The Road to Eternity

The spoken word can never take us along the road to ultimate Eternity. As a child, listening to my schoolmates gabbling the Lord’s Prayer as quickly as possible so they could go out to play, I used to wonder: Here we are, in a convent dedicated to the religious life of worship of the Most High. What then, does this prayer really mean? Child that I was, I could find no answer. I thought: My mother, a Protestant, prays: “Our Father which art in heaven”; and here in school, Catholics say “Our Father who art in heaven”, which means they intimate he is a person. Is he out there, a kind fatherly old gentleman, resting on a damp cloud; or is he some feeling inside me that is demanding my full attention?

When we grow up and find a Master, through habit we carry these mundane ways of reasoning with us into our early practice of Sant Mat. The outer form of the physical Satguru is our target of worship and we strive with each other to show who is the strongest in expressing our appreciation and respect for him only in the way our earthly senses perceive him. Then if we leave his presence, or he goes away, time and space make a gap that tends to dim our love through forgetfulness. He seems to be telling us so clearly: Don’t worship this earthly form, this who that you have made of me. Go to that which, that power of Shabd, the Holy Ghost inside your innermost being that shines within you. Then I will always be present, always available; now, and now, and now, a glorious hymn of sound and light and life, of bliss and peace and joy within you, against which all the calamities and attractions of life in the world will pale into insignificance and disappear. Mankind is busy outside, searching like the scientists do in outer space for the black hole through which we came when creation began with a BANG! But, from the moment of initiation we can now look within much more convincingly through that black hole of our third eye, into a growing and widening awareness of timeless perception that no earthly words can convey.
_{Flora E. Wood, In Search of the Way}