The Path of Love

Sant Mat is a path of love. So why are we always wondering about our love? Wondering if we really have any or how to make it grow. We are always conscious of a sense of separation. No matter how hard we try, our mind still feels that the Master is a million miles away from us. There are moments of effort and moments of laziness, and there are long periods of time when it seems that our spiritual development has nothing whatsoever to do with us. It all just seems impossibly distant, and we feel like children longing to be grown up.

But as time goes by, we are growing up a little every day. The Master’s love works a subtle spell on us. With time, even the way we see the Master changes. Rather than a deeply loved distant figure, he becomes more of a familiar presence, a friend.

Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, put it so lovingly:

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.
_{Spiritual Gems}

The gentle influence of his grace continues whether we are conscious of it or not. At a certain point, we start to realize its importance. The sense of being loved becomes a recurring emotion. We feel the sweetness of gratitude and want to respond. The desire to love him through the practice of our meditation grows.

We experience progress in subtle ways; it seems to relate mostly to our attitude, our view of things. The grace is so unexpected, and yet it is somehow delightfully familiar. In the end, we don’t have to go anywhere; it is all happening inside us. We feel deeply loved and so very much in love with the Master.

Maharaj Charan Singh said these beautiful words about our attitude:

If we can learn to be indifferent to pleasure and pain, so that they do not take us away from our path, it would not only lessen the weight of our karmas, but they would also be paid off in much less time.

If you can take what comes to you through him, then, whatever it is, it becomes divine in itself; shame becomes honour, bitterness becomes sweet, and gross darkness clear light. 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, and therefore God is the same to this man, alike in life’s bitterest moments and its sweetest pleasures.
_{Spiritual Discourses, Vol. I}

This was echoed by the present Master, who recently suggested that for some of us, the whole of life is parshad. When he said these words, you couldn’t help but feel the presence of his Master, or fail to be awed by the loving humility of one perfect being towards another.

Sooner or later the simple truth comes home to us. We don’t have to love anyone as much as we love the Master. We want to be with him. He is our lover, our father, our mother. We may be hard-hearted, stubborn, and proud, but the sheer relentless weight of his grace, raining down on us day after day, cannot help but affect us.

Meditation is the only way we can accelerate the process. It is the only way to find the peace we need, to give expression to our spiritual love. It is the ultimate positive step. It allows us to focus all our efforts on dispelling the nonsense of life. It definitely changes our attitude toward life.

When we are meditating, we have the potential to experience a warmth, a satisfaction, which is so personal, so unaffected by others that we wonder why we don’t meditate all the time. We feel relaxed. We feel safe. No one can touch this inner feeling. Sitting in meditation, we realize we don’t have to be perfect, clever, popular, good-looking, rich or successful. Here, we can find sweetness that is its own reward.

Our simran and bhajan is our struggle to find that still place where we can be alone with our love. When we meditate, we are trying in our own small way to be real disciples, and then we know what it really means to have a Master, to want him, to know him, to be so close to him – and that’s when we experience spiritual peace and love.

Beloved, take me to that Station
  where You Are,
  and I am not.
_{Sheikh Abol-Hasan, The Soul and A Loaf of Bread, as rendered by Vraje Abramian</sub}