor of the province travelled a great distance to seek his advice.  When he arrived, he asked two simple but profound questions: “What is it that all the wise ones have taught?” and “What was the most important thing that Buddha ever said?”

There was silence and then the monk replied; "Don't do bad things.  Always do good things. That's what all the Buddhas have taught."

The governor heard this and became annoyed. He mockingly repeated the advice the monk had given him – “Don't do bad things. Always do good things.”  Then the governor said, “I knew that when I was three years old.”
Looking down at the governor with kindness the monk replied, “Yes – the three-year-old knows it, but the eighty-year-old still finds it very difficult to do.”

For many of us on the path of Sant Mat this story speaks to an experiential truth. The Master explains very clearly what the “good things” are, but we often struggle with doing them. The Shabd Masters are living examples of what it means to live a good, honest, moral life – a life in which they always do the good things. If we follow their advice completely and wholeheartedly, we will never do bad things. Moment by moment, throughout our lives, if we are doing a good thing, then we will not be doing a bad thing.

The truly good things we should do in our life are covered in the four simple and straightforward vows that seekers take at the time of initiation.

The first “good thing” we vow to do is to live solely on a lacto-vegetarian diet. This is the humane thing to do, the compassionate thing to do, the least harmful thing to do. We must deliberately stop killing the higher forms of life, either for sport, profit, or food. The renowned philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer is quoted as saying, “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”

We must try not to harm animals – that's a “good thing” – simply to try to do the most good and the least harm to all of God's creatures, that is the right and kind thing to do.

The second good thing that the Master asks us to do when we come to this path is to abstain from mind-altering substances like alcohol, tobacco, and all forms of recreational drugs, including marijuana. We need to stop damaging this gift from God, this human body; rather, we need to respect it, keep it clean, and stop the “out of control” activities of the mind. Hazur Maharaj Ji used to say that alcohol and drugs “bind the mind and blind the soul.” Giving up our indulgence in these damaging substances will eventually help us to slow and still the mind. Our mind must become like the still water of a lake on a windless day for us to make progress on our spiritual journey. Abstaining from alcohol, recreational drugs, and tobacco helps us toward achieving that stillness, so this is a very good thing to do.

The third good thing we must do is to live an honest, ethical, courageous, and truly moral life – one in which kindness and compassion for everyone becomes our nature, our character, the way we live. Of the first three vows, living a truly moral life is perhaps the most difficult for us to follow, because it involves a deliberate and conscious determination to give up our old, deeply ingrained ways of saying and doing wrong or hurtful things. This applies to our actions, our words, and even our thoughts. It involves changing the acquired habits of this and countless previous lives, so that we give up doing bad or hurtful deeds and always do good, ethical, kind, and compassionate deeds.

Hazur Maharaj Ji said in a meeting with Western disciples:

If we have a kind heart, a loving heart, we are kind to everybody, we are loving to everybody, we are helpful to everybody. When we are kind and helpful and loving to everybody, we're not attached to any particular person – this has become our nature. We have to develop that. It happens automatically if we are filled with love and devotion for the Father. Then all such qualities come like cream on milk. We don't have to strive for them; they become part and parcel of us, because then we see the Lord in everyone. We are humble before everyone, loving to everyone, because then what we see is the Lord – not a particular person – but the Lord who is residing in everyone.¹

To make these changes by ourselves is virtually impossible, for we have neither the means nor the capacity to do it alone, to “single-handedly and unaided” become truly good human beings. Fortunately, however, the Master has given us the example, the means, the knowledge, and the moment-by-moment support that will permit us to make this extraordinary change possible.

The Master starts off by telling us that when we are seeking truth, if we can live for one year within the three vows, if we can practise those first three “good things,” avoiding the bad things, then we may apply for initiation to this path of the Masters; and if we are given initiation, then we need to live this way for the rest of our life. We need to do these three good things as a spiritual foundation, in order to be able to start doing the very “best thing of all” – the fourth “good thing” – our meditation practice under the guidance of our living Master.

To do our meditation practice – simran, dhyan, and bhajan – every day in accordance with the instructions that we are given at the time of initiation is the fourth vow. As we engage with our meditation, our spiritual practice, we will begin to turn toward the Creator and away from the world. We will become thankful for all that we are given as we come to understand that each breath, each moment of our lives, is a gift and an opportunity to take a step toward the Master, toward the Lord. The Master has asked us to do it. He has said that “our meditation should be our main concern” – and that is the very best thing that we can do.

These four major “good things” are the cornerstones upon which a spiritual life is based, so when we start to follow the path seriously and do our regular meditation practice, we will truly begin to follow the advice of that old Buddhist monk: “Don't do bad things. Always do good things.”

In the book Legacy of Love, there is a beautiful picture of Maharaj Ji smiling, and in the caption beneath the picture he gives us the secret for living our life as best we can, as he says, “I keep fit because I don't do what I shouldn't do.”²

The Shabd Masters make us all “fit” to go home by teaching us to not do what we shouldn’t do and to always try to do what we should do. We know that doing a good thing is a positive action, and doing a bad thing is a negative action. In the book Quest for Light, Maharaj Ji explains:

It is your effort that will change your mind from the negative to the positive. With effort and determination, we can achieve many things in life. Our meditation is nothing but an attempt to acquire the positive gifts and to get rid of the negative evils. Meditation gives mental strength and spiritual bliss, and enables us to face life with great hope and courage. We then know that we have a goal before us which we have to achieve, and which will give us that bliss which nothing in this world will give us.³

The Master is giving us, very beautifully, the same message as the wise old Buddhist monk taught. He teaches us to live in a way that will ensure that we don’t do bad things and only do good things.

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #500
Legacy of Love, p. 310
Quest for Light, #396

Sincerity Download | Print

Sincerity

The word “sincerity” or “sincere” pops up a lot in the Sant Mat literature. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh often said that we should do our meditation with devotion and sincerity. What does it mean to be sincere in our meditation?

The dictionary defines sincerity as honesty of mind and also freedom from hypocrisy. Some words that mean the same thing or are related are “wholehearted,” “heartfelt,” and “unfeigned.” The dictionary says that “heartfelt” implies “depth of feeling” and defines “wholehearted” as “earnest devotion without reservation or misgiving.”

So, to do our meditation with sincerity, to approach the teachings of the saints with sincerity, is to embark on our spiritual journey with “earnest devotion without reservation or misgiving.” In other words, we have to be committed, we have to have “honesty of mind.”

Maharaj Charan Singh sums up our spiritual quest in Light on Sant Mat:

The only way to bring lasting peace and happiness and a sense of real comfort is to go within and rely upon the inner Power. The best way to contact that inner Power is through a real Master. A living Master can be approached outwardly as well as inwardly. Hence, the disciples have confidence and a sense of security, knowing that they would not be left dangling in mid-air and they can always have their doubts and difficulties resolved. But as you know, there is a time for everything. Our duty is only to make continued and sincere efforts, and when the proper time comes and the Lord so ordains, the great gift comes to us.¹

Baba Ji has said that Sant Mat is an experiment with the truth and that meditation exposes us to the truth. It is the Master’s job to lead us to the truth. But it is we who must develop the capacity to face it.

When we put in a sincere effort to do our meditation and to follow the path, we actually are exposing ourselves to truth and increasing our capacity to face it with “honesty of mind,” as the dictionary says.

When we apply ourselves wholeheartedly, with “earnest devotion without reservation or misgiving,” we are in the process of making our hearts whole. We are healing our broken hearts, hearts that were broken when we separated from our home. We’re in the process of becoming whole, of becoming wholehearted.

To become wholehearted, to be sincere in our efforts to face the truth – of our origin, our spiritual identity – we must be true to our intent, true to our purpose. We have to remember what we started out to do.

In other words, we have to remember our goal in order to apply honest, sincere effort. Someone asked Hazur, “Could you explain what it means for us to be honest in our meditation?” He replied:

We have to be sincere within ourselves. We must live with ourselves rather than living for others. We have to put in honest and sincere efforts, then leave the result to the Lord.²

We must live with ourselves rather than for others. To live with ourselves means that we must fulfill our responsibilities but at the same time be one-pointed in our pursuit of truth. In the end, we will never be able to please all the people all the time. We can’t compromise our principles, the vows we take at initiation, to please other people. If we do compromise our principles, we feel as if we literally can’t live with ourselves. We have to work hard to get back to center, and we can do that only by putting in honest, sincere effort.

At another time Hazur said:

We have to be truthful and honest with ourselves, not with others. When we are truthful with ourselves, then we can live with ourselves; otherwise, we are always at war with ourselves. We are always miserable within ourselves if we are not honest and truthful with ourselves. So, we shouldn’t try to deceive ourselves. We must face facts, and we must understand the reality, and we must be honest with our own feelings, with our own self. And if you are honest with yourself, you’ll be honest with others also. If you are deceitful to yourself, you’ll be deceitful to others also. One always knows whether one is being honest with oneself or not. You don’t require anybody to tell you about that; you know within yourself whether you are truthful to yourself, or honest with yourself or not.³

That is an amazing statement. At first, we may think: Oh, no problem, sure, I can be honest with myself. But really, how easy is it? Is it really so easy to face facts, as Hazur says, understand the reality, and be honest with our own feelings? If it were easy, would we still be here, still struggling to do our meditation, still struggling to do what the Master has asked of us? And yet he says that we don’t need anyone to tell us what’s true, because we already know.

This is a standard we have to hold for ourselves: Are we facing facts, facing life? Or at least are we exposing ourselves to the truth? Are we trying to understand reality? Are we being sincere in our efforts?

Honesty of purpose. Keeping our goal in view. Facing facts. Understanding reality – that is, understanding what we need to do to realize the truth within ourselves – these are all part of sincere effort, of not deceiving ourselves. But when we’ve been on the path for a long time, we face one of the biggest enemies of spiritual seekers. Not lust, anger, greed, attachment, or ego – rather, complacency. We get comfortable. We say the path is our life, but we start wearing it like a pair of comfortable slippers.

We become like mountaineers who get together at base camp to talk about climbing the mountain. We’ve got our expensive gear, our fancy hi-tech climbing clothes; we’ve built a cozy fire; and we talk all night about climbing the mountain. We create a home at the base camp, conveniently forgetting that we had intended to climb the mountain.

But we’re cozy and warm. We don’t want to go out into the howling wind and start climbing the mountain. It’s just too hard, and we’re also not sure that we can do it. So, we tell each other stories about what other people say about the mountain. We talk about what they found at the top. And we talk endlessly about our climbing guide.

In the same way, many of us have stopped seeking the truth. We become like mountaineers at base camp talking endlessly about the mountain we want to climb. We surround ourselves with the trappings – before the Covid pandemic, we went to satsang, did seva, visited the Master at every opportunity. We may parrot the Sant Mat platitudes, but are we out on that mountain in the howling wind, all alone on the mountain, putting one foot in front of the other? Facing our fears, exposing ourselves to the truth? That is, every day stashing our mobile phones and attending to meditation for 2 ½ hours, putting forth honest, sincere effort?

We want to feel safe, we want to feel comfortable, and so we tell ourselves that we are already saved, that everything is the grace of the Master. It is easy to become complacent and hold ourselves back by staying stuck in old habits.

One writer said this about our choice to move forward or hold ourselves back:

You have to be willing to be uncomfortable, enter the unknown, do things your ego doesn’t want to do. You have to value being true to what you glimpse as possible – to the heart of your heart – more than you want to be right or get your own way or be comfortable.⁴

The Master tells us that it is possible to achieve the heart of our heart – to go back to him, to be one with him. But we have to want this more than anything in this world, and then we have to be true to our intent, true to what we know is possible.

As Hazur wrote to a disciple:

There are some people who hold that in spite of their great desire to go within, they do not get the necessary help. Such people have only to search their hearts a little deeper. They will find that what they call their ‘great desire’ is very superficial. When a soul really wishes to go to its Home, there is nothing to prevent it. This is the law.⁵

He is asking us to search our hearts a little deeper, to be honest with ourselves. How much do we really want what we say we want?

Someone once asked him, “How can we possibly clear all our karmas?” He said: “By meditation. That is the only way. You see, brother, the Lord’s grace is not lacking; our efforts are lacking, our sincerity is lacking, our faith is lacking.”

When our sincerity is lacking, our effort is half-hearted – we hold back. The Master doesn’t withhold his grace; we withhold our effort. And again, he refers to our sincerity, our honesty, when he continues: “If we are sincere and honest in our devotion, in our efforts, he never withholds his grace. He is always there.”⁶

There is a cosmic law that is one of the keys to our ultimate success on the path. It sounds so simple, so obvious, but it is very profound, and if we take it to heart, we will find our heart’s desire, the heart of our heart. Great Master wrote to one of his disciples: “All actions are performed with a motive, and it is the motive that is binding.”⁷

This means that the quality of the action, that is, our success at performing it, is not as important as our motive, our intention. You can see this in the legal system. Killing someone with prior intent carries a much heavier sentence that killing someone by accident. Your actions resulted in a death, but you meant no harm.

This is a dramatic example, but let’s apply the same principle to meditation. If our motive is to please the Master, to awaken our consciousness and merge with God – if we have sincerity of purpose – then if our actual performance is somewhat feeble, for example, it doesn’t matter. “If we are sincere and honest in our devotion, in our efforts, he never withholds his grace.” It is our motive that counts, our motive that is binding. So, we can’t be half-hearted.

How many times does the Master tell us that if we just do our part, the Lord will do his? It doesn’t matter if we’re not up to the task. None of us are up to the task! That’s why we got initiated in the first place – we can’t do this on our own, we can’t climb the ladder if no one is holding it.

At a recent Dera session, someone who had been initiated for a long time sheepishly said to the Master words to the effect: I’m not spiritual. I’m not grateful enough. I complain all the time. Baba Ji replied that it’s not the words we say, it’s what’s in your heart that counts.

He knows very well what’s in our heart, no matter how we behave or what we babble on about. He knows when we’re scamming, and he knows when we’re being honest, heartfelt, sincere. So regardless of our success or failure, what the Lord responds to is our motive, our deepest truth. And as the saints make clear, this has nothing to do with who we present ourselves to be on the outside. It doesn’t matter if we feel as if we are the worst disciple on the planet, or even if we actually are the worst disciple. Nothing matters except the sincerity of our purpose. We must hold on to that for dear life. We must remember why we came to the path and sought initiation. That sincerity will lead us not to success but to effort, and that’s all the Master wants from us.

A famous rabbi said: “God is waiting on every road that leads from intention to action.”⁸

This same rabbi has written about the wholeheartedness of our spiritual journey:

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind – these are all a drive toward serving him who rings our hearts like a bell. It is as if He were waiting to enter our empty, perishing lives.⁹

Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, #96
Ibid., Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #454
Ibid., #119
Geneen Roth, Lost and Found, Penguin Group, 2012, p. 194
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, #30
Ibid., Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #478)
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #20
Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, Crossroad, 1999, p. 12
Ibid., p. 15

Spiritual Need Download | Print

Spiritual Need

In the book Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s Perfect Teacher, Shams speaks frequently of spiritual need, which carries several meanings for him. First it is a deep desire to experience the love of God. It is also what the translator calls:

…a sufficient degree of self-awareness to understand one’s own inadequacy and helplessness in that quest; and yearning, restlessness, that sense of something missing and of not belonging, that distinguishes those who seek God from those who are content with the world. Above all, need speaks of deeply felt humility and prayerfulness – asking the sheikh and God for help and guidance.¹

Shams uses the word “need” to describe an intense longing and yearning for spirituality, for a constant and loving connection to the divine inner spirit, which will make us whole. A need is a desire that is so strong we can’t survive without it, such as our basic physical needs for air, water, food, shelter, and clothing. Shams sees spiritual need as essential for seekers of God.

Very importantly, embedded in this need is an understanding of our helplessness to satisfy that need on our own. In our human condition, we are so deluded and ignorant that we can’t see beyond the immediate physical and mental needs tied to the survival of our ego. Spiritual masters point out to us that we are ignorant of the life of the spirit, the inner life of our soul. We may have the best education money can buy, or the best job, or the most loving family and friends, but if we know nothing about the essence of our being and the spiritual life force that sustains us, what good is our learned knowledge? True wisdom, inspiration, and understanding can only come from contacting the inner source of truth.

It is the very step of recognizing and appreciating that there is someone in the creation who has knowledge of spirituality that allows us to begin to move away from a self-centered perspective to the broader perspective of beginning to understand God’s plan or God’s will. We begin to appreciate the greatness of the Lord and his agent, the spiritual master.

Shams says [speaking in the voice of the master]:

I look for need from the needy, but only real need, not just its appearance,

When you come with an attitude of need, then that, in essence, is asking me the way to God.²

He’s saying that the master looks for real need in us, not just a superficial or calculated appearance of a need. When we come with a sincere and heartfelt need, we’re making it clear that we need help and that we recognize the master as someone who can help. The master is pleased when we can humbly admit that we need his help.

In another place Shams says [again speaking in the voice of the master]:

If someone wants to listen to me using discussion, words, or arguments from other sheikhs, or Koranic stories, neither will he hear a word from me, nor can he gain from me. But if he comes with humility, in a spirit of need to hear my words – for one’s only capital is need – then he can benefit. Otherwise, if he continues his discussion and debate not just for a day or ten days, but even for a hundred years, still I would just rest my chin on my hand and listen.³

Our only capital is need. This is what we have to invest in our relationship with the master. This is what we bring to the relationship. The master will sit and listen to us carry on for a hundred years, but we won’t get spiritual benefit unless we bring him our need and rely on him to satisfy it. It’s through our reliance on the master for guidance at every moment of our lives that we build up our relationship with him. The master works through people and situations in our daily life that help us see how he directs everything from the inside for our spiritual benefit. He knows what we need to become truly humble, to realize our need, and to become receptive and open to his guidance.

In another place, Shams says:

A human has two qualities: one is need. Have your eyes on that quality, build your hope on it… The other quality is a lack of need. What hope can you build upon having no need? … However, what is the ultimate goal of need? To find one without need.

And who is without need? He answers this question by saying…

…The King [God] is absolutely without need, and the way [to Him] is through need, humility, and begging.⁴

We are the ones with need, and the Lord is the one without need, as are the spiritual masters, who are one with the Lord. They have merged their soul into the Lord and live in that divine presence. They are without restlessness; they live in equipoise. They are the kings of spirituality, because they have that inner wealth of shabd with them all the time. Hazur said in Spiritual Perspectives:

Our real master is shabd, that holy ghost, that spirit, that logos or word which is within every one of us. That is our real master, that creative power which has created the creation. But unless we find someone in whom the word has taken its abode and he connects our soul with that word, we cannot be brought in touch with that word within.⁵

We are the ones with need. We need the love of the inner shabd to become whole. Our soul longs to lose itself in the shabd. Our role is to beg the master to help us do what needs to be done to fill our need. We beg by repeating our simran, by doing our meditation, by carrying the presence of the master with us. We beg by realizing our insignificance in the face of the greatness of the Lord and the master. Hazur says:

So the Father creates his own love in us through his sons, through his mystics. And the mystics attach us to the shabd and nam within, by which they detach us from this whole creation and attach us to the Father. They don’t need our love at all. They only build that much faith and love in us so that we may get attached to the shabd and nam within.⁶

Shams refers to passages in the Koran (indicated by the K numbers in parentheses embedded in the below quotation), to describe this relationship:

When such a magnanimous court exists and He is so free of need, you can take your need to Him, for those without need enjoy the needy drawing near.

Thus you suddenly leap out of the midst of these inferior surroundings [creation] through your neediness. Something beyond this creation will reach you – and that is love. The snare of love comes and wraps around you, for ‘They love Him (K5/54)’ is the effect of ‘He loves them (K5/54).’ You will see that which is beyond this creation, through itself. ‘And He pervades the eyes (K6/103).’⁷

He is saying that it is our neediness that brings the Lord to our aid, and he comes from beyond this creation and wraps us in his quality, which is love. In this way any love we feel for the Lord can be credited to the Lord loving himself through us. He loves us to come to him with our need, and he makes us receptive to do this, because this is the play of the Lord. We are quite helpless in the whole relationship, except to put in our effort in meditation. Through meditation, we start to feel the presence of the inner master, who is our connection to the Lord and the sound and light, the shabd. We become part of the circle of love between the Lord and his creation. We start to see the world through his perspective – he pervades our eyes.

In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur says the same thing:

Everything is in the hands of the Lord. He creates his own love in us. We then feel that we love him or that we are separated from him and we want to become one with him. He’s the one who is pulling us from within. That is entirely in his hands. Unless he gives us the means, we can never generate that love ourselves. Meditation generates love. Meditation creates that pang in you, that desire in you to become one with the Father. Meditation makes you realize that life is worthless without him. Meditation makes us realize our false pursuits in this world. That is all his grace. That is all the effect of meditation.⁸

Meditation is our daily begging to the master. We sit quietly and repeat names with sincerity, yearning, and what Huzur calls “the pang… to become one with the Father.” In this way, we can put our whole mind into repeating the simran, which occupies us to the extent that we can forget about other distractions. Once the mind is settled, the soul is free to exercise its natural quality, which is love. We need meditation because we need love.

Shams says:

I can talk to myself, or to someone in whom I can see myself. The “you” who expresses need is the real you, not that “you” who shows himself needless, acting like a stranger; that one was your enemy. I was hurting him because that was not you. How could I hurt you? For even if I kissed your feet, I fear that my eyelashes might prick and wound them.⁹

He’s saying that the part of us that feels real need is our soul, our true self. It’s the mind, the part of us that deals with the outer, physical world, that acts like a stranger to the master and shows itself as not needing any help. This is our ego. We’re proud, and we think that we can take care of ourselves and accomplish everything on our own. As long as we feel this way, the master can ignore us, or even be harsh with us, just to bring us to our senses. But the master is very kind in dealing with our soul and shaping the disciple. If we come to him sincerely, with an open heart full of need, and humble in realizing that we can’t do anything on our own and depend entirely on the master, then he is so kind and loving and compassionate.

This is why we feel such gratitude and thankfulness for the master and the role he plays in our life. The more we are on the path, the more we realize that he is doing everything, and we just need to appreciate it and be with him. In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur says:

The more we travel on the path, the more humble we become. The more we get the devotion and love of the Lord within us, the more humble we become. The more we are in love with the Lord, the more we realize his greatness, and the more insignificant we are in our daily life – the more humble we become. The more we are away from him, the more the ego increases and we think “I am doing it, I am supreme.” When we find the real Supreme One, we know how humble we are at his feet. Then the real humility comes.¹⁰

It's through recognizing our spiritual need that we are able to constantly ask the master for help and guidance. This is our prayer. In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur says:

Actually, our whole meditation is nothing but a prayer before the Lord, nothing but a prayer from the heart, the soul, to merge back into the Lord. Real prayer is only to pray to the Lord to have mercy on us, to give us his grace and guidance to live in his will, to give us such circumstances that we can meditate on his name…. The real prayer is from the heart; it’s submission to the Lord.¹¹

The point of following a spiritual path is to get to the point where we can feel the love of God. And we can’t do it when we’re so full of ourselves. We have to need God’s love so badly that we will do what the master tells us to do, and we will submit to whatever he asks of us, since we know – with a grateful heart – that he will only give us whatever we need to do to remove whatever barrier stands between us and the Lord.

Shams also used stories to convey his messages, and once he told this story about the Prophet Mohammed:

After recounting the story of one of his disciples who had reached an inner state by praying for forty days, the Prophet said, “If anyone worships God, purely for God, for forty days, rich quarries of the heart’s knowledge will reveal themselves through his tongue.” Subsequently, one of his followers engaged himself in prayer and supplication to God for forty days, but noticed no advancement within. So he went to the Prophet and said, “O Messenger of God, I tried my best for forty days, but nothing happened to me that resembles the state of the one whose story you told us – and I know there is no error in your words.”

Now doesn’t this sound familiar? It sounds like one of us getting up to ask Baba Ji a question about why we haven’t experienced anything within, despite our having meditated for so many years! The story continues:

The Prophet answered, “I said ‘purely for God.’ Purity and sincerity of desire for God, with no other desire or intention, is the condition necessary for success. Hearing about the rare words and talk of the other man, you became greedy with desire for that state, but not for God.”¹²

So the masters aren’t fooled by our insincerity, our indifference, our calculations and our lack of real need. When we calculate, we get nothing. This story points out how we need to have a heartfelt need for God, in order to be with him within. We can’t try to mimic someone else’s experience, since it won’t have any meaning for us. In Philosophy of the Masters, Maharaj Sawan Singh says:

The results of repetition will be in direct proportion to the love and faith brought to bear upon it. Carry out the simran of the Lord with love and faith. His names have a great power. When repeated with faith one feels intoxicated with joy, with the result that he forgets his body and himself and is aware of the presence of the Lord. How potent and blissful is the Name of God! It creates in the devotee a fast-flowing current of bliss, peace and soul force, and he feels truly blessed.¹³

This is what happens when we do our simran practice because we need to. We can’t live without it. Need helps us to prioritize what is important in life. Need helps us to focus, to concentrate.

In the book The Way of a Pilgrim, a nineteenth-century Russian peasant speaks about how he approached intense repetition of the Jesus Prayer, which is a Christian prayer that goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” It’s the prayer that Christians repeat when they go through the beads on their rosaries to help them count the number of times they repeat it.

For a whole week I stayed alone in my hut and recited the Jesus Prayer six thousand times every day, neither worrying about anything nor paying attention to the distracting thoughts, no matter how severe they became. My main concern was to carry out the advice of my director [spiritual advisor] as accurately as possible. And do you know what happened? I became so accustomed to the Prayer that if for a short while I stopped reciting it I felt as if I were missing something, as though I had lost something. When I would begin reciting the Prayer again, I would immediately feel great joy and delight.¹⁴

Our Master doesn’t ask us to count and repeat our simran six thousand times a day, but we do have to do it for a couple of hours in our meditation practice. It is also very helpful if we develop the habit of doing it in the background of our mind throughout the day. That brings us into a constant state of being in his presence, which makes it easier when we actually sit down to practice. We need to need simran; we need to need listening to the shabd. We need to need meditation, and we need to need “being with him.”

In Philosophy of the Masters, Maharaj Sawan Singh said:

Bireh [intense longing] has various stages. The first is the recollection of one’s Beloved, accompanied by longing and contemplation. This condition of recollection and contemplation becomes so strong that a devotee’s attention is completely diverted to the form of his Beloved, which always remains fixed in his mind’s eye. The Beloved becomes the sustainer of his life, and he will not leave Him.

This is the state of mind needed on the spiritual path. Intense longing means that we need to be with the Lord so much that we can’t be without him. This is sincere spiritual need.

Shams-e Tabrizi, Rumi’s Perfect Teacher, Tr. Farida Maleki, Beas: RSSB, 2011, p. 17
Ibid
Ibid, pp. 246-7
Ibid, p. 18
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 1, Beas: RSSB, 2010, p. 441
Ibid, p. 462
Shams-e Tabrizi, pp. 61-62
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 2, p. 100
Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 226
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. 2, p. 233
Ibid, pp. 137-138
Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 202
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 1, Beas: RSSB, 2002, pp. 62-63
Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, Magdalene Press, 2017, p. 131

Advice for All Times Download | Print

Advice for All Times

There is a well-known group of simple sayings in the “Ethics of the Fathers” – a section of the Jewish Talmud that relates to how we conduct ourselves in all situations and what our priorities in life should be. The sayings are attributed to various rabbis who were active in the early years of the first millennium. For example, Rabbi Hillel, who lived at roughly the same time as Jesus Christ (100 BCE – 10 CE), taught:

If I am not for me, who will be for me?
If I only care for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?¹

So, what does this mean and what can we take from it to protect and enhance our spiritual life?

If I am not for me, who will be for me?
If I am not concerned about my spiritual well-being, then who will be concerned on my behalf? The Master has given me the guidelines and initiation. He’s provided the road map, the goal, and a loving “push.” Now I have to prioritize my meditation and my seva and live a life in accord with the Master’s teachings. No one else will do this for me.

We have to be vigilant all our lives – both in adhering to our meditation as well as with our lifestyle. We have to overcome the tendency to become overly self-absorbed and focus on all our priorities – meditation, family responsibilities, work, seva, and living a positive life. Sometimes satsangis worry they are becoming too selfish. Hazur Maharaj Ji had this to say:

Nobody can live in this world without being selfish. Everybody is selfish. So we should also be selfish to find our goal in life. Why are we not selfish in that regard? ... When this human birth is given to us to go back to the Father, and it is a rare opportunity which we don’t get so easily, we should also have that selfish instinct to realize that goal during this span of life.²

On another occasion, Hazur explained:

I feel that the more time we give to meditation, the nearer we are to the Lord and the closer we are to our destination … We are expanding ourselves; from a part, we are becoming the whole. When we merge into the Lord, we become the Lord. And when we become the Lord, we become everybody. I would say that now, as long as we are slaves of the senses, we are self-centred. And we are self-centred as long as we try to fulfil our desires for anything except to merge back into the Lord.

As we go nearer to him, our vision becomes broader and broader, and we belong to more and more people. We come to love more of humanity as we go nearer to the Lord. When we love him, we automatically love his creation, and then we belong to everybody. When we belong to him who belongs to everybody, we then also belong to everybody.

It is a very wrong conception to think that our meditation will lead us to selfishness. What is selfishness? To think about yourself? Everybody thinks about himself or herself…. But when we start our devotion to the Lord, when we are going nearer to our home, we are rather getting out of this selfishness. We are then coming into the whole; our vision becomes much broader and we know that we belong to everybody. We then realize that we were attaching ourselves unnecessarily to a few, and that when we belong to the Lord, who belongs to everybody, we also belong to everybody. I think we are getting rid of selfishness by our devotion to the Lord.³

If I only care for myself, what am I?
We need to be balanced. If I am only concerned about myself, as Rabbi Hillel taught, then I am not even a human being. The Masters have always emphasized that we need to be compassionate and loving towards everyone. If someone is in need of help, we should extend ourselves as much as we can. This principle was demonstrated recently by the stupendous efforts of sevadars at Dera and all around India, who fed and sheltered thousands of migrant workers in India who were stranded during the lockdowns. They also rendered medical help and isolation shelters as necessary. This effort is an extension of the medical relief efforts of Radha Soami Satsang in normal times throughout India.

Caring for others as one cares for oneself is a reflection of becoming one with the Lord, and thereby with his creation, with all living beings. Great Master wrote about the importance of compassion for all and quoted Guru Nanak:

He only can understand this compassion who considers all living beings as his own self. One can reach this stage only by dying while living. Guru Nanak Sahib says such a man receives honours at the door of the Lord. This stage is easily reached by one who dies while alive.⁴

O Nanak! All glory to him.
He recognizes himself in all beings.⁵

In a question-and-answer session, Hazur Maharaj Ji expanded on what it means to feel connected with all living beings, not only human beings.

You have to be a good citizen, good friend, good brother, good father, good husband – kind, loving to everybody, helpful to society. That doesn’t mean you are attached to them. To have a sympathetic heart is very different from attachment. If you are driving and see a dog that has been hit by a car, you just stop the car. You take so much pity on the dog that you even shed tears, seeing him in such a pitiable condition. That doesn’t mean you are attached to the dog. You don’t know the dog at all. It is only having a loving heart, a compassionate heart, which is bleeding for the dog…. It’s a question of attitude. You must have a kind and loving heart, a sympathetic and helpful heart.⁶

If not now, when?
Of course, this is what the Master always tells us – not to procrastinate. There is no tomorrow. If we need to make changes in our behavior, in our values, in our attitude, the time to do it is now. That is how we can live in the present, in the Master’s presence. People often asked Hazur if they could be assured of going back to the Lord in four lives. He would say:

Why limit ourselves? Why think about four lives? Why not try to do it in one life? We should do our best to achieve our destination in one lifetime. If we do not succeed in this life, the Lord will give us another life, and two or three more if necessary, but the assurance is there that when we are trying sincerely to meet him, we will definitely meet him, and every life will be better and more conducive to our spiritual progress than the previous one.⁷

We should only think that this is our last life and we must go back to the Father. We should never console ourselves that we have sufficient opportunity in the future. That is the wrong concept. This is the time when we have to become one with him.⁸

Hazur chided the questioner:

Why think of coming back at all? Make best use of this life. Whatever you want to achieve next time, try to achieve now! You are taking a chance in assuming you’ll be a human next time, but now you are sure you are human, so make use of your human birth now.⁹

The Master’s message is always consistent. Let us now look at what Great Master wrote to a western disciple.

The first essential thing, therefore, is to enter this laboratory within ourselves, by bringing our scattered attention inside of the eye focus. This is a slow process. But we are not justified in saying that we cannot do it, or that it is impossible, or that it is useless. Here is a worthy pursuit for the application of our critical and other faculties. If we cannot control and subdue our thoughts, arising within us, who else will? It is our job and we must do it; and we must do it now, in this very lifetime … ¹⁰

So, the answer is clear – there is only now!

Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), Babylonian Talmud, 1:14
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 590
Ibid, # 589
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 3, p. 235
Guru Nanak, Adi Granth (M 1, Sidh Gosht, 940–17); in Ibid, p. 235
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, # 366
Ibid, # 599
Ibid, # 600
Ibid, # 602
Spiritual Gems, #157

Karma Made Simple, Our Fate is the Sum Total of our Stupidity Download | Print

Karma Made Simple
Our Fate is the Sum Total of our Stupidity

The subject of karma generates lots of questions and intellectual discussion. Perhaps this is because we have trouble accepting the simple cold hard reality of the law of karma and reincarnation. In fact, however, the law of karma is quite simple and easy to understand. The way to deal with the impact of karma on our life is also simple and easy to understand.

The things that cause us to cry in this life are the fruition of our past actions or karma. In a nutshell, we commit actions, actions have consequences, and the consequences become our karma. The Bible tells us that “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”¹ We come into this life to pay off the karmas from previous lives, yet while doing so we go on committing deeds that result in increasing our karmic debt. We wonder, why me, what did I do to deserve this? Our life brings tears, but they are tears of our own making.

In the movie called A Man Called Ove, Ove says, “Your fate is the sum total of your stupidity.” This is perhaps the simplest and most straightforward definition of karma. Humans in general are unaware of the laws of karma and commit foolish acts, not understanding the cost of doing these things. While we have this vague idea of “what goes around, comes around,” most are unaware of the law of karma and its consequences.

If you go to a department store to pay off your debts, you often find that the payment department is on the top floor, all the way in the back somewhere. As we pass through the department store to pay down our debt, we have to walk through all the departments and we see all kinds of things to buy, and we end up leaving the store with more debt than when we arrived. What makes things worse is that we buy things in the karma shop without even knowing the price of the item. In life, generally, we do not buy anything without knowing the price. Yet we commit actions without knowing the dire cost. Hazur once said, to paraphrase, if you knew the price, you would not do these things. This is the plight that keeps us in the wheel of birth and death.

We each have a great store of karma. When we come into this life, we are assigned an allotment, so to speak, of karmas to go through in this lifetime. This allotment is only part of our great storehouse of karma; thus many more lifetimes will be required to go through it all. To make matters worse, we foolishly commit new actions which add to the load.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh explains the law of karma in these simple terms:

Whatever we have sown in the past, we have come now to reap that portion allotted to this life. Whatever we cannot go through from what we have sown in the past is thrown into our reserve store of karmas. So that portion allotted to this life has become our fate karma. That is our destiny. We have to go through it. Whatever we are sowing now, whatever karmas we are performing now, that will become our destiny in the next birth. And whatever we cannot go through in that next birth will be added to our store of karma.²

The saints come to wake us up! They tell us that the purpose of human life is to achieve God-realization. They explain the law of karma and tell us how to break free of its chains. They change our fate from the sum total of our stupidity to the sum total of our spiritual practice. As we listen to the saints we have an “uh oh” moment. We realize the predicament we are in. Our impulse is to race to the microphone and ask the Master for forgiveness for our actions. His response, sadly, is that we have to pay for our actions. The Masters are not here to take our confession and forgive our sins; rather, they are here to show us the way out of our karmic predicament. Recently the Master, to paraphrase, explained that your karma will not get erased just by your asking. It will only get erased by Shabd practice – listening to the Shabd.

The saints give us a simple two-part formula to break the chains of karma and reincarnation. If we understand and do these two things listed below, we will not only resolve all our questions about karma, but we will solve the problem of karma itself. These two things are:

Stop doing Stupid so as to reduce our sum-total. Do only those things that will take us closer to the Lord. Follow the first three vows taken at the time of initiation. We agree to be vegetarian, to abstain from alcohol and drugs, and to live a moral life – being honest in all our dealings and abstaining from sex out of wedlock. One might think that taking these vows is sacrificing something. But no, it is just giving up the things that cause our suffering. If the vows mandated that you stop hitting your toes with a hammer, stop eating poison, and stop poking out your eyes, you would easily see the benefit. Following the vows we take at initiation reduces our suffering by an exponentially greater amount.
Start Doing Smart – Contact the Shabd – Practice simran and bhajan as prescribed by the Master. Follow the fourth vow taken at the time of initiation, which is to meditate for 2.5 hours each day. This is doing smart. In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur tells us: “Without initiation, without spiritual practice, nobody can get release from birth and death.”³

In simple terms, Shabd is the antidote for karma, it is the cleanser of karma, its power is the only thing that can destroy our store of karma. We can obtain the Shabd, Nam, only through the practice of meditation, done with devotion, attention, and love. We do not overcome our faults so that we can do meditation. We do meditation to overcome our faults. In Spiritual Perspectives, Hazur explains:

You have to fight for your own karmas. You have to do your meditation to get rid of those karmas. You can’t just have the idea that Master has taken those karmas and I can be absolutely free now. That’s a wrong concept. You see, if a soldier is equipped to fight the enemy, he has to fight the enemy.⁴

So all we need to know about karma is this: Follow the vows taken at initiation. This is the formula for success. This is how the Master has equipped the soldier to win the battle.

Bible, Galations 6:7
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. I, #65
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. I, #68
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. I, #541

Come, Let Us Meet Love in an Instant Download | Print

Come, Let Us Meet Love in an Instant

Good morning, this is God! I will be handling all of your problems today.
I will not need your help. So, have a good day!¹

Yes indeed, a good day, as Baba Ji daily invites all of us to build a relationship with the Lord and never let go of his hand. If we enjoy our time with him, we will be building a relationship with the Lord!

The die has been cast and the invitation has been sent for a relationship with the Lord! Let us take his hand! Let us go and greet him on the field of his Love where we can commune with him in an instant.

It is said that the language of mystics is Love and they come fully embodied as love. Mystics say, “The path of love is therefore the highest, so much so that God himself is Love.”² Yes, “God is Love,”³ and “Love is the most powerful and effective of all practices to meet the Lord. It is the only method by which one can attain communion with him in an instant.”⁴ In an instant, no less!

And why not? We have been endlessly drifting in the ocean of his Love! And so, for all of us, his Love is life itself! Like Rumi, how our soul longs to be free and to belong exclusively to the emperor of souls intoxicated by love.

“True love cannot come without the Master.”⁵ Love is the consciousness of all mystics. Presently, we have a limited knowledge of this Love-consciousness, but when we read the words of the mystics or when we are in the Master’s presence, we are ever so eager to learn more about this palpable essence. There is a familiarity – a resonance – which strikes a chord deep within us and which enlivens us with hope! And we start to get a glimpse of a spiritual reality through those beings who embody the elixir of Love. They advise us: “The essence of all paths to God-realization is love. It is the most powerful and the sublimest of all paths. The seeker will never reach his destination without love within him.”⁶

Dare we even think of the possibility of loving him? What are our possibilities? “Love is beyond all limits.”⁷ How can we mere mortals love the Limitless? “Love permeates every pore of the lover.”⁸ And yet, what do we know of love? How do we love the Infinite? How to reach the Sublime? How do we love God? How do we make that leap? How do we even start?

It is easy! We can do it! It is a small leap plus a small portion of the love that we can muster. We can start small and it will build on its own, for Love is a dynamic force. Love is self-generating. Love is an experience felt as it surrounds and embraces us in a cocoon of love.

If our hearts are touched and softened by dear loved ones, a pet, or a beautiful sunset, it means we are not devoid of love. We can channelize that energy of love – no matter in what portion – channelize it directly to the eye center and sit in that loving space with Master, as our inner smile softens and soothes us ever so sweetly. That is enough magic to make it happen! It is very simple and very effective. We do have love! If we desire to meet him on the field of his Love, love is our means to bypass all other systems and meet him in an instant. We can be an active participant with Love in our meditation. As Baba Ji has told us, it’s wonderful if we enjoy the time that we spend building a relationship with the Lord.

“There is only one God and we are all expressions of his love.”⁹ Our conscious attention is our love. In Philosophy of the Masters, Great Master defines our soul as “conscious attention.” And so, that means love is the key to everything! Love can bypass the mind! The mind cannot conquer the mind, but love can cut through it like a knife through butter. The mind has no defense when faced with love. That is why Master is so powerful. His whole being is Love! He is that weapon – the weapon of Love! Even if we could multiply Love by infinity and take it to the depths of forever, we would still barely have a glimpse of the Love spiritual masters have for the Lord.

Huzur Maharaj Ji said, “Meditation creates love. It strengthens love. It deepens love. It grows love. Ultimately, it illuminates you and it makes you God. That’s all meditation.”¹⁰

We do not have the words to convey the love Master has for us. I don’t even know if we have the depth of understanding to realize what that love is. And if we could even understand just a small portion of the depth of his love, then perhaps, perhaps we may have an inkling of the debt of gratitude that we owe to him.

But we can start small, as he says – we should build a relationship with the Lord and never let go of His hand. We have a daily invitation to meet with the emissary of Love. Let us give our love to the one who already owns our very breath and our precious moments. Let us sit in our daily meditation with those loving simple instructions to build a relationship with the Lord and never let go of His hand. So come, let us meet love in an instant!

Joyce Meyer, Good morning, this is God…, Faithwords: Hachette Book Group, 2003
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 172
The Bible, John 4:16
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 174
Message Divine, p. 100
Ibid, p. 99
Ibid, p. 99
Ibid, p. 99
www.rssb.org, homepage
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, #146

Seeking Divine Presence Download | Print

Seeking Divine Presence

During these times of Covid-19 we are asked to socially distance, wear a mask, wash our hands, and self-isolate as much as possible. Many of us experience fear, isolation, uncertainty, and confusion. And we miss having the Master’s darshan, either from not being able to visit the Dera or from not having the Master visit us. So let us look at this from a different perspective and see if we can have a deeper understanding of our real situation.

Are we not already distant from everyone? How many ways do we remain separated, and what separates us? Are not our very thoughts a separation? We divide everything. Good and bad, right and wrong, pretty and ugly, smart and dumb. Have we not always worn a mask? Do we not put forth what we are not? Are not our personality, desires, and opinions a mask? Do we live an honest, pure life? Or do we hide many things from others? Would we be embarrassed if others could see our thoughts? Are we not a mask personified? We are told to wash our hands to prevent infection. But have we washed our minds to purify what already is infected? We have the most virulent virus already within us: ego. Is there a way to wash the mind? We feel isolated now – have we not been isolated our whole lives? Separation has been our condition from our first breath. We are isolated from our true self! We do not know who we are. How isolated can one become?

All veils are nothing but one veil. There is none but that one, and that veil is this existence.¹

The saints tell us that from the highest perspective, from the Lord’s perspective, all is good. Whatever the Lord does is for our good. We are told by the Master that we humans are the most destructive creatures on the planet. The world needs a reset, a slowdown, a pause. We are forced to turn inwards, examine ourselves, and hopefully reset our values, our perspectives, and our purpose.

Goethe said, “Noble be man, helpful and good.”² Baba Ji has said: Be a good human being and spirituality will naturally follow. This should mean not just in our interactions with others, but in our interactions on every level with the entire creation; from the soil on the ground to the sky above, and everything and everyone between. What brings us to this condition as we now live? Perhaps it can be summed up like this: we seek our happiness where it can never be found.

Oh, while you seek resolution
Of your difficulties, you die.
Oh, you are born in union,
Yet, in separation, you die.
Oh, you sit by the lip of the sea,
Yet thirsty, you fall asleep.
Oh, you sit on a treasure,
Yet in poverty, you die!³

Our attention is outward. Our seeking is outward. Our love is outward. Why? Because we believe our happiness will be found outward. We also seek spirituality outside of ourselves. We are deaf and blind with the veil of worldly love. We miss the world as it was before Covid. But do we miss the Beloved? For a lover, is not separation what enhances the longing? And in longing, does not everything else weaken?

Only thinking of the Beloved attracts the heart so that the world feels weak and insipid.⁴

If we believe that happiness is found in our relations, our jobs, our country, then we are placing our hopes in self-created illusions! Our loves and desires are not born from our intellect. They are born over ages of numberless forms and lives. Just in this single lifetime we have been so colored by the parents who gave us birth, the country in which we were born, the schools we attend, the friends we associate with, and so many other factors. And add to that the impressions left on the mind from so many past lives – we are seeking the false from the false. Like thinking that the desert mirage will abate our thirst, we chase the illusion, thinking it will give us happiness. By being absorbed in the world and all its allurements, we have lost all awareness of who we truly are. We have become the veil! We are the obstacle. We live in maya and are enslaved servants of the mind. How can anyone, of themselves, free themselves from such ignorance and servitude to the world?

Until such a one who knows the way home, knows the ins and outs of the world and its illusions, and has the power that transcends the world comes to rescue us, there is no way out. Only the Satguru has the power to rescue us. Guru Nanak says:

Of the million aspects of your wisdom,
Not one will accompany you in the hereafter.
How then to become true?
How then to rend the veil of falsehood?
By walking in his will, O Nanak,
In step with the writ of destiny.⁵

The veil the saints refer to is a wall of illusion separating us from the soul. If we are born in illusion, live in illusion, and are separated from Truth, how can we know what or how to tear down this wall? Our very thinking is all illusion. We are utterly, completely immersed in illusion. So, Guru Nanak asks the important question, “How then to become true? How then to rend the veil of falsehood?” So the only way a follower of falsehood can remove the wall of illusion is to follow the One who is Truth. In other words, change your loyalty from the mind to the Lord. But we don’t know the Lord. He is behind the veil.

How does one become a devotee of the Lord? By the grace of the Lord, he is personified in the form of the Guru who comes to us personifying the qualities of the Lord at the human level, to give us the method by which we can rend the veil of falsehood. The command and answer to the question of how to rend the veil is “By walking in his will…in step with the writ of destiny.”

The word used by Nanak for will is hukam. This word hukam firstly means will. It is the Lord’s law, process, plan, and method. It is his Command. Secondly, it means the dynamic power of God which creates and enlivens and sustains the creation. It is the power through which the soul returns to the Creator. Thirdly, the saints use the words hukam, Shabd, Nam, Name, and God synonymously. Thus the seeker – soiled, ignorant, lost, blind and deaf to the Lord’s will or hukam directly – follows the command or will of the Guru, the one who is one with the Shabd or hukam. It is the Guru’s will that the devotee follow “in step with the writ of destiny.” While going through one’s destiny, fulfilling all the devotee’s obligations, duties, debits, and credits, he walks the path of life in the command of the Master. By following the instructions, by turning his mind from the world and absorbing his mind in the Guru and eventually in the Shabd, or Sound Current, he slowly awakens, and what was always within him – he begins to realize it within himself.

How can we achieve our objective? We come to the Master filled with so many concepts of the teachings. We are all at different stages along the way. We have different backgrounds and bring all our baggage with us. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes is adjusting the teachings to our way of thinking. As one saint said, by trying to take a shortcut, we miss the goal, which was in our sights, by a thousand miles.

Because we have become used to the world, comfortable in our suffering, we are like a frog put in water that is being slowly heated, but the frog does not know it will die from the hot water – so we, too, do not realize how short life is and what a treasure we have within reach! For a bird to fly, it needs two wings. On this path, the two wings are the Master and the disciple. The Master will do his part. But the second wing is the effort of the disciple. We are asked to sit quietly, repeat the Names, listen to the Sound, and hold our attention at the eye center. For ages upon ages we have done the opposite. Our attention has run down and out into the world.

To change course, at first, appears hard. And it may be hard. We want to rely on the Master entirely. But that means that we don’t want to do anything and instead wait for the Master to do everything. His command, our seva, is to do what the Master asks of us. We take his command as the most important task in life. Don’t follow the mind! Follow the Master. It is that simple, no matter what. If the mind puts up a fight, strike back. We follow the Guru, not the mind. As the saint Tulsi Sahib of Hathras in the Ratan Sagar said:

Enter this battlefield with the grace of the Satguru.
With this grace that descends from your original home,
Charge forward and attack, O friend.
Do not retreat or move away till you have achieved
victory in the battlefield, O friend!⁶

As Tulsi says: Capture your mind and all its companions – in other words – control your thoughts and senses. At initiation, every satsangi is taught how to do just that. The result will be that a mind filled with vices and passions becomes transformed into a mind filled with virtues like refined discrimination, discipline, truth, and contentment. Follow the orders of the Guru and you will be freed from everything connected to the body and mind. Then you will be attached to the inner sky and you will begin to hear the melody of Shabd. Tulsi says beautifully in another shabd:

When this majestic mind becomes absorbed in the Divine,
the soul will merge into the Lord.
When the attention is fixed on the Sound
emanating from the inner sky,
the soul will arrive at the door to Satlok,
adorned in bridal finery.
Tulsi says: With great fervour did I make this journey –
My soul merged into Shabd.⁷

We have seen the suffering of the world. The Master says the panacea of all ills is Nam-bhakti. There is no pleasure equal to devotion and love for the Lord. Only in the face of the Guru do we get a glimpse of the divine in this world. Till we awaken the spirituality within us, we cannot find spirituality outside of us. When we make the effort, we experience the closeness of the divine.

The Master never changes his message. He always says through meditation we will fulfill the purpose of our life. As Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to his future successor, Great Master Sawan Singh Ji:

At work or moving about or sitting around, keep your thoughts fixed in simran all the time; always from everyone, and from you, at all times simran is accepted at the court of Hazur. Listen to the Shabd-dhun and remember that whether or not your mind is in it, or scarcely feels for it, your effort at all times will be acceptable.⁸

There will always be trouble in the world. Whether in this time or in past times, the world may physically change, but the mind is always the same. Until we accept the Guru’s teaching, surrender our body and mind to the Master, and make an effort to be good disciples to the best of our ability and circumstances, we will not achieve our goal of happiness. Whether we call it happiness, peace, or contentment, we will only find it within ourselves with the grace of the Lord. Do not get lost in the chaos or falsehood of the world. Mirdad said, “Speech is at best an honest lie.”⁹ Whatever the world has to offer, it will not give us what we really seek.

There are two paths before us: the path of the mind and the path of love, which is the path of the Masters. There is no joy comparable to surrendering and following sincerely with all our heart the path of the Master. No matter how weak we feel, or how little we have done in the past, or how far we have strayed, or how we fail, always remember, we may be zero, but with Master being One, we are always a Ten as He is always with us!

Try it. Try being with him as you walk, as you work, as you cook. Be with him when you are happy, when you are sad, when you are lonely, and when you are inspired. He is never absent. We are absent. Do the work as if the Master is right there with you, watching you do your simran or listening to the Sound. Watch over the mind as an observer and not as a participant. Watch how it reacts, watch how it behaves, watch how it is attracted to the world, or to the Master. Watch how it feels when you are kind, when you are angry, when you are scared. Watch the mind, knowing that Master is also watching your mind. He does not judge. He only wants the best for you. It is your actions that bring more and more grace upon you.

You cannot imagine how your world changes as your mind changes. You be the commander. You control the mind. Never say “I can’t.” You can – for one simple reason: the Master is within you. That means unlimited strength to follow him and not the mind. It just takes a little practice to get some results. Then you will have experience – step by step. This is the most rewarding path to follow. Make your life worthy of the grace you have received by having been given the highest form in the creation, the human form. Everything is now possible. The Guru has come from the highest region and has given you Nam. He is protecting you, pulling you, teaching you, and loving you. Be still and be receptive. You will feel His presence. Baba Ji has said numerous times:

Spirituality is the awareness of the constant presence of the Divine.

This is our Treasure. Claim it now. He has given us the greatest gift and every one of us now has the capacity to achieve our highest aspirations. Don’t let the mind get in the way.

Shams-e Tabrizi said:

You must be so zealous and so hot in your seeking that, if your ardour reaches anyone, he too will join you…¹⁰

The path we are on is simple. Keep it simple. Don’t get lost in the machinations of the mind. The Master says the path can be followed by a five-year old or an eighty-year old! This means it is very simple. Our questions, our analyses won’t take us far. What can a five-year old understand? But a five-year old can put into practice the orders of the Master! We can repeat the sacred words. We can listen to or for the Sound. What makes it difficult? Our habits, our attachments, our desires, our mind! A child doesn’t discriminate like we do. The Master says, give a child a diamond or a plain piece of glass and he will accept it as the same. The gift is precious because of who is giving it, not what the gift is made of. Take your “self” out of the way, says the Master. Tulsi Sahib says:

In satsang the unfathomable secret is revealed;
the soul cleans its binoculars in preparation
for its journey.
Renouncing the ways of the mind it gazes within;
when this practice matures,
the soul is brought up to the (inner) shore, the third eye.
It longs to soar high in the sky
and yearns to behold him night and day –
in this way the soul remains connected within,
amassing the wealth needed to reach
the Beloved’s abode.
Tulsi says: It is only through personal experience
that I have gained this insight – the soul
that truly loves her beloved Husband
attains her goal.¹¹

This poem reveals the essence of our association with the Master and our detached effort in meditation. We meditate in accordance with the instructions of the Master. But we should not assume we are succeeding or failing based upon our efforts (such as, by putting in five hours I should see results). There is no scale we can use to determine our progress. That is entirely in the hands of the Master. And Tulsi is saying the meditation creates a deep yearning, a longing that becomes love. Our practice creates the connection within, which matures into experience. Whatever we do to remember the Master and the Lord – whatever meditation we do, seva we do, reading we do, satsangs we attend – these are amassing the wealth needed to reach the Beloved’s abode.

Maharaj Charan Singh Ji used to say everything happens automatically. Make the effort, do the work, and everything happens automatically. Let go of all your thinking, all your planning, and trust the Lord and the Master. If you fail at every step, it means you are trying, making the effort. Trust Him! He knows what he is doing. Become like a child in matters of the path.

Let us turn to Tulsi again.

When the soul toils to attune itself to the Shabd,
surat and nirat are awakened,
and the true Shabd manifests.¹²

Listen to his message. He says what Baba Ji says today. It is our effort that is in our hands. It is our effort that counts. It is our effort that makes the bird fly with two wings. We cannot awaken the seeing and hearing capacity of the Light and Sound. But by our effort, our practice, something happens beyond our understanding. Automatically, when the time is ripe, the soul’s power of seeing and hearing is awakened. Without the effort, nothing ripens, nothing is awakened. Therefore, our effort is a key that we should never neglect.

Let us go to Tulsi one more time:

When the mind, this restless bee, attends satsang,
all its vices and passions are eliminated.
When a sweet-maker makes jalebi (a sweet), he dips it in syrup –
It absorbs and soaks up the syrup.
So also when the nectar of the saint’s company
is absorbed by the mind,
its negative tendencies are dispelled.¹³

In the time of Covid, when we miss the physical company of the Master, always remember that Soami Ji said there is no difference between the inner and outer Master. We are always in the company of the Master in meditation, whether we see him or not. As a commentator of Tulsi Sahib said succinctly: “Spiritual knowledge begins through external satsang, and one achieves the true realization of that knowledge though internal satsang.”

You are never alone, and being initiated, it is within your reach. To repeat Baba Ji’s statement:

Spirituality is the awareness of the constant presence of the Divine.

Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 142
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Das Göttliche (The Divine)
Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 130 (quoting Attar)
Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 131
Jap Ji: A Perspective, pp. 99–100
Tulsi Sahib, p. 163
Ibid
Maharaj Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, p. 35
The Book of Mirdad, p. 68
Shams-e Tabrizi, p. 303
Tulsi Sahib, p. 120
Ibid, p. 121
Ibid, p. 121

A Bright Sun Has Dawned Download | Print

A Bright Sun Has Dawned

When responding to our questions, Baba Ji reassures us again and again that the Lord loves everyone, gives love in equal measure, and does not take away from one to give to another. Saints and mystics of all times, of all religions and faiths, come to remind us of the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of Man: one Father, and we are all his children, regardless of our race, gender, nationality, religion, or status in society – one spiritual family.

As seekers longing for God’s love ourselves, we may ask, why is it that in our experience “divine love” remains a rather abstract quality, an elusive goal? Why is it not a constant tangible presence in our life? Are we applying ourselves correctly to our quest?

In a letter to a disciple, the Great Master explains:

You are right when you say that to concentrate on an attribute or abstract quality, such as love, is a little too intangible. Let your friend seek the substance of which love is the attribute. The attribute does not exist without the substance. The substance lies behind the attribute. The Sound Current is the substance and love is its attribute. This current is present in all of us. When the current is grasped, the attribute – love – comes with it.

Your sorrow over your inability to come here is also bhajan. Never mind the distance. When the desire to come here is in you, you are here with me. Satguru is always present with you in Shabd Form. He sees, he knows and responds.¹

From the Shabd masters or satgurus of the Surat Shabd Yoga path we learn that Shabd or sound current is the emanation of the Lord in this creation. All of creation and all beings in it resonate with its divine sound. This sublime resonance is the originator of all life in this world. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly being guided by God’s love through that luminous resounding energy within. It sustains us, and without it we wouldn’t be alive. The masters say that through the Shabd, the Lord projects himself in the creation and is constantly calling all his beloved souls to return to him.

God’s Nam as Love cannot be separate or be severed from him, so the Shabd masters are God-realized, having surrendered and blended their being in the love of God through the practice of the Name. They take birth and live among us, as the tangible, corporeal true Friend we can relate to. They come as a trusted and beloved guide to show by their own example that we have the potential to develop our soul power through which we, too, can aspire to God-realization by attuning ourselves to the Shabd and awakening love for God within.

Limitless and infinite is the power of the soul. Is it not a drop from the limitless and infinite Ocean – the Almighty God?²

To cover an emptiness within or a dry spell in our meditation, we may pursue recreation and new experiences to give us a diversion and satisfaction for the mind. Before long, the latest innovation, discovery, or breaking news captures our attention and entices us again, but never finds lasting peace of mind. Baba Ji has often said that Hell is a heart on fire, while Heaven is a contented heart.

As seekers on the spiritual path, we have the opportunity to avail ourselves of the experience of an expert guide who not only lays down the path for us but is always by our side to protect us from the pitfalls on the way. If we choose to accept our Master’s advice and learn from him, we need not go through obsolete lessons and experiences that do not benefit a spiritual life. Why re-invent the wheel? As Hazur Maharaj Ji says: “Either we want to experience, to learn the lesson, or we can take advantage of the lessons of the mystics.” ³

A rendering of one of Kabir’s poems follows below:

I wandered out into the world
And was amazed at what I saw,
For I beheld all humanity burning
Each in its own blaze of passions.
But I could not find the One
Who would give me refuge – the One
Who could lead me from this inferno
To a place of safety….

O Lord so merciful, I pray with folded hands
That you grant me the joy
Of the company of your servants –
That through your limitless mercy
You lead me in humility to their holy feet.⁴

In her book Adventure of Faith, the author describes the pain of longing for a personal experience of the Lord.

Whosoever reads the words of mystics about their intense longing may heave a deep sigh and confess not feeling such a strong desire for God themselves. But the moving and inspiring words from the mystics can create a painful awareness that this desire is lacking. This deep pain is precisely the pre-condition for stepping on to the spiritual path, because it creates in the seeker’s heart that empty space in which the Lord can kindle the spark of true longing for him. To nourish this desire for the longing of God within and not seek consolation in worldly things – is essential for walking the spiritual path. Seekers of God can trust that the Lord will kindle a spark for Him in their hearts and that, if it is nourished, this spark will develop in a blazing fire of love.⁵

To begin with, the spiritual path is about learning to go through life with a contented heart and becoming aware of our role and responsibility on the spiritual path. Here, we are reminded that for every effort we make, the Master supports us with an abundance of kindness, consideration, and love. He constantly empowers and reassures us that he has full confidence in us, that there is no reason why we couldn’t succeed in attaining our spiritual goal. All our efforts in trying to live as a good human being, live the Sant Mat way of life, together with our sincere efforts in meditation as instructed by the Master, serve to facilitate the ascent of mind and soul in the spiritual realms.

Attending to the meditation practice as instructed by the Master will result in calming the restless waves of the mind. The saints underline the significance of the moment, be it only an instant, when we will be able to be truly still within. Soami Ji wrote:

No one can describe the glory of the moment when the mind is still and the soul is in a state of complete absorption.⁶

And Shams-e Tabrizi wrote of the same exhilarating moment:

Yes, even though one moment is a short time, yet a moment spent with God is an eternal moment.⁷

It is said that humility is the “adornment of the Saints,” who speak from personal experience when they advise us to approach our meditation with reverence and humility. They say that the full extent of the glory of the Shabd can only be discerned by the soul. Through the Master’s grace, the soul rediscovers its soul power and in loving devotion submits its humble supplication before the Supreme Being. It is our responsibility to nourish this longing and be receptive to our Master’s love within our heart. By gradually weaning ourselves away from unnecessary outside activities, into the stillness of meditation, we learn to patiently wait for his grace. The biblical prophet Jeremiah sang of faithfully waiting for the blessing of the Lord’s presence:

The grace of the Lord has not ceased,
and his compassion does not fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul;
therefore I will hope in him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that a man should quietly hope
for the salvation of the Lord.⁸

When faced with a challenge or difficult task in the world, we believe in and rely on our knowledge and acquired skills so that we may overcome the difficulty and bring about a positive outcome. Having a spiritual master by our side, we can draw on our devotion and faith in him to preserve our meditation practice or when we lack the strength to overcome a weakness on the spiritual path. Hazur explains how to preserve and strengthen our faith:

How can we deepen our faith? By meditation. Meditation will strengthen your love, strengthen your faith, strengthen your devotion. Your roots will go very deep, and then nobody will be able to shake you from the path.⁹

The Great Master consoles us:

When we are away from the Master and the satsang, the world imperceptibly impresses itself on us so much that, in spite of our regularly giving time to simran and Nam, we often begin to feel discouraged, dry, and desolate. In such a state, faith and love are our support; and if faith is firm, the Master responds. He is always with us – within us – watches as a mother watches her child. So long as we are on this side of the focus, we do not see him working. But he is doing his duty.

Your worries and cares are Master’s worries and cares. Leave them to him to deal with. Having become carefree, your business is to cultivate his love. He is not going to let you drift. You will go up.¹⁰

The Master’s written and spoken instructions motivate us to action. By practicing devoted and attentive meditation, as instructed by him with all our heart, we begin to enjoy the sweetness of the inner serenity and tranquility. Like a weary traveller finding respite in a welcoming refuge after traversing strange and treacherous terrain, the mind finds poise and equanimity during its retreat in silent remembrance or repetition on the Name. Here again, the role of the Master is vital as he guides and supports each disciple throughout the inner journey. To the extent that the mind becomes firmly established in inner concentration, it releases its stronghold on the soul, permitting the soul to partake of the ‘Nectar-Name’.

Softly fall the showers of the Nectar-Name,
And through the grace of the Master
I see my Beloved Lord.¹¹

All is accomplished by the grace of our Satguru who shelters us with compassion and patience and who sustains us with his love. He guides and encourages us to never let go of our meditation practice. We may look upon the meditation practice with some apprehension, as a difficult and tedious task requiring great effort – or with a contented heart – as the ‘lifeline’ it is, and a precious opportunity to be cherished with profound gratitude. As Maharaj Sawan Singh wrote to a disciple:

When your love for the Master exceeds your love for yourself and the I-ness has been replaced by “Thou-ness,” the form of the Guru will make its appearance visible within.¹²

And Soami Ji expressed the glory of the inner realization.

Your radiant face has brought such light
to the darkness of my heart
that it would put to shame
thousands of suns and moons in the sky.¹³

In One Being One the author writes:

So, to find Him (the divine Beloved) is the eternal quest, the only journey worth travelling with all our heart and soul. To remain seekers until the journey’s end. Never to give up, to remain positive, to let go of despondency and negativity, and become aware of the One… He is never apart from His creation. He is always there, within every little being, every soul. It can never be said enough, never lived enough. He is in the present moment, right now. He is within. He is without. Whenever the mind is quiet, we will find Him in our being. He is the “wind beneath our wings” He is not what we think; He is what we are.¹⁴

Only by attending to simran and bhajan can we gain the personal experience of the love of God within our very own being. Union with the Divine is attained by worship of the Name with the help of a master, a God-realized soul. This is the ancient and timeless message of all saints and mystics: To this day the living Shabd master of the time encourages us to understand and practice this form of true worship of the Lord and devote ourselves wholeheartedly to it.

By awakening to the thundering strains of the Anahad Shabd within, I have pleased my Master, my supreme Guru. A bright sun has dawned and the flame of the moon lights me within.¹⁵

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 189
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, 9th ed., 1994; “Spiritual Bouquet” #50, p.202
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, # 61
Isaac Ezekiel, Kabir, The Great Mystic, “The Quest,” pp.171 & 175
Shraddha Liertz, Adventure of Faith, p. 481
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry p. 233
Farida Maleki, Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s Perfect Teacher, p. 119
Bible, Lamentations 3:22–26, as quoted in The Mystic Heart of Judaism, p. 97
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, # 182
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 117 pp. 172-173
Guru Ram Das, in Adi Granth, p.442, quoted in Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, p. 396.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #47
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 245
John Davidson, One Being One, pp. 177-178
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 233

Water Seeks Its Own Level Download | Print

Water Seeks Its Own Level

Maharaj Charan Singh visited the United States in 1970 and did not return for the remaining twenty years of his tenure. So, before Baba Ji graced us with his first visit, disciples had to function without the physical companionship and shelter of the Master. The books were there; our fellow travelers gave talks at meetings; but meditation was the only substantive way to truly understand his message.

