The Master Answers

A selection of questions and answers with Maharaj Charan Singh

Q: Do you know your disciples personally or impersonally? For example, when you see me, do you know everything about me – my troubles, my doubts, my past, my future? I am asking this because I doubt, I don’t know how to discriminate when people say master knows everything. Could you please explain?
A: You see, master is a medium between the soul and the Lord, and he is concerned with the soul – to help it to develop, to reach to the level of the Father. The soul, being in the body, and being a slave of the mind, is ensnared in karmas. So it has to go through certain types of karmas – otherwise nobody stays in the body. That is known as destiny.

Whether master knows, whether master doesn’t know, it makes absolutely no difference. Master definitely helps the soul to develop spiritually, not from the material point of view. Our concept of grace and help is all material – worldly ambitions, worldly achievements, worldly fulfilments – but that is not the purpose of the master. That is already destined – we have to go through our destiny. Master is concerned with what way the soul spiritually develops. He gives the source of strength to the soul to spiritually develop within so that it is transported to the level of the Father and gets released from the mind and thus from birth and death. That is his duty. Our real master is shabd, which is within every one of us, and there is nothing which is hidden from the shabd. If he is the Creator, he is also all-pervading and all-knowing.

That word which has created the whole creation is our own master and that is within every one of us. So he is the Creator; he is all-knowing, all-pervading; nothing is hidden from him. In the flesh, master has realized that word within, and we are connected through him to that word.
_{Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}

Q: Master, if you feel in meditation that you’re not making any progress but yet in life you feel that there is a higher power helping you, can you look forward to that, or must you just ignore it?
A: Well, brother, Master’s protecting hand is always there, whether you ignore it or accept it. By attending to meditation, even if we don’t feel any progress within, we will definitely feel the effect of meditation in our life. Progress we may not see within, but we will feel the effect of meditation in our nature, in our dealings with people, in the way our whole attitude towards life changes. We should not feel much concerned about progress, because progress is always there. The effect of meditation can never be removed, and nobody can escape that effect.
_{Die to Live}

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}