Which Child Am I?
During one of Baba Ji’s question-and-answer sessions, someone asked a question about realizing the Lord through submission. In response, Baba Ji talked about meditation being the easier way – the path that leads to submission. He also spoke about spiritual maturity, which allows us to understand that everything the Lord gives us is for our own good.
He ended the exchange with a powerful metaphor. He described the difference between an innocent child who jumps into his father’s arms from a table without hesitation, and an older one who hesitates, thinking about whether his father will really catch him if he jumps. The little child has complete faith that his father will catch him. But the older child starts analyzing the situation, worrying about whether he’ll be caught or if he might fall. The Master suggested that we be innocent like a small child and simply surrender to the Lord unquestioningly.
You might ask yourself, “Which child am I? The one that fully trusts and is ready to jump, or the one that hesitates, worries and doubts?” A letter Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to his disciple Maharaj Sawan Singh, published in Spiritual Letters, helps us think about how to answer these questions. He begins: “The day the individual being, that is the soul, separated from Sach Khand and the Shabd-dhun, that very day its trust in the True Lord and the Shabd-dhun was also severed.” He goes on to say, “The Shabd-dhun looks after it [the soul] all the time, but it does not realize this because its love and loyalties are deeply entrenched in mind and maya … and the senses that deceive.”
Baba Jaimal Singh then writes: “The Satguru, attaching the disciple again to the same Shabd-dhun, will guide him back to Sach Khand. So the disciple’s trust that remained broken in life after life has been restored.”
Just because our faith wavers doesn’t mean that the Lord has stopped taking care of us. But in our delusional state, unaware of the Lord’s presence in our lives because we are trapped in mind and maya, we chase desires and dreams that we believe will give us some comfort or happiness. We have forgotten that the only thing that will give the soul peace is to merge back into its source.
How do we re-establish our connection with the Lord once our trust in it has been broken? That separateness is itself an illusion. We just have to realize our true essence, our true identity. It is a state of awareness, of realization.
Bulleh Shah explains the idea in the book Bulleh Shah:
Oh Bullah, the Lord is not separate from us.
Other than the Lord, none exists.
Alas! We do not have the seeing eye.
That’s why life is a tale of suffering.
We have to develop our “seeing eye” – wake up from the dream of suffering and realize that we have been in the Lord’s embrace all along. The Master often reminds us that when he is talking to us, we see him; we hear him. But we turn around and look the other way. He is still there; he is still talking – he hasn’t gone anywhere. It is we who have turned away.
Our meditation practice enables us to turn our attention back to him – inward and upward – and realize for ourselves that there is no separation. It was just that we had turned away. In that turning away, we gained nothing but sorrow and misery. And in turning back around and experiencing the Shabd, we gain faith and trust; we gain the Beloved himself.
No words can describe the bliss of that experience. The trust which was broken is fully restored, and we become that little child who is able to jump when the father says jump – with innocence and true faith – into our Father’s arms.