Our true nature and the equilibrium of our spiritual practice emerged during this long absence. There were times when we felt pulled apart, times we were high or low, and times we arrived at equilibrium. At every level and in every way, through our trajectory of work and contemplation, we remained true to our nature, and the Lord, too, remained true to his own nature. After time, only One purified whole remains. Over many years and in every state of being, the promise of unity that is conveyed in the teachings of the saints proved essential to maintain spiritual discipline when devotees felt abandoned to their own devices.

Often it is remarked that "water seeks its own level" when someone desires to express the inevitable consequence of natural character in human affairs. Despite every obstacle, whether from mountain, rock, or plains, water finds its way to the lowest available point and there establishes a perfectly level equilibrium.

Hermeticism refers to a Hellenic mystical philosophy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who was most likely a composite of several historical figures who wrote anonymously to express the simple but controversial truth that nothing is excluded from divine law:

What is below is like that which is above; and what is above is like that which is below: to accomplish the miracle of one thing.¹

These writings of Hermes state, as has also been said by other mystic adepts, that “the world is one, the soul is one, God is One."² Years must be spent in contemplation to understand the notion that if a teaching or ideology is based on dualism and contains any absolute differentiation, it cannot be true. One is the only absolute. What remains to be resolved in nature and human life is whether people’s equilibrium rests in their identity with God or somewhere isolated and separated into the surround of contending elements. We can find hope in these ancient teachings because they understood that the elements operate in equilibrium by divine law. They also assumed what modern philosophy has forgotten, that human equilibrium also depends on conformity with divine law.

…the Lord has built this body as a temple for his residence.³
_{Maharaj Charan Singh}

Inside the human body is where we find the Lord. In this journey over the long run of a human life, every choice and action, whether positive or negative and for or against the common good, has a consequence. The shape of a person's character does clarify with time. Social misperceptions drop away and truth is revealed. Objective analysis suggests that regardless of every obstacle, water will arrive at its destination. Whether obstacles arise from class, culture, knowledge, poverty or wealth, and despite applause or rejection from the world, character will be known, and with good character equilibrium will be achieved. A spiritual identity, then, can be achieved and appreciated by any human being. The verdicts of pop culture, gossip, trend, fashion, glamour, orthodoxy, political parties, and authority are false, but our destiny is certain and firmly based on our own actions and their consequences.

At every moment in time, a person's true nature shows in a smile or a frown, in laughter or fear, in kindness or cruelty, or in selfless service or self-assertion. All potential good and evil compresses into each individual human form. The macrocosm is in the microcosm. Nothing is left out or left to chance. How our virtues play out in time is just a question of character, choices, actions, and the resulting equilibrium or disintegration. Human life is a learning experience.

The fundamental questions, then, are resolved by what we do. But why do we ask questions when all the answers are obvious and well established by custom: Who am I? What do I stand for? What do I believe? What should I do? Simply stated, these questions arise because they are the only ones that give private leverage on the otherwise overwhelming tide of conditioning and circumstance. The individual is swimming in an ocean filled with unforeseeable rip tides and storms. These are the only questions that allow people to widen their private perspective in order to intuit where they and the swirling currents are headed. But to see the big picture accurately requires a suspension both of programmed conformity and emotional reactions to circumstances. Reflexive analysis, patience, and a pause before acting are the first steps towards spiritual maturity and equilibrium. If people do what they do because their character requires it or because they are tending to the yearning of the soul, that signals the end of doubt, compulsion, and addiction.

The pandemic has forced these basic questions out into the open from behind the screen of social appearances. Nevertheless, a private truth can only be realized through contemplation. But who has the time in a culture of nanoseconds and fragments to ask fundamental questions? Contemplation is a lost art in the digital world that now can barely be recovered. Who is willing to risk disconnect and social rejection by the whole world on Facebook or Snapchat, or martyrdom, by setting aside time from thousands of obligations for private contemplation and introspection? Who is willing to risk an encounter with silence, with emptiness, nothingness, and a private, desperate yearning? And who willingly stares down an overwhelming terror of inner darkness, ultimately foreshadowing death, sourced by this pandemic somewhere in the unknowable tidal forces that govern the body in its world?

Contemplation teaches that only by applying a trained, concentrated, inward gaze can people suspend their cultural history, religion, schooling, parents, business and military decorum, geographical and agricultural assumptions. Contemplation with focus leads to awareness of our unique equilibrium, just as with water. Yet, to face our questions is to courageously face our lack of answers, our uncertainty and emptiness. Something then shifts. Serious questions help a seeker to move around the outer edifice of schooled knowledge to find the secret gate where the waters of life and wisdom flow.

A contemplative and wide view of humanity has been forced upon us by the pandemic, and first and foremost it presents itself as an overwhelming tide of human suffering. From this vantage a person can no longer avoid the facts of genocide, mass warfare, chemical poisons, racial injustice, human exploitation, and most fundamentally the abyss of human ignorance and irrationality. Surely, we can do better. Were these conditions truthfully acknowledged as though residing within oneself, the wider question must follow: What is the purpose of all this depressing struggle, chaos, and madness in human life? Such a fundamental question drives the contemplative mind back to the study of first principles and essentials and the study of the origins of life itself. Is life a good thing or a bad thing? What is my fundamental connection to life? What is the nature of life? Again, what is my essential nature, good or evil or beyond? If wisdom can arise from contemplation, then clearly, the answer will not arrive in a nanosecond to a distracted and irresolute mind. This is why character and determination are needed in order to achieve an ongoing equilibrium between the opposing traits that define who we are.

On the path of contemplation, many counterintuitive paradoxes confront the contemplative mind. All thinkers have to explain to themselves certain incongruities such as: good actions can have bad outcomes; painful experiences can produce wisdom; all life ends in death; unbelievers can be wiser and kinder than believers; innocent believers and children can at times be more in touch with truth than adult scientists; poor people are more likely to share than rich people; people celebrate the unalloyed misery of war more than they celebrate peace; "progress" destroys nature; life lives on life; immoral people rise to prominence and yet can be redeemed while the good languish; and a nonconformist may be better equipped to save a society in crisis.

Another such paradox is that the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic, by forcing sequestration and exposing everyone to themselves, has widened a feeling of shared human purpose. The epidemic has obligated everyone to exercise some degree of contemplation. Many people have rediscovered the importance of family. Many have realized how precious and precarious human life is. The crisis showed exactly who was an essential worker. Mutual interdependence and necessity shredded the myth of individual freedom and the notion that only the wealthy should be given first consideration under policy and law. Many people have stepped up and discovered the joy of service and giving, which has connected them to these re-emerging warm feelings for shared humanity. Those who stepped forward to support life had no time to waste tearing down other people with different and more-limited perspectives. They glimpsed the abyss into which water will flow when cultures spin out of equilibrium.

The worldwide pandemic also has challenged spiritual seekers to become a little bit more honest with themselves. Everyone is vulnerable, nobody is special. Like everyone else they have been asked to be more disciplined, to wear masks, to keep social distancing, and to be aware of the needs of their neighbors. Have these simple changes in behavior been easy to do? Many have been forced into greater social isolation. Has that been a welcome change or a source of discouragement? They have had extra time on their hands. How have they used the time? Did they discover a treasure trove of creative thinking or spiritual wealth, or feel restless and bored? How random or organized was their day without the usual professional constraints? Some have been thrust into poverty or displaced from their homes. Did they respond with courage or fear, faith or doubt? Some have been forced to work in dangerous environments for the good of others. How encumbered was their selflessness? The answers to these questions have been instructive, but the pandemic also has opened the door to an even more fundamental wisdom.

The spiritual teachings and methods of contemplation offered by the Radha Soami path have an esoteric side manifested by the economic, social, and political crisis of 2020. What a person says matters and what a person does matters more. For many years the seekers of truth have been blessed with support from gatherings and lectures by like-minded practitioners. Those who stayed within the orbit of those meetings, like other good Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs around them, became habituated to acting in certain ways. They greeted each other with certain greetings. They behaved with a certain decorum. They positioned themselves socially within the group in certain ways. They established an equilibrium that prioritized meetings and community service over other appealing preoccupations.

These activities did support good character and in some cases meditation and an inward focus. But then the pandemic removed most of those outer supports and everyone was able to observe water seeking its own level. The seekers were able to observe how their equilibrium arrived at its natural level or not. Did their attention shift into local politics, economic worries, family conflicts and pleasures, general panic – discouragement from dashed hopes—or did it shift towards inward longing and well-being? How did the seekers manage spiritually without the external supports? How did they remedy the deficit? What steps did the seekers take to better understand themselves? Did their perspective shift to a better understanding of life on earth with all its risks?

A fundamental reason for outer satsang and spiritual instruction offered by an adept like Baba Ji is as stated by all esoteric teachings:

Through the power of association he [Man] has the potential to become whatever he associates with: any entity from God to matter.⁴

Seldom is "association" considered a power because as amazing as is this truth, the alchemy is so ordinary and imperceptible as to seem normal. Yet, this association is a doorway to infinity, though disguised as the doorway to Maharaj Ji's palace. Where is the doorway and in what palace will this association take place? At times it appears as a long hallway filled with doors, only one of which leads to truth. It means that humans can covet, desire, and identify with any entity from God to inanimate objects.

Every day we note the attentive worship by human beings of anything and everything from deities to devils, judges to criminals, politicians, to sports heroes, animals down to dogs, cats, and deep ocean dwellers, plankton, plants, nay even inanimate diamonds and stones. A person becomes similar to those with whom he lives and identifies. The heart opens and closes, is inclusive or exclusive accordingly. Mystics explain the reason for such multifarious identification has to do with the fundamental kinship of all things in the great order of creation:

Divine consciousness reaches down to human beings and is accessible to them through the power of attention.⁵

Human character, therefore, is reflective of the fact that the Lord extended himself throughout the hierarchical order and made all that was made according to divine and physical laws. This is the greatest secret or the most obvious truth, according to our perspective. On this metaphysical basis, the reason for the creation and the rare emergence of this noble human form has to do with a divine mandate that the human being recognize his divine origins and begin associating with the everlasting One. Initiates have been privileged to associate with an enlightened being, but do they share inwardly the virtues of the master? What aspect of the master do they see? Did they realize their eternal kinship or was it just a bit of human chemistry?

Now that the pandemic has limited that outer association with the Master, with satsang meetings and their protective atmosphere and social constraints, seekers may find themselves alone, if they choose to be, with only their memories, choices, and past experiences to guide them. Water seeks its own level. What is the content and form of this tidal experience? What am I made of, really? Where is the seat of my strength and conviction? What is the source of my faith? How bound am I to my cultural heritage or my patriotism? My faith? What has my character and virtue amounted to? What aspect of myself do I associate with? Am I still blaming others for my own ignorance? Do I feel guilty or anxious? Why? How is salvation to be achieved?

Questions follow any separation. But what if initiates choose the principle of unity instead of separation? What if they never allow a moment’s separation from omnipresent truth? Esoteric teachings give people a choice. Seekers can choose to find answers or an end to all questions by remembering the One, the emissaries from the One, and the teachings of the One—and we have so many means to do so. In this practice of “I am nothing,” the Lord is everything. This realization prompts recognition that only the Lord has identity, life and existence. An individual's separate existence in an interdependent world seems more and more just a fiction. Yet, for the disciple, what becomes just as inevitable as the tendency of water to seek its own level is that focused attention on the One brings union and the result is equilibrium.

The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, translated by Dr. Everard, London: George Redway, 1650, p. ix
Asclepius: The Perfect Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus, edited and translated by Clement Salaman, London: Duckworth, 2007, pp. 12-13
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint Matthew, Beas: RSSB, 2003, p. 143
Asclepius, p. 15
Ibid

Seek the Lord – Do It Right Now Download | Print

Seek the Lord – Do It Right Now

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh wrote the following letter to a disciple:

Live a joyous life, fully relaxed and thanking the Lord for the great gift he has conferred upon you. Keep your thoughts in simran and bhajan and see what happiness you will find within yourself. Do not worry about anything in this life, which is all an unpleasant dream. The real life lies beyond, where your master awaits you.¹

Until we met the living master, most of us felt like something was missing in life. We had a hunger, a thirst that couldn’t be filled by anything in the world. When we met the master, we learned that this feeling of emptiness and loneliness is the soul’s longing for the Lord, who is hidden deep within us, just behind the dense forest of our thoughts and the thick wall of our ego. The master taught us that if we want lasting peace and happiness, we must search within ourselves and find the Lord.

We were taught how to meditate; how to unplug the phones of our five senses and turn our attention within. The master attached our consciousness to the audible life stream, the Shabd, the Holy Spirit residing inside us. He taught us that through meditation on the magnetic, ringing radiance of Shabd, our soul merges into it, and is carried on its current back into oneness with the ocean of consciousness, the Lord.

Then we realize that our soul is a drop of that ocean and that we have never been separate from the Lord at all. Mystics call this life a game of hide and seek, an illusion, a play, a dream. But oh how real it seems until we waken from this dream of daily life!

The master makes us take a hard look behind the sunny days of this world, to awaken us to the plight of our soul. He teaches that there are many realms in the hierarchy of creation, and that this physical plane is at the bottom. We live in a transient, restless world that has never known peace. Nations, races, and religions have always been at war with one another. Conflict, strife, and struggles have always been rampant here. Nothing here is permanent. The only thing we can count on is constant change. In time, everything disintegrates and turns to dust in our hands. The people we love can be ripped from our arms at any moment without warning. Nothing and no one here can ever really be ours.

The master teaches us that this world is the home of the body, not the soul. In this world, one being must eat the body of another being to stay alive. Though the entire creation is pulsating with the luminous presence of God, hardly anyone can perceive it. The lower planes are governed by a negative power and we live under the hard law of justice – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – in a world where settling karmic accounts is the only business.

The mind of man is on fire with the five passions of lust, anger, greed, attachment, and vanity, and soul is its helpless prisoner. Mind races through the world, craving pleasure through people, places, and things, but it never satiates its ravenous appetite, never finds lasting peace and happiness. And the cost for its escapades is high. Mind does the crime and soul does the time, as the saying goes. Thrown into debtor’s prison, in prison cell after prison cell of different bodies, soul has no voice, no peace, no hope for freedom.

But in our endless rainy night of exile, the Lord hears the soul’s cry. He sends a living master to rescue his lost souls. This is the greatest turning point in the entire history of our soul. The master initiates us into Shabd, and for the first time, we hear the Voice of the Lord calling us to return to the shores of home. His Voice forms a path of sound and light within us that leads back to him. We actually get to listen to the Voice of God. Can we comprehend what an astonishing thing we are doing? Shabd is God. Each day, we get this rarest of privileges; to enter into a relationship of love with the Shabd Master within.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said:

When you are in meditation, you are with the Master.²

Giving ourselves in meditation pleases the Lord more than anything else we can do in life. All He wants from us is our attention, our love, and for us to come home to him as soon as possible.

He has showered us with grace. He has given us the grace of the human form, the only body through which a soul can return home. He has graced us with longing for him. He has graced us with initiation from the living master, who has placed four sacred circles of protection, our vows, around our souls. The Lord has graced us with the promise of passage home and given us the keys to his kingdom.

There are no greater gifts of grace the Lord can bestow on a soul. Without this grace, the mind would never choose to think of him for even one moment. Without this grace, the soul would have no hope whatsoever to return to him.

The master gives us a new way of life so we can escape the law of karma, the domination of the mind and senses, escape the creation, and grow to become one with the Lord. He gives us everything we need, and free of charge. All he asks of us is to meditate; to get up every morning and make the effort to withdraw our consciousness up to the eye center, the gateway to the inner realms, so we can merge into Shabd and reach back to our destination. Meditation is the journey in consciousness that each one of us must make to free our soul.

It takes effort. But what other option do we have? To endlessly postpone our journey and subject our soul to more suffering? What are we waiting for? If nothing in our millions of past lifetimes has ever brought us permanent peace and happiness in this world, why do we think something will in the future? All masters implore us: Seek the Lord – Do it right now. These golden days of our precious human birth are slipping away. This is not the time to procrastinate. This is the time for action. This is the time for meditation. Someone is calling. It is time to go.

Guru Arjan Dev said:

The One who has sent you to this creation, He is calling you. He is calling, “Come with me. Let’s go back to the Father.” ³

With the immense grace bestowed upon us, there could be no greater tragedy for our soul than for us to live as if we had never received it. To turn our back on Shabd, to love our sleep more than our own soul, to love our pleasures and comfort more than our Creator.

A caterpillar crawls this earth, voraciously eating. But at a specific moment in time, it stops and makes a cocoon around itself. The caterpillar has to be still and wait in the dark. It has to die to what it once was.

In that dark stillness, a miracle takes place as the caterpillar’s cells transform into a totally different being. Soon, he emerges as a beautiful butterfly that only drinks nectar of fragrant flowers and flies above the earth with sunlight on its wings.

We humans also have a special body, divinely designed for our transformation. In the cocoon of meditation, in that dark stillness, a miracle takes place. When we still our body, still our mind, and merge into Shabd, our false ego self dissolves into love and we become another being.

In time, this mind, that has been so miserable running down and out into the world after sense pleasures and objects, falls in love with Shabd, the sweetest of all pleasures. Mind begins to reach inward and upward for more and more nectar of Shabd. It is completely transformed from a garbage-eating crow, from the worst enemy of the soul, to its best friend.

Our soul, an immortal being of pure light, that has been enslaved and imprisoned, forced to crawl the earth in the cage of body after body, is finally set free to return to its real home in the resplendence of pure spirit, the ocean of consciousness.

This is not a path of information. It is a path of transformation. Through meditation on Shabd, through this simple act of love, we grow and we grow to lose our separate identity and become another being. Become the Lord himself.

Think of Shabd like a radio wave. This divine music that flows from the Lord is constantly broadcasting to us, within. He never stops transmitting to us through the audible life stream of Shabd. But we don’t attune our attention to his frequency. We attune our attention to a thousand frequencies of the world. We attune our consciousness to the channel of our own mental chatter. Then we wonder why we feel no love, why we have no peace.

Unless and until this mind is repurposed, turned within and trained in the art of meditation, it will continue to overstuff our consciousness with endless desires, ambitions and activities, projects, plans and pleasures. Its latest addiction is to technology, the virtual world. The internet awaits! Over 1.7 billion websites and counting. Around 547,200 new ones each day. All just a click away. WhatsApp. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. YouTube.

Convenient. Informative. Entertaining. But how many of us squander countless golden hours from our treasure of human birth, hypnotically staring at digital impulses on cell phone, computer, and TV screens. These once-merely convenient devices have become an addiction, something we can’t live without. They have become the negative power’s weapons of mass distraction, ferociously devouring our precious attention, day and night, while we ignore the cries of our soul within, longing for Shabd. For Freedom. For the Lord.

The master has begun awakening us from the dream of daily life. He has told us who we are, where we are, and where we have to go. He has fanned the flames of longing and awakened us to the divine nostalgia. Mind tries to run away, to escape the pain of our awakening awareness of our separation from the Lord, but it can’t outrun the grace of the master. Our time has come.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh often spoke about the effects of our growing love for Shabd – that this emptiness we feel is the Lord preparing us from within for something real to hold on to, preparing us to be one with him. The master used to talk about how we begin to feel the bliss that we belong to someone and someone belongs to us. The vacuum of emptiness and loneliness finally begins to vanish. We begin to feel moments filled with happiness and peace within, for no rhyme or reason.

So why keep running away from love? From the only place we really want to be? What if we could have the courage to turn off our cell phones, computers, TVs, or whatever it is that keeps us away from the Lord? We could then sit in the silence, create a sacred space where we can become conscious of our longing. We could go to bed earlier so we could rise in the early morning and give ourselves to our Beloved in meditation. Not to see Light. Not to make progress. Not to clear karmas, but just to please him, because we love him and miss him, and want to be one with him.

Meditation is love-in-action. Those who are sincere lovers of the Lord never miss their daily time with him in meditation. Day after day, year after year, their burning desire is to reach him. They live normal balanced lives in this world, but their love for him, manifesting as meditation, is the self-luminous diamond shining at the center of their existence. And when they get up from meditation, they stay attuned to that frequency. They light the torch of simran and carry it in their minds through their days and nights. The purifying flame of the holy names burns away all their dark desires and fears. It casts out all the shadows and sorrows of worldly life.

Wherever true lovers are, they fill the atmosphere with the sublime vibration of love. They radiate peace. They cheerfully accept whatever the Lord sends them. They are no longer dependent on the outer circumstances of life for their happiness. They become blissful and intoxicated with joy. They forget themselves and become aware of the Lord.

Through loving simran, we gain access to Shabd. It takes up residence in our consciousness. It floods our being with radiance and bliss. It transforms our mind into a temple of peace and purity. We begin to see the light of the Lord shining everywhere and in everyone. Then it is all love. Then we know we will soon win this game of hide and seek and return home to the Lord.

The Great Master said:

If you wish to be filled with the grace of God, then you should banish all else from your mind. Leave everything else aside and cherish the Name of the Lord alone in your heart. As soon as you empty your mind of all thoughts by means of simran, you will find the way back to the Lord's mansion.⁴

This is the path of love. It is so simple. Mystics tell us that God is love. Shabd is love. The essence of the living master is love. The soul is love. Through the Lord’s grace, through meditation, we give ourselves to Shabd, until we become the Shabd. Until we become the Lord.

These are the strangest of times. The world became sick so they closed it. Everyone is struggling to cope with lockdowns, financial and social restrictions being thrust upon us. The future is unclear. Fear is in the air. But let us try to be of good cheer and see the blessing of these days. Let us take relief in this break from our usual dead run into worldly activities. If these days help to turn us from the world and turn us toward the Lord, these are days of grace. Sacred days.

May we one day look back at this interlude as the days when we began to carry the torch of simran in our hearts. When we stopped thinking – I will meditate tomorrow, when I’m not so busy and tired – and started thinking – Everything in this life can wait, but my journey back to the Lord can’t wait.

May we look back on this time and think – Those were the days when I came in out of the storm and took shelter with my Master, took refuge in Shabd, the great comforter. Those were the days when I put my faith in the Lord and began to breathe breaths of happiness and sighs of relief.

During a talk Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh gave in Pasadena, California, in June 1970, he used the Bible and commented on what Jesus was saying to his disciples:

Do not think that you have selected me as your master; I have chosen you. I have called you and drawn you near me. This was in your destiny. It was so ordained by my Father. It was also destined by my Father that you should bear fruit – that is, that you should make spiritual progress.

I could tell you so much about the beauties of the inner regions and many other wonderful things but I cannot do so now because you are not sufficiently advanced on the path to understand them. So far, I have only given you the gist of my teachings. But I shall always be with you to guide you and I shall explain all these things to you when you reach my radiant form within yourself. When you come to me inside, I will show you things you have never dreamed of and that are beyond the comprehension of the mind….

Until you achieve that goal, your effort may be compared to the anguish of a woman in labor. But your happiness will know no bounds when you meet me within yourself. Then you will absolutely forget all your trials and sorrows. You will be so filled with love, joy and indescribable happiness that there will be no room for anything else. You will not even remember that you were ever sad.⁵

Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, letter #340
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #125
Guru Arjan Dev, quoted in Die to Live, letter #354
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. I, p. 63
Maharaj Charan Singh, transcript of a recorded session in Pasadena, Ca., June 1970

One Fold, One Shepherd Download | Print

One Fold, One Shepherd

And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.¹

In Light on Saint John, Hazur Maharaj Ji beautifully explains the close relationship between the predecessor and his successor. The present Beas Master, Baba Ji, also always points to his Master, Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, when his disciples try to give him credit or show their gratitude for having been initiated or been given seva. As Hazur’s successor, he wholly lives up to the teachings as given and commented on by Hazur, who paraphrased the verse from the Bible as quoted above:

What Christ is saying here is that I am responsible for the initiates of my predecessors – those initiates of theirs who are still in this world and whom I can contact in the flesh. I also bring them into the fold so that they may know me and hear my voice. I will take them under my protection and help them also, and then there shall be one fold and one shepherd.²

The first Master in this Beas line of Masters was Baba Jaimal Singh, who was appointed by Soami Ji Maharaj of Agra to start initiating in Punjab in 1891. In 1903, when Baba Jaimal Singh passed away, the torch of mastership was passed to Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji, known as the Great Master. Maharaj Sawan Singh passed away in 1948 and some of his disciples are still alive. “There is really no difference between the predecessor and his successor,” says Hazur. The real Master is the Shabd or inner Master. The real disciple is the soul, which in essence is the Shabd. So the disciples, too, merge into the Shabd, their Master.

The parable of the sheep and their shepherd contains so much beauty, truth, and comfort. First of all, the Master loves all his disciples equally. There is a silent recognition and joy in realizing the relationship of one’s Master with the successor. Apart from knowing him, there is also hearing his voice – literally – but also at a deeper level, listening to his teachings, getting a better understanding of them, and finally loving them. The depth of the teachings is being absorbed more and more, and one starts living them. The meditative process becomes so much part and parcel of one’s being that any reminder of the Master’s teachings generates a feeling of joy.

The guiding hand of one’s Master is always there; we experience it as the subtle inner guidance we might suddenly become aware of, or when we read or listen to the teachings of his successor. Master’s guiding hand is also a protecting hand. How often does he change a dagger thrust into a pinprick! Living with Master’s presence is truly leading a blessed life. Being part of his sangat and living within its parameters is seeking the protection and refuge of his flock. You won’t and can’t stray too far away from it. You will always hear his “whistle” and come back to that “one fold and one shepherd.”

‘Hearing his whistle’ could be interpreted and experienced in many different ways. It could be a huge wake-up call, like Huzur’s passing away in 1990. His being with us was so much taken for granted, that a knock on the head was needed to realize that everything on this earthly plane is temporary. Meeting and seeing the Master on one of his foreign tours or during a Dera stay can have the same effect, a renewed longing to follow the path. There are so many inspiring books, publications, videos, and magazines, the RSSB website, and not to forget the wonderful Q&A sessions with Baba Ji on YouTube these days – all to remind us of our real mission in life.

Our beloved shepherd’s calling can also be very subtle and intimate. He wants to take us to the next stage or level in our meditation, in order for us to get a deeper understanding and appreciation of doing his work, Master’s work. “Walk with me and work with me,” the present Master will tell us time and again. The reward we’re getting, the wages we’re receiving, are so much more than we deserve. By our own efforts we wouldn’t get anywhere, but what urges us onward is an increasing intensity of love, the reward and wages of our brave but inadequate efforts.

We needn’t have any illusions about our state of being, for so little is needed for us to get distracted, to stray away from the path. We’re all lost sheep, so easily forgetting or neglecting Master’s teachings. We have to be reminded over and over again of our true goal in life. The Master’s infinite love expressed by Huzur in Light on Saint John is a comfort beyond words:

“I lay down my life for the sheep,” He [Christ] says: I am willing to sacrifice anything to save the souls allotted to my care, because my Father wants not a single soul to be lost. I must bring every marked soul back to Him. This is my work. For this He has sent me to your level. I am prepared even to give my life to save them.³

Bible, John 10:16
Light on Saint John, p. 148
Light on Saint John, p. 147

Seva in the Time of Covid Download | Print

Seva in the Time of Covid

In 2020, everything changed. Our old normal disappeared in a heartbeat, and it’s not clear what the new normal is, how long it will last, and when or if we will ever again experience what used to seem normal before the pandemic. We are undergoing the truism that the only constant in life is change.

For many of us, depending on where we live, what we used to know as seva – often done in large groups, working closely together – has vanished. It seems there is still seva being done in India, as we glean from the occasional inspiring videos of Covid-care centres and groups that are chosen to join Baba Ji’s question-answer sessions at the Dera. Also, some centers around the world have been hosting small groups of socially distant sevadars, and some satsangis are fortunate to be working on seva projects that can be done at home. But many of us are aching for seva that circumstances don’t allow us to undertake.

So, the question arises: what is the new seva for us? This is a good time for us to consider what seva really is, and how we do it, regardless of what physical form it takes. Perhaps our understanding of seva needs to deepen.

In the film “Seva of Love,” available on this website, we get a taste of the rich experience of seva throughout the world before the pandemic, covering the origins of the Dera up through the making of the film. The film discusses outward seva, showing various examples of seva involving others, as well as meditation as seva, with views of satsangis sitting in meditation. Various satsangis share their thoughts about the nature of seva, including the idea that seva is done to please the Master.

Hazur addresses this point in Spiritual Perspectives, telling us:

Real seva is meditation – withdrawing your consciousness back to the eye centre and attaching it to the divine light or melody within…. Other sevas are means to that end…. So, every seva pleases the master, and all these sevas will lead you to the real seva. The real seva will help you to go back to the Father.¹

He helps us understand how seva helps us return to the Lord when he explains:

The purpose of seva is to create humility in us, to help us become one with our fellow humans…. It is the ego which separates us from the Father, and we have to eliminate that ego. When we serve the masses, serve the people, then automatically we become humble. That is the real purpose of seva.²

Let us lean more deeply into these words, in an attempt to deepen our understanding of what seva is and how it helps us:

If, as Hazur implies, the manner in which I do seva in my country has the potential to please the Master, whose physical form is in India, what does that tell me? That he is with me always, that physical proximity has no meaning. Perhaps “nearness” is a matter of tuning in to the master within rather than closing physical distance. We are told at initiation that the master takes his seat at our eye centre – but at what level do we understand that? Is it still a concept, or have we actually experienced the profound truth of it?

Now that most of us are cut off from our usual seva activities, such as preparing meals, trimming trees, or sweeping floors, we are thrown back on ourselves, especially if we live alone. How can we use our solitude, our physical distance from the master and other satsangis, and our break from pre-pandemic routines, to strengthen our inner relationship with our master and turn to the real seva of meditation? As a student learns school lessons, so seva can subtly teach us about the reality of the master and our relationship with him.

Could it be that the real value, the vital importance of all those blessed gifts of seva that once occupied as much of our time as we could spare was to prepare us for the inevitable moment when the ever-changing world would suddenly shift and throw us off balance? How strongly and consistently are we turning toward perhaps the only seva left to us: meditation? Viewing our meditation practice as a form of seva might help us to value more highly this time of forced retreat, allowing us the precious opportunity to finally give practical shape to the teachings we purport to follow.

And finally, are we treating the tasks of daily life, including service to others – family, coworkers, community members – as seva that is worthy of pleasing the master? Does this count as seva?

A satsangi asked Hazur that very question, one that so deeply resonates with the present situation we find ourselves in:

Q: Maharaj Ji, in the West, away from the Dera, is there a way that our worldly work can be a form of seva? Is there some approach to our worldly work that you can take to make it like seva?

Hazur responded:

If you keep the Lord and the master in your mind for all twenty-four hours, whatever you do is seva. You don’t bring your ego into whatever you do, you do everything as a duty towards your Father. If the Lord is always in your mind, whatever you do is seva.³

What comforting words! The thought that wherever we are, seva is within our reach as long as we remember the Lord. It can be a lifeline to us in this time of upheaval. It tells us that yes, it is entirely possible for us to continue being sevadars – loving, responsible, humbly serving our fellow humans – as long as we continue our efforts to remember the Lord and sacrifice the ego. And if we lose that orientation, we can always bring ourselves back to it, again and again, as we do with our daily meditation and simran. The choice is ours, every moment of every day.

Just as Baba Ji and his local sevadars are lovingly serving the suffering in India, we can lovingly serve those around us, and because he is always with us, it will give him as much pleasure as when we did seva at our satsang sites. We just need to turn our attention to the one who lives within our eye centre, who is waiting for us to turn toward him. Seva is always available to us, as long as we remember him. As the rabbinic sage Hillel the Elder once said, “If not now, when?”

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #189
Ibid., #192
Ibid., #197

Confronting Nothingness Download | Print

Confronting Nothingness

Just as some children are scared of the dark, mainstream Western thought has historically been scared of the concept of nothingness. The absence of thought, the stillness of matter, seems to be terrifying to Western philosophy. The concept of “zero” has existed in India for almost two millennia and was brought to the West via Arabic algebra – but the use of zero was initially banned by the Christian Church as heretical.

Much later, in the nineteenth century, some maverick European philosophers stumbled upon Buddhism and the Indian Upanishads. One of them, Arthur Schopenhauer, came to the conclusion that stilling our will is the only way in which we will be able to cease our suffering in this world. He argued that the world we see around us is given substance and value by the mind or will. It follows that negating one’s will would cause the universe to dissolve into nothingness. Schopenhauer concludes Volume 1 of his masterwork The World as Will and Representation by declaring that for someone who achieves that state, this “world of ours, with all its suns and milky ways, is – nothing.”

Commenting on this passage, the great 20th century thinker and historian of philosophy, Bertrand Russell, writes: “There is a vague suggestion here that the saint sees something positive [in nothingness] which other men do not see, but there is nowhere a hint as to what this is….”¹ Western thought finds it very difficult to imagine anything positive in nothingness or emptiness. Since emptiness is the absence of everything we can lay our hands and minds upon, there isn’t much left for empirical science or philosophy to work with. Russell quipped that if nothingness is the goal, suicide and drunkenness might be just as good as mystic practice.

Eastern thought is much more positive about the concepts of nothingness and emptiness. In a witty passage, the 2,500-year-old Chinese text, the Daodéjing, points out that nothingness is often the key to positive results:

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes the wheel useful.
Shape clay into a vessel –
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.²

If our goal is to learn, emptiness is a great tool. Empty space is required to hold things. The absence of walls helps us see new things. If we believe that what we know now is not all there is to know, perhaps we should make space for new knowledge?

Writing about a hundred years after Schopenhauer, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned, in his famous book Being and Nothingness, that nothingness was, in fact, logically required for conscious knowledge. All animals think. But maybe only humans think about thinking! We reflect on our thoughts, desires, and goals. But we have to put some distance between ourselves and our thoughts in order to reflect upon them, and this distance is nothingness. This nothingness lets us rise above ourselves and gain focus and perspective. It leads to the unmistakable insight that we are not our thoughts. But, as is typical in the Western tradition, this emptiness was frightening, even repulsive, to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote in his book Being and Nothingness that “nothingness lies coiled at the heart of being, like a worm” and felt that it rendered life pointless and absurd. The result was “nausea.”

By contrast, the Buddha argued that only the journey to nothingness could cure life’s nausea. He said to a disciple:

For the sake of those people stuck in the middle of the river of being, overwhelmed by death and decay, I will tell you where to find solid ground. There is an island, an island which you cannot go beyond. It is a place of nothingness, a place of non-possession and of non-attachment. It is the total end of death and decay, and this is why I call it Nibbæna [i.e. Nirvana, the extinguished, the cool].³

The 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, similarly compares our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and hopes to veils for the real self. And when all the veils are removed there is no-thing underneath.

All veils were rent and my self saw Itself.
That which no tongue could speak was heard by no ear.
Your skin will split from joy when love appears,
but the joy felt when He makes you vanish
is beyond compare.⁴

That secret can conquer the world
when the heart is purified.
Then no one will die in No-Place.⁵

So both Eastern and Western philosophers agree that nothingness is part of the human experience. And we have seen that in the East, whether in the Chinese, Indian or Islamic classical traditions, the norm is to assign positive value to nothingness, while in mainstream Western philosophy, we tend to find the opposite view. So who is right? Whom should we believe? It is a very Western notion that, faced with two opposite points of view, one should conduct an experiment to determine the truth. We should not accept anything not experienced for ourselves. Who has the pedigree to guide us to conduct such an experiment? In the recent Jewish Hasidic tradition, the master, holy man, or “tsadik”…

…was understood as simultaneously embodying the opposites of Being (yesh) and Nothingness (ayin) – two important kabbalistic concepts adopted by Hasidism. His body is Being – it has substance and is physical – while he actually is Nothing, without substance; he exists in the divine eternity, in the realm of spirit.⁶

The suggestion is that there are Masters who have access to both Being and Nothingness, who are able to explain the technique that will allow us to gain experience of the “divine eternity.” Indeed, Maharaj Sawan Singh, in the 20th century, said:

Saints’ foremost argument is “Come with us and see.” Few are ready for it. So the saints come down to the intellectual plane of men and talk to them in their terms. By their superior intellect, they give people’s beliefs a little shake up and make them think afresh. Slowly and slowly they bring them up to the point of experimentation. They give Initiation, and the experiment begins.⁷

In many ways a living saint is like a walking argument, convincing us to travel the mystic road. If we encounter such a saint, we might feel that he or she has something – some quality, majesty, serenity or love – that we would like to imbibe. And saints tend to say that we should practice emptying our minds in order to reach such a state. Baba Gurinder Singh Ji, the present teacher at Beas, is no exception. He says that we have a neglected spiritual dimension and that we can strengthen that dimension through the practice and experience of stillness. That practice will also make us more content, more serene, more efficient, and more giving in everything that we do.

This encouragement and guidance from a modern authority is crucial, as practicing stillness and emptiness requires a lot of effort and commitment, and we need to have some confidence that the effort is worthwhile. But ultimately it is our own experience which will give us true faith in the Master’s words and true bliss from emptiness.

If a fact has been stated by some reliable authority in the past, one can believe it. If some modern authority (Guru) supports it, the belief becomes firmer. When the same fact has become one’s personal experience, the element of doubt that always accompanies belief disappears, and what was fact to modern and past authorities is a fact to him also. The value of authority or belief to a believer lies in making an experiment on the lines recommended by authorities, and testing this belief. If the result comes out to be as expected, the belief becomes a fact to the experimenter.⁸

The first essential thing, therefore, is to enter this laboratory within ourselves, by bringing our scattered attention inside the eye focus… There are many ways of doing this; but from experience, Saints find that “repetition” called “simran,” done in the manner explained at the time of Initiation, is the best and most effective way, as well as the simplest way.⁹

To extrapolate from Maharaj Sawan Singh, all the beautiful poetry and talk from the Guru about nothingness is pointless unless we take action to make our own journey into nothingness. Mystics sometimes compare themselves to mutes, trying to explain the taste of sweets. It can’t be done, but the way they describe the futility is nevertheless most encouraging:

No one can describe the glory of the moment when the mind is still and the soul is in a state of complete absorption.¹⁰

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2008, p. 787
Lao Tsu: Tao te Ching, ch. 11, tr. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English
https://www.dhammatalks.net/Books9/Ajahn_Passano_Amaro_The_Island.pdf, p. xvi
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Divān-e Shams-e Tabrizi (Selections), tr. Maleki, p. 171
Ibid, p. 341
Miriam Caravella, The Mystic Heart of Judaism, p. 421
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #116
Ibid
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, #157
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 233

Language of Love Download | Print

Language of Love

Our topic today is love. Love is such a short word, easy to say and yet impossible to describe fully. In the present times we’ve forgotten the real meaning and true depth of this word. Just as oil is present in every part of an olive, similarly love is present in every part of the creation. Words cannot fully describe the flavour of an orange; you have to taste the fruit to know its flavour.

Many of us wouldn’t think it necessary to analyze what love is. We commonly recognize love as a feeling we have for our family, relatives, friends, and others to whom we are strongly attached, but there is much more to real love than that.

The Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, Anthony de Mello, says in his book, The Way to Love:

Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is, here and now … that you can truly love them. … the most painful act the human being can perform, the act that he dreads the most, is the act of seeing. It is in that act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is love.¹

I once read a beautiful article on learning the language of love. In it, a man narrates the following story: “When I was in university, I took a class in linguistics, the study of language. One day the professor asked, ‘What is the most important element that determines success, in learning of a foreign language?’” This is a question we might ask ourselves also, since in our spiritual quest, we too are trying to learn a foreign language: the language of love.

However, the language of love is not a foreign language. It’s our “mother tongue,” but we’ve completely forgotten it. Instead, we’ve become fluent in the language of the mind. The greatest struggle of our lives is to relearn our mother tongue and become fluent again. Now, we may ask what are the similarities between relearning the language of love and learning a foreign language?

In the linguistics class some students offered several opinions. “Finding a good teacher,” one student suggested. “Total immersion: living where the language is spoken,” said another. “Being born with natural language skills,” the next student suggested. The professor responded: “A good teacher, although this is very important, is not the most important factor.” Similarly, Masters often reminds us that having a spiritual master will not do us any good unless we follow – and practice – the lessons he gives us.

The professor also agreed that living in a place where one can be immersed in the language we are trying to learn does help. This is similar to when we return from a visit to Dera; many of us think that if we could just live there and spend time with our Master, in a place saturated in love, maybe then we could become proficient in the language. Living in place may help, but it’s not everything.

What about having a natural ability? Some are born with a talent for learning languages easily. Do some people have an instinct for love, a special talent for it, which others do not? Masters say we all have the capacity to love. It’s only that we’ve lost touch with this pure instinct, due to living in the land of the mind. Love isn’t something we lack; it’s something that is our very essence. The professor then said that natural ability also is not the most important factor.

Since none of the first guesses were correct, another student asked, “How about practicing regularly and persistently? Is that the key?” The professor now smiled and said, “Yes, learning and practice.” Just by listening to lectures or reading books, we will not learn; we learn by doing. As disciples, in order to learn the language of love, we must practice; we must meditate regularly.

Now we may think, so what is it that makes us do the practice? The most important element that determines our success is motivation. Mother Teresa says in her book Where There is Love, There is God: “It is not how much you have given, but how much love you put in the doing…”² Maybe you only know how to peel potatoes, but you must peel potatoes beautifully. That is your “love for God in action.”³

As normal human beings we have no control over love. When we fall in love, we truly fall. We plunge deeply, head over heels, with such intensity and velocity, that we push aside all obstacles in our way.

One of Albert Einstein’s best-known quotes is: “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.”⁴ Love is another force – a force more powerful than gravity – that tugs at our soul from deep within. Falling in love is so simple that it just happens to us. In that state of intoxication, we often make promises of lifelong commitments to our lovers. In such a state, many of us have promised our beloved Master that we will meditate for two and a half hours every day. How are we to cope when the love that once fuelled us starts to feel like a distant emotion? When falling in love was effortless, why is staying in love such a challenge? The truth is that falling in love was a divine gift, whereas staying in love requires sincere effort and hard work on our part.

This brings us back to the learning of a new language, in our case the language of love. The best news is that learning the language of love is very different from learning a worldly language; we’re not judged by the results. Master constantly reminds us that it doesn’t matter what the results are – we’re judged solely by our obedience and our attendance. He only sees our effort, however weak, however minute it may be. Are we present or are we absent in our daily meditation? He never asks us for perfection. All he says is – just do it; just do it.

We read in The Book of Mirdad: “Love is not a virtue. Love is a necessity; more so than bread and water; more so than light and air.”⁵ We are taught that air, light, water and food are essential for survival, but only for the body. What about food for the soul? Well, the food for the soul is love. The only way to feed the soul is through prayer and meditation. We have all heard the expression “love in action.” As disciples who are initiated by a true Master, there is only one form of love, which is doing our meditation. That is the only gift we can give our Master; that is our “love in action.”

As we grow on the spiritual path, many of us have the desire to serve the Master. Wanting to serve the Master sincerely means living in obedience to his will. It is when we carry this attitude to please him at all times that we show him the depth of our commitment to the path. Masters constantly remind us that meditation is the medication; it is our life-support system. It is through meditation that we earn the Lord’s grace to burn the load of karmas that stand in the way between him and us. A story is told to illustrate this:

Two birds were sitting on top of a tree, observing a baby turtle. The turtle struggled to climb up to a branch and then jumped off, flapping its four little feet madly and crashing to the ground. Once again, the poor turtle struggled to climb up the tree, then jumped off and crashed to the ground.

The birds saw the turtle do this a third time and a fourth time. Finally the one bird turned to the other and said, “I think we need to tell him that he’s not a bird.” What can we learn from this story? The first point is that we do not know our true nature. We try to find happiness in this world, we try to fit in, we leap into the mire of lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride. We make the same mistakes over and over.

The second point is that saints are sent by the Lord to adopt us as their own, to make us aware of our true divine nature. They tell us we are spiritual beings and take us into their spiritual family.⁶

In a letter to a disciple, Maharaj Charan Singh wrote: “Initiation is not just some ceremony. The Lord has made you his own. He has chosen you for eternal liberation and wishes you to come back to him… now it is time to show your gratitude to him, by doing your bhajan and simran every day, with love and devotion.” So here Hazur tells us that the Lord has made us as his own self! He has adopted us. Are we taking this great gift lightly? Do we understand the responsibility the Master has taken for us? Are we in return grateful and aware of this precious opportunity?

Hazur Maharaj Ji is quoted in the book Legacy of Love:

Love means obedience. Love means submission. Love means losing your identity to become another being. That is love.⁷

What do we understand from this quote? Love means merging into the beloved and becoming one with him. Our attention directs itself solely on the Beloved – not out of force but out of helplessness. Love entails living our lives for him and making choices that will lead us to him. It is consciously being with him throughout the day, while doing our daily activities and then looking forward to being with him alone in solitude. It is yearning for him, longing for him so much that the soul loses itself in him.

A few lines from Amir Khusrau, the beloved 13th–14th century Sufi saint, will inspire us:

I have become you, and you me,
I am the body, you soul;
So that no one can say hereafter
That you are someone, and me someone else.

O Khusrau, the river of love
Runs in strange directions.
One who jumps into it drowns,
And one who drowns, gets across.⁸

Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love, Meditations for Life, New York: Crown Publishing, 1992, pp. 97, 99
Mother Teresa, Where There is Love, There is God, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk, New York: Doubleday, 2010, p. 26
Ibid
Albert Einstein, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, ed. Alice Calaprice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 440
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad, Great Britain: Element Books Unlimited, 1992, p. 62
Story retold in satsang “I Love You”; www.rssb.org, Satsangs & Essays #42
Legacy of Love, Beas: RSSB, 2000, p. 525
Amir Khusrau, The Writings Of Amir Khusrau: 700 years after the prophet: a 13th–14th century legend of Indian-Subcontinent, ed. Habibuddin Ahmed; Islamic Thought and Science Institute, 2007, Forest Park, Ill. (no p.#). See also: Amir Khusrau, In the Bazaar of Love, tr. P. Losensky & Sunil Sharma, Penguin, 2011

Can You See Me Now? Download | Print

Can You See Me Now?

On a recent Saturday morning, my local sangat received word that we were invited to a live video Q&A session with Baba Ji, to be held at the regional Science of the Soul Study Center. I was overjoyed by the news, but the timing was unfortunate, as we were in the middle of an unusual gasoline shortage affecting this area of the country. About 60–70 percent of all gas stations in the state where the Center was located were out of gasoline.

Luckily, I had just filled my tank, and I knew that a full tank would get me to the Center. I was ready to drive five hours for zoom darshan! Wait, is zoom darshan a thing? As I threw some toiletries and snacks into my bag, I felt Baba Ji’s presence – not in my soul (where, we’re told, his shabd form resides), not at Dera, not wherever he happened to be geographically (or spiritually), but in the state of North Carolina, where the video session was to be held. That is a geographic state, my friends, not the state of my soul. Whatever. He was in the worldwide web and so was I, and we were going to connect there, via a video screen an afternoon’s drive away, me dragging my poor neglected soul along like a filth-encrusted jewel in a battered suitcase.

Speeding down the highway, I wondered if I was crazy. I was traveling nearly 300 miles (480 km), with an uncertain ability to refill my gas tank so that I could return home, just to sit in a room with a few hundred other people to watch a digital projection of Baba Ji. Sure, it would be a big screen, but his body would be elsewhere. Did that count as darshan? And what about the ride home? What if I couldn’t refill my gas tank? What if I ran out of gas somewhere on the highway?

To heck with it. God would provide – or not. This was an invitation to sit with the guru in a live chat, and I didn’t plan on missing it. I felt as if I was going to see Baba Ji in person, and, as it turned out, I was.

If Jesus Christ could distribute enough food – the proverbial loaves and fishes – for a multitude on a hillside 2,000 years ago, Baba Ji could manage to make himself available to a few hundred people while he was sitting in his own room thousands of miles away.

I arrived at my hotel safely, with half a tank of gas to spare. The next morning, lo and behold, the gas station across the street was stocked with plenty of gas. I know we’re not supposed to tell miracle stories; so this is not a miracle story! Nor is it a miracle that eager, overjoyed sevadars had gathered at the Center at a day’s notice to organize our video chat with the guru. On our entry into the hall, sevadars ensured that we were all masked and checked those of us with vaccination cards; ushers led us to our seats; and, most important, techies orchestrated the true miracle (even though this isn’t a miracle story): a live internet connection between us and Baba Ji, wherever he was.

Suddenly he popped up on the two large video monitors suspended from the ceiling. He looked, well, adorable. Am I allowed to say that? He seemed to have a little bit of that questioning, fumbling look that people of a certain age get when clicking onto a technically challenging video call. It was endearing. And so was the huge exercise machine looming above his left shoulder, and the tiny black-and-white photo of Hazur over his right, way in the background.

We were definitely looking at Baba Ji himself. He was animated. I’m calling it – it felt like darshan; it looked like darshan; it seemed like darshan; it was darshan – zoom darshan. So intimate, so personal, and yet we were separated by several thousand miles. But surely our souls are not separated; time and space are illusions, mental concepts. Now we are connected not only mystically with our satguru inside, but on the worldwide web of love and unity pulsing through cyberspace. If shabd imbues everything in this creation, surely shabd can manage to permeate the internet.

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But now, a day later, I know that yesterday I sat in the presence of our Baba Ji. It wasn’t imaginary, it wasn’t “just” his image on a video screen – he was with us. He wanted it to happen, and we wanted it to happen. He orchestrated the sevadars to initiate the connection, and he responded, clicking the right link (to us), thereby closing the circle. Suddenly he appeared before us, an apparent miracle of the cyber age. Most striking of all was that it seemed perfectly normal. We asked him questions, and he answered them. As he gazed at each questioner and each of them gazed at him, the rest of us got to gaze at him too. He answered every question with his customary love, attentiveness, insight, and charm, but his words were really not the point.

This was the first satsang most of us had attended in more than a year. Sitting together after the trauma and difficulty of the past year was a treat in itself, but to have living, breathing Baba Ji there with us was … well, it was really cool. Words can’t describe what it’s like to be with our master inside or outside, whether that “outside” is in time or space or some other dimension.

An old satsangi friend liked to call Hazur Maharaj Ji “the modern mystic saint of Beas.” Hazur certainly was a saint of a new age and was the first one in the Radha Soami line of masters to travel throughout the world. What then is Baba Ji? The post-modern mystic saint of cyberspace? Masters come to teach their disciples in every era, and they deliver their teachings appropriate to the time and place in which they live. Their seva is to deliver the teachings of all saints, from every time and place. Nothing can stop them from doing their seva of encouraging us to do our meditation and be good human beings. Not a pandemic of a deadly virus, not a gas shortage, not our own limited beliefs about who the master is, what he does, or how he does it.

The worldwide web has no borders. Baba Ji wants us eventually to graduate from outside space, where time and geography reign, to inside space, where we will be merged forever with his Shabd form and no time exists. In the meantime, cyberspace seems a happy medium, a liminal space where illness, weather conditions, and gas shortages do not prevent us from connecting with our Master with the click of a link. Our post-modern mystic of cyberspace is using the tools at hand to urge us toward our ultimate connection, where no links or video screens – or gasoline – are necessary.

Struggle Makes Us Strong Download | Print

Struggle Makes Us Strong

Once upon a time, there was a farmer who took good care of his land. However, he was frustrated because no matter how much effort he put into growing his crops, their success depended on the amount of rain that fell that season, or whether there was a hurricane, drought, or infestation of locusts. He became so frustrated that he went to the Lord and told him that he, the Lord, was doing a terrible job of managing the world. He told God that he should be ashamed of himself for planning so badly. He told him that there was unnecessary suffering in the world and it was all God’s fault. The farmer then said, but if you listen to my advice, at least no one in your creation would need to suffer from hunger.

He then told the Lord that if he would guarantee a year without extreme weather and enough sun and rain, then he, the farmer, would guarantee that hunger would disappear and people would have enough to eat. The Lord said no. He said, “Live in my will.” The farmer argued and argued, and finally the Lord agreed to allow one year with ideal circumstances for growing. The farmer said that he would work hard to fulfill his part of the bargain.

It was the most perfect year. The weather was beautiful, there was just enough rain and there were no extremes of heat or frost. The farmer worked hard and his crops thrived. They looked healthy and fruitful with the wheat golden and tall. So again, he went to the Lord and told him that the harvest would be bountiful. He said that there would be enough grain for ten years of bread and that no one would go hungry.

God said, “Show me.” The farmer then cut a stalk of wheat and opened a sheath to show the Lord the goodness that was inside. But the kernel was small and wrinkled and half the size of a normal one. The farmer was stunned. He exclaimed, “How could this happen?” God then said that because there were no challenging or adverse circumstances, the wheat did not have to struggle to survive. It became weak instead of strong, pretty on the outside but stunted on the inside.

We are like that kernel of wheat. We need challenging circumstances in life in order to grow and mature. If life is too easy, we become lazy and complacent. Mistakes and suffering are our bad weather and scorching sun. They give us the necessary experiences that help us to understand who we are. The pain we feel from challenging karmas is what makes us better human beings. If our life were too easy, then we would expect that life would always be this way, uneventful and smooth. Then, when something challenging would happen, we would not have the strength to adjust to the event. Even worse, we would be shocked when we have to face ill health or when a loved one dies. We would not have the maturity and perspective gained from adjusting to the storms of life.

A friend once said that he became the positive adult that he is now because of the death of his brother when he was eleven years old. His brother suffered greatly and his death was a release from that suffering. It was also the most painful experience of my friend’s life. However, he is also grateful, as it set him on the journey that led him to become a satsangi. He wanted to understand why there was so much suffering in the world. His answers and comfort came from the teachings and the Master.

By accepting his brother’s death he took baby steps in learning to live in God’s will, in accepting the bad weather of life. Every one of us needs challenges in order to find our inner strength. Positivity and hope come from accepting that everything that happens to us in life is for our good. There are no good karmas or bad karmas. The karmic continuum is a constant opportunity to learn and mature. We realize that life is filled with difficulties and that acceptance of these shifts in karma, whether challenging or easy, brings us contentment and balance in any situation life throws at us. We realize everything that happens is inevitable and are all gifts from him. These gifts are opportunities to grow, opportunities to mature. No karma is a punishment. It is the result of actions from the past, nothing more and nothing less.

The Lord has only our best interest at heart. He is all love. His love manifests inside us as the support and strength we experience during the storms of our karmic drama. We realize the proof of the teachings by staying even-keeled and contented in the midst of difficult circumstances. The Master is at the heart of our teachings. He gives us strength. In his Shabd form he is the power of love inside us. He is encouragement, grace, and love.

The farmer had it wrong. He thought he could change the fundamental order of life, the cycle of pleasure and suffering. He felt he knew what we needed, that he knew our needs better than God. However, he learned that the divine plan is one that slowly but steadily brings us closer to eternal joy. We need disappointments and challenges in order to realize that the foundation of the creation is hope and love. Life is perfect as it is. There is no need to be angry or frustrated with our circumstances. Our circumstances give us the perfect opportunity to learn and mature.

Now we can relax and enjoy the journey. Living in His will doesn’t have to be a challenge or an exercise in discipline. It can be a joy, a pleasure.

What If…. Download | Print

What If….

What if I get sick
What if I lose my job
What if …. What if ….

Much of our time is spent in running myriads of such scenarios through our mind that could seem to have significant impact on our daily life. We also find ourselves dwelling on the negative events and experiences throughout our day more than the positive ones. For example, we tend to focus more on unpleasant remarks or comments made by someone, rather than compliments received. Researchers have concluded that the negative experiences and events tend to have stronger impact on our brain than positive ones. In other words, our view of the world tends to be largely negative. They have called it the “Negativity Bias.”¹ Additionally, the more time we spend thinking about the negative events and experiences, the more likely we are to commit them to memory, which explains why they tend to linger in our memory longer than positive experiences. Not only does this rob us of the opportunity to enjoy (and live) in the present but also sends us spiraling down into the abyss of negativity from where it becomes difficult to extract ourselves. This may even lead to physiological and pathological manifestations, affecting our overall physical and mental well-being.

So, if we are naturally wired toward negativity, thinking positively evidently seems like an uphill task. The good news is we can train our mind and brain to think and act positively. Although there are an infinite number of things around us to be fearful, anxious, and sad about, the truth is that there are also an infinite number of things to feel joyful, excited, and grateful about. It's up to us to decide where we want to focus our attention. Hazur Maharaj Ji often said that it is just as easy to think positively as it is to think negatively. It all depends on our attitude. So:

What if…. I think positive
What if…. I become a better human being
What if…. I realize my inherent true potential and realize who I truly am.

Imagine the possibilities!

And these possibilities can become reality by developing the most powerful force in the universe… Love. How would developing love within ourselves make them a reality? Hazur says:

When you are in love, when you are happy within yourself, you’ll find happiness everywhere, even in a little pebble. You’re just dancing – when you’re dancing inside, you’re dancing outside. Everybody you come across looks lovely to you. Everybody looks like a very fine person to you because you are very fine within yourself, you are very lovely, very devotional within yourself. When we develop that love, that power within ourselves, then wherever we look, wherever we go, we find the same Lord, the same power within every one of us. Then the illusion of this world doesn’t bother us at all. Being in the world, we’re not of the world. We’re in our own love, we’re in our own devotion for the Lord. Then this world doesn’t affect us at all. But to develop that detachment, we have to know that this world is an illusion and not be tempted by it.²

However, he also makes it very clear that the dawn of realizing that this world is an illusion doesn’t mean that we withdraw from it as if it doesn’t matter anymore. In fact, he encourages us to adopt an even more kind and compassionate attitude towards it.

If you have a kind heart, a loving heart, you are kind to everybody, you are loving to everybody, you are helpful to everybody. When you are kind and loving and helpful to everybody, you are not attached to any particular person – this has become your nature. We have to develop that. It happens automatically if we are filled with love and devotion for the Father. Then all such qualities come like cream on milk. You don’t have to strive for them; they become part and parcel of you, because then you see the Lord in everyone. You are humble before everyone, loving to everyone, because then what you see is the Lord – not a particular person, but the Lord who is residing in everyone.³

Saints have been encouraging us to know that the divine power that is accessible to all of us within is eager to help us succeed on this path of Love and potentially transform our attitude from negative to positive, with resolve and determination. From “what if….” to:

“I can….”

Wikipedia.org “Negativity Bias”
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III # 490
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III # 500

Appointment with Death Download | Print

Appointment with Death

There is a well known and ancient tale that illustrates the bracing truth that we can never escape our destiny. The story first appears in the Jewish Talmud, written in Babylonia (Mesopotamia) about 1500 years ago. It also appears in Muslim Sufi literature. Called “When Death Came to Baghdad,” the story was included in the collected tales of Al-Fuḍayl ibn ʻIyāḍ, who was a ninth-century reformed bandit, turned Sufi sage. Today it comes down to us through the writings of the Sufi teacher Idries Shah, in his Tales of the Dervishes.¹ Some details change from version to version but it’s the same story; just the location and names are changed. Owing to its universal nature and the appeal of its inevitable truth, it has persisted in the world’s folklore. The story was even adapted by the British writer Somerset Maugham in 1931, under the title “Appointment in Samarra.”

In most of Hazur Maharaj Ji’s Punjabi satsangs, of which video recordings have been made available over the past few months, the Master often says that the saints’ teachings are meant for everyone. He quotes Guru Nanak saying that the teachings of Nam are meant for all the four castes, meaning that they apply to all humanity. This is because all humanity faces the same challenge – how to meet death when it comes for us, how to live with total faith in God. And that is probably why this story has been told and retold in many cultures and contexts, by many saints and teachers. It proves the principle that the saints’ teachings are meant for everyone.

In this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is natural that people’s minds turn to destiny and death. It is good to remember that although we may try to protect ourselves, ultimately death may come when we least expect it and we cannot avoid our destiny. As the Talmudic saying makes clear: “A man's feet are responsible for him; they lead him to the place where he is wanted.” Here is the story.

Appointment in Samarra

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions, and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd, and when I turned I saw it was Death that had jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop, he went.

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw Death disguised as a woman standing in the crowd, and he came to her and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” the woman said. “It was only an expression of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”²

So what does this mean for us on a day-to-day level? Should we just give up and wait for our karmas to unfold? For death to meet us in the marketplace? Sometimes we have to force ourselves to remember what life and death are about, as we forget so easily. We need to realize that our karmas and their results are unfolding before us all the time and that we need to prepare ourselves by attending to our meditation and keeping simran in our mind continually. We have to be ready. Hazur Maharaj Ji presents an example of the need for constant focus in a letter he wrote to a friend, reproduced in Treasure Beyond Measure:

You will be sorry to know that at Ludhiana I met with a serious accident, but by Maharaj Ji's grace, Damodar (the driver) and myself both escaped.

At Ludhiana railway crossing, when we were waiting for the railway gate to open, suddenly, on opening the gate, a cart full of iron bars about six inches round and thirty-five feet in length pierced the front windscreen, just passing by Damodar, and reaching where I was sitting on the back seat. When the bars were just one inch away from my head, the cart stopped. There were three to four thousand people there and everybody was surprised how we had escaped death.

By Maharaj Ji's grace, I was so calm and cool that I even laughed when all was over. The iron bars went six feet inside the car and they were spread about three feet apart…. At the time of the accident, I was doing simran as a matter of habit.

Hazur Maharaj Ji’s example underscores the importance of constant awareness for all of us. So let’s double-down on our efforts – that will help us maintain our faith and dedication.

To sum up, Great Master advised that by adhering to the process, to the practice, a certain “spiritual force” awakens our love and faith:

The willpower becomes strong by repetition and concentration, and spiritual force is created, which awakens love and faith within, and that leads to personal magnetism which is present in a small or large degree in every human being and even in animals. This spiritual force is within every one of us but is awakened only by spiritual practice. Only those whose internal eye is open can feel it.³

So, yes, we have to accept and adapt to the reality that death may be just around the corner. But in the meantime, we can live in the atmosphere of meditation by being assiduous in our practice, by showing up regularly and punctually, and “just sitting,” as Hazur Maharaj Ji used to say, whether the mind obeys or not.

And we can always be thankful. After all, his advice is for our benefit.

The Master often reminds us that a shopkeeper has to open his shop and spend the entire day waiting for customers, even if no one comes. But if he doesn’t wait, he won’t be present when a good customer does come, ready to buy.

Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes (London: Octagon Press, 1993), p. 191
Epigraph by W. Somerset Maugham to John O’Hara’s 1934 book of the same name
Spiritual Gems, Letter 202

The Origin of Origins Download | Print

The Origin of Origins

Confinement brings with it its own set of unique joys. Months of cloistered existence brought upon us unheard of challenges but, thankfully, also revived interest in long-forgotten subjects. The origin of everything is one such subject, and it typically meanders through some captivating theories. After all, the idea that at some point there was only emptiness and void, nothingness, with no notions of time and space, has always been intriguing. It was the chance discovery of a small book that brought the subject to the fore. The book, a translation of the Daodéjing, an ancient compilation of verses attributed to the legendary Chinese spiritual master, Laozi¹, contains one of the most evocative descriptions of the origin of everything.

There is a thing inherent and natural
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Motionless and fathomless,
It stands alone and never changes;
It pervades everywhere and never becomes
exhausted.
It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe.
I do not know its name.
If I am forced to give it a name, I call it Dao,
and I name it as supreme.²

Through a mere eighty-one cryptic verses, some of them only a couple of lines in length, the Dao is glorified as the origin and essence of everything, beyond existence and non-existence, and predating all that is known and unknown.

Like a fountain head of all things...
Yet crystal clear like still water it seems to remain.
I do not know whose Son it is.
An image of what existed before God.³

The Daodéjing loosely translates as the Practice (Dé) of the Way (Dao). It sounds simple and functional, though it is far from it. One of its highlights is, in fact, concealed in its hazy origin and history. However, a researcher’s nightmare can sometimes be an advantage for the open-minded reader. Whether Laozi existed or not, or whether he expressed these teachings or not, becomes secondary to the verses themselves. And they are unambiguously in praise of the Dao. Verse after eulogizing verse calls it an ethereal power, swirling through all of creation, impeccable and flawless, creating, sustaining, and taking back, without so much as a whisper or a quiver. Reading the Daodéjing kindles our interest in the Dao. Majestic but humble, uncomplicated but indecipherable, how can we know this silent origin of origins?

Throughout the ages its Name has been preserved
In order to recall the Beginning of all things.
How do I know the ways of all
things at the Beginning?
By what is within me.⁴

The Daodéjing states that the Dao is present within us, just as it is in every infinitesimal particle of the creation. It is, however, hidden and needs to be realized. And according to Laozi, its realization depends on the crossing of a significant hurdle – the stilling of the mind resulting from the elimination of desire. He points to that as being the way to manifest the Dao within us.

Those constantly without desires,
by this means will perceive its subtlety.
Those constantly with desires,
by this means will see only
that which they yearn for and seek.⁵

Desire stems from the mind, which yearns and seeks all that the five senses beguile it with. And, as the above verse indicates, the mind is incapable of holding on to its own frenzied cravings and to the Dao at the same time. The first must give way for the second to be revealed. Laozi’s advice, therefore, is to empty the mind, thus creating a necessary vacuum, a hallowed space for the subtle and sublime essence, the Dao, to occupy.

Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.⁶

Laozi uses everyday examples to give a complete picture of the human being. He considers the human body to be the edifice, the superstructure, containing the all-important, useful centre within it. The centre can be seen as the mind, but, like the hole in the wheel, and the space within the clay pot or the room, it needs to be hollow and empty in order to be useful. The emptiness is synonymous with stillness, where the mind has no thoughts and desires, and nothing intrudes upon its mirror-like calm.

Negative prefixes abound in the Daodéjing – un-learning, non-desiring, de-tachment and, most important, non-action or wu-wei, all of which describe the way to stillness and tranquility of the mind. None favor indolence, escapism, or asceticism. Ultimately, the struggle is with the mind which cannot be calmed by outward activity and change.

Having come this far, we come face to face with a simple problem – a still, tranquil mind does not magically appear and become receptive to the presence of the Dao. Unlocking the mystery requires the help of someone with intimate understanding of both the mind and the Dao, and the power to manifest the Dao in ourselves. Fortunately, coming into contact with a realized spiritual master places us in this enviable position.

