From Ignorance to Awareness

The true spiritual path is a path of light. The essence of God and the essence of our souls are also pure light. Minerals, plants, animals, virus or bacterial germs, and even astral beings are sustained by this energy of light. At the core of every atom is nothing but powerful energy.

But a nagging question arises. We see so much light outside of us physically, such as the sun and numerous artificial means to provide light, so why is there spiritual darkness in our souls? If we are of the essence of God, why are we not experiencing the power of that light within us?

Brother, a diamond is a diamond. If you throw it in the mud, it will be encrusted with mud, but the moment it is washed, it is again as brilliant as before. The soul is a diamond. Every soul is the essence of the Lord. It is pure in itself, but having taken the company of the mind, and the mind having become victim of the senses, it has covered itself with evil, darkness and filth.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}

Hazur Maharaj Ji often used the image of an electric bulb. If you place many dark coverings over the bulb, its light is obscured. Likewise, it is unimaginable what karmas we have collected from the beginning of time. Layers and layers of these dark coverings conceal the tremendous light of our soul.

The soul … works under a serious handicap…. This world is not its native habitat. Here it is obliged to work under and through a series of coverings…coverings of mind and matter. Though mind is a refined sort of matter, we are accustomed to speak of it as apart from matter. Under all of its coverings, the soul finds it exceedingly difficult to express itself and have its own way.
_{The Path of the Masters}

Our soul consciousness once fed on divine nectar. Unfortunately today, it feeds daily on darkness – the darkness of pride, anger, attachment, lust and greed.

If darkness tries to understand light, it will never succeed. Its darkness is its own limitation. But one thing is assured; where there is light, darkness cannot remain to prove its existence. So on a positive note there is no darkness, just the absence of light in our minds. In this dark state we have created an identity separate from our true inner self. This compels us to dwell in illusion and misperceptions. The result is that everything we feel, sense or experience projects through our own distorted perception and has no reality.

Everything we perceive with our senses is just a projected image. There is the light in the projector: that’s the One Being. Then there’s the film through which the light shines: that’s the mind. And then there’s the screen on which the projected images appear: that’s this world…. Switch off the light in the projector and everything disappears.
_{One Being One}

Let us suppose that we possess a well-cut piece of glass. Looking at it, we see it as a diamond. Yet all the while it is glass. Where is the diamond? Where does it exist? It does not exist on the outside because on the outside it is actually glass. It only exists in our mind. If a diamond expert assesses it, he will confirm it is glass. The illusion it was a diamond disappears, and if we lose or misplace it, we are not distressed by the loss.

Light in our mind is borrowed from our soul, much like the moon reflects the light of the sun on its surface. When one has transcended his mind, he is enlightened. In other words, light has entered his mind and he is awakened to the truth. He now sees the world as it is in its true nature. His inner vision is clear and he can see with the eyes of the soul that wealth, fame and human relations are all false, so he does not suffer their loss. He is detached from the material world and attached only to the inner true love of the Lord.

“What does it mean to be enlightened?”
“To see.”
“What?”
“The hollowness of success, the emptiness of achievements, the nothingness of human striving,” said the Master.
_{Anthony de Mello, One Minute Nonsense}

The Buddha taught that all suffering is caused by ignorance. When he was asked what he meant by such suffering, he gave a clarifying example. He explained that how on one very dark night, a person fell down from a cliff. In his anguish, he caught hold of the branch of a tree in the pitch darkness of the night. He was unaware of what was beneath him – the ground, a deep valley, or water.

All night long he trembled and wept. In utter fear, he clung even tighter to the branch. When morning light came, he saw he was only one foot away from the ground. This is what ignorance is and what it does to us.

The masters have often said that darkness symbolizes ignorance because we are unaware of who we truly are. Outwardly we may “practise” awareness – staying in the moment, keeping track of where we left our keys, and thinking before we speak, for example. These are good skills to acquire, no doubt, but true awareness is an inner consciousness of the Shabd.

Nam, or Shabd, is the only power that can liberate us from our ignorance and thereby from our suffering. Being enslaved by the mind, we do not know the way or have the means to connect with the Shabd by ourselves. It is the living Master who explains to us the proper procedure at the time of our initiation. He guides us all the way to our true source – Sach Khand.

Were a hundred moons to rise
together with a thousand suns,
it would be, with all that light,
utter darkness without the Guru.
_{Adi Granth, as quoted in Gurbani Selections, Vol. 1}

In Sanskrit, gu means darkness and ru means light. The Guru shows us how to apply the collyrium of Nam on our inner eyes by the practice of meditation – a metaphor that conveys the power of the Word that brings light to the spiritually blind so that they can see.

Progress in meditation is slow because it takes time to adjust to the tremendous light of our soul. It would be very easy for the Master to pull up a soul prematurely and bring it face to face with the light within. But it would not be easy for the disciple to bear seeing that tremendous brightness all at once. Our inner eye needs to gradually open, without losing our balance in this world.

Coming closer to the Truth is like coming closer to the sun. Our objective is to come closer to the inner light until the ego burns. Then the soul becomes like a moth whose desire for the lamp is so intense that it rushes towards the flame to burn its very self and lose its identity.

Darkness is the first step we must go through to appreciate light. When we meditate and see nothing, it isn’t nothing. It is a dark sky we see. Keeping our attention at the focus without wavering awakens the inner Shabd of light and sound.

Until then, darkness plays its part in the scheme of life. Everything has its time, everything has its reason and season. A seed has to be placed underground away from sunlight for some time to germinate and then sprout out into the light.

We have that Light within us, but unless we see that light within, unless we merge into that light – as Christ said, if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light – we are not aware of it…. You have to open that single eye in order to see that light.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}