Drawn to the Path

The Master is in our life. His path is our way of life. We don’t have to try to find him – he has found us. By coming into our lives, the Master has given us an opportunity to realize the reality of our soul and who we really are. But there’s a real possibility that many of us are wasting it owing to our lack of effort, our lack of understanding, and the lack of a sense of urgency.

As we go about our daily business, we are mostly oblivious of him in our life. But it is not by chance that we find ourselves on the path with the Master guiding us.

Maharaj Charan Singh said that it is difficult to analyze why we are associated with the path and that it could be for various reasons. But whatever beneficial karma brought us to him is now irrelevant. What is crucial is that he must become the pivot on which our lives rotate. Our attention and awareness should be tuned to him. In One Being One we read:

He is forever waiting for us to turn to Him. Indeed, He is the one who prompts us from within, and makes us turn.

Maharaj Charan Singh elaborates on this:

How has the soul come now to the feet of the Master? Is it by your own efforts or by some other means? Did you start searching for the Master right from your birth? Circumstances led you in such a way that you were drawn toward him. If the seed has been once sown, it is the Master who finds the disciple. The disciple can never find the Master. The Master will automatically find his disciple, wherever he may take birth.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}

The fact that the Master finds and watches over the disciple is beautifully explained in the following extract. Lahiri Mahasaya was a spiritual Master born in 1828. A story is told about the first time he met his Guru, also known as Baba Ji, in the Himalayas. The Guru’s voice rang with celestial love as he said to Lahiri:

For more than three decades I have waited for you to return to me. You slipped away and disappeared into the tumultuous waves of the life beyond death. The magic wand of your karma touched you, and you were gone! Though you lost sight of me, never did I lose sight of you! I pursued you over the luminescent astral sea where the glorious angels sail. Through gloom, storm, upheaval and light I followed you, like a mother bird guarding her young. As you lived out your human term of womb life, and emerged a babe, my eye was ever on you. When you covered your tiny form in the lotus posture under the Nadia sands in your childhood, I was invisibly present. Patiently, month after month, year after year, I have watched over you, waiting for this perfect day. Now you are with me.… My own, do you now understand?
_{Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi}

It’s awesome to think that our Master has also been watching over us, patiently waiting for us – possibly over many lifetimes. Ever present, ever vigilant – and yet we are totally unaware of his presence. Maharaj Charan Singh once asked: “How do you know I am not there when I am not there?” He then mentioned a similar message that Christ gave to his disciples, and explained it saying:

I will always be there. I will always hear you and take care of you.… I am always with my disciples.… Do not think that I am not there.
_{Light on Saint Matthew}

Sadly, as much as we like to think and imagine him with us, in truth, we are mostly unaware of his presence. The reason for this is that our consciousness is not yet adequately developed to be able to be aware of him. To understand and comprehend both the Master and the inner regions we need a totally different level of consciousness from our everyday awareness of the physical world.

We are creating our spiritual future now – but what sort of future are we creating? Given our lack of understanding, we probably don’t grasp the importance of the Master’s request when he implores us to do our meditation now, while in the human body.

All mystics have repeatedly advised us to not simply depend on the Master’s grace to carry us through and beyond death. In Shams-e Tabrizi, the author writes that Shams is emphatic about the uselessness of waiting lazily for God’s grace to alter the course of events. Rather, he says, we should make the effort to follow the Master’s instructions and actively seek God. He echoes what so many mystics have said: ‟Effort attracts grace and moves us towards God.” Our effort indicates to the Master that we are serious about following the path – and that invokes his grace.

Remorse is a devastating emotion. Will we regret our lack of dedicated effort when we are facing death? We may suffer deep anguish and rue the fact that we did not put more effort into our meditation while we had the opportunity. We all have incidents in our lives where we have done the inappropriate thing, and the result has caused us agonizing remorse.

How many times have we wished we could move back in time and do or say something differently? But we cannot undo what has been done. If our speech or actions can invoke such overwhelming remorse, imagine the regret we will feel when, facing death, we find our spiritual efforts to have been totally inadequate.

Let us not waste another precious life, another precious moment. We must make best use of what we’ve been given, right here and right now.