The Path that We Follow

The path of Surat Shabd Yoga, or the yoga of the sound current, is a path as old as time itself. It is the process by which the soul, the true essence of man, is awakened and reunited with its source, the Creator of all that has ever been or will be. It is only as human beings that we have the opportunity to escape the creation and to find our way back to our true home.

Kabir, a mystic of the 15th century, wrote:

Even gods crave a human form;
You’ve obtained this precious body,
Now keep yourself engaged
In devotion for the Lord.
Worship him, forget him not,
For realization of God
Is the profit to be reaped
From this human form.
_{Kabir, The Weaver of God’s Name}

Why do we want to reunite with our Creator? It is true that not every human being wants to find his way back, but virtually every human being is discontented in this world and hankers for something more. As human beings we are able to suppress this feeling of discontentment by losing ourselves in the pleasures of the senses, and by investing in family, friends and our physical surroundings. But the primary cause of all our pain is our separation from our source.

We are not our mind, this ever-changing entity that chatters to us day and night; we are pure soul, a particle of the Lord. But we have forgotten our real self, we have forgotten our true Father, and we have invested more and more in a world that delivers less and less. We are born, we die and we are born again. We only know and remember this world, and so we keep incarnating in body after body, desperately trying to fill a void that can never be filled with any satisfaction through worldly things.

Eventually even the mind becomes weary of this world, and the cries of the abandoned soul grow louder and louder. For those who reach this point of disillusionment it feels like something inside them is driving them towards the search for truth. They may attribute this to their own disillusion, but what is happening behind the scenes is quite different. This discontentment and seeking is a gift from the Lord, and we only begin to experience this restlessness when the Lord wants us back.

We are told that there is an entity who has the responsibility of looking after all the regions below pure spirit, namely the realms of mind, sensation and physical creation. This entity has been given many names, including Kal. It is Kal’s job to keep souls in the creation. This is achieved by using the instruments of desire and karma.

Desire engages us in the creation and makes us act at the behest of our senses for frivolous gains. In other words, we create karma. The mind and the body are bound by the law of karma, or action and reaction. The law states that for each and every action performed by a mind or body there is an equal and opposite reaction that balances out the original action. So, we are also embroiled in credits and debits based on the actions we perform. These, and the desires that lead to actions, keep us bound to this creation, as no soul can escape the creation if it still has karmic debts.

It is not an easy process to leave this creation. The Saints tell us that the entire creation is a very powerful illusion; nothing is permanent and what is here today is gone tomorrow. Even if we accept the concept that we are trapped in an illusion, we know nothing else and our experience of it is very real, so we struggle to turn away from its attractions.

All spiritually realized souls say that man is made in the image of God. They tell us that we each have a spark of divinity within us but we don’t experience this because we only know ourselves through a series of sense impressions from the time of our birth until now.

So how does one get out of this creation? How will we settle our karmic accounts and discover our true selves? The Shabd Masters explain to us that we can only find the Lord and the truth about everything within ourselves.

Everything else we learned up till now came to us through our senses and was processed by our minds, so why can’t we see and know the Creator? It’s because our mind and senses are too limited. The Master tells us that the only way to come to know ourselves and meet our Creator is through meditation. He tells us to close our eyes, close our ears and focus on one thing so we can still our mind.

And how does the meditation practice of Surat Shabd Yoga work? The answer is: by listening to the Shabd. We are accustomed to hearing sounds with these outer ears and our sense of hearing, but now we learn to listen to the inner sound. This is what the yoga of the audible life stream is designed to help us do. The Shabd, or divine melody, is the manifestation of the Lord. It is what the whole creation is made of, and human beings are capable of hearing it. Saints often refer to this sound as the Word or the Name.

The Master is pure spirit, his consciousness is one with the Lord, and he is above the mind and the senses. It is the Lord’s design that when he wants to recall a soul to his abode, he sends a true master who draws these souls towards him like moths to a light.

The attraction between the disciple and the Master is, at the highest level, the recognition by the soul of its true self as manifested in the Master. At our level, it is experienced as admiration, emotion and love for a being who loves us unconditionally – an experience that we get from no other being in this world. Our attraction for the Master comes from deep within us.

We have been in this creation since its beginning. Our soul has been dominated by the mind and senses, and our soul is in a deep slumber. The experience of unconditional love, and the attraction to the Master’s form, enables us to look away from the creation into ourselves for the first time in millions of years.

The Master tells us how to live so we can avoid entrenching ourselves further in this creation. And if we are very fortunate, the Master grants us initiation. Once we have this initiation the real work starts. Now it’s up to us. The Master has given us everything we need to start our journey.

However, we should remind ourselves that, whether we are young or old, only a little time remains, and the only chance we have at salvation is while we are alive. If we never want to face birth and death again, we must practise the art of dying while living by following the meditation practice our Master has taught us. He is our guide and our saviour, and he is everything we will ever need. When we have finally had enough of giving in to our incessant desires and give him a chance to be in our lives, that is the day that our true happiness and contentment begin.