The Divine Connection

We have been drawn to our path and received initiation, but this does not mean we have found God. We are now being guided along a path towards realizing God; a journey that, we are told, will culminate in our return to our original home and our true Father. We are fortunate to have a true spiritual master guiding us through all the perils and obstacles that life in this illusionary existence presents. The masters are committed to returning each of their disciples to their original home.

In order to know God, we need to undertake some meaningful spiritual practice. Irrespective of our limited understanding and our imperfect grasp of truth, it is our desire to know him that keeps us moving forward, and compels us to continue with our spiritual journey.

In the book Adventure of Faith, the author tells the story of her spiritual search for God, which took most of her life to complete. It culminated when she met and was initiated by Maharaj Charan Singh.

Her story starts by describing how she had her first profound spiritual experience at the age of thirteen. While travelling home from school on a train, she was overwhelmed by the feeling of an invisible light coming from above. From this light, she heard a clear and distinct voice inside, saying: “Preserve your heart’s capacity to love, for you know not, whether God will one day ask you for your undivided heart.” This experience was so profound that it created a complete about-turn in her life. She wrote: “This was the beginning of my Adventure of Faith.”

She had no doubt that it was God who had spoken to her. She described the voice as “insistent and at the same time infinitely gentle and full of love.” The direction she was guided to take was clearly a spiritual voyage of discovery. She described the effect:

He had laid his hand upon me and had thus become my personal God, to whom I surrendered my life unquestioningly, and unconditionally, not knowing what the consequences would be.
_{Adventure of Faith}

The masters affirm that we are all spiritual beings and therefore, in essence, one with the divine. As our attachments to this illusionary world are severed, and with conscientious spiritual practice, we will begin to experience this divine connection. This is confirmed in from self to Shabd, where we read:

Little by little, with spiritual practice, we will begin to detach from all those things that used to have a strong grip on us. This will give us the confidence that we are on the right track and on our way to truly identify with Shabd consciousness. As our awareness of our true nature – our oneness with Shabd – develops, we will experience far more peace and happiness than this world is capable of giving.

This detachment, the mystics tell us, comes as a result of our meditation, especially the practice of simran – the repetition of the five holy words given to us at the time of initiation. When we substitute the habit of thinking about the world with the habit of simran, we feel more peaceful. Simran distracts us from the world, helping us to detach from the character we are playing and the events playing out around us.

If we acquire the habit of switching to simran, we will eventually reach a calmer, more serene mental place – a sanctuary in which the world starts to lose its attraction. This state of awakened consciousness is exactly what the masters require of us if we are to overcome the resistance of our mind and connect with the divine.

It is worth reminding ourselves that remaining in the present moment, through concentrated simran, enables us to control the mind’s obsessive activity. Stilling the mind is possibly our most important task and is to be performed each time we meditate. The nature of the mind is activity – it needs to be constantly busy, and simran satisfies this need in the most productive way possible.

We may be spiritual seekers on the path of Sant Mat, but we still need to act out our roles in this illusionary stage show. Our destiny has been allotted to us, and we must attend to our responsibilities to the best of our ability. At the same time, we need to avoid becoming obsessed with the illusions of the world. There is nothing permanent in this region of duality – happiness does not last, contentment is fleeting, security is fragile and relationships are impermanent.

This world is designed to imprison us, using anything and everything to distract us from our spiritual purpose. Our true, original home is with the Lord in Sach Khand, and we need to prepare for our return home, which entirely depends on our spiritual practice and the grace of our Master.

We need to use our allotted time in the world to attend conscientiously to our worldly duties, but while doing this, we need to keep our attention directed towards the Lord. In other words, while working through our destiny in this world, we must not lose focus on our spiritual goal.

Constant simran is the antidote to our mind’s absorption with the world. Only our conscious, focused application of simran will enable us to still the mind sufficiently to achieve what the masters call ‘dying while living’.

In Die to Live, Maharaj Charan Singh says:

By the grace of the Master, we cut asunder our attachments with the world and forget its troubles and miseries. Daily, through the practice of meditation, we die. We Die to Live, to enjoy the eternal bliss and peace of our True Home, and live forever.

The mystics stress the importance of keeping our objective in mind during our spiritual journey. We cannot afford to be distracted by the world’s fairground, brimming with delights and temptations. We know where our attention must be: awareness of God is only obtainable by sincere and focused meditation.

In Message Divine, Guru Nanak is quoted as saying: “Constant simran is the ladder to the palace of the Lord. It is priceless and comes only to a rare fortunate one through the grace of the Master.”

We all have a yearning for some form of divine connection to enable us to live more in the presence of God. The following quote from the book Awareness of the Divine effectively sums it up for us:

Ultimately, it is all so very simple, and it has all been said before. We are spiritual beings living in the ocean of the divine Being, of God. All the problems of the world, personal or otherwise, have just one source – our forgetfulness or unawareness of this one Reality, of the divine presence in everything. The meaning and purpose of life are enfolded in this mystery, and enlightenment is to discover who and what we truly are.