Freedom Through Simran

There are two types of imprisonment: one is when we know we are in prison; the other is when we don’t. Which type of imprisonment is more binding and hopeless? Clearly, the second, because if we are not even aware we are a prisoner, then we have no reason to even think of leaving. However, when we know we are imprisoned, we’ll want to free ourselves, or at least be attentive to any opportunity to break free.

Let us imagine that someone comes to free the prisoners. Which prisoners will respond right away to the call of such a liberator? Would it be the ones who know they are prisoners and long for freedom, or those who are not even aware that they are prisoners? Obviously, the first group. The second will not understand what the liberator is talking about.

This strange prison in which some know they are prisoners and some don’t is our prison –one of our own making, comprised of our own deluded, unchecked thinking.

In a recent question-and-answer exchange with Baba Ji, someone complained that they could not focus on their simran at all. But mystics have been telling us for centuries that we have no control over our mind because we have spoiled it. The mind seeks and takes the easiest way out, and we allow it the freedom to do much of what it wants. The mind would do almost anything to avoid simran. So, instead of using our mind to work toward the freedom of our soul and focusing it by means of simran, we tend to let the mind do as it will. Baba Ji implied that we have lost our freedom and handed the control of our life to the treacherous mind. He also implied that our only path to freedom is simran. All else – seeing the Radiant Form of the Master and listening to the Shabd – are results of his grace. So, simran is a lifeline for the soul because the soul does not have a full life when it is intertwined with the mind. It is a prisoner, subject to the ups and downs that the mind experiences in its interactions with the material world.

Even just by trying to do simran, we begin to notice our imprisonment more. We become more aware of the walls that surround us and more attentive to the chance of breaking free of them. We won’t miss our opportunity for liberation because we are waiting for it. Our perceived failures at doing simran have given us first-hand experience of how unable we are to control our thoughts, emotions, and actions that keep us trapped. Every time we try and fail at simran, we are banging our heads against the prison wall; we realize how helpless we are before the power of the mind from which we cannot free ourselves unaided.

Neither of the two types of prisoners can escape their enslavement unaided. They are both trapped. The first type of prisoner’s efforts and banging against the prison walls look ridiculous and perhaps even insane to the second type of prisoner, who does not understand what all the commotion and agony are about. It is easy to remain unaware of the prison walls. The prison has corners with many delights and attractions. So why not just stay and enjoy them?

The prisoners who are possessed by a mad desire to escape are not, in fact, insane. On the contrary, they are in love with freedom. This is a divine gift because their agony and their intense longing sharpen their perceptions. They will be able to hear the call to escape, even if the call is barely audible. Every soul, sooner or later, awakens to its entrapment. The Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) expresses the feelings of a person who has awakened to the fact that he is a prisoner of selfcentredness, cut off from the outside world of freedom:

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they’ve built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

We can feel in this poem the plight of the spiritual seeker, especially if we replace the word “outside” with “inside,” because we know that in the way to freedom, the way out is in. The divine lover feels entrapped in the outside world. He is unable to go inside even though there is so much to do, see, and experience inside. He feels that someone has imperceptibly closed him off from the inside world, the eternal reality of inner freedom. Why did he not hear when the builders were silently at work? Because his own thoughts were the builders. Brick by brick, the untamed mind deprived him of the freedom that comes with innocence and the ability to go within at will.

What can he do now? He is helpless before this self-created imprisonment. There is nowhere to turn but to an experienced guide who knows exactly what ails the soul. Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh said in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I:

The purpose of the saints is to take us away. We are all prisoners here. The purpose of the saints is to unlock the prison house, to set us free. That is their mission, their purpose, and that is what their teachings tell us.

We were walled off from our inner world’s innocence, and we have lost the key. Masters do not just awaken us; they also give us a key to restoring our innocence and freedom. That key is simran. This key does not work like other keys; using it is not as simple as turning it and opening the door.

The key of simran works more like the spade and the brush of the archeologist who removes layers of debris to uncover a hidden treasure that was always there, unnoticed. Our past thoughts and impressions have wrapped themselves around our soul, around our attention. The impressions have imprisoned us, but with simran, we begin to disrupt and erase those layers of impressions and thoughts, the symptoms of our bondage. Maharaj Sawan Singh (the Great Master) explains in Spiritual Gems how accumulated impressions bind us: “So long as all the impressions (received ever since the soul entered into the spheres of minds and bodies) have not been removed, the soul is not free, and till then shall remain subject to karma.”

Similarly, ancient philosophers known as Neoplatonists, who later influenced Gnosticism, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Western Esoteric traditions, and philosophers like Spinoza and Kant, called accumulated impressions ‘the vehicle of the soul.’ This vivid image conveys what the Great Master is also saying: It is impressions that carry the soul from one embodied life to the next in an unending process, just like a vehicle transports us from one place to the next. Great Master writes in the same letter quoted above: “the impressions that you brought with you in this life form your fate, and you have to undergo this.” Terminating those allotted impressions, he says, will cause immediate death. However, in our current life, we can avoid accumulating new binding impressions, the building blocks of future lives. This can be done first by performing new actions “not as an independent, but as an agent of the Master. A faithful agent does not misuse the powers and property entrusted to him.” Second, “the saints put us onto the current [the sound current of Shabd]. By these means they free us from the new impressions, and the assigned impressions are worked out during the lifetime.”

Acting as an agent, concentrating on simran, staying in the current requires constant attention. Another group of philosophers known as the Stoics practiced a discipline of erasing false impressions by refusing to identify with them, by refusing to say ‘yes’ to them. They cultivated their attention through vigilance, aware that our prison walls rise in silence. So, they did not let their mind slip into errant thoughts, ruminations acting as a smokescreen blocking clear vision and keeping us enthralled in the illusion of this world. These are our prison walls, whether we are aware of them or not. When the soul leaves the sound current and associates with the mind, Great Master says in Spiritual Gems, then we perform actions that land us in a prison of our own making.

The walls of shadows and falsehoods have held us captive for too long. Now we can shake off our false impressions once and for all, so that they don’t keep us entranced and trapped within walls that feel real but aren’t, walls of our own making. So, let us cling to our only experience of freedom right now – simran.

Simran is the beginning of the way to freedom for the soul. When we keep repeating the Names with focused attention within, we will reach the eye centre, where the sound current will break down our prison walls as our karmas are demolished and our mind becomes free to return to its home in Trikuti. Freed from the mind, on the path of the sound current, in the company of the Radiant Form of the Master, by his grace and love, our soul savours its freedom and the return to its origin with the Lord. Then, never again will we have to regret what the poet Cavafy expressed so well: “When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!”