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by
what he feels and not by what he sees.⁷

As we can see, the Daodéjing points out a distinguishing feature of the sage or master – one who is beyond the realm of the senses or the mind – one who identifies with, and is guided by, the Dao itself and ceaselessly strives to help people achieve the same goal.

Therefore the sage rules
By emptying their hearts,
Filling their stomachs,
Weakening their ambitions
And strengthening their bones.⁸

The Daodéjing is brevity itself when it condenses the entire unlocking of the secret of the Dao into “the sage rules by emptying their hearts and filling their stomachs.” In other words, the master empties people of their desires and fills them with spiritual contentment. At the same time he firms their resolve (to merge with the Dao). The verse makes the Herculean task – of vanquishing desire and stilling the mind while instilling resilience and perseverance – seem effortless and doable. That is the hallmark of the spiritual master.

The sage is self-effacing
and scanty of words.
When his task is accomplished
and things have been completed,
All the people say: “We ourselves
have achieved it!”⁹

The master’s method is outwardly unassuming and unobtrusive so it all seems natural, but fundamental changes occur within us. Thus is the master instrumental in removing what clogs the mind and cloaks the Dao – desire, ego, and attachments. At the same time he awakens and then nurtures in us an eternal love for the Dao. It is a fine line he helps draw between renouncing gross worldly desire on the one hand and striving to achieve the ultimate – merging with the Dao – on the other.

In fact, it is only in the company of the master that we first become aware of these myriad distinctions, of mind as a separate entity and its limitless wants and desires. We begin to understand the mind’s subservience to the senses and its voracious appetite for sensual pleasures. Gradually, we embark on the practice to quieten it by following the Master’s method.

In the beginning one has to go against the mind’s very grain and wrench it away from its inclinations – such is the abrasive struggle to calm it. In the course of time, however, something unexpected happens. We gradually return to our natural and original state. We take back control of the mind, of something that was not meant to dominate in the first place, but was intended to be a mere tool for helping us to exist in this world. The master aids in this and demonstrates our oneness with the Dao, not with the mind, by revealing our true selves to us. “He only helps all creatures to find their own nature.”¹⁰

And yet, like the Dao, his way is gentle, soothing and patient, without a hint of coercion or insistence. People are drawn to him for his seamless love and his endless compassion. He does not judge, distinguish, or discriminate. His message and love are for all.

He who holds the Great Symbol (the Dao)
will attract all things to him.
They flock to him and receive no harm,
for in him they find peace, security, and
happiness.¹¹

The Daodéjing frequently draws parallels between the Dao and the sage or master. For instance, it describes the Dao as doing everything while not doing anything. Laozi calls it a defining characteristic of the Dao. “Dao is ever inactive, and yet there is nothing that it does not do.”¹² Here, action is separated from desire and expectation; hence the Dao is inactive and yet achieves everything. The sage, as the verses below reveal, acts precisely in the same way.

It [The Dao] accomplishes its task,
but does not claim credit for it.
It clothes and feeds all things
but does not claim to be master over them.
Always without desires it may be called the Small.
All things come to it and it does not master them;
it may be called the Great.
Therefore (the sage) never strives himself
for the great, and thereby the great is achieved.¹³

The Daodéjing considers the master or sage as being one with the Dao and speaks of him in the same vein. The sage –

Manages the affairs without action;
Preaches the doctrine without words;
All things take their rise, but he does not
turn away from them;
He gives them life, but does not take
possession of them.
He acts, but does not appropriate;
Accomplishes but claims no credit.¹⁴

In the end, what shines through is the master’s ability to join us to the Dao. In fact, since his true form rises up and flows out of the vast Ocean of Truth, it is indistinguishable from the Dao. His inner, radiant form answers to the same description as the Dao – mysteriously unfathomable by the physical senses, but magically alive to the spiritual being:

Looked at, but cannot be seen –
That is called the Invisible;
Listened to, but cannot be heard –
That is called the Inaudible;
Grasped at, but cannot be touched –
That is called the Intangible;
These three elude all our inquiries
And hence blend and become One.
Not by its rising is there light,
Nor by its sinking is there darkness.
Unceasing, continuous,
It cannot be defined,
And reverts back to the realm of nothingness.
That is why it is called the Form of the Formless,
The Image of the Nothingness.¹⁵

Bibliography
Boisen, B., Lao Tzu’s Tao-Te-Ching: A Parallel Translation Collection, Boston, MA: Gnomad Publishing, 1996
Ch’u Ta-Kao, Tao Te Ching: A New Translation, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1959
Feng, Gia-Fu and English, Jane, The Tao Te Ching, London: Vintage Books, 1989
Lin, Derek, Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, Nashville, TN: SkyLight Paths, 2006
Lin, Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse, NY: Random House, 1948

The book’s title appears as Daodéjing instead of Tao Te Ching and its author Laozi instead of Lao Tzu, as this essay has adopted the Pinyin system of transliterating Chinese words into the Roman alphabet.
Ch’u Ta-Kao, 1959, Verse 25
Lin, Yutang, 1948, Verse 4
Wu, John C.H. in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 21
Henricks, Robert in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 1
Feng and English, 1989, Verse 11
Feng and English, 1989, Verse 12
Ch’u Ta-Kao, 1959, Verse 3
Wu, John C.H. in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 17
Wu, John C.H. in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 64
Wu, John C.H. in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 35
Ch’u Ta-Kao, 1959, Verse 37
Chan, Wing-tsit in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 34
Lin, Yutang, 1948, Verse 2
Lin, Yutang in Boisen, B., 1996, Verse 14

One and the Same – The Ends and the Means Download | Print

One and the Same – The Ends and the Means

After so many incarnations, we still are unconscious and lost, without a compass and deceived by the mirages of the world. At last the true Master enters our lives. He gives us a purpose, a direction. Our rescue has begun.

Such a mystic is both the goal and the means of achieving it. The goal, because the real form of the true Master is the Shabd, Nam, or Word, which we seek. It is the Lord's outstretched hand into the creation, one could say, for which we reach and ultimately grasp. Henceforth, it will carry us back to the Source, effortlessly.

But to consciously experience that magnetic Shabd, we need to progress to full concentration in our meditation. Yet, easier said than done: for most, our minds are too scattered, spellbound by the world. So the Lord has sent his emissary, the Satguru or true living Master, now and throughout the ages. His captivating beauty entices us to experience the Shabd where He directs us to look – within – through meditation. And so it is He who draws us to the practice, inspires us to persevere, as we gradually feel his presence. The consequent love that evolves brings forth the spiritual power with which He has imbued the five Names that we repeat. Thus, only through him can the mind be tamed, the “world-spell” be broken.

Soami Ji in Sar Bachan says, “One who seeks only Nam ... but has no love for the Satguru will get nothing. Love for the Satguru is of first importance. It detaches us from all bonds.”¹

Thus everything begins with the indispensable physical form of the Master, as the medium or vehicle – the charm of his being ignites the spark of love in our hearts. He inspires us to follow his instructions more resolutely. We will seek more and more of his sweetness within, through meditation. The spark will turn into a flame and our attention will be fixed on him, the source of nectar.

And so, indeed, the Master is both the end we seek and the means to reach it.

As Jesus said, “I am the way... No one comes to the Father except through me.”² We can extrapolate that the Shabd, the real form of the Master, is an extension of, one and the same as, the Father, our goal.

Again in Sar Bachan, Soami Ji says, “the seed sown in unprepared soil yields nothing. The soil of the heart is prepared by devotion to Guru. Without love for Guru, Nam will be of no avail.”³

His physical form will lead us to the real one. He is our everything.

So let us look inside, with unwavering dedication, for that manifestation of Love which is the Master. Let nothing deter us or discourage us. It behooves us to keep digging for the treasure. To paraphrase what Baba Ji once said, “The reward will more than exceed our expectation.”

Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan (prose), eleventh edition, 2001/ 2019, p. 79, #2
Bible, John 14:6
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan (prose), p. 88, #33

Wondrous Sound - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Wondrous Sound

Shams-e Tabriz wrote:

Be silent and listen to the five sounds from Heaven,
The Heaven which is beyond all senses and directions.
Every moment of life this wondrous Sound
Reaches down from the courts of Heaven.
Fortunate above all the children of men
Is he who hears its enchanting melodies.¹

All the true Masters have taught their disciples how to listen to this wondrous Sound that is always reaching down to us from the courts of Heaven. Their mission is to connect those who come to them with that Sound. They teach, they encourage, and they inspire their disciples to live a pure life and to do the work of withdrawing their attention to that place where they can come into contact with this heavenly Sound. They create within the disciple a love and a yearning to go back to the Lord.

These Masters may have lived thousands of years and thousands of miles apart. They may come from any religion or any culture, yet what they have taught is exactly the same: that this great spiritual current of Sound is the essence of life and of all things.

They describe this creation as having emanated from the Creator through the dynamic of this creative power. This power, this current of Sound, is always present in the creation. It sustains it and all that lives within it. It is related to the Lord in the same way as a wave is related to the ocean.

In Sant Mat we use the word Shabd to refer to God’s creative power. It is just one of thousands of words that have been used throughout time to attempt to describe this one, singular creative power.

Saints explain that listening to this holy Sound is the only way of obtaining release from the cycle of birth and death. It makes the soul fit to rise from the finite towards the infinite.

References to the Shabd are ubiquitous throughout the world and throughout time. They’re everywhere, in all of the writings of mystics and in all of the scriptures. They are found in poems and songs – for example, the well-known song, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound!”

The Shabd rings within every one of us, yet hardly anybody knows what it is. It is the core of spirituality, the cornerstone, the lynchpin. When the Shabd is forgotten the life has gone out of the teachings and they devolve into religion.

Many references to Shabd point to its quality as a sound, such as Name, Word, Sound Current, Audible Lifestream, Celestial Music, Divine Melody, Call from the Skies, or the Voice of God. But other names refer to different qualities that can be experienced.

In the Gurbani the word amrit is used as a metaphor for the Shabd. When translated it becomes immortalizing Nectar or Divine Ambrosia or the Nectar that confers immortality, implying that when one hears that Shabd within he is drinking that Nectar which makes him immortal.

So by referring to the Shabd as Nectar the Gurus are implying the experience of listening to the Sound Current is sweet, satisfying, delicious, and nourishing to the soul. In fact it is so satisfying that one loses interest in all the pleasures experienced through the body.

The term Bread or Bread of Life was also used because bread was the main source of nutrition and it sustained the body, so people could understand that the Shabd or the Word would feed the soul in a similar way. As Christ said:

I am the Bread of Life;
he that cometh to me shall never hunger.²

In this life we are never satisfied. We always hunger for more, whether it’s worldly possessions or power, but Christ is saying that when the Master attaches us to the Word, then we have no worldly desires left. We are never hungry again.

The metaphor of water is used in the same way. Spiritually we are all very thirsty and since all of our attention runs outward into the world we seek to quench that thirst in the relationships and pleasures of the world. When we experience the futility of each attempt, we rotate to the next one, only to be disappointed again. Furthermore, the karmas we create in this seeking bind us more to the wheel of reincarnation. Drinking water will quench our thirst for the moment, but we will get thirsty again – however the saints say that when we drink that spiritual Water that they give us within we will never thirst again. As Christ said:

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.³

Again here, he is making the connection between drinking that water and finding everlasting life – immortality.

The transition from mortal to immortal is really a transition from identifying with the physical body and the mind to identifying with the soul. It’s realizing who we really are. Our death is certain. The body will perish and there is no way to avoid death. The soul, on the other hand, is immortal. It will not perish. Unfortunately our consciousness is in the body and the soul is forgotten.

Baba Ji often reminds us that we are not human beings seeking a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings going through a human experience.

In other words, it’s all backwards. We are not the body nor are we the mind. Our true identity, our true self, is soul. Yet because our attention goes so much into the external world and we are so preoccupied with our human experience, we fail to notice that there is a soul within us that is our essence – the very source of our life.

Just as our physical body is not who we really are, this physical world is not our real home. Hazur used to tell us that what we see is not real and what we don’t see is real. The famous English poet William Shakespeare wrote:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.⁴

We are actors in a play and the script has been written by our karmas. We came here to play a certain role as husband or wife, as son or daughter, as creditor or debtor, and when our scene is over we depart. We step off of the stage and enter a higher reality. Then we see that it was all a dream and we spent our life caught up in nothing but an illusion. As Soami Ji wrote in his Sar Bachan Poetry: “This whole play is but a one-night dream.”⁵

The problem is that all we can perceive through this mind and body is transient and impermanent. Because of that, everybody and everything we are attached to is also transient. Ultimately we will be separated from everyone we love and everything we believe we possess. We love our children and parents and spouses so much that being separated from them breaks our hearts. In previous lives we had children and parents and spouses, yet where are they now and where is that love we had for them? These loves serve as an obstacle to realizing our true purpose in life.

Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote to a western disciple: “All unhappiness in life is the result of our attachment for people and things of this world. Where there is no attachment, there is no misery.”⁶ The fact that our attachments keep us bound here is what makes us mortal. When we have to take birth we have to die and when we take birth again we have to die again, and the reason we have to keep taking birth is because we go where our attachments are. We go where our heart is.

The time of death is the critical moment when the direction that the soul will take is determined. If throughout our lives we have indulged ourselves in the love and desires of the world, then the end of life will soon be followed by a return into a physical body.

But what choice do we have if everything and everyone in our field of awareness is also bound to this impermanent world? The mind must attach itself to something. That is its nature. So unless we can find something permanent to attach ourselves to we cannot escape the cycle of birth and death.

The Master comes from the Father and is above it all. He is not attached to anything of this creation. He is attached only to the Creator. He is a wave of that Ocean of Divinity. If we want to return to the Creator it will only be through love, and that love for the eternal Lord begins when we meet a Master.

When the Master initiates us, he teaches us how to shift our attachment from the world of phenomena to the divine power or Shabd through meditation. The disciple has to lead an honest and pure life, to work hard and apply great discipline before being able to contact the Shabd within, which is the real form of the Master.

As we sit for meditation, we appreciate how powerful the mind is. Until we tried to concentrate our attention within we probably never realized that the mind is not in our control. The mind is running the show and we are forced to go wherever it takes us. It’s constantly running out and it never stops thinking! If somehow it were to stop, the attention would rise in the body and we would immediately become conscious of the light and sound within.

The Master has given us the tools to make this happen. We gradually develop the habit of concentrating the mind by sitting regularly and punctually for meditation. We should not be under the illusion that this is easy. As Hazur said to a disciple: “It's a struggle for a whole lifetime, not just for a day or two. It's a constant struggle with the mind – but it's worth it!”⁷

Our meditation, our simran and bhajan, is all about making the mind still and bringing it to the eye center. This is the seat of the mind and the soul. Hazur describes it as the “pivotal point that holds the mystery of life.”⁸

The Radiant form of the Master or the Shabd does not descend below the eye center. So our objective is to get to that point. This is really the most important work of our lives. To achieve it we will have to give it all of our attention and our love and devotion. The eye center is our spiritual goal and our purpose in life. This is where our spiritual journey begins. It’s also where we will experience for ourselves that the Master and his teachings are for real.

And what happens when we enter the eye center and we hear the Sound of the Shabd? Hearing the Shabd, drinking the Nectar, eating the Bread or Water of Life, turns the mind away from the transient pleasures of the world and attaches it to the sweet and transcendent bliss of the Shabd. This is monumental because this is exactly how one achieves immortality.

This effect that the Shabd has on the mind and soul is often illustrated by another metaphor for the Sound Current – Wine Divine!

The word “wine” was used by the Sufi mystics to convey the intoxication or ecstasy that one experiences when hearing the Shabd. The Wine-bearer, the one who serves the wine, is the Master. The cup is this body that holds the wine and the tavern is that place within the eye center where one can enjoy the wine. The Masters talk about being drunk on wine. The intoxication that comes from hearing the Shabd renders all other pleasures insipid.

The Indian mystic Kabir explains how sweet and powerful is this elixir of Nam:

All the elixirs of immortality have I tried,
But none of them compares with Nam.
If only a tiny particle of it is absorbed,
The whole of one’s being
Is transmuted into gold.⁹

Hazur Maharaj Ji explained to a western disciple:

The taste of the inner pleasure is so intoxicatingly blissful that it rises above, and hence kills all desire for outer pleasures. The heart is then filled with the love of the Lord, which is the only true means for attaining God-realization.¹⁰

This is how the transformation takes place. The mind becomes so enthralled in the Shabd that it wants nothing else but to be in that blissful experience. Instead of resisting the focus it wants to spend more and more time in that place. Instead of the attention always running down and out it enjoys going in and up. The mind is now our friend and wants to travel in the same direction as the soul.

Previously, it employed so many tactics to keep us scattered and away from the focus. All of our worrying, anxieties, and fears have kept us away. All of our desires and obsessions, our planning, analyzing, calculating, living in the past or the future instead of the present moment made it impossible to concentrate. Now the mind doesn’t want to play its games anymore. The frustration and struggle that we experience in the initial stages is over.

The disciple is at peace and he happily accepts whatever his destiny brings. He has no burden, no worries. Death has lost its dreaded sting as he has already stepped through the door to the other side. His heart is filled with gratitude. He is kind, loving, and compassionate to others. He is now enjoying his meditation and looks forward to it like an infatuated lover. His myriad desires have been replaced with only one desire, to be with his beloved Master.

When he meets the Radiant form of the Master within he experiences true unadulterated love for the first time. It is a meeting between the soul and the Shabd, the true form of the disciple and the true form of the Master.

When Baba Ji is giving satsang in Punjabi, he often says, “Shabd guru, surat dhun chela.” It means that the true form of the Guru is Shabd and the true form of the disciple is the soul that is attuned to the Shabd. It is a relationship of pure love and that love will grow and grow until there is no difference between them.

Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

Meditation creates love. It strengthens love. It deepens love. It grows love. Ultimately, it illuminates you and makes you God. That’s all meditation.¹¹

So in the end, this experience of listening to the Sound Current is what leads to our salvation, to our escape from the cycle of birth and death and the world of impermanence and misery. It leads to the return to our true home – to immortality.

That is why Shams-i Tabriz wrote:

Every moment of life, this wondrous Sound
Reaches down from the courts of Heaven.
Fortunate above all the children of men
Is he who hears its enchanting melodies.¹²

Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, 17th ed. 2012, p. 398
Bible, John 6:35; Light on St. John, p. 86
Bible, John 4:14; Light on St John, p. 55
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 117
Quest for Light, Letter #231
Die to Live, Q #311
Spiritual Discourses, vol. 1, p. 180
Quoted in Divine Light, p. 117
Divine Light, Letter 426, p. 367
Spiritual Perspectives, vol. 2, Q 146
Path of the Masters, 17th ed. 2012, p. 398

We Don’t Belong Here Download | Print

We Don’t Belong Here

We don’t belong here. We have forgotten where we have come from, but we don’t belong here. Such is the state of forgetfulness in which the Master finds us when he comes to rescue us – God alone knows where from. This is one of the great surprises of the saints’ teachings: we don’t belong here. Basically, what the Master suggests to us when we meet him is that we need to go back home, to go back to what we are in reality – to recover our true identity, that of a spiritual being going through the human experience, as he tells us. Maybe we thought that ending up on a spiritual path would enable us to become wiser, to be happy, perhaps to get “enlightenment,” even to change our way of life, but certainly not to change our identity. Yet this is precisely what the spiritual path requires: letting go of what we call “my identity.”

But in reality, to regain what we call that “other identity,” we have to accept losing the present one. Because what we’re calling today “identity” or “personality” – and unfortunately we tend to confuse identity and personality – is but a manifestation of our ego, a manifestation of the mind. And in fact it is the mind which drags us away from our spiritual identity, which takes us away from the inner path leading to our true nature.

Mirabai shares with us her experience and what she feels in the depths of her being. With Mirabai, as with all the saints, there is no pretence. Only the saints have this degree of authenticity. And this is precisely what she is describing: this identity, this original state which was once ours, along with the one we’ve drifted towards to reach where we are today.

Without the Lord, to me this township
appears desolate and dreary.

The swan whose repast once
Was shining pearls divine
Now after millet runs.
Leaving the crystal lake
Of bliss that was his home,
He has now come to take
Abode in a muddy pond.
His plumage once sublime
Is now smeared with slime.

Soon the pond will be dry,
And then it will be time
For him to leave, and fly.

Mira’s dear Lord, when
Will your arm extend,
And with much love and grace
Take her in your embrace?¹

In the first two lines, as in most of her poems, Mira tells us that her existence is meaningless if she is not in direct contact with the Lord, with her Master. It is truly a constant theme with her, and she describes the overwhelming pain of absence. As always, there is the simplicity which is characteristic of the saints: a few words, and we understand where they are at, but most of all, we understand where we are at….

The simplicity with which she expresses this pain gives it such power that we, who are so complicated, could almost doubt its authenticity. So we turn to the Master to find out what it really means, because Mira’s words appear so strange to us. Like this question put to Huzur Maharaj Ji:

Q. Sir, this pain of separation, the pain that drives Mira, was it a real pain or only a way of expressing it in poetry?

A. This real pain never comes unless love is there. With the mystics, their heart speaks. It is not the tongue that speaks, it is not the pen that writes; it is the heart that speaks, it is the heart that writes. And the mystics just express all that. Without going through the pain, nobody knows the pain. And that pain can be experienced only with the Lord’s grace. When he pulls from within, then this is what happens – what Mira has written. Unless he pulls from within, there is no pain.²

So after hearing this, we might think that we are miles away from experiencing such feelings, from feeling such longing, such ache caused by separation.

And yet, if we think about it, why did we decide one day to follow the teachings of a Master? Why did some of us ask for initiation and commit ourselves to this path? This feeling of separation, of nostalgia, of the pointlessness of one’s existence – we’ve all probably experienced it at one time or another, in one way or another. Before meeting the Master, before he gave us the keys to the path, these feelings were possibly more hazy and may have led us to perceive life, even our own existence, as being absurd.

Now, this feeling of separation – we experience it with regards to the Master who has granted us the gift of Nam. This feeling of something missing drives us to seek him where he truly is – within us. This very feeling is the beginning of reconnecting with the identity which we aim to rediscover.

Of course, we cannot compare the words of a saint like Mirabai with those of a popular singer, but one occasionally comes across some beautiful lyrics which have a spiritual connotation and inspire us in our quest, as is the case with a popular rock song written by Roger Hogdson of the British band Supertramp, “Lord, is it mine?”³ The songwriter talks about the bond that we’re trying to create. Addressing the Lord, he tells him about the need he has to be alone sometimes – a need we all experience, the need to find a quiet and private “place,” a place we can truly call our own and where we can seek refuge from the mayhem of the world. He says, “You show me there’s a silent place that I can call my own,” and the chorus line of the song is his plea, or maybe his prayer to the Lord: “Is it mine, Lord, is it mine?”

The Master keeps on repeating that the solution, the answer to this yearning, lies within ourselves, in solitude, in introspection, in meditation. That place which belongs to us, which we can really call our own, is within us. It is wonderful to think that this refuge, this comfort, but also this path leading to the “Being,” in the true sense of the word, is within arm’s reach, so to speak. No need to travel the length and the breadth of the world, no need to expend a massive amount of energy. This place which is ours cannot be closer to us. As Baba Ji often reminds us, sit down, close your eyes and you’re there.

Coming back to the song, the writer says that he is tired of the battles of life. These battles seem to be such a waste of time. Our only hope, he says, would seem to be the Lord: “And there's many times it seems that you're the only hope in sight.”

Our life as human beings – this experience that we’re going through in the human form – is determined by our karmas. It matters little what different types of karma we have to face; we definitely have to face them. We have to face what we call pleasures and what we call troubles. Of course, when we’re going through what we consider nice karmas, we don’t complain. We don’t say anything. At most, we thank our lucky stars, but more often than not, we take the credit for these pleasant things. However, when we’re going through the consequences of karma we qualify as being negative, and therefore unpleasant from our viewpoint, we realize that this world, despite its beauty, is only a land of suffering where the machinery of karma is constantly working, a kind of factory for settling accounts. This karma tosses us about, like coconut shells in the ocean, until finally, just when we think that death will be our deliverance, we find that the product of this combination of cause and effect will bring about our return to this world in one form or another. And then, it all starts again….

Ultimately, we realize that we never win anything. We are programmed by this system of cause and effect; but if we open our eyes, then we notice that none of this exists. All is futile. The daily battles we fight in this world will never come to an end. We will never win a battle because every action we do has a consequence that leads us to another action, which in turn has a consequence, and so on. The Masters tell us it is a huge wheel that rolls over everything in its path, crushes everything, and leaves no way out.

So, like the songwriter, we ask ourselves the question: “O Lord, is it mine?” Will I soon be with you and freed from this system? And like the songwriter, we too want to know how to feel the Lord’s sweetness through the day, experience ourselves the love that shines around us. “When will your arm extend?” says Mira. We sense this divine love, but our present state doesn’t let us experience it intimately – just a few glimpses perceived here and there. However these few glimpses exhilarate us. So when will this love be ours? When and how shall we be constantly connected or, rather, bathed in this love that nevertheless surrounds us? How do we reach that state, how do we rediscover this identity?

The song ends with these words: “We know what we have to do.” Maybe the songwriter had been given an answer? But this is no concern of ours – we have been given an answer and we know what we have to do, which is to carry out the Master’s instructions to the letter. Nothing else.

Obviously, as Mira says, the plumage of the swan which we really are is right now sullied with slime. So then – the ultimate paradox – we project what we are onto the Master and we go as far as thinking that he is like us, instead of doing the opposite and trying to be like him, to identify with him. We think that his plumage is covered with mud like ours is, as Mira says. But if we think that, it is because the Master comes down to our level; otherwise it is highly likely that we wouldn’t be able to bear being in his presence. Our concept of love is poles apart from what love truly is. It’s because we lack experience in the field of love. So we have to seek advice and the Master goes to great lengths to explain to us what true love is.

Just as he replied to this question a disciple put to him:

Q. Maharaj Ji, can you tell us how we can love our family and fellow man without feeling or being attached to them? How can we love them and at the same time be detached from them?

Here is what the Master answered:

Sister, when we love everybody, we are not attached to anybody. Loving everybody means loving that power which is in everybody, and not just in certain individuals or in one particular person or creature. We should try not to justify our weaknesses by saying that we are loving his creation when we are loving one particular person.

I shall tell you a little portion of a mystic’s example, written in his lifetime. He was going down the street, followed by some of his disciples. He always used to remain in devotion and love of the Lord, in his own mood. As they were walking, a dancing girl came happily dancing towards them in the street, in her lax manner, and he just kissed her and said, “Oh, how beautiful is the Lord.”

Because the master kissed her, his disciples also kissed her and said, “O, how beautiful is the Lord.” The master saw that. As he went a little farther, he saw a blacksmith hammering a molten hot plate. The master went up to that hot plate and kissed it and said, “Oh, how beautiful is the Lord,” but the disciples held back. Then he said to them, “Where is your love for the Lord?” Sometimes we just try to justify our weaknesses in this way and we say that we are not loving the person, we are just loving the Lord in that person. For everybody, the real attachment should be to nam or shabd, for that alone attaches us to the Lord.⁴

So here we are, we interpret what he says, what he does, what he is, according to our own criteria; but that’s because we do not have that real perception of what he is. Our way of loving is the one that fits our criteria, but unfortunately not his.

What do we need to do to truly love him? The one thing that we never stop wondering about, so limited is our understanding: what must we do in order to be a good disciple?

The reply Hazur Maharaj Ji gave to this question was very simple, very direct and very easy to understand!

Q. Maharaj Ji, from a master’s point of view, what are some of the characteristics of a good disciple?

A. Well, I don’t know who is worthy to go back to the Father or who is worthy to be his best disciple. But one who stands firm on the principles of Sant Mat and is attending to his meditation and living in the will of the Lord, naturally he’s the right type of disciple.⁵

We know what we have to do.

Now let us go back to the words of Mira:

Soon the pond will be dry,
And then it will be time
For him to leave, and fly.

Mira’s dear Lord, when
Will your arm extend,
And with much love and grace
Take her in your embrace?

The Master’s promise is that if we meditate, the swamp of our karma will dry up. In reality, the game is on and the ball is in our court. We just have to sit down and close our eyes … and it is time, it is high time for us to be going home. It’s time to be leaving this place. The Master repeatedly tells us, “What are you waiting for?” And when he asks us, “What are your priorities?” he’s really telling us, “Come on, hurry up!”

As soon as we do see or understand, in a word, experience what the Master’s true identity is, then we will merge in him; and when we merge in him, we will rediscover our true identity. One goes hand in hand with the other, or rather One with One.

As we’ve seen earlier, “We know what we have to do.” And as Mirabai says: he will take us so tightly in his “embrace” that we will become One.

V.K. Sethi, Mira, The Divine Lover, RSSB, p. 92
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q. 89
Album:“Breakfast in America” by the band Supertramp
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q. 365
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q. 558

Keep Your Gaze Fixed on the Master Download | Print

Keep Your Gaze Fixed on the Master

Tulsi Sahib was a mystic with a Hindu background who lived in Hathras in eighteenth-century India. He wrote many poems about the inner spiritual path that leads to God-realization. Among them are a few ghazals, or lyric devotional poems, that he addressed to Sheikh Taqi, a Muslim fakir or saint. Sheikh Taqi was on his pilgrimage to Mecca and happened to pitch his tent in the neighborhood of Tulsi Sahib’s residence. In this poem Tulsi Sahib is explaining to Sheikh Taqi what it means to follow a spiritual master and what a disciple needs to do.

O Taqi, fix your gaze on the Master
who has offered you his hand.
Do not be neglectful or give up if you wish to behold
the splendour of your Beloved.¹

Mystics and saints urge us to keep the purpose of human life in mind and to focus on that goal every day for our entire life. What is this purpose of life? Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh Ji explains:

The main purpose of life is to realize God. This privilege the Lord has bestowed only on human beings. …Everything else we have been getting every time we have come into this world, in any form, in any species.

But the privilege of going back to the Father can be achieved only in the human life. So we should always be mindful of our destination and try to follow the spiritual path which leads us back to him. While working out our destiny, our karmic accounts or adjustments – our other duties, responsibilities – we should not forget the end and purpose for which we have come into this world.²

Here Hazur is reminding us that whatever life brings us is a result of our karma, of actions that we have performed during previous lives. The situations we find ourselves in, the people we meet, the responsibilities we get, the assets we acquire – all are a result of that. We cannot change this karma, this destiny. It is the path of life that we have to follow, with all its associated ups and downs. Mystics and saints, however, emphasize that there is more to life as a human being than just the working out of karma. This life gives us also the opportunity to realize the Supreme, the Divine, to meet the Beloved of our soul and thus transcend this world and its cycle of birth and death. For that purpose, this life form has been given to us. “Saints say: Face that destiny; and then also try to find your way out of this world.”³

How can we find our way? By unceasingly focusing our attention on the messenger of God, the master, who offers us his guidance and help to find our way back to the Most High. For the way to God is unfathomable. It is a path that we do not know, that we ourselves cannot find and, above all, that we cannot oversee, because it is different from what we think or envision. Hence, Tulsi Sahib says, if you want to see the purpose of life fulfilled and realize the Divine:

O Taqi, fix your gaze on the Master
who has offered you his hand.
Do not be neglectful or give up if you wish to behold
the splendour of your Beloved.

He lovingly advises us to do our utmost to involve the master with every step we take on this path of life – to keep him in mind in everything we do. We need to do this so that we won’t get lost in what’s going on around us and won’t be deceived by our own thoughts, ideas, feelings, and emotions – or be upset by what happens to us. The master knows the way, knows the ups and downs we have to go through, and he is only too happy to guide us through them. Hence, he reaches out his hand to us. It’s up to us to let ourselves be taken by the hand, to put our hand in his, and to surrender to his guidance. It’s up to us to do our very best to hold his hand once he has initiated us by following his instructions and focusing our attention on the true form of the master, the Shabd, at the eye center through the daily practice of meditation. During all those moments in the day when we do not need to involve our mind in the work we do, we repeat in our mind the sacred names he has given at the time of initiation. Hazur Maharaj Ji elaborates on this when he says:

Whatever you may do in this world to keep your master within you or keep yourself with the master is meditation, is a part of meditation. Whether you are properly sitting or sitting just quietly, full of love and devotion for the master, or hearing the sound, seeing the light – whatever you are doing, even worldly work – if your master is with you in your mind, in your heart, if all your dealings conform to the teachings, to the commands of the master, then you are with the master. That is why we say that Sant Mat is not only meditation; it is a way of life. We have to mould ourselves to that way of life so that we are always with our master, in all the activities of our life, so that we don’t forget him anytime, anywhere.⁴

Don’t be negligent in this, writes Tulsi Sahib. Don’t let yourself be distracted by all the issues that pass during the day. For only when our attention is one-pointedly focused on the master, on the Shabd, and there is nothing in our hearts but a deep desire to meet the Beloved of our soul, will he reveal himself to us – inside at the eye center – in all his greatness.

It sounds so easy – not to get distracted from the purpose for which we’ve been born, and to keep our attention focused inwards on the Shabd instead of outward on the world. But it is the most difficult assignment or task that can be given to us. This is because our mind is so accustomed to orienting itself outward. It is so easily seduced by worldly things and not easily withdrawn from them. Great Master says:

Mind is not a thing that can be switched off and on at will.

It cannot be taken away from its routine course in spite of one’s best effort in a day, a month, or a year. It is a lifelong struggle. Those who have undergone this struggle, or who are engaged in it, understand what it is to conquer the mind. …It is attached to the outside world with ropes, double ropes, triple ropes, and manifold ropes and has been held by these chains so long that it does not feel the irksomeness of its bonds. It likes them instead.

…If it were an easy affair, Guru Nanak would not have sat on pebbles for twelve years. Christ would not have spent nineteen years in the Tibetan hills and Soami Ji himself would not have contemplated in a solitary, dark, back room for seventeen years.⁵

There is a story in Tales of the Mystic East that gives us an even stronger impression of how difficult it is to control the mind:

Guru Vashist once said to his disciple Ramchandra, ¨If I was told that someone had lifted the Himalayas, I may, for a moment, assume that there is such a person in the world. If someone were to say he has swallowed the sea, incredible though it may seem, I may, for an instant, believe him too. If someone were to assert that he has tamed the winds of the world, he is not to be taken seriously but, for a split second, I may agree with him. However, if someone were to boast that he has controlled his mind, I would never believe him.¨ The mighty force of the mind is not easily controlled.⁶

So it is not an easy task, and it seems to be an impossible one. Nevertheless mystics and saints like Tulsi Sahib impress upon us to do our utmost to keep our gaze, our attention, focused on the Shabd at the eye center and to hold the hand of the master in every action we perform, not leaving it through negligence. Every effort we make gives the master the opportunity to guide us and shower his grace upon us, and it is this grace that will lead us to our Beloved. Hazur says:

His grace is never lacking if our effort is sincere and honest. …We wouldn’t be given this human life, we wouldn’t be on the path at all, we wouldn’t meet a mystic at all, but for his grace. So when he has marked us to be part of a certain fold, of a certain master, he doesn’t withhold his grace after that. He’s more anxious than we are! So his grace is always there, but we have to do our duty. We just can’t look to the grace without even doing our duty. We should do our best; then his grace is always there.⁷

As Maharaj Jagat Singh says:

We must strive hard to subdue the mind and put in every effort to drive away the evil qualities that overpower us. But, if after struggling very hard we still find that we have not advanced a single foot on this long journey, we should not get disheartened. Master knows well that with our feeble hands and feet, we shall not be able to accomplish this journey even if we were to go on traveling for a hundred thousand years. He wants to impress upon us that unless the Lord’s grace intervenes, no one can walk on this path of immortality. When we collapse and fall, and have no strength left to struggle further, then Master’s loving kindness and grace will carry us forward as a tottering child is carried in the arms by its mother.⁸

That’s what the master does. He will carry us towards our Beloved after we have put in the part that is within our capacity – that seemingly insignificant part that is so essential. That’s why the master emphasizes so strongly that we need to make every effort wholeheartedly. By doing this we will come to gradual submission. A writer on Buddhism discusses the importance of devotion in this process of surrender:

The bhaktic trend eliminates, in faith, all reliance on self-power, all reliance on one’s own ability to plan and control one’s own life and salvation. ...

Surrender in faith involves a high degree of extinction of separate selfhood, partly because one does not rely on oneself, or one’s own power, and partly because one sees the futility of all conscious and personal efforts and allows oneself to be “carried” to salvation.... Elementary modesty lets us perceive that any merit we may claim compares as nothing with that of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and with the power of their help.... All pride in our intellect, all pride in the purity of our heart, sets up a self against others. If the intellect is seen as futile, the heart as corrupt, that self is deflated. The grace of the Absolute alone can carry us across, and our own personal schemes and endeavours are quite trivial.⁹

Tulsi Sahib continues his poem to Sheikh Taqi by saying:

His mercy will protect you till you arrive at his court;
there is no need for worry or fear.
Go straight and reach there,
for this is the Master’s decree.
Mansur, Sarmad, Bu-Ali,
Shams and Maulana – they all followed
this same path with firm resolve in their hearts
and reached their destination.

Tulsi Sahib mentions certain saints well-known among Muslims, including Mansur, Sarmad, Shams-i-Tabriz, and Maulana Rum (Rumi) all attained God-realization by walking this path. So “take your chance” is the message. The master has taught you the method of meditation. Don’t delay; go straight to your destination. Be determined in that. Be determined in gazing at him again and again, following him and his instructions, even if you don’t understand the course of the way. Trust him completely, and his grace will lead you to the Beloved of your soul without fear or danger on the road – the master, the Shabd, the Nam, guides and protects you, as expressed by Guru Arjun Dev:

On that path of endless miles,
God’s Nam provides you with sustenance.
On that path of intense, blinding darkness,
God’s Nam is your guiding light.
On that path where no one recognizes you,
God’s Nam stands by you as your identity.
Where the sun is ablaze with scorching heat,
God’s Nam is the cooling shade over you.
Says Nanak: O my mind,
When you are tormented by thirst,
God’s Nam will shower its nectar on you.¹⁰

Tulsi Sahib continues:

Love is the destination of this path,
and reaching there is not difficult,
for the one who removes all difficulty
stands before you and has given you his hand.

Guru Arjun Dev Ji and Tulsi Sahib both acknowledge that the path to union with the Beloved is not an easy one. Traveling the spiritual path takes a lot of effort. We will have to work hard to reach the destination of love. At the same time, there is the comfort and confirmation that reaching that destination, that love, is not difficult, because the one who resolves difficulties is with us and has offered us his hand. Al-fattah is one of the ninety-nine names or qualities of God, as reported in Muslim tradition. It refers to the attribute of God that opens our heart.

He is the opener and the solver, the easer of all that is locked, tied and hardened…. There are states and problems that are tied in a knot. There are hardened things that one cannot see through and pass through…. There are also hearts tied in a knot with sadness, minds tied up in doubts or questions they are unable to answer. Allah al-Fattah opens them all. …He opens all gates…

He has the key to the treasure of sacred secrets that is the heart of man, God’s very own house. Stand at the gate of God’s mercy and knock on the door of the One who resolves all difficulties. He certainly will come and open it sooner or later. Pray … unceasingly, always. You are poor; he is rich. You are in need; he is the satisfier of need. You are in the dark, he is light.¹¹

Tulsi Sahib ends his poem by pointing out to Sheikh Taqi that the way to God is an inner way. It is the way of the Shabd, the true Name, the secret hidden in the heart of every human being. It is the Name that can only be experienced, not pronounced; the Name that leads to the Most High, to God, the Beloved of our soul. Tulsi’s advice is to cherish it within when you experience it. Don’t talk about it. It’s the treasure of treasures, the most precious experience that can be given to you. It’s the secret way to union with the Beloved of your soul. By following it, the purpose of your life will be fulfilled and your journey through creation will come to an end.

Tulsi says: Listen, O Taqi, the inner secret is beyond
all you can imagine.
Keep it safe – it points to the Most High.

J.R. Puri, V.K. Sethi, & T.R. Shangari, Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, Beas: RSSB, 1995, 2017 (rev. ed.), p. 231
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol I, Beas: RSSB, 2010, Q. 251
Ibid, Q. 118
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol III, Q. 125
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Beas: RSSB, 2004, p. 206
Tales of the Mystic East, Beas: RSSB, 2006, p. 109
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol II, Q. 474
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul, Beas: RSSB, 1994, p. 203
Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development, p. 159, quoted in K.N. Upadhyaya, Buddhism: Path to Nirvana, Beas: RSSB, 2010, p. 207
Guru Arjun Dev, Gurbani Selections 2, Beas: RSSB, 2011, p. 87; quoting “Sukhmani,” A.G. 264
Excerpted from Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti, The Most Beautiful Names (Threshold Books, 1983); https://sufism.org/sufism/writings-on-sufism/excerpt-from-the-most-beautiful-names

The Bird that Sings Within - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Bird that Sings Within

No one tells me about the bird
That sings within the body.
Its colour is a colourless hue,
Its form a formless form.
It lives under the shade of Nam.¹

Born into a poor family of weavers near Banaras, Kabir was deprived of a formal education and may have been illiterate. However, as is evident from his compositions, he had a keen intellect, discerning mind, and capacity for mystical understanding.

In this verse, Kabir tells us about our soul. Who can tell us about our soul if not the mystics, the saints of the highest order, who have merged their consciousness into the Nam of God? This is what gives power to their words. They speak to our essence, to what we really are.

Kabir tells us that our soul has no colour and no form. How indeed could it be described, for this soul of ours cannot be found in the physical body! Our senses would have us believe that it doesn’t exist, and yet Kabir tells us that it does. He compares it to a bird hidden behind the coverings of the physical body, living under the shade of Nam, the Shabd, the holy spirit of God.

No one tells me about the bird
That sings within the body.
In the vast tree dwells a bird.
It hops, it pecks, it eats,
And from branch to branch it flies.

Kabir uses the metaphor of a vast tree to illustrate the domain of transmigration, the wheel of 8.4 million species. The bird, our soul, moves within this vast tree and takes birth countless times; it flies from branch to branch, says Kabir.

No one knows where it comes from,
No one knows what makes it sing.

Only the saints, the true Masters, know where our soul comes from and what makes it sing, in other words – what delights her, what fills her with happiness. No one else, not even the most accomplished scientists, can explain the origin of life and death. And those among them whose intuition tells them that there is a primordial energy that sustains life are unable to prove it. Nor can scientists locate an exact spot within the physical body where the soul is to be found.

We do not ourselves know where our soul comes from nor the many different births that it has taken. We are ignorant of our past lives; we have drunk the waters of the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Interestingly, in ancient Greek, the word for truth is a-letheia, which is related to the word Lethe. The a indicates that truth is “un-forgetfulness,” uncovering of forgetfulness, remembrance.

This divine bird within us asks only to be able to sing, to be heard by all, which unfortunately in our present state is not possible, because our attention is greatly scattered into the world. Not only is our attention scattered, but we also have accumulated so much karma throughout our past lives – good and bad – so many actions and their reactions. Like layers of cloth or dirt that make it impossible for a lamp to shed its light, we’re going to have to patiently remove every single one of these layers in order to become aware of our soul’s radiance. The soul remains soul – it is not altered – but its radiance is concealed; the mind holds her captive and she is unable to sing!

When we meet the master, we are given the technique that brings our soul back to life, that makes her sing again. And this happens by her listening to Nam, by being immersed in Nam, her true essence. Nam or Shabd is present in every one of us. It rings within us ceaselessly, and without it our life would be over. It is the very core of our being; it is what we are made of, what we are, but in our present state we are simply unaware of it. Even a “particle” of Nam has the power to wipe away vast amounts of karma. The soul is always alive and a part of Shabd, but the mind has to be purified. And this is the reason why the Masters have no doubt that we can succeed.

No one tells me about the bird
That sings within the body.
Numerous vines entwine the tree,
Throwing shadows dark and dense;
Numerous birds huddle together
To build their nests
In the tree's sunless gloom.

The numerous vines entwining the tree represent our attachments to this world. We are truly entangled, prevented by all those attachments from being in constant remembrance of God. At one time in the past we used our free will; we got attached and now these attachments limit and constrain this free will. Kabir tells us that these attachments throw dark and dense shadows, meaning that they obscure our vision; they obscure the light of our soul and create a thick veil within our mind that makes us unaware of our soul and what it really needs. And Kabir therefore says that this world, this tree, is in deep darkness – sunless gloom – deprived of divine light.

But they fly away in the evening,
Morning they return for the day;
No one understands their strange ways.
No one tells me about the bird
That sings within the body.
Only to taste two fruits comes the bird,
Not for ten, not for twenty,
Nor for countless, nor for many.

Kabir tells us that the birds fly away in the evening and return to the tree in the morning; with this metaphor he is talking about the transmigration of souls. The birds leave the tree at death and return to this world in the morning. They take birth again to taste two fruits only – the fruit of their good and bad actions. And this cycle goes on endlessly until the bird seeks help, realizing that it is in need of a guide. Here is how Soami Ji expresses the soul’s prayer for help:

Take hold of my arm, my Master,
or I will be swept away by the swift currents
of this ocean of existence.
How can I possibly get out of this net?
You are my only hope.
Now I have found a wonderful opportunity,
but I still face the dreadful vipers of Yama and Kal.
Come and teach me some mantra
and kindly take me under your protection.²

Kabir tells us now that the bird’s true home is beyond time and space. It is limitless and eternal, and if the bird manages to fly back to where it belongs, it won’t have to visit the tree of this world ever again.

But vast and inaccessible,
Boundless and eternal
Is the bird's true home;
If the bird will only return
To its original home,
It will not be forced
To come and go again.

But for this to happen requires the intervention of a true guide or Master. Soami Ji therefore continues:

In his mercy the Master then said:
raise your consciousness to the sky within –
the path is treacherous.
Withdraw your mind and senses, put them to rest,
surrender your mind, body
and worldly possessions –
only then will you find the eternal Shabd.

Kabir concludes his poem by addressing the learned ones (the pundits), those who have thoroughly studied the scriptures, and he asks them whether that kind of knowledge has given them an understanding of where the soul’s true home is.

But no one tells me about this bird
That sings within the body.
Says Kabir: Yes, my friends,
The story I tell you
Is hard to comprehend;
But where, O pundits,
Where, O learned ones,
Is the Home of that bird
That no one is able to see,
That sings within each body?

Only the Saints, the true Masters, know where our soul comes from and what makes her sing: listening to the Name of God, the Shabd. In order to achieve this, they only have one recommendation, which never changes – bhajan and simran – simran, the ceaseless prayer that concentrates the mind at the third eye, and bhajan, which is the practice of listening for or to the sound current. Bhajan and simran will unfailingly develop our soul’s two faculties to her greatest delight, that of hearing and that of seeing. And it is this spiritual practice alone, under the guidance of a true Master, that can free the bird forever. No amount of scriptural knowledge, says Kabir, will ever grant liberation to the soul.

So, let us be thankful to our Master for giving us this teaching, for showing us how to practise this constant prayer and derive full benefit from it, for showing us how to be in touch with the Name of God, the Shabd, the sound current – sound current that will in the end free our soul and make it one again with the divine.

Sant Kabir, Shabd 358; in V.K. Sethi, Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, RSSB, 1984, 2020; pp.242–243
Soami Shiv Dayal Singh (Soami Ji Maharaj), Bachan 29, Shabd 2; in Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), RSSB, 2002; p. 285

Revolutionary Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Revolutionary Love

Valarie Kaur, a young lawyer and civil justice activist who is the daughter of Sikh farmers in California, coined the term “revolutionary love” to describe the ideal taught by sages throughout the ages that remains radical despite its pedigree: loving without limit, loving all, seeing no one, even opponents, as strangers.¹

When we read the words of the sages, we can see why this limitless love is called “revolutionary.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says:

You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.²

This ideal of Christ – ‘turn the other cheek’ – is often quoted, but do we actually believe it? And can we follow it? Most of us, in theory at least, wish that we could respond with kindness and mercy to those who have harmed us. But when we are hurt, or when a friend or family member is hurt, our first reaction is to want justice – we can’t imagine turning the other cheek to be slapped again. So we have to ask ourselves some tough questions: Are we ready to give up our ideas of justice? Do we even want to do this? And if so, how can we transform this natural tendency to retaliate against evil – how might we evolve into revolutionary lovers?

In the Adi Granth, Guru Arjun Dev gives the conditions under which we can access revolutionary love:

I have forgotten my envy of others since I found sacred company. I see no enemy. I see no stranger. All of us belong to each other. What the divine does, I accept as good. I have received this wisdom from the holy. The One pervades all. Gazing upon the One, beholding the One, Nanak blossoms forth in happiness.³

Once we take the “sacred company” of a spiritual teacher, gaining “wisdom from the holy,” we can begin to learn to see no enemy. This ability comes with seeing all people as belonging to one another, as members of one family. We are all related because we are all parts of the One. When we gaze on anyone – friend or enemy, loved one or stranger – we behold this One who pervades all. And when we turn our gaze to the One, miracle of miracles, we evolve into revolutionary lovers and “blossom forth in happiness.”

Valarie’s journey to revolutionary love began after her uncle was killed when she was only twenty years old. This drew her to civil rights activism. She became a lawyer and filmmaker, working to protect those who were targets of hate crimes. But very little seemed to change – no matter how many culprits were put behind bars or how many hurtful policies were changed, the problems persisted. Fifteen years after her uncle’s death, she and her uncle’s younger brother went to yet another memorial and dared to ask the question, “Who is the one person we have not yet tried to love?” And the answer was: her uncle’s killer.

They phoned the murderer in prison, and he expressed sorrow for what he had done to her uncle. He then said that when he goes to be judged after his death, he will ask to see her uncle and request his forgiveness. Valarie replied that she and the uncle’s brother had already forgiven him.

Valarie started meeting with the killer, approaching him with “wonder” – wondering who he was and what his wounds were. Through this process she began to understand the grief and fears that had motivated him. She told him her story, so that he could also see her not as a hated stranger, but as a sister, a member of the same family.

For Valarie, this process of developing revolutionary love is built on the foundation of a concept key to Sikhism – charrhdi kala, ever-upwelling joy – the ability to sail through life with optimism and positive energy, always trusting in the will of God no matter what adversity one faces.

Charrhdi kala is mentioned in the last line of the daily prayer recited by Sikhs. This short line encompasses the parameters for achieving ever-rising joy: “Nanak Nam charrhdi kala, tere bhane sarbatt da bhala.” – “Nanak, with Nam comes ever-rising joy, and through your will may there be blessings on all.”

In this one short sentence, the path to revolutionary love is outlined. The first component is Nam, the divine energy, the divine love through which the One became many and created the universe, the energy that pervades the whole of creation, the energy through which we will all return to the One. This energy knows no evil – it is 100% positive. It is only “with Nam” that we can activate our own positive energy and begin learning revolutionary love. Without Nam, our universe is small and fearsome, our horizons limited, our joy circumscribed. With Nam, we see all as One, we expand and rise and love.

As long as we identify with our ego, our mind, with ‘me’ and ‘mine’, the attacks we receive seem really big and we see the world as our enemy. But when we broaden our horizons through contact with Nam, the big ego becomes small – we see how puny we are in the scheme of the Lord’s plan. When we complain to the Master how strong and stubborn and unconquerable our minds are, he just laughs. The ego strong compared to Nam?! How absurd! When we experience the power of Nam, we begin to see how petty our concerns and our hurts are. The Buddhist text, the Dhammapada, says:

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox. … If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred. … Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.⁴

These verses identify the culprit that keeps us away from charrhdi kala – it is the mind. Being able to love our enemies is an ideal – we will most likely spend years trying to even approach this state of non-hatred. In the meantime, when we are abused or robbed of something or someone we love, we probably will feel grief and anger. This is natural and shouldn’t be suppressed. But what we can begin to control is what happens with those feelings – what we give energy to, what we feed. In the story of the two wolves, sometimes attributed to the Cherokee Native American people, a wise man tells his grandson that there are two fighting wolves – one is darkness and despair and the other is light and hope (charrhdi kala). When the grandson asks which one wins, the man answers, “the one you feed the most.”

We naturally have both these wolves inside us. We are not advised to kill one or the other, but to be very careful about which one we feed. When we constantly put energy into thinking about our hurt and abuse, we are feeding darkness and despair. When we put our energy into connecting with Nam, we are feeding light and hope, our ever-rising bliss. Nam lives in stillness, and we connect with Nam through stillness; as the Dhammapada says, when we stop giving safe harbor to thoughts of anger, we still our hatred. When we clear our mind and make it pure and still, happiness follows like a “never-departing shadow.”

How can we connect with Nam, how can we still our mind so this ever-upwelling joy can be fostered? There are three ways to do this:

The first is with simran, the repetition of Nam, the names given to us at initiation. This stills the constant spinning of our thoughts so that we are able to open ourselves to the boundless energy of Nam, which can’t be felt through the thick curtain of our ruminations. Once the mind is cleared, there is room for love to replace hatred, compassion to replace anger. When we are with simran, we are with Nam.

The second is through contact with Nam in human form – the Master, the “Word made flesh.” The Master is the personification of the One – he brims with charrhdi kala and models it for us. We feel the power of his joy, of his love and care. We want to become carefree and positive, full of well-being, with nothing but love for those who oppose us, just as he is.

And the third way is through the practice of dhyan and bhajan, gazing upon the One, feeling his presence within, and listening to and experiencing the Shabd dhun, the sound with which Nam manifests itself. With this we become absorbed into Nam and into the One, and the bliss of charrhdi kala naturally follows.

The next important concept in this line is “through your will.” With the ever-rising joy and positive energy that stem from making friends with Nam, we will find ourselves able to ask the Lord that, through his will, all beings may find happiness, all beings may prosper. As the Adi Granth verse quoted earlier says, “What the divine does, I accept as good.” This acceptance of the Lord’s will is crucial to nurturing the upwelling of happiness.

We can learn to accept God’s will by replacing the negative aspects of our mind with its positive features. One way to do this is by using our sense of discernment and clear thinking. Through discernment we are able to completely accept the concept of karma. We come to know that we are never victims; we are the architects of our own fate, as are all the people in our world. What we have wrought in previous lives is bearing fruit in this life, and whatever suffering we need to go through is for our own good. We realize that cleaning the vessel of our heart, making it radiant and pure, often takes some hard scrubbing. The brass pot may hurt from the abrasive scrubbing, but there is no other way to make it shine.

If we have hurt someone in a previous life and it is our turn in this life to be hurt, we can stop the cycle by not retaliating. If we want ‘justice’, if we want this person to hurt as we have, then we are just continuing the rounds of give and take. But when we can let go of the hurt, when we don’t feed it by constantly thinking about it, when we practice Nam and gladly accept the Lord’s will in every instance, then charrhdi kala naturally emerges, and we enter into the bliss of dissolving our hardness and negativity. Then compassion has room to flourish.

Compassion means a feeling of empathy and tenderness toward one who is suffering. We can approach our hurt and suffering with compassion toward ourselves, our suffering, not blaming ourselves, but accepting that these feelings come with the human state. We don’t have to dwell on them and thus magnify them; we can simply do our simran and bhajan and accept our pain in the presence of our Master – in his refuge. His presence helps us to nurse our pain, to heal our wounds, so that the obsessive thoughts and plans for retaliation can dissolve. Then we can approach others with compassion. We can happily ask for blessings for everyone – ourselves, friends and enemies, the ‘evil’ and the ‘good.’ We can see our opponents as people like us, weak and wounded, but also permeated by the divine – souls filled with love. As Abraham Lincoln said: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”⁵ And Martin Luther King said:

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says ‘love’. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.⁶

Just as the Sikhs recite this prayer asking for blessings on everyone every day, other spiritual traditions also have prayers to foster blessings on all. In the Buddhist practice of loving kindness, some time is set aside daily to consciously repeat wishes for well-being, for example, “May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe.” Practitioners first offer these wishes for themselves, then for someone close to them, then for a neutral person, and then for someone with whom they have conflict. This quiets the mind and transforms the negative energy of the inner critic to that of acceptance and love. It helps to connect with Nam, it allows charrhdi kala to rise and blossom. We can start each day with an attitude of loving kindness like that described in the Sikh prayer, “with Nam comes ever-rising joy, and through your will may there be blessings on all.” Or we can begin our day with the first prayer that the Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh learned when he became a monk:

Waking up this morning I smile.
Twenty-four brand-new hours are before me.
I vow to live them deeply and learn to look at everything
around me with the eyes of compassion.⁷

https://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/valarie-kaur-activating-revolutionary-love/?print=print
Bible, Matthew 5:38-39
Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Raag Kanarra, 1299:13–15, trans. Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger (p. 321). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Dhammapada 1:1-5 Buddhanet Presents the Dhammapada: The Buddha’s Path to Wisdom, © 2008 - BDEA / BuddhaNet. http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp01.htm
Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the first person to say this, but this quote is often attributed to him. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/05/13/make-friends/ for information on the sources.
From "Loving Your Enemies" ―Sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., in A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. Silence (p. 128). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Simplicity – In All Its Grandeur - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Simplicity – In All Its Grandeur

What is that which attracts us most when life’s complications cross into the unbearable? When, in the sea of possessions surrounding us, we cannot find a single thing pointing towards peace and tranquility? At such times it is the idea of a simple life that becomes most attractive. Indeed, we begin to feel as if it is the answer to all our problems. To some, embracing simplicity may appear as audacious thoughts of giving it all up and moving somewhere peaceful; to others it may mean retaining a handful of basic essentials instead of a houseful of clutter. But these remain within the realms of “How I would love to...” and we settle back to life as it is, to the humdrum, until the next wave of restlessness hits.

So how do we switch to a simple life? And is it truly for everyone – the average person with a family, job, and social life, and all the necessities each create? Here is where it gets interesting. When simplicity is defined merely as having minimal possessions, following old-fashioned techniques, or simply remaining static in a dynamic world, its lack is often traced to modern life. And our accusing gaze falls on our cellphones and laptops among other things. We make those very objects we craved, acquired, and have happily used the emblem of our troubles, and the reason for our ever-shrinking time and energy.

Modern life is easily vilified. A combination of nostalgia, selective memory, and a certain affinity for all things beyond reach (such as the past) makes it a prime target for our ills. But should it really be that way? After all, life has never been easier – back-breaking work has been reduced manifold, communication has never been this good, and precious time has been freed up with modern gadgets. Unfortunately for us, it has not stopped at that! Along with the benefits of these modern objects and technology has come a silent but all-consuming longing for more and more. In the end, modern technology has become a mute spectator to our frenetic desire to have it all.

Desire! The masters point straight to desire as the reason we are unable to live a simple life. If the masters had thought that having possessions and using technology were the main reasons we couldn’t live a simple life, they would have advocated hermetic living from the start, which is something they in fact tirelessly discourage. Instead, the saints say that it is the mind which is complicated; it is that which is possessed by possessions. Simplicity is achieved when mind lets go of its desires and attachments.

This state of the mind has been sought after since time immemorial, even when technology as we know it was nonexistent or taking its very first steps. History is crowded with failed attempts, for then, as now, the real culprit – desire – always remained at large. There were successes too, though few and far between and quietly hidden within the noisy workings of the world. For rare are the souls who have been chosen by a perfect saint and inculcated in the art of defeating the mind and its desires. The saints tell us that the mind has its ways, and unless it finds something more captivating than what it sees in the world, it will not budge. That captivating Nam, Shabd, or Word is the essence of the saints’ teachings and takes us out of the orbit of the mind, its avarice and cravings. In following the practice, the mind itself becomes tame – a friend urging us inward and upward as it senses the nearness and bliss of the eternal Shabd.

And thus does the turning of the mind lead to simplicity, in all its grandeur – when one can live in the world, move with the times, use for one’s own and others’ benefit all that there is, and indeed, enjoy the fruits of technological progress without ever becoming enslaved by them. Huzur Maharaj Ji’s evocative example would then play out in full: “The fly who sits at the edge of the honeypot both enjoys the honey and flies away at will.” Eventually we would taste the sweet, fine and everlasting joy of Shabd. The burning fires of desire would be doused, layer after layer of coarseness would shed away, and the soul would behold its own immaculate and pristine nature. The goal of simplicity would finally be within our grasp.

The Elephant in the Room - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Elephant in the Room

People use the expression “the elephant in the room” when referring to a major issue that may be affecting their lives, but which they shrink from acknowledging. For more than a year we have faced the Coronavirus pandemic, which has brought the world to a standstill. It has caused so many difficulties and has brought grief to millions of people who have lost loved ones, taking over 4.5 million lives worldwide. Yet most of us do not face the fact that death from this disease could be imminent.

Historians tell us the world has faced many similar tragedies caused by disease. Over 50 million people died from the Spanish Flu in 1918. Over 40 million people perished from smallpox during the 1700s. India weathered two severe epidemics in the late 1800s and early 20th century. The sixth cholera pandemic (1899–1923) began in India, probably starting at a Kumbh Mela in Haridwar; in India it killed more than 800,000 people and then spread to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Bubonic plague arrived in India from China in 1896 and lasted till 1921; an estimated twelve million Indians lost their lives, compared with three million in the entire rest of the world.

Aside from illness, humanity has faced other challenges during our lifetime. Several African famines have led to the deaths of up to four million people at a time – and there have been countless earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other such natural disasters. So the pandemic is running its course during this modern era. We have also experienced similar crises during our past lives in this creation. The saints explain that our soul has been trapped in a transmigratory cycle in this world for millions of lives, in one physical form or another, ever since the Lord brought the creation into being.

What has provided comfort and solace for many people during this pandemic has been their love and devotion for the Lord. They have retained their faith that He is the creator and sustainer of this entire universe. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. This pandemic has not happened because the Lord has lost control, or looked the other way for a while, or because He wants to punish us. Baba Ji has explained to us that the current situation is of humanity’s own making, whether it’s affecting us personally, our families, or the society around us, environmentally or medically. All the mystics have explained that human beings are the authors of their own destiny, through their actions committed in previous lives. All of us are simply reaping the karmic outcomes from past actions, which we ourselves have committed.

Guru Nanak Dev explains that our soul is caught in this world as if trapped in a net. The only escape is through having the good fortune of meeting a true Master, understanding the philosophy he shares with us, and acting on it. Only the mystics can show us the way to escape from the net of this world. Guru Nanak explains:

In an inextricable net
Is the whole world caught.
Only through the guru’s grace,
by contacting Nam,
can we swim across.
The true guru is the boatman,
and the Word (Shabd) ferries us across.¹

This world is a dreadful ocean, and our mind is a loaded boat – loaded with the heavy weight of our karmas. Our boat is floating on the dreadful ocean of this world, which is very difficult to cross. The only way is to seek a true Master who can ferry us across. The Master acts as our boatman. The Shabd, the ringing radiance or sublime sound within, is the oar that steers us back home to the Lord. Only when our soul returns to its home with the Lord can we escape from this world.

The saints explain that our soul has been mortgaged to this world through the vast karmic debt we have accumulated during the millions of lives it has been bound here. Our situation is, in fact, “the elephant in the room” which we don’t like to face. Our suffering is caused by the mind, which compels us to try to satiate the five passions, without any thought of the karmic repercussions we will subsequently have to bear. This results in us increasing the karmic debt already weighing heavily on our shoulders, and this has been happening life after life. The result is we are miserable in this world, yearn for true contentment, fail to find it, and have no inkling where to seek it.

During the recent lockdowns and quarantine periods, businesses, factories, offices, shops, and public places have been closed. People have had to stay indoors, permitted to leave home only for essential trips. This social distancing and isolation have affected people’s emotional health and wreaked havoc with their mental wellbeing, because people crave human companionship and look to the world for solace and comfort. But to make progress on the path towards our true home, the saints say we must withdraw our focus from this world and let go of our obsession with it. We need to focus inwards towards the Lord, through our daily meditation. So from a spiritual perspective, solitude and stillness are helpful to a disciple. There is a very beautiful quote in the Bible:

Be still, and know that I am God.²

“Be still” – first we have to still the body by sitting quietly, without moving, eyes closed, making the body still. Then we make the mind still by focusing our attention at the eye centre and engaging the mind in silent repetition of the five holy names. When we totally still the mind by absorbing it in simran, our consciousness will go within, with the Master’s grace, and we will experience the ringing radiance of the Shabd within. When we are able to direct our consciousness inwards, we will hear the Shabd resounding within, and we will know the Lord himself is within us. Hence, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

To their credit, many people have taken advantage of this lockdown to finally look the elephant in the face. They have spent even greater time in devotion to the Lord. The mystics say our silent inward contemplation, as prescribed by the Masters, will bear fruit. We are investing our invaluable time for the ultimate purpose of this life – to seek the Lord. We should remember that it is our duty to put in this spiritual effort every day – but it is also our privilege. We will eventually reach the spiritual destination we are seeking – so let us continue in that direction joyfully.

J.R. Puri, Guru Nanak: His Mystic Teachings, 2nd ed., RSSB, 2004, p. 295
Bible, Psalm 46:10

Simran Is Remembering Our Master - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Simran Is Remembering Our Master

We all have memories, and when we recall a friend from days gone by, that friend’s image pops into our mind and a fond feeling arises in our heart. Some years ago, an elder stood to ask Baba Ji a question. Even though I have kept a daily practice of meditation, he said, lately I have lost contact with simran. My mind just takes off and overwhelms my concentration.

Baba Ji replied by noting that is the way of the mind. After a pause, he added that simran should be automatic. Leaning in slightly, Baba Ji then asked the brother, “How can we forget Hazur Maharaj Ji?”

As the Master has done so many times in so many places, he answered a sincere question in a way that moved all of us. How can we forget our Master? How can we go through hours, if not days, if not weeks or months, without remembering the person who attracted us to this path of spiritual liberation, initiated us, and guides us still? Isn’t it shocking how easy it is to forget the greatest person we have ever known?

Simran is remembrance. We remember him by repeating silently the names he gave us, with our attention at the third eye, where his spiritual form resides. Such a supremely loving and powerful person not only gave us his spiritual contact information – five simple words – but also directed us how to arrange our lives so that we can stay in touch with him. Still, the power of the mind is such that we forget him. Even when we don’t intend to forget, we find that we have done so.

Baba Ji gave a three-part reply to this question. First, he said the function of the mind is to direct our actions in this world. Whether we feel positive or negative about the desires and thoughts of our mind doesn’t matter; it just keeps pulling our focus away from the eye center. Our task is to replace those thoughts and desires with simran. As the Master so often says, “do your simran and let go.”

“The mind is never still,” Hazur Maharaj Ji once explained. “It’s always thinking about something or another – either about the children, country, work, or whatever… This thinking is known as doing simran.”¹ And, how should we practice simran of the Master? “Be 100 percent in simran,” he advised,“ (and) by 100 percent I mean that we should do only simran and nothing else. Nothing in the whole world exists except for the simran.”²

The second part of Baba Ji’s reply to the questioner was, “simran should be automatic.” The Masters present simran as a kind of level of consciousness, where we can become so committed and focused on those five names that their repetition is automatic. Perhaps it’s like riding a bike: at first we have to give it our supreme effort or we will fall and not get anywhere. After much practice and desire to succeed, however, our cycling becomes automatic, as if our body and the bike are completely in sync, virtually one thing. We are still paying attention, but the riding feels automatic.

The third part of Baba Ji’s answer was a rhetorical question, “How can we forget Hazur Maharaj Ji?” With that simple question, he shocks us into a deeper understanding of what simran is. Of course, we could never forget our Master, yet in meditation we do forget him. Once, during Baba Ji’s Q & A session in a crowded satsang hall, a sister sitting in the back of the hall said she didn’t know whether to focus on Baba Ji himself at the dais, or the much larger video image of him. Instantly, the Master replied that it didn’t matter – both were illusions.

The path of the Masters is a path of seeking truth; the last thing we want to do is follow an illusion. Once again, Baba Ji is reminding us to remember our real Master who is available within us. There is a state of mind where simran is automatic, but we need to perfect our concentration. Then the remembering of our Master will be ongoing; he becomes unforgettable.

When our friends and those whom we love come to mind, we can feel our heart relax. We enjoy a memory of being with them and we wish to be with them again. We were happy with them. Why not Maharaj Ji? Why not Baba Ji? We can relax in meditation, as we did with them physically.

Simran is such a beautiful gift from Master to us. It is a support in times of distress and imbalance, just as it is a weapon against the mind. It is something the Master gave us that is inviolable, and the words are easy to remember. “The words by themselves have nothing in them. But since they have come from the Master, they have their own significance and power within them,” Maharaj Ji explained.³

As we mature in life, we see that, no matter how much we learn, the mind remains our spiritual adversary. As long as we are in this physical body, the mind is with us, pulling our attention toward the things and people important to our physical experience. There is no end to it. With simran, however, the mind can be silenced. Those simple words, uttered with devotion, disempower the mind and turn it into our servant. Not forever, of course. Just as our mind bothers us at every moment, simran is the remedy at every moment. It must be repeated endlessly. Maharaj Ji advises us, “Put your whole mind in these words; you will automatically feel the love and devotion… Love comes automatically.”⁴

These are precious, holy names, and they are unique. The difference between remembering an absent friend and remembering our Master is that, by remembering the Master through simran, we strengthen our relationship to the Shabd, to the Lord, who is timeless.

The Master is not only our past, he is our future. As Soami Ji wrote, “Nam or Shabd is a great power but nobody realizes it. A sleeping person is awakened when his name is called. Such is the importance of Nam. If you call Him who is always awake by His Name, why would He not hear? But he tests your sincerity and firmness of devotion.”⁵

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q. 226
Ibid, Q. 228
Ibid, Q. 234
Ibid, Q. 223
Sar Bachan (Prose), 6th ed., 1974, p. 84, Note 52

I and My Father Are One - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

I and My Father Are One

In Sant Mat, the teachings of mystics and saints, the living Master is essential. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh Ji has beautifully explained why, in the book Light on Saint John. The gospel begins:

“In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him;
and without him was not anything
made that was made.” (John 1:1–3)¹

Hazur explained:

Before there was any creation at all, only the Lord existed. He has created the whole universe through the Word, and there is no difference between the Lord and the Word, the Holy Spirit, [...], the Shabd, the Nam [...], or the divine Sound Current. The Creator and the Creative Power are one and the same. The Word cannot be written, it cannot be spoken, it cannot be touched. It is not the physical eyes which see it, nor the physical ears which hear it. It is within every one of us.²

Hazur cited another passage from the gospel:

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in the darkness;
and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:4–5)³

Hazur further explained:

The Word to which Christ refers has both sound and light. Elsewhere in the Bible he alludes to the light of the Word: “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”⁴ This means that we will be able to experience and enjoy the light of that Word when we withdraw our consciousness to the eye centre. He also indicates that we can enjoy the bliss of the sound of that Word when he says, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”⁵ Here Christ is actually describing the Voice of God within and the effulgence of light which emanates from the Word of God.⁶

Mystics and saints like Hazur Maharaj Ji are witness to the truth that God exists. God is the loving power which gives us life. Without this love nothing can exist. God is the life in every particle of the creation, the light that shines in all. Strangely enough, we are not conscious of the omnipresence of this power. When we close our eyes, we don’t see this divine light. We see only utter darkness. How is this possible? How can we be so blind to the true essence of all life? Mystics explain that this is caused by the restlessness and impurity of our mind. Our mind is like a veil of darkness which prevents us from seeing or enjoying the divine light and hearing the inner Voice of God. And this is the cause of all our human suffering. The mystics also say that the true purpose of a human life is to remove this veil, to eliminate it, so that we may realize the presence of the Divine and experience its love and supreme bliss.

How do we remove this veil? In other words, how can we dispel this inner darkness, this restlessness? How can our mind become still and pure? The mystics say that it is through love and devotion to the Divine.. But is it possible for us to worship the Divine, which we cannot see? Is it possible to love a power we’re not conscious of?

Saint John reveals that we can eliminate this veil of darkness and see the Light of the Lord within us only when, with His grace, we come in contact with someone who has come from the Father and who, after having come to our level, is also at the level of the Father. Otherwise, how can we worship Him whom we have never seen and whom we have never known since we have come to this creation? How can we love Him if we do not know what He looks like? So the necessity of the living Master arises. If it were not so, there would be no link between us and the Father.⁷

The Odes of Solomon, a series of hymns attributed to a Christian mystic of the first century CE, poetically expresses the teaching that God makes himself known to us through the living Master.

My joy is the Lord, and my course is to Him:
this my path is beautiful.
For I have a Helper to the Lord.
He made himself known to me,
without grudging, in his generosity,
For in his kindness,
he set aside his majesty.
He became like me,
in order that I might accept him.
In appearance, he seemed like me,
that I might be clothed in him.
And I did not tremble when I saw him,
because he had compassion for me.
He became like my nature,
that I might come to know him,
And like my form,
that I might not turn away from him.⁸

Every living true master, whom Jesus called the Word made flesh⁹, is a helper to God, a bridge, a ford to the divine reality through the river of life – full of rapids and eddies of happiness and sorrow. As he bears witness to the existence of the divine from his own experience, he teaches us how we too may devote ourselves to the divine. He teaches us how we can withdraw our attention from the world and focus it on the divine through the practice of meditation. But above all, through his very being, our heart becomes filled with love of the divine, and we are imbued with a longing to realize this love. How may we do this? Through the unspeakable love that emanates from the saint, as beautifully described by the Indian mystic, Sant Paltu, who writes:

Soft and tender are saints,
No one else in the world is like them.
There is no one else like them;
They are kind and merciful to all.
Foe and friend are alike to them,
And alike are bad luck and good fortune.
They are as tender as flowers;
Not even in a dream do they see others’ faults.
They ever wish well to others,
For they savour the wine of divine love.
Affable to all, with a gentle smile,
Soft and sweet of speech are they.
Cheerful whatever happens, they emanate coolness;
In every glance they radiate compassion.
Whatever one might say to them, O Paltu,
They are not in the least perturbed.
Soft and tender are saints,
No one else in the world is like them.¹⁰

The divine love that emanates from the Master opens our heart, resonates in our being, and increases our love for the divine – love that culminates in the daily practice of meditation, which deepens and intensifies through his grace. And that is nourished by moments of being in his physical presence – precious moments which we should not ever take for granted – as this period of the Covid pandemic teaches us so clearly. Dr. Julian Johnson, a disciple of the Great Master, wrote about the precious moments when he was with his Master. In his letters we can sense the divine love of the Master and the loving response of the disciple.

Since seeing him I can think of nothing else. His image lingers before me all the while. I have never seen such a face before, nor imagined there was one like it among the sons of men. If ever there was a face combining old age (he is now seventy-four years of age) with beauty, majesty, and calm power, it is his. But beyond all of that there is a sort of a spiritual radiance which no words can describe, but which gives one a feeling of deep peace, as if discords of earth were no longer possible in his presence.

As you look into his face you lose all desire to talk, even ask questions. You simply absorb the light. His voice is vibrant with love and his smile seems as if it lights up the room. … His manner towards all of us is like that of a mother comforting her tired children and soothing them to rest. His manifest love is his supreme quality, as it appears to me, and that is also the very essence of his gospel.¹¹

There is no place so sacred as at the feet of a living saint. He who is privileged to sit there is blessed above all others. To look into the eyes of divine love, to listen to his voice full of resonance of the highest spiritual culture, to feel in the depths of one’s own soul the warm glow of his holy light – that is something never to be forgotten when once experienced. How precious the moments.¹²

This love is not only nourished by the moments of being with the master physically. It also deepens and intensifies when we are separated from him. How is that possible? How can this pain of separation be expedient for us? Huzur Maharaj Ji explained this to us in the light of Jesus’s words, who said to his disciples before he died:

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7)

As Maharaj Ji further explained:

Christ explains: Day and night you are running after me now. You are mad in your love, and you are not trying to devote your time to the Spirit inside. But without attaching yourself to the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, you can never go back to the Father. So when I leave you physically, you will not find me anywhere outside and will have no option but to seek me within. Then you will be in touch with the Comforter, who will pull you up to my level, the level of the Father.

The Master comes to our level to fill us with devotion and to put us on the path, and he fills us with so much love that we cannot live without him. Physically we cannot always be with him, so the love he creates in us ultimately leads us within. When we turn within, we are in touch with the Comforter, which pulls us up to the level of the Father. “But if I depart, I will send him unto you.” I am so much in love with you that my love will always be pulling you to my level.

According to history some saints often kept their disciples away from them for many years. It was no fault of the disciples, but it was a divine design to fill them with more longing, more love, more devotion, to prepare them for something much higher.¹³

So the Master kindles love of the divine reality in us but prevents us from becoming dependent on him. That is why Baba Ji has often said that he himself doesn’t matter, for the physical master is not the true master. The physical form is a means to an end. He is like a finger that points towards the teachings, the truth, towards Shabd, the Word, the true Master, to God. We have a tendency to take the easy way out. We prefer to focus on the finger, ignoring what it is pointing to. Therefore, it is in our interest that we are not allowed to be with the Master all the time. As soon as we become physically separated from him, there is only one place where we can find him, where we can find comfort for the pain of separation – and that place is inside, at the eye centre. So the physical separation helps us to search for the true Master, to focus our attention within, where he waits for us, where he always is. It urges us onward, to follow his instructions, to practise meditation, to do seva. By doing so, the love of the Master, and with it love of the Lord, is being cultivated within us. And our belief and faith in the Master, and in God, intensify. For these are the same, as Hazur Maharaj Ji explains, citing the gospel:

“Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.” (John 12:44)

Hazur explained:

Jesus says: If you believe in me, you do not believe in this physical form but in the Father who sent me. If you love me, if you have faith in me and follow my teachings, then you love the Father who sent me, because “the Father and I are one.” (10:30) I do not need your love and devotion, but I want you to go back to the Father, and that is his way of calling you back. Therefore, if you love me and follow the teachings, actually you are loving the Father and are on your way back to him.¹⁴

Hazur Maharaj Ji goes on to the next passage, followed by his explanation:

“And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me.” (John 12:45)

Whosoever will see my Radiant Form within himself is actually not seeing me but the One who sent me, because I and the Father are one. If you have not seen the Radiant Form of the Master within but have seen the living Master in the flesh, even then you will eventually go back to the Father. By seeing the physical form of the Master you will become attached to him, and that attachment will enable you to see his Radiant Form within. From that point you will travel upwards until you merge in the Father.¹⁵

This personal, unprecedented, strong bond that is formed by walking this spiritual path ultimately leads to such a great love in our hearts that only one desire will remain there: to see the Master in his true form within and become absorbed in it. We will be happy to give up all other things if that one desire might be fulfilled, as beautifully declared in Soami Ji’s poem:

Reveal your real form to me, O Master.
You have assumed this physical form
to lead souls to their salvation.
Show me now your other form
that is inaccessible and boundless.
Let me see that form and be absorbed in it,
and grant me the gift of fearlessness….
Merciful Radha Soami, benefactor of souls,
help me realize the purpose of life.¹⁶

This intense longing for his real form will enable us to see the Master in his radiant form, as demonstrated by Hazur Maharaj Ji’s explanation, which is based on the words Jesus shared with his disciples shortly before his death.

“A little while, and you shall not see me: and again, a little while, and you will see me, because I go to the Father.” (John 16:16)

Christ says: When I leave the physical body, you will not be able to see me with your physical eyes, but after a little while you shall see me.

This does not mean that you will see me with your physical eyes or that I will return to a physical body, but that your spiritual eye will be opened and you will be able to see my radiant Form within yourself.

When I shall have left this physical body, you will miss me and will long to see me. You will therefore devote more time to the spiritual practice and will try to reach the point where you merge into me and into the Father, just as I have merged into the Father….

But your happiness will know no bounds when you meet me within yourself. Then you will absolutely forget all your trials and sorrows. You will be so filled with love, joy, and indescribable happiness that there will be no room for anything else. You will then not even remember that you were ever sad…. We then have no unfulfilled hopes or desires but dwell forever in perfect love, peace, and bliss beyond description.¹⁷

To summarize: The Master is a son of God, a manifestation of His love and grace. In his physical form he teaches us the method of meditation through which it becomes possible for us to focus our attention within, to remember the Lord and devote ourselves to him. He also serves as a living example and gives us good advice. And in his true form, as Shabd, he purifies and stills our mind. He does this all just to help us dispel the veil of darkness and realize the true essence of all life, the omnipresence of the divine.

Do we realize how merciful he is to us? Let’s make the best use of this special period by deepening our meditation, so that our love of the form may culminate in love of the Formless.

John 1:1-1:3, as quoted by Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh in Light on Saint John (LoSJ), pp. 9-12. All quotations from this gospel are taken from LoSJ.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John (LOSJ), p. 9
Ibid, pp. 9-12
Matthew 6:22
John 3:8
Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, Light on Saint John, (LOSJ), p. 10
Ibid, pp. 14–15
John Davidson, The Odes of Solomon, Ode 7, p. 30
John 1:14
Saint Paltu, His Life and Teachings, p. 182
Julian Johnson, With a Great Master in India, p. 28
Ibid, p. 98
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John (LOSJ), pp. 261-262
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John (LOSJ), p. 214
Ibid
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 33, Shabd 15, p. 329
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John (LOSJ), pp. 264-267

Babel and Babble - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Babel and Babble

One of the most well-known stories in the Bible is found in the first book of Genesis. It recounts the legend of the Tower of Babel. For despite the fact that historically a high tower may indeed have been built in the ancient city of Babylon, its story and myth have become a symbol and moral lesson for humanity.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
_{Bible, Genesis 11:1-9}¹

Many years ago, when we first learned about social media, it seemed to offer the potential to link people across distances and cultures. We hoped and believed that through it humanity would be helped to overcome differences and prejudices and find a commonality and unity. It seemed logical. Yet, as it has turned out, that internet connectivity has a dark side that gives voice to our more base instincts. Gossip, malicious rumors, lies, misinformation, and violence now permeate online information and communications. It is as if a force of gravity rules the human mind causing it to fall lower and lower, and our negative tendencies manifest themselves ever more strongly. Presently, many websites have become repositories of negativity. As the Great Master once said, referring to the period of World War II when hate and violence manifested worldwide, “the weak side of human nature takes the upper hand.”

Individual mind is Kal on a small scale. It is Kal’s agent, attached to every soul to keep it out from the eye focus and keep it entangled in this world. No individual is at peace with himself and no one is happy. In ignorance, doubt, and fear, men go about. When such is the case of the individual, the case of groups of such individuals and nations cannot be expected to be any better. The world is a plaything of Kal. Both the parties in this war profess to be Christians, and Christians are killing Christians for transitory things of this dirty material world. When art flourishes, luxuries come in its train, and the weak side of human nature takes the upper hand. Forces of evil are let loose and war is the ultimate outward expression. In spite of the development of science, the world is ignorant of the value of the human form. It does not know that it is the residence of our Creator. In this form we have the opportunity to meet him and end our woes and wanderings.²

So what is this weak side of human nature? Perhaps it is the tendency to become confused and frightened by the unknown, to reject it and distance oneself from it – creating a safe space for oneself, a vantage point from where to view everything outside ourselves as “other” and worthy of suspicion. And so, with social media, we tend to form subgroups – narrow allegiances of race, religion, color, ideology, and nationality – and try to dominate or ostracize our neighbors. People see each other competitively, rather than realizing we are all members of one human family. Hazur Maharaj Ji, in his satsangs, often quoted Guru Nanak, who said that the Sant Mat teachings are meant for all the four castes which extend to all of humanity, as being worthy of his universal teachings. These are the fundamental teachings that underpin all religion and spirituality, of love for one another.

Pope Francis recently wrote about the failure of social media to bring humanity together as one:

Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity; instead, it tends to disguise and expand the very individualism that finds expression in xenophobia and in contempt for the vulnerable.

The flood of information at our fingertips does not make for greater wisdom. Wisdom is not born of quick searches on the internet nor is it a mass of unverified data. That is not the way to grow in the encounter with truth. ... We fail to keep our attention focused, to penetrate to the heart of matters, and to recognize what is essential to give meaning to our lives. Freedom thus becomes an illusion that we are peddled, easily confused with the ability to navigate the internet. The process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits that are free and open to authentic encounters. ³

The situation is reminiscent of the legend of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. According to the story, human beings until that time spoke one language, and they decided to build a tower that would enable them to ascend to the heavens. It was a story of hubris, of pride, of trying to usurp God’s role as the Lord over all, and his power. But, as we read in the Bible:

When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly,…; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, ‘confusion’.⁴

In Judaism, rabbinic literature offers many accounts of why the people decided to build the Tower. According to one midrash (commentary), the builders of the Tower said:

He (God) has no right to choose the upper regions for himself, and assign us the lower regions. Come, let us exchange, so that we take the upper regions and he takes the lower regions.⁵

And so, when trying to find a common cause in building the Tower, the people ended up creating doubt and confusion and came into increasing conflict. Perhaps the story is telling us that God, knowing the human tendency to negativity and conflict, was trying to prevent the unleashing of our destructive impulses by keeping us apart. This is a direct parallel to the situation resulting with social media. What was conceived as a way to break down barriers became the means of strengthening divisions, as people tended to create loyalties and adopt compartmentalized thinking.

A novel published in 1996, Babel Tower, by the English writer A.S. Byatt, raises the question of “whether language can be shared, or, if that turns out to be illusory, how individuals, in talking to each other, fail to understand each other.”⁶ And this is our situation today. We think we share the same language, but we always misunderstand and misinterpret each other. All our talk is simply babble. We find causes for conflict rather than harmony. We get caught in the “worldwide web of maya” – the web of illusion and delusion.

We have to reject the illusory promise that technology and social media can become a means of creating an overarching society that all can subscribe to. Instead, we have to seek out a platform of love, acceptance, mutual respect, and support, based on human-to-human interpersonal relations. We can find the strength to do so, and rise above our divisions, when we tune in to our common, universal human spirit. That is the only true and timeless reality, through which we can hear the Lord’s message of love. It is the timeless creative power of God that reverberates within all humanity, within all creation. When we experience that oneness, the unity of God within ourselves, we will find harmony in our common human relationships and with the world around us.

Bible, King James Version
Spiritual Gems, letter 116
Pope Francis, Encyclical Release of 3 October 2020, Fratelli Tutti
Wikipedia, entry “Tower of Babel”
Midrash Genesis Rabbah, 38:7; Midrash Tanchuma Buber, ch. Noah: 27 (www.Sefaria.org)
Wikipedia, entry “Tower of Babel”: discussion of A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower

Discouragement in Meditation - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Discouragement in Meditation

In one of his letters, the Great Master wrote:

What is the object of our lives? Man is born so that he may merge his soul in its source and not be born a second time in this world. The greatest service one can render is to merge his soul (by freeing it from the attachment of mind and matter) in that ocean of peace and bliss of which it is a particle or drop.¹

The path we follow consists of exploring spirituality through a meditation practice designed to help us understand the nature of human existence and experience higher levels of consciousness, to merge our soul in the ocean of peace and bliss.

We are beginners on a long journey. In the process of our seeking, and by great grace and after many lives, we have come to the feet of a spiritual Master. And he has given us a technique for spiritual evolution along with his guidance and support.

Our real identity is soul, and that soul, which is a drop of the ocean of consciousness or God, longs to return to its true home and become one with the supreme Father. The technique of meditation we are taught consists of repetition or simran of five holy names, in order to still, quiet, and purify the mind, followed by bhajan or listening for the inner spiritual Sound. The Masters teach that this Sound, which the saints refer to as Shabd or Nam, is a manifestation of God and creates and sustains the whole creation. It is the Word of the Bible and the logos of Greek philosophy.

The meditation practice is supported by a specific way of life, which includes a lacto-vegetarian diet and abstaining from mind-altering drugs, alcoholic drinks and tobacco products, and leading a clean moral life.

Daily meditation is part of the disciple’s way of life. It is a spiritual discipline. It is not so easy to conquer the mind and ego, which have been used to running out into the world for eons. It can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We have our ups and downs and sometimes we might feel dry and discouraged in our efforts in meditation. Yet it’s something we’ve committed ourselves to pursue, so we need to keep at it.

There is a story about the Devil laying out all his tools on a table. Someone comes along and sees an unusually large, bright tool. “What’s this tool?” “Oh,” the devil says, “this is my best tool! This is discouragement.”

Even though the Masters have stated that there are no failures in Sant Mat, we may sometimes feel like we are failing, or that we are not making any progress.

Having climbed to the top of a mountain, the mountaineer stands at the peak with awe and a great sense of satisfaction and wonder. Looking down, he sees that there is real meaning to his climb, to his journey. But if he had flown to the top of the mountain in a helicopter, he would not feel so much of that meaning, understanding, and awe. It is the journey that makes the destination ever more meaningful. The struggle and effort seem to play a part in our becoming better people and perhaps making us more worthy disciples.

As to your bhajan and simran, progress on the path is not the same pace with everyone; however, progress is always there even though we are not conscious of it. No amount of effort is ever spent in vain. One should continue to persevere lovingly and regularly, without trying to check every week or every month how much he has progressed. This one comes to know automatically only when the path has been sufficiently cleared and one is nearing the eye center or appreciably improving in concentration.²

There is always progress although we may not be conscious of it. Perhaps when we try to assess our efforts we get a sense of discouragement. Perhaps trying to assess our own efforts is a bad move because we cannot see the whole picture.

To discourage or dishearten someone is to deprive him of his courage, hope, or confidence. The prefix dis in discourage means “away,” so discourage means to take away one’s courage. The root of the word “courage” is the French coeur, which means “heart.” To “discourage” is to remove heart, or, as the definition says, to dishearten.

But how do we define courage – what is being taken away? Courage is defined as: spirit, resolution, tenacity; mental or moral strength to resist opposition or hardship. Courage implies firmness of mind and willpower in the face of danger or extreme difficulty. So, as courage applies to our spiritual path, we need tenacity and moral strength to resist opposition and hardship – firmness of mind and willpower in the face of difficulty.

To be a spiritual seeker means having the courage to face one’s own mortality and be drawn to seek answers to the mysteries of life. Looking at our own lives honestly takes courage. Seeking the mysteries of life takes courage.

When we have a long way to go and we are tired, and it seems there is no end in sight, we may feel discouraged or become disheartened. It is human and natural when the road and the distance we have to travel seem long. But whenever the road feels too long, the Master comes and reminds us to take heart.

Stepping back and viewing our circumstances from a higher level can give us a fresh perspective. As Great Master wrote:

Please do not feel disappointed at what you call retrogression. There is no such thing as retrogression on the path, but such spells of dryness and lack of devotion often occur in the life of a devotee. In fact, these spells of depression are in a way to spur us on to greater effort. Otherwise, we are likely to become static and complacent.

There is no reason to feel disheartened on this path. Go on attending to your meditation daily with love and devotion, leaving all else in His hands. He knows His duty and will not fail to pay the wages due. Worldly cares will always remain with us in some form or other so long as we are here. Try to rise above them and keep your thoughts in meditation.³

On this journey there are going to be ups and downs. There will be dry times, and even they serve a purpose. They spur us on to greater effort.

Acceptance and understanding of our hardships help give us a bigger picture. There may be some significance in the fact that God has started us on this long and seemingly difficult journey. We are forced to remember that life is difficult and it is an uphill battle. There are no ideal circumstances and we all have struggles.

The Masters encourage us onwards. They say that we know you have challenges and trials but these things will teach you and strengthen you. And so we learn to be better, more loving, and more flexible people. We are working for an ideal, striving for an ideal. If we were perfect, we wouldn’t be here, the Master often says. The Masters accept that and encourage us in this effort to improve. We are all struggling souls trying to improve. None of us is perfect yet.

The Masters have told us that we are always making progress whether we realize it or not. Trying to assess ourselves is a bad idea because we cannot do so accurately. He has his own timeline and he knows when it is safe to increase our love. In A Wake-Up Call we read:

The only thing we can say with certainty is that each of us has been placed in the precise circumstances that are in our best interest, where we can best clear our karmas, where we can best live out our destiny for this life and fulfill our duties at the same time.⁴

We may have read the story of the King of Bokhara, who asked Sant Kabir for initiation and Kabir said, “No, you are not ready.” Then Kabir asked his wife Mai Loi to dump the house sweepings on the king’s head as he stood in the courtyard. The king reacted strongly and arrogantly. Some years passed, and when Kabir again asked his wife to throw the sweepings on the king’s head, this time the king responded humbly, “May you, the doer of this, live long. This mind was still full of ego and self. It had to be treated this way.”⁵

This is symbolic of what we have to go through in life. We are paying back the results of our own actions. The king finally was humbled through his service to Kabir and accepted the sweepings being dumped on his head. So we become humble when we accept the events of our life with understanding. The Master advises us to go through it all and stay cheerful. Keep going. And stay upbeat. Be encouraged! Have courage!

Keep a positive outlook, the Master always advises us. Although we have obstacles, struggles, and hardships to overcome, we will be given the strength and wisdom to meet those obstacles. We will be given the understanding that these experiences are the result of our own actions, and we will gain the ability to learn from these experiences. We become stronger and better people.

We have to be patient and keep working. It is all in His hands. He is not going to pluck the fruit off the tree before it ripens. The Masters often remind us that they know when it is the right time to increase their love in our hearts.

This path has been described as a “school of practical mysticism.” It’s a school. We enroll. We attend classes (meditation, satsang). It is a step-by-step process. A kindergartener cannot earn a PhD degree overnight. But we attend school every day, and slowly and slowly we grow and learn.

No matter how much we may feel that we are failing in our meditation, all that matters is the effort – our intention, our desire to try to make effort. If we have expectations about results, we are missing the big picture. The Master is aware of our efforts and will give us results when he knows we are ready to experience and digest them. He also wants us to go through our karmas and fulfill our responsibilities. Our effort in itself is a wonderful thing. It plays an important part in this great evolutionary process we are going through. Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote in letter to a disciple:

Even in the face of seeming failure, one should continue the practice with faith and devotion. The mind has been going out for countless ages, and each time it has become more scattered. The object is to collect the mind at the point of concentration, contact Shabd, and begin our homeward journey. The first step is the most difficult of all and takes a long time – the length of time depending on the results of our own previous actions plus the sincerity and amount of steady effort we put forth in following His instructions. Effort and grace go hand in hand. The more effort we make, the more grace we receive to make more effort until the goal is reached.⁶

A parent loves to watch her little child try to do something that is beyond his abilities – perhaps to lift a heavy rock or climb a ladder. It is not possible for the child to do this alone. But the parent smiles lovingly as the child tries. She holds out her protective arms to catch the child in case he falls. So the supreme Father is pleased with our efforts. And Master tells us that progress is always there, even though we can’t perceive it.

It is the Master’s grace that has pulled us to the path and has given us this meditation practice. Without his grace we would not even be interested in spirituality. We wouldn’t be discouraged about our meditation practice because we wouldn’t even be trying to meditate. It is all the Lord’s grace. It has all been initiated by the Lord. As Hazur Maharaj Ji says in Die to Live:

Who makes us yearn? It’s not our meditation. It is the Father himself. He uproots us from here and takes us to his own level. Practically we do nothing. You can take credit that you sit for two or three hours, but there is something which makes you sit. It’s not you. Left to you, you would never sit, even for five minutes. So if you see this from the higher point of view, it is definitely the Father who is pulling us up to his own level. It’s not our efforts at all.⁷

So although we all have struggles, his grace is behind all our efforts and our ups and downs. The struggle becomes meaningful when we get to the top of the mountain. Thomas Merton, a Trappist Catholic monk, spoke of our profound shortcomings as we attempt God-realization in times of discouragement. He says:

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone…..You would profit much by patiently resisting distractions and learning something of your own helplessness and incapacity. No matter how distracted you may be, pray by peaceful, even perhaps inarticulate efforts to center your heart upon God, who is present to you in spite of all that is going on in your mind. His presence does not depend on your thoughts of Him. He is unfailingly there: If He were not, you could not even exist. The memory of His unfailing presence is the surest anchor for our minds and hearts in the storms of distraction and temptation by which we are purified.⁸

Now that we have established the fact all this is due to the Lord’s grace, we can turn our attention to following his instructions without expectations or judgment.

Yes, we have obstacles and difficulties. But at the same time, we have that sense of wonder and grace as we go through our lives. We are striving to get closer to God. In our everyday lives, the divine presence is there. The river of love and peace is flowing through our lives if we but take the time to look for it, listen for it, and experience it. We may have difficulties but at the same time we have the sense of a spiritual presence, the Shabd, the grace of the Master. As we keep on striving to follow the path, it is His grace that gives us the courage and inspiration to keep going.

Spiritual Gems, Letter 150
Light On Sant Mat, Letter 338
Quest for Light, Letter 365
Wake-Up Call, p. 66
Tales of the Mystic East (ed. 2017), “The King of Bokhara,” p. 22
Light On Sant Mat, Letter 260
Die To Live, p. 351
Thomas Merton, New Seeds Of Contemplation, NY: New Directions, 2007; pp. 221, 222, 224

Entering Sach Khand - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Entering Sach Khand

We often refer to the highest spiritual region as Sach Khand and call it the goal of our path. We are told that we can enter this region while still in this human body through meditation. We also know that such a goal is easy to talk about but seems impossible to achieve. We fail even in the initial baby steps when we attend to our simran and bhajan, and so this ultimate goal called Sach Khand seems a distant dream. Yet we do entertain the hope and belief that as we have been initiated, a place for us in Sach Khand is reserved and assured.

When a near and dear one passes away, we often say “he/she has gone to Sach Khand,” in much the same way as believers in various religions speak of entering heaven or whatever term they use to refer to the abode of God. Such an attitude makes our path no different from other religions – a belief system rather than one that is subject to verification. As long as we have not had any inner experience, our path is actually just a belief system. That being the case, is there anything we can do to make it more practical and more than simply a belief system?

Attending to meditation regularly, even if there are no apparent results, is of course the most important thing we can do. But in addition, we could go deeper into what the term “Sach Khand” stands for. Sach means truth or reality. Khand means section or division. What our physical senses reveal to us is illusion, maya – we could call it Jhoot Khand (that part of reality which is not true). In this way, we divide the reality of what exists into two parts – that which is true and that which is not true. We can see the reality or truth of this physical world only when we can see God within each particle; otherwise we only see maya, the illusion. So Sach Khand is actually a reference to the truth or reality that can be experienced even in this world, not merely something we will encounter only after death. Hazur Maharaj Ji described this truth as follows:

The pity is that what we see, what we feel, what we touch is not real. What we don’t see, that is real. What we don’t touch, that is real. That is the pity of it. …. God is in everything. God itself is reality. Wherever God is, is a reality.¹

We can strive towards this goal by not only bringing our so-called failures at meditation every day to the Master, but also, throughout the day in our interactions with everyone around us, by reminding ourselves of the truth of the above statement.

Perhaps it would help to think of God as shabd and shabd as energy. Nothing that we see around can function without energy – every body, every mind, even dead matter needs energy because, as science tells us, matter consists of sub-atomic particles which are actually immeasurable energy. So every time we drive in our car, we could tell ourselves, “the energy that fuels this car is shabd”; every time we get up from bed, we can tell ourselves, “I can do this only because of the energy my body has, and this energy is a manifestation of shabd.” Such reminders of “God in action” can be a help in focusing our mind when we sit in meditation, especially if the day’s events have made us miserable. Let’s say we have been cheated or slighted by someone. Seeing everyone as “energy,” and therefore as shabd – guru – God, might help us overcome our negative feelings.

Another way we can approach the concept of Sach Khand is to equate all living beings with their consciousness, rather than their body/mind. We often say our soul is a particle of God. These days, Baba Ji often equates soul with consciousness. The advantage of using the word “consciousness” is that we have all experienced it. Even atheists cannot deny its reality – for the body is totally incapable of anything when it enters the unconscious state. Therefore, if we can focus on the consciousness – as different from the body and mind – of the person we are interacting with, then we can recognize the love, the soul, the God in one another.

This comes through well in a question-and-answer exchange in which the questioner complains about the terrible behaviour of her teenage granddaughter. She describes how the girl makes unfair demands on everyone and goes into terrible temper tantrums when denied what she wants. She speaks of how fed up she and the girl’s mother are with this behaviour and asks Maharaj Ji for advice about how to deal with the situation. She adds that her son-in-law, however, remains unfazed by all this and deals with his daughter very lovingly despite her difficult behaviour. Maharaj Ji asks how the son-in-law has managed to remain unaffected by the terrible behaviour of his daughter. The lady says, “Well, he never misses his mediation, ever.”

Such situations test not only our patience but our spiritual maturity. Unlike the mother and grandmother, the father of the girl was focusing on her spirit, on the love, rather than on her mind and its unfortunate behaviour. This allowed him simply not to react, but to respond in a more loving and compassionate manner. While there is no guarantee what results this will have, at least the father doesn’t lose his balance as well and remains a calming influence.

The child’s reality is the life-force in her. When a child is born, sometimes even before birth, we are totally consumed by our love for him or her. At that point, we have no idea what form his or her body or mind will take. It is the life-force or consciousness that grips us, immerses us in love. But as the child grows up, we start mistaking the body and mind for the reality and do not focus on the child’s consciousness. The father of the young girl who was experiencing tantrums focused on the reality of the girl – the love in her, the God in her. That represents the Sach (true) aspect of her. Her tantrums represent the jhoot (false) aspect of her. His devotion to his daily practice of meditation enabled him to make this important distinction and thereby not get upset by his daughter’s tantrums.

Whether we succeed in having inner visions or not during our meditation is of less consequence than the changes that happen within our inner being as a result of our efforts, however fruitless they seem at that point in time. In fact, it is not in our interest to have visions until a certain level of spiritual maturity is reached. Therefore, it is necessary for us to reach a level of spiritual development that gives us the ability to handle “difficult” people and situations with love and understanding before we are ready for such inner visions.

When we are faced with difficult situations in life, there is a natural tendency to want to run away from the world. But Sant Mat is only for the brave – no question of running away from anything. Saints come to this world as living examples of how we should lead our lives here. For instance, Kabir continued to live in Varanasi despite all the social problems, hatred, and poverty he encountered there. He earned a meagre livelihood through his daily efforts at weaving cloth. He provided for the worldly needs of himself, his wife, and their two children. Despite the hardships of his life, he never wanted to run away from his worldly responsibilities.

There is a story about Kabir which describes that when his wife went to the local grocer to purchase their daily needs, she ran short of money. Seeing how beautiful she was, the grocer told her, “As you don’t have the full amount of money, you will have to come to me tonight to compensate for the shortfall.” That night, Kabir himself took her in his arms to the grocer as an offering! Seeing this, the grocer felt ashamed at what he had wanted, and that enabled him to turn over a new leaf and become a better person. Thus, Kabir was demonstrating the truth of what he had said: “I live in a township full of love.”² To an ordinary observer, the town he was living in – Varanasi – was anything but a town of love. But to him, it was Sach Khand – even the grocer who wanted his wife represented God. To reach Sach Khand, he did not have to leave the body or Varanasi and go anywhere.

As Baba Ji once told someone who had quoted from a book that described this world as a “smelly toilet,” it all depends on our perspective. From the saints’ perspective, this world and every living being in it is a creation of God, and nothing He creates is anything less than wonderful. If only we can realize this, we will have already entered Sach Khand.

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q# 16
Kabir Sahib ki Shabdavali (Hindi), part 1, p. 15

The Living Water - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Living Water

When you’re thirsty you often feel hungry. This is because the signals that the brain receives for hunger and dehydration are very similar. In fact, a recent study tracked situations when people at work were thirsty but not actually hungry. They responded by having a drink only two percent of the time! That means 98 times out of 100 people either ignored their thirst or ate something to soothe their headache or rumbling stomach.¹

In this example, our physical body has a thirst. Instead of drinking, we eat to fill the emptiness, then we get even thirstier, and so the cycle repeats. Our innermost nature also has a thirst. We feel it as an emptiness in our lives or in our hearts. Sometimes we feel it in times of stress, but sometimes we feel this emptiness the most when everything is perfect from a worldly point of view.

We do a lot of things to try to fill this emptiness. We get involved in relationships, try to gain wealth or status, take risks, watch endless TV, and take drugs. But these things are like junk food that doesn’t take our thirst away. By pursuing these solutions, we aren’t recognizing our inner thirst for what it is. Unless we understand that thirst, we can’t take steps to quench it. Jesus called it a thirst for the Spirit. Like every great mystic throughout history, he spoke from his own experience and told his disciples that within every human being there is a current of divine love and radiance from which we have become disconnected. If we can re-connect to it, we can attain peace. And then we can become more loving human beings who radiate that same peace. Only that divine current or Spirit can quench our inner thirst.

In other traditions that divine current is called Dao, Nam, Kalma, Khuda, or the Music of the Spheres. Jesus sometimes called it the Word of God, and also refers to it as the Living Water.

In the gospel of John, Jesus is quoted as saying to the crowd of people:

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said (referring to the earlier scriptures), rivers of living water will flow from within them.

Which earlier scripture was he referring to? Perhaps this one – in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, in which Isaiah uses a metaphor for the life-giving spiritual “water” reviving the barren earth:

For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants.²

And John explains:

This He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive.³

Elsewhere in the gospel of John, Jesus is quoted:

Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.⁴

There is no doubt that the Living Water he is referring to is the holy Spirit. The highest grace we can have is to possess a conscious thirst, a strong need to drink of this Living Water, doing whatever it takes to quench this spiritual thirst. The next best thing, if we don’t have that conscious, desperate thirst, is to at least have faith in a person who observes that we need a drink. If we have such faith, we might put in the effort to take a sip and gain some benefit from it. Then we might build a habit of sitting and looking for that Living Water every day. Eventually we start to feel the thirst, and sitting becomes a matter of necessity, not obedience or duty.

The nineteenth-century mystic Soami Ji uses the word Shabd to refer to the Living Water. He says that you need to obtain the method of connecting to the Shabd from a teacher who has made that connection himself.

When you decide on a life of devotion,
obtain the path of Shabd from a Master
and devote yourself to him.
If he is not a Master of the path of Shabd,
you can be sure he is teaching under false pretences.
A true Guru is a lover of Shabd –
he practices Shabd, nothing but Shabd…
Obtain the secret of Shabd from him,
and put your heart and soul
into the practice of that Shabd.⁵

He's saying that when you have that thirst – or at least are ready to devote yourself to something, some practice or path – make sure that it is the path of Shabd, the path to that Living Water, because there are so many paths and practices competing for our time and attention. We might have figured out that money, status, and sex don’t fill the emptiness, but there are so many new, seemingly more-noble alternatives presented to us in bestselling books or by influencers and endless apps claiming to have the answers. Some examples are: eating the healthiest or most environmentally friendly foods; serving a good cause; practicing mindfulness; being in harmony with the planet; various forms of physical or mental exercise; spending time in nature; and being part of a religious, charitable, or creative community.

All of these practices aim to help us cope with the world or be more effective in the world. Soami Ji says, though, that the real Shabd comes from beyond the world we can see with our physical eyes. Putting our heart and soul into being attached to that divine current transforms us, brings lasting joy, and connects us to a power beyond time and space. Building a relationship with that Shabd is the only way to quench our thirst, to bring us peace. And for that, he says, we need a teacher who “is a lover of Shabd – he practices Shabd, nothing but Shabd.”

Now, our ego might not like the idea of a Master, a guru, a higher authority. The thing is, though, in the end, everyone has a master. It’s just whether we follow a spiritual master or a worldly authority. As the American songwriter Bob Dylan sang:

You may be a construction worker working on a home
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody's landlord, you might even own banks
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.⁶

What Dylan is getting at is that we all have some sort of goal. And in the pursuit of that goal we’ve got to serve someone. If our goal is peace, love, true humanity, or God – then we need to follow the one who practices Shabd, nothing but Shabd; we need to serve the Master and the Lord. If we don’t, then we are going to sink deeper into the world, with all of its greed and attachment. Even if we’re pursuing good causes, we will end up having to play politics. If we start our own business, we will have to serve our customers – and do what is needed to pay our staff. If we pursue mindfulness in order to be more effective at work or in our relationships, then we’re still saying that the approval of those people is the most important thing. Soami Ji put it this way:

A life of luxury, of worldly power and authority,
rests on wealth and the favour of your boss.
See how you serve your superiors
to acquire this wealth, power and prestige!
So slavishly do you comply with their orders
that you forego food and sleep to please them….
I feel ashamed to disclose
what servility you endure for love of wealth.⁷

You can see where he’s going with this. Just look at how much effort we put into our worldly endeavours – our studies, our jobs, our service of family. It seems automatic to cut into our sleep or miss a meal for a big obligation. If our salary or status is at stake, we’ll always be ready to put in extra hours. It might be the same with our seva or service – if others are watching or praising us, we’ll put in the time and effort.

But what about our most important service, the meditative seva that happens in private, where no one but the Lord can see us? If we shirk that duty, it means the world is our master, and we’re not really serving the Guru.

The Sufi mystic Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir (967–1049 CE) explains that performing this private duty as our top priority is not selfish, but rather makes us more selfless and loving to all:

The best use of your tongue
is to repeat the Beloved’s Name in devotion.
The best prayers are those in
the solitude of the night.⁸

If you are seeking closeness to the Beloved,
love everyone.
Whether in their presence or their absence,
see only their good.
If you want to be as clear and refreshing as the breath
of the morning breeze, like the sun
have nothing but warmth and light for everyone.⁹

As our spiritual master, Baba Gurinder Singh Ji, often says, peace of mind is the key to happiness. And if we have that peace, then we can radiate that peace to others. We can only give what we have. But this lasting satisfaction, the fulfillment of our thirst, comes only from within, from the Living Water that the Master graciously offers to us. Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir referred to it in the passage above as “the Beloved’s Name,” and Soami Ji likewise refers to it as Nam when he concludes his hymn by exhorting us:

Therefore attend satsang, serve the Master,
and utilize every breath of your life
to earn the wealth of Nam.
Nothing compares with Guru, Nam and satsang;
nothing else counts.
Everything will be accomplished through these –
you will wipe out your karma,
you will reach your original home.
Accept my advice now, while living,
or you will deeply regret it in the end.
Wealth and pride will do you no good;
power and authority will disappear.
Therefore practice devotion to the Lord –
apply yourself to this, the most fulfilling task.¹⁰

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/wellness/hunger-vs-thirst-are-you-eating-when-you-should-be-drinking/
Bible, Isaiah 4:3
Bible, John 7:37–39
Bible, John 4:14
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Selections), Bachan 16 Shabd 1, p. 171
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/gotta-serve-somebody/
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 16 Shabd 1, p. 173
Nobody, Son of Nobody: Renditions by Vraje Abramian; Prescott, AZ, Hohm Press, 2001, p. 55
Nobody, Son of Nobody, p. 33
Sar Bachan Poetry, Bachan 16 Shabd 1, p. 177

The Reason for Living - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Reason for Living

Shakespeare wrote many romantic sonnets, poems, dramatic plays, and tragedies. In one of those tragedies, King Lear, the King says to his right-hand man, the Earl of Gloucester, “When we are born we cry, that we come (again) to this stage of fools.”¹

A different perspective on birth, perhaps – a little cynical but true! Because we are indeed fools, in that most of us do not use this life for the purpose it was given; we don’t realize that all these joys, attachments, and experiences – this pain and its resulting influence on our varied lives – is not the main purpose of living. The saints have always told us that the main reason for life is to return to our original home – to return to God – that God resides within this body, and the way to Him is also within this body. The fact that He cannot be seen, felt, or tasted, or that the correct technique to be aware of His existence is unknown to us, does not mean He is not there.

Guru Amar Das says:

The Lord himself dwells within the body;
He is invisible and cannot be seen.
The foolish, self-willed one does not understand;
he goes out to search for Him.
_{AG, Rag Suhi, M3, p. 754²}

Saints have continually explained to us that He is to be found within the body. Scientists often claim that He does not exist at all, that God is just a figment of our imagination, that he is just a crutch to support a weak and inept character. But the scientists cannot explain about the life force; they cannot tell us what “goes” when a body dies.

The mystics tell us that God is that life force in everyone, that He is manifest as light and sound, and all we have to do to contact God is, first of all, to be conscious of His existence, then to control our mind and change the focus of our attention to be aware of His company. They remind us that we all have that potential and we are here solely to fulfill that destiny.

But how many of us do that? Most of us are too engrossed in the physical aspects of life: we try to enjoy life to the maximum – we play too long, work too hard, spend too much, indulge too often. We waste our time, ignore the warning signs, and die too young and quickly. This use of life, destiny, and an observation on the way we waste this precious opportunity is exquisitely put in a poem by James Rhoades (1841–1923), quoted in the book Sarmad, Martyr to Love Divine:

That which thou art thou dreamest not; so vast
that lo! time present, time to be, time past
are but the sepals (petals) of thy opening soul,
whose flower shall fill the universe at last.
Thou ponderest on the moon, the stars, the sky,
why the winds gather, how the waters run,
but all too lightly deemest of thy Self
who art a thousand miracles in one.³

Who are we? Who art Thou?
We don’t even dream of what we are, what we are capable of, that we are“so vast, that our potential is unlimited. “Time present, time to be, time past” – this is a growing time of understanding, a time of learning who we really are, beautifully explained as “the sepals (petals) of thy opening soul, whose flower shall fill the universe at last.” Just think: Who are we? – Who is the real me? The mystics have repeatedly told us that we are not just this body, which we call I or Me – that we are much more than that. We are soul, an entity that does not die, does not age, that has existed in different forms and bodies since this creation came into being. Soami Ji tells us, “After drifting through millions of births you have obtained this precious human form.”⁴

We spend this life taking great pride in our ability to increase our achievements, wealth and possessions, improve our body, care for our family, develop our position, yet still we always want more, and it is these unfulfilled desires that keep us here, returning life after life into this physical creation. Yet what is there to be proud of? Our youth and beauty, our strength and intellect, our wealth and health, our authority or status in life – if so, we have to ask ourselves why? Will we keep all these things? All these attributes are with us for just a few years, and then they vanish into old age, into emptiness, into history. They become just personal memories, of no meaning for anyone else, like photographs in an album, and yet we are so proud of them for the short time that they exist.

That which thou art– thou dreamest not; so vast …

And still the mystics remind us constantly that we deserve and should expect more than these physical attributes and achievements. In all ages, countries, and languages, the saints have told us through their writings that this human form is the “top of creation,” that we are made in “God’s image,” that time – past, present and future – is just a passing dream, an illusion. But for the real us, our soul, time is nothing – we are the whole universe, so vast – yet we run around and worry about all the petty things, like the stars, the sky, and physical phenomena. (Will the sun rise tomorrow? Will the crops fail? Will there be war? Will my children be happy? Will the stock market crash? Will we become ill with Covid? These are things we can do little or nothing about.) But still we never think about our self, the real us who is a thousand miracles in one. We have everything available to us; the passing time is for learning and growing, and we don’t even consider using it correctly. As Guru Amar Das reminded us about the futility of searching for the Lord outside:

The Lord himself dwells within the body;
He is invisible and cannot be seen.

Every thought and action, every experience through which the soul passes in endless ages, is recorded in this body; all knowledge, wealth, wisdom, happiness and peace are stored within it, and we still go outside in search of these things: Why? Unfortunately our mind comes into play, gets involved in all the attractive experiences the world has to offer, so we go looking there for happiness and fulfillment. But unless we have the great good fortune to meet someone who can guide us to the internal path where life’s true miracle can take place, where we can find true peace and happiness, we have no idea of the possibilities. In the words of Guru Amar Das:

In this body are myriads of things,
but one sees only if one realizes the Truth
through the Guru –
And closing one's nine doors,
one enters into the tenth door (of the Self).
He is thus emancipated
and hears the unstruck music of the Word.⁵

And Hazur Maharaj Ji similarly commented:

This body of ours is not merely a five- or six-foot structure containing blood, flesh and bones; the Lord has kept countless treasures hidden within it. Even the Lord himself lives within it, but so long as we do not meet a perfect Master, we are not in a position either to carry out research in the body or to meet the Lord.⁶

One tragedy is that we rarely take enough notice to appreciate how short our life is and to realize its true purpose. We need to appreciate what we can achieve – if only we would investigate our unlimited potential – before we find how quickly our time here will disappear. As Maharaj Sawan Singh told us in Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II:

But the best feature of the body is that it is the temple of the soul, and any respect or honour that is due to it is deserved only so long as the soul resides in the body. We should, therefore, spend some time for the development of our soul, when we waste so much time on nurturing the body day and night.⁷

Often, even when a person is equipped with perfect health and wealth, intelligence, faithful friends and relations, and the modern paraphernalia of happiness, he or she still feels dissatisfied, especially when sitting quietly alone, trying to understand the why and wherefore of it all.

Distractions
Within the period of living memory there can be few people in the world whose lives have not been fragmented and affected by wars, revolutions, economic upheaval, and epidemics that appear to be chaotic and leading nowhere at all. A quote from an unidentified author says: “Life is like a jigsaw puzzle, with most of its pieces missing.”

It is difficult while going through this life not to regard our passing years as haphazard incidents interspersed with good and bad luck! It’s like the jigsaw – unfortunately most people think that they have designed it, made the pieces, and then put it together all by themselves. Not knowing the whole picture, what life has in store for us, is it any wonder that some of us think that half the pieces are missing? How can we think that we are in control of our lives when we cannot successfully plan and execute events for one day? How can we think that we will not get disappointed today? Observe the perfect integration of all life around us! How can we then deny that all is happening according to a master plan; how could we think that everything we see around us is an accident, a series of events occurring by haphazard random selection?

The Master tells us that all events in life happen according to a predestined plan, that nothing in our life is irrelevant, nothing is too small an event – we see time and time again that two pieces of this jigsaw, if only viewed from a physical or intellectual perspective, do not fit together. But we have to keep an open mind, use a bit of lateral thinking, and move to a different concept – the spiritual – which gives much more sense to the meaning of life and its unfolding purpose.

This then leads us to the most serious and profound question that people can ask themselves – what and why is the real meaning of life? And when we start to pursue our investigation with an open mind, we will require courage and faith. Immediately we question the normally accepted values and answers. We are told that one of the most urgent things in this world is “self-discovery.”

That Lo! time present, time to be, time past,
Are but the petals (sepals) of thy opening soul,
Whose flower shall fill the universe at last,…

Time – Use It Wisely
We are advised of the importance of spending our time wisely in The Cloud of Unknowing, written by a 14th century English monk:

So be very careful how you spend your time. There is nothing more precious. In the twinkling of an eye, heaven may be won or lost. God shows that time is precious, for He never gives two moments of time side by side, but always in succession….. Time is made for man, not man for time…. Man will have no excuse before God at the Day of Judgement, when he gives account of how he spent his time.⁸

Time and change are explained in The Book of Mirdad. Mirdad uses the metaphor of time as a wheel, and illustrates that change is illusion.

You sense the bewildering change of seasons and you believe, therefore, that all is in the clutches of change. But you allow withal that the power which folds and unfolds the seasons is everlastingly one and the same…

How credulous you are! How gullible of every trick your senses play on you. Where is your imagination? For with it only can you see that all the changes which bewilder you are but the sleight of hand.⁹

He continues by telling us that it is all smoke and mirrors, a conjuror’s trick:

One is the road of life and death, O monks, upon the rim of the wheel of time, for motion in the world is a motion in a circle. Shall man, then, never free himself of the vicious circle of time? Man shall, because man is heir to God's freedom.

The wheel of time rotates, but its axis is ever at rest. God is the axis of the wheel of time. Though all things rotate about Him in time and space, yet is He always timeless and spaceless and still. Though all things proceed from His Word, yet is His Word as timeless and spaceless as He.

In the axis all is peace. On the rim all is commotion. Where would you rather be?¹⁰

Imagine the bicycle wheel: if we watch the rim of the wheel as the bike travels along, it bounces along the road, hitting all the bumps and stones. But the hub, the centre of the wheel, just flows along smoothly, doesn’t even appear to be turning. So Mirdad asks – “where would you rather be?” On the rim, getting hurt, bouncing along, catching all the holes and lumps, or at the hub (the axis), at peace, having a smooth ride?

I say to you, slip from the rim of time into the axis and spare yourselves the nausea of motion. Let time revolve about you: But you revolve not with time.¹¹

And to locate the axis, all we have to do is “slip” our attention from this physical world (the rim) to the spiritual (the axis), as instructed by the Master, by meditation at the eye centre. And through our meditation – simran, dhyan, and bhajan – to contact that light and sound within, to find that bliss.

In Light on Sant Mat, Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote about the most effective use of the time we have been given:

Even if one has to spend his whole life on research alone, it is not time lost but time gained, because the stronger the foundation, the surer it will bring a sound structure. It is therefore essential that before accepting Sant Mat principles the inquiry and investigation should be complete and thorough.

After you have made up your mind, the inquiry should be abandoned and the knowledge applied to practical experiences. This human body is a rare privilege and opportunity because the main object of life, which is self-realization, can be attained in this human body. We have to carry out the duties of the worldly life and live as normal human beings, but the goal and destination must not be overlooked.¹²

The Journey
This goal, this destination, is to open the flower of our soul. Travel the path of self-realization, the main object of life, to know our true self. Our spiritual journey starts from the soles of our feet and goes to the top of our head. In this body the spiritual journey has two stages. The first is up to the eye centre, the second from the eye centre to the top of the head.

In our body, the soul and the mind are tied together at the eye centre, in the wakeful state. From here our consciousness is spread into the whole world. Even when we close our eyes, we are not here (at the eye centre). We (our minds) are never still; rather, we find ourselves on the rim of that wheel – thinking about worldly ambitions, mundane daily affairs, our relations, family, and work. Our daily activities take up all our thoughts. All we think about takes our attention; we picture these things in our mind’s eye and we become attached to them. They take up all our time, we dream about them, and this is how our mind and attention have spread out into this creation, into this world of illusion. Saints remind us that all we have to do in order to slip into the axis is to reverse this trend, bring our attention back – to its central point of concentration at the eye centre, the home of the soul and mind in the human body. Guru Ram Das describes our present state:

Each and every moment, my mind roams
and rambles and runs everywhere.
It does not stay in its own home,
not even for an instant.¹³

Unless we withdraw our attention to the eye centre, we cannot concentrate within. We cannot even take the first step on our spiritual journey home, for our soul “to fill the universe at last.”

Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

Even the power of becoming divine is given to man. This limited individual soul has unlimited capacities and does not rise to higher regions simply because it does not make use of those capacities. Naturally, if one does not make proper use of his potentialities to rise to higher regions, but becomes attached to the sensual pleasures of this world, he is sure to be sent down to some lower species where he can enjoy those pleasures to his heart’s content.¹⁴

Only one who has already taken this journey within can guide us to those higher regions. But because our mind is embedded in this world of phenomena, we have no concept of those spiritual regions or of our capacity to become divine. Then Hazur continues in the same letter:

Few men know what a great mine of happiness and bliss is to be found within themselves. Man, in his ignorance, tries to find it in worldly wealth, sexual indulgence, and wine. But true bliss is not to be found in this world of senses. For that peace and bliss, one has to turn Godward.

Life does not begin with birth and end with death. We are an expression of infinite life, which had no beginning and shall never come to an end.

And that knowledge of “infinite life” is, in a nutshell, why we need a true Master to show us the way to turn Godward. Then what is required is action – to get ourselves out of this predicament that we find ourselves in. He stresses the importance of doing this now.

How to Travel
We must live a lifestyle which is conducive to our spiritual goals. To do this,

we must live a high moral life, one of truth, honesty, and compassion, living in harmony with our neighbours and the environment,
we must be vegetarian – no killing – living a compassionate life,
we must control our mind as much as possible by abstinence from alcohol and mind-affecting drugs, including marijuana and hemp products, as well as tobacco products.

These three vows are fundamental to the philosophy and there are no arguments, no exclusions, no possible exceptions, and absolutely no compromises. All that He gives is completely free, with absolutely no charge in money terms, only in our commitment – which allows us to give our tithe – one tenth of our time – 2 ½ hours every day in meditation as instructed at the time of initiation.

The Master wants nothing from us except our effort. It is no good finding a cure to an ailment and then not taking the cure. We cannot leave our first steps on the spiritual path until we are old, when our worldly responsibilities are complete, when our children are grown up, when we have enough money and have purchased all the things in life we think necessary –because if we do that, the day when we start will never come.

We will never have enough time and our mind will never be satisfied sufficiently that we will think it is enough. If we don’t know our potential, what can we hope to gain? How can a child in kindergarten understand a university degree and its benefits, the broad spectrum of understanding and fulfillment that can be obtained from higher education? It’s the teacher’s function to guide the student to reach that higher level of education, slowly, slowly, over many years. It doesn’t happen overnight.

The Master first shows us the goal; then He teaches us how we can attain that objective, and He provides continuous encouragement and guidance. In fact, He promises that once we start on this path, he will make us reach our goal.

But what a waste of life if we don’t make the most of that one moment in which heaven may be won or lost – if we don’t derive the benefit for which we were put here in this material world! The only way we can know what that true meaning is, and the only way in which we can learn the way to make that meaning come true, is to find a perfect Master. It is from him that we can be shown the method of Love which allows us to rise above this existence.

Thou ponderest on the moon, the stars, the sky,
why the winds gather, how the waters run.
But all too lightly deemest of thy Self,
who art a thousand miracles in one.

We look to the big picture and get overwhelmed. If we could concern ourselves only with what we can do, we would be much better off – just to take care of what we can do, however small, however personal. There is a story of the small boy on the beach. The waves were washing up small starfish. The boy was throwing them back one at a time. A bystander watched this for a while and asked the boy what he thought he was doing. Saving these starfish, the boy said. The bystander smiled and told the boy he was wasting his time, that he would never save all the starfish, so why bother, that it didn’t matter all that much. Well, said the boy, picking up another starfish and throwing it back into the waves, it matters to that one.

Mother Teresa, when given her Nobel Prize she was asked by journalists, “What can we do to promote world peace?” Such a far-reaching, high level and noble ideal, one that governments, prime ministers, senior statesmen can’t contemplate because they think in terms of budgets and money – but she broke this into a manageable unit for anyone and everyone to act upon. She replied, “There is so much suffering, so much hatred, so much misery, and we with our prayer, with our sacrifice, are beginning at home. Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do,” she said.

If we can be effective with the things we can do, then what else do we have to concern ourselves with? The trouble is that our mind always wants to take the easy way out, makes excuses for not doing what is right and sometimes difficult. Whenever we have to make a decision, we look to the senses for the answers, because in this physical world we perceive everything through the senses; we only know what we can touch, hear, feel, taste and see, and so we automatically go to those faculties for the answers. But we have to just go about our real work, our spiritual work, in a controlled and dedicated manner. It will not be quick, it will not be easy, but the Master assures us that it will be effective.

Maharaj Sawan Singh wrote to a disciple in The Dawn of Light:

One word about general behaviour: Most of our time is devoted towards worldly ends, so by sitting in contemplation for only a few hours, our soul cannot properly enjoy the holy Sound. Again and again the mind goes out and remains thinking of worldly matters. So keep a sharp eye over its working during the whole of the day and take care that it may not carry you away. Try to resist its mean cravings and check their outward manifestation through the senses….

Our Father is love and we are small drops from that ocean of love. This huge machinery of the universe is worked on that eternal principle of love. So try to bring yourself in harmony with this principle of love. The deeper the love of the Master takes root in you, the fainter will be the worldly love in you. His love will displace the love of earthly things. Then the mind and spirit will transcend the flesh and the curtains will rise before you one by one. The dark mysteries of the universe will become revealed to you, and you will find yourself in the loving lap of the Holy Father; in fact you will be one with Him….

Then he stresses how lucky we are to be in this enviable position of knowing what we can do and having the opportunity to do it. He continues:

He, out of his mercy, has bestowed upon you such a noble gift that all the treasures of the world stand in no comparison with it. But it will not improve your condition if you will not use it. A hungry person is never satisfied simply by counting the names of the various dishes that are before him. Though the teachings you have received are invaluable, yet they cannot be of any use unless you utilize them and daily engage in the spiritual exercises for as long a time as you can spare from your worldly engagements.¹⁵

As the English 19th century writer Samuel Johnson advised:

Reflect that life, like any other blessing,
derives its value from its use alone:
Not for itself – but for a nobler end
the Eternal gave it, and that end is virtue.¹⁶

Herein lies the key; every day, for as long a time as we can spare, engage in the holy exercises, our meditation – simran, dhyan, and bhajan – to bring ourselves in harmony with that eternal principle of Love. “Slip into the axis” to appreciate that we are all “a thousand miracles in one.”

William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, scene 6
AG, Rag Suhi, M3, p. 754
I. A. Ezekiel, Sarmad, Martyr to Love Divine, pp. 151–152
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan 14:12:7 (Hindi)
AG, M3, p. 110
Divine Light, p. 64
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II (6th ed.,1996); “My Submission”, p. 12
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, Part IV
Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad (London, UK: Watkins Publishing, 2002), p. 91
Ibid, p. 93
Ibid, p. 93
Light on Sant Mat, letter 217
AG, Rag Basant, M4, p. 1179
Quest for Light, letter 71
Dawn of Light, letter 4
The Beauties of Samuel Johnson (1828), p. 161

Three Diseases, One Cure - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Three Diseases, One Cure

All beings are curious, humans most of all. Animals wander around, sniffing and looking wherever their instincts and senses lead them. So do we! Unlike animals, however, we are also curious about existence itself. And we can’t ponder the question of existence for more than a few seconds before we bump into the reality of death.

Soami Ji names “the liability to birth and death”¹ as the first of three universal maladies. We understand that death involves the disappearance of life from a body. One minute, a person’s body is the most precious thing in the universe; the next minute, it is put in a coffin or on a funeral pyre. That fact is alarming, because everyone we love and everything we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is liable to disappear at any moment.

When we are troubled by this situation, our feeling is a spiritual gift – it propels us to seek. We read scripture and attend religious services; we take pilgrimages and join prayer groups; we wander to mountains and forests and seashores. This is normal behavior: people have been doing such things throughout history.

We are searching because we need to know what is the meaning of this life, if indeed it can end at any moment! We wonder, is there something that does not end? The poet Rosalie de Castro put it beautifully: “I don’t know what I seek, but it is something… Which lives invisibly in everything I touch and see.”²

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh Ji writes, “Love alone is eternal and God is love. He alone is permanent, … on the otherwise shifting sands of time and space. Those who devote themselves to Him alone also become eternal and deathless.”³ Could there be a more healing promise? This disease can be cured, say the Masters, and the cure is spiritual devotion.

The second question which plagues every single human being is how can we win “the strife and struggle with our minds”?⁴

People rich and poor, healthy and ill, famous and unknown, all of us struggle with the mind. No one escapes this fight, and it is extremely demanding. After all, as the Great Master wrote so succinctly, “We are out to conquer the mind – the mind that governs the world.”⁵ What an audacious goal!

During our life’s journey, people mistreat us and we mistreat others. Our mind becomes filled with negative thoughts about ourselves and others and about the general condition of life. How do we stop?

In regard to our past harmful actions, Hazur writes, “By just mere praying to the Father, we don’t get forgiveness. We have to work hard for it in meditation.”⁶

In regard to being mistreated by others, he advises, “We should forgive the person, because we’ve had enough and we don’t want more of these karmic relationships.”⁷ He adds, “We do forgive people, but now we don’t forget that we have forgiven them. So a scar is always there. We shouldn’t be conscious of even the scar.”⁸ The Masters offer us the spiritual remedy: to focus on simran instead of worldly relationships. That our simple repetition of five holy names with love and devotion is sufficient to heal us from this persistent strife and struggle – this is the great surprise of Sant Mat!

Soami Ji diagnoses our final malady to be ignorance: “Man does not know who he is … or where his Source is.”⁹ Who are we? Where did we come from? We think our parents created us, this world is our origin, and the body is who we are. The Masters say, however, that we are strangers to our own essence.

Not being in touch with our true spiritual home, with the confidence that brings, leaves us psychologically dependent on others and deeply vulnerable to being manipulated.

So much depends on our relationships with other people. We meet somebody and later we say we shouldn’t have trusted them. Others we don’t dare trust for years, but later, we may count them as a good friend. Whom can we trust when these three diseases are blinding us spiritually?

We are looking for someone who inhabits a place where death does not reach. This person must have access to that place which existed before physical life began and after it has ended. We cannot rely on someone who is frightened of death or struggles with the mind or is ignorant of our origin. We have enough ignorance of our own!

Is the living Master deserving of our trust? We can easily find out, through study, satsang, and meditation at the eye center, where our spiritual essence is located in the body. It is a natural human interest. As Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote, “Man seeks the Lord because the Lord is man’s origin.”¹⁰

The answer to these three troubling questions rests in the process of our own heart. Who are we? Where is our home? Are we this body and the mind that directs it, or are we a being of divine vibration? Is our origin the moment of human conception or before countless previous lifetimes, in Shabd?

It is one thing to say it, but it is quite another to know it, through experience. To know it, we must do what Baba Ji and Hazur did: meditate with love and devotion, like nothing else matters. Not only when we feel like it, but also when we don’t feel like it.

We trust the living Master to provide the remedy for these three maladies, because we feel his love and understand his message. He gives us the medicine for spiritual recovery: being with him in meditation is the medicine.

We can recover from these troubles and identify with Master through simran, so that when the body is dying, we may cling to simran with attention at the third eye and let the body go. The experience of meditation slowly turns our fearful mind into our fondest friend: no more strife and struggle. As our meditation deepens, our trust grows. We find comfort within, and ultimately we realize our spiritual origin and destination.

Soami ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Prose, 11th edition (2001, 2019), # 222, p. 161
de Castro, Rosalie, Spanish Poetry , edited by Angel Flores (Dover Publications, 1998), p. 225
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, vol. 1 (2020), p. 115
Soami Ji Maharaj, Ibid
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Letter 52
Spiritual Perspectives, Volume III, QA 333, p. 260
Spiritual Perspectives, Volume III, QA 332, p. 257
Spiritual Perspectives, Volume III, QA 338, p. 263
Soami Ji Maharaj, Ibid
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat (1985), p. 22

The Path of Love - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Path of Love

The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh Ji, said in The Dawn of Light:

The single most important factor in developing spirituality is the cultivation of love for the true Beloved. ... Without it there is nothing, and with it there is everything.¹

Here the Great Master is describing love as the core of the spiritual path, whose ultimate goal is union with the Beloved, the Lord himself. This sentiment, of love for the Lord, is mirrored by every mystic and saint. They say it is the highest form of devotion and they glorify it in their own distinctive ways. The Sufi mystics, for example, say love is an all-consuming state of madness which brings about union with the Lord. In Rumi’s words:

O lover, be mindless! Become mad!
Dive into the heart of the flame!
Become fearless! Be a moth!
You must be all love
to be worthy of the beloved.²

True love for the Lord contains the ache of longing and the pain of separation from the Beloved. We come across these sentiments reflected in Kabir’s poetry, where he laments:

O my Lord, can a fish live long out of water?
How then can I live without you?
My eyes are aching from gazing
At the path by which you will come.
My tongue is raw from calling your Name.³

Mirabai’s devotional songs for her Lord echo the same pain and heartache. She sings: “Ah! I am madly in love! And no one knows my pain!”⁴ Mirabai’s songs beautifully describe her helpless state in love. They also express her desire never to lose those pangs of longing and separation. Hazur Maharaj Ji, in an answer to a question about love, said that Mirabai would plead, “take everything away from me, all that I have, but please do not take away that love.” Queen as she was, Mirabai’s words are a revelation of the intensity of her love and how incomparable it was to the finest of worldly possessions.

Love has been described in many other ways. Tulsidas Ji, in Ramcharitmanas, describes love as the purest form of simplicity there can be. He narrates the story of Shabari, an old, tribal woman whose love for Lord Ram was intense and pure. On hearing that he would be visiting the forest where she lived, she plucks what she thinks are the ripest and sweetest of all fruits and arranges them for him to eat. Then, not satisfied that the individual fruits were sweet enough, she tastes every one of them. She keeps the sweet ones even though they were half-eaten and discards the sour ones. Lord Ram comes to her hut, is offered the plate of half-eaten fruits and relishes them. Shabari’s love for the Lord was so complete that it never once occurred to her that she was doing something strange or unacceptable. All she was concerned with was pleasing her Lord.

Another quality of love is its pervasiveness, which is seen in the lives of true lovers of the Lord. They see him everywhere, in everything, and are unaffected by the question of good and bad and of right and wrong. To them the Lord has created this world, he is in every particle, and since they are in love with him, they are in love with his creation, every bit of it. We often come across wonderful stories about saints and their boundless capacity to love everything. One such story is about Sant Namdev. He was once sitting down by a roadside to eat a simple meal of roti and sabzi (Indian bread and vegetables). A stray dog snatched the roti and ran away with it. The story goes that Sant Namdev ran after the dog, saying, “My Lord, you have forgotten the sabzi. Please don’t eat the roti dry.”⁵ These stories and tales reinforce the message that to mystics and saints, everything is sacred. Even when condemned to death – and so many of them have had the most violent of ends – they go willingly, accepting it as the will of the Lord, bearing no hatred towards anyone, even their killers.

So, we see the various aspects of true love – joy, madness, pain, longing, burning desire, simplicity, and pervasiveness. However, there is a central theme in all these aspects. And that is the disappearance of the self, the obliteration of the identity or ego of the person in love with the Beloved. In each description and story, the lover has eliminated himself or herself and merged into the Beloved. Thus, an essential characteristic of true love is selflessness.

Bulleh Shah says that nothing of his self was left, now that he was in love:

I had thought love was easy;
It is turbulent as the flow of four streams.
It flares up in flames, it freezes to ice.
The fire of separation ever consumes me!
Not an iota of self is left in me.⁶

The mystics use strong and evocative language to describe the experience of self-annihilation. After all, they are talking of the destruction of our selves, our identities, everything we think of as us. Hazur Maharaj Ji would narrate the story of Heer and Ranjha, the timeless tale of unrequited love. In one tale Heer once said that she had pined for and called out Ranjha’s name so many times that she had become Ranjha himself. She said, “I am no longer Heer, call me Ranjha instead.” Maharaj Ji used this example to show how deeply a lover is lost in the Beloved.

So, we have seen the characteristics of a true lover of the Lord and that love is the way to union with the Lord. We have also often heard, as is said in the Bible, that God is love itself. In a book on Sultan Bahu, love is described in the following way. It says, “[W]e live in a dimension that has God at one end and humans at the other. Love is the ladder by which we can reach him.”⁷ So, love can be described as the beginning, the end, and everything in between. As Farid-al-Din Attar, the Sufi mystic and poet, says:

The kingdom of love is circular,
its throne and its entrance are the same.⁸

Thus, God is love, the way to him is love, and we, too, being a part of him, a drop of that vast ocean of love, have that love within us. But our love is not manifest – it is hidden and latent, and we therefore are unable to experience it. Here is where the role of the Master, our spiritual guide, our savior, comes in. Masters are the link between us and the Lord, and they come to ignite that spark of love within us. Hafiz openly declares:

What do those raw ones who have not trodden the path
Know of the taste of love?
Seek the all-encompassing Master
Who will take you to the Beloved.⁹

The Guru Granth Sahib has the highest praise for the Master or Guru as it says:

He (the Lord) himself grants his love,
Which the devotee imbibes forever through the Guru.¹⁰

Elsewhere it proclaims:

God created the Guru as the bridge
across the ocean of existence.¹¹

As the Guru Granth Sahib says on page after page, it is the Master, the spiritual guide, the Guru, the lover of the Lord, who can help us realize that love within ourselves. With his help, we are able to cross the ocean of existence and merge in the ocean of love that is the Lord.

Through the Master’s discourses we understand the concept of love, and eventually he teaches us how to love the Lord. He speaks to us about Nam, the Shabd, the Word, the stream of life that is the creative power, the power of the Lord himself, which flows through each one of us as the Sound Current. He explains how that Shabd, that river of love, permeates us and every particle of this creation, and that it is only in the human form that one may connect with it. It is beyond us, beyond our intellectual capabilities, to fathom this wonder. Yet, it is the truth, whereas all else that we feel and sense in this world is false. The Master, through his endless grace and love, creates that awareness in us. On the one hand, he is with us in a physical form and on the other, at the same time, he is merged with that love, with the Lord. The seed of love within us needs his nurturing, without which we may be left with exquisite notions and beautiful words about love, but no experience. As Great Master said: “Love ... is a pure and delicate feeling or emotion which can be experienced only by one who is in love.¹²

Without being in love, without that experience, we flounder and search endlessly everywhere except within, in our own selves. We split hairs and argue about love, unaware that it is God himself, it resides in us, and it is both the path and the guide, our Master. Rumi, whose Master was Shams Tabriz, describes it in his unique, inimitable way:

Love is a tree
With branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity,
And no trunk.
When you become the Friend,
Your longing will be as the man in the ocean
who holds onto a piece of wood.
Eventually, wood, man, ocean become
one swaying being,
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.¹³

The Masters thus choose to explain it simply. In order to feel that love, they ask us to go within. When we turn inwards, we start looking at ourselves differently. We see that we are made up of various components – our soul, which is hidden for now, our mind, our body, and the senses, which work through the body. The Masters explain how the soul is the real us, the part of the Lord, while the mind is a mere tool to help us exist in this world, and the body a temporary home for all of these. How are we then connected to that love? Hazur Maharaj Ji explains it in this way:

The soul by instinct is in love with the Father. ... but it is helpless due to the mind. The mind has a weakness for the senses, so it has become a slave of the senses.... there is such a great load on the soul that its love is just crushed under that weight....[we] have to lift the weight of the senses, of the mind, of karmas or sins, before we can experience that love.¹⁴

It is the soul, therefore, that needs to be freed from the clutches of the mind and karmas for us to experience true love. The Master aids in this, and in his company we begin to feel the first stirrings of that love. The Guru Granth Sahib says:

By the Guru’s grace, one nurtures love for God
And receives the divine jewel of Nam.¹⁵

The Master bestows the divine jewel of Nam or initiation, which is the beginning of our journey of love. Then meditation, the work to disengage oneself from attachments, desires, and karmas, the fruits of countless previous births, begins in earnest. It is a slow but sure process. As Hafiz says:

Time is the shop
Where everyone works hard
To build enough love
To break the shackle.¹⁶

Love is the core of our being, as Baba Ji says. But it is buried deep, lost within us, as a consequence of being billions of lifetimes away from its divine origin, and it needs to be rediscovered and to merge back into its source, the Lord. Hafiz, in another poem, says:

[Love] can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.¹⁷

Hafiz is comparing love to the forming of diamonds which can take billions of years, so painstaking is the process. But we have nothing to worry about – we are in an enviable position, at the cusp of discovering that love within ourselves. The Master, our guide and eternal friend, is by our side throughout our journey. As Rumi says:

You have fallen into the beloved’s arm.
You are in his hand.
He carries you.¹⁸

With the Master taking care, we have nothing to worry about on our spiritual journey. We simply have to follow the instructions, uphold the four vows we take at the time of initiation, and leave the rest to him. Progress depends upon many factors. But, of them, what is within our grasp is our effort at meditation. This, and only this, is what makes human life worthwhile. The jewel of Nam severs the bonds binding the soul to the mind and lifts the colossal karmic weight off the soul. The latent love in us then comes to the fore. That love is freedom, lightness, the ability to fly to become one with the Lord. The Great Master says: “Love charges the soul with an inconceivable energy to fly to the Beloved. That is why love is considered the be-all and end-all of true spirituality.”¹⁹

It is not easy and the saints talk often of the difficulties. At this moment other things are jostling for our love – our families, our cultures and traditions, our countries, our status and wealth, everything to do with the creation and its manifestations, because that is all we see. Our time and attention are somewhere between work and relationships, between our needs and desires, and between worries and mishaps. Physically, we neither see our soul nor the Lord, so the whole story of love seems just that, a story. And yet we want that love. We want to experience that feeling of ecstasy that the saints speak of so highly. We want to flow in those joyous currents, to forget everything and set ourselves free. Hafiz says:

What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?
It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!²⁰

We are waking up. We feel the presence of that love, especially when we see the Master. He loves us, wholly and unconditionally, but we need to reciprocate that love, not just feel it. And the only way to reciprocate it is through our meditation.

Where in this journey of love do we encounter problems? By far the biggest is in trying to analyze love. That is when the mind is in full form and presents its own understanding of love. It is good at planting seeds of doubt – at times making us believe that loving close ones is all that is needed, and at other times, making us wonder whether true love is ever possible in this world. And the most troublesome of all is when it makes us compare ourselves with others. Hazur Maharaj Ji’s answer to a question about love explains it clearly:

There is nothing to think about love. Love is just there. Our problem is that we compare ourselves with each other. We think that person is probably more in love than I am and I should be like him. But nobody knows anybody at all. We should never compare ourselves to anyone at all. But for love of the Father, nobody would come to the path. ... without that love, we would not remain on the path. So we should try not to always analyze whether our love has deepened or become less, whether it has grown or is fading.²¹

So, the trick is not to analyze but just to follow the teachings and do our meditation. Analyzing keeps us trapped within the mind’s orbit, away from that love. In the following quote Rumi illustrates how divergent in nature the mind and true love are:

The intellect says: “Do not go forward,
Annihilation contains only thorns.”
Love laughs back: “The thorns are in you.”²²

Those thorns, those miseries, plague us because we are within the domain of the mind, even when we think we are in love. In an audio recording of a Question and Answer session with Hazur Maharaj Ji, uploaded on the RSSB website, a lady tells the Master that she is tired of trying to be loving and good. She had striven towards it all her life and, as far as she knew, loved everyone and everything, but now she felt exhausted with that effort and felt no closer to the pure true love being talked about. She wanted to withdraw from contact with other people. Hazur Maharaj Ji’s answer was: “It is because you are not in love with everything – your love is confined to some, a few people and things that you want to love.”²³ He explained that true love meant loving everything, irrespective of who or what they are, because it is all created by the Lord. When we restrict our love, when we choose and cherry-pick those whom we want to love, we end up feeling this way.

The fact is that for us, love is an emotion. Led by the mind, like our other emotions, it waxes and wanes. When it does not meet our expectations, it makes us sad and when it is not reciprocated it makes us question ourselves. This is the mind at work. It takes meditation to subdue the mind, to gradually separate us from its illusions, and to change emotion into devotion. And once the force of the mind starts weakening, the soul and its love start to shine through. As that true love grows, it simply drowns the mind’s insecurities, its weariness, its calibration and categories. It vanquishes all those niggling things the mind is so fond of placing before us as problems. That divine love, once ignited, lights up everything and fills our hearts.

The Great Master calls that love: “[a] kind of fire. When it is kindled, it burns away all the blemishes of the mind. The dross of attachments that the soul has accumulated during many births is at once reduced to ashes.”²⁴

As Sophocles, the Greek playwright of 5th century BCE, famously said: “One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life ... That word is Love.”²⁵

Love’s magic is thus endless and, as Sultan Bahu says, when one merges in it, an even higher reward awaits the lover. He says:

A seeker can quickly become a Saint
When he loses himself in love.²⁶

Thus, an unimaginable, divine transformation occurs when, through love, the disciple becomes the Master himself. And it does not end there. The end is the achieving of the highest state, that of merging in the Beloved, the Lord and Supreme One. No position can be higher, no acquisition greater, and no love deeper. Through the Master’s endless grace and guidance, and through the pangs of separation and longing created by true love, we become the One itself. As Dadu Dayal says:

God has become the anguished lover,
And the anguished lover has become God.²⁷

*****

Bibliography

Avery, Kenneth and Ali Alizadeh, Fifty Poems of Attar, “re.press publishers”, 2007
Barks, Coleman, A Year with Rumi, Harper One, 2006
Dutt, Shiv Singh, Gurbani Selections, Vols. 1 & 2, RSSB, 2011
Ergin, Nevit O. and Johnson, Will, The Forbidden Rumi, Inner Traditions, 2006
Ezekiel, Isaac A., Kabir: The Great Mystic, RSSB, 1966, 2002
Helminski, Kabir, The Rumi Collection, Shambala Publications, 1998
Khak, Dr. Kirpal Singh and Puri, Prof. Janak Raj, Sultan Bahu, RSSB, 1998
Ladinsky, Daniel, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, Penguin Compass, 1999
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vols. 1, 2 & 3, RSSB, 2010
Maharaj Sawan Singh, The Dawn of Light, RSSB, 1985
Puri, J.R. and Shangari, T. R., Bulleh Shah, RSSB, 1986
Puri, J.R. and Sethi, V.K., Sant Namdev, RSSB, 2004
Rassouli, Rumi Revealed, Blue Angel Publishing, 2015
Subramaniam, V.K., Mystic Songs of Meera, Abhinav Publications, 2010

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, Intro,“Essence of the Teachings” (1985 ed.), 65
Rassouli, 2015, 131
Ezekiel, 2002, 246
Subramaniam, 2010, 119
Puri and Sethi, 8
Puri and Shangari, 1986, 256
Khak and Puri, 1998, 19
Avery and Ali, 2007, 145
Khak and Puri, 1998, 66
Dutt, Vol. 2, 37
Dutt, Vol. 1, 195
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, Ibid, 65
Barks, 2006, 387
Maharaj Charan Singh, Vol. 3, 2010, Q 386
Dutt, Vol. 1, 2011, 191
Ladinsky, 1999, 129
Ladinsky, 1999, 76
Ergit and Johnson, 2006, 142
Maharaj Sawan Singh, 1985, 66
Ladinsky, 1999, 19
Maharaj Charan Singh, Vol. 3, 2010, Q 396
Helminski, 1998, 192
Maharaj Charan Singh, Audio recording of Q&A, vol. 64: https://rssb.org/QandA.html
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, Ibid, 68
Sophocles, from his play Oedipus at Colonus, line 1616
Khak and Puri, 1998, 152
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Dawn of Light, Ibid, 67

Lovers of Leaving - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Lovers of Leaving

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

These lines – attributed to Rumi – call the seekers to gather together. The poet addresses them as people who wander – perhaps physically, perhaps spiritually – and as people who worship. He also used a slightly baffling phrase. He labeled each of them as a lover of leaving. What does that mean? Could satsangis possibly be lovers of leaving? Is this a positive thing – something that makes us feel closer to our Master? Or is it a negative thing – something that makes us feel separate from him?

Well, maybe it’s both. We often declare – whether we’re being fully honest or not – that we’d love to leave this world behind. We’d love to just surrender to the Master and leave all our worries with him. And sometimes we can even do that with a minor worry or two – just let go of it and decide that the Master will smooth it out however he wants, or not! Sometimes we give up and love to leave things in his hands. In that way, being a lover of leaving is a very good thing for any satsangi or seeker.

In another way, we seem to “love” to leave the focus of our meditation and roam around the world in our minds. Certainly, we often do just that. This mental roaming makes our meditation restless and inner peace even more elusive. In this sense, being a lover of leaving doesn’t serve us well.

Another kind of leaving involves the physical presence of the Master. Every time we see him, he eventually leaves us. How can we be lovers of leaving as we watch Baba Ji get up from satsang? That doesn’t quite make sense; how can we love for him to leave us?

But if we think for a moment, if he never left, we’d never long for him to return. That longing is spiritual gold, much more valuable than a bulging bank account. Such yearning increases our awareness of the Master’s inner presence.

A question was once put to Hazur Maharaj Ji about the devastating loss that disciples expected to feel when he left their country after an official visit. Hazur answered, “Brother, are you sure I am leaving?” and then added, “The more we miss anyone, the nearer we are to the one we are missing. We only depart to meet. We are never separated.”¹

Satsangis are very attached to the Master’s beautiful physical form. However, Baba Ji often reminds us that the Master is not the body – that his body is aging, his hair is going grey, and he can even get seriously ill. Yet we never cease wanting to be near him, wanting the Master to look at us, to come to our sangat.

But we live within this physical world with its physical laws, and so do the Masters. They choose to obey the natural laws of the universe. They leave us physically. Sometimes they simply exit the satsang hall. Sometimes they leave the Dera. Sometimes they visit our country and then say goodbye after a few days.

And, of course, if we visit Dera, we eventually have to go home. We pack our bags, settle ourselves into a van, taxi or car, and give the beautiful streets of Dera a last look as we say goodbye. We may leave reluctantly or eagerly, perhaps anxious to see family again, yet missing the Master already.

This missing him is a gift, delivered as we depart. It’s a feeling to hold close and to cherish.

An old story illustrates the value of this gift.

A lover of the Lord was in the habit of rising for prayers at dawn every morning before her work day began. Every day, the angel Gabriel joyfully watched over this worship.

However, one morning, the disciple, tired from her many family duties, failed to awake before sunrise. Suddenly, the devil himself appeared and shook the woman’s shoulder, saying loudly, “Wake up! Wake up!”

Angel Gabriel was astonished. Why would the devil want anyone to arise for prayer? Surely that’s exactly what he wouldn’t want.

When Gabriel asked the devil to explain his actions, the devil replied, “If I hadn’t awakened her and she had slept through her time of prayer, the woman would have felt a terrible longing for what she had missed. That longing is worth a thousand prayers.

When we leave the Master’s physical presence, the longing to be with him again can propel us inside, where we never feel separation. Like the devotee in the story, our longing is invaluable, worth a thousand pious prayers or offerings.

Thus, the mystic poet’s declaration that we are “lover(s) of leaving” begins to have a very sweet ring, doesn’t it?

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, #84

A Spiritual Perspective - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Spiritual Perspective

Spirituality is an affair of the heart. It is not a doctrine, a prescription, a teaching, or anything that can be set out in words. It is the life behind the doctrine, to which words can only hint. It is a matter of experience, of love, of bliss, of understanding the true nature of things without intellect or analysis. It is an expansion of awareness or consciousness approached by means of spiritual practice or meditation, through exercises within ourselves that are designed to bring about and to enhance that experience. It is something universal, beyond time and place and language.

So when it comes to talking about it, we find that there is really nothing new to say. We go on saying the same things to inspire ourselves, to remind ourselves of the Essence, and to reformulate the same old truths in the language of our times. This is no doubt important, and spiritual masters have themselves always used the language and idioms of their own times. But ultimately, it is all so very simple, and it has all been said before. We are spiritual beings living in the ocean of the divine Being, of God. All the problems of the world, personal or otherwise, have just one source – our forgetfulness or unawareness of this one Reality, of the divine presence in everything. The meaning and purpose of life are enfolded in this mystery, and enlightenment is to discover who and what we truly are.

We have lost touch with the great mystery through our entanglement with material things. The ever-roving mind – its thoughts, emotions, and impressions – obscures our essential divinity, veils the Oneness from our inner vision. We may have inklings of a fundamental unity holding everything together in its embrace, but for most of us the clouds of delusion, misperception, and misapprehension have yet to part and let in the light. But through spiritual practice, the clouds can be dispelled so that we experience an increasing awareness of the Divine.

The world is a school to which we are sent to harvest the fruit of our past and to discover our reality. Our essence is the Divine, the soul, but the driving force behind our coming and going is the mind. It functions in this world and in higher worlds as well. All deeds, desires and thoughts are recorded in its soft putty; and according to the cosmic principle of cause and effect, we reap in this life what we have sown in the past. What we think of as the world is in fact an ocean of transmigration, of souls coming and going under the influence of the mind.

We arrive in this world through the mysterious event we call birth, but only the most advanced mystics truly know how birth takes place and what it actually is. The biology of the process may be well known, but how a newborn being really arrives in this world and where it comes from remain a mystery. We may rejoice at the new arrival, but we do not understand.

The infant – mental faculties yet to develop, unable to speak, no words with which to formulate its thoughts or feelings, unable to walk or move about in this world – lies helpless, utterly reliant upon other human beings for its sustenance and survival.

Taking an interest in the world through the medium of the senses, inescapably caught up in the process of physical and mental development, the new arrival grows, learns to walk, to talk, and to interact with the world. And so life goes on. If the child ever had any inkling of a prior existence in this realm or elsewhere, it is usually soon overwhelmed by the insistent, incoming tide of experience of which its present life consists. The essential divinity or spirit within is lost, forgotten. Play, curiosity, learning, interests, work, self, emotions, needs, desires (not to forget the flood of mind-shattering hormones that inundate the body and brain in teenage years) – all these and more hold the mind captive and entranced. Depending upon the depth of entanglement in previous lives – the karma that weighs upon the mind – the developing human being may or may not retain any glimmer of the spirit within that is the source of life and consciousness.

To make some sense of the world, according to our bent of mind and the circumstances into which we have been born, we may resort to religion, philosophy, or science. But however clever and compelling our thinking and investigation may be, it is all based upon concepts spun out in a mind we do not fully understand. We are using an uncharted and uncalibrated instrument as our means of comprehension. So everything we think we know is related to a point of ignorance.

Yet with each human birth comes the wonderful opportunity of transformation and spiritual growth, of answering the fundamental questions of human existence. Who am I? What is life? What is death? What is time? Does life have a purpose?

If we are fortunate, we develop a sense of the divine Oneness of which we are a part. We may even have some preliminary glimpse of a higher reality. We may take to prayer or meditation to enhance that understanding and awareness. We may even be blessed enough to find a spiritually realized soul to help us on our way and give us confidence that our subtle perceptions are not mistaken, to lead us out of the round of birth and death, to realize the Divine. It can be done. But for the most part, human beings remain caught up in the play of life, giving scarcely a thought to the unseen Reality that affords us our existence.

And then comes death – a mystery as profound as birth. These two great events that mark our coming and going are beyond our understanding. Our way in and our way out of this world are shrouded in the same essential ignorance that accompanies our life. We may shed tears at the departure of a loved one, but what has really taken place, we cannot say. One moment, the body was infused with life; the next, the life essence that we call the soul has departed, leaving behind a still and lifeless corpse.

At the present time, it is estimated that over 360,000 human beings are born every day, and over 150,000 die; and if we consider all the other life forms on this planet, the coming and going of souls amounts to uncountable centillions, every second of every day. No wonder the mystics of ancient Greece called it the ‘wandering’ of the soul.

The only answer to the mystery of life in this ocean of material existence is recollection of our Source – with the help of the ever-present divine grace, to stitch together whatever fleeting moments of remembrance we may have into one continuous awareness of the divine presence within ourselves and within all things. Then, by degrees, the veil will be pulled aside, the clouds of ignorance will disperse, and the light of true understanding will dawn. Then, little by little, our awareness of the Divine will grow until at length we realize the One who has been with us all along.

This essay is an extract from Awareness of the Divine, a book by John Davidson, published with permission by Science of the Soul Research Centre, RSSB, in 2020.

Are We There Yet? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Are We There Yet?

Road trips in the ‘50s and ‘60s were often a time of great expectation and vacation fun. Plans for packing clothes, snacks, and maps to show the way became the magic formula to ensure the trip would go smoothly. Depending on the length of the trip and the destination there was always an air of excitement that the journey would end with great happiness and good times. However, there weren’t ever enough coloring books, games, or snacks to keep children amused as the trip was always longer than expected, and inevitably the chorus of “Are we there yet?” – sometimes accompanied by frustrated tears – became the opening line of all conversations.

Perhaps when we came to this path, we also had the perception that it would be a short journey to the enlightenment that we sought. We responded to some pull within us and followed that pull toward an unseen and unknown destination. When we first listened to that inner voice that called us, we probably had no real idea of the mysteries that lay ahead. Martin Buber wrote, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”¹ But our inner map, the master, is rooted in the innermost recesses of our soul, and he has given the promise that he will guide us on this journey.

Farid ud-din Attar, a contemporary of Rumi, wrote:

The Friend decides the when and the how.
Wherever you go, you are with me.
And for every step towards me
I cover both worlds to come to you…
Since separation from Me is not in your destiny.²

The Torah (Hebrew Bible) begins with a tale of a journey similar to the one that we have now embarked upon. It is the story of Avram and Sarai, who become later known as Abraham and Sarah. They were called upon to relocate not to just a new and unknown land but to cross over entirely to a new way of being. They had no road map, no games, and probably no snacks, but what they did have with them on their journey was the voice of God, the unknowable and unnamable mystery beyond our comprehension. In Genesis 12:1 the Lord speaks to them:

Go to yourself,
Leave your homeland
Your birthplace
Your parent’s house
(and go) to the land that I will show you.

For this journey, they are not only asked to take a journey outward, but also to take the journey inward. “Go to yourself.” This is the first commandment of the Lord. This journey of theirs is a call to self-realization leading to God-realization. It is a message that is spoken to every one of us. What is unusual is that Abraham and Sarah listened to the voice they heard and acted upon it.

We too have been urged to embark on a journey to an unknown land. The journey is not to the land that is all too familiar to us here where we are born, we live, we get married, we have children, we seek wealth, and get more and more distracted from our spiritual priorities; it is a journey, as a seventeenth-century kabbalist writes, to “search and discover the root of your soul, so that you can fulfil it and restore it to its source, its essence.”³

In Yoga and the Bible it says:

No questions of greater importance confront a human being than those of discovering who and what he really is, what place he occupies in the universe, what his relationship is to the Supreme Creator… and what path he should follow to “do the Fathers’ will” and gain … salvation.⁴

Abraham and Sarah understood the immensity of this journey, which is really an allegory of the journey from an ego-centered life to a God-centered existence. In the nineteenth-century Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter’s Sefat Emet (“Language of Truth”), it says:

And the deepest truth is that we must listen in order to receive that which is beyond our comprehension, namely, the knowledge of God’s infinite nature. To this end, we must continually surrender our conceptual knowledge – that which we understand with our minds alone.⁵

That key, that guidance that makes our steps sturdy, is the gift of meditation. Through the deepening of our simran and bhajan and remembrance of him, our understanding of the path and the role that our karmas play in the purification of our consciousness will grow stronger, and we will experience without a doubt that he has always been with us and that this journey is leading us to the doorways of eternity.

The American Trappist monk Thomas Merton suggests:

Intellectual brilliance is never required [for meditation] … It does not have to feel itself enkindled with raptures of ardent love.⁶

But we must do it. Hazur seems to go out of his way to reassure us that even though the path to the infinite is not immediately known to us, our heavenly Father always keeps the promise we are given at our initiation, “that we have been chosen for eternal liberation.” He says:

The One who has created you is more anxious about you and takes much more care of you and is more concerned about you than you are about yourself…have faith in the Father.⁷

Maharaj Sawan Singh says in Spiritual Gems:

Those of you who remain faithful and go on working to the best of your ability must realize how great is the work you have done and how great the reward which awaits you.⁸

We are on a journey like Abraham and Sarah, with the voice of God, the Shabd, continually beckoning us. Sometimes loudly, sometimes softly, our beloved is continually lighting the way; we must listen to his voice and go forward step by step.

Hazur encourages us by saying:

When the Lord has chosen you for eternal liberation, then what other power can keep you back for long in this creation? … It will take a lot of time and effort and perseverance … But it will definitely be done one day. The Master will see you back home.… The Master is always with you and so is his love.⁹

We are on a road to union with him, and as Thomas Merton wrote, “No matter how distracted you may be…continue to centre your heart upon God … His presence does not depend on your thought of Him. He is unfailingly there.”¹⁰ On this journey we will discover that He and we were there together all along and separation was not in our destiny.

No more questions of: “Are we there yet?”

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinbube133855.html
Sweet Sorrows: Selected Poems of Sheikh Farideddin Attar Neyshaboori, Renditions by Vraje Abramian, p. 91
Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 127
Yoga and the Bible, p. 2
Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Leib of Ger, in Estelle Frankel, The Wisdom of Not Knowing (Boulder: Shambhala, 2017), p.26
Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation (Collegeville, MN:Liturgical Press), p. 67
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on St. Matthew, p. 77
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, # 158
Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light, #451
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing), p. 224

It’s All About Stepping Up - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

It’s All About Stepping Up

There was a farmer who owned an old mule. One day the mule fell into the farmer’s well and the farmer heard the mule braying for its life. After assessing the situation, the farmer sympathizing with the mule, figured out a way to raise the mule from the well and save its life. Therefore, he called his neighbors together and enlisted their help in carrying sand to fill in the well and slowly raise the mule.

The mule didn’t understand what was going on and thought the people were trying to bury him by throwing sand down the well. But as the neighbours continued shovelling and the sand hit his back, a thought suddenly struck the mule. It dawned on him that every time a shovel load of sand landed on his back, he could shake it off and step up.

And, this is what he did. Shovel after shovel of sand he repeated to himself; “Shake it off and step up, shake it off and step up.” He repeated this to himself over and over again, and no matter how distressing the situation seemed, the old mule fought “panic and fear” and simply kept right on shaking it off and stepping up!

It wasn’t long before the old mule, battered and exhausted, stepped triumphantly over the wall of that well. What appeared would bury him, in the end saved him, all because of the way he handled his seemingly looming adversity. He simply stepped up!

This little tale is a reminder for all of us on the spiritual path, of the kind of mental discipline we need to achieve our goal of God-realization.

When we are first initiated, we vow to meditate for two and one half hours every day for the rest of our lives, because our aim is liberation of our soul and the desire to return to our Creator and merge in Him. And it’s through our simran and bhajan that we are taught by our Master that we will eventually master our mind and achieve this, because simran and bhajan is the life blood that will fuel our inner development.

However, this is not as easy as it sounds because our mind is powerfully attached to this world and all it has to offer. Our feeble attempts to rein in our mind appear futile at times.

We may even imagine that the commitment it takes to master our mind is just too much and we give up the struggle. Maharaj Charan Singh Ji explains why:

At present the mind dances to the tune of the senses. They have completely enslaved it. But when the mind becomes completely absorbed in the inner light, and constantly hears the sound of the divine music and thereby reaches its own place of origin, namely Trikuti, our soul will be released from its vicious grip.¹

Guru Nanak said:

If you seek to play the game of Love,
enter my Path with your head upon your palm.
Once you set your foot on this Path,
offer your head, and do not flinch.²

In other words, if this is something we really want for ourselves, we won’t give up when things seem difficult, but continue to step up in the most determined way, because overcoming the mind is no easy task.

Perhaps an incident that took place some years ago in a televised circus act with Bengal tigers, which was broadcast live, might provide us with further clarity on the mind’s power and how to control it. A tiger trainer went into a cage with some tigers to do a routine performance. The door was locked behind him, the spotlights lit up the cage, the television cameras moved in close, and the audience watched in suspense as the trainer put the tigers through their act.

However, in the middle of the performance, the lights suddenly went out! For twenty or thirty seconds the man was locked in the dark cage with the Bengal tigers and only a whip and a chair. The tigers could see the trainer, but he couldn’t see them!

After the lights went back on the trainer was discovered to be safe. Later he was asked in an interview how he felt during his situation in the cage. He admitted that at first he felt a chilling fear, but then he realized that the tigers didn’t know that he was unable to see them. He said, “I just kept cracking my whip and talking to them until the lights came on again.”

So how does this incident relate to Sant Mat and mastery over the mind? First, a smart trainer knows what tools he needs to fend off an attack and make the tigers obey him, in this case his whip and his chair. Similarly the Master has armed us with simran and dhyan to fend off the attacks of our mind as we sit quietly in the darkness.

Therefore, just as big cat trainers use their knowledge of cat behaviour to induce certain reactions and eventually train the animals, true Masters understand what is needed to fend off an attack by the mind and for the disciples to win the "fight" with their minds. Not a literal fight, but a kind of "pushback" that allows the disciple to rise to the spiritual challenge and master the mind and its assault of downward-pulling thoughts of lust, anger, greed, attachment and ego – those five destructive tigers of our mind.

Our simran, our repetition, is our strongest “pushback” against the onslaught of our mind. Then, as our mind becomes neutralized by the pushback of simran, the shabd – through the practice of our bhajan – gradually manifests as enchanting sound and light, drawing our mind automatically inwards and upwards to the radiant form of our Master.

Our inner Master in the form of Shabd radiates such love that our mind becomes quite helpless and bound by this love, and it’s this special kind of love that we refer to in mysticism as being divine love. This love then binds the Master and disciple in the deepest and most intimate way.

However, it takes determination and discipline to achieve this outcome. We have little choice but to keep cracking our whip against those tigers of our mind, focus intently on our simran and bhajan and continue “stepping up and shaking it off.”

By Guru’s grace, God’s fear is obtained,
and by great good fortune
God comes and abides in the mind.
When the Lord’s fear is obtained,
the mind is restrained, and
through Nam, ego is burnt down.³

Divine Light, p. 69
Guru Granth Sahib, p. 1412
Guru Granth Sahib, p. 645

The Value of Tears - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Value of Tears

Once initiated on the path leading to God-realization by a true master, a disciple’s life is a constant ebb and flow: at times being in the physical presence of the master and at times – actually most of the time for the majority of us! – being away from him physically. Day and night, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, presence and separation...

All mystics explain to us that this separation is essential to burn away the impurities in the disciple’s heart and make him or her fit for union with the Lord. The heart must be absolutely pure to contemplate the face of the Beloved. Now, there are times when this physical separation from the master doesn’t impinge too much on our daily lives. We get on with our daily routine and feel fairly content. Or our inner connection is strong and we feel at peace.

But there are other times, and they come out of the blue, as it were, when an intense longing for the master’s outer darshan arises in us. The heart is gripped with nostalgia, tears flow, and nothing in the world seems to assuage the pain. This is the longing that forces us to seek him within, to seek the inner darshan. In Philosophy of the Masters, the Great Master explains that this longing is created because our soul has not been able to succeed in getting what it actually longs for, and that just as a fish is in anguish without water, our soul is intensely restless because of its separation from the Lord. This longing is a pre-requisite for meeting the Lord.¹

During these times of heartache, we see more clearly the illusory nature of our small self; we become more aware of our attachments and desires, of the karmic burden we carry – all veils hiding Reality.

Since every disciple has to go through this necessary cleansing process, much of what Baba Jaimal Singh writes to the Great Master can be of comfort to us:

You write that for darshan you are writhing like a fish out of water. His will is like that. When true love for the Satguru is felt inwardly, only then does true yearning for darshan develop. Please understand that even with hundreds of years of bhajan, one does not become so pure as one does with true yearning for the Satguru's darshan. That is why the disciple is separated from the physical form of the Satguru: because he does not become pure so quickly through doing bhajan as through true love for the Satguru and true longing for his darshan...

True yearning for darshan is the key for meeting the Lord. The mind’s dirt is shed only when these means become fully ingrained in the mind. Only then can the disciple perceive the Shabd-dhun form of the Satguru. So please try to listen to the Shabd-dhun – then the Dhun itself will take you to your home. He who has true longing for the Satguru in his mind has accomplished everything.²

He also explains that whatever is happening is being done by the current of the Shabd, that if our benefit lies in pleasure, the master will send us pleasure, and if it lies in pain, he will send us pain. Therefore “look upon pain and pleasure as the same,” he advises.

In The Book of Wisdom, the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Ata’ Illah gives the same message:

Sometimes He makes you learn in the night of contraction what you have not learned in the radiance of the day of expansion. You do not know which of them is nearer to you in benefit... Sometimes darknesses come over you in order that He make you aware of the value of His blessings upon you.³

When asked if the desire and longing for the master is the same as darshan, Hazur Maharaj Ji replied:

Yes. Even if you don’t get the opportunity to see the master but the real longing and desire is there to see him, you will get the same effect... Ultimately what counts is the love. You may not have that longing even in the presence of the master – the darshan becomes just mechanical, meaningless. And you may have a very deep longing and desire to be with him even when you are a thousand miles away from him – that may have much more value.⁴

Again and again, the master reminds us that the purpose of the physical presence is to create love and devotion in us and ultimately to convert it into the real inner darshan, which is the real love and devotion. Hazur would often quote from the Beatitudes in the Bible: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

Ultimately, what is required of us on the spiritual path is complete surrender to the Shabd master, in other words to the Divine Will. Sultan Bahu says, “My Master has sown in my heart the jasmine of God’s Name... He himself moulds me into his own real Self.”⁵ But transforming us from beings steeped in the world to true lovers of God is not ‘tea at auntie’s’. In one of his poems, Sultan Bahu graphically describes what this moulding entails:

Like a piece of iron that is to be forged into a fine sword,
you must bear the Blacksmith’s
unrelenting hammer blows.
Like a comb, you must be finely sawn
before you can caress the Beloved’s locks.
Like henna leaves, you must be ground into powder
before you can adorn the Beloved’s palms.
Like cotton, you must endure being carded
before you are woven into a turban for his head.
You will only taste the nectar of divine love
when you become a true lover of God, O Bahu.⁶

So the acid test of our spiritual maturity is our stability of heart, our total acceptance of what He gives us, our recognition of His grace in whatever happens to us. In the words of Ibn ‘Ata’ Illah, “If when given something, the giving expands you, and if when deprived of something, the deprivation contracts you, then take that as proof of your immaturity and the insincerity of your servanthood.”⁷

Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, pp. 75-76
Spiritual Letters, p. 29
The Book of Wisdom (Paulist Press, tr. Danner, 1978), Aphorisms #150 & 198
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q #94
J.R. Puri & K.S. Khak, Sultan Bahu, Bait (poem) #20
Ibid, Bait #162
The Book of Wisdom, Aphorism #147

The Waiting Soul - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Waiting Soul

In the Bible’s gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ tells the story of ten virgins waiting for the bridegroom to come.

Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, who took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.¹

Here he is setting up his story. Perhaps we all have that desire to meet the Lord, the bridegroom, the Master, and we go to see him and want to be with him. But we have to make preparations. It’s night. All is dark. We have to take a light. So the ten virgins take a lamp, but some take no fuel for the lamp. It’s like taking a flashlight without any batteries. Not very good preparation, even in the physical world, let alone on a spiritual quest. So Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh says:

He gives an example to explain to us how we should prepare ourselves, in order to make the best use of this life…The foolish virgins made no preparations to meet their beloved, and only left everything to the last minute, whereas the five wise virgins made all the proper arrangements in advance for their bridegroom’s coming.²

Saint Matthew continues:

And at midnight there was a cry made,
“Behold, the bridegroom cometh:
go ye out to meet him.”
Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps.
And the foolish said unto the wise,
“Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.”
But the wise answered, saying,
“Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you;
but go ye rather to them that sell,
and buy for yourselves.”
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came;
and they who were ready went in with him to the marriage;
and the door was shut.³

So, why couldn’t the wise virgins just loan some of their oil to the others? It’s not because they were stingy or unkind. To some extent it was just practical. If you and your friend go out into the night with flashlights, and your friend’s flashlight runs out of juice – his batteries have died – you can’t give him half of your batteries, because then neither of the flashlights would work. So the wise ones said, “You had better get some batteries of your own.”

Now, this story can be taken just from a worldly, practical level – of seeing the Master in the flesh. But if we take the story as a spiritual metaphor, it also emphasizes the need for us to prepare for the arrival of the inner form, the radiant form of the Master. And the story is as much about waiting as it is about preparation. The virgin represents the soul in all its purity, which is waiting to be carried home by her master, her Lord.

What do we do while we wait? Clearly, we need to have enough oil in our lamps to see him, to recognize him, when He comes. That oil is our meditation and way of life. And the blessings that come from doing our meditation cannot be shared, even if it’s just a calmness or composure in getting through our karmas. We might reflect his blessings through our behavior, but we cannot actually share them.

The Master wants us to be one-pointed at the eye center, at the door – the spiritual eye center. He wants our vigil to be constant while we wait. Hazur Maharaj Ji explains the waiting component of this vigil:

And the Master waits for that effort, which invokes his love and devotion that He gives us. It is all a gift from the Master, but we must be ready for it, we must be receptive to it. There is no dearth of his grace. It is always being showered in abundance. But we must put in our effort. We must show him we are truly grateful, that we have faith that he really is there within to give it to us. So when he appears to us in his inner Radiant Form, we are ready to go back with him.⁴

So that’s a hint about how we should wait – with effort to fill our lamps, with gratitude for all he gives us, and with faith that he really is there within us – where he gives us everything. We have to be ready to go with him when he appears at the door of our single eye. If we are not ready, if we are not receptive to him, how could we receive him? It would not be possible if we ourselves are not receptive. Then the door of the bridegroom would stay closed until we are ready.

So he said, “We must show him we are truly grateful,” for everything is a gift from the master, the Lord. How do we show him? The primary way, of course, is to be regular and punctual in doing our meditation. This is a must. It is what he’s looking for. Everything else can be corrected or molded if we stick to our meditation.

And truly, our love and gratitude should also be reflected in our day-to-day life. Where is the depth to our love if we do not follow the guidance he’s given, particularly the vows we’ve taken? Master Jagat Singh wrote:

It is also wrong to suppose that the Master does not care how we live or what we do if only we go on doing our meditation. To begin with, progress in spiritual meditation is, to a great extent, dependent on our life and thoughts.⁵

So, what we think and how we live have a direct impact on trying to train our mind to concentrate and to raise our consciousness out of the physical body. The mind keeps slipping back into its well-worn grooves, into those thought patterns we’ve molded over the course of many lifetimes. So if those thought patterns and actions are lower and coarser, then it would be more difficult to raise them and keep the mind focused at the eye center.

So, we like to think we’re grateful and love the Master, but how deep is that gratitude, that love? The saints tell us that we are not sufficiently grateful. And it is clear that we are not. Even so, the Great Master says, “Where is the room for feeling self-disgusted?” We are not meant to wallow in self-pity, negativity, or guilt. And guess what? Without his grace we will never be sufficiently grateful, for we are imperfect beings. Only the perfect one will be perfectly grateful.

This is not to say we shouldn’t try to be more conscious of these gifts from the Divine and develop a greater sense of gratitude. We should. It is part of spiritual development. But in the end, we have to have faith that he is helping us, despite what we think we are. He is looking both more broadly and deeply. He is seeing our true self, our soul, which wants to be free of this realm of negativity, which wants to experience the innate love that we are.

In our daily life, all the Master wants is to walk with us, to be with us, to be our companion in all that we do. This implies, of course, that we need to keep him in our thoughts, in our memory, and keep ourselves in his simran throughout the day. Baba Ji has often said he doesn’t want to walk in front of us or behind us; he just wants to be alongside of us, to be our friend and guide. He’s trying to win our confidence. Otherwise, it is hard for us to open ourselves to him, to trust him, to be receptive to him.

Henry Suso, a 14th century Christian mystic, tells a story of a spiritual man who wanted to live perfectly. He went to a group of diligent practitioners and asked what their school of thought was. One replied that it was nothing more than a thorough abandoning of self in all things. The elated seeker said that he wished to stay there even if he had to die a thousand deaths to do so. There he would build his cell where he could live as a hermit. But the brother replied, “No, continue your life calmly and without frenzy. The less you accomplish, the more you have accomplished.” Suso explains this story:

People are terribly blind and want to do great feats, undertake something, as though they wanted to take God by storm, doing everything themselves according to their own will, and self-confident in their own nature. No, not by fighting but by abandoning, by dying, by decreasing and abandoning!⁶

Sometimes in our efforts, we allow too much ego. Fancy that! Let us not take on great feats, always being the doer. The idea is to let go, abandon the self, even in our everyday life. As he says, live “calmly and without frenzy.”

Maharaj Charan Singh puts it another way:

A clean cloth will take on any colour in which you dye it. Our mind is like this cloth. Good company and honest effort will turn it in the direction of God. It is for this reason that every saint has enjoined holy company on his disciples. It is a fact of human nature that it becomes inevitably like that which it loves. And the deeper, that is to say, the more adoring, the more worshipping, the more self-effacing this love is, the more rapidly and surely does the transformation take place.⁷

The saints enjoin us not to forget the Lord throughout the day at any cost or at any time. And that is one aspect of gratitude – to remember him. That is also love, practice and persistence.

There is a story by C. S. Lewis, a 20th-century Christian writer and lay theologian. His book, Till We Have Faces, is a retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Cupid. Here the story is told from the perspective of Psyche’s eldest sister, Orual, who has a complaint against the gods, because they never answer humanity’s pleas and yet they expect humanity to make decisions anyway; and that causes actions and reactions, many unexpected. Orual also complains that the gods strip one of all that one holds dear. It isn’t fair, especially if we lose the love of another person. So Orual gets finally a hearing in the court of the gods, and she goes through an entire rant of what the gods have done to her – which was really a pretty self-centered argument. She testifies:

You’ll leave us nothing … the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can’t follow… We want to be our own. I was my own and Psyche was mine and no one else had any right to her.⁸

Quite possessive, isn’t she? But Orual realizes when she’s finished with the rant that she never really had a selfless love for Psyche. The ego was always present. The ego even thought it owned Psyche, which actually means the soul. That is, our minds think they own and possess our souls, rather than the other way around – that the soul owns or uses the mind and body as needed. Then it was the god’s turn to judge Orual; as part of the judging she was cleansed, and through that cleansing she became her soul. The book ends shortly thereafter with Orual writing:

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face, questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.⁹

Ultimately, the only answer is to meet the Lord, the bridegroom, face-to-face. Then there will be no questions. Then we will know. Everything else is mental gibberish.

In the meantime, Hazur Maharaj Ji’s other guidance on how to wait was: “We must show him…we have faith that he really is there within to give [his grace] to us.” We might intellectually accept or believe he is really there within us – but how much more difficult might it be to accept or believe that he is actively working within us! The Great Master wrote:

How could such a benefactor as the Master…be a silent observer of what is happening with his disciple in life? He is giving necessary guidance and help as he thinks proper…[W]hat ordinarily is called a misfortune is a blessing in disguise. It is a way of clearing an old account. It lightens the karmic load, and the Master is not unaware of it.¹⁰

The Master is always with us, encouraging and helping us in our attempts to shift our attention from the world to the Lord, whether or not we are aware of him. In Light on Saint John, a letter from Maharaj Charan Singh is quoted:

The Master within is continually attracting the disciple upward, and the purer the soul, the sooner it contacts the inner Master, the Word. As long as we are caught by the attachments and pleasures of this world, we are not even aware of that attraction. But when we do the spiritual practice as instructed, we are gradually cleansed of our sins and become pure and receptive to his grace. It is his grace, in other words, the Shabd, or Holy Ghost, that draws us up to his Radiant Form, so that we may live in Him, and He in us.¹¹

So this is an interesting definition of grace. He says, “It is his grace, in other words, the Shabd, or Holy Ghost, that draws us up.” Shabd is that divine essence, the Word of the Bible, the Tao, the Nam, which permeates everything and gives life. It is the holy spirit within us, our soul. It is this Shabd that will draw us up to the Radiant form, the Shabd form of the Master, “so that we may live in Him, and He in us.” That is his grace. Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote:

Masters are completely absorbed in Shabd, so by loving them we also merge into the Shabd. Love for and faith in the Master will, therefore, connect our thought currents with Shabd.¹²

Hazur Maharaj Ji also answered several questions about feeling love and closeness to the inner Master. For example:

Whatever you do in this world to keep your Master within you or keep yourself with the Master is meditation, is a part of meditation. Whether you are properly sitting or just sitting quietly, full of love and devotion for the Master, or hearing the Sound, seeing the Light – whatever you are doing, even worldly work – if your Master is with you in your mind, in your heart – if all your dealings conform to the teachings, to the commands of the Master, then you are with the Master. That is why we say that Sant Mat is not only meditation; it is a way of life. We have to mold ourselves to that way of life so that we are always with our Master, in all the activities of our life, so that we don’t forget him anytime, anywhere.¹³

Again:

Is there any place the Lord doesn’t walk? You’ll get everything from within yourself… You have to build your own atmosphere of meditation within yourself, and you have to live in that.¹⁴

He is saying that this sense of nearness, of closeness, of intimacy with the Master is developed and experienced inside. It is love, the Lord’s love, which lies within us because our soul, our real self, is nothing but love, nothing but Shabd. We create an atmosphere, perhaps unconsciously, within us and around us, in which we are related to the Divine, and we live our outward and inner lives within that. This is part of meditation.

The alternative that we face is common but tougher. Maharaj Jagat Singh wrote:

When a man presumes that he can subdue the mind by his own labor and powers, the Lord makes all his efforts fruitless in order to kill his ego. When he falls into despair and realizes his utter weakness, then the Lord’s grace and gifts are beheld by him.¹⁵

Ego, ego – it always comes back to the ego, that barrier between our real self and the Lord, that sense of self. We need to surrender the ego, and the only way to do so is not by fighting it but, as the mystic Suso said, “by abandoning, by dying, by decreasing and abandoning!” The Masters tell us how. We need to become selfless through meditation and merging with the inner Shabd Master – so that we may live in him, and he in us. Then we realize we are Shabd and return to the Lord.

And all this takes devotion (some call it effort) – devotion to do our meditation conscientiously, devotion to remembering his Name throughout the day, devotion and love for our Master with the faith that he and the Lord are really there within us, and that he knows best when to bestow his gifts and when to take us unto himself.

We will reach the Master within. It is assured. We will reach the Lord. The soul will be more than satisfied.

So may our midnight vigils, waiting for the Bridegroom, be as sincere as that of the five wise virgins who waited. But it is not just we who wait. He is also waiting for us.

Bible, Gospel of Matthew, 25:1-5
Light on Saint Matthew, 2003 ed., p. 265
Bible, Gospel of Matthew, 25:6-10
Ibid, p. 270
Science of the Soul, p. 139
Henry Suso, The Exemplar (Sermon 4), p. 373
Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, p. 11
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 292
Ibid, p. 308
Spiritual Gems, letter 28
Light on Saint John, 2019 ed., p. 237
Divine Light, letter 379
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q #125
Ibid, Q #136
Science of the Soul, “Spiritual Bouquet” #89

The Purpose of Quarantine - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Purpose of Quarantine

We have all become familiar lately with the word quarantine. The word originated in Venice, Italy, in the 14th and 15th centuries, from a word meaning “forty,” signifying 40 days. It was the designated period that ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could disembark, to prevent the spread of the plague. The “black death” had wiped out 30 percent of Europe’s population and much of Asia’s as well. So the 40-day quarantine was part of a strategy to prevent the spread of disease – a way of isolating people from exposure to dangerous infections.

The number 40 also has a spiritual significance. In the Hebrew Bible, we are told that the prophet Moses led the Israelites on a wandering journey in the desert for 40 years after liberating them from slavery in Egypt. In the Bible, the number 40 generally symbolizes a period of testing, trial, or probation. It also signifies change and transformation; we read that Moses fasted for 40 days and nights to prepare himself to receive the Torah (Bible). Manna (spiritual nourishment) rained down on the Israelites for 40 years during their wanderings. Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights to prepare for his public ministry. And there are many more such examples in the Bible.

Why is it significant that the Israelites wandered in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years? The journey could have been much shorter, as the distance was not so great. Some Torah commentaries state that the 40 years in the desert were a period of spiritual growth and development necessary to prepare the Israelites for entrance into the Holy Land. The enumeration of their journey is an account of their spiritual progress. The same people who were lacking faith in God – manifested by their creating a golden calf to worship, with some even wanting to return to Egypt – needed to develop spiritually under the guidance of Moses. Since results are not always apparent in the short term, they needed to have patience so that the will of God could reveal itself.

So perhaps this period of isolation, quarantine, and lockdown is an opportunity being given to us to look inside ourselves and draw on our innate spiritual core, to refocus our spiritual efforts and let go of any negativity we may have absorbed during our many lifetimes. We need to change our mindset. Perhaps our faith has weakened, or we have become lazy and complacent, which is why we don’t make as much effort in meditation as we used to, or try as hard to live the Sant Mat way of life. Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we looking to the Master to guide us? Are we faithful to our vows?

Hazur Maharaj Ji spoke to our inconsistency in devotion and effort and our dependence on seeing results in the short term:

You see, when you learn to walk, learn to run, you fall many times, but you get up again, and again you start running. It doesn’t mean that if you have fallen once, you will not get up and try again. Slips are there. And the mind is very powerful. It sways us off our feet to the right and left. But if we continue in meditation, we become firm again on the path. … We have so many pitfalls in life which we have to face, very unpleasant things. But if we keep our destination before us, the path before us, and the determination to follow it and reach the destination, then you are able to do it.

In the following answer, Maharaj Ji was even more encouraging. There are no failures on the path:

Brother, we are all struggling souls in this world. When we have our destination in view, we know the path leading to the destination and we travel on that. There are falls – we fall, we get up, and again we run. There are no failures on the path. …. Pitfalls here and there do pull us back, but as long as we try to overcome those weaknesses, we again get up and again go ahead. We have to do our best under the circumstances.

When we are sincere, the Lord comes to our aid and nature also helps us in our environment, in our atmosphere, in our circumstances. The Lord’s guiding hand is always there whether we are conscious of it or not. We should never lose heart when we have pitfalls or when we have fallen or think that we are being driven from the path. He never leaves us. Momentarily, we may feel that we have left the path, and at another time we may feel that we are again on the path. We explain to ourselves that we have left it. Actually, we do not leave it; we cannot leave it. We are so strongly bound, so strongly got hold of, that we cannot leave it; we cannot go astray.

But naturally it takes time to learn to walk and then to run. So we should try not to analyze too much. We should do our duties while living in this world, try to give our time to meditation, try to live to the best of our ability, and then slowly but surely, with the Lord’s grace, we will become successful in our endeavour….

The master’s guiding hand is always there to steer us through all those pitfalls, to steer us through all those weaknesses. We pierce through and we do come to the light.¹

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q# 577 & 578

In the Court of the Lord - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

In the Court of the Lord

Many of the shabds or hymns in the Indian Sant tradition were written along with their melodies by the saints themselves. They are, therefore, legacies of God-realized beings and have a unique freshness and impact. The truths the saints have realized are set down in a very pure and concentrated fashion so that each word springs from active realization. Unlike text which can be re-written or re-interpreted by priestly agendas, the shabds have remained unchanged for hundreds of years because each word as it was set down is part of the melody – words and music are inextricably linked. Just as with the inner Shabd, light and sound are one.

The well-known shabd discussed in this satsang is from the teachings of Paltu Sahib. Paltu was a shopkeeper saint in the highly orthodox religious town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh during the 18th century. Maharaj Charan Singh Ji in his discourses about Paltu described him as “fearless” because he did not spare the priests and religious leaders when he explained the path of the saints. Consequently, Paltu, at age 70, was burned alive for what were perceived as his heresies.

And what is it that the worldly and the ways of the world can’t stand? The truth. The saints’ teachings are very simple. This is not our true home – our true home is the abode of the Lord, Sach Khand. That is where our innermost being is based. Sach Khand is a state of consciousness. And a state of consciousness can be achieved anywhere; we do not have to go to a strange land to find it nor do we have to pay money, wear special garbs, or go through an official priesthood.

We are not just creatures of mind and matter. If we were, we’d be robots. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is mind and matter – recognizably non-human. Proof of the existence of surat or soul is that we are not like AI, not like robots. We have an extra dimension. We are surat, soul-being, loving consciousness captured in physical form which is yearning to return to its true home. As human beings, we all have this “chronic nostalgia” in one form or another, a longing to return to a former time or state, a belief that things are not as good as they were in the “old days,” a feeling we can’t put into words. The root meaning of ‘nostalgia’ is from the Greek, meaning ‘pain from an old wound’. The Welsh language has a word ‘hiraeth’– meaning a longing for somewhere we can’t return to because it doesn’t exist anymore or never was. This chronic nostalgia affects our behaviour and leads us to look for distractions and solace or to seek happiness in the physical world – when, in fact, we are connected to this world only through our previous actions, their reactions and desires.

The Lord is inside every one of us in the form of light and sound – the Shabd. Our journey is to make conscious contact with the sound and light within and gradually realize through spiritual practice that firstly, we are soul beings, and secondly, soul and Lord are one. The saint or true living Master is the key to our return home. He is a wave of the ocean of the Lord in a human birth.

The Master initiates us by establishing a conscious link with Him inside, with His shabd form. He teaches us how to meditate and what to meditate on. He requires a necessary foundation for this path through four vows: strict vegetarianism – no meat, fish, or eggs. We are to live a moral life and not dissipate our discrimination with alcohol or mind-affecting drugs. These three “lifestyle” vows are prerequisites for the fourth vow, the commitment to meditate two and a half hours every day – a tenth of each 24 hours. In four simple vows, we get the whole package – a lifestyle that addresses every aspect of our being, physically, mentally, and spiritually without the complications of rites and ritual. The saint assists us both inside and out like a mother watching and training a child. Through his grace and our effort, he promises we will ultimately achieve liberation from mind and its delusions and from matter and finally return home. There is a lovely quote from Hazur Maharaj Ji in Light on Sant Mat:

First comes the grace of God, then the company of Saints, and then the acquisition of the secret of Nam. Then, by constant application and unceasing devotion, comes the actual realization of Nam.¹

Maharaj Ji used to say that sincerity and honesty in our effort again provoke his grace to make more effort – however hopeless we may feel we are, or actually are, in our efforts to concentrate. There is a magic about sincerity.

To keep us straight and God-focused in our daily lives, we repeat the five holy names given us at the time of initiation. The Masters say repeatedly, “simran is the key.” Again, in Light on Sant Mat, Maharaj Ji writes:

Regarding the repetition of the five holy Names, it is not just repetition for the sake of breaking the habit of the mind and inculcating obedience. These names, if properly repeated with devotion, stir up spiritual vibrations and bring you in contact with those inner regions through which the soul has to pass on its way up to Sat Lok.²

Eventually, the Masters say, simran will permeate our subconscious and emerge consciously and automatically when we are not concentrating on something else. It will pop up. Thoughts, too, are external although they are going on in our head – their subject matter is external. Do we want to spend our meditation time dwelling on externals and strengthening them? This is why Baba Ji has said if we dwell on things in our meditation, instead of eliminating them or deleting them from the computer of our mind, we are essentially re-programming them back into our minds, strengthening them. We need to keep bringing the attention back to simran.

And, to reinforce our commitment to meditation and enhance our spiritual awareness, we attend satsang. Maharaj Ji gives us the reasons for that too:

The object of satsang is twofold: To non-satsangis it provides an opportunity of seeking the truth, removing their doubts, and arriving at a correct understanding, thus realizing the importance and significance of Sant Mat principles. For satsangis it creates or strengthens the yearning for going in and helps to concentrate the mind. The real satsang is the hearing of the Shabd within.³

Yet, nevertheless, in order for this world to continue, the saint’s teachings end up becoming bent and externalized into ritual, dogma, and practices. The saints themselves often get persecuted. However, no power can stop a saint from collecting his flock, his marked souls for that life. Fortunately, there are always Masters or saints in this world because there are always souls earnestly seeking the Lord and due, in a particular human birth, to return to Him. The saints’ presence cools this hot, heaving world. Paltu’s shabd cuts through the worldly tangles of status, dogma, ritual, and mental analysis. His tone is gentle.

In the court of the Lord, O Paltu,
nothing counts except love and devotion.
Love and devotion alone count,
for they please him most.
He prefers a poor devotee’s insipid food
to a kingly feast.
With all their penances and austerities,
the rishis and munis,
sure of their own piety and holiness,
were put to shame
when Shivri’s loving offering
of berries was accepted.
Yudhishtra arranged a sacrificial feast
to which all holy men were invited.
Pride that day died for all –
without Supach the bell would not ring.
Forbear, therefore, says Paltu,
from feeling proud of your high caste.
In the court of the Lord, nothing counts
except love and devotion.⁴

Paltu uses the metaphor of a monarch’s court to describe Sach Khand. Even in this world, courtiers imitate their king or queen. Paltu is describing how man and God are one, but the veil of ego separates us from him. Love alone can remove the veil. Our problem is that we identify with the veil or our ego-structure – that entire sense of ‘I-ness’ and ‘mine-ness’ which has dragged us through so many incarnations – and not simply that ‘me’ or ‘I’ that is attached to so many things in this world, but also the lunatic ramblings of our mind.

Someone once asked Maharaj Ji if Kal, the negative power, has incarnated on this earth. Hazur responded:

Well, Kal can do anything. You see, Kal can work through any human form. He's working through us. Mind is the agent of Kal and of any mind under the control of Kal – you can say he is working in the human form. I mean, after all, it is the mind which is the agent of Kal, and wherever mind dominates, Kal is dominating; he is working. And being human, we are all working under the domain of Kal, as dictated by him.⁵

Hazur also said:

We're all slaves. We are dancing to his tunes. Our strings are at the back, in his hand. And he pulls from the back, and we're dancing according to his pull. And those strings are our karmas. And Kal is sitting at the back. Through our karmas, he makes us dance. So when you go beyond the realm of mind and maya, Trikuti, then you are free. Then you are beyond his reach, beyond his realm. Then he cannot force you to dance at all. Then you live in the will of the free, the Lord.⁶

The mind bombards us with desires, shame, guilt, the sense of being affronted, unhappy comparisons with others, the pain of attachment, loss, and low self-esteem. So we try to bury our self-awareness in distractions – television, being workaholics, alcoholism, drugs, or other vices. Then, of course, the mind being ultimately a machine, a creature of habit; it becomes addicted to these things.

This is the process of the mind being led by the senses through the nine lower gates of the body and beyond. Mind, the Masters say, is bottomless in its desires. Time is change, and both mind and maya (illusion) are subject to it. Therefore the notion of permanent happiness or being satisfied when particular desires are fulfilled is illusory. Permanent happiness is not part of the law of nature here. The Great Master describes this process:

The world is a thick forest, thickly populated, where all have lost their way and are ceaselessly and aimlessly running about, life after life, harassed by the great dacoits: lust, greed, anger, attachment, and pride. The remarkable thing about these dacoits is that people associate with them joyfully and, (despite) knowing that the result of their association is suffering, have not the courage to dissociate themselves from them. They eat the poison, cry, and eat the poison again.⁷

It is ego which brings the other perversions of the mind in train – lust, anger, attachment, and pride. If we didn’t have such a strong sense of ‘I-ness’, of being the centre of our own universe, who would there be to feel the lust, anger, etc? The core of this sense of identity is the feeling that actually we are the most important person in the world – to ourselves. The saints teach that even our worldly love is based on selfishness and a desire to survive.

We must be cautious and vigilant in this deceitful world. Our friends and relatives are all about ‘give and take’. They are described by Soami Ji as the ‘outer swindlers’; the ‘inner’ swindlers are the five passions. Both steal the wealth of our attention. Paltu, however, speaks of love and devotion. Devotion is the path to love. The root meaning of devotion is from Latin vovere – to vow. The four vows taken at the time of initiation could be described as the four devotions – devotion is the four vows in action, because the essence of following the four vows means putting another interest before that of the ego. Devotion is a gift of God’s grace – it tips the balance of our awful karmas in the right direction by setting our inclination towards the Lord.

