Be Careful What You Wish For

For better or for worse, most of us have had our wings clipped by the Covid pandemic. We’ve spent time either in enforced isolation or doing much less travelling about while trying to escape the dreaded Corona virus. This virus has certainly brought home to us a clearer sense of our own mortality. Faced with this threat, every one of us must have given thought to our own readiness – or lack of it – to come face to face with death.

No doubt there may be some of us who feel more than ready to die. And probably we’d like this to be our last death – no more coming back to this imperfect world. However, we might be brought back by unfinished karmas, or dragged back because of attachments and desires.

Great Master tells us that the very reason why we are here now at all is because of past desires. We read in Spiritual Gems:

Do not give to the world and the people of the world a value equal to that of your own ideal. Wherever your desire is, there must your residence be. Because our love is all for this world, that is the very reason why we must come back into this world again and again.

So desires are powerful things. They lie at the root of reincarnation, and they are frequently the cause of our suffering. The only way to get rid of them is through devotion to a Master and doing the meditation that he teaches. As Great Master tells us, also in Spiritual Gems:

If… one daily gives time to the practices, and has no worldly desires, then there is no power which can bring one back to this plane. Birth is for those who die weeping with desires unfulfilled.

Maharaj Charan Singh used to explain that by nature man is actually happy. But over time, what makes us unhappy are our desires and our ambitions. If we don’t get what we want, we become miserable. We imagine that once we do get what we want, we’ll be happy. But it doesn’t work that way.

As Hazur Maharaj Ji used to tell us, it’s impossible to get rid of desires by trying to satisfy them. The mind has to rise above all these desires – to be contented with what we’ve been given. This constitutes living in the will of the Father.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that we must be careful what we wish for – because every desire will be satisfied. The trouble is: our desires might not be satisfied in this life but in the next. In another of his letters written to the early American Satsangis, Great Master told somebody:

You ask what clutches you fast in the darkness. This can be answered in one word: desires. They are the result of our own past karmas. If we can get rid of the worldly desires, there is nothing to keep us confined in this world.
_{Dawn of Light}

Getting rid of worldly desires means learning to live in the Lord’s will. It means wanting nothing more than what we have, and accepting that we need to wipe the slate clean of all those karmas that have been bringing us back.

In Philosophy of the Masters, Great Master tells us that complying with the Lord’s will means that whatever comes to us, we should accept it cheerfully – accept both pleasure and pain as gifts that come from the Lord. In other words, whatever he wills for us is perfect, exactly what we need at that time. Good or bad, whatever he gives us is an expression of his love for us. We read in Dawn of Light:

Whatever good or bad happens to you, through whatever person or object, directly proceeds from our loving Father. All persons and objects are but tools in His hands. If an evil befalls you, think it to be His greatest mercy. We have to suffer for our past actions sooner or later. Our Master, by taking us through this suffering speedily, intends to relieve us of our burden earlier. And by this early payment of debt – because debt it is – the amount of the suffering is very much lessened. If we had to pay one ton at first, we are now released by paying one pound only.

Real acceptance means that there’s no room in our lives for worry. We can then be truly contented with our lot. There’s great peace of mind in contentment. But of course, absolute contentment implies complete surrender to his will, and this may be something that we can only work towards. Absolute surrender would mean that we had achieved everything. There’d be nothing more that could hold us back, ever. And here Great Master tells us something quite startling: “If the mind could throw away all the worldly desires this moment, the soul would go up like a shot, instantaneously.”

The truth is that the Lord’s will is going to prevail anyway, whether we like it or not. But it’s up to us to recognize what grace it is that we want to submit to it and then to be grateful for whatever he gives us.

When we take the initiation of a true Master, we take him as our guide and our mentor. Right from the moment of our birth he has taken full control of our lives. In fact, from the time that we were marked for initiation, everything that happens to us can happen only according to his will.

We may try our best to accept everything as his will, but strictly speaking, this is still beyond us. In fact, Hazur Maharaj Ji tells us we can’t really live in the will of the Lord until we are completely free of the mind. But in another sense he says we can: by accepting without complaint the fate that’s been allotted to us. But this we can only do, Maharaj Ji adds, when we are filled with love and devotion for the Father.

We talk very easily about trying to live in the will of the Father. But the truth is that as long as our attitudes and actions are based on what the ego wants, we can’t truly say we’re living in his will. For us to truly live in his will requires far more than the petty needs of the ego. It requires the love that we start to develop for our Master – the love that grows to the extent that we want him more than we want any other worldly person or thing.

And eventually that will happen – because he makes it happen. He gives us love for him because this is a way to let us rise above our worldly attachments and desires. It will happen because it is through this love we feel for our Master that we will finally be able to find our way back to the Father, the ocean of all love … back to the source of love from which we once came.