Just Be with Him

On this path, we meditate because we want to get to where our Master is, to be with him forever. The Master wants us to achieve this goal even more than we do. Hence, Maharaj Charan Singh says:

The Master is waiting for you at the eye focus and is anxious to receive you there in his arms; it is for you to rise up to the eyes.
_{The Dawn of Light}

The image of the Master receiving us in his arms is an image of love. The Master loves us and, more than anything, he wants us to come to where he is inside. This is why he says over and over again, just meditate – just do your bhajan and simran.

Who among us who is initiated does not want to reach the eye centre to meet our Master and be received in his arms? Could there be anything more wonderful than that? And yet for many initiates, it is a struggle: a struggle with the mind to lead a life that supports our meditation, to give full time to our meditation, to think of the Master during the day; and in meditation a struggle to stay still, to repeat more than one round of simran before the mind skips out; to stay awake; to withstand the pain of our body being held in one position for two and one half hours. Meditation can be a struggle and the Masters know this, so they give us so much advice about how to deal with all of these struggles. The Sant Mat books are full of letters of advice about how to balance our time throughout the day, how to sit comfortably in meditation, how to deal with the sleep factor, how to persevere though dryness, and on and on. But one piece of advice that puts everything into perspective is encapsulated in these four words: Just be with him. Words that Maharaj Charan Singh said to someone who was crying over how hard meditation is. Just be with him.

Our goal is to be with our Master at the eye centre, but we don’t have to wait until we reach the eye centre to be with him because the Master is here with us right now.

Maharaj Sawan Singh says in Spiritual Gems:

As far as the Master is concerned, time and space make no difference to him, for the Master is not confined to physical form. The Master takes on this form for man’s guidance, to talk to him, to sympathize with him, to make friends with him, to develop confidence and faith in him, to induce him to seek peace and happiness within himself, to show him the way to it, to teach him by becoming an example, to develop in him God-like attributes, and to pull him up out of his physical form to his astral form.

The physical form of the Master is the one who answers our questions, the one with whom we develop a worldly relationship and with whom we gradually fall in love. But it is the astral, the Radiant Form, that is with us always here as we go through our lives and even beyond death. In Die to Live Maharaj Charan Singh says:

The Master does not leave or forget the disciple after initiation. He is always with him, guiding and leading him. In his Radiant Form, he helps the disciple at every step, accompanying him throughout the spiritual journey. The Master not only guides and helps during the disciple’s lifetime, but stays with him even at the time of his death, and afterwards.

It is this Radiant Form that we are talking about when we say, just be with him – not the outer Master, not the physical form, but the inner Master, the Shabd form. The primary way that we can be with him is in our meditation, just sitting and looking into the darkness, holding our attention there while repeating our simran – the five holy names that our Master gives us when we are initiated.

Maharaj Charan Singh continues:

When you close your eyes, you are here in the centre of the darkness in the forehead, and being there, you do the simran. You also feel that your Master is there and that you are there in the darkness and you are there doing simran in the presence of the Master, if you can’t visualize his form. So be there and also feel your Master is there, and that will hold your attention there in the darkness.

Hazur says, just be there in the darkness, be there with your Master. If we love someone in this world, don’t we want to be with him or her all the time? When we fall in love with the Master, we want to be with him more and more. Practically speaking, many can’t be with the physical Master. The only way to truly be with him is in meditation. The more we meditate, the more we fall in love with him; the more we fall in love with him, the more we want to meditate.

In Die to Live Maharaj Charan Singh says:

When you fall in love with somebody, you automatically want to remain in the company of that person, but before falling in love, you don’t plan to spend much time in the company of that person. Similarly, when you fall in love with meditation and you feel peace and bliss within, then whatever time you can manage, you would at once like to attend to meditation, because you want to be there in that peace, in that bliss.

When we fall in love with meditation, he says, we want to meditate more. But for some of us, it may seem impossible to get to the stage where we have that amount of love for our meditation because it is such a struggle. The answer here is also, just be with him. Be with him when we sit for meditation; be with him when we are going through our daily lives. We are told over and over again that meditation is a way of life; it is not just sitting for two and one half hours a day, every day. We have to mould our whole lives around the path and not forget it for even a minute in the day. Correction: Ideally, we must not forget the Master for even a minute in the day. This path is about the Master. And the Master is a real person, whom many disciples have met. So during the day, if we remember the physical Master, it may be much easier to feel that closeness to him when we meditate. And of course, if we have already seen his Radiant Form, we are remembering that form all day long because that is our real Master. Inside he is ours; we don’t have to share him with anyone.

But whether we can see the Radiant Form or we can merely think of the physical form, just be with him, remember him. How does Master want us to remember him during the day? Primarily by simran. Simran, when our minds are not occupied during the day, is remembering him.

Maharaj Jagat Singh says in Science of the Soul:

Throughout the day, no matter in what occupation you are engaged, the soul and the mind must constantly look up to him at the eye centre. All the twenty-four hours of the day, there must be a yearning to meet the Lord, a continuous pang of separation from him. Nay, every moment, whether eating, drinking, walking, awake or asleep, you must have his Name on your lips and his form before your eyes.

In the book about Maharaj Jagat Singh’s life, In the Footsteps of the Master, we encounter the example of this perfect disciple who became a perfect Master:

Sardar Bahadur regarded his Satguru as the Lord himself and followed his orders implicitly. He was an example of a perfect disciple. When he went to Great Master’s room for darshan, he would sit quietly in a corner and keep looking with unblinking eyes at Great Master’s face. He never requested a private interview with the Master, never asked him a question, and never initiated conversation with him. Before Sardar Bahadur did anything, even rising from his seat to leave a room, he would momentarily close his eyes, first contemplating on his Master’s form within.

This example of what it means to just be with the Master, silently, lovingly, with total concentration, is one for us to aspire to, although realistically we may not be able to achieve it right now. To remember the Master before we do anything, to remember him with every breath, is a goal to reach for. But we have to begin where we are, and if we are not remembering him at all during the day, then we start by trying to remember him in certain situations: while we are preparing or eating our meals, while we are walking to the car, while we are waiting for family or friends. There are many times during the day when we can practice the presence of our Master, when we can just be with him.

Being with our Master in silence and in love, is the first step to being received in his arms, to merging with him. When that is achieved, we will discover, as Sultan Bahu did, that:

He now lives in me and I in him, O Bahu:
not only distance from him
but even nearness to him
have become irrelevant!

The mature heart is not perfectionistic: it rests in compassion for our being instead of in ideals of the mind.… It does not seek to gain or attain in spiritual life, but only to love and be free.
_{Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma}