The Promise of Spring

A nine days’ wonder is the springtime;
It’s your chance to play Holi, my mind.

Without cymbals, without drums,
The unstruck music comes resounding.
Without any tune, without any sound,
With no pause the Melody resounds,
Filling every pore of my body.

I fill love’s spray with the hue
Of virtue and contentment,
And blissfully I sprinkle this colour around.
The colour scatters, the sky glows red,
And without a stop it rains
In vivid and varied tints.

I have flung away the veil of my body;
I have shed all reserve and fear
Of what people may say.
Such a Holi I play in this springtime.

Mira adores her beloved Lord;
She sacrifices her all at His lotus feet.
_{Mira: The Divine Lover}

Throughout the ages, mystics have associated springtime with spiritual joy. In the poetry of Persian mystics such as Rumi and Hafiz, we find descriptions of flowers in the garden that find a voice and call out to one another. Their joyous exchanges hint at what it must feel like as mind and soul experience inner bliss. In the verses quoted above, Mirabai draws a parallel with the Hindu festival of Holi, when family and friends toss coloured powders at each other in a light-hearted manner to celebrate the season.

Spring is a good metaphor for spiritual awakening as it’s a time of glad transformation – the emergence from the darkness of winter to the energy of new life. Think baby animals gambolling in the sunshine, tender buds on the trees and green shoots pushing through the earth.

We understand that these birth pains are an essential part of the whole journey, reminding us that growth and renewal often require overcoming challenges. However, the excitement of new beginnings naturally comes with the darker days of winter, the time when life first begins to emerge. In his poem ‘The Wasteland,’ the 20th-century poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land.”

Why should April be cast as cruel? Perhaps it is due to the inherent pain of all transformations and change. The seasonal cycle begins with a descent into the decay of winter. Plants shed their leaves, lose their ability to retain life-giving elements, and shrivel into the ground. This process is painful in itself. Similarly, when we commit to a spiritual way of life, we must eventually confront a life of mental sacrifice. In this regard, Maharaj Charan Singh says in Die to Live:

It is not easy to follow this Path. One has to sacrifice a lot in life to achieve the end. You constantly have to be alert with your mind as if you were on a razor’s edge.… To follow Sant Mat requires a complete transformation, so it’s not easy.

First comes the transformation from an ego-centred sensual being to the renunciation of physical attachments. Saints have told us we need to ‘cleanse the heart’s chamber’, meaning we must empty our hearts to make room for the love of the guru, God’s light-bringer. That clearing out, possibly experienced like winter when withering, is a painful process. But so too is the awakening to spiritual love, the stirrings before spring has truly taken hold. To recognize that we want something better than the old humdrum life – that we have seen and felt something better, yet have temporarily lost it again – those pangs of love are painful. In the same passage in Die to Live, Maharaj Charan Singh says: “And then to be filled with love and devotion and to yearn to become one with the Being is not a very pleasant feeling.”

Maharaj Charan Singh advises the seeker that, through all this, “We should be bold enough to struggle.” This means we should bravely accept our winter of the senses and the challenging recognition of a greater destiny. The happiness and fulfilment we seek will be realized once we gain control of our minds, and to achieve this, we must struggle to get our minds to attend to meditation. Meeting a true master and receiving initiation from him are crucial turning points in our lives. He can provide us with a method so simple that even a child of eight or an elderly person of eighty can follow it, and the Master will also offer inspiration and guidance. Maharaj Charan Singh says, “We have to create in our mind the habit of concentrating, and slowly and slowly we will succeed.” Success comes when we begin to enjoy meditation. At this moment, it is as if spring is on the horizon.

Repetition
The habit of concentration that Maharaj Charan Singh refers to is cultivated through repetition. This happens in two ways: at the time of initiation, we promised to build up to two and a half hours of meditation each day, so living a disciplined life means that part of our day will consistently include that meditation session. Secondly, the process of meditation itself is built on repetition. During the first two hours, we constantly repeat the five holy names (simran) to quiet our wandering thoughts and bring our mental focus to the eye centre. Whilst gazing into the darkness, we try to visualize the Master’s form (dhyan). The masters advise us to approach this with love and devotion. Repetition is the engine, but love and devoted application are the fuel. This fuel is not always easy to find – meditation can seem dull and unproductive, and the mind is rebellious. So, simran during the day, as we go about our business, is the key to reining in the mind; eventually, concentration grows. We then begin to take pleasure in the practice.

After simran, where we focus our mind at the eye centre, we listen to the sound current (bhajan). In Mirabai’s verse, she says, “Without cymbals, without drums, the unstruck music comes resounding.” This is her way of describing the experience of hearing the Shabd, the vital life current that is audible as sound and visible as light. The effect of becoming Shabd-conscious is so profound that those who tune in to its wonderful harmonies are automatically liberated from the tyranny of the mind and its negative tendencies, allowing all positive qualities or virtues to manifest in the disciple spontaneously. Mirabai imagines these qualities sprinkled on the currents of her love, just like coloured powders are carried through the air during Holi.

I fill love’s spray with the hue
Of virtue and contentment,
And blissfully I sprinkle this colour around.

Maharaj Charan Singh also assured his disciples of the inevitability of the transformative power of spiritual progress (becoming attached to the Shabd) by stating that virtues will manifest in a diligent disciple “like cream upon milk.” This assurance often came in response to initiates expressing their struggles to find humility, contentment, or any of the virtues we are encouraged to cultivate. The Master’s message was that, although we should do our best at the mental level, the mind is truly tamed only when it becomes attached to the divine power of Shabd. In fact, even before we hear it resonating at the eye centre, if we are faithfully practising meditation as instructed at the time of initiation, Maharaj Charan Singh reminds us that:

You may not have experiences within, but definitely you will feel the effect of meditation. You will enjoy that bliss and happiness and contentment within yourself, and your whole attitude towards life will change.

For those of us with feet of clay, still mired in the mud of the physical world and struggling to fulfil our daily duty of two and a half hours, these words are an inspiration. If we dedicate our time and give our best effort, eventually we will see the sky lightening and feel the soft breeze of spring.