And we must not forget the grace of the Father. It is a nudge to enable us to make an effort. If we are devoted to following the four vows, we will change, because we become how we think and behave. If the motivation of our actions, whether in the world or in our meditation, is putting others first, then we will have begun the process of loving, of losing our identity and beginning to merge with another being.

The Great Master wrote: “The highest action and the highest quality in human life is devotion. If one does not practice it, his life is wasted.⁸

We respect devotion as a quality on this plane whether it is in our marriage, in our family, or in our working life – the doctor devoted to his patients or a mother devoted to her children. We instinctively recognize and do not respect devotion to (lower) self. We realize that devotion to self causes great harm in this world – the dictators we meet in every sphere of life, the tyrants who will have their own way. Devotion to the Lord is a great gift. The Masters say even the angels are yearning for devotion to Him but such devotion cannot be obtained without a living true Master.

The first step of our devotion is to the physical form of our Master. When we meet him, we trust him because something in us recognizes something in Him. In other words, our soul leaps up in recognition of a fully realized soul-being. It is deep calling to deep. We fall in love with him and we want to serve him. But if we are just attached to his physical form and do not do the spiritual practice, then our service becomes externalized and even dramatic, because it is still on the emotional plane. Emotions change and shift, causing dramatic situations. Emotion is of the mind.

It is the quiet practice of Surat Shabd Yoga which generates the transforming power of love. Love works on any creature, even plants, trees, and insects. Receiving spiritual love from the Master enables us to love in a spiritual way and that spills over into loving the creation.

By devotion to the Sound Current, the effects of both good and bad deeds, and the sense of identity which drives them, are burnt away. When we start our meditation and try to concentrate at the eye centre, we have been given holy Names and a form we are attracted to for contemplation. The simran and the Master’s form are not associated with our sense of identity, so the mind, with no familiar hooks to hang onto, quiets down and becomes calm and smooth. Through simran we reach that state of tranquillity where we are not disturbed by good or bad things happening, regarding all as the Lord’s will. This is a state of consciousness, not an intellectual decision. The Master so organizes our life as to enable us to reach a state of one-pointedness, an inner focus on the Master.

The Master knows that as human beings we all have the capacity for devotion but it’s spread out willy-nilly. One-pointed devotion, like the sun shining through a magnifying glass, can destroy a mountain of karma. One-pointed devotion becomes bireh, longing for the Lord. When the distractions of the mind calm down, the soul’s yearning is at last truly felt. The soul has always been in a state of yearning and longing to re-unite with the Lord, but those keen pangs have been muffled by the blanket effect of the mind and senses. Bireh is described as a painful and sweet state of consciousness – we are all experiencing bireh, but we don’t realize it until the mind becomes still.

Only spiritual practice can uncover this longing and set in motion the return home. The beauty of this is that any time is good for meditation, any time is good for simran, any place is good for simran. We are not confined by buildings and rules.

The Masters love our effort in meditation. Great inner experiences without love or devotion for the Master will lead us nowhere except straight back into this world with an expanded ego. Sant Paltu in his shabd describes how the great rishis and seers attempted to attract the Lord Ram’s attention by outward ceremonies and dramatic displays of apparent self-denial. But Ram chose to share the berries of a poor woman, Shabri, berries which Shabri had already tasted to test for sweetness. Ram chose to spend his time with a humble devotee and ignored all notions of caste behaviour and ‘un-cleanliness’ (ritual pollution) by eating her half-eaten food. Ram saw the motives behind everyone’s behaviour. Self-awareness drove the wise men but love was the motive for Shabri’s apparently unhygienic actions. The Masters teach that motive is binding and they can see our motives and true intentions like pickles in a jar.

Paltu also refers to the Mahabharata in which, after the great war is over, the Pandava brothers decide to hold a feast and invite many ascetics and holy men. Krishna tells them that their ceremony will not be complete until a bell rings in the heavens. The bell does not ring even when Krishna as the Lord himself goes to the feast. Krishna tells the brothers of a poor saint, Supach, that until the saint attends the feast, the ceremony is not complete and the bell won’t ring. The Pandavas assume cynically that the poor man would be attracted by the free food, but he is not. They issue a personal invitation, but he says that until he is given the benefit of one hundred ceremonies, he will not come to the feast. The brothers realize that they haven’t completed even one ceremony, never mind a hundred. Queen Draupadi then cooks some food and goes by herself, barefooted, to the saint’s door begging humbly for his attendance. Supach, seeing the purity of her heart and intention, does not pause even for a second but accompanies her to the feast and the bell in heaven rings.

The Lord, like Krishna at the feast, is omnipresent but the Shabd, the bell that rings in heaven, can only be heard through the intervention of a living saint. We can only benefit from his company if we are humble and loving. Otherwise, we will assume that he shares our way of thinking. The brothers thought that a poor man would be attracted by food and their interesting company. They were confusing love with worldly knowledge. We take one step towards the Master and he takes one hundred steps towards us, and those steps are not influenced by our caste, colour, creed, status, lineage, or nationality. ”Pride that day died for all,” says Paltu. The attendees at the feast realized the hollowness of worldly institutions and the lack of value of their own investment in those things.

As a satsangi once wrote in Spiritual Link:

We have to tune ourselves to a different chord, and to accomplish that task he gives us the tuning fork of simran and bhajan. We demonstrate our real love by faithfully using the tools he’s given us.⁹

We have taken up a way of life which is a gradual refocussing of our attention so that the Master may slowly become larger and larger on our mental horizon, until the day when he becomes the whole view. Sardur Bahadur Jagat Singh Ji said in a discourse:

Practice maketh a man perfect. Even though he starts with misgivings, in due course, perseverance and sincere effort enable him to develop a strong fervour and piety. Mere show can lead him nowhere. An antidote for lack of devotion is more and more steadfast devotion. With unwavering faith in the Master, devotion unfailingly leads to realization of ‘Nam’– the elixir against all suffering in the world. Soami Ji lays stress on bhakti. There is no other way to realize Him and free the soul forever.¹⁰

Light on Sant Mat, p. 60
Light on Sant Mat, ltr. 169
Light on Sant Mat, ltr. 142
Paltu Sahib ki Bani, Part 1, Kundli 218, in Isaac Ezekiel, Sant Paltu: His Life and Teachings (4th ed. 2009), p. 17
Q&A with Hazur Maharaj Ji, March 16, 1981
Q&A with Hazur Maharaj Ji, December 1979
Spiritual Gems, ltr. 28, p. 55
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 2, p. 57
Spiritual Link magazine, No. 41, Autumn 1989
Maharaj Jagat Singh, Science of the Soul (2014 ed.), “Excerpts,” #12, p. 97

Signs of a Vanishing Ego - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Signs of a Vanishing Ego

Saints tell us that the only thing we can surrender to the Lord is our ego. It alone separates us from God.

They point out that Sant Mat is a path of dynamic transformation and that with honest self-reflection and consistent meditation, we will eventually see signs of spiritual growth. They also emphasize that it’s a big mistake to measure our spiritual growth based on inner experiences during meditation. The reasoning behind this is that the Master, like any good parent, will keep those riches in trust for us until we’re mature enough to appreciate and digest them without feeding our ego, which would further chain us to this creation. In fact, we may not be fully aware of our progress within until the time of our death. However, the Masters make it clear that there is indeed a way to assess our progress, right here and now. We can do this by reflecting on how much our ego dominates our lives.

While an ego is necessary to function in this physical world, if we let its lower self-centred tendencies dominate us, it hijacks our happiness. Then we live in a quagmire of egoic darkness where we spend our lives in a constant state of discontentment, tension, and negative emotions, obsessing over all our cravings, aversions, and problems.

Signs that the negative aspects of ego are dominating us are:

We are afraid to be alone without constant stimulation, sensual gratification, and distractions. We live in a relentless state of anxiety, fear, and uneasiness. We have disdain for our own shortcomings and those of others. Our goal is to always be unique, right, and special. We take everything personally and are easily hurt, resentful, and spiteful. We live in constant judgment and are happy feeling superior, unhappy feeling inferior, and jealous and resentful when others have what we want. We create personal stories and build cases to justify our desires and weaknesses. We are totally engrossed in getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t want, no matter the cost. And finally, we feel justified in complaining and groaning when life and others don’t bend to our will.

Surrendering the ego lies at the heart of every spiritual tradition. We can’t fix our ego’s negative tendencies, but we can shift our focus away from them and eventually transcend them. However, we’ll only succeed in doing this when our desire for inner peace and contentment becomes the driving force of our life. Then meditation and honest self-reflection become the tools to help us achieve our objective.

Signs that spiritual growth and maturity are developing in us are:

Clear thinking. Maharaj Jagat Singh emphasizes that satsangis should form the habit of clear thinking. Clear thinkers realize that permanent happiness comes only when we begin to recognize the divine oneness of our soul, God and Nam, and we act in ways that strengthen that relationship. Clear thinkers live in the present and view every moment as an opportunity to retreat into simran, let go, and live in the presence of the Divine. As a result, they witness that God, through Nam, is present in everyone, doing everything. Then their problems, depression, anger, and fear dissipate and are replaced with love, contentment, and compassion.

Clear thinkers let go of the past and don’t try to recreate it, because they realize that living in the past is fruitless and leads only to disappointment. They remember the past only enough to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them. They also don’t ruminate on scenarios of what will happen in the future, because they realize that doing so mainly creates anxiety and fear.

In addition, clear thinkers keep a balance between their worldly and spiritual lives. Baba Ji often reminds us that the world is round and the repercussions of our behaviour will eventually come back to us. He tells us that there are twenty-four hours in a day, and it is our responsibility to structure our lives so that we have time for our spiritual and worldly work, our family, our friends, and to maintain our health. If we do this, our lives will be more productive and pass with relative ease; if we don’t, we’ll bring havoc and misery on ourselves and those who must deal with us.
Patience. For most of us, achieving spiritual realization isn’t quick or easy, and our lack of progress can be frustrating. But spiritual growth never comes from putting ourselves down and beating ourselves up, but by patiently using our positive strengths to overcome our weaknesses. Baba Ji always says: “We wouldn’t be initiated if we couldn’t succeed.”
Acceptance. As long as we live in the body we’ll be affected by people and situations. The question is, if things don’t go our way, do we blow up like a stick of dynamite or use every situation as an opportunity to do our best, maintain our balance, and accept outcomes as the Lord’s will? We pay the price for our behaviour. Our actions and reactions can cut our karmic chains and lead us to liberation or just bind us to new shackles that further burden and imprison us here.
Courage. Bravery is being willing to face our weaknesses and recognize the part we play in problematic situations and then to take steps to correct our mistakes. Critics are our best teachers; if their feedback is true, we can use it to change; if it isn’t, we need to hold no grudges and move on. As Baba Ji has pointed out, who are we to tell others what they should think or how they should feel?

If we are courageous, we accept the responsibility that our happiness and contentment are under our control. Just as we can delete the junk mail in our inbox without reading it, we can decide whether to accept or delete what we are offered by our own minds and the opinions and behaviour of other people.
Honesty. For a happy life, maintaining honest, supportive relationships is invaluable. We are advised to be truthful and not put on airs. We often pretend to be who we’re not in order to hide our inadequacies, out of a fear that others will reject us if they knew who we really are. But when we engage in this futile quest to protect our ego, it’s not only exhausting but also requires a better memory than most of us have. What’s worse, this phoniness makes us feel even more isolated and unworthy of love and friendship. So, lighten up, laugh a lot, be sincere, keep good company, forgive, accept, and give love freely.
Self-discipline. Saints teach that there are a thousand excuses for destructive behaviours but never a good reason. All initiates on this path have been taught what’s good for us and what isn’t. We can never use the excuse “I didn’t know.”
Unselfishness. Unselfish service, or seva, is the cornerstone of Sant Mat. We do it with our body, wealth, mind, and our soul in meditation. Anything we do selflessly for love alone is seva. Seva is important because, as our giving becomes more selfless, we realize the tremendous joy that comes from giving rather than taking. All seva prepares us for the greatest submission and joy of all, surrendering our illusion of separateness from the Lord through meditation and realizing our oneness with him.

In conclusion, Baba Ji always emphasizes that none of us are perfect – otherwise we wouldn’t be here. What is important is that at the end of our lives we can look our Satguru in the eyes and say, “Do with me what you will, but I want you to know, I gave Sant Mat my best shot – I left nothing on the table.”

Living Water - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Living Water

Based on The Odes of Solomon, Ode 30¹

Saints and mystics have come in all ages, in all cultures. They don’t come to form new religions nor to set one group against another. The words they speak may differ according to their different languages and cultures, but their message is always one. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh explains to us: “Saints come with the sole purpose of awakening within us the desire to meet and love the Lord, and to explain the method by which we can find Him.”²

They speak to us of the mystery and beauty of that Power that brought the creation into being and sustains it even now. They often use analogies to describe what words cannot. They use metaphors to give us some inkling, some idea, of the divine and how we can realize this divinity in our very lifetimes.

For the ancient people who lived in dry, desert lands, water was of huge significance, essential for life and very precious, due to its scarcity. So when the mystics and prophets talked about the experience of the divine, what better metaphor was there than water?

To desert people, or to any who live in arid areas, the availability of water, springs and fountains is vital to existence. Hence, the Creative Word, as the divine Source of Life, was described as the eternal Well or Fountain, the Spring of Immortality, and the Living Water.³

This living water is the creative current that flows throughout the entire creation. It is called “living water” because water gives life and is something that we cannot live without. When the current is withdrawn, life cannot exist at all. It is living because of its quality – it is vibrant: it carries no death in it at all. It is the source and sustainer of life itself.

The whole universe was created by this current and is sustained by it even now. It is referred to in all our religious texts by many names: Shabd, Word, Name, Akash Bani (voice from heaven), Kalma (inner sound), Kun (Word or Shabd), Logos, and Holy Spirit. It is also known as the sound current. We say “current,” because it is always moving, always flowing. We also call it the audible life stream or the ringing radiance, because everything in this entire creation is constantly in motion; light and sound are the expression of creative power in all things.

What does water do?
Not only does water allow us to live and give us sustenance, but it cleanses, carries life, and provides power (produces electricity). Just as physical water has these capabilities, so too does the current of living water. As water can generate electricity, so the living water generates life. This current smoothens us, as water smoothens even the hardest rocks. It carries us back to our Source, just as the rivers flow back to the sea. It washes away our dross, our karmas, our impurities.

Whether we are Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Jew, or atheist – no matter which country we come from, whether we are rich or poor – we all need water. But the saints point us to that water that alleviates not just our physical thirst but also the thirst of the soul. This water is always flowing within us, but it is only when the master initiates us that we may have conscious contact with it. The living water, as described in the book The Holy Name, “does not water a physical land, but the parched desert of a heart void of love and devotion.”⁴

Mystics come to tell us about this current of divine water and how we can drink from it. So let us see how this divine story was told by a mystic of the first century CE, in the Odes of Solomon:

Draw for yourselves water from the Living Spring of the Lord,
Because it has been opened to you.

Where does this water spring from? What is meant by a Living Spring? Only in the human form can the Lord be realized. The third eye is the place from which the soul current descends into the human form and the place where we can ride that current back to our source. That Living Spring is within our very own selves.

How has it been opened to us? Is it open to everyone? Through the teachings of the Masters and saints we come to realize that the spiritual water that we need to survive does not come from books, no matter how holy and uplifting those books might be, nor from buildings made of bricks and mortar, nor from rituals and ceremonies. That water that we need to drink comes from the Living Spring right within us, and can be realized while we are alive. We need to come in contact with the Shabd, become aware of the Nam, that living water, so that we may drink.

Just as we can’t get drinking water from a stale well or a muddy puddle, we need to get water from a fresh spring, the Living Spring. Our religious scriptures only point the way or inspire us to find it. We need to get our water from the Living Spring, which saints tell us is the third eye, the tisra til, that point within, just above the eyes, where we concentrate. This is where the Nam, the living water, flows into us.

This water, the Shabd, is always flowing within, but it is only when the master initiates us that we come into conscious contact with it:

It is an infinite fountain flowing eternally at the third eye, the entrance to the house of the Lord. In fact, the Hebrew word for fountain, ma’ayan or ‘ayin, is the same as the word for “eye,” revealing how profound is the identification of the eye (the third eye) as the source of the divine waters of life.⁵

By receiving initiation from a true living Master, this spring is opened, meaning that we are able to draw upon that Word or Shabd. The water is always there, but without the help of the Master, we do not gain access to it. It is as if the Master shows us how to turn on the tap. In our homes, there is always water flowing in the pipes, but until we turn on the tap, we can’t get at the water or drink it. Water runs in pipes underground, but we have to register with a supplier and get connected to access it.

Masters are like water diviners – they have the special knowledge. Masters don’t have more of it than we do – it is a matter of awareness. Masters show us where to find it and give us the method to draw the water: They recommend that we follow a particular lifestyle and that we do meditation, which will enable us to experience the light and sound of that vibrating, radiant life current. It isn’t the light that we can see with these physical eyes – it isn’t the sound that we hear with these physical ears. Meditation attunes our spiritual perception and expands our awareness.

Being vegetarian – not consuming meat, fish, or eggs, nor alcoholic drinks or mind-affecting drugs, and living a pure and honest lifestyle – all this makes our cup clean. Attending to daily meditation wipes away our conceptions, our limited view and understanding, and prepares us to be filled. But the cup won’t provide us with water. The cup is one thing – the water another.

Come, all you who thirst, and take a draught,
And rest beside the Spring of the Lord.
For fair it is and pure and gives rest to the soul.

Born thirsty
The writer beautifully says: If you are thirsty, come and take a drink.

We are all born into this world thirsty. We come into this creation needing to drink to survive. A human being will not survive very long without water. Nature has given us thirst so that we may feel the craving to imbibe the vital fluid that we need to flourish in this creation. Without that thirst we wouldn’t want to drink.

Just as our bodies have been given thirst in order to be able to survive, our souls also have been given a thirst, so that we will seek that which will enable us to survive spiritually. We know that we need far more than physical sustenance in life. We need love, we need nurturing – from our parents, our families, our communities, our friends. But even those who have worldly love in abundance often feel a thirst that is hard to understand. This thirst is for something higher, something purer, something divine – something which, no matter how hard we try, cannot be found in the world around us.

We try to quench this thirst by every possible means known to us: through relationships, through our activities, through work, hobbies, social and political deeds. Yet our spiritual thirst is not quenched. And the thirst of the devotee of the Lord is unique. A terrible dryness can come in life, when nothing satisfies and nothing sustains us in this world.

This spiritual thirst is given to us so that we might seek our true Nature and our source, that living water, to keep our soul alive. That thirst is actually a blessing.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted… Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.⁶

Why don’t we drink?
Why don’t we just drink automatically if we are thirsty? We’re so busy trying to satisfy our thirst in the world through the senses. And then, there is so much noise in the world. We have heard the story of the horse that is led to the well, but when the wheel is turning to raise the bucket of water, it creates a noise, and he won’t drink because of the noise. When the wheel stops it is quiet, but there is no water. When the wheel turns, there is water but noise. Again and again, he is led but he won’t drink. Eventually the horse has to be whipped, so that despite the noise he drinks. This is like the mind and meditation.

We have to take charge of our horses, whip the mind to attend to our bhajan and simran despite the noise of the world, despite all of our problems, all of our worries! The living Master helps us learn how to take charge of our minds in the midst of the noise of the world, so that right here in the middle of it all, we can attend to our meditation and drink.

Yes, we realize the true power of the mind and just how difficult it is to control it when we sit face to face with it in the silence and stillness of meditation – but without our effort, without that struggle, we won’t be able to get the water.

The Masters call to us, and they say, “If you are thirsty, drink!” The saints invite those who are thirsty, those whose thirst cannot be quenched by any worldly water, or any worldly activity, or any worldly love, to drink. They invite those whose souls are weary and seek rest. As it says in the Bible:

Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.⁷

It is only man who has the ability to become aware of his situation – that there is no rest to be found in this creation. The soul goes from form to form, from life to life, seeking to return to its source. Try as we may, nothing gives us any peace at all.

Baba Ji often reminds us that what we need is peace of mind. It’s just that we’re looking in the wrong direction! The Master tells us where to look to find that permanent peace.

In the Adi Granth we read:

The ambrosial Nectar, the Unstruck Melody,
rains down continually.
Deep within my mind and body,
peace and tranquillity have come.⁸

Similarly the author of this Ode says:

Come, all you who thirst, and take a draught,
And rest beside the Spring of the Lord.

Even in the world we seek rest near bodies of water: by the seaside, by rivers, and by fountains in our gardens. How many thousands of pounds (or dollars, or rupees) we spend to go on holiday and find places of refuge! But when we get there, do we really enjoy it, do we find any rest at all?

Just as we can’t enjoy ourselves and find any rest if our minds are totally restless and fraught with worldly anxieties, or if people are always chattering and perhaps distressing us, so too we can’t enjoy our time by the Fountain of living water. When we go on holiday and try to find some rest, we distract our mind with activities that engage its active nature: maybe we read, play games, swim, or do some other sport. So too in spirituality, when we seek to find rest, the Master gives us satsang, seva, and ultimately the technique of repetition and contemplation, which lead to concentration and enjoyment of the sound current, to engage and still the mind.

Sweeter by far than honey are its waters,
And the honeycomb of bees cannot be compared with it …

The mystics try to describe a sweetness that we cannot even imagine. Sheikh Farid is quoted:

Sugar, honey, and buffalo’s milk are all sweet,
but incomparable is the sweetness of the Lord.⁹

How can we describe love? Words fail us … How many words have been written about love, but no words can ever describe it! How can the mystics possibly describe that river of light and sound, that vibrating luminescence? How can they describe the bliss that comes when we taste it? We describe the thirst of the rainbird, but how can we describe the joy he feels when that rain finally falls and he can drink! So mystics choose the sweetest things and say, “sweeter than that...”

Why is it sweeter?

Because it flows forth from the lips of the Lord,
And from the heart of the Lord is its Name.

The Nam, the Word, the unstruck Music, Logos – give it any name – flows from the lips of the Lord. The Shabd flows into the creation, giving life and sustenance. It is the energy of life itself. The Master is the mouthpiece of the Lord, the lips of the Lord.

In Eastern literature the eye centre is often referred to as the heart. The Master and our connection to him at the third eye is the point from where this water, this Nam, this Shabd, flows. We receive knowledge of that Nam, that Word, from the Master; we are connected to the Nam at the eye centre by the Master through initiation. We’re taught how to meditate, how to merge our heart into his heart.

If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.
He who believes in me…
out of his heart will flow
rivers of Living Water.¹⁰

Out of his breast, out of his infinite love, we drink in his Presence; his love flows into us, his Grace descends upon us. We say they pour their love into us – “it flows from the lips of the Lord.”

The mystics, our spiritual guides, don’t come only to talk about these things. They speak about that which they have experienced. If they spoke through book knowledge alone, they would be professors instead of saints. We flock to the mystics because they are powerhouses of living spirituality. They themselves are bearers of this living water; they themselves have drunk their fill and show us where to find this water.

If someone were to start preaching about the wonders of water but looked withered, parched, and thirsty, we would know that there is nothing we could learn from that person. He might say, “This is where to find water.” But if he really knew, then he would have had a drink himself, and we would be able to see that freshness in his face! Rumi is quoted:

The sign is in the face.
You can look at an orchard
and tell if it rained last night.
That freshness is the sign.¹¹

So the saints come to help us because we are thirsty, and they tell us where to find this water to alleviate our intolerable thirst, so that we may drink. They know through their experience of water, not just because they have heard about it. We see, we feel that they aren’t thirsty!

And it came unhindered and unseen,
But until it sprang up within them, men knew it not.

It came unhindered and unseen – it is ever present and yet we are unaware of it. That current lies latent in human beings, but we go around absolutely ignorant of its existence. We are standing in the river, water flowing all around us, mad with thirst, saying, “Where’s the water?” As Rumi describes our state, “like a pearl on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell: where is the Ocean?”¹²

Until we are connected to the Shabd, until we practice devotion to the Word, the current, until our consciousness rises up to the Living Spring through concentration, we cannot realize it, we cannot imagine it. We can read about it, we can hear about it, but until we experience it, we cannot know it.

If we have seen the ocean, it doesn’t matter if the people who live in the desert tell us that we are delusional – we know that the ocean exists. When we have the experience, then nothing can shake us. This is why the Masters ask us to put the teachings into practice, so that we may experience this water for ourselves – the peace, the safety, the love. In the beginning we do need to go on with a bit of faith and trust that we are going in the right direction.

With his grace
The Master’s grace is always flowing, but we do not always perceive it. How does his grace come to us? Unhindered and unseen. It flows abundantly, although we don’t know it, we don’t see it, we may not recognize it. Grace isn’t always what we think it should be. Grace is what brings us closer to the Lord. When we are thirstiest, that is when we turn toward the Lord. And yet, as Hazur used to say, when our cups are not turned upward, they can’t receive that grace. We have to do our best to turn our cups rightside up, so that we may receive that living water. Grace and effort go hand in hand.

Blessed are they who have drunk from it,
And have found rest thereby. Hallelujah.

Blessed – because it is through the Lord’s grace we come to understand the teachings, we are put under the Lord’s guidance and protection, and we put the teachings into practice. We are able to live that pure lifestyle; we are able to drink of that meditation, of that Love, of that current, that Nam, that Shabd, the living water. Then alone can we truly find rest and repose. Then alone can we return to our source and the drop will merge back into the ocean. The biblical psalmist sang:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul.¹³

And in the gospel of John:

Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.
But the water that I shall give him
will become in him a fountain of water
springing up into everlasting life.¹⁴

To conclude –
Talking about water, praising water, thinking about water, is not the same as drinking water.

First, we feel thirst, without which we would never seek the water.
Reading the Sant Mat books or scriptures is like reading about water.
Coming to satsang is like hearing about water.
Sitting in the Master’s presence is like swimming in water.
But it is only through attending to our meditation that we can drink that water.

Draw for yourselves water
From the Living Spring of the Lord,
Because it has been opened to you.

John Davidson, The Odes of Solomon, Ode 30, p. 134
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II, p. 7
John Davidson, The Song of Songs, p. 38
Miriam Caravella, The Holy Name, 4th ed., 2003, p. 113
Ibid
Bible, Matthew 5:4, 5:6
Matthew 8:20
Adi Granth, p. 105
Adi Granth, p. 1379; quoted in The Path, 1976 ed., p. 1
Bible, John 7:37-38
Jelaluddin Rumi, This Longing: Poetry, Teaching Stories, and Letters of Rumi, ed. Coleman Barks & John Moyne; Threshold Books, 1988, p. 13
Ibid, p. 71
Bible, Psalm 23
Bible, John 4:13

Our Relationship with the Divine - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Our Relationship with the Divine

Choose the pir and regard him as the essence of the Way.
The pir is summer, others are the autumn month;
They are like night, the pir is the moon.
I have bestowed on young fortune (Husam-al-Din)
the name of pir (old),
Because he is old in Truth, not old in time.
So old is he that he has no beginning:
There is no rival to such a unique pearl.
Truly, old wine grows more potent;
Truly, old gold is more highly prized.¹
_{Rumi, Masnavi}

The pir is the equivalent of the living master, a living reference to the inner form, the Shabd form of the master. For without Shabd, the creative power, no life is possible. It is the spiritual life force permeating the whole of creation, and the living master is the conscious embodiment of this Shabd. He is the pivotal point around which the perennial wisdom teachings revolve. It is through contacting such a spiritual teacher that the journey back to the source of the Divine starts, with the disciple’s first hesitant steps. The pir is to be regarded as “the essence of the Way.” He puts us on the path of self-realization and God-realization. He guides us on the way to the understanding that we are spiritual beings, yearning to become united with our true essence, our intrinsic spirituality.

Meeting the pir is the cosmic turning point, ending the descent of the soul into the creation and starting the ascent of its journey homeward back to the source of the creation. The pir is the be-all and end-all as spiritual guide, slowly revealing the essence of the spiritual teachings. Step by step, the disciple of the living master progresses on the path, slowly digesting the spiritual food. He partakes of this food in its purest form in his meditation. The meditation is his lifeline, and the disciple should never slacken his hold.

The status of the pir is unique. Rumi calls him “summer,” all light and bliss, not to be compared with others who are “the autumn month.” The metaphors he uses are images of light, to be contrasted with darkness. Then he makes a wonderful shift and draws full attention to his beloved disciple and successor Husam-al-Din, whom he calls “young fortune.” Husam-al-Din is the one who writes down his master’s teachings in the Masnavi, which are inspirations coming directly from the Divine.

Doing Maharaj Ji’s hukam (will or command) is the purpose of a Shabd disciple’s life, the objective he should always keep in front of him. The relationship between a master and his successor is the paramount example of what it means to have a relationship with the Divine. As individual disciples we’re building up a relationship with the inner Shabd master by submitting ourselves to the meditative process. It’s a lifelong process sustained by ceaseless daily efforts. Progress can be measured by a growing sense of maturity and by the extent to which we experience peace of mind. An undercurrent of spirituality is present in the disciple, which he or she can tap into any time of the day.

Because he is old in Truth, not old in time.
So old is he that he has no beginning:
There is no rival to such a unique pearl.
Truly, old wine grows more potent;
Truly, old gold is more highly prized.

Shabd masters bear witness to the Truth, and they give us a glimpse of this Truth in their teachings. The teachings are not only imparted by word of mouth, but also without words. Shabd practitioners imbibe the spiritual fragrance radiating from the living master, experiencing an atmosphere suffused with light and love. One’s consciousness expands, more in a subtle than a dramatic way. A deeper, intuitive understanding of the meaning of life and the interconnectedness of all things becomes embedded in one’s inner life.

The teachings of the masters are age-old and timeless, and so are those who are expounding them. Spiritual guides have no limitations and have risen above time and space. There is freshness in their approach to life, which is inspiring and invigorating. Every day is a new day, full of opportunities, and it’s up to us to adopt a positive attitude – with an underlying feeling of gratitude, because as Baba Ji so often emphasizes, “we get so much more than we deserve.”

Rumi’s wordplay on “old” is interesting and revealing. Some of us have literally grown old with our master and observed how the successor merges into the predecessor. The impact of the Guru’s message becomes deeper in the course of a lifetime. His words, his images, familiar one-line sayings, however inspiring and uplifting when you hear them for the first time, only gain in meaning and depth while we’re progressing on the path. In the Bible the Father and Jesus are referred to a couple of times as the “Ancient of Days,” having no beginning and no ending. This goes for the Shabd masters as well; they are old beyond time, speaking with God’s own voice. This is beautifully illustrated by the poet and philosopher Hazrat Inayat Khan, who is quoted in A Treasury of Mystic Terms:

Although the tongue of God is speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great teacher of the past having been this guiding Spirit living the life of God in human guise. [They are] known or unknown to history, always one and the same person.²

Since the beginning of time, there has been an unbroken line of “sons of Man” or “sons of God,” who have taken their allotment of souls back to the house of the Father. Owing to karma, to decisions we have taken in the past, we have missed that golden opportunity. Now is the time to grasp the opportunity, to realize that our Golden Age has finally dawned. In the words of Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh:

Sister, don’t you think this is a Golden Age when we are on the path, we are meditating, and we are doing our best to go back to the Father and lose our own identity? Isn’t this a Golden Age?³

Rumi, Masnavi I: 2938-42 in A Treasury of Mystic Terms, Vol. 8, p. 365
Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message, Vol. 1, p. 14, in A Treasury of Mystic Terms, Vol. 8, pp. 394-395
Die to Live, p. 279

Addicted to Our Selves - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Addicted to Our Selves

An addict is someone who believes he can only function if he has a regular supply of the substance or activity to which he is addicted. Deny him his ‘stuff’ and he goes into a state of profound grief compounded by a sickness that is caused by physical withdrawal symptoms. Similarly, when we are denied our ‘attachments’, we have withdrawal symptoms and suffer the same profound grief – indeed we believe we cannot function without them or even that we will cease to exist.

The word is from the Latin and literally means ‘spoken for’, but ‘addiction’ has come to mean something much more. The mystics talk about our ‘attachments’, a word from the Old French, atachier, meaning to fasten or to fix. ‘Addiction’ carries a powerful sense of compulsion and physical dependency that is somehow missing from the way we use ‘attachment’, but they are really the same thing. Maybe any seeming difference lies in the fact that ‘addiction’ has only meant a ‘compulsive relationship with a substance or activity’ for a mere 250 years or so, and thus has all the urgency of a recently discovered malaise.

But it is not recent: man has always been addicted to those constituents of the physical and mental worlds from which he tries to construct his worldly self. We are addicted in just the same way that a junkie is addicted to heroin. What are these constituents? They are the very substance of our worldly beings: our relationships in all their complexity; our possessions in all the ways they possess us; our ambitions, longing, frustrations, fantasies, lusts and fears, in all the ways they inhabit most of our waking – and sleeping – thoughts and dreams; our tastes and opinions, especially those we hold about ourselves.

Many of the U.S. soldiers sent to fight the Vietnam War became heroin addicts. It was readily available and numbed the pain of fighting a war that seemed pointless to many. When the Americans pulled out and went home, many of the newly addicted soldiers found that the rapid and profound change in their environment enabled them to simply stop using heroin with no serious withdrawal sickness or crisis. Their addictive relationship with the drug was turned on its head by the move back home. So it is with trainee mystics: as soon as we are able to turn homewards, our individual attachments cease to have such a hold over us.

As the mystics tell us, we can stop the mind from giving any energy to the story of our addiction, yearning for the stuff of space and time. We discover we can “just say no.” We can turn inwards. There is a cure.

The materials we use in our vain attempts to build solid selves are the attachments to which we fasten our worldly existence, the stuff we defend with anger when it is criticized. Because these constituents are the very bricks and mortar we use as we try to build our ‘selves’, we come to regard them as our very lives. We cling to them just as a drowning man clings to a life raft or an addict to his stash.

An addict is very like a slave – his actions are completely determined by his dependency as are the actions of a slave by his owner. The mystics tell us that we are spoken for, slaves of our senses; but how can we be slaves of such intangible phenomena, the senses? How can I be a slave of my sense of touch, for instance, or of my sight, or hearing?

Because it is our senses that create the duality in which our slavery sings the blues. The duality says there is “me” on the one hand, and the experience of the world in which I live, on the other. Everything that is not “me” is a great and terrible sea of what happens. An addict believes he can only stay afloat on that sea when he has his stuff; otherwise he will drown.

Baba Ji tells us we can let go of all our stuff simply by discovering the reality within us, by realizing it. He urges us to be objective, not subjective, to discover how to avoid reacting to what happens. He wants us to find liberation from our addiction to what we perceive (through our senses) to be going on. Not only do our senses tell us what is, apparently, happening, but then our minds tell us how to interpret what we think is happening. This event is a ‘good’ thing and it makes me happy, while that is a ‘bad’ thing and it fills me with fear. On and on we go, labouring away at ‘understanding’ what our senses tell us and reacting to those conclusions. Our selves and all their turbulent illusions are entirely in the thrall of what our senses seem to tell us – we are slaves of this seeming reality.

The key word here is ‘seeming’. If we, or rather, when we experience the divine reality that is God within us, then we are free. There is no “seeming” with the reality the Master would have us experience. It is beyond space and time and it is within us.

Being the creatures of habit that we are, each of our perceptions and subsequent reactions makes us more likely to perceive the world in the way we did the last time we were in a similar situation.

Character – how we respond to what we think is real – is habit. Self – the driver of our time-travel limousines – is memory. We remember, however dimly, how we became what we are. The more depressed or frightened we are, the more we see things to depress or frighten us, making us even more depressed or frightened. We get into the habit: we become convinced that the world is the way our personalities perceive it to be. We cling, like seaweed to a rock, to these defining perceptions.

I am what I have, what I own, and what I remember. If I lose what I have, who or what then am I? We are always in search of something to give us the impression we exist. This is at the root of why the Masters urge us to meditate, to become one with the Shabd, so that we can die to live. When we lose everything, are we nothing, or are we one with God and thus everything? The wonder of this mystical process is that by so dying, and only by this death, are we able to live in a way that makes our previous lives seem like death. We die to live so that we may truly live; not just existing, waiting to die, fearful that the story we have been spinning will simply stop.

As long as we have not withdrawn our consciousness in our meditation by completely letting go of everything we thought or imagined or hoped was us, we will be spoken for – addicted to those possessions, fantasies, fears, angers and lusts. The way to kick the habit of our selves is to turn our attention to the core of love, the Shabd, to substitute it for the shadow of the self. Our master-doctor gives us the addiction treatment that brings about this recovery. It is remembering to be here, in the centre and the practice of looking at and listening to what is here. This treatment is called simran, dhyan and bhajan.

Find the Positive! - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Find the Positive!

There is no doubt that these past months of Covid-19 have shaken us up, changed our lives, and given us a global wake-up call.

We have been, and still are, locked in the throes of an epic battle with a malevolent virus. And for many of us it has been an exceptionally difficult period of time. Everyone has been affected in some way. No one invites nor welcomes calamity into their lives, but when it arrives unbidden they must deal with it in the best way they can. We can either dwell on the negative and drag ourselves down, or find the positive and pull ourselves up.

People have taken various approaches when considering these two options. For some, the effects of this pandemic have offered an unsolicited opportunity to take stock of their lives. For many, it has been a time of forced seclusion, limiting their engagement with the tumultuous world around them. There are those who have used this time to reflect and be unusually thoughtful and deliberate about how they spend their time and energy. They have used this interval to restructure their daily lives around those things which are most important. As a result, they are casting off those things which were bad habits or simply did not add sufficient value to their lives, and they are thoughtfully replacing them with activities that enhance their lives and help them stay focused on their spiritual path. Some have asked themselves the all-important question: Am I making the best use of this precious life the Lord has granted me?

When we look at our family, friends, and the people around us, we see a myriad of experiences and emotions resulting from our forced isolation. But one thing we all have in common is that our lives are different now.

Great Master writes:

This world is the plane of struggle. There has never been peace here, nor will there be. Problems of today give place to problems of tomorrow. In a place where mind and matter are active, there can never be peace… The soul must seek other planes to find peace. To find peace is the business of the individual. Everybody has to seek it within himself.¹

Ultimately this is the only lasting solution to our current difficulties – or to any difficulty. And the Master is only interested in a true and lasting solution.

Again, from Great Master:

I am well aware that you have struggles. You have some things within yourself to overcome and some things outside of yourself which must be surmounted. But you can do it. If you have full confidence in the inner Master, he will always help you. And often when you find the difficulties greatest and the hour darkest, the light will appear and you will see that you are free. Let nothing discourage you.²

There is no question that it has been a difficult time for many of us. But it is also true that we are extremely fortunate. Our lives are held steadfast to the solid anchor of Sant Mat. We may get tossed and buffeted by the winds and waves of life, but our anchor is deep and strong, and keeps us secured through turbulent times.

It would be irrational to think that we know what the future holds, or to think that once this Corona virus becomes manageable, there will be no more trials or calamities for us to deal with. These have always been a part of this plane of existence. As Hazur Maharaj Ji tells us:

The world is no more than a bubble that may burst at any minute. … We are hardly rid of one fetter when a tighter one is fastened onto us. … The realization of the deception of this drama comes only when we wake up – at the time of our death. The moment death closes upon us, everything of this world – friends and relations, wealth and possessions, name and fame, caste and creed – is left behind. Only then do we realize that our time has just been wasted in illusion, in trying to make ours that which can never become ours.³

Many, many times, Master has told us that we cannot change the course of events dictated by our destiny. But we can change our attitude in facing these events of life.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is attributed as saying:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.⁴

The serenity, courage, and wisdom he is asking for comes through meditation.

The Masters tell us that to develop a true sense of happiness, contentment and peace of mind we must adjust to these events and the daily challenges of life.

We are not helpless in this present situation. Sant Mat is a path of action, a path steeped through and through with positivity. We need to draw up our courage, change the things we can, and redouble our efforts to follow the guidance of the Guru. In this way we can lift ourselves up during this period of widespread distress. We have to adapt and change to suit our present circumstances and surroundings, but we can do it, and we can move forward. We can be a source of strength, stability and optimism to others. The things we cannot change, the things beyond our control, we have to let go. Being obsessed by them is self-defeating.

Many, if not most aspects of our daily lives, were swiftly turned upside down by this pandemic. Many things about the world changed seemingly overnight, some of them forever. But some things did not change, not at all. Not one iota. The basic tenets and practice of Sant Mat remain absolutely constant!

No matter what the current state of the world is the Masters give us the same guidance:

Do your meditation and lead a Sant Mat way of life.

When we stay true to the practice and principles of Sant Mat, we can remain balanced and at peace with ourselves, whatever the current state of the world may be.

Look at how hard Baba Ji is striving to support and encourage us as we isolate ourselves taking refuge from this calamity: his travels, the weekly questions and answers, Zoom calls, and so much more. He has adapted to the use of new media to reach us but his message is the same.

Recently we have heard him talk a lot about doing our duty, fulfilling our responsibilities, and being a good human being. Many of our family, friends and acquaintances have truly struggled during this pandemic. In order to lift them up, some people have found deep reservoirs of empathy, self-sacrifice and hidden strengths and abilities that they didn’t even know existed within themselves. Some have given of themselves on a level previously unimagined by them. Look at the healthcare professionals and volunteers. What a shining example of being a good human being! No matter what our circumstances, we all have an opportunity to be a kinder, gentler, and more compassionate version of ourselves. We all have the opportunity to be a comfort to others, and to assist them in whatever way we can. But in order to do that we must be strong ourselves and able to keep our balance. We can’t give what we don’t have.

Hazur Maharaj Ji writes about serving others:

If we can do anything to help anybody, we should. That is our duty. We are meant to help each other. Humans are meant to help humans – who else will help? Birds and lions will not come to help you! You have to help each other. We should be a source of strength to each other, but we should not be involved with the suffering of another person to the extent that we start suffering ourselves – that we ourselves become miserable. We must be strong enough not to be affected. We have to be very helpful, kind and compassionate to them, and help them with their problems.⁵

Living the Sant Mat way of life provides that strength and that unshakeable foundation. No matter what we as individuals or as global citizens are going through, the essential truths remain constant. The guiding principles of Sant Mat have not changed; they have only been brought more sharply into focus.

When immersed in the world of maya, and when dominated by the negative mind, we will never find the peace we are searching for. It is only when we turn our gaze inward that we will find this peace that transcends anything we could ever imagine or hope for.

There is nothing equal to this way, and it gives more real joy and satisfaction than all else in the world. But to get that you have to go inside. It cannot be realized outside.⁶

Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, # 148
Spiritual Gems, # 152
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, pp.10–12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr
Legacy of Love, p. 372
Spiritual Gems, # 152

Our Positive Essential Nature - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Our Positive Essential Nature

The spiritual path is positive in its very essence. Our common essence as human beings is goodness. Maharaj Charan Singh says: “Love is always there. Potentially every soul is God... So love is always there in every soul.”¹ He explains that everyone is the Lord and when we know our reality, “the soul shines and becomes pure, we become the Father, we become the Lord.”² As spiritual beings, we are positive at the core of our being – this is our intrinsic nature. The love that is within our soul is the most positive force in the universe.

The teachings of all mystics in every religion explain that we have this common essence, that it is within everything, and that it is part of the divine law of the universe. “The Golden Verses,” from the tradition of Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE, tells us:

When you have mastered these teachings,
you will know the common essence of immortal gods
and mortal humans; you will know how this essence
runs through all things, how it rules all; you will recognize,
as divine law demands, the same nature in all.³

The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard calls this fundamental essence, this treasure within us, the buddhahood. He reflects:

One reason why this life is so precious is that all beings have within them what is called ‘tathagatagarbha’ in Sanskrit, the essence of, or potential for, buddhahood, which is the fundamental nature of all conscious beings. That nature, temporarily obscured by confusion and disturbing emotions, is like a treasure buried within us. The purpose of practicing the Buddhist path, or ‘Dharma,’ is to remove those obscurations. We are not trying to manufacture the state of buddhahood but simply to reveal what is already there...The qualities acquired on the way to enlightenment are not fabricated. They reflect the gradual reactivation of our nature, like the brilliance of a jewel covered in mud that is revealed gradually as the dirt is removed.⁴

We are like a jewel that is embedded in mud, but we are not the mud itself. As we do our spiritual practice, the mud gets cleaned off and the brightness of the jewel shines through. The jewel has always been there, but it was hidden under the mud. Ricard quotes the Buddhist master Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye who says:

Getting butter from milk is only possible because milk already contains cream. No one ever made butter by churning water...Likewise, the quest for perfect enlightenment only makes sense because buddha-nature is already present in every being. Without that nature, all efforts would be futile.⁵

Maharaj Charan Singh also explains that everything is already within us, that we are already filled with light and sound. The purpose of our spiritual practice is to awaken our consciousness so that we can perceive who we really are. He says:

You see, nothing is put within us at the time of initiation which is not already there. Everything is there; we are just brought in touch with that sound. The soul is within, the sound is within…There is nothing but light, but unless we are within that realm from where we can see the light, we see only darkness. So everything is already here. We just have to come here to see that light.⁶

The positive qualities of our nature are always present, but they are latent until we recognize them, become familiar with them, and activate them through what Baba Ji calls the meditative process. Soami Ji explains that our truth, our real essence is love, in the same way that the Master’s true essence is also love.

... the true Master is the real form of love.
In fact, your own real form is also love,
so you may accept all beings to be of the same essence.⁷

We come in contact with our real form, our real self, as we cultivate awareness of it. We have to make time to develop this awareness of our deep and positive inner being. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a contemporary Buddhist monk, says:

Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. The only problem is that we get so caught up in the ups and downs of life that we don’t take the time to pause and notice what we already have. Don’t forget to make space in your life to recognize the richness of your basic nature, to see the purity of your being and let its innate qualities of love, compassion and wisdom naturally emerge. Nurture this recognition as you would a small seedling. Allow it to grow and flourish.⁸

When we get caught up in the ups and downs of life, it is like living in a place that is always cloudy. We think the gray clouds are the sky and we don’t realize that there is a luminous blue sky behind the clouds. But then one day the clouds part and we are able to see the bright blue sky and the brilliant shining sun. This is like the awakening we experience on the spiritual path. Our lives can sometimes seem gray like the clouds and we get mired down in our difficulties, but behind the clouds is the infinite blue sky of the Shabd within us that, as Baba Ji says, is ringing twenty-four hours a day. This blue sky, this Shabd, is our real substance.

Maharaj Charan Singh describes this process as coming to an understanding that we are not the dirt we are mired down in. We discover that the dirt is something different and we realize our origin in the sky.

You see, there is water in the clouds in the sky, but when it rains the water comes onto the ground. It merges into the dirt. It stagnates; it gives off a foul smell. It has forgotten its identity. It is thinking itself part and parcel of this dirt. But when a hot wind touches that water, it evaporates. Then it realizes: The dirt is something different from me; unnecessarily I was thinking of myself as part and parcel of the dirt. It realizes its origin – it is a cloud in the sky. It goes back and merges into the sky, the clouds. That is the condition of everybody’s soul.⁹

This happens through the meditative process as we begin to realize our true identity. We become aware that we are one with the Lord, and we lose the illusory identity of a separate self. The mud of a separate identity is washed away and we come to an understanding that we are part of the Lord. Maharaj Charan Singh explains:

The Lord is one. When we merge back into him, we become the Lord. We become a part of him. A drop has its own identity when it is in the mud. When it leaves the ground by means of evaporation, it still has its own identity, separate from the ground and separate from the cloud. But when it merges back into the cloud it becomes the cloud.¹⁰

When we expand our horizons through meditation, we are able to see past our limited separate identity. Rumi says we go beyond ourselves and even beyond the sky to a place of ancient light.

When you go just a little beyond yourself,
past these skies, you will see
the king of truth and meaning –
and his banners and pavilions
made of ancient light.¹¹

This ancient light is the connection between the soul and the Lord. Maharaj Charan Singh, using this metaphor of ancient light, explains that we are the rays of the sun and are not really separate from the Lord, we are of the same essence.

There is no difference between the rays and the sun. The rays come from the sun and merge back into the sun. So the soul comes from God and merges back into the same God. Potentially every soul is God, because its origin is the Creator...The ray has its root in the sun. It comes from the sun and merges back into the sun.¹²

He says this light is within us, and it doesn’t come from outside of us. We want to develop the level of consciousness through our meditative process in which we have direct perception of this light.

The light, of course, is there, and it does not come from anywhere outside; but we have to develop that consciousness to open that eye which sees that light...We are all rays of the same light and we come from that light and we have got to go back to merge into that same light.¹³

The rays are not separate from the sun, the drops are not separate from the ocean, and we are not separate from the Lord. The illusion is our sense of separation. We aren’t separate and never have been. Our only problem is our lack of awareness of who we actually are. Maharaj Charan Singh says, “Unless we know who we are, how can we know who God is?”¹⁴ The meditative process helps us to know our real selves, and then to know God. We are all potentially God, but we have to realize our potential.

Potentially every soul is God, but we have to realize that potentiality and become God, to be one with the Father.¹⁵

Unless we realize our potential, we are living in the realm of illusion, where we believe that the separation is real. Soami Ji describes this realization as letting go of the parts of ourselves that are unaware of our divine origin, the parts that are fragmented and are not connected to the oneness of our common positive essential nature.

This world, this alien land,
is a game of body, mind and senses.
Discard these coverings,
these extraneous fragments of your Self.¹⁶

He explains that our real self is our soul, the infinitely positive aspect of our internal being. He pleads with us to tune into it so that we know who we really are. And knowing who we really are is the essence of the path. It is knowing God.

Since your own real form is soul,
you should follow his trail of Shabd.
The Master’s form is in your eyes –
if only you would open your inner vision!
The Master’s Shabd resounds in your ears –
if only you could hear him calling from the heavens!
This is the essence of the path, says Radha Soami.¹⁷

The positive Creative Power is our common essence, the substance of all life. The mystics come into this world to awaken us to this because we have forgotten our true identity. If only we would open our inner vision, if only we would hear the call from the infinite, boundless blue sky of ancient light. If only we would know the positive nature that is our real self so that we can truly know God.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 265
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 232
Translation by Dr. D. Markus based on H.C. Thom, The Pythagorean Golden Verses with Introduction and Commentary. Leiden: Brill 1995, p. 183
Matthieu Ricard, On the Path to Enlightenment, p. 9
On the Path to Enlightenment, pp. 11–12
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q # 20
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 103
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey through the Bardo of Living and Dying, pp. 252–253.
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 260
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 234
Farida Maleki, tr. Jalal al-Din Rumi (Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, Selections), p. 21
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 227
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 266
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 261
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 227
Soami Ji, Sar Bachan Poetry, p. 129
Sar Bachan, p. 21

Keep Paddling - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Keep Paddling

When we find ourselves in turbulent and troubled times we often feel lost. Our friends and family, whom we feel connected to, may feel distant and separated. We want to find help but we don’t know where to look.

Hazur Maharaj Ji sometimes compared us to logs floating down a river. The current brings us in contact with each other for a while; then it pulls us apart. He reminds us:

If we look at our own lives we see that some family members have already left us and passed on, while we ourselves are preparing to leave others behind. Anyone who has watched pieces of wood floating down a river will have noticed how one current brings them all together, and then another disperses them. It is the same with worldly relationships.

Imagine the currents in a river. The movement of one brings several pieces of wood together, while the movement of another disperses them. Similarly, a wave of karma arises, and within moments all our relationships are established: brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends, and acquaintances. Another wave of karma comes and they all scatter, all in their own particular directions.¹

Hazur would often quote Guru Nanak Sahib:

Mother, father are transient relationships,
an affliction of the body;
afflicted is the entire family.²

In the course of our own life, we might feel that we are in a river. Some days it flows smoothly, tranquil and serene. Other days it’s more like a run of whitewater rapids, smashing into rocks and tumbling through canyons. We try our best to stay afloat, but we feel we can barely keep our head above water.

There are some adventurous folks who like to ride in wild rivers for fun, floating in inflated rafts, paddling by hand, under the direction of a guide. They lead people down the rivers, through churning ‘rapids’ as well as smooth, pond-like flows. Those folks do it for the adventure, even though there are risks involved. They ride in the boat, and each boat has a guide who steers the boat and gives direction to the riders.

The guide sits at the back of the boat and calls out directions to the riders, “Right side forward! Back paddle!” Each rider has a paddle, to pull the boat through still parts of the river and to steer and control the boat in shifting waters.

What’s most important for the riders is to listen to the guide and follow the directions he gives. This can keep the boat and the riders both safe and moving toward their goal. As we make our way through our lives on this path we may have a similar experience, and it may be helpful to know what the river guides have to say. Their directions are simple:

First – Stay in the boat.
When we’re on the river in a turbulent stretch, our boat may be bouncing around from one side of the river to the other, from still water to whirlpools, and we don’t know what to do. We may start thinking we can do better if we just jump out of the boat and start swimming. The boat feels so limiting, and we’re sure we can do better on our own.

Similarly, when turbulent times erupt in our own lives, we may feel that the way of life that the master has given us is too restrictive. We want more freedom and flexibility. The ‘four walls of his commandments’ may seem like the walls of a jail cell rather than a fortress of protection.

On the river, when the boat is tossing and turning, the guide calls out directions for our safety: “Hold on! Keep your arms and legs inside! Stay in the boat!”

On our personal river journey, when things are going wild all around us and we can’t seem to make sense of it all, it is tempting to just jump out. We may feel that this way of life is just impractical or too difficult. Keeping to the diet, monitoring our conduct, and our regular daily practice that we have pledged to follow may feel too restrictive, and we just want out.

Here it is most important to remember the first instruction of the guide: Stay in the boat. We may think we might do better in the water on our own, but the guide has seen the river and the troubles ahead. If we’re in the water on our own, there is nothing to protect us from the rocks and tree branches that line the river and can pull us under the current. In the boat, we have a structure that can protect us. The master gives us a way of life that protects us from the dangers of the wild river we find ourselves in.

Second – Keep the boat pointing in the right direction.
The currents of the river can turn the boat from side to side and even spin it around. The guide is experienced here and gives direction for keeping the boat pointed in the best direction. He may call out, “Right side forward! Left side back!” to keep the boat in the moving current of the river.

Similarly, the master advises us to keep our eye on our goal and the main purpose of life and to keep things in perspective. Here it is useful to attend satsang, read the books, and keep good company. We want to keep our mind pointed in a good direction and at least to know the right direction to be able to make good choices.

Third – Keep paddling.
We are in the boat, and we are keeping our goal in view, so now it’s up to us to take action. We need to keep paddling, to maintain our daily meditation practice. The practice is just that – a thing we do every day to keep the boat steady. The river is always flowing and we don’t know when or where the turbulence may come. We need to keep our paddle in the water, to build the good feeling of regular daily meditation. And never miss a day.

Then, as we go on in life, dealing with the ups and downs by following this guidance, we may realize that these instructions also apply when we sit for meditation:

Stay in the boat – Here the boat is the eye center, where we want to maintain our focus.

Keep the boat pointing in the right direction – Here the right direction is upward and inward. We want to keep our attention there and keep bringing it back when it goes out.

Keep paddling – Simran, repetition, is the one action that we can take that always keeps us moving toward our spiritual goal.

Spiritual Discourses, Vol. 2, p. 272
Adi Granth, M1, p. 1153

Being Still Over 3,000 Years - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Being Still Over 3,000 Years

There is a line from Psalm 46 in the Bible that Baba Ji often quotes:

Be still and know that I am God.¹

This statement speaks from a knowledge that we human beings are always in motion – that our bodies and minds are constantly moving, changing and shifting, while God is the still center around which everything turns.

Mystics have always taught that human beings are part-angel and part-animal. We have the capability of rising to the highest spiritual level – even to reuniting with God – or falling lower than animals. Our soul is the angelic part, divine in nature and pulled always in the direction of God. Our lower mind is the diabolical portion, running out into the world, captivated by the senses, hungry for experience, anxious to feel and see and taste as much as it can, yet never satisfied, ceaselessly generating new desires. And it continues creating problems so it can ponder over them and try to solve them. Lusting, craving, scheming and analyzing, it never stops.

And because it never stops, it becomes an almost insurmountable barrier that separates us from the divine world that surrounds us and permeates us. We can’t see or know that divine world because our mental activity and our ego hide it.

This is nothing new. For thousands and thousands of years, men and women have hungered to know God but have been blocked by their minds. And for thousands and thousands of years, mystics – those who have achieved first-hand knowledge of God – have taught seekers how to overcome the mind.

Let’s look at four different sources spanning 3,000 years which have described the same technique for slowing and eventually stilling the mind. We’ll start with the most recent and work backwards.

Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh instructed his disciples to do simran, or repetition, in order to control the mind, which roams ceaselessly. He is quoted in The Path:

The seat of the soul and the mind in our body lies hidden behind and between our two eyes, at a point sometimes called the third eye or single eye…. Everybody’s attention descends from this point and spreads out into the world through the nine portals of the body.

Hazur quoted Guru Ram Das:

Every minute the mind wanders, lost in delusion;
It never settles down in the til, its home…²

Hazur then continued:

Even if we were to sit in a dark room and lock the door, our mind would not stay locked up in the room; it would wander away into the whole world. The mind’s constant habit of thinking of worldly affairs, people and things is called simran (repetition) by the Masters. Everybody has this natural habit.³

Later, Hazur concluded:

The Supreme Lord is permanent and eternal. He is birthless and deathless. Those who remember him and always think of him will become immortal like him. They will end the cycle of births and deaths. We should therefore focus our attention behind the eyes by simran, as taught to us by a Master.⁴

So, this simran consists of the disciple repeating the five names the Master has bestowed at initiation, while holding the attention at the eye center.

In Die to Live, Hazur says the following about maintaining our focus and concentration:

Your mind should merge into the words. Your mind should become part and parcel of that simran, so that the words you repeat are not different from your mind. Then only can concentration come. If you are repeating those words, and your mind is thinking about all the problems and activities of the world, concentration will not be there. It must merge along with the words. You should be in those words, not somewhere away from them.⁵

The Masters teach that once we succeed in concentrating our attention at the eye center through simran, we will come in contact with the inner sound or Shabd. And that Shabd is the link that connects us to the Father, purifies us, and leads us back to our divine origin.

Let’s jump back 800 years to the Islamic world in the Middle East. In The Mystics of Islam, Reynold Nicholson, one of the great translators of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic, describes the practice of “recollection or remembering.” First, he makes clear that the seeker must have a Master, because “one who attempts to traverse the ‘Path’ without assistance…is likened to a tree that without a gardener’s care brings forth none or bitter fruit.’⁶

Then he writes:

Sufis made a practice of repeating the name of God or some religious formula, ... accompanying the [repetition] with an intense concentration of every faculty upon the single word or phrase...

This closely parallels what Hazur wrote:

Your mind should merge into the words and you should be in those words, not somewhere away from them.⁷

Now let’s jump back another five hundred years, to shortly after the time of Christ. A wonderful poem was composed then describing the descent of the soul from its home with the Father, down into the physical world and the prison of the body, and then its release from bondage and return to the Father’s house. It’s presented, with very interesting commentary, in a book called The Robe of Glory. Let’s look at how it describes the mind and the method for controlling it.

The poet says he was told by his father, the Lord, to go down into the physical world to find and bring back the one pearl (true spiritual knowledge). And the pearl is guarded by the “loud-breathing serpent” (the mind). What a description of the mind! He captures so many of the characteristics of the mind:

serpent – powerful, dangerous, evil, full of guile and trickery;
loud-breathing – loud and bothersome, constantly throwing up
thoughts and cluttering our heads

The poet falls under the sway of the mind and forgets who he is and where he is from. Isn’t that our condition most of the time? But the Father sends down a son to rescue him. (Again, we need a living Master!) And the Master initiates him and teaches him how to subdue the mind (the loud-breathing serpent). Here’s how the poet says he did it:

I began to charm him, the terrible loud-breathing serpent. I hushed him to sleep and lulled him to slumber by naming the name of my Father upon him, and the name of our next in rank and of my Mother, the Queen of the East.⁸

He names “the Name of his Father upon him.” By repeating the Lord’s Name, he lulls the mind to sleep. That is, he stills it. He stops its running out into the world and eliminates its thoughts and cravings and scheming. What the actual words of the simran are doesn’t matter. It only matters that the Master prescribes them and that the disciple repeats them faithfully, with great concentration.

Next, we’ll jump back many centuries further, to the Jewish culture in the Holy Land a thousand years before Christ. There is a story in the Hebrew Bible (I Samuel) that is very famous in the West, and is often used to teach young people about courage. It concerns a young Israelite named David and a giant named Goliath from the opposing Philistine army. On its face, the story seems to be about courage triumphing over supposedly impossible odds. But it also seems to contain another description of the power of simran over the mind. David is, as the Bible says, just a young man “with pink cheeks.” So, let’s consider him the disciple – innocent and relatively powerless. Goliath, on the other hand, is described as nine feet, nine inches tall (9’9”), wearing a coat of mail, with armor on his back and legs. And he carries an enormous spear. Mystics use powerful imagery when they describe the mind: a rogue elephant, a wild horse, a loud-breathing serpent. Here, the mind is depicted as an absolute giant, covered in armor and armed with a great spear. What can young, pink-cheeked David do against it? No more than we can do against our own minds, unless we have a special weapon.

The Bible says, that David “chose … five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had.”⁹ And then David takes his sling and goes out to meet Goliath. And he throws one of the stones with his sling, strikes Goliath in the forehead, and kills him. Now, where is it that we have to confront the mind and defeat it? At the eye center, in the middle of our forehead. And then David takes Goliath’s sword and cuts off his head -- a symbol of triumphing over the ego. So it’s a beautiful allegory showing that despite the seemingly impossible odds, we will eventually still the mind through our simran, as we direct the names, those five smooth stones, in a continuous flow against the mind (though probably not with the first stone we throw!).

What the masters can say clearly and directly today, they could not in former times, as they were often put to death by powerful religious leaders if they deviated from the dogma of the time. So they often would give their teachings in parables and stories. Despite the variations in approach, we can see that there is a great similarity in these four accounts, though they come from many different times and places.

What are we to make of these four different accounts spanning 3,000 years? The yearning to know God is inherent in human beings. That pull from the Lord is there in all of us, to greater or lesser degrees. True spiritual masters are always present, sent by the Father to find their particular souls and take them back to the Father. And the method they teach is unchanged over thousands of years.

Let’s look next at another aspect of being still that has already been alluded to. That Shabd, Nam, or Word, also known as the voice of God, sound current or audible life stream, is calling to us day and night from within us. It resounds within every being, giving it life and form. It flows from God down through the creation, holding it all together.

We must be still (achieved through simran) so we can begin to hear that voice, that Shabd, that Nam. That’s when our real spiritual journey begins, the masters tell us. They say that we follow the Shabd back to our home, being carried along on its current. We have to listen to it, tune ourselves to it, merge in it, be purified and transformed by it.

Simran stills the mind enough so that we can contact the Shabd, but it’s the power of that inner sound that really quiets the mind, pulling it away from its desires and attachments, then allowing the soul to separate from the mind and ascend beyond the physical and mental regions to the truly spiritual realms.

Let’s look at the same or similar sources that we read from earlier, to see what they say about the Sound Current.

Starting with Great Master:

When you have entered the first region, you will get the full benefit of the Sound Current. It will come to you clear and sweet, and its music will fill you with joy, and that of itself will enable you to overcome all your remaining difficulties and weaknesses. That is the one thing that makes you strong against all foes and makes your victory absolutely certain. With the melodious sounds ringing in your ears, your success is absolutely certain.¹⁰

The nineteenth-century mystic Tulsi Sahib said:

Listen, O friend, to the thunderous roar of Shabd,
Which reverberates throughout the firmament.
Water, which becomes turbid by relishing earth,
gets cleansed of its impurities when filtered.
Waves of pure bliss emanate from the heart,
when the dross that covers it is removed.

So, he’s saying – be still and listen to this mighty sound within, which will clean and purify you! Then he paints a picture of what the process of concentration might look like. Imagine an archer, standing with their bow and arrow, facing their target. He says:

Hold the arrow, [your attention],
be still, [calm the mind],
stretch the bow taut, [stronger concentration still].
Fix your aim sharp at the target, [focus at the eye center],
pierce the firmament. [Let the arrow, our concentration, fly, to pierce the target].

Then Tulsi continues:

The invisible world is contained within the human eye,
So say and describe all men of inner knowledge. …
The soul in Sunn will hear resounding peals of Sound,
She will uncover and know the essence of Shabd.
They alone, O Tulsi, will know that perfect state,
Who have seen and experienced it themselves.¹¹

Five hundred years earlier, Shams-i-Tabriz, Rumi’s spiritual companion, spoke of the Sound Current in rapturous terms:

Be silent and listen to the five sounds from Heaven,
The Heaven which is beyond all senses and directions.
Every moment of life this wondrous Sound
Reaches down from the courts of Heaven.
Fortunate above all the children of men
Is he who hears its enchanting melodies.¹²

When we return to the early Christian era and The Robe of Glory, we see again that the poet beautifully describes deep mystical truths in his parable. The poet says he had been sent down into the creation, had lost his way, and forgotten his Home. We saw earlier that he had learned from the master to do simran and still the mind. But the Lord also sends down a special power (that Shabd or Word) to help him return home. The poet likens the Word to a letter:

...And my letter was a letter which the King sealed with his right hand. …It flew in the likeness of an eagle, the king of all the birds; It flew and alighted beside me, and became all speech. At its voice and the sound of its rustling, I started and arose from my sleep. ...I remembered I was a son of kings, and my free soul longed for its natural state...¹³

Here we see that it comes from the hand of the King himself, just as Shabd has its origin in God. It “becomes all speech,” that is, it is sound and it carries a message, a special knowledge, just as the Shabd does. It awakens us from our sleep of ignorance of the Lord and we remember who we are and where we came from, and we long to return there.

He continues:

And my letter, my awakener, I found before me on the road,
And as with its voice it had awakened me,
So too with its light, it was leading me,
Shining before me in a garment of radiance,
Glistening like royal silk.
And with its voice and its guidance,
It also encouraged me to speed,
And with his love was drawing me on.¹⁴

Shabd is perceived within as light as well as sound. And so we see that this poem describes the Shabd as the other sources did: drawing the disciple back to his home, purifying him, guiding him, transforming him.

