I Will Lift up My Eyes

The Bible contains a group of spiritual hymns known as psalms which are ascribed to King David, a leader of the Jewish people in the tenth-century B.C.E. Some of these verses lend themselves to a mystical interpretation and can give wonderful encouragement to spiritual seekers. The verse below is Psalm 121.

I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and coming in from this time forth and even for evermore.

A mystic interpretation suggests that we are being told to raise our consciousness to the third eye, the spiritual hills, and there we will find the help that will take us back to our true home. Behind and between the two eyes, we will find the Shabd, the Holy Name, resounding.

My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
Contact with the Shabd will lead us to its source. Just as the psalmist says, we will find that our help is coming from the Lord, who created heaven and earth through the dynamic power of Shabd. In Divine Light, Maharaj Charan Singh quotes Guru Nanak who explains:

The Word created the earth,
The Word created the sky,
Through the Word emanated light.
The entire world is sustained by the Word,
The Word, O Nanak,
Dwells in every being.

Guru Nanak informs us that God sent out his Shabd to create the entire vast creation and that the creation is now sustained by this wonderful power which is resounding in every being.

As satsangis we know that we can follow this truth still further and say that our true friend or helper is our living Master. This is because the Shabd manifests as the living Master who comes to connect us to our home with the Lord. The Lord, the Shabd and the living Master are the same one power which helps and guides us. And the word ‘help’ here conveys the strongest possible meaning: if someone drowning cries out for help, when that help arrives it saves his or her life. We are drowning in the sea of maya or illusion and the Master saves us by pulling us out with the rope of Nam. The Master is our help, the Master is our lifeline, the Master is our everything.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
When the Master brings us onto the path, we can confidently feel that no harm can now ever come to us and that nothing can take us away from the path. The Master directs our karmas so everything that does happen to us takes us towards our home.

In the worldly sense, it doesn’t mean that nothing unpleasant ever happens to us – but we can take comfort from the thought that everything we go through pays off our karmas. In fact we read that the Master’s great blessings are poverty, disease and dishonour. From the worldly point of view these are disastrous, but spiritually they are terrific blessings because they loosen our ties to the world and attach us to him.

The Master is always attentive to our needs, but our needs are not necessarily what we desire. Our need is that the reality within us, our soul, should be taken out of this dark dungeon of the body, within the prison of the world, and back to our true home in Sach Khand.

It is natural for us as humans to make efforts to make the best of our surroundings here, but Masters have always reminded us that the world is not our true home. We are on the march, with an unsleeping general who watches over our every footstep.

Behold he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The psalmist tells us that the Lord is ever awake and alive, sustaining the entire creation. The Lord is our keeper, so close to us that he is like shade over our right hand – here with us all the time, even when our Master’s physical form is far away. The psalms were written for people living in the Middle East, in a hot country where the sun could be fierce. So having shade on one’s right hand conveys the coolness and tranquillity that guides the actions (undertaken by the right hand) of someone who takes the Master’s protection.

The whole tone of this psalm is one of care and love. On reading it, a sense of gratitude wells up in us – gratitude to have been plucked from the world and brought into the atmosphere of satsang. How can we make the best use of our good fortune?

We may have heard the Master remind us that it is the Lord’s grace that has given us human birth; it is the Lord’s grace that brought us to the path; it is the Lord’s grace that granted us the boon of initiation – now we should take advantage of that by doing our meditation.

It is meditation that will transform us from a wayward and egotistical individual to a spiritual being. So, amidst the trials and tribulations of our self-inflicted karmas, we should keep on with our meditation.

The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
Whilst we are protected from evil from without, the Master also works to ensure that we are protected from ourselves. The object of meditation is to become conscious of the Shabd which is resounding at the eye centre, but there is a fine distinction to be made in understanding how that is to be achieved. If we think that our own efforts will attach us to the Shabd, we will be sadly disappointed.

We might meditate for ten hours a day, every day, for thirty lifetimes, but as long as we are doing it out of ego, we will go nowhere. We have to make the effort, but our efforts at meditation should be done with submission, with the attitude that “I love my Master, he wants me to meditate for two and a half hours each day so that is why I’ll do it. I want to please my Master.” The words of this psalm remind us of the total reliance that a true disciple places on his Master. This means that submission replaces the arrogant and mistaken idea that we have goals to set and mountains to climb on our own.

Of course we have to make the effort, but the inner door is locked and only the Master can open it. Our task is to keep trying to focus at the eye centre, trying to keep still and to let go. Like a beggar, we should always keep knocking on the door. Maharaj Sawan Singh explains, “Only he or she realizes the Sound on whom the Lord showers his grace.”

The Lord, as we’ve heard in the psalm, is closer to us than the shade of our right hand; he knows when we are thinking of him, when we are doing our simran in the day, when we are meditating. The power of the Lord is within each word of our simran, and every time we repeat the holy names we are realizing our spiritual nature.

As we persist, we begin to see a distinction – it’s not our feeble efforts that are making us spiritual but, because we are making the effort, the Master is helping us reach our spirtiual objective.

When the Master sees we are doing our best to try to keep within the principles, and faithfully doing our meditation, then he opens the inner door and we become conscious of the Shabd. When this happens, we are transformed; all doubts disappear and everything about us – body, mind and speech – becomes pure, or “preserved from all evil”.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and coming in from this time forth and even for evermore.
Through the Master, the Lord helps us in the world as well as inside within the inner regions. Because the inner regions are so vast compared to this physical universe, without the Master as guide, it would be very easy for us to get lost or be led astray. But, once initiated, no evil can approach us if we focus on the five holy names. Without the Master guiding us, we could not even take one step inside, but by following our Master’s instructions, our soul is strengthened and prepared for the inner journey.

Now that we have been initiated by a living Master, our coming and going, our dying and being reborn, is ending. He will take us to our home in Sach Khand where we will stay forever. Our karmic debts paid, our soul regains its original status of being a citizen in the country of the Lord.

This all comes to pass when we lift up our eyes to the inner hills -when by the grace of the Master, we ask to receive the help that the Lord has provided for us.

It is not difficult for the Master to take a soul upward, but premature uplifting causes harm. Just as fine silk cloth, when spread upon a thorny hedge, is torn to pieces if suddenly pulled away, so the soul, entangled in the thorns of karma, which penetrate every cell in the body, must be gradually purified by the Master’s love. By his grace the soul is freed from these thorns and the karma is slowly sifted out from every cell in the body. You will get everything you wish – things more wonderful and remarkable than you ever dreamed of. He, who has to give you all, is sitting inside, in the third eye. He is simply waiting for the cleanliness of your mind and is watching your every action.
_{Maharaj Sawan Singh, Spiritual Gems}