A Parcel Has Arrived in the Mail

Imagine receiving a parcel in the mail: it is a box made of sandalwood, beautifully wrapped in a pink ribbon. It is obviously a gift. You open the box and find a card that says: “Congratulations, you have won a trip to Sach Khand, your true home. All expenses paid.” A note adds, “For this trip, I give you a human body; take good care of it.” Then you find a scroll; you open it and find a map showing in detail all the ups and downs of this journey – where you will go, who will accompany you, where you will stay, what you will do. It is your personal road map. It is your destiny, and it comes with a warning: “No changes allowed!”

Next to the scroll, you find a small piece of paper, wrapped tightly. You read it and it says, “You have been assigned a guide. Do not worry; he will find you.” You continue looking into this box and you find two pouches; you open the first one and it is filled with the fragrance of joy; you anxiously open the second one, and it is filled with the fragrance of gratitude. And, finally, engraved in the box are these words, “Dear child, my stream of love will bring you back to me.”

You close the box, ready to embark upon your life journey with your guide. You have a beautiful body as your armour and you hold your individualized map in your hand. Let us think about the messages in the box.

The human body! We take it so much for granted. We have been given this magnificent form after spending eons wandering from one form to another. It is an incredible piece of art and design, perfect for functioning in this world. No engine could come close to mimicking how it and our amazing brain operate. But the greatest miracle of this body is that it allows us to research and find the divine within us. While in this body, we can connect with the creative power – with the divine melody and the divine light. No wonder the little note in our box says to take good care of this magnificent human body that the Lord has given to us. In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III, Maharaj Charan Singh says:

When we become conscious that this body … is the real temple… in which the Lord resides and where we will be able to reach him, you can imagine how much we have to care for this body temple. We have not to misuse it, we have not to make it dirty by eating dirty things. We have not to have any malice or hatred in it for anybody. Naturally, we have to look after this body because it is the temple of the living God.

We have a trip to go on. The journey has already been mapped out for us, meticulously and in all its details. It is our destiny. In Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, a questioner asks, “Is it true that our life’s destiny, the things that have and are to happen to us, had already been planned in advance?” Hazur answers: “What is destiny? Destiny is something with which we are born and which we have to face during our life’s span. We call it fate.” Actions of the past determine this destiny of ours, who we are to become, who our companions are going to be, parents and friends, emotional and physical sufferings, our attitudes towards life, our value system, the country we live in, our education, and our jobs – everything stems from what we have done in prior lives.

Our destiny is not a bed of roses. There will be pain; there will be sadness; there will also be moments of joy and happiness. What matters is our attitude toward these inevitable ups and downs of the journey we have to travel on. Hazur advises us to keep our balance and tells us that our spiritual practice, done daily and regularly, will help enormously. He says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I:

When you devote proper time to spiritual practice, you will become so strong that you can smilingly and calmly face your destiny. You will not feel much of the ups and downs of the world, and you will be able to account for everything quite gracefully.

On this spiritual journey, our attitude of mind matters a great deal. Maharaj Jagat Singh explains in The Science of the Soul, that progress on the spiritual path “is due in no small measure to your past karma and the attitude which you have adopted.” What is this attitude the Master is referring to? Remember those two pouches we found in our box? One contained the fragrance of joy, the other, the fragrance of gratitude. Joy and gratitude: these indeed are two key ingredients of a committed disciple’s makeup. Maharaj Charan Singh says in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II, “You can only break strong attachments by experiencing joy, joy from becoming one with the sound and light within.”

Paltu Sahib says in Sant Paltu: His Life and Teachings:

Dance with abandon,
cast off your veil!
Let the whole world watch your free dance.
Your aim is to please the Lord –
Who can stop you from dancing to your own heart?
You are fortunate … to have won his love.

About gratitude, Hazur tells us in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. III:

We have no words with which to thank him [the Lord] – we cannot thank him at all with this tongue, whatever the Lord or the Master does for us in this life. We owe our very existence, all these privileges, just to the Father. This very human birth is nothing but his grace. So at every step we must thank him. We must find every excuse to thank him.

Joy and gratitude are nurtured through meditation, and they develop as we open our mind in awe to what has been given to us.

We are just a few out of billions of human beings living on this planet who have been given the opportunity to embark upon the trip to return home. Masters say that it is only by the grace of the Father that we come in contact with any saint. We have been assigned a guide who finds us at the right time and takes us under his protection. This guide, as explained by Maharaj Sawan Singh, releases our soul from the thorns of karma that permeate “every cell of the body.” The Master touched us soul to soul at birth and told us: “Come back. I am showing you the way. It is not a matter of ‘if’; it is a matter of certainty.”

Remember the words engraved in the box: “Dear child, my stream of love will bring you back to me.” It is this stream of love that has pulled us to the Master; it is his love that we are longing for and nurturing during meditation. Such is the power of divine love. It is his love that is doing it all. It is his love that is purifying us. As we learn to let go, we will allow ourselves to be carried away on the currents of that love – all the way back to Sach Khand.