Finally, returning to Psalm 46, the source of our theme (“Be still and know that I am God”), we find a beautiful line that seems to describe that inner power, that Shabd or Sound Current:

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God…

The Shabd is often referred to as a river or stream, or audible life stream, and masters often call the human body the temple of the living god. So the author of this line seems to be saying: ‘There is a divine river within this human body, within this temple of God, that will bring great joy to us.’ This is just as Great Master had said about Shabd, “its music will fill you with joy.”¹⁵

As interesting as it is to see these common patterns that run through mystic literature, we should be extremely grateful that we have been blessed to come in touch with a master who gives us the understanding to recognize those patterns and know what they mean. There is an enormous volume of literature generated over the years that describes seekers’ spiritual experiences, the techniques they used, and so forth. Some writings are based on the teachings of real mystics, while others are not. The inner path is long, complex, and filled with traps and snares set by the mind. A person who comes in touch with a true living master who knows the Path from beginning to end, and can explain it to us and guide us along it, is extremely, marvelously blessed.

In conclusion, we began with the line from the Bible that said:

Be still, and know that I am God.

Simran and Shabd are our path to that inner stillness.

Huzur Maharaj Ji discusses this connection:

Concentration is stilling your mind at the eye centre. The real concentration is to be here at the eye center because this is the seat of the soul and mind knotted together. From here our consciousness spreads into the world through the nine apertures. To withdraw the attention to the eye centre, to still the mind, that is concentration. Real concentration can only be when you are here at the third eye. Be still, still your mind and be with God.¹⁶

Bible, Psalm 46
AG, p. 1179; quoted in Maharaj Charan Singh, The Path, p. 56
Ibid, p. 57
Ibid, p. 58
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Q # 149
Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, p. 33
Ibid, p. 45
John Davidson, The Robe of Glory, p. 16
Bible, I Samuel, 17:40–50
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, ltr. 152
Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras, p. 76
Julian Johnson, The Path of the Masters, p. 501
Davidson, The Robe of Glory, p. 16
Ibid, p. 17
Bible, Psalm 46
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q # 222

Inner Silence - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Inner Silence

The 19th century saint Tulsi Sahib commented:

In this world, says Tulsi, there are but five gems:
company of the saints, refuge in the Satguru,
compassion, humility, and benevolence.¹

Here Tulsi Sahib is describing the qualities of a perfect disciple, a saint. And recently, Baba Ji described the one who completely submits himself to his own Master as one who becomes a Master, that is, a fully God-realized soul, whether he is a teaching and initiating saint, or not. Every God-realized soul does his work in the spirit and service of his own Master. In Hazur Maharaj Ji’s desk diary, written in Urdu on the last day in his office, he had written, “In the service of my Guru, the perfect Master, Hazur Baba Sawan Singh Ji.”²

The relationship of love between Master and disciple becomes so intense that the disciple loses his own identity and becomes another being, merging completely into the Shabd. To become a ‘guru’ – literally ‘a doorway into light’ – one who gives initiation, teaching, divine light, and understanding, depends on the Lord’s hukam. He is the one who can take that responsibility. It is unlikely that we will become teaching saints, but our love will become so intense, ultimately, that with patience and repeated practice, we will merge into the Shabd, the creative power of God manifesting as melodious light, which is of itself conscious, blissful, intensely loving, and purposeful. It is life itself. We talk about life and death, but the situation here is one of birth and death. Life – the Shabd – goes on forever. Our essence is immortal. Baba Ji has stated that everyone potentially can hear the Shabd whether initiated or not. But until we meet a teacher who can explain to us what it is, we might understand Sound in our ears or emanating from our forehead as a form of tinnitus or migraine or just ignore it. If we ignore it, to paraphrase Baba Ji, “it just moves on…”

The Shabd cannot be accessed by the physical senses or be spoken. It is very subtle, and in order to have access to it, we have to become subtle ourselves.

The 17th century philosopher-mystic Baruch Spinoza taught and wrote that everything is in God. We are all in the Oneness of God. He disputed Descartes, who said, “I think therefore I am” – a statement that embodied the fracturing of the self into body, mind, and spirit. Time, thought, emotion, nature, reasoning – all are in God. There is nothing that is not the Lord. It is we who dissect and analyze. Spinoza’s realization chimes in with Guru Nanak Sahib:

From Shabd is the earth, from Shabd is the sky,
from Shabd emanateth all light.
The whole creation resteth on Shabd
and this Shabd, O Nanak, abideth in us all.³

We can’t see it, can’t hear it, can’t touch it through the senses. Only the power of the Lord himself can connect us to it. The Lord draws us back to himself through incarnating as a human being. Maharaj Ji used to refer to saints as waves rising from the ocean of God – which we already are in – but because our attention is turned out into the world, we don’t realize that we are spiritual beings. We watch waves roll into the shore, and they come in one after the other and merge together, both on the shore and out at sea. This is a visual metaphor of the saints’ essence that we can understand. We are exposed to the light and love of the Lord through the presence and teachings of these magnetic God-realized souls, the saints, the true Masters and, ultimately, to the reality of Shabd through meditation.

We are very willing to believe in the mind but not in the soul. The saints teach that mind is a powerful entity which is very busy – constructing, sustaining and destroying; measuring and analyzing; like a great computer, drawing its power from Shabd. Hazur Maharaj Ji stated:

“The soul cannot help but love its own origin.”⁴ It is not busy, but it is knotted with the mind at the eye centre, weighed down by the centrifugal senses, the mental and physical consequences of former actions (karmas) and the mind’s desires. Yet, he said, “there is such a great load on the soul that its love is just crushed under that weight.”⁵

So we have to become subtle to permeate through all this, the sieve of karmas and desires. The four vows are about transformation from the gross to the subtle. Our strict vegetarian diet is compassionate – why let creatures die in fear and pain just to satisfy our palates, especially when mammals, in particular, gaze at us with such trust? We know that we have been in an animal form many times. The diet is also practical as it reduces further consequences that arise from taking life.

The Great Master wrote that meat-eating “hardens the heart and makes the soul dull and heavy.”⁶ In other words, it has a damaging effect, physically and mentally. The same applies to taking alcohol and mind-affecting drugs. We simply become the animals we once were through losing our discrimination. A clean, moral life means no cheating, lying, thieving. Immoral behaviour makes us more calculating than we already are. Being calculating is the opposite of our intrinsic, original Oneness, as it means we are always looking to our own advantage.

The fourth vow is that of daily, punctual regular meditation for 2½ hours. In this time of the pandemic, perhaps we can do even more meditation than usual. Baba Ji made a statement to the effect that corona has become karuna (compassionate action). Indeed, the virus has released waves of compassion in human society, as we are all in this together, and as initiates we can be more compassionate to ourselves by sitting more in meditation. Another boon of this period is that life has become physically quieter and therefore maybe mentally quieter too.

We have a habit of mistaking religious activity for spiritual activity, with external sounds – chanting, singing with musical instruments; sermons and speeches. However if we look into all the yogic traditions, silencing the body and mind are prerequisites for contacting the Lord. The Great Master is quoted in Call of the Great Master: “To stop these constantly surging waves on the surface of the mind is the function of yoga; that is, to suspend the working of the mind and to stop all thinking.”⁷

There is very little worldly activity that is not associated with sound. We can say that this is not a ‘worshipful’, contemplative world according to this account, because however we feel about this creation, whether we regard it as beautiful, sad or ugly, we can all agree that it’s certainly noisy. We all have different attitudes about what we regard as intrusive ‘noise’ as opposed to tolerable ‘sounds’– to some, noise is loud music; for others the noisy cawing of crows, barking of dogs, or loud chatter. What all the sounds of the world have in common, whether we like them or not, is that they are all external – either outside or within the body (tummy rumbles, creaking bones). They are all part of the play of this world of the mind. Living is noisy; birth and death are noisy. We oppose life with silence by talking about “dead quiet.” And “dead quiet” is exactly where we want to be – dead to the world and quiet in mind and body.

Even before birth, while we are still floating in the womb, unless we are profoundly deaf, our attention can be attracted externally. We can respond to external music and voices. And, of course we are programmed for speech right from the start. Babies can reproduce the key sounds of all the languages before they are diverted into the language of their culture. The Great Master used to say that most of our attention goes out through the eyes and ears. They are the dominant senses.

The Masters teach that the natural resting place for the attention is at the eye centre, where the mind and soul are knotted together. The Great Master stated: “The five tattwas (earth, fire, air, water, and ether), the three gunas (qualities of matter), the sense organs, mind and matter – are all inanimate.”⁸ Only our attention, our soul current, our consciousness, is alive; hence for the mind to experience anything it has to take the conscious soul with it through the nine gates of the body.

We could say that all external sounds are a reflection of that inner creative energy, Shabd. We could say that all sounds are gross manifestations or distortions of that Shabd played through matter, that all external sounds are an effect. When we are initiated by a true Master, we have the opportunity through spiritual practice to reach the ultimate cause, the source of all sound – the real Sound – Sound we would never wish to stop listening to, the voice of God, with which we can merge.

The Lord will never be found amidst the sounds of this world, even though He has been described with beautiful words and music since the beginning of creation. Even if we were to spend a whole lifetime listening to the Masters’ words in satsang, we would never find the Lord within, although a great desire to do so might be generated by those satsangs. No, we have to seek the Lord in silence! The preaching, noisy good works, heavenly singing of sacred poems and hymns, must ultimately cease, for only within a profound and deep silence will we be able to hear the voice of God.

All the Masters have taught about the type of silence we need to practice in order to turn our attention from the will and world of the mind to the eternity of the soul. We can impress upon ourselves the import of Maharaj Ji’s oft-repeated words that the soul is always yearning to go back to the Father and has no interest in this world at all – so the essential us, our true identity, has no interest in this world at all. So the only part of us left to be interested in this world is the mind – all our interests, whatever they may be – nature, science, arts, philosophy, politics, philanthropy, money, fashion – are all the mind’s interests. Whether higher or lower mind, it’s all the mind being pulled out through the nine gates of the body by the senses, dragging the soul energy with it.

Mind is restless because it’s not at home either. It wants to merge in the peace and tranquillity of that layer of subtle matter termed “universal mind.” However, it does not want to lose its energy source – the soul. The second layer of subterfuge worked by the wily mind to keep our precious attention flowing outwards is the law of karma and reincarnation. We are actually helpless to try and avoid our destiny. We can’t avoid our destiny, as Maharaj Ji used to say: “Whatever happens has already happened.”

The soul cannot realize its true identity until our karmic account is cleared. Maharaj Ji stated clearly that everybody has to account for his karmas before he can go beyond the realm of Kal. He emphasized that whether we clear our karmas by going through them, or through our meditation, or through his grace – by whatever the means – they must be accounted for and cleared. He said: “Unless all types of karmas are cleared, our soul cannot merge back into the Lord. So we have to face this destiny as the will of the Lord.”⁹

And our soul has no interest in our karmic relations or activities either. So indeed we are puppets. The only way to leave puppet-hood and the mind as puppet-master is to reverse the negative flow of attention from outward and downward to inward and upward. The Great Master gave a very positive description of this process:

When the water of a reservoir that has been leaking through a large number of holes and pipes is made to pass through a single pipe after shutting all other apertures, what a great force and velocity it acquires! In the same manner, our soul current – passing out through the eyes, ears, nose, and other apertures – has become attached to wife, sons, daughters, parents, other relatives, friends, and other objects of the material world – animate and inanimate. When all this love is concentrated singly on the Master, you can hardly imagine what power and energy it generates and what wonders it performs.¹⁰

Self-realization, God- realization! What greater wonder for our souls which have been languishing here for immeasurable periods of time to reach the yearned-for goal. To begin this process, we need to turn from the noises of the world to a mental silence within, to become one-pointed devotees of our Master. This means initially imposing both an internal and an external discipline. We can’t imagine or emote our way into devotion for the Master. There is a clear process of developing or growing our love and devotion for the Lord. The Great Master was asked, “What is true love and devotion?” He responded by quoting a poem by the fifth Sikh guru, Guru Arjan Dev:

“Whatever order the Master gives, to obey it implicitly is to love the Master.”… To love the Guru is to love God. Perfect your love for the Master. As the Master is saturated with love of God, when we love the Master, we will automatically become filled with the love of God. This is the only way to merge in the Lord. Love of the Master, so to say, is a condition precedent to God-realization.¹¹

As Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote as his last message to us, “May the love of the form culminate in the love of the formless.”¹² Guru-bhakti leads to Nam-bhakti, but it’s not a progression – it’s a realization, and we don’t lose Guru-bhakti when we achieve Nam-bhakti.

Following a spiritual path means developing an aptitude for outer and inner silence. All movement generates sound, even the motion of the atoms in our body, so part of the road to developing inner mental silence is discipline of our outer routine, of outer movement in obedience to the Master’s wishes.

Baba Jaimal Singh Ji wrote many letters to the Great Master about discipleship. And this of course is our destiny too. We can’t be overawed by the advice, thinking – well, that advice is for a Master in preparation. The principles laid out in the letters apply to us too. What we can do is try to emulate what Baba Jaimal Singh Ji was giving the Great Master – a structure, a routine, a discipline to live by, permeated with daily meditation. This is so we live with an awareness and a focus – we don’t go blindly through the day in careless fashion. In the following passage, Baba Jaimal Singh Ji lays out our responsibilities very clearly:

Do your bhajan and simran every day, my son. If you say that you are occupied with too much work, that is no excuse, because the mind, surat and nirat still continue to be unoccupied.

The mind stays intoxicated with the world like a person drunk with alcohol; all inebriated, the mind does not engage in bhajan and simran, and offers excuses that there is no free time for meditation. This is all false; it is a deception of the mind. Our breaths, our eating, sitting, walking, and sleeping are all accountable. Except for the Satguru, no one is going to get the individual liberated. Even now, try to understand! Keep your attention in the Shabd-dhun and think how much of your time has been wasted in idle talk. This time will never come again. Think! Remember your own death. We are not going to live here forever. Our days, time, hours, seconds, breaths are all numbered. Pull your mind out of worldly desires and fix the attention in the Shabd.¹³

This doesn’t mean we become strict, stand-offish, and miserable. Even the Great Master was given time to chat and socialize with others. We are social beings by nature; we like to get together and chit-chat. If we don’t want to talk much, we can always smile. There are also many things in the world we have to do; we can’t escape or run away from the ‘give and take’ of our karmas.

Note Baba Jaimal Singh Ji’s comment that if we miss out on our spiritual practice, the mind, surat (soul’s power of hearing) and nirat (soul’s power of seeing), “still continue to be unoccupied.” The faculties are “wasted,” so to say.

If we cannot access the Shabd, then we can occupy the surat by repetition of simran during the day, and whenever possible, occupy the power of nirat by picturing the Master’s form before us. We have heard Baba Ji say frequently – “bhajan simran karo”– Do your simran and bhajan.” The saints do not command us to do dhyan (contemplation on the form of the Master) because dhyan, the facility to picture the Master, is not in our hands. It is an outcome of love, which emerges gradually through doing our simran with the Master in mind. But they do say dhyan is a great help, and anything which is a great help in meditation is very welcome. Hazur Maharaj Ji elaborated on this point:

The purpose of simran is to withdraw your consciousness to the eye centre. The purpose of dhyan is to hold your attention there. It is difficult to hold the attention in a vacuum. It becomes a little easier if you contemplate on someone’s form. So that is why we advise you to contemplate on the form of the Master, because His ultimate form is the Shabd, with which we want to merge. Dhyan is only an additional help, it’s not a must. Simran is a must. Shabd is a must. Naturally, only those people who have seen the Master can do dhyan’….¹⁴

So since we do simran on the name of the Lord, we also have to contemplate on him to hold our attention in the vacuum, because we get attached to whomever we contemplate, unconsciously or consciously. We fall in love with them, so to say. We get so attached to them that we even start dreaming about them, and at the time of death their forms appear before us like on a cinema screen. And those attachments often pull us down to the level of this creation. So we have to analyze on whom we should contemplate, since we do not know the form of the Father.

Saints advise us to contemplate on the form of the Master because his real form is Shabd. As you have read in the Bible, Masters are the word made flesh, Shabd incarnate. There is nobody else in this creation worth our contemplation….¹⁵

Maharaj Ji explained further about dhyan:

Actually, real dhyan comes when we see the radiant form of the Master within, because when we see the light, then something is there to hold our attention…. Once you start seeing the light and other visions, you don’t have to try to contemplate on the form of the Master if it becomes a problem or an effort for you. Then, when you see the radiant form of the Master, automatically dhyan will be there. That is real dhyan, when we see the Master within and contemplate on his form or are absorbed in his radiance there. That real dhyan doesn’t let our attention fall down.

So dhyan is not a must in meditation, but it is a great help. Even otherwise, by keeping our attention at the eye centre or in the darkness, we are able to hold our attention there, but we have to put in a little effort. With dhyan it becomes very easy to hold the attention there. And once you see the radiant form of the Master, then automatically that form absorbs your attention and will not let your attention drop down.¹⁶

Thus the mind, our nirat and surat (seeing and hearing faculties), become inwardly inclined. It’s like exercising a muscle. If we don’t exercise our legs by walking, they become weak and useless – we need to exercise the muscles of spirituality. Our inner attention can be occupied in this way while we are working or socializing. If we are trying to do this, we will be less likely to talk ourselves into the ground or worse, indulge in idle gossip, slander or hurtful comments.

Sardar Bahadur Jagat Singh Ji observed that much physical and spiritual energy is dissipated by talking, because in talk, the mind receives so many impressions and images. Too much chatter excites these waves of the mind. We want to still and focus the mind, to stop all thinking. So Sardur Bahadur Ji advised that we should speak as little as possible and when we do speak, “do so in the most kind and gentle manner.”¹⁷

This is why we are very lucky if we have a certain amount of solitude in our lives. We never have any need to feel lonely – being on our own is an absolute blessing and a gift to enable us to focus on our spiritual practice. And even if we are living in a crowd as the Masters have to do, we can practice inner solitude by speaking as little as possible (without being unfriendly), visualizing the form of the Master, listening to the Shabd, repeating the simran. This does no harm to anyone – in fact it makes us more calm and positive. Most importantly, it is the work of chiselling away at our ego-centricity, which is the major veil between us and realizing that our Master has been within us all along.

Silence is golden. Outer silence leads to inner silence and vice versa. In order for our attention to be withdrawn from the body, the body needs to be still and silent. When our mind is stilled and silent and we contact the Shabd within, then we begin to see the Creator in the creation. Inner silence transforms our outer life.

So we want to work towards a companionable silence with the Lord, that is to say, by trying to be constantly aware of His presence, listening for Him. We don’t have to shout about it or tell anyone, but like two dear old friends we will be able to sit together without the need for speech, for questions, for demands that our desires be met. In that way we can understand Baba Ji’s frequent advice that “silence is the beginning of wisdom.”

The Radiant Form of our Master is awaiting us. The Great Master wrote:

When you reach the tisra til behind your eyes you will find the Master waiting for you there…. Then He will never leave you. He will always be with you at all times and at all places. You are sitting in your room, with all the doors closed, you remember the Master and lo! He is there before you. Ask Him any question, he will answer. He will help you out of every difficulty. In every pain and trouble he will guide you. In the mountains, hills, forests and oceans, he will guide and protect you. This is the real way to devotion, all else is maya. Only the wealth of Nam will avail us in this world and beyond.¹⁸

The Master is not promising the end to pain and troubles. He is saying his guidance is there even if we aren’t aware of the Radiant Form. And this is just the start. Ultimately we will merge in our Master – we will lose our own identity and become that other being. No need for conversation then! Soami Ji has written that in the very highest region of spirituality there is only silence and wonder.

The final silence enjoined upon us is about digesting any spiritual experiences and not discussing them – firstly, because if we do, they will be taken away from us, as such talk swells our ego and stops that inner progress, and secondly, because such experiences are very personal and special. The Great Master wrote about seeing the Radiant Form:

There is nothing in this world to which that Form could be compared or likened. Like the bride returning from her husband, when questioned by her sister (companion) as to the pleasure of meeting the Beloved, the disciple expresses himself in silence and a smile. That is his greatest eloquence.¹⁹

The Shabd is ringing and calling inside every one of us; it is resounding throughout creation forming and re-forming worlds, galaxies, universes. Any silence is pregnant, full of Shabd, full of Love – we just need that microscopic shift of attention from outwards to inwards to hear it, with the physical form of the Master helping us on this earth and the inner Master pulling us from within. Through practising silence in its various forms, we come to spiritual love, our own heritage.

Santbani Sangrah, Part 1, p. 214
Legacy of Love, frontispiece
Puratan Janamsakhi, p.137
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q # 506
Ibid
Spiritual Gems, Letter 170
Daryai Lal Kapur, Call of the Great Master, 11th ed., 2005, p. 12
The Dawn of Light, Letter #5
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 67
Call of the Great Master, p. 42
Call of the Great Master, p.45
Legacy of Love
Baba Jaimal Singh, Spiritual Letters, p.152
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q # 250
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q #244
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q # 245
Science of the Soul, “Spiritual Bouquet, #10,” p.185
Call of the Great Master, p.46
Spiritual Gems, Letter 25

The Ocean and the Ship of Nam - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Ocean and the Ship of Nam

I seek refuge with you, O Lord –
ferry me across the ocean of existence.
_{Sant Mirabai Ji}¹

Saints so often use the analogy of the ocean to describe many different aspects of the spiritual teachings. Here Sant Mirabai talks of one we often hear: the ocean of existence.

We know that the world and our existence in it can feel like an ocean, with the waters of life continually washing over us; wave after wave, one event after another, one situation after another, one emotion, one thought after another. Not even every minute, but every second brings a swell, a splash, that foam and water crashing about us. Yes, we can enjoy the experience, like when we are sailing, surfing or snorkelling, but often we can feel that we are drowning! The twelfth-century Indian saint Basavanna wrote:

Look, the world, in a swell
of waves, is beating upon my face.
Why should it rise to my heart, tell me.
O tell me, why is it rising now to my throat?
Lord, how can I tell you anything when it is risen
high over my head.
Lord, Lord, listen to my cries
O Lord of the meeting rivers, listen!²

Devotees call out to the Lord to save them from the waves of the ocean of life, from the waves of events, their passions, from the waves of their minds. Sometimes the waves are bigger than others – sometimes there is a gentle lapping and the sunlight sparkles brilliantly on the water. Sometimes there are great waves which destroy everything in their path, capsize boats and can drown those unfortunate souls who are cast away

No, the ocean is never still – it is not like a lake that sometimes shines like glass and reflects the sky above with great clarity. The ocean’s waves continually surge and swirl.

How do we survive in the ocean?
We are trying to survive in this ocean of life. Maybe the sharks won’t get us, maybe we’ll be lucky and get a friendly dolphin or a curious whale who might not be intent on eating us for lunch. We just don’t know. The crucial question is, how can we survive?

If we were stranded in the middle of the ocean, we would hold on to anything that we could to stay afloat, otherwise we would drown. People desperately look for all kinds of things to hold on to in life’s vast ocean: families and friends, careers, activities, politics, and social causes. In the ocean, some things float better than others – some materials provide no help at all, and some keep us buoyant. Throughout our lives we grab one thing and another, seeing which will help us to keep afloat. Eventually we realize that all will fail in the end – nothing can keep us afloat permanently. We start searching for a boat that cannot just keep us afloat, but can take us to shore.

We would never be able to let go of our worldly attachments without having something greater to hold onto. If we are having trouble staying afloat out at sea, we do not let go of the passing plank of wood unless we see a life raft or a boat, and then we use all our energy to swim towards it.

Our predicament
Saints and mystics come to lovingly and patiently help us to understand our predicament and to offer advice. Do we know where we are? Do we know where we want to go? Do we know how we will get there? What are the dangers? How will we survive? How will we cross? How will we get to shore? Do we have a boat capable of taking us across these stormy seas? They come with answers, with a solution, a way to lead us to safety.

They explain that our soul, the essence of our being, is a drop of the Divine Ocean. To function here in our worldly existence, the soul takes the association of the mind. The mind is attached to the creation through the senses, and because of this we are subject to the worldly passions. Sant Kabir tells us that the waves in the ocean of the world are deadly because of these passions: lust, anger, greed, ego, and attachment.

In the world’s deadly ocean
Surge waves of desire and avarice,
The billows of lust and anger
Make the waters turbulent.
The sharks of ego and envy
Lie in wait to prey on you;
Joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain
Are its ever-changing shores.³

It is because of these passions that life moves constantly from joy to sorrow, pleasure to pain and back again. It is not just the events or things of this world, but our reaction to them. Our minds should ideally help us to be clear-thinking and enable us to remain balanced and positive, but saints tell us that these passions make the waters turbulent and cloud our thinking.

Desire, of course, is necessary for life. (Baba Ji often tells us that everything is based on desire – even God-realization is a desire.) Without desire of some kind, we would not feel motivation to do anything at all! But desire can surge to greed: wanting what is harmful for us, and wanting more and more of something, greater than our necessity; or we spend all of our time and resources wanting and acquiring what is useless! Or we just are very confused about what we want, and end up going around in circles.
Anger can be a healthy display of self-preservation, and it is sometimes necessary to scold our children to make sure they behave. But normally we become inflamed by anger due to our offended egos and because things go against what we think is right, or good for us. In anger we can even do harm to ourselves and others.
Wealth isn’t a bad thing in itself, as we need it to survive. But we should be using wealth to live, not living our life in order to gain wealth. It is harmful when it leads to excesses, and doing things that make us go against our principles to achieve it.
Ego is necessary in life to some extent, but out of proportion it can lead to inappropriate pride and can isolate us.

We are never free from these passions – Kabir says that they lie in wait like sharks in the ocean’s depths. We never know when they will surface and attack. That is why the scene in the movie “Jaws” is so scary – because the people are just swimming, laughing, having so much fun, totally unaware of the danger below – the monster shark. It is only when we are watching the film that we see what is beneath those swimmers. We are like that in the world – we are splashing around in the ocean, and those passions take us by surprise. Saints and masters are like lifeguards – watching from the shore, they see the trouble we’re in, and they want to save us. They come with a boat to rescue us.

The Boat of the Lord’s Name
Kabir, the Lord’s slave, declares:

The Lord’s Name is the boat, the Master its adept oarsmen.⁴

The Master comes to tell us about the boat of the Lord’s Name. The Master helps us to understand what this Name is, where it is to be found, and how it can be realized. It is not a mere written or spoken word, but rather the creative Power that brought the creation into existence and sustains it even now. It is the current of life itself, that essence that shines and reverberates within us and in all things. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

The Shabd has created this whole universe and it is sustaining this whole universe. The whole universe is existing on the strength of this power, and the Lord has kept that power within each one of us also.⁵

This power is referred to in all our religions. Hindus call Ram Nam (Gods Name), Ram Dhun (God’s inner music), Nirmal Nad; Muslims call it Kalma (Inner Sound), Kalma-i-Ilahi (the Voice of God); Guru Nanak called it Nam or Shabd (spiritual Sound); Christ called it Word or Logos. In the Rig Veda it is called Vak (Word). In Judaism it is translated as the Memra (utterance), Shem (Name), Hokhmah (Wisdom) and Shekhinah (God’s presence). And what does science say? Science calls it Energy.

This Nam or Shabd, also called the Sound Current, is what we have to ride to merge with the Lord. The practice of the Name is therefore our boat. The Master is the adept oarsman because he is capable of crossing the raging sea of existence: he is a living example to us. Most importantly, it is the Master who is able to impart the technique so that we too may cross. He helps us to understand how to navigate in that ocean of existence, how to keep afloat, and how to reach our destination. Masters teach us to recognize what stands in the way of reaching it, the way to overcome the obstacles – not when we die, but in this very life, and so not only do we survive, but we can cross these stormy seas. Sant Kabir says:

Lord, Thou master of all creation –
Thy Name is the sturdy ship
To cross the dreadful ocean of existence.
Had the Lord not designed this ship,
the entire world would have been consumed
by the raging flames of passion.
My gracious Lord in his mercy
raised the ship of Nam,
And its command He entrusted
to the saints.⁶

Maharaj Charan Singh explains in Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I:

In the wild waste of the vast ocean, the boat of our mind is being tossed to and fro without even a rudder and oar, without even a steersman. It is battered by one wave after another and is endlessly tossed by storms. Leaking and nearly derelict, it knows no way of escape to a haven of peace.

If in our boat we had a steersman who was thoroughly familiar with the ocean and its perilous storms, we would doubtless reach the shore safely. And there is such a steersman. He is the perfect Adept, and the boat he uses is the boat of Nam.⁷

The Master not only gives us sensible guidance in life, but more important, through initiation into Nam-bhakti, devotion to the Name, he enables us to sail on the ship.

Nam is the destroyer of all pain,
The adornment of the entire creation;
The source of all love and devotion,
It is the haven of peace and bliss.
The Lord himself has made this ship,
and it is called the Lord’s Name.⁸

So the Master tells us that if we want to survive in this ocean of existence, if we want to cross this ocean, if we want mastery of our passions – and if we want peace and bliss, love and devotion, and to realize the true potential of life – if we want to merge back into the divine Ocean, we need to board the ship of the Lord’s Name, which the Master sends to our rescue. And we know that we certainly need a strong ship to navigate the oceans not only of the world, but of ourselves! If we want to cross an ocean, we need an ocean liner – a rowboat won’t do, as the waves would tear it apart. The ocean is not such a treacherous place if we are in a strong ship. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

It is only when we leave the leaky boat of the mind and step on to the strong and seaworthy ship of the Word that we escape the perils of the deep and reach the haven of safety.⁹

Sant Ravidas wrote:

The ocean of existence is utterly dreadful –
Why do you not understand this, O foolish one?
Know that Nam is the boat
And the Guru is the rudder thereof, says Ravidas.¹⁰

We can talk about a boat, we can read about a boat, we can describe the boat to other people, we can serve at the dockyard where the boat is kept, but this is certainly not the same as boarding the boat and setting sail! The Master will ferry us across – if we board.

But how do we board the master’s boat? The master has given us a recommended lifestyle (maintaining a vegetarian diet without meat, fish or eggs; not polluting our bodies and minds with alcohol and mind-altering drugs or even smoking tobacco; living according to strict moral standards, being good, kind and compassionate human beings), and most importantly, he imparts to us the technique of meditation. Simran (the repetition of the five holy names given to us at the time of initiation), is given to still the waves of our mind so that we can achieve concentration. Dhyan (contemplation on the form of the Master who initiated us) is to hold our concentration, and bhajan is listening for and to the Sound Current.

If we are drowning, just crying, “help, help” won’t save us. Someone needs to hear our cry, come and throw us a rope, and then pull us to safety. We can say that simran is our cry for help. Dhyan is when we fix our attention on the one who is saving us. Bhajan is hanging on to the rope that the Master has thrown for us, and through his Grace we are pulled out of the water on to that ship of Shabd, Nam, the Word. Simran plays such an important role! In the Vedic scriptures it is said:

For men lost in this world, indeed there is no higher gain than repeating the names of the Lord, whereby one attains to perfect peace and liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death.¹¹

The ocean is so huge
The ocean is so huge – it is too much to fathom. Our ultimate goal of merging back into the divine Ocean is impossible to comprehend. So the Masters give us something to concentrate on, to focus our attention – our simran and bhajan.

Once we had the privilege of being with a toddler who saw the sea for the very first time. His father placed him by the edge of the shore and the waves were coming in, surging, powerfully, splashing, rushing. The little one was terrified! As a wave came in, he turned and started to run away. His father knew that children like small objects, so he picked up a few stones and showed his son how he could throw them into the waves. It was fascinating to see how quickly the child changed! He had his stones to throw, and while he concentrated on this task, he forgot to be afraid of the ocean.

The words we are given at the time of initiation are our stones to throw into the waves of our mind. The more we focus, the more we concentrate, the calmer we become. We start to lose our fear of the ocean. As Hazur Maharaj Ji said: “Through simran we learn to put faith in a higher power and we become carefree.”¹²

Baba Ji often tells us that simran is the only thing we have in our control; it is the one thing we can do – just sit down, start our simran, and then let go. So many people say to Baba Ji that they can’t do simran, but he tells us that these minds are just creatures of habit. The more we are able to bring the mind back to simran, the easier it will become.

Living the recommended lifestyle and, after initiation, attending to our meditation, is like boarding the ship. Once we are aboard, our worries become the captain’s worries and we can be carefree. Like boarding a cruise liner, we research where we want to go, we make the arrangements, and as soon as we board the vessel, we can relax. We can just sit there and let the captain do his job. We don’t need to keep asking if he is doing his job – because we assumed he would when we bought the ticket! We have bought our ticket home. We just have to let go of unnecessary concerns and enjoy the ride! Hazur Maharaj Ji said:

It is only by meeting with Masters who are themselves steeped in Nam-bhakti and by following their directions that we can cross the ocean of phenomena and tear away the veil that masks Reality; that we can break through the barrier that hides the Lord from our sight; and that we can transcend ourselves, and that we can transform ourselves, and merge in the Lord himself and become one with Him.¹³

And Great Master asked us to think – what is the object of our lives?

Man is born so that he may merge his soul in its source. The greatest service one can render is to merge his soul (by freeing it from the attachment of mind and matter) in that ocean of peace and bliss of which it is a particle or drop.¹⁴

Effort is our responsibility, but the results are in the captain’s hands. Meditation is our effortless effort, our place of rest, the place that we can take refuge in the waves of our daily lives. Tides may come in and go out, waves may rise and fall. The ebb and flow of the tides is the one sure thing in life, but we have a refuge in the repetition of the holy names, and practice of Nam-bhakti. The saint Dariya Sahib of Bihar is quoted:

Practice thoughtfully the repetition of the blessed gift of the Master.
It is the most gracious and beneficial of all….
The repetition of the holy names
Is the boat for the ocean of the world.¹⁵

Our boat
Right now, we are sailing in our own little boat, this little self. If we want to undertake this difficult journey, we have to make sure it is a strong boat; we need to be able to steer and control it. Otherwise, we will be tossed by the waves and the boat will surely be overturn or capsize. The Master has given us the directions, the technique, to do all these things, and so much advice.

How can we be strong? We need to take care of our little boat. We need to try to man the boat of our life like a good first mate, making sure that everything is in order for the journey. We can keep the deck clean, and maintain it, making repairs where required. We are given guidelines for clean and good living to prepare us for our journey. Following the guidelines, learning not to plague ourselves with negative thoughts and emotions, and as Baba Ji recommends focussing on the solutions not the problems, always finding the positive in every situation, learning from the past and protecting our future.

We gain strength through attending to meditation. Baba Ji has explained in different ways on so many occasions:

On our own, no one has the strength to fulfill all of our responsibilities and carry the load of our karmas, so we need support.
When we meditate, we are trying to attach ourselves to the Shabd, the power that created and sustains the whole universe. If we attach ourselves to that power, we will start getting stronger.
The very purpose of meditation is to make our minds so tranquil that no matter what happens in life, we stay calm. We get that strength from within.

Steering: By using a seaman’s tools we are able to steer our boat to shore. Saints give us the tools: the map, the compass. But if we sit in the boat watching the waves, looking at the sky, busying ourselves with keeping out of the sun and warm at night, making a few meagre meals, making no attempt to steer our boat, how will we get home? We have to look, to understand, then to follow the path home, keep our boats afloat on a sturdy course for shore.

Every repetition of the names is a stroke of our oars.
Dhyan is keeping our gaze fixed on our destination, the shining light that points us to shore.
Listening for and to the Shabd-dhun is listening for and to that divine wind, the breath of God that fills our sails and steers us home.
Devotion and love provide the determination and energy to row.

Controlling: We have to control our boat, raise and drop the sails according to the winds and weather. Which captain has the luxury of always sailing on a calm sea? No sea is without its waves; they may be big or small, but waves there will always be.

The skill of the captain comes from manoeuvring through the waves. What would the necessity be for skill without the waves? We can’t say that our meditation isn’t a good boat because there are still waves! In life, we have to adjust to the ups and downs. True strength is the ability to adjust, and attending to our meditation helps to give us the strength and discretion to adjust.

If we are standing in a rowboat, it will wobble, but if we sit down and row, it will glide through the water; and with strength and perseverance we will arrive at our destination. Sitting for meditation is like sitting down in our boat to row. Meditation helps us to gain control.

Balance: We have to balance the load of our boat – work, home, friends, family, study, hobbies, our spiritual work – we carry so many responsibilities. Baba Ji reminds us that we have to create that balance in life; no one else will do it for us. Every individual has their own strengths and weaknesses, and our balance will depend on those things.

In our daily lives, love for the Master, love for the teachings, compassion for one another, understanding, forgiveness – that is our ship. Putting the teachings into practice – that is our ship. Living a clean and moral life and attending to meditation – that is our ship.

If there is no air in an inflatable lifeboat, it is just a big piece of rubber. If it is inflated it becomes a rescue vessel. Similarly, if we are filled with love and devotion, then we can be saved. Meditation, attending satsang, doing seva, is blowing air into our raft.

Baba Ji’s advice
Baba Ji talks to us about the importance of having a strong anchor in life. He says that if we have a weak anchor, we will just be swept away with every wave, with every storm. Living according to the teachings and meditation on the Lord’s Name anchors our little boats to the Master’s ship. Devotion to the Name, the practice of meditation, is our anchor in life, it is something to hold on to, something to steady us. It is our support and our strength.

Baba Ji has told us that the passions within, which Kabir described as ‘raging flames’, are remnants of our animal nature. Through the practice of meditation, we slowly, slowly are able to rise above their hold on us. We learn to find a balance so that desire and greed will give way to contentment; anger will be replaced by forgiveness; lust will give way to continence; ego and pride will be replaced by discrimination and humility. Not that this will happen overnight! But slowly, slowly we will gain mastery over the passions and will not be consumed by them.

A seeker asked which of the passions is the last to go. Baba Ji advised that we always have to be cautious. All of them are equal and can attack us with the same intensity. We have to be on our watch for all of them. Until we have risen above mind and maya, we are susceptible.

Baba Ji has told us that at this time we’re all slaves of the mind, no matter what we say. We all have the impressions from our past actions upon our minds. So, no matter how much we may try, the impressions can overpower us so that we might end up doing something wrong. He says that’s why we’ve been given meditation, so that we can gradually remove those impressions – to dilute and eventually erase them. If we learn from our mistakes, if we adopt the right path, the Lord showers His grace.

Baba Ji reminds us of the example Hazur Maharaj Ji used to give, of the drop of water and the ocean. A little bit of dirt in a drop of water will seem enormous. But if that drop of water merges into the ocean, it becomes the ocean, and the ocean has the capacity to merge that drop into itself and then it will not be affected at all.

Where are our boats headed?
In the beginning, perhaps we set out with excitement to explore new horizons, with our boats headed to distant shores; but when we got there the cargo disappointed, or it spurred us on to want more and more, and we set sail time and again. We will never find peace or satisfaction at all, no matter what we achieve or possess. Actually, we just need to turn the boat around, point it in the direction that will bring us to the state of oneness and bliss that we crave. The longing is the same – just pointed in a different direction!

Think of what happens when we try to reverse a boat, the process of turning the boat around. First, we have to stop and turn. This is why that phase feels so long and slow – we have been heading in the wrong direction for such a very long time – it is a process that requires great effort to turn around.

When we embark on the spiritual journey, living a wholesome lifestyle and then practicing meditation as we’re taught at the time of initiation, we are fuelling and propelling the boat in the right direction.

Saints are surging oceans
It is not just the world that the Masters describe as an ocean. The saints too are oceans of the Lord’s love and mercy. Great Master said:

Saints are surging oceans of God’s love and they act as lighthouses in our life’s journey in this world... Many saints have left their footprints on the sands of time for our guidance. Their lives were oceans of Love. By studying their writings, love for spirituality will be awakened in our minds. But above all, we should meet a Master … so that we may receive guidance and be able to obtain within, the nectar of love.¹⁶

Love is not dependent on anything else. It is an ocean of faith and fortitude. It is an ocean of strength.¹⁷

Sultan Bahu describes the terrifying “gales of countless thoughts” that interfere with his contemplation of the Lord and the grace that rescues him.

In the ocean of my heart
arise the waves of my Master’s grace.
In it appear whirlpools;
In it blow fierce gales of the countless thoughts and arguments
that hamper my contemplation of the Lord.¹⁸

Those mental and emotional waves might be crashing and swirling around us and in us, but His ocean of love is always there, His grace is always there. Attending to meditation is the way that we are able to obtain his grace. Saint Bahu is giving a wonderful description of what happens during meditation: He says, those whirlpools, fierce gales, countless thoughts and arguments appear. But, he is saying, that is where the waves of the Master’s grace arise. Kabir says:

Have Mercy on my plight, O Master.
I am tossing in the turbulent seas;
I will be swept away by its stormy waves
if you don’t hold my arm and rescue me.

Great Master emphasizes how important it is to hold on to the sound current:

A boat held to its moorings will see the flood waters pass by; but detached from its moorings, may not survive the flood. The current is our base – our moorings. A soul that is attached to the current is safe.¹⁹

Taking refuge, we are able to set out on the voyage, to not only survive but to cross the ocean.

Ocean of Shabd Within
The Saints also refer to the Ocean of Nam within us. This is the power of life within us, the divine current of the Lord that permeates our very being, even if we’re not always aware of it.

The oceans of the world are always there, even if we don’t see them. If we live inland, we do not experience the ocean. Some people are born far from the ocean, and have never even seen it, have never experienced it. They cannot imagine its immensity or its power. Equally, even if we live right by the ocean, just a few streets away, in our house we won’t hear those waves crashing. And if when it is dark and there are perhaps thick clouds, even if we stand on the shore, we might hear the waves, but we won’t see that huge ocean right at our feet.

Similarly, here in our bodies we are living in the presence of a great ocean – but because we have been living in a different part of the country, or we have been locked behind closed doors we have not yet experienced it. It is there all the time; it never goes anywhere at all. There is a thick fog, and so we do not see it. What is that thick fog? Our desires, our concerns, our worries, our negativity, the accumulation of lifetimes of actions.

Diving deep
We are told that we have to still the waves of our minds in order to come into contact with that ocean of Nam. But we know that so often when we sit for meditation our minds are so restless, and we wonder how it would be possible to still the waves of our thoughts. No, it isn’t possible! Oceans are never still!

But we know that the surface of the ocean is different from the depths. The surface is affected by the weather and the winds. Down deep is a whole other world. Meditation is the way that we dive beneath the surface, to find a place where we are not buffeted by those waves. And what pearls there are, pearls of happiness, contentment, love.

Story: The Sieve
A Master was instructing his disciples in the practice of meditation. He told them, “The process is like filling a sieve with water.” This confused the students. Some thought it meant meditation was very difficult, and others thought that it meant they could only expect temporary gains from their practice.

Discouraged, most of them stopped meditating. One student, however, approached the Master and asked him to explain. The Master took the student to the edge of the ocean with a cup and a sieve. At the water’s edge they stood on a rock, the sea breaking around them in great, frothy swirls. “Show me how you would fill the sieve with water,” the Master said. The disciple stooped and filled the cup with water. He poured it into the sieve. Cup after cup he poured, but no matter how quickly he poured, only the slightest moisture was left in the bottom. … All the time the master watched, saying nothing.

In the end, the disciple faced the master and shrugged. The task was hopeless. Now, the Master spoke: “It is like this with the life of the human spirit too,” he said. “So long as we stand on the rock of “I” … and try to pour the divine life into that shell, so certainly that life will escape us. This is not the way to fill a sieve with water, nor the human spirit with the life of the divine.”

Then the master reached out his hand and taking the sieve from the disciple, he threw the sieve as far as he could, out into the face of the deep. For only a moment, it lay glinting in the morning sunlight on the face of the water. Then it slipped far below. “Now, it is full of water,” the Master said. “And it will always be so. That is how you fill a sieve with water and the spirit with divine life. Meditation is not about scooping small amounts of Spirit into your individual life, but about dropping yourself into the ocean of Spirit and merging with it.”²⁰

In summary:
Through his grace we realize our predicament; through his grace, he shows us the way to survive in the ocean of life, he teaches us to steer and care for our boat. He invites us to board his ship. Hazur Maharaj Ji emphasized that we should avoid the tempestuous seas and swim along with the waves, not against them.

Through his grace we board his ship. He puts us in contact with the Ocean of his Love, the ocean of the audible life current. Through his grace we dive in, and the drop of our soul merges in the ocean of the All. As Mirabai sang:

Pray have mercy on me,
Forget all my transgressions
and bless me with your darshan.
I seek refuge with you, O Lord –
ferry me across the ocean of existence.²¹

A contemporary songwriter wrote about spiritual seeking and longing and its culmination in our ultimate merging into the Lord.

We are sailing, we are sailing
Home again
'Cross the sea
We are sailing
Stormy waters
To be near you
To be free
O, Lord, to be near you, to be free!²²

Voice of the Heart, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 2013, pg 73
Translated with an introduction by A.K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, Penguin Books Ltd., pg 67
Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, p. 318
Ibid
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perpectives, Vol I, p. 177
Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, “The Ship of Nam,” p. 209
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, 2020 ed., p. 140
Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, “The Ship of Nam,” p. 209
Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I, p. 31
Guru Ravidas, The Philosopher’s Stone, 2009, p. 51
Shrimad Bhagavatam 11.5.37
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, Letter 21
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol I, 2020 ed., p. 131
Spiritual Gems, Letter 150
K.N.Upadhyaya, Dariya Sahib, Saint of Bihar, p. 259
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, pp. 232-33
Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. II, p. 116
Sultan Bahu, 2013 ed., p. 282
Spiritual Gems, Letter 205
Maurice Lynch, in “RE Today” (online), Summer 2001
Saint Mirabai, Voice of the Heart, 2013, p. 73
Song by Maurice Sutherland, sung by Rod Stewart

Being Alone and Lonely - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Being Alone and Lonely

One of the situations that many have struggled with during this long COVID period is being alone, because in most of us it evokes feelings of loneliness, of being lonely, or even of abandonment. Whether we are young or old, for many of us this feeling is hard to bear, because in our experience it stems from a painful lack, a lack of being part of something; the lack of belonging to someone or being in contact with others. But it is also difficult because it makes us confront ourselves in the emptiness that accompanies loneliness, since introspection occurs almost automatically when distraction disappears.

Mystics consider this feeling of loneliness and abandonment from a different perspective; they say that these moments of solitude, though difficult for us, are in fact very valuable – because it is in that loneliness within us that the Divine lets us know that it exists. It is in that emptiness that the voice of our true self, our divine essence, becomes so clearly audible to us – a voice so often drowned out by the activity of our mind or the outward noise.

No possible logical explanation can prove the existence of the Lord. But he gives his own proof when he creates that loneliness within us, and we find that this feeling of loneliness doesn’t leave us, no matter what we may achieve in this world. This is actually the inclination of the soul towards its own origin. It will not rest unless it goes back to its own source, its own origin. So the very soul in the body proves the existence of the Lord.¹

For this reason, mystics regard these moments of being alone and experiencing loneliness as a blessing in disguise. Because then we get the chance to experience reality and to realize the truth. For, thus says Hazur:

We are all lonely in this world. It’s a self-deception to think that somebody belongs to us, or we belong to somebody. It’s just a self-deception. The time comes when we all realize the self-deception, when we wake up from our deep slumber. We are lonely because soul is the essence of that divine ocean, and this feeling of loneliness will never leave the soul unless it merges back into that ocean. This very feeling of loneliness is forcing us to follow the path which leads back to him. But for this nobody would bother about the Lord. This feeling of loneliness is forcing us on to the path and keeping us straight towards the Lord. So it is only a question of time until we realize that we are lonely. We think: I belong to mother, mother belongs to me. I have got sisters, brothers, so many friends, my wife, my children, my property, my wealth. I have so much. I belong to so much.

But in everyone’s life an opportunity does come when one realizes that he is really lonely in life. Nothing belongs to him, and he doesn’t belong to anybody at all. I think that is a most fortunate moment when it comes in anybody’s life. …. The sooner one can realize this fact – that one is lonely – the better it is for that person.²

Loneliness is a blessing in disguise when it makes us realize that we are truly lonely. It becomes a divine gift when we can endure its pain. When we stop trying to run away by throwing ourselves into activity and socializing, or seeking distraction in sensory pleasures, and instead, accept it, even welcome it, and dare to look in the mirror of our heart. Being lonely is an opportunity to get to know ourselves better; to become aware of the existence of God and realize how much we need him. It is a powerful divine tool to teach us to focus on him, to remind and inspire us to live more and more in his presence. As Hafiz so aptly put it in one of his poems:

Don’t
Surrender
your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more
Deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so
Tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.³

When we try to learn this lesson there will come a day that we will experience a peaceful happiness in being alone, a sweetness in the pain of missing, and gratitude will warm our heart – because experiencing loneliness has helped us to refocus on God; it has strengthened us in our meditation practice and, by doing so, it has brought us more and more in the presence of the Divine. It’s then that we will realize that all these moments of being alone and lonely have truly been a divine gift.

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives Vol. I, Q14.
Ibid, Q. 399
Hafiz, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, ed. D. Ladinsky; Penguin Compass Books, 1999, p. 277.

Remembering Our True Objective - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Remembering Our True Objective

This world is always governed by two contradictory philosophies. One is a materialistic philosophy and the other is a spiritual philosophy.

The followers of a materialistic philosophy maintain that this creation comes into existence on its own and is running on its own momentum. There is nothing called spirituality and there is no God.

The followers of this philosophy believe that the only purpose of our human existence is to collect the material objects of this world and to enjoy them all to the core. In brief, the proponents of a materialistic philosophy have only one aim: “Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow, we shall die.”

Now this belief, this thought process, leads us towards a very fundamental question: Is it the only purpose of our existence? Is it the only reason behind our presence in this creation? If we are here only to experience this world, to procreate, and just run after ephemeral sensual pleasures, then how are we different from the rest of the animal kingdom?

If this is the course of our life process, then every animal – be it dog, cat, horse or our nearest evolutionary relatives, the ape – also have the same life cycle. They also come into the world; they eat, sleep, grow, produce offspring, and then die. Then in what aspect can we claim that we are superior to the rest of these creatures?

The quest for answers to these questions leads us towards the second concept, spiritual philosophy. Once we start treading the path of spirituality, we start to understand that this world is created by a supreme power. That power has not only created but is sustaining this entire creation. We may call this supreme power Lord, God, Hari Om, Waheguru, Allah or by any other name – the meaning is the same. Gradually, we begin to understand that we are here in this creation with a definite purpose. And that purpose is God-realization.

As the present Master often says, quoting a French philosopher, “We are spiritual beings going through a human experience.” So the real purpose of our life is to be a seeker of spiritual realization while living in this creation.

Now again, the question arises that if it is so easy to realize our supreme goal, then why are we perpetually dwelling in darkness? Why are we going through the endless cycle of transmigration? Why can’t we have God-realization on our own?

In the Adi Granth it is written:

Aapan leeya je mile, vicharr kyon rovann.
If people could meet the Lord by their own efforts,
why would they be crying out
in the pain of separation?¹

The full understanding of the real purpose of our human birth unfolds only when we take refuge in the company of a contemporary true Master. Once we start following the teachings of a true Master, we begin to realize that the real purpose of this birth is to merge our soul back into the Lord.

In the company of our Master, we gradually understand that there is only one purpose of human life.

Bhayi paraapat maanukh dehureeya,
gobind milan ki eh teri bareeya.
Avar kaaj tere kitai na kaam,
mil saadh sangat bhaj keval naam.
This human body has been given to you.
This is your chance to meet the Lord.
All other efforts are in vain.
join the company of the holy
and meditate on the one Nam alone.²

A true Master is not like the philosophers of the world. He does not just impart the teachings of others. Rather, he becomes the embodiment of his teachings and becomes a role model for us, so that we may also feel motivated and can incorporate the essence of those teachings in our daily life, in our daily actions.

In every sphere of life, to learn a worldly art or skill, we need a teacher, a professor. If we want to be a doctor or engineer, or to learn any other profession, we need a guide who has experience in the subject and is able to lead us towards the goal. Now, if we need a teacher to progress in our normal worldly pursuits, it is obvious that we would need the guidance of a true Master to follow the path of spirituality.

A true Master in his physical form appears to be a normal human being like each one of us. He also eats, sleeps, talks, and goes through the phases of life, as all of us do. So, looking only at the physical level, we creatures of limited intellect fail to understand his real identity and start questioning. But his true identity is not the body. Beyond the physical, at the inner level he has merged his soul with the Shabd, the Word. He has realized God and is one with that supreme power.

The Adi Granth teaches:

sat purakh jin jaaniya, satguru tis da naa’o.
The one who knows the true Lord
is called the true Guru.³

Throughout our history, we have examples of true Saints who guided their disciples on the path of God-realization. In our own lifetime, we have the example of a true Master right in front of us, who not only connects but guides us at every step on the path of our spiritual journey.

Hazur Maharaj Ji always used to remind us in his satsangs that Saints or true Masters do not come into the world to create a new religion or dogma, nor do they come to introduce rituals or outer forms of worship. They come into this creation with only one purpose – to take us back to the Lord. They come with the single aim of awakening our soul and merging it back into the supreme.

Masters do this by imparting the technique of withdrawing our attention from what pulls it outward and downward and channelling it inward and upward. They connect our soul to the Shabd, which is also called the sound current, audible life stream, holy name, the Nam or Word.

True Masters are the custodian of this spiritual wealth. They have the absolute authority to bestow this wealth on anyone they so choose through Naam Daan – the gift of initiation.

The Nam or Word is the essential reality of which all Saints and Masters speak; it is the source and sustainer of this entire creation. Throughout the ages, Saints have described it with different names. In the Sikh religion, it is referred to as Hari Kirtan, Akath Katha, Saachi Bani or Dhur ki Bani. Hindu scriptures refer to it as Ram Nam, Ram Dhun or Akash Vani. In Christianity, it is referred to as the Holy Ghost, the Word, and Logos. Muslims Saints remember it by such names as Nada-i-Sultani, Kalma, or Bang-i-Elahi.

All these names are just the attributes of the inner sound that is intrinsic to the Shabd or Word. But the essence is that absolute reality which is constantly reverberating within each one of us. This reality which we call Shabd or sound current is resounding within each of us and is the heritage of every individual. But because we are ignorant of our divine heritage, we live a life of spiritual poverty.

Baba Ji often describes our present situation with this quotation:

bheekha bhookha ko nahi sab ki gathri laal;
girah khol na jaansi, taate bhaye kangaal.
O Bhikha, no one is lacking; within everyone’s bundle
is a priceless jewel.
They do not know how to untie its knot –
thus they remain wretched and poor.⁴

Mystics explain to us that the Lord created this creation through the Word. This word is our link with the heavenly father. This Word is the creator and sustainer of this universe. If the Lord withdraws the Word from this creation, the whole creation will cease to exist.

The Bible explains this supreme reality:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.⁵

Similarly, the fifth Guru, Shri Guru Arjun Dev, in his Bani, describes Nam:

Naam ke dhaare sagle jant,
naam ke dhaare khand brahmand.
By Nam are sustained all creatures.
by Nam are sustained continents and universes.⁶

In Sar Bachan Poetry, Soami Ji Maharaj describes the Shabd as creator of this whole universe:

Shabd ne rachi triloki saari,
shabd se maaya phaili bhaari.
Shabd ne khand brahmand racha ri,
shabd se saat deep nau khand bana ri.
The Shabd created all the three worlds;
the Shabd spread the vast net of illusion.
The Shabd created the regions and universes;
the Shabd created the seven islands
and the nine realms.⁷

Brothers and sisters, to get the gift of initiation or Naam Daan is not just a one-off event in life. It is the culmination of good sanskaras (good deeds and impressions) of our countless births and the grace and mercy of the Lord himself, so that we may get a chance to be in the company of a true living Master.

In the company of a true Master, when we do our meditation regularly, we start to understand the reality of this creation, the reason for our separation from the Lord, and the true purpose of our life. We learn how to merge our soul back into the creator.

Just as any worldly institution is governed by principles and stipulates certain regulations, so the path of Sant Mat has laid down conditions to be followed in the form of four vows:

To maintain a strict lacto-vegetarian diet; not to eat meat, fish, fowl, eggs, or anything made from them;
To refrain from all intoxicants, including alcohol and mind-altering drugs, as well as tobacco products;
To lead a clean and healthy moral life, and earn our livelihood by fair, honest and honourable means;
To give two and a half hours of our time to our meditation every day.

Sant Mat is not a path of expressing our love merely in words; it is a path of demonstrating that love, that earnest desire to meet the Lord, in each and every action. Our every thought, every word, and every action should reflect our true love and desire for the Lord. The only way to express that love is by attending to our meditation most regularly, for at least two and a half hours every day.

However, looking at our present situation, the Adi Granth says:

Poochhat pathik teh maarag na dhaarai pag.
Preetam kai des kaise baatan ke jaa’eeyai.
One asks a wayfarer about the path
to the Beloved Lord’s abode
but does not tread on it, not even a step.
Without walking that path, how can one reach
the abode of the Beloved
by mere talk?⁸

Out of his love and grace, the Master has bestowed the gift of initiation on us. Now it is our turn to express our gratitude to the Master by attending to our meditation.

Being initiated on the path is not the end-point but rather it is the start of the journey. It is the lifelong commitment to be steadfast on the principles of Sant Mat. Being initiated does not mean that our life will be smooth, or that there will be no pain or suffering in our life. We have to go through whatever is written in our destiny. But if we attend to our meditation regularly with love and dedication, we will be able to face every situation in life with the grace of the Master.

As the present Master always reminds us in his satsangs, that if we have caught hold of our father’s finger, we can pass through every challenge of life cheerfully and we will not be afraid of anything.

The question arises: How can we hold onto our father’s finger? The answer is simple – by attending to our meditation; by doing our bhajan and simran with sincerity, regularity, and with one-pointed love and faith in the Master.

While emphasizing the need to have complete trust and with absolute surrender to the Master, Goswami Tulsi Sahib explains:

Ek bharosa ek bal,ek aas bisvaas.
Swaanti salil gur charan hai chaatrik Tulsidas.
One is my hope, One is my strength,
and in One alone is my faith and reliance.
The feet of the Guru are like the swanti drop
for Tulsidas, the rainbird.⁹

However, the truth is that our trust in our Master is not based on our absolute love and surrender, but it is based on wishes and expectations. It changes with the circumstances of our life, with our happiness and sorrows. That’s why whenever we sit in the meditation, instead of asking only for Him from Him, we beg for the objects and relations of the world. We spread a long list of our demands, wishes, and aspirations whenever we sit for meditation.

Looking at our inner condition, Hazur Maharaj Ji often cited this passage from the Adi Granth:

Vin boliya sabh kichh jaanda,
kis aagai keechai ardaas.
He knows everything without being told –
unto whom should we offer our prayers?¹⁰

The purpose of this life is not to accumulate the wealth of this world. The real aim of this birth is to accumulate the wealth of Nam. If the purpose of this life was only to collect worldly wealth, then Mira Bai Ji, who was born into a royal family and had the all the wealth and comforts of the world, would not have decided to renounce it all to become a disciple of Sant Ravidas. When the Master gave her the gift of Nam, she did her meditation with absolute devotion and love. With the Master’s grace, when she got the inner wealth, she expressed the following words of gratitude to her beloved Master:

Paayo ji, main to naam ratan dhan paayo.
Bastu amolak di mere satguru, kirpa kar apnaayo.
I have realized the jewel of Nam;
I have obtained that precious wealth.
My true Master bestowed a rare gift;
in his mercy, he has made me his own.¹¹

Dear brothers and sisters, the relations of this world are transient and temporary in nature. With the passage of time, every relation comes to an end. But our relationship with the Master is the only relation that is permanent and everlasting.

That day when he bestowed the gift of initiation on us – at that very moment our relationship with the Master was established. This is the only relationship which will always remain with us – not only in this lifetime, but also after death. We may turn our face away from our beloved Master by not attending to our meditation, but his face is always turned towards us, waiting for us. So, whatever the conditions of our life may be, our face, our focus, should always be turned towards our Master. Meditation should be the central axis of our life. Our every thought and every action should only revolve around our meditation and Master.

And, while attending to meditation, we always must submit only one request to our beloved Master:

Asi khate bahut kamaavade, ant na paaraavaar,
Har kirpa kar kai baksh leho,
hau paapi vad gunahgaar.
Har jeeo lekhe vaar na aavayi,
tu bakhas milaavanhaar.
I make so many mistakes –
there is no end or limit to them.
O Lord, please be merciful and forgive me.
I am a sinner, a great offender.
Beloved Lord, if you keep an account of my mistakes,
I will never be forgiven.
Please forgive me and unite me with yourself.¹²

Adi Granth, p. 134
Adi Granth, p. 378
Adi Granth, p. 286
Bhikha Saheb ki Bani, pp. 71–72
Bible, Gospel of John 1:1-2
Adi Granth, p. 284
Sar Bachan, 9:2:1
Adi Granth, p. 439
Santbani Sangreh, part 1, p. 221
Adi Granth, p. 1420
Mira Bai ki Shabdavali, p. 24
Adi Granth, p. 1416

Just Stay in the Race - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Just Stay in the Race

During the filming of the epic film, Ben Hur, it is said that the lead actor found it difficult to learn how to drive the horse-drawn chariot that would be used for the spectacular chariot race. After a lot of practice, he was finally able to control the horses, but he still had doubts. He explained his concerns to the director, saying. “I think I can drive the chariot, but I'm not sure I'm going to win the race.” The director replied: “You just stay in the race and I will make sure you win.”

This is precisely what our Master, the director of our spiritual life, asks us to do: just stay in the race, sit down to meditate every day with love and devotion and without expectation. He asks us to simply keep our attention on the inner Master, the Shabd, twenty-four hours a day.

In the book Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name, the author reminds us that as love for the Satguru grows in the heart of the disciple, he begins to lose his own will and replace it with that of the Master. He surrenders his ego to him and accepts everything that happens in life as the will of his Master.¹

In the book Sant Paltu, the spiritual path is described as being on a razor's edge. It takes love and courage to walk on it. Jesus Christ taught us that without love, all our efforts to achieve God-realization are meaningless.²

On receiving initiation, we promise to meditate for two and a half hours every day to pour our attention, our love, our soul current into the audible life stream, the Shabd, so that the mind may taste that amrit, that supreme pleasure within, and free the soul to travel home on the path of Shabd.

We promise to keep our minds in simran, the repetition of five holy names given by the Master, so that the factory of our mind may be stripped of worldly thoughts – the raw materials needed to manufacture worldly desires, actions, and, eventually, future lives.

Meditation is not easy. We sit the body down to meditate, but the mind is not so quick to obey. It wants to keep doing its job the old-fashioned way. It rejects the restriction of simran. It keeps creating thoughts, images, and scenarios during meditation – another and another and another! The disciple finds the journey much longer and much more difficult than he counted on. Mind keeps submitting topic after topic, desire after desire, trying to capture the attention of the devotee.

The mind comes up with a fascinating idea and the devotee takes off on a wild ride on that train of thought. Suddenly, he becomes aware that he has stopped his simran and has let the mind lead him astray again. How long have I been away? One minute? An hour? He starts his simran again. Again, the mind submits more thoughts, more images. The disciple struggles to repeat the holy names, and once again he finds that his mind has led him down a dark road to some strange place. And so the fight goes on...

The devotee is discouraged. He feels he’s not getting anywhere. He begins to feel that there is nothing stronger than this monstrous manufacturing machine called mind. His simran is so poor that he feels that there is no point in even trying. The negative power sends daunting doubts through the devotee’s mind, such as, “How can five little words control an immense machine that can produce millions and millions of thoughts and images?” or “How much good can this be doing? Maybe I'm just wasting my time.”

The mind finally wins the battle – or so it seems! The devotee gives up and gets up early from meditation. The soul is kept out of the Shabd's magnetic field for another day. And this is how the negative power’s enemy army advances, inch by inch, one day at a time, one moment at a time, one thought at a time until a priceless human lifetime is over. Fortunately, that doesn't happen to our devotee! Sunday comes in a few days and the Satguru pulls his discouraged disciple from within to come to the Master's satsang: Association with truth.

What is satsang? Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh made the importance of satsang very clear when he said: “Satsang is an appetizer to create real hunger for the darshan of the Lord.”³

The devotee listens to the teachings of the Master. He is reminded again that it is the mind's job to keep the devotee out of Shabd's magnetic field. He is reminded that he has joined the Satguru's army to save the soul and that he has to fight with his mind until the last breath. He is reminded that love is giving oneself and not expecting to receive inner experiences in return.

He is reminded that when he is in meditation he is with the Master. He is reminded that the only thing more powerful than the mind is Shabd, and for that reason, he must listen to it every day; he must align himself with Shabd's superpower. Whether the mind concentrates in simran or not, he is reminded that meditation is just trying to surrender to the Father, begging for his forgiveness, trying to become one with Him.

And in the satsang, without words, without the devotee knowing, the Satguru always gives his grace. He sends a gentle breeze of Sach Khand through the heart of the devotee. This fans the flame of love and longing in him. Filled with haunting nostalgia for his homeland, the devotee leaves the satsang inspired to again sit in meditation.

The Master only asks us to sit down and meditate and promises us that he will take care of the rest of the journey home. We have only to repeat the holy names, listen to Shabd, and leave everything else to him. Meditation may not be easy, but it’s so worth the effort. The effort itself gives us happiness. Even when we seem to fail, we feel contentment in doing what our teacher has asked us to do. As Maharaj Charan Singh often said, there are no failures in Sant Mat, because you are trying to follow the path. So even if we lose the battle of love, we still win.

With our effort and his grace, we learn how to hold the reins of the mind, control the stampeding horses of the senses, and drive the chariot. We stay in the race. And the Master keeps his faithful promise to make sure we cross the finish line and win.

