Faith and Loneliness

Faith and loneliness: at first glance, these terms come across as mutually exclusive. They don’t belong together. If we have faith, how can we be lonely?

The truth is that our faith is at best shaky and laced with doubt. We think we have love for the Master and have undying faith in him, yet we are torn between our love for the material world and our soul’s longing to merge with the Creator.

In Quest for Light Maharaj Charan Singh calls faith the foundation on which the whole structure of spiritual progress stands. So, how do we acquire true, lasting and unshakeable faith?

This mansion of faith is built upon numerous pillars. The first and most essential of these pillars is loneliness, the most painful of human conditions – the constant sense that we are not quite whole. We are born sensing that there is something missing, which creates in us a desperate need to find this missing something.

Shams-e-Tabrizi, Master of the poet Rumi, speaks frequently of this need, which seems to carry a variety of meanings: a deep desire for the inner Beloved and for God; a sufficient degree of self-awareness to understand one’s own inadequacy and helplessness in the quest; a yearning restlessness, a sense of something missing and of not belonging; and above all, a deeply felt humility and a need for prayer, asking God for help and guidance. In Shams-e-Tabrizi Shams says: “When you come with an attitude of need, then that, in essence, is asking me the way to God.”

And it would seem that even the Lord himself has a need. In Spiritual Perspectives someone once asked Maharaj Charan Singh: “Is the Lord lonely?” And he replied: “Maybe that’s why he’s calling us.” Then Maharaj Ji was asked if the Lord needs our love. He answered that it was the Beloved who gave that love to the lover. It was the Lord who put that pull in the heart of the lover. Therefore he must feel a need for that love.

Isn’t it beautiful and reassuring to know that he also wants us to love him? As our soul is of his essence, it naturally feels a pull towards him. There is a magnetic pull from the whole to the part, and from the part to the whole. It is a great circle of love. And our Master waits for us patiently and longingly, day after day, to complete this circle of love.

Once we have acknowledged this heartfelt need, then the second pillar is to follow the instructions and teachings of our Master – the instructions that will help us fulfil our need and take us a step closer to true faith. The method and teachings of true masters are based on four fundamental principles: following a vegetarian diet, not taking alcohol, tobacco or mind-altering substances, living a moral and honest life, and giving at least a tenth of one’s time daily to the practice of meditation.

How can we follow the instructions of someone diligently if we do not trust them? The third pillar, therefore, is to fully and unconditionally trust the Master – much as a passenger who buys an airline ticket trusts that the pilot of the aircraft will take him to his destination.

The mystics explain that this is an exact parallel to the plight of the soul, which is lost in the maze of mind and matter and does not know how to make its way to spiritual freedom. That is, until a compassionate and loving spiritual master comes along who not only knows how to escape, but who offers to help the soul realize its freedom. Considering the helplessness of our situation, why would we not gratefully accept his help?

True mystics teach by example. Like loving parents, they use logic, reason and love. They want their disciples to walk the path with a strong conviction derived from their own understanding and experience. But to reach that level of experience, we need to trust in the Master. We need to acknowledge that when it comes to the liberation of our soul, he is the expert and he knows best how to get us home.

Based on this trust, we must also embrace the idea of letting go. We cling so desperately to the cheap treasures of this world that we feel we have worked so hard for, but we do not make the space, we do not create the receptivity to receive the treasures that our Father has bestowed on us.

To acquire true faith we need to trust, we need to let go. But how do we build this attitude? It is built on the fourth pillar, which is love. We need to develop love for the Master. Not human love that is based on emotion, but the kind of love that the soul feels for the Creator. Does this mean there is no place for the love of the physical form of the Master in Sant Mat? Not at all.

In the book Adventure of Faith we learn that once during an evening meeting Maharaj Charan Singh spoke most lovingly about his own Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, who had left this world decades before. Tears welled up in Maharaj Ji’s eyes and he said,“I would give my life to see him again in his human form.”

If our own Master longs for his Master, then for us too as human beings it is only natural to feel great love for the physical form. On this coarse plane of material existence where the Shabd form is not easily accessible to us, it is the physical Master who teaches us how to go within and get in touch with the inner Master; and it is he who helps us develop our love, trust and faith.

And the love we may feel for our Master is far more than human emotion. In Living Meditation we read, “Emotion, rightly directed, becomes devotion.”

The mind wants us to believe that the path of devotion is one of romance. But all the saints have told us that the path of love is both a path of devotion and of struggle. The battle we have to face is inside, and it is inside that it has to be fought. In practical terms it means we have to keep our attention as much as we can in simran, repetition of the holy words, at the eye centre. This is where we’ll come face to face with the real inner Master.

The task of the physical form of the Master is to initiate us and prepare us to meet the inner Master. The physical form is a means, not an end. We need the physical to love because we cannot develop the love we need for success on the spiritual path if its object is just an idea, a concept, in our mind. Our aim has to be to direct our love for the outer Master into effort in meditation so that we reach beyond the physical to the spiritual.

As we grow in understanding of the purpose of the physical Master, we cannot stop there. We must carry on our search for the Master’s real form – the Shabd form. Therefore, the seed of love can only grow with the fifth pillar: meditation, to lead us to the Shabd. All masters proclaim the same truth. The true Master is Shabd. True darshan is inner darshan. Truth is within.

The Master can point us to the truth, but he cannot experience the truth for us. Meditation is the means by which the love and natural emotions generated by contact with the Master are directed inwards and upwards, to bring us to that state where we become intimate with the real Master. In Light on Sant Mat, Maharaj Charan Singh says:

Love for the Master comes by having darshan inside, that is, by seeing him inside. It is only then that the feeling of real love springs up. In the beginning we have to practise it more or less. If we carry out his wishes and commands and follow his instructions faithfully, … it also leads to darshan inside.