Bubbles on Water

Saint Namdev, a poet and mystic from Maharashtra, wrote this short poem:

One moment bubbles appear
on water – the next, they’re gone.
This is life – the moment you see it, it’s gone,
and in the end your hands are empty.
The magician’s show lasts a few moments
and the tricks look real, says Namdev.
Life looks real, but only for a moment.
_{Many Voices One Song}

For the most part, we human beings are deeply rooted in this material world. Most of us have no direct experience of any other kind of reality. This is what we know, understand and experience on a daily basis. Because of this we invest heavily in what we see around us. We give our families, friends, careers and hobbies a great deal of our time and attention. We attach great importance to possessions – homes, cars, clothes, money in the bank and savings plans.

However, mystics throughout the ages have been at pains to explain that there is a great deal more to life than what our outer physical senses register. And they also tell us that life does not end at death. Life, for our immortal soul, continues for each and every one of us. They explain that our souls originated from God, are of his essence and belong with him. They also tell us that until a soul is reunited with its heavenly Father, it is subject to reincarnation and even transmigration.

Every death is followed by another life – but not always in the human form. A human life lived carelessly, cruelly and dishonestly may well be succeeded by life in a lower life form. This is the law of karma that binds us here to this level of creation.

This is not a happy picture. But there is a way out – an exit that will lead us back to God and release us from this endless, ages-old cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Happily for humans, and human beings alone, there is a path of release that will eventually lead to reunion with God and a state of permanent peace and joy.

This makes the human body the most precious possession one could ever imagine. Once a longing, lonely and weary soul in a human form has been granted God’s gift of meeting one of his sons and being blessed with initiation, that soul has the treasure in his hand – a treasure that can be used to secure its passage home.

Now, we must ask ourselves: What are we doing with this gift? Are we squandering it, or using it to help us grow? What are we doing with our lives? Are we still furiously trying to add to our worldly treasure, or are we trying to invest in a different kind of future, now that we have a different kind of treasure?

We probably all need to be investing heavily in another kind of bank account altogether. We need to gather the wealth of God’s Name through devotion to our Guru, and to God. This spiritual wealth can accompany us at death. It may even be enough, when added to our Master’s enormous contribution of grace, to ensure that we don’t have to come back here again. Surely this is the best investment we could ever make.

What our devotional practice requires of us is our attention. When our attention is on our worldly treasures and activities – more than is necessary to function in the world – then it clearly isn’t on God. If we have always given worldly attachments our best attention, energy and effort, then what have we been able to devote to the Lord? The leftovers?

The mystics tell us that at the time of death we will go where our attachments are. If we have spent the majority of our years focusing on the world, then that is where we’ll end up. If we’re trying to become attached to the sound current, to the Shabd, then that’s where we’ll go. Either our worldly attachments will pull us, or our spiritual ones will. And our own effort, commitment and energy can help determine the outcome.

This is going to involve a conscious kind of effort and commitment; the kind that weighs the two options and chooses what we really want and what our soul longs for. Then, having made the decision, we need to formulate a plan that will allow that choice to govern our lives, because this is a lifestyle choice: a 24/7 approach to life.

Our souls have been in this creation for so very long. And throughout that time our minds have created webs of attachment that draw us back here life after life. We cannot sever these incredibly dense, sticky and interwoven webs on our own. We need the intervention of a living true master to come to our aid, and then we need to participate in the process as actively as possible.

Attaching to the sound current and building up spiritual wealth in heaven are not only about his abundant grace – they are also about our effort, our attention, our seva and our meditation. When we meditate we are trying to live in the Lord’s will. Meditation shifts our attention inwards, slowly but surely, away from outer distractions. Meditation will help the Master to take us home. He can use whatever bits of treasure we have laid up in heaven to secure our release from this prison.

We must prioritise our meditation time and make the world’s demands fit in with meditation, not the other way around. We need to sort out meal times and sleep times so that we’re ready and fresh when that alarm clock goes off every morning. And we need to be regular and punctual – trying to be in our meditation place at the same time every day.

Meditation needs to become a desirable habit rather than a boring duty. The passage of time since initiation mustn’t make us lazy, despondent or complacent about our meditation. At our initiation we promised our Master to try every day to do our best, and that promise must motivate us through the good and the bad sessions. And there are seemingly bad sessions – of that there can be no doubt! But every single time we try to sit, it’s to our credit. It’s an act of devotion, an act of love. It may not feel like that at the time, as we struggle with the mind, but that’s what it is.

The struggle with the mind will not cease until we go beyond the realm of the mind. Until then it will do whatever it can to keep us trapped here, tied up in karmas and attachments. Our job is simply to persevere with our honest efforts – knowing that time is fleeting, but also knowing that nobody wants us to succeed more than our Master.

To check this mind we need to try, more and more often throughout the day, to consciously choose our simran rather than worldly thoughts. Simran is a love-based choice. It is us rejecting the lure of habitual worldly thoughts in favour of thoughts that will lead us to the Master. Simran is indeed the vehicle that is leading us to the eye centre.

For every penny’s worth of effort, love and devotion we put in the bank, we can be sure Master is matching it one thousand-fold. We cannot lose in this endeavour. If we actually succeed in meeting the inner Master, hearing the sound or seeing the inner light in this lifetime, then we might be able to say we’ve won the struggle. But if we seem to be losing the battle, we are still his, still in the palm of his hand, and he has us so firmly in his loving embrace that we will have won – even when we think we’ve lost. We just can’t lose.

The struggles and frustrations are there to make our resolve firm and make our love grow. Our little love-seedling thrives on our apparent failures as much as our successes. Every effort takes us closer to our Master who is taking us home. And as Maharaj Charan Singh says: “We have only one future – to go back to the Father. There’s no other future.”