The First Step

In the introduction to Sar Bachan (Prose) we read what the final stage of our spiritual path will be like:

Its primary attributes are wisdom, love and power; or as some prefer to name them, intelligence, joy and energy. This is the abode of the Supreme Creator and numberless hosts of pure spiritual beings possessed of unimaginable god-like greatness and splendour and enjoying the most intense happiness. This region is practically boundless, or limitless, in extent. It knows neither death nor change nor any imperfection.

Those who are initiated can experience it in this life. It is not a distant pipe dream – it is realizable in this lifetime. When we were accepted for initiation by the living Satguru, one of the criteria for choosing us was that we have the potential to make the transition during this very life. Our karmic load was light enough and we had enough love, which meant that we had the potential to make the transition from this pain-filled world to a state of pure intense happiness. Not only do we have a human birth, but we have also been granted the gift of initiation – we are a few among the many.

Consider how rare this is. If we stop for a moment and become aware of this, we will realize that we have already made gigantic progress on the path. There is now actually very little between us and supreme happiness – only a conditioned mind still blocks the light. The Master has given us the method to break through the barrier of the mind: to focus the attention and experience this state as a real and permanent experience, an unimaginable godlike greatness and splendour. An intense happiness will result from the practice of bringing the mind to stillness and then tuning our attention into the life force, the sound current and following it to its source – a state of absolute purity.

Standing back and looking at the situation objectively, one would think that we would be practising day and night, and for most of us that was the intention at the beginning. But it didn’t work out that way. The mind proved to be unruly and stubborn and the effort needed proved to be too much. At the time of initiation we thought that, unlike all these other slackers, we would be enlightened by the week after next at the latest! But after a while, the promise of four lifetimes as the most it would take to make the journey looked like our only hope. Yet when the Master is asked about ‘four lifetimes’ he has answered that he knows nothing of four lifetimes, there is only this lifetime!

As the clichéd and familiar statement says – the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. It’s time to take that step. After many years of initiation, some of us are still at the starting point on the path. We are staring into the distance trying to see the wonders that lie ahead and despairing that nothing has come into view. That is because we are missing the fundamental step – that of taking the first step.

For some of us our history on the path goes back decades. The intellectual grasp of death and the desire for a really meaningful spiritual experience led a lot of us to the path when the empty promises of salvation by religious structures failed us. For those of us who started out in the 1960s and 1970s, we now had a real guru and a real meditation practice. We were streets ahead of others, or so it seemed – except the scenery was not changing.

We have strictly followed the vegetarian diet, attended lots of satsangs, improved our morality and had years of getting up for an attempt at meditation – why? Because our Master has told us that we can make the whole journey to our source in this very lifetime. As unlikely as it seems, this means that we could one day become fully realized, superconscious beings in a state of perfect bliss – God-realized.

Stop for a moment and get past the familiarity of the promise. See that this is a definite possibility! Most of us have settled into the fact that it is not really going to happen any time soon, but the Master reassures us it can happen. Why then are we still here after such a long time? Because we wander in the vast unending unreality of our mind and we are unaware of it.

If we are not aware of the mind and its virtual reality, how can we tell, even as a satsangi, what is real and what is fantasy? How do we tell whether we are experiencing reality or whether the mind is simply creating fantasy? Simran can separate reality from fiction inside, but what if we are still some distance from inside? We are like a fish in water, unaware that we are living in water. Our experience beyond the water cannot even be thought about because we would have to be aware of the water first. It is the same with the mind.

What is the mind? Where does it begin and where does it end? All our experiences are in the mind, so how do we actually know that the way out is not just another mind experience?

The Masters tell us that the way out is through the eye centre and into the spiritual realms beyond, riding on the sound current, but after all these years we may still have no inner experience. We may get discouraged at the lack of inner experience, but still we will have the faith to continue and to please him. And we will become more conscious of what we are doing – which is to try and stop the mind, to remove its power to delude us, and to enter into the inner world and make the journey to pure consciousness.

When we cannot tell the difference between reality and mind fantasy, the need for an experienced guide is a vital necessity. He has explained the way out, given us instructions and offered to lead the way. The first step is to stop getting lost in the mind, for the way does not lie in the mind but past the mind. This is the barrier we face. No amount of intellectual manoeuvring is going to take us any distance along the way because the intellect, which is the reasoning power of the mind, cannot be threatened into submission. It must first be satisfied; then we are able to follow the path and do our meditation without doubts. Beyond that it is only of value in carrying out our worldly work.

The practice as taught by the Masters is the practical way of saving our consciousness or attention from being lost out here in a state of endless misery. We are trapped in the wheel of reincarnation. When we were born we were dealt a hand of cards. We now have to play it to win, and Baba Ji tells us we can win. The hand of cards is our karma – our fate for this life. We have a certain degree of choice in what we do – in how we play our hand. We don’t have absolute free will but we do have conditioned free will. This emotive subject of free will is used by some to explain away or justify their situation and lack of progress. Those who take this approach do not do themselves any favours.

Maharaj Ji explains conditioned free will by saying that our will is conditioned by our birth circumstances. He points out how different someone’s outlook and reaction would be if they were born in Russia or the United States. We are trapped in a conditioned mind, and the intellect has to be satisfied for the mind to escape the prison of conditioning. This is possible – and the first step is to see the value of the path of the Masters. The second is to request guidance on the path from the Master. The third is to walk the path according to the directions given by the guide – the perfect living Master. Most of us are likely to have met the first two conditions. It is now a case of taking the first step on our journey inward.

The method of the Masters is to still the mind – not to sort it out but to still it. Most of our problems exist in the mind, so to try and sort out our problems with the mind is a bit like washing the dirt out of our clothes in muddy water. Still the mind and we still the troubles. The Masters advise us to stop all this analyzing and not to be waylaid by the mind. They teach us that meditation is the first step to stilling the mind, and this is done with simran.

Take the first step. Give it priority in your life because it is the way. Take advantage of this great gift from which we can uncover our godlike greatness and experience the most intense happiness, rather than whatever it is we experience in our daily lives now. This godlike greatness and intense happiness should be our fundamental reality. Right from the beginning of our journey on the path, we can get a taste of the huge rewards of doing our meditation.

Meditation is the highway of the wise to Enlightenment. The basic idea is to go inside ourselves effortlessly and in silence and to progressively reach quieter levels of the mind until we transcend and experience the quietest level, the Absolute. Through repeated practice we become very well acquainted with the Absolute and we start to make that our existential home. With time and practice, transcendence becomes a perpetual daily reality where we experience this silent world of bliss together with our normal daily routine. This is Enlightenment and with this new way of living comes the wonderful ability to cheerfully and effectively deal with everyday life while living a fulfilling and joyful inward life.
_{Gustav Barnard, A Simple Plan for Enlightenment}