You Can Do It!

Sant Mat is the easiest path for self-realization and God-realization. When satsangis used to ask Maharaj Charan Singh if there is an easier method, he would reply that nothing is simpler than meditation. Similarly, Baba Gurinder Singh says that all we have to do is to learn to sit and do nothing.

Yet satsangis find it hard to do their meditation. Whilst most can keep to the vegetarian diet, abstain from alcohol and drugs, and – although there are many subtleties we may overlook – live a good moral life, it’s meditation that they find difficult. Nonetheless, meditation is the Satguru’s hukam – his order or will.

And although we find meditation difficult, it is not as difficult as is often depicted. It depends on our attitude. As Baba Ji says, if you think meditation is easy then it is easy, if you think it is difficult then it is difficult.

Recently, after looking at a review in this magazine, I read a book which describes the experience of a western Buddhist nun and what she had to go through in her search for spiritual enlightenment. She spent twelve years in a remote cave, 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, cut off from the world by mountains and snow. Three of these years were spent in complete isolation as she engaged in intense meditation. She faced unimaginable cold, wild animals, near starvation and avalanches. The following paragraph captures her existence:

Every day for the months and years she was in formal retreat inside her cave she got into her meditation box and followed the same gruelling, utterly repetitive routine: Up at 3 a.m. for the first three-hour meditation session; 6 a.m. breakfast (tea and tsampa); 8 a.m. back into the box for the second three-hour meditation session; 11 a.m. lunch and a break; 3 p.m. return to the box for the third three-hour meditation session; 6 p.m. tea; 7 p.m. the fourth three-hour session; 10 p.m ‘bed’.… All in all that amounted to twelve hours of meditation a day – day in, day out, for weeks, months and years on end.
_{Vicki Mackenzie, Cave in the Snow}

This shows how determined some people are to attain spiritual enlightenment and the hardships they are prepared to face. It is incredible. To me, the cold is probably one of the greatest adversities the nun endured:

And then there was the cold. That tremendous unremitting, penetrating cold that went on for month after month on end. In the valley below the temperature would regularly plunge to –35 degrees in winter. Up on that exposed mountain it was even bleaker. There were huge snow drifts that piled up against her cave and howling winds to contend with too.

Reading this helps to put the Sant Mat way of life into perspective, which, as the Masters say, is the easiest path. The Masters tell us to live normally. Perform your duties to yourself, to your family, to society, but also give daily time to meditation – live Sant Mat. This is easy. In fact, the Masters couldn’t have made it any easier. In the Adi Granth it says:

O Nanak, meeting the true Master, one learns the perfect way to live. Then laughing, playing, dressing or eating, while living in maya, one finds liberation.