The Master Answers

A selection of questions and answers with Maharaj Charan Singh

Q: If you haven’t attended to your devotion and meditation, will the Master still greet you at the time of death?
A: Well, sister, Christ has said two things. He says, when you see the Son and believe on him, then I will raise you at the last day. ‘See the Son’ means you go to the company of a living Master. ‘Believe on him’ means if you follow the teaching sincerely, then he will raise you at the last day. If you don’t follow the teachings, don’t live the teachings, then it is for him to decide whether he comes or not. But we can have a claim if we live in his teachings and follow the teachings. Otherwise, it is just his grace.
_{Light on Saint John}

Q: In Maharaj Jagat Singh’s book, Science of the Soul, we read that if a disciple criticizes another, it is a very bad sin. What is the consequence upon a person who criticizes others?
A: Every mystic has been telling us the same thing. Christ also says that you do not see the beam in your own eye, but you see a mote in another person’s eye. What Sardar Bahadur Maharaj Ji meant was that instead of criticizing others, we should criticize ourself – what is our weakness that we cannot live with another person? Rather than criticizing him for not cooperating with us, cooperation has to come from us. We have to adjust to a situation; the situation cannot adjust to us. We have to be good to another person and not expect him to be good to us. We always expect others to be good and nice and loving to us, but we never realize that it has to start with us. That is what he means, that it is sinful to criticize anybody unnecessarily and not to look within our own self and find our own faults and try to remove them. _{Light on Saint Matthew}

Q: Is running after the Master out of love for him the same as outwardly expressing our inner experiences and feelings of devotion and love?
A: Running after the physical form of the Master is something very different from having love for the Master. Running after the Master doesn’t mean that you have love. You may be empty within and still you may be running after the Master. Yet, you may be filled with love for him and you may not move even an inch. You would like to remain in discipline, but that doesn’t mean you have no love. Running after the Master doesn’t show any special love.

Love is always within. When you try to dramatize your love, you lose the depth of the love. You have to digest that love within. If you have that love within, the moment you try to dramatize it, you lose its depth.
_{Die to Live}

Q: Master, I was told that if one is doing very heavy manual labour, that perhaps you’ll get tired because you’re doing this type of work, and that it’s actually a little harder for you to withdraw from your body because you’re more attached to it, having to work very hard with it.
A: I don’t think physical exercise, physical work, has anything to do with your withdrawal within. In fact, it has nothing to do with it. It is your attachment to the senses which makes it difficult to withdraw to the eye centre. Hard exercise doesn’t make it difficult to withdraw from the body, because the body does the exercise, not the mind. It’s wrong. Do you mean to say that weaker people who don’t do any manual work withdraw more easily?

The only problem is that people who work very hard get too tired, and they should not try to sit in meditation at the cost of sleep. Physical work makes no difference at all in withdrawing.
_{Die to Live}