V.K Sethi, Kabir, The Weaver of God´s Name, p. 162
Isaac Ezekiel, Sant Paltu, His life and Teachings, p. 110
Sabina Oberoi, Concepts & Illusions: A Perspective, p. 152

A Change in Outlook - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

A Change in Outlook

We all like to believe that we love the Master sufficiently in our own unique fashion. So what if we do not always meditate? We are present at seva and satsang. We avoid meat and drink and don’t harm anybody – isn’t that a sufficient sacrifice? But the question we should ask ourselves is this – should we love our Master according to our preference or his? Is not doing anything wrong enough to earn his precious happiness? Does an athlete achieve a high level of fitness simply by not eating sweets? He or she must actively train the different aspects of body and mind – be it strength, flexibility, skill, hand-eye coordination, reflexes and more. Only then does one improve at one’s sport slowly over time. The same holds true for spirituality. Shouldn’t we aim to please him with our heart and soul, and follow his every command like obedient children? That includes more than simply not doing something wrong, but also taking positive action whenever we can. And that positive action is meditation. Through our daily practice, we will be able to grow the different facets of our spiritual fitness, be it our focus, our resilience, our love, our humility, and our resignation to his will. Only if we obey the instruction of meditating every single day of our lives till our last breath can we earn his infinite grace.

When we are around the Master we feel a great pull and love emanating from him. We can’t help but look at him helplessly. But the mystics tell us that this attachment to his physical presence is somewhat misplaced. The Master is not limited to the physical form. He is within each of us in his rapturous, boundless, and ever-present Shabd form, awaiting our arrival at the eye centre. He is closer than we can imagine and all we need to do is realize it through bhajan and simran. In the book Honest Living we read:

When we put our spiritual goal first, we find that our happiness and contentment increase. When our lives are clear, harmonious and balanced, we sleep well at night because we are at peace with ourselves. We discover for ourselves, through our own experience, that it is through the natural order of the Lord’s creation and not through our efforts that we receive whatever we have.¹

Yes, if we think about it, everything we have has been given to us by the Lord – our education, our family, our cultural influences, our bodily appearance, and our circumstances are all things that have never been in our control. We like to believe that it is we who are intelligent, or wealthy, or kind. But is it not a gift from him that we must cherish? He is watching over us in ways we don’t even realize. It is he who pulls us back in the right direction when the mind is easily influenced by the attractions of the world. We have been granted the priceless gifts of seva and satsang, which serve as the boundary walls for the crop we are trying to grow, so that it is well-protected and not squandered away by the tricks of the mind.

The highs of success and the temptations of the world may appear appealing, but are a lethal trap. If we don’t keep the mind in check, it is these temptations that can take us away from our vows. We must remain unaffected by the highs and lows that come our way in life. When something bad happens to us, we always tend to ask – why us? But are we as analytical or suspicious when something good happens? We simply accept it without stopping to appreciate it.

These notions of good and bad emerge from our limited understanding of life. The reality is that everything in the Lord’s creation is in perfect harmony. ‘Worldly good’ does not always equate with ‘spiritual good’, and the things we label as ‘bad’ are often blessings in disguise. It is often in difficult times when we feel truly helpless and alone that we go back to remembering the Master and realize our powerlessness. We interpret worldly conditions as good or bad because we forget that our ultimate goal is to grow spiritually, and not indulge in the fleeting play of the creation. Our goal is to achieve union with the Lord in this very lifetime, and we must never let that objective out of our sight.

The Great Master wrote to a disciple:

Human life is very precious and is due to past good karma. It was not granted to us for rearing children, or for enjoying ourselves. All these functions are performed even by the lowest animals. The only difference between man and the lower creation is that man’s life here was meant for seeing the Lord and reaching the highest spiritual plane, in this life.²

There is a great pleasure in stillness. That is when the mind, in a rare moment of peace, has been bullied into submission and quiet. From a spiritual perspective, the more still and focused we are, the closer we come to hearing the Divine Music. We forget that we can greet and merge with the astral form of the Master within. We don’t have to ‘reach anywhere’ in our meditation – we are already there. The entire creation is already within us – we must simply realize it. And to do so, we must be filled with devotion, obedience, and love. Maharaj Charan Singh reassures us in Die to Live:

Just change your way of life according to the teachings and attend to meditation. That is all that is required. From meditation, love will come, submission will come, humility will come. Everything will come.³

Love in all forms is beautiful and powerful because it's the opposite of ego and is capable of destroying our sense of self. We feel an immense love radiating from a true living master. He has blessed us with a human life and with initiation despite our glaring flaws. He only looks at the divine potential in us and has even given us some degree of control in how we live our lives from this point on. We must learn from our follies and shortcomings. If we choose to forgive, kindly and lovingly, then it is possible that we will be treated the same. If we count every good deed we do, then every bad deed of ours will be counted too. We can all choose the measure by which we want to be judged and the way in which we want to build our lives. Let us build our lives around our spiritual goal and submit to His sweet will.

M.F. Singh, Honest Living, 4th ed., 2001, p. 52
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems, Ltr. 21
Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Q. 352

I wish you joy of heart today… - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

I wish you joy of heart today…

… the joy that laughs and sings,
the joy that finds happiness in simple things.
May life bring her choicest gifts to you,
and may you never lack a Friend who’s honest, real and true.”

These encouraging words, printed in a simple greeting card, remind us to open our heart and recognize the many opportunities for expressing generosity and gratitude. Saints and mystics come into the world as our true friends and, out of an abundance of love and generosity, they wish to share their ‘choicest gifts’ with us. They invite us to seek the true purpose of life, which they say is to unravel the mystery of the Divine within and reunite our soul with God. With their own example they inspire us to becoming more loving and generous human beings.

When reflecting on the true meaning of love and generosity, both qualities become interchangeable in relation to our interactions with fellow human beings. We define generosity as freely giving of our time to help others or giving gifts of considerable value without any expectation of recognition or reward in return. Love has the same characteristics. We cannot be truly generous without being truly loving. For some, substantial acts of generosity or unconditional selfless love may still be an ideal to which we aspire, while waiting for the right time or the means to put our good intentions into practice.

Yet, extending heartfelt kindness and empathy – small gestures for us – may give the recipient renewed hope. Giving hope to someone in need is one of the most meaningful gifts we can share: connecting with another human being in need and recognizing that the recipient and giver both need each other, because at a deeper level we are indeed all connected as one human family, children of the one true Creator.

The authors of Being Generous give a hint of the power of generosity:

Generous acts beget generous responses, which means that it spreads not only the asset that is given or shared, but also the optimism that inspires it. This is not to say that generosity is easy, or that it evokes instant reciprocity. The joy, instead, comes from being connected to a sublime, ever-constant creative source that flowed through human history and carries humanity into the future.¹

When we can gladden someone’s heart, the unintended consequences of even the smallest act of kindness circle back to the giver. In her book In the Heart of the World, Mother Teresa recounts an event from her visit to Australia:

Some of my sisters work in Australia. On a reservation [in a remote area of the country], there was an elderly man. I can assure you that I have never seen a situation as difficult as that poor old man’s. He was completely ignored by everyone; His home was disordered and dirty.

I told him, “Please, let me clean your house, wash your clothes and make your bed.”

He answered, “I’m okay like this. Let it be.”

I said again, “You will be still better if you allow me to do it.”

He finally agreed. So I was able to clean his house and wash his clothes. I discovered a beautiful lamp, covered with dust. Only God knows how many years had passed since he had last lit it.

I said to him, “Don’t you light your lamp? Don’t you ever use it?”

He answered, “No. No one comes to see me. I have no need to light it. Who would I light it for?”

I asked, “Would you light it every night if the sisters came?”

He replied, “Of course.”

From that day on, the sisters committed themselves to visiting him every evening.

We cleaned the lamp, and the sisters would light it every evening.

Two years passed. I had completely forgotten that man.

He sent this message: “Tell my friend that the light she lit in my life continues to shine still.”

I thought it was a very small thing. We often neglect small things!²

Even if we start out with small steps on the spiritual journey leading to our true home, here too, every step counts – small steps or long strides. Every effort we make to follow the Master’s instructions counts – easy or hard. The Master knows and sees the efforts we make. The more effort that we put in, and the more generous we become in giving time in meditation, the more the Master’s grace becomes apparent.

With the Master’s grace, we will become increasingly aware that true love and true generosity are divine, and are gifts dispensed by the Master for the ultimate generous and loving act – to liberate our soul from its bondage in the endless cycle of births and deaths and return to its divine origin. As Hazur Maharaj Ji says:

First comes the grace of God, then the kindness and mercy of the Guru who initiates us into the mysteries of Nam, and finally, our own unceasing efforts to tread the path and follow the instructions.³

All we need do is dig deeper into our pockets of ‘time’ and give generously of it to our meditation practice. More practice leads to more love. Love causes us to surrender, and it is in surrender that we can merge in the Supreme Being. As the Indian mystic Sarmad wrote:

The Ocean of his boundless generosity has no shore.
The tongue is powerless to thank,
the heart too bewildered to understand.
Though my sins are many,
his compassion is greater still –
I swim in the seas of disobedience
But I do not drown.⁴

Lucinda Vardey & John Dalla Costa, Being Generous: The Art of Right Living; Knopf Canada, 2009, p. 14
Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World, New World Library, 1997, p. 53 (slightly edited)
Light on Sant Mat, p. 60
Sarmad, Martyr to Love Divine, p. 289

From Compulsive Stumbling to Conscious Living - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

From Compulsive Stumbling to Conscious Living

There have been many surveys done of the elderly around the world to find out if they had any regrets in life, and if so, what those were. A regret that was high on the list was:

I wish I had let myself be happier.

Many realized very late in life that happiness is a choice in the present and not some goal to be achieved in the future. They wished that they had not lived most of their life trying to please others, or live as was expected of them; or worry about whether they would have enough to sustain them in the future.

Everything (and everyone) around us seems to hold the remote control of how we think, what we say, how we act. We keep stumbling over one thought and onto the next. We have heard many times that our life has become one big reaction after another. At some point, one has to pause to reflect on life and wonder how we have made it this far; and what would it take to live a conscious life and make the choice of being happy.

All living beings are considered a combination of body, mind and soul (divine power or divine energy). We know we have a body, we know we have a mind. Saints advise us that these are the two instruments to be used to realize or know the soul. And it is self-realization that brings about clear understanding of a life filled with gratitude, which leads to happiness in the present moment.

If our instruments or tools are not in good condition, the task we use them for will not be completed in the most successful manner and will most definitely lead to an undesirable outcome. So, if we are seeking self-realization, let’s see how we can use awareness and a conscious approach to first ensure that these tools of the body and mind are in good working order.

This physical body, while at its foundation is genetically programmed, is primarily built on an accumulation and assimilation of food. Whatever we eat, becomes part and parcel of us. The food we eat has tremendous influence on the way we think and act, in addition to its karmic implications. Hence the adage, “you are what you eat.” That is why saints recommend a simple, vegetarian diet. A balanced diet, along with some sort of regular exercise, is considered necessary to keep the body in optimal condition.

And this approach is neither new nor based solely on recent scientific research. Since ancient times, yogis and sages have practiced vegetarianism and performed some form of physical, yogic exercises, such as hatha yoga postures, to support their meditative practices. If the body is not brought into balance, it will become obvious very quickly when we sit down to meditate that it won’t cooperate. This will result in our having aches, pains, and restlessness – not allowing for stillness. Not only the type of food, but also the quantity and time of eating, have a direct effect on meditation. Hazur Maharaj Ji has also advised us to “sleep with a light stomach.”¹ So conscious effort and decision-making are of paramount importance when we choose what ends up on our plate and goes through our lips.

Just as the physical body is made of five elements and largely is the result of the accumulation of food, the mind consists of five subtle elements and is primarily the result of an accumulation of thoughts and impressions (in addition to the influence of past karmas or sanskaras). All day, every day, we pick up the impressions of the world, and based on how conscious (or unconscious) we are of how they affect us, they tend to determine our “state of mind.”

It only makes sense to practice discretion as to what type of impressions we want to “accumulate.” Hence the saints advise us to keep good company or satsang. At the physical and mental level, attending (or listening to) satsangs, doing seva, or reading uplifting and spiritual literature play an important role in keeping negative impressions in check. But the superior tool for keeping the mind in check is the practice of meditation. The Buddhist tradition recommends:

When in public, watch your speech.
When sitting alone, watch your mind.²

Just as the first step in shedding a bad habit is becoming aware of it, the process of simran allows us to become aware of how wayward the mind is, and then gradually reins it in. This process strengthens the mind’s ability to become more conscious and clear and less reactive. With regular practice of meditation, the results of conscious thinking become exponential and spiral upwards. It is like the (mental) muscle getting stronger with each biceps curl.

The more conscious we become of our thoughts and actions, the more we are able to pause and reflect on the kind of effect they have on us and on others around us. We also become more sensitive and aware of our dependence on the universe for our existence and well-being. Everything that we need and have comes from the universe. We may not pay much attention to the tree in our backyard, but it gives us oxygen every day. Awareness of inter-dependence fills us a sense of gratitude and brings us in harmony with others, which naturally helps us in being joyful and happy every moment. In “Open Heart, Clear Mind,” the great sage Shantideva says:

Whatever joy there is in the world
All comes from desiring others to be happy,
And whatever suffering there is in the world
All comes from (selfishly) desiring ourselves to be happy
But what need is there to say much more?
The childish work for their own benefit;
The Buddhas work for the benefit of others.
Just look at the difference between them!³

Regular meditation practice as taught by a true Master enables us to live a conscious, joyous life in the present, while helping us to realize our true nature, leading to permanent happiness.

In other words, it teaches to get our own compulsive self out of our way and live our life as consciously as possible. Then there is no room for regrets.

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q. 415.
Thubten Chodron, Open Heart, Clear Mind. NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1990; p. 65.
Ibid, p. 156.

Worship - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Worship

Why do you worship lifeless stones,
what can they give you, poor soul?
How have you been so misled, fool?
You don’t consider the origin of every place of pilgrimage –
it is the One within.
The One who is worshipped at hundreds of places of pilgrimage –
That Lord lives in your heart.
Your own body is his temple, but you wander everywhere else,
Completely lost, says Dnyaneshwar.¹

Wherever we look, in all human cultures across the world and throughout recorded history, we can glean information; we see people performing worship of one sort or another. It seems to be an innate quality of the human species – that we feel a drive to honour the divine to improve ourselves. Often this is tied into the structure of society, and people are expected to take part, even if they are none too sure.

The modern, western world seems to be the exception to this overall trend – most people never even consider taking time out to perform acts of devotion, but just carry on doing what they feel important for their own lives. And then feel empty. Those who do engage in worship, though, are at least sincere in their efforts, which is good.

The forms that worship takes are many and various, often elaborate and sometimes out and out bizarre, so often one of the first things we learn about an unknown culture is their prevalent form of worship. Usually, people go to a special place associated with devotion – and in the case of pilgrimages that can involve a lot of effort, time, expense, and air miles. Once at that place of devotion, there are rules of behaviour (such as removing shoes, wearing or removing hats, speaking in hushed tones, etc.) and usually some ceremonial actions, like ringing a bell, dipping fingers into holy water or bowing down, and most often, an offering or sacrifice.

The details of costume, actions, expectations, and set-up of the devotional space may make those participating feel at home and help them focus their devotional feelings, and may well be entertaining to outsiders, but are they important? Great Master wrote in Philosophy of the Masters:

The [Sanskrit] word puja [worship]… means to serve or praise some higher and sublimer being than one’s self in order to gain spiritual benefit. Nowadays wherever one looks one finds only outer worship prevalent. [All] religions are engaged in outer worship. Churches, gurdwaras, mosques and mandirs are all religious places. In the same way, all religious books deserve to be venerated. But people regard bowing their heads and offering flowers before them as worship.²

Performing ceremonies, or watching a priest or other advocate perform them, and bringing an offering are easy ways to show our devotion, but it is all too easy to get caught up in the outer form and forget the main reason for going to all this trouble. Great Master tells us that the whole point is to gain spiritual benefit – to develop ourselves spiritually, to improve our relationship with the Divine. I think we all start out with that intention, but then all too often find ourselves getting distracted by the tendency of the mind to pull us to the external expression of that devotion, because that is what we are used to.

Even in the satsang hall, we find find ourselves pulled to rites and rituals – like the habit of folding hands to the stage when we arrive, of removing shoes, and so on. Each of these start out as a form of showing respect, or helping us to focus the mind, but too often they become empty rituals, devoid of meaning. Obviously, we should be respectful and aim to foster a devotional attitude, but we must be very careful that the mind does not lead us gently into the distraction of thinking our little rituals are important in their own right.

All too often we find that feeling of respect and devotion morphing into piety, which can (ironically) make us feel proud of our levels of devotion and even start to look down on those who do not keep to our “high standards.” Before we know it, we are boasting about how humble we are! It happens automatically if we are not very vigilant, watching out for the subtle tricks of the mind.

Hazur Maharaj Ji reminds us:

All of us try to worship God in the way that we think to be best, for the inclination of the soul is always towards its source. No doubt we do search for God, but when we search, we follow the dictates of our mind. Such worship can never free us from the cycle of births and deaths and can never take us to our true home. Our true home is Sach Khand, the fifth spiritual region, while the domain of the mind extends only up to the second spiritual region. It is only through devotion to the “music of the spheres,” the Word or the Name, that our mind can become pure and reach its own source, thus making it possible for the soul to return to the Lord. Not every form of worship leads to God-realization. ³

As Soami Ji Maharaj writes:

Now that you have been blessed with a human form,
devote yourself to bhakti and burn away your karmas …
Give up apathy, detach yourself from the world,
then prepare and drink the ambrosia of the Name.
Be on your guard against the mind and serve your Master.
Radha Soami has revealed to you the sublime mystery.⁴

The mind originates from the second spiritual region, but there are many more stages yet, before we reach our final destination, so how can following the urges of the mind ever lead us to the pure spiritual regions? In our day-to-day functioning, we rely on the mind to help us negotiate all our activities, so we imagine that even when it comes to the spiritual the mind will be able to guide us, but it is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Fortunately for us, we have someone with the clarity of vision to help guide us when we do get caught up in these distractions. Our Master spends a lot of his time unpicking the little knots of ceremony we have accidentally tied, which have become a hindrance on our spiritual path. Why did he have to stop us from having bhandaras and tea after satsang? Because they were becoming a distraction from what was important – the actual discourse playing second fiddle to the buffet.

It is a general trend with everybody who wishes to express devotion and find a form of worship, that we start getting led down the garden path by the mind, with its love of variety and entertainment and secret mission to keep us far away from contact with the soul. Where there is no enlightened spiritual master, where we are left to our own devices, we can get very lost indeed – even going to worship of objects with devotional connections only, believing that external ceremonies alone are enough to improve ourselves and gain unity with the Divine, offering sacrifices of material objects – or even, in extreme cases, of other living creatures, in the belief that this will please God.

This is where Dnyaneshwar picks up the theme in his poem. It is quite common for people to make statues to worship, or even special stones believed to have some spiritual power or influence. He says:

Why do you worship lifeless stones?
What can they give you, poor soul?
How have you been so misled, fool?

No matter how pretty the painting of the stone or statue, or how well we decorate it, or how nice the niche or plinth we place it in or on, it remains a stone. It can’t even breathe or move, so why are we, humans – the top of creation – giving it our time and attention? The most we can hope to gain is a focal point for our devotion, but quite often people believe their wishes can be fulfilled and problems solved by the stone. We really are kidding ourselves.

He continues:

You don’t consider the origin of every place of pilgrimage –
it is the One within.
The One who is worshipped at hundreds of places of pilgrimage –
That Lord lives in your heart.

When we visit religious sites, be they churches, temples, or even holy glades or rivers, they are only made special by our sense of devotion, by the fact that the Lord is within us and we have brought Him with us, as it were. Without the presence of devotees, that place is no more holy than the car park at the supermarket. By letting ourselves get caught up in the external form – the nice site, the history, the resident holy men or ladies – we are moving away from the place we can really find God – within our own hearts.

There is a nice little point here that Dnyaneshwar slips in – that all different sites of pilgrimage, whatever the religious background – are all dedicated to the same one Lord. When it comes to devotion, there are no distinctions between race, culture, caste or religion, because all souls are equal, all perfect tiny replicas of that same Lord. Our mind creates that sense of distinction, of difference, because it loves to divide and categorize to understand things, and maybe, also to make us feel superior, which is clearly not in the best interests of the soul. The poem continues:

Your own body is his temple,
but you wander everywhere else,
completely lost, says Dnyaneshwar.

And he is not on his own when he describes the body as the Lord’s true temple. In the Bible we read:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple
and that God’s spirit dwells in you?...
for God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.⁵

In the same vein, Sant Tulsi Sahib wrote:

Cleanse the sanctuary of your heart to welcome the Beloved.
Remove your attention from all else to make room for him
to be seated within.
Look with your mind’s eye at all the drama
that takes place around you –
so many captivating scenes to torment your heart!
One heart, with countless desires,
yet it continues to lust after even more.
Where then is there room to seat the Beloved?
What a great pity!
He who dwells in the natural mosque of the body
visits artificial temples and mosques, only to suffer in misery.
Within the arch of the natural Ka’bah, listen with rapt attention:
a voice resounds from your original abode,
calling you back home.
Why do you stumble and wander about in search of the Friend?⁶

Hazur Maharaj Ji commented on this poem saying:

Where do we try to seek God, the fountainhead of the soul and source of all energy? We seek him in the stone mosques and earthen temples which we build with our own hands. How absurd it is that instead of searching for God in the temple that He himself made for His residence in this world, we try to find Him in the houses which we build with bricks and stones.

The human body is the temple of God, and He dwells within it. Christ, Guru Nanak, Mohammed, and the founders of all religions agree on this point. But, ignoring their clear dictum – “The kingdom of God is within you” – we try to find it in churches, mosques and temples.⁷

So in this hymn, Tulsi Sahib is saying to Taqi, concerning his visit to Mecca, that the real Ka’aba is within us and this forehead of ours is its arch. Concentrate your thoughts between your eyebrows and listen intently in the centre of this arch. You will hear a sweet melody, which flows from the highest heaven. This celestial music is resounding within the body of every human being, no matter which race, religion or country he may belong to. This voice of God constantly calls us towards itself.

As the Maharashtrian mystic Tukaram wrote:

The Lord has built a house, a house as small as a sesame seed,
and He dwells within.
This house is as small as an atom, but it is filled with light.
That focus as small as a sesame seed contains the three worlds.
The form of the Lord comes and goes in that focus.
This focus, says Tuka, is filled with three worlds.⁸

Here Tukaram is referring to the eye centre, here in the forehead, which is the tiny point of focus that we try to settle on when meditating. It is described as being as small as a sesame seed or an atom, to emphasize how one-pointed our concentration needs to be to gain access, and yet it is filled with light and contains the three worlds.

How? Because this is the spiritual departure lounge. It is from here that our soul and mind gather together and take off out of the physical plane to access the astral and higher. The rules of physics, that we have learnt in order to stay safe in the world of time and space, no longer apply. We have left the physical and are in a whole other kind of environment, where we have access to universes beyond our imagination and, even better, we can meet the Lord in His own home or temple.

When we talk of worship in the normal sense, there always seems to me to be a feeling of duty and sacrifice. As if it is something we have to do, even if we don’t particularly want to. We have to give something up, go along with whatever is required of us, for some far-off gain, or even just to try to ward off some sort of harm. Most uninspiring!

What if there was a form of worship that demands minimal sacrifice and is joyful and fulfilling?

This is exactly the sort of worship that Tukaram is describing. We enter the Lord’s temple by concentrating within ourselves, where we gain access to the light, music, love and supreme contentment that comes from contact with the Shabd, or Word of God within. In reality it is all around us, all the time – the universe is made of it and derives energy from it, but we are pulled outwards by the mind’s obsession with what the senses have to show us and cannot see, hear or feel it.

When we meditate, we start to gather back all the dissipated strands of attention, so that we can sit, poised and still at the eye centre. Then we refocus away from the world and begin to perceive and understand the power behind it, that creative force we call Shabd, Nam, Word, or Spirit of God. And that is real worship.

It is a joyful process, immediately rewarding, purifying and fulfilling. We learn that we are beloved children, that the Lord was always waiting and longing for us to return here, where we belong. Why would we choose to be anywhere else? Why would we choose to do the humdrum mind-led external worship that is nowhere near as enjoyable? As Great Master wrote:

The Lord is the basic substance or essence of all forms and of the formless. How can we worship Him? The Lord as the Shabd or Name pervades the whole of the universe. Name and Shabd are the Lord, and worship of them is worship of Him. The Saints teach that real worship consists of remembrance and repetition of the Name of the Lord.⁹

Our true worship is simply remembrance, and the repetition given by the Master at the time of initiation, that teaches us how to refocus and hence to encounter the Shabd within. The Shabd is the Lord’s dynamic creative form within the universe and so provides us an interface, which we can learn to love and worship.

Such worship does demand sacrifice – mainly of our time, the 2½ hours we promise to dedicate daily to the meditation practice. We also have a sacrifice of devotion – we learn to turn away from the old obsessions and attachments. We have to mould ourselves into disciples, learn to live in devotion, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Part of this devotion is to follow those three other vows we commit to when we receive initiation – firstly, to eat only lacto-vegetarian food, avoiding anything to do with meat, fish or eggs. Secondly, to avoid substances that agitate and confuse the mind – alcohol and mind-altering drugs and those that create addiction, such as tobacco, because we are meant to be free as a bird, to come and go in the spiritual realms. Thirdly, we try to live a life of high moral standards, making ourselves fit to be the Lord’s own disciple. If we remember Tulsi Sahib – “Cleanse the sanctuary of your heart to welcome the Beloved” – well, this is how we do that.

Live clean, learn to behave with purity of thought, word and deed, and keep the damage we do to innocent creatures around us to an absolute minimum. Then we are on our way to becoming a true disciple.

However, there is more still that we need. Many a devoted soul seeking God has taken on vegetarianism, kept away from mind-altering substances, and lived the most exemplary lives. They have dedicated themselves to worship, devotion and meditation, sometimes giving up all contact with family and friends, living in monasteries or distant forests, but have failed to find liberation of the soul. There is one vital ingredient missing from the recipe – the living spiritual master.

Without him we are trying to make bread without adding yeast – that living ingredient without which the dough will not rise – will just be a lump of wet flour. Shabd is our interface in the universe with the Lord, but it, of itself, is hidden to us and totally unknown to most people, even to those who have studied their holy books. The keeper of the secret, and our first encounter with Shabd, is the Master – it is he who sets us straight, cutting through the nonsense generated by the mind, who gives us clear and simple instructions on how to approach life for the maximum spiritual benefit.

And, most vitally, it is he who takes on responsibility for the soul, uprooting it from its toe-hold on the cliff of the world and planting it in his own luxurious nursery, where it can thrive and grow properly, tended and nurtured by him. He teaches us the proper method of meditation, and then gives us the pass key that will unlock the doors to the spiritual realms beyond.

He is our focus for dedication and devotion, one who is fully aware of his inner reality as soul, as part of the Lord, reunited and complete. He lives here on earth with us so we can see how he lives, ask him our questions, resolve our doubts and thoroughly fall in love. It is vital that we nurture our relationship with the master, because we need that anchor for our souls in this stormy world.

God is love, so our main job as disciples is to develop love, to live it in our lives, diving deep into the ocean of love, and that starts with love for the master. We change our lifestyle because he asked us to, we meditate to please him, we look for him when we try to focus. Eventually, our dedication to the physical form matures into love for the Shabd form of our master, but the relationship with the physical is absolutely essential.

Only through the form of worship that the Lord recommends do we develop that relationship – meditation. Master asks us to put in the time – love and devotion will make that time more powerful, but even if we don’t feel that love, we still need to give the time. Like any skill, it will take time and practice for our meditation to mature, but only by putting in the time will we be rewarded with love, which improves the meditation, which brings us more love – and so on.

Step by tiny step, one atom at a time, we learn to discipline the mind, to teach it to settle and focus within at the time of meditation, so we can clear the muddy waters of the mind and finally see clearly. We are spring-cleaning our hearts, our inner selves; the accumulated filth of millennia of wasted lives is in there, so we cannot expect it to be a quick and easy job. There is no value in putting off this most vital work, even if it is difficult initially.

If we have been accepted by the master and given the pass key to the Divine, we have a golden opportunity and we need to roll up our sleeves, put on our overalls and get down to working on cleaning and sorting out the mind. Every second we dedicate to this work will be generously rewarded by our master, well out of proportion to the effort we have made. We stand to gain access to the hidden heart of the universe and the expressway back to the Lord – the Shabd. This is our worship, within the temple of the human body, as recommended by the Lord himself.

Niloba, a Maharastrian saint, described what we see when we finally manage to settle out the detritus of the mind:

Astounding, this light, so different –
even with eyes closed you see it.
It was never lit, nor does it ever go out –
the luminous soul makes it shine eternally.
No colour, yet all colours, this light is illumined by life itself.
Nila says, Today God, in his grace, used my offering
of the lamp of devotion
simply as an excuse to let me experience this light.¹⁰

We are so blessed to be who we are – life may be tough, may not be going the way we hoped, but actually, the most important things are exactly where we need them to be. We inhabit the human form, we have the opportunity to consider the Lord, and we have been accepted into the VIP lounge of contact with a true spiritual master. Now we need to make the most of every moment of our charmed lives to worship the Lord, to sort out the mind, and to spend as much time in the presence of the Shabd as we can, through our meditation.

Then we leave the rest to Him.
Prepare to be astonished by grace!

Many Voices, One Song, p. 243.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 3, p. 31.
Maharaj Charan Singh, The Path, p.113.
Soami Ji Maharaj, Sar Bachan Poetry (Bachan 15, Shabd 10), p. 145.
Bible, 1 Corinthians 3:16–17.
Tulsi Sahib, Sant Bani, 44–45 in Tulsi Sahib: Saint of Hathras, p. 230.
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Sant Mat, p. 51.
Many Voices, One Song, p. 67.
Maharaj Sawan Singh, Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. 3, p. 35.
Many Voices, One Song, p. 240.

The Days of Our Lives - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

The Days of Our Lives

Several years ago, when I was going through a hard time, a childhood friend, who is not initiated, said to me: “You’re vegetarian; you don’t drink or take drugs, you meditate – and you’re still a hot mess! What’s the matter with you?” I would have been mortified if I hadn’t been laughing so hard. My reply was something like: “Imagine how much more messed up I’d be if I didn’t meditate and abstain from meat, drink, and drugs?” She couldn’t argue with that.

Clearly, I’m not a good example of the teachings – although my old friend does admit that I’ve stuck with this path for 50 years and that I do seem happier (most of the time) as the decades slip by.

Many of us, when we received initiation, imagined that we’d “go within,” see the radiant form of the Master, and/or hear the Shabd in a matter of a few years at most. We’d work very hard, overcome our weaknesses, see the Master in person as often as possible, and inner bliss would be our reward – along with a successful career and a lovely family.

But at a certain point we had to concede that perhaps our spiritual journey was not like driving from New York to Los Angeles in three days when we were young college students, capable of surviving with little sleep and few material comforts. As we aged and experienced the normal ups and downs of life, it dawned on us that this path is a long and winding road, traveled at the pace of a slow trudge rather than a quick leap across time and space in a blaze of astral glory.

It’s a good thing. Baba Ji has been emphasizing the importance of learning from our experience and from our mistakes. Those of us initiated at a relatively young age who have survived into older age can see the long arc of our lives and realize how all the twists and turns have formed the destiny that was ours to go through, come to terms with, and learn from. The illnesses, the failures, the losses, the dark years – along with the joys and triumphs – have deepened our appreciation of the mysteries of life and our tremendous good fortune to have been initiated into this path of the sound current. Oh yes, we’ve made mistakes, taken some wrong turns … but here we still are, struggling and striving, learning and growing. Here we still are, grateful to be initiated, to have a Master, to have the opportunity every day to deepen our relationship with him and do better.

We’ve learned so much: that we really don’t know anything at all, especially about spirituality; that we need to take responsibility for our actions; that nothing in this world can make us truly happy; that nothing here lasts – not the happiness or the sorrow, the pleasure or the pain; that the Master really does seem to have our backs. Even when we can’t feel his presence, we sense that our lives are working out for the best, especially when we don’t get what we thought we wanted. We’ve learned that it’s really true: the Master does not judge us; he wants us to succeed more than we do; if we keep looking forward and not back, keep looking inward and not out, we will be guided and supported.

Baba Ji has often said that the Shabd and inner experience are not what we think they are. Indeed, traveling on this path is not what we thought it would be. We get to be grateful for and appreciate all that he’s given us, all that he’s done for us. But as he has said, everyone needs something to look forward to. One thing we can count on: the best is yet to come.

Just being grateful - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Just being grateful

When we truly meditate, then “I” just disappears. Then we realize His grace – that but for Him how could we ever think or even attend to it. Then there is no “I”, there is nothing but gratefulness ─ everything in gratitude.¹

Maharaj Charan Singh, the predecessor of the present spiritual teacher, Baba Gurinder Singh, touches upon the essence of the meditative process in the above quotation from the guide to meditation, Die to Live.

Realized masters, called ‘Sants’ in the Indian spiritual tradition, express themselves in golden words. Their answers to questions from their disciples in Question and Answer sessions are precious treasures to be cherished. The direct interaction between the spiritual teacher and his followers, either in a physical setting or (these days during the pandemic) in a virtual setting, sparks off unique dynamics. It’s always inspiring and often moving to be witness to the way the Beas masters give their undivided attention to questions from their disciples. On the one hand, it is a one-on-one exchange; on the other it is a universal message they’re sharing with their audience.

How often does Baba Ji, in the Q& A sessions broadcast online, emphasize that we need to appreciate what we’ve been given and show our gratitude, not by talking the path but by walking the path? It’s interesting to have a closer look at the etymology of the words ‘grateful’ and ‘gratitude’. They stem from the Latin word gratus, meaning beloved, pleasing.²

Our efforts at meditation are nothing but actions to please our beloved master. In our lifelong struggle to walk the path, we’re building up a relationship with the Divine. That is an intimate affair between the soul and its Creator, the heavenly Father. It’s taking place outside the boundaries that the “I”, our ego, imposes on our being. There’s no personal involvement whatsoever. When we’re meditating, we are engaged in a spiritual process, resulting in nothingness or emptiness – nothing or empty, because the ego has no part to play there. And there’s the rub!

When it is said that we’re on the path of becoming nothing, the path of doing nothing, we should keep in mind that we’re walking with the inner master. In other words, we are constantly seeking the presence of the Divine – becoming nothing, empty of thoughts, losing our ego identity to become another being. It is our true being, whose core is love. Once we start experiencing something of this state of being, we get flooded with otherworldly emotions. Feelings of tranquillity, stillness, and peace of mind suffuse our being. The pull from within becomes so strong that there is no resisting it. We’re becoming absolutely helpless, deeply sensing our own insignificance. A sense of purpose, always keeping our true objective in front of us, takes hold. We’re moving away from the world and coming closer to the Spirit within.

He’s the One who is pulling us from within. He’s the One who is creating that desire in us to meditate. He’s the One who’s giving us that atmosphere and those circumstances and environments in which we can build our meditation. He worships himself in us.³

Maharaj Charan Singh beautifully explains that we are really doing nothing. It’s all the Father’s play, a divine play. We’re left with nothing, we only have to be – to be grateful for those opportunities that life is giving to us; and from a deeper understanding, accepting what is coming our way; seeing his hand, the working of the Divine behind everything.

What incredible blessings have been bestowed on us! Initiation is our boarding pass for the ship of Nam. Our Satguru is the helmsman, taking us to the port of destination. We’re safe on the ship of Nam, forever under his guidance and protection. We’re on the greatest journey ever. At the same time, everything is taking place in the here and now. Self-realization will precede God-realization. It’s a superhuman task, and the masters say that we can do it. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been initiated. We are encouraged by being given an occasional glimpse of what it means to follow in His footsteps. There is so much joy, a deep sense of fulfillment in being obedient and doing what pleases him the most. We need discipline and perseverance, but more than anything else, we need to be filled with yearning.

Who makes us yearn? It’s not our meditation. It is the Father himself. He uproots us from here and takes us to his own level. Practically, we do nothing. You can take credit that you sit for two or three hours, but there is something which makes you sit. It’s not you. Left to you, you would never even sit for five minutes. So if you see this from the higher point of view, it’s definitely the Father who is pulling us up to his own level. It’s not our efforts at all.⁴

Maharaj Charan Singh, Die to Live, Q. 364
H.C. Wyld, The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1956)
Die to Live, Q. 364
Die to Live, Q. 365

Vast Joy - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Vast Joy

Ask anyone what they want out of life and you will get no end of variety of answers. Then ask them why they want those things and the field narrows down considerably, dig a little deeper and the prime motives driving us are safety, love and happiness. Why is happiness so important?

Even Baba Ji has made it clear that all he wants from us is to be good human beings and to be happy.

The vast majority of people seek contentment. Most people are looking for happiness and do get some, but always it fades away after some time. Why is that?

Two main reasons: firstly it is important where we look for our happiness (more of this in a moment) and secondly, this region of the grander universe – the region of space-time – is ever-changing. Nothing here is permanent, not the planets nor stars, not the size of the universe nor our position in the stream of time, not our feeble human bodies. Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher, is quoted by Plato:

Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still. And likening existing things to the stream of a river, he says that you would not step twice into the same river.¹

Maybe we’re fools for thinking we can be happy in the long term – and there are plenty of people to back this concept up, but maybe actually it is possible, we just need to know how. And now, we need to be happy to make Baba Ji happy, so it has to be possible.

So, let’s revisit the point that it matters where we look for our happiness. Yet again we have two main viewpoints – the worldly and the spiritual. What does the world tell us – nay, shout at us? To be happy you need stuff – the right brand of tea or coffee, the nicest clothing, a big house, plenty of cash in the bank, a swanky car. Still not happy? Maybe then you need a holiday, to exercise more, join a golf club, start a new relationship. Still not happy? Then you’re clearly not trying hard enough – change your diet, change your job, change your home town, change your nose, have a bigger bottom or a smaller one. Keep looking out and around, it must be here somewhere!

It is all too easy to get on this particular merry-go-round, so enticing are the claims and so noisy and ever-present. But we all know in our heart of hearts that it’s never going to work. If it hasn’t worked so far, yet more of the same is really not going to work any better.

So, let’s examine the other option – the spiritual approach. In Light on Saint John, Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said:

In order to find peace we have to undertake research within ourselves. We must have a spiritual outlook. A political, economic, [or] social outlook can never give us peace. They will improve our physical environment, they will improve our standard of living, but perhaps in the long run these things will make us even more unhappy and frustrated.

Real peace and happiness we can get only from within ourselves. Unless we make an effort within to seek that real peace, we can never get it. The nearer we are towards our home, towards our destination, towards the Lord, the greater the peace and happiness we will find within ourselves. The more we wander away from Him, the more frustrated and unhappy we become every day.²

It is interesting that in this passage, Hazur equates happiness with peace – if we think about it, our happiest times are associated with a sense of peace and contentment, whereas from the worldly point of view we are led to believe that stimulation and novelty are required for happiness. The further out and away, they say, the closer to happiness. There’s a new concept – FOMO, which means “Fear of Missing Out,” which is the feeling and anxiety that others are having more fun, living better lives, or experiencing better things than you are. This feeling is often exacerbated by social media sites. It is that belief that “out there” is where we need to put our attention to find happiness.

In complete contrast, Hazur advises us that looking outwards for our happiness is looking in the wrong direction. Instead of churning around in the choppy waters at the surface of the ocean of existence, he says that peace and happiness are to be found by diving deep down, where the agitation of the surface waters won’t affect us. How do we do this? Of course, it comes back at last to meditation!

We are made of three distinct parts – body, mind and soul. If we are to find true happiness, contentment and peace, these three need to be in balance. The body needs to be rested, fed, kept active and clean. The mind needs to be calm and disciplined, and the soul needs the Lord.

The problem is, we are very familiar with the body and most of our daily efforts are designed to keep it clothed, fed, and so forth. We’re fairly familiar with the mind, especially when it is getting agitated, upset or even unwell, and we have some understanding on how to help it out. However, the soul gets a very raw deal, because we have completely forgotten about it. Many people don’t even believe the soul exists, or deeply doubt it, and those who do generally confuse the soul with the mind, and only very rarely are people familiar with their soul – indeed those who have experience of the soul are advanced practitioners, saints or masters.

The majority of our consciousness is felt through the mind, but the source of that very consciousness is the soul, so satisfying the urges, desires, or needs of the mind can never give us peace until the needs of the soul have been addressed.

In our many and various explorations of the physical plane – through many bodies and species – we originally were operating from consciousness of the soul, via mind and body, but gradually we have slipped to allowing the mind to take over and the soul has been quietly forgotten, tucked into a dark and quiet corner out of the way, so the mind can get on with its shenanigans unhindered. The soul is not being fed; it is not getting time with its family – the Lord – so it is weak and utterly miserable. How do we ever hope to find lasting happiness in such a state?

Meditation is our only means of satisfying the soul, settling the churning agitations of the mind with simran (repetition of five holy names given at the time of initiation), and contacting the creative energy of God within through bhajan. This may manifest as sound, light, or just a feeling of inner peace. This is how we feed the soul, allowing it to find contentment and peace, and there is great joy to be found in this practice. Great Master writes in Spiritual Gems:

In this world it is difficult to find a happy person. One thing or the other is always going wrong, and man finds himself miserable and care-worn. Only he who has taken his attention in and hears the clear bell sound is free from worries and cares of this world. Man takes birth here and his destiny comes with him. This destiny cannot be changed. Man has to undergo it. The destiny is of his own making. What he had sown before, he reaps now. Therefore, the wise undergo their destiny with patience and fortitude, while the unwise undergo it all the same, but are dissatisfied and worried.

Lasting peace and happiness are within us. Peace and happiness derived from worldly objects and companions are transitory, because they are not lasting. They change and in time vanish. Their attachment leaves behind scars which disfigure life. Therefore, while working for a decent, comfortable life, one should not lose sight of the aim of life – permanent peace. By the very nature of things, this is not obtainable in the matter and mind regions, because these are themselves changeable. As one is going in and up, one is getting independent of the changeables and finds peace in spiritual regions. Peace is excellent, but is obtained through effort.³

If one were to look up on YouTube the TED conference talks on happiness, there are many inspiring talks – one of my favourites tells of how we can choose to be happy, and another tells of how we make a great mistake when we allow external circumstances to dictate our feelings. Great Master resonates with them when he warns us that our destiny of life is always going to bring ups and downs. Even when we don’t like it, we can’t really argue with it, because we have generated the circumstances ourselves in past lives. It simply has to happen, like a bitter medicine to get us better from some illness.

But we should not let these things sway us from seeking the lasting and inner happiness; rather we should use them as lessons for our mental maturity and motivation to help us find inner peace. He advises us to go through life with patience and fortitude. Great Master used to say that we cannot clear the path of life of all its thorns, to walk in bare feet, for tomorrow those thorns will spring up again, but rather to put on stout boots, so the thorns cannot harm us.

By choosing to meditate, we are putting on the stoutest boots, for our experience of the tranquillity and satisfaction when we find focus in meditation allows us to see the external events and dramas for what they really are – a show and a sham.

Chokha Mela, a Maharashtrian saint, advised:

Being in the world, don’t be here.
Make your mind take this advice.
Even a few minutes –
don’t leave them empty of the company of mystics
and the enjoyment of the Name.
Drive your passions away like stray dogs,
then happiness will come on its own to your home.
If you let the passions stay, says Chokha,
you’ll be ridiculed and miserable
and your life will come to nothing.⁴

The events of our life are going to happen whether we approve or not, and they are not the source of our happiness, contentment or peace, for we know plenty of people whose life circumstances are very favourable, but who are dissatisfied or even downright miserable. Much rarer are those whose life is difficult, who have little in the way of material advantage, but who are content with what they have.

Chokha Mela is explaining that the secret of happiness is in cleansing the mind of the poison of the passions – meaning those negative habits we have developed by going native in this dark basement of creation, which are greed, lust, egotism, attachment and anger. We have gotten into the habit of reacting to the circumstances around us with one or more of these negative habits, so much so that changing this tendency is going to take considerable effort. Indeed, we cannot do this alone. We can make a start using the support of general good behaviour, or the prescriptions of religions, but to be truly and permanently free of these passions we need have the support of the saints and contact with the Name within.

What is the Name? This refers not to a specific word or name in a human language, but to a power that emanates from God – God- in-action, also known as Shabd, Nam, Tao, Holy Name, Word of God, Holy Spirit, Ism-e-azam and many other names, according to the culture describing it. It is the conscious creative energy that underpins all that we see here, all that ever was and ever will be – the building bricks of the universe.

The Name is the original source of the energy that produces quarks and bosons and gluons that combine to make atoms, which combine to make the molecules that build the physical world. But not just this physical world, but the innumerable finer more spiritual worlds that we access only when we tune into the vibrations of this energy. Saint John put it like this:

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him
was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.⁵

This Name or Word comes directly from God and is the interface we connect to when we focus our attention during meditation. To cleanse ourselves properly of the passions, we need to bathe regularly in the Light and Sound of this creative Power.

Choka Mela also talks of keeping the company of saints and mystics every minute of every day – surely this is an idealistic notion and totally impractical! Well actually, it is possible, although not in this physical plane. We are so used to thinking body/physical that we immediately think he means us to move to Dera and follow Baba Ji around all day. Clearly not!

To have the company of mystics every moment, we need to think spiritually. The true form of the saint is that very Name of God. Similarly, the true form of the disciple is soul, so to be in their company all the time, we need to connect soul with Name and dwell in the awareness of that connection. And if we have this particular connection open all the time, how could we ever get angry, selfish, greedy, or lustful? All the toxic attachments to the physical would be dissolved too, for we are saturated in something so much more fulfilling. And that will bring contentment, peace, and great joy.

Hazur Maharaj Ji put it very well in a reply to a question found in Die to Live:

Simran looks dry, but the concentration that you get with simran alone gives you peace and bliss and happiness. The more your mind is concentrated, the more happy you are; the more your mind is scattered, the more frustrated you are. As long as the mind is below the eye centre towards the senses, you can never be happy – there’s nothing but frustration and agony. But when you’re able to withdraw your consciousness to the eye centre and still your mind, you feel bliss and contentment and happiness. And simran is the only way that you can withdraw your consciousness to the eye centre.⁶

If we have access to simran, we have the key to happiness right there with us, we just need to apply ourselves to learning to use it. It really is a no-brainer if ever there was one. Here I am, feeling unhappy, frustrated, anxious or whatever, but I have the answer to my problems right here inside me – simran with focus and devotion. Now it’s up to me to decide whether or not to use this key, but really – why would one not bother?

It’s like having the packet mix for an amazing chocolate cake and hoping that just looking at the box will satisfy our chocolate cravings. We need to make the effort to turn the oven on, pull out the mixing bowl and get stirring, and before we know it, we have a lovely cake that we can enjoy and spread the joy by sharing with our friends or family.

Baba Ji has done all the heavy lifting for us by connecting us with the Shabd or Name, giving us the access codes and training us up to using them. No wonder he gets frustrated – all we have to do is follow his instructions and fearlessness, peace, bliss and happiness stand ready to serve us. The Maharashtrian saint Eknath wrote:

O, mind, don’t keep going from door to door,
You’ve suffered too much coming and going.
Abandon your fantasies and come to the mystics–
it’s all happiness close to them.
Anguish and attachment burn away in the darshan of your Master;
Sin, passion and fear of Kal run away.
Do your devotion and see how close he is.
See him inside and find vast joy, say Eknath.⁷

Again, we hear from Eknath that wandering about “door to door” – looking for happiness and fulfillment out there – is futile, even damaging. All we are doing is adding to our store of karmic debt, the very thing that is burying the soul and keeping us away from our divine origins and the happiness that we have been seeking for so long. Eknath mentions ‘coming and going’ – referring to the soul’s constant wandering through different and diverse bodies.

We have taken the form of birds, animals, plants, microbes – even angels, demons and gods through the unimaginable reaches of time that we have inhabited the physical and mental realms. Physicists have calculated that the universe we know has been around for about 13.7 billion years and is still in its infancy, but our souls have not been confined to just this universe, so who knows for how long we have been around in total. So many lives, so many experiences, so much karmic detritus to clear out!

No wonder it takes a lot of effort to cleanse and still the mind. For how long have we been seeking pleasure, experience, novelty out there? Old habits die hard, but here we have a golden opportunity to reject the old habits and build new ones, but it goes against the grain – not only within ourselves, but everything we see around us also is pulling in the outward direction.

However, we can take comfort in the fact that we wouldn’t be here if our souls hadn’t reached the end of their patience with the mind and its terrible behaviour. Having sunk so deep in the mire, we have finally reached the very bottom, felt a hard floor and kicked against it to work back to the surface. Our desperate struggles have captured the attention of the Lord, who sends the spiritual lifeguard to help us. As long as we trust him and accept his help, follow his instructions and dedicate ourselves to finding a better way, he will pull us out of this mire as fast as possible.

Eknath says that the darshan of the Master has a healing quality, but he’s not talking here about physical darshan. Seeing the Master in a meeting, or even out and about during seva, is lovely, there’s no doubt, but it is a reflection of a shadow of the real thing that is only obtainable within. Only by working on improving our focus and devotion, and cleansing the mind of bad habits with regular daily practice can we have inner darshan.

To help us achieve this, the Masters advise four simple rules of living. The first minimizes the making of new karma – for we have quite enough to cope with as it is – and that is to be lacto-vegetarian, leaving aside meat, fish and eggs, or their derivatives. There is no medical need for animal-derived foods; indeed being vegetarian is better for our health and that of the planet, and, of course, we do not want to be causing unnecessary suffering. Secondly, they advise us to avoid alcohol, mind-altering drugs and addictive substances, for they get us into unnecessary trouble and become an artificial crutch for difficult times. They also make it way harder to settle and focus the mind, which is already a monumental task in itself.

The third rule is to be as good a human being as we can – living honestly, respecting and helping others, earning our own living – in short to be a real goody two-shoes! We are trying to cleanse the mind of all impurities, so we need to live a life that is virtuous. We’ll never be perfect, but we can at least try to be good. These three rules help to prepare us for the fourth – that of daily meditation for 2 ½ hours. This is a tenth of our time to be given to the single most important project in our lives, so I’d say that’s a bargain. Of course, if we can manage more time, every little bit helps. I know Master wouldn’t complain!

So, with these good habits, we can start to undo some of the damage we have caused ourselves with our old bad habits. Step by step, by tiny increments, we move towards our goal. And who do we find there? Eknath tells us – none other than our Master.

“Do your devotion and see how close he is, keep him inside and find vast joy” – the Master’s inner or spiritual form is none other than Shabd, Name, Word of God, and we are made of that – it is our very life. That’s how close he is, it is all a matter of realization, then we will not only be happy, but find vast joy. Knowing he is right here gives us such confidence that none of the ups and downs of life can touch us. Eknath says, “Sin, passion and fear of Kal run away” – then we will really be pure and joyful.

Once we find our way to him within, he will guide us in person from there through the many mental and spiritual stages that ultimately lead us back to our original home with the Lord. Without him, we cannot complete our quest, for there are insurmountable barriers for the unprepared. In the Persian hymn cycle “Angad Roshnan,” from the Manichean tradition, as quoted in The Gospel of Jesus, we find:

I shall show to you the Mother of the Beings of Light:
forever shall you rejoice in lauded happiness.
I shall reveal to you the holy Brethren,
the noble [ones]… who are filled with happiness.
Forever shall you [dwell] joyful among them all,
beside all the jewels and the venerable gods.
Fear and death shall overtake you no more,
nor ravages, distress and wretchedness.
Rest shall be yours in the Place of Salvation,
in the company of all the gods
and those who dwell in peace.⁸

The treasures that we are due to inherit, once we make it past the barrier of the mind, are vast and unimaginable. By holding back from plunging into devotion, we are depriving ourselves of so much. The writer describes the “Mother of the Beings of Light,” which is another reference to the Holy Name, for this brings us back to our original state as beings of light. We will become one of the holy Brethren and we shall finally find rest from all the struggles and fears we face in this corner of creation.

So, when Baba Ji said he just wanted us to be happy, he meant that he just wants us to turn up and claim our spiritual birthright. To set things back to where they ought to be – this is the normality, not those terrible troubles we have become so accustomed to.

If we have been given initiation, we have the means to find this wonderful treasure, our inner peace and vast joy. Now we just have to do our bit and turn up for meditation.

Plato, Cratylus 402A, in The Presocratic Philosophers, by GS Kirk, JE Raven, M Schofield, Cambridge Univ. Press 1983; p. 195
Maharaj Charan Singh, Light on Saint John, p.230
Spiritual Gems, Letter # 67
Many Voices, One Song, p.150
Bible, John 1:1-4
Die To Live, Q # 176
Many Voices, One Song, p. 216
“Angad Roshnan,” in The Gospel of Jesus, by JDavidson, p. 454

Who Am I ? - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Who Am I ?

“Who Do You Think You Are?” is a U.K. television programme in which well-known guests, assisted by expert researchers, are invited to delve into their family ancestry, in order to discover interesting and sometimes surprising facts about their forbears, in some cases reaching back over many generations. Quite often, participants get the feeling that knowledge about ancestors from the distant past can somehow throw light on their own identity or direction in life.

The relentless quest for meaningful, authentic identity is a prominent preoccupation of the current age, often referred to as an ‘identity crisis’. We are being persuaded to believe that we can be whoever we want to be! Who am I? It’s a question many of us may have asked ourselves at one time or another.

What exactly is identity, anyway? Is it located in the physical body or in the mind? Mind – my mind – a collection of thoughts, experiences, memories, opinions, bits of knowledge, possessions, relationships, achievements, reputation? Are all these transitory, changeable, impermanent, unreliable phenomena me or mine? If any of them were to change or vanish, would I still be “I” or “me”?

So, who or what do we think we are? We describe ourselves as humans, homo sapiens, endowed with intelligence and the freedom to make conditional choices. Fortunately, or unfortunately, making choices brings consequences, like the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. Against God’s specific command, Adam chose to eat the forbidden fruit and this led Man to self-awareness. But this act of disobedience also led to his expulsion from the paradise-garden.

Self-awareness had been awakened and we became bound by consequences. Faced with temptation, it is hard not give in to human curiosity and suffer as a result. One of Oscar Wilde’s characters famously quipped that he could resist anything except temptation.¹

What is the self of which we have become aware, this “I”, this “me”, this “self”? We think of the self as located in a physical body, the same body that we occupy every morning when we wake and look in the mirror. We regard this body as ours. It seems fit for purpose most of the time even though we eventually notice gradual changes as we pass through the seven ages, from “mewling and puking in nurse’s arms” in infancy to “second childishness and mere oblivion”² at the far end of life. Time takes its toll on the body. It’s on loan – “for a moment’s use” according to an ancient Buddhist text.

The higher dimension to being human is mind, discernment, consciousness. It makes us aware of our thoughts and actions. Conscience brings inner knowledge of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Conscience can’t be fooled. There is an old English and more graphic phrase for conscience — agenbite of inwit, the prick or remorse of conscience.” Inner knowledge of our behaviour and motives comes back to bite us.

Who is doing all this mental activity, this thinking, questioning, imagining, analyzing, and communicating? Can the individual mind know itself or have an idea of itself? Is there such a thing as the individual mind?

The 19th century French poet Rimbaud reached the conclusion that “one should not say I think but rather I am thought.” “Je est un autre”³ – meaning: ‘I am another’. Rimbaud abandoned poetry to pursue a more “real” search for his soul, as he put it.

Thoughts and emotions are in constant flux and so is the world around us. All concept of a stable “I” is undermined. It’s all very unsettling.

So, there is more to the self than just the body, or “life in a fading animal’s body,” as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats put it.⁴ We could lose bits of our body and still hold on to our sense of self. The body grows old – the self may not.

Furthermore, the self seems to point beyond our mind. A sense of self is certainly lodged in our mind. But we constantly change our mind. Fleeting thoughts, moods, desires, attractions, aversions, images, and all the rest of it grab our attention and then pass on.

The Chinese sage Chuang Tse (Zhuangzi) wrote: "Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”⁵

Can we be sure we even have a real and lasting self? Are we still the same self we always were? The mystics tell us that all these selves are just an illusion, transient, and have no lasting reality. In fact, all our mental activity keeps us away from the reality of who we really are.

The 20th century Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi is quoted as having said, “The question ‘who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer, the question ‘who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.”⁶

The mystics go on to say that the only self that truly exists is the One Being who made us as parts of himself – which means that our reality, our true self, is the same as His. We’re made of the same stuff. Our innermost being and consciousness, our spirit or soul, the essence of our existence, can be found within ourselves.

In fact, what could be more important than the inner search for our real self?

Maharaj Charan Singh Ji put it like this: “If we just pursue that happiness within ourselves, we can become happy. And unless we find that happiness within ourselves, life is not worth living.”⁷

We need to contact our true self by changing the direction of our attention and turning it inwards, as all mystics have prescribed. To achieve that we must learn to control and still our own minds. But that is not so easy. How are we going to regain inner control over our restless mind when it has been turning outwards since the beginning of time?

The answer is meditation. Finding the centre of our own being, within ourselves, where there is stillness and silence, blissful peace and joy, and relief from all the turmoil going on around us.

We are body and mind indeed – but far more importantly we are soul, that part we cannot reach without help from a special sort of individual – an adept, a true master, who can show us how to discover our true self through meditation and inner quietness. The saving grace of this age is the presence of such masters or saints who can show us the way to realize our true selves.

The personal self leads nowhere but to dissatisfaction. The true self lies within. It can only find fulfillment by becoming one with the Divine of which it is a spark, through diligently following the guidance of a true master.

Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” Act 1
William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” Act 2, scene 7s
Letter to Paul Demeny. 15th May 1871, Éditions Pléiade. pp. 343-344
W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” Collected Poems, Papermac, 1971.
Chuang Tzu, Taoist Philosopher and Chinese Mystic, George Allen and Unwin, 1961, p 47.
Quotation attributed to Ramana Maharshi – Be As You Are, ed. David Godman; Penguin/Random House, 1989
Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, vol.1, Q 225

Living the Vertical Life - RSSB Satsangs & Essays Download | Print

Living the Vertical Life

We all remember the question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” The somewhat humorous answer is “to get to the other side.”

There is a cartoon labeled “Chicken Poetry Reading” which gives us a different slant on this question. In the cartoon, a wise chicken is reading the following poem:

Chicken Road
The Crossing is within.
There is no other side.

In this simple poem the chicken has described some of the fundamental teachings of the saints.

The saints tell us that everything we seek in order to attain lasting happiness, everything we seek to obtain true knowledge, everything we seek to obtain peace and bliss, and everything we seek to obtain God-realization lies within us.

Yet we seek these things on the other side of the road. We spend our whole lives thinking that what we need is on the other side of the road. The grass is always greener. This new job, this new car, this new house, this new person, this new treatment, this new investment will make us happy. Yet cars break down, work makes us tense, houses fall into disrepair, investments go up and down. We spend our lives crossing roads in search of fulfillment and happiness only to find disappointment. Yet all along, true happiness is waiting within.

Look at the example of our isolation during Covid. We missed our friends, we missed our co-workers, we could not go to the movies, we felt isolated. Over time, we realized how peaceful it was to remain at home. We were able to spend more time in meditation, we had Question-and-Answer sessions, we avoided the traffic and fuss of the daily grind. So when things opened up, we were suddenly miserable that we had to commute in traffic. We were back to all the distractions and conflicts. We missed going out and then we missed being able to stay at home.

This is like everything in life. We want it, we get it, we don’t want it.

We spend our time living a horizontal life, crossing roads instead of travelling on the road that will lead us to happiness. Our chicken poet tells us that the only crossing that is worthwhile is within and that is the crossing from the world of illusion to the world of reality.

The saints teach us to live a vertical life. The horizontal life is chasing after the illusions of this world. The vertical life is the inner road. The horizontal life is paved with illusion. The vertical life is paved with truth. The horizontal life takes us away from the Lord. The vertical life takes us toward the Lord. The inner road protects us, while the outer roads subject us to all kinds of travails.

The quarantine during Covid provides us with another interesting analogy. In March of 2020 Baba Ji sent us all a message:

We need to stand with all our brothers and sisters at this crucial time and show our support and sensitivity by fulfilling our social responsibilities. Therefore all are requested to comply and follow the directions to stay where they reside. Please exercise extreme caution where your health is concerned and refrain from any travel that is not absolutely necessary.

Let us take the liberty to analyze these instructions. The Master tells us the human birth is a “crucial time” in which we can fulfill our “spiritual responsibilities.” He tells us to follow his directions and stay inside the walls of his teachings. He always tells us to exercise extreme caution with regard to our spiritual health. Don’t venture out into the trappings of the mind, the trappings of the world. Just do what is absolutely necessary. Live simply and stay within.

Hazur said:

The pity is that what we see, we are not supposed to love and what we don’t see, we are supposed to love. What we see does not exist, what we don’t see really exists and that is the whole tragedy of our love. So we have to love Him who we don’t see at all and who is everywhere. All that we see will perish; nothing is real.¹

Truth and inner peace will never be found on the horizon because one can never get there. So instead, climb the ladder that is within us to reach that place which never moves further away.

The saints teach us that the inner road is paved with Shabd. Shabd is energy that sustains the creation and, more importantly, it is the manifestation of God within.

Yet, we are running in circles, trapped by the gravitational pull of the mind. In addition, we are burdened by our past karma and, through improper actions, we perpetually add to this karmic load. If we do not account for these karmas, we are subject to reincarnation.

But not to worry. When one meets a saint, a living Master, a God-realized being, he boots us out of the orbit of our mind, gives us the tools to overcome the laws of karma and reincarnation, and provides the fuel that propels us higher. When we practice the path of Surat Shabd Yoga, we cease to be travelling horizontally through life and instead travel within.

The saints teach us to stop doing the things that bind us to the world and start doing the things that free us. This is simply put in the four vows we take at the time we are initiated by a saint. We agree to become vegetarian, to abstain from alcohol and drugs, and to live a moral and ethical life. With the fourth vow, we agree to meditate for 2 ½ hours each day. Eliminate the horizontal and do the vertical. Abstain from bad actions and embrace the good action: meditation.

In this practice of meditation we travel on the inner road step by step with each repetition of the five holy names and with each minute that we spend listening for and eventually to the Shabd – also known as the audible life stream, Word or Logos.

As mentioned, the saints give us the tools to overcome our karmic load. As we listen to the videos of Baba Ji’s questions and answers we again and again hear the plea to get release from lifetimes of past karmas. The answer always seems to be that this is only done through our simran and bhajan, which requires us to put in our promised time each day. As Hazur said:

Since all types of karmas have to be cleared before you can escape from this realm of Kal, and destiny you can not change, the saints advise that if you meditate and live according to the principles of the spiritual path your willpower becomes very strong and you are not affected by those fate karmas.²

It sounds so easy – quit running around chasing after the mirage of happiness across the road and instead sit in meditation, ascend the inner road, and reach unconditional happiness.

Do we put in our full time? Do we focus on the simran or do we chase one thought after another? Have we given our priority to so many things that we do not have time for meditation? Are we still falling victim to the five plagues – lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride?

Sultan Bahu said:

Only the mind that works in harmony with my spirit
can be my friend.
Only the person who has so tamed his mind
can realize the Name of God.
This same mind forces the abstinent and the devout
to grovel before greed and temptation.
Tough is the path to God, O Bahu –
it is not a cup of your mother’s pudding.³

Beset by the maladies of the mind, we tell ourselves, “First I have to overcome my bad thoughts, control my desires, then I can meditate.” Indeed one of the biggest mistakes we make is thinking that we can overcome our bad actions and desires with our will power and, once done, we can meditate. No, no, no. It is meditation that releases us from bad actions. It is only meditation that can tame the mind. Not the other way around. The more we meditate, the more our worldly desires dissipate.

Hazur responded to a question:

Instead of worrying about or eliminating that thought, attach yourself to the sound within and you will automatically rise above the thought. It’s very difficult to eliminate thoughts one by one. It’s impossible. But when we attach ourselves to the Shabd and Nam within, all these thoughts are automatically eliminated. Instead of cursing the darkness, we should light a candle.⁴

So, little chickens, quit crossing the road; there is no other side. Practice your meditation. The road is within.

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Q # 509
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, Q # 65
Sultan Bahu, p. 230
Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, Q# 402

Making Sense of Being Human

Dream or Reality?

Our Heart with His

Nothing Else Matters

Remembering

Diamonds

I Love You

Thankful Beyond Words

Intellect and Rationality in Spiritual Practice

Forget Your Perfect Offering

Stay Close

Meditation is Medicine

I Know the Way You Can Get

Attachments

The Spiritual Journey: Balance, Discipline and Responsibility

A Spiritual Perspective

The Red Carpet

Longing for Love

Why Be Vegetarian?

Mysticism and The Search For Truth

Cults, Gurus, Religions, and Misconceptions

Commitment

Prescription For Life

Remembering Our Objective

We All Have So Much in Common

Rebuilding Our Platforms

As Innocent as a Child

Wonder

Devotion and Love

Don’t Worship the Physical

Becoming Conscious

Listening

True Grit

Cinderella and the Dead Parrot

Simplicity

Habits – The Stockholm Syndrome

Running From Death, Longing For Love

Human Being

Search for a True Guru

Living in the Will of the Lord

A Clear Mission

Finding Peace and Happiness At Last

Butter, Rope, $20, and Happiness

Thoughts from Lockdown

Time and Opportunity

How To Be a True Sevadar

Look into the Darkness

Doubt

Illusion

Sticking to God's Plan

Ancient Myths, Modern Mystics, Unchanging Truths

Catch-22

Be Doers of the Word

Going to the Giver

Love - Bhakti

The Purpose of Human Life

Dera’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Coronavirus and Karma Theory

One Spiritual Family

The Fatherhood of God – The Brotherhood of Man

Advice from the Masters in Times of Upheaval

The Magic of Life

Freedom from Misconceptions

The Secret of Attention

Rumi on Meditation

The World Has Come to a Full Stop

Trusting Mystery

A Hero’s Journey

Very Beauteous Is the Body-Bride

Happiness Is Available Right Now

Shabd Amrit Dhara

Transforming Prison Into a Refuge

What Is Our Perspective on Life?

Love Defined

Life’s Contradictions

The Meaning of Satsang

Denial and Acceptance

Do We Need a Minister of Loneliness?

Patience

“What, me worry?”¹