The Mystery of God

Sant Mat writings include many different topics – the soul, the Shabd, the Master, the vows, meditation, and the disciple’s way of life. The most difficult topic to write about is God, for good reasons. Saints explain that God is too vast, esoteric and mysterious to understand and know. People have lost their ability to perceive God.

In order to perceive God or to understand him, our task is to become as subtle as he is. Our denseness is a veil that renders us blind to the divine as our inner, spiritual eye is closed. Unfortunately, we believe that reality is that which is seen with our physical eyes.

The Great Master writes in Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV:

We can see subtle things only when we ourselves become subtle. The Lord is extremely subtle. Unless we become as subtle as he is, we do not get connected with the Lord. It is a basic principle that the instrument with which we see must be appropriate to the thing to be seen…. It is necessary that our inner eyes become subtle. The Lord is the subtlest of the subtle. To realize him we have to be equally subtle.

Saints explain that in the spiritual realms too, reasoning is useless, as God is too vast for mere human minds to comprehend. Why then even explore the idea of the mystery of God? Perhaps Maharaj Charan Singh’s letter to a seeker in Quest for Light explains why:

I quite appreciate and understand your difficulty in loving and understanding God whom you cannot see, feel or communicate with. This feeling of dissatisfaction is in itself a sign that the Supreme Power desires you to investigate this matter further; otherwise, the whole world is drifting away without ever devoting a moment’s thought to its Creator.

Masters say that human birth is for a twofold purpose: to recover our spiritual identity and to find our way out of the creation and back to the Creator. This means that we should aspire to know and to be with God, before our physical death. Many fail to realize that when one dies one does not automatically ascend to God’s mansions. Masters say that there is a cycle of reincarnation that keeps each person coming back to this level of existence, lifetime after lifetime. Each individual’s spiritual goal could be to get out of that cycle in order to reunite with God.

Through his own will, God brought the creation into being. Through his will, God originated divine law, the Shabd – the Shabd that is the creative energy which sustains the entire universe and all the spiritual regions. This Shabd is the link between God’s will and God’s creative action.

The Great Master writes in Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV:

All the universe was created by divine Law (or Shabd) and he, as the Creator, is running the universe according to his Law (or the Shabd).… Everything takes place according to this Law, and according to it the administration of this universe has been placed under the control of the negative power or Kal. It is only by knowing the divine Law (or the Shabd) that one can travel beyond the sphere of Kal.

Saints tell us Shabd is that energy of sound and light which has the power to cleanse souls, end karmic indebtedness, and pull the soul up through the various spiritual regions back to the Father. It is the energy which emanates from God and which is God, and it is only by connecting to the Shabd that the soul is able to travel beyond Kal’s jurisdiction and back to the Father.

The few to whom God reveals the mysteries of the Shabd are his saints, the perfect living Masters, and through them he reveals the Shabd to their disciples, those souls marked by God for the Master to bring back to their spiritual home.

These Masters are manifestations of the Word incarnated in flesh, the manifested Shabd. Through them flow the loving, all-powerful, all-knowing energies which are Shabd, which are God. It is through the Masters that God reveals himself to us on a level at which we can relate to him. Humankind cannot worship and develop love and devotion for an abstract idea of God. In his mercy God reveals himself to us in the form of a man, the Master. Throughout aeons of creation God has given us the Masters.

Through initiation the Master instructs us on how to become God-realized. He cautions us to keep the four vows and to meditate, which is the key to spiritual understanding and development. He instructs us to practise simran – the repetition of five holy names. This sharpens and strengthens our powers of concentration and love and our devotion for the Master. In the practice of bhajan, we listen to the melodious sounds of the Shabd within, and begin the journey that will take us back to God, the Supreme Lord. Only a perfect living Master can take a soul on this journey. And as the saints frequently remind us, to be put on the road back to God the Father is the rarest and the greatest gift given to a human being.

In conclusion, the saints tell us that while we might be able to see manifestations of God here in the physical world, his true form lies within. They tell us God is the embodiment of love and his love for humankind causes him to call us back to our spiritual home.

In Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. IV, the Great Master describes the mystery of God:

The Lord is beyond time and timelessness, high and separate. All the creation is under his orders … he is beyond form and formlessness. He is omnipresent and the sustainer of all; creator, immovable, all-powerful, imperishable, redeemer, eternal and pure consciousness. He is everlasting, invulnerable, a storehouse of knowledge and nectar, without attributes, kind to devotees, self-existent, apart from all, an ocean of sweetness and is omnipresent. He is the embodiment of Shabd and his Name sustains all.

If you take instruction from the Master and do your work, light will appear inside you; your attention will gradually go inwards and become attached to Nam. You’ll be fully absorbed in it – to your benefit. This is the path of the Guru, and the Guru’s will. You cannot pursue this subject without the Guru’s wisdom.
_{Maharaj Jagat Singh, Discourses on Sant Mat, Vol. II}