An Open Heart

Maharaj Charan Singh writes in Quest for Light, “His grace is always there, but we do not open our heart to receive it.” Similarly, when someone recently asked Baba Ji to explain grace, he said that grace is what he is showering on us all the time, if we would only open our hearts to it.

Is it true? Do we close our hearts to him? On the one hand with simran we are knocking on his door, knocking and knocking – and waiting for him to open the door. But what if he is also knocking on our door, the door of our heart, and we’re keeping it locked and bolted?

In ordinary worldly relationships – in a friendship or marriage or with our family members – if we “open our hearts” to each other, it means we don’t hold anything back. We are unguarded, open, and we let the other person in. Whatever we are, we don’t have to hide it. In essence, we give ourselves away. The foundation of all that is trust. If we don’t quite completely trust the other person, we don’t quite completely open our heart. We are guarded.

Is it the same with opening our hearts to the Master? Is this a friendship we can trust? Maharaj Charan Singh writes in Light on Sant Mat:

Shabd and Nam are the only real, everlasting and unfailing friends, and these we should try to cultivate. Shabd never deserts, nor does the Master.

But these are easy words to say, easy words to read. Can we believe them? Probably no one’s life on this planet is free from the experience of being unheard, uncared for, unloved. We all have some experience of being betrayed or abandoned or disappointed. We’ve all learned to be a little guarded when it comes to human relations. Do we carry what we’ve learned of distrust into our relationship with the Master? Maybe.

Baba Jaimal Singh says that this most fundamental trust was severed at the dawn of creation. He 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, and in maya’s objects and the senses that deceive…. It 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.
_{Spiritual Letters}

And here we are countless lifetimes later. Baba Jaimal Singh says that the Shabd is still supporting us, still nurturing us, still taking care of us. But we don’t know it, so we try to take care of ourselves. He goes on to say:

So have full faith in the words of the Satguru, my son. These words are specifically of the Lord himself. 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.
_{Spiritual Letters}

We’ve come at last to the Master. We’ve come at long, long last to the court of love. Our poor, well-defended heart can finally let its guard down. If we would only open our heart to him through daily meditation, we might find that we are already swimming in an ocean of grace and mercy. Rumi writes:

My tired heart, take a sigh of relief.
The time has come for you to heal.
The friend who helps all lovers
has come into this world
in the form of a man.
_{Rubai 810}

We might wonder if we are worthy of the extraordinary grace that has come our way? We know what we are. We know our weaknesses, our pretensions, our deceptions, as well as our jealousies, pettiness and cravings. But if we focus too much on our failings, we may scuttle back into the dark recesses of a closed heart.

Shame is a great closer of hearts. If we are to give ourselves to him, all we have to give is what we are. Therefore, the Sufi mystic poet Jami begs:

Beloved
no fear if you break my heart a thousand times
but do not abandon me in contempt
because of what I have here become
for in this garden every flower has its roots in dirt.
_{This Heavenly Wine: Poems from the Divan-e Jami as rendered by Vraje Abramian}

When Jami says he has “no fear if you break my heart a thousand times”, he is begging to keep his heart open to his Master’s grace, no matter what form that grace might take. But, what if the Master’s grace breaks his heart? He begs to stay in his Master’s company. What if his heart is broken? So what. What if it is broken a thousand times? He still begs to stay in his Master’s company. After all, it just may be that the heart that is open is the heart that has been broken.

Ansari of Herat expresses the humility of one who knows his faults, combined affectionately with the intimacy of one who knows he is loved. In Ibn ‘Ata’ Illah the Book of Wisdom/Kwaja Abdullah Ansari, he writes:

With your eternal knowledge you saw me.
You saw what you were buying, in spite of my faults.
You and your knowledge.
Me and my faults.
Don’t send back what you once approved.
_{Intimate Conversations, translated by Victor Danner, Wheeler M. Thackston and Annemarie Schimmel}

Ah this sounds like the ease and warmth of a heart that is open to the Master’s grace. But maybe it is Ibn ‘Ata’ Illah who offers us the ultimate reassurance:

If you were to be united with Him
only after the extinction of your vices
And the effacement of your pretensions,
you would never be united with Him!
Instead, when He wants to unite you to Himself,
He covers your attribute with His Attribute
And hides your quality with His Quality.
And thus He unites you to Himself
by virtue of what comes from Him to you,
not by virtue of what goes from you to Him.
_{Intimate Conversations, translated by Victor Danner, Wheeler M. Thackston and Annemarie Schimmel}

Maharaj Charan Singh used to say that we are all puppets dancing on a string. The only difference, he would say, between realized souls and unrealized souls is that the realized souls know they are puppets. The unrealized souls say, “We are dancing! Who can make us dance?”

We believe we are acting, that we are choosing, that we are doing. Actually, the Shabd, that current of love and mercy, is not only supporting us, nurturing us and caring for us; actually it is also doing everything. In Spiritual Letters, Baba Jaimal Singh says:

All work, temporal or spiritual, is done by the Shabd-dhun, but the mind takes undue credit for it, which is false. In fact, the Shabd-dhun does it all. So, you should make your home in the Shabd.

He says, in effect, this is the reality, the fact. Shabd is doing everything. Master in his Shabd form is always present, always with us, aware of us, waiting for us to turn to him, to open our hearts to him. He waits for us to know that there is no separation, that Shabd is doing everything.

And we carry on longing to be relieved of our burden of separateness, all the while clinging to it. We form concepts that place God far from us. Love, we picture as a distant goal. We imagine the Shabd in a fortress atop a high cliff, and we down in the plain must storm that fortress. Simran is our battering ram as we drive forward to break down that heavy oaken and iron-studded door that separates us from the Lord’s treasure of love, the Shabd. Jami writes:

I assumed you outside of myself
beyond the reaches of my imagination
Now that you have dropped the veil I realize
You are the one
I left behind with my first step.
_{This Heavenly Wine: Poems from the Divan-e Jami as rendered by Vraje Abramian}

The first step. That age-old first step we took believing ourselves to be separate. Ever since that fundamental trust was severed, ever since creation, our actions have bound us. Why? Because we have believed we were the only one to take care of ourselves. Because we have believed we were separate, isolated from Lord’s love, and that we were the doers. Maharaj Sawan Singh spells out our situation with precision:

Actually, all actions that are performed under the influence of the ego – whether good or bad – are equally responsible for the ties of attachment which bind an individual to this world.… So long as a person considers himself to be the doer, he is weighed down by the shackles of karma.

We are bound by the “shackles of karma” so long as we believe we are the doers. What will happen once we place ourselves in the Master’s loving hands? When we open our hearts to him, to his grace, and we come to know that the current of the Lord’s love and mercy is actually doing everything? Won’t the shackles of karma, shackles that have gripped our ankles since time immemorial, shackles rusty with age – won’t they creak open and clatter to the ground?

We’ll be free to give ourselves away. As Maharaj Charan Singh once said, “You give me whatever you have, and I’ll give you everything I have.”

Search the Darkness

Sit with your friends; don’t go back to sleep.
Don’t sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.

Surge like an ocean,
  don’t scatter yourself like a storm.

Life’s waters flow from darkness.
  Search the darkness, don’t run from it.

Night travelers are full of light,
  and you are, too; don’t leave this companionship.

Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,
don’t slip into the dirt like quicksilver.

The moon appears for night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.
_{The Rumi Collection edited by Kabir Helminski}