Pleasure and Pain

Baba Jaimal Singh Ji wrote to the Great Master:

Body is the abode of pain and pleasure.
Of necessity, both must operate
So accept them cheerfully.¹

While we are in the body, we are subject to both physical and mental pain and whatever our scientific or philosophical persuasion. The seesaw of pleasure and pain continues because as Maharaj Ji so often said “mind is fond of sensual pleasures.” We are habituated to many forms of sensual pleasures below the eye center. The five passions are all a form of sensual pleasure as they are all experienced through the senses and felt in the body. They are sensations which become habits. We then have to experience the consequences of our actions. As the Great Master said:

Poison and cry, eat poison and cry again.²

Tulsi Sahib warns in one of his poems that there is no way of avoiding the consequences of our actions through forcibly trying to control the mind through willpower.

One who practises penances, discipline and fasting, O friend, will later obtain exactly what he has renounced.
By performing penances one is born a king, but indulgence in the pleasures of a life of royalty hurls him back to hell……..
When we remain engrossed in sensual indulgences, it is in fact the consequence of restraining the senses.³

Stretch a rubber band back too far, when we let it go it will fly in the opposite direction. That is why Maharaj Ji warned us against repression, and Baba Ji repeatedly advises that we need to find a balance in our lives and reduce our expectancy. We are born with considerable energy and vitality–what to do with it?

We can fritter away our time, constantly stimulated and distracted by social media, peer pressure, etc., appealing to one or all of the five passions to find, if not pleasure, but oblivious relief.

We are suffering horizontally, so to say, with what’s going on within and outside ourselves, but as humans, we also suffer vertically. Maharaj Ji said that the human form is the door to the Lord, it is the temple of the living God. We have the unique ability as humans to take our attention out of the senses, through the body and into higher planes of consciousness through the Eye centre. We have the privilege of being able to raise our consciousness, our attention sufficiently to make contact with the Lord, Logos, Nam, Word, Shabd in the form of sound and light – to perceive the Sound Current and develop the capacity to merge with it.

The Masters teach that once we have left our bodies and been pulled up by the Shabd, we see the Lord everywhere, in everything and in everyone–and what we see is Love. Maharaji Ji said:

If we love the Lord, we love His creation, and we also want to serve His creation, because we see the Lord in everyone that he has created.⁴

Meditation makes us very soft-hearted but not mentally weak.

We can leave our bodies, we can go through the process of dying in meditation and return to the body again.

Every living thing has a body, a mind and a soul but as humans with discrimination and the ability to reflect on our circumstances, our souls are yearning in separation for the Father, wanting to return to our ancestral home, Sach Khand. The soul very much wants to go through the process just described but is knotted with the mind and thereby tied to the senses. Our souls, particles of the creative power of the Lord, the Shabd, which gives us all our life and energy, want to return and merge into the ocean of bliss. Our soul is always tugging away at us humans. We might have the whole world at our feet and still feel empty and lonely-something is missing. Nothing of this world is permanently satisfying or can give us permanent happiness.

So whether we try renunciation or dissipation in a quest for peace and happiness, neither works. Even the mind gets bored with these external pleasures and may become more depraved to get some excitement. The mind is not at home here either. It just wants peace and stillness, rest, after aeons of movement and running about. So as humans we have a double challenge – karma, both good and bad, plus a smothered, yearning soul in separation, crushed by the demands of our egos. We are naturally uneasy for we are both mortal and immortal. The mortal bit of us is unique.

Let’s celebrate that uniqueness as the infinite wonderful creativity of the Lord while remembering that it is that which gives us our delusion of grandeur, our ego. There’s nobody quite like ME. No there isn’t but what counts is our immortal soul because it is beautiful, full of love and our birthright as being a particle of God.

What can overcome the tension of cycling pleasure and pain and the pain of separation in the yearning soul?

Only unconditional Love greater than all the pains and pleasures of the world can pull us out of this. Now, we recognize military power, financial power, intellectual power–why is it so hard to recognize spiritual power? Because we won’t unless we’re meant to recognize the mystics, the Master. A mystic comes at a particular period, a particular time to collect only his or her allotted souls and to merge them back in Sach Khand, our original home. This is the Law of the Lord’s grace. Grace is a mystery, but if we can accept that our essential self is Shabd, then we should be able to accept the truth of grace. Maharaji Ji defined grace as:

Anything which pulls us towards meditation, that is the Grace of the Master…..Grace is only that which pulls us back from this creation and takes us back to the Father….Anything which makes us blind to the world and opens our eyes to His love and devotion, is his grace.⁵

The driving power of Grace is love and mercy and that love and mercy is embodied in our Master. He is our guide, teacher and example in his physical form, and in his real form, the Shabd, His Radiant Form is helping at every step.

The foundation of a spiritual path is building and sustaining a relationship of deep love between Master and disciple:

Inayat Khan wrote:

Heard from my murshid, from my initiator, something which I shall never forget: This friendship, this relationship which is brought about by initiation between two persons, is something which cannot be broken: it is something which cannot be separated; it is something which cannot be compared with anything else in the world; it belongs to eternity.⁶

Baba Ji has repeatedly stated that he is not an idol. He does not wish to be worshipped. No, because worshipping implies separation- but in Love, we merge.

We are tied to this world by both golden and iron chains and both can bring us back here in some form. Our actions are judged according to our intention. Motive is binding. To achieve liberation from the pains and pleasures of this world and the constantly accumulating consequences of previous actions is not a task we could ever begin to achieve on our own.

The Master is the fleshly embodiment of the creative power of the Lord in action and he is part of the way things are to be in this physical realm of Pind. Nothing strange or new about it. The true Masters have been coming into this world, taking on the human form since the beginning of time, each merged in his own Master, forming a great golden rope of spirituality far more powerful than the iron and golden karmic chains in this world.

When we are initiated, we take four vows or undertakings. The first three vows help us to gain some balance in living, start making us worthy to hear the sound current and see the light within. They begin to remove us from some of the pains and pleasures of this world while stressing that we can’t avoid our destiny for this life. However, the Master becomes part of our destiny when we meet him; and when we hear from him that we have made our own destiny by previous actions, and that we can rise above our pleasures and pains, this is an instant merciful help. It takes the sting out of many events.

The vows move us gently from the mainstream of life. The lacto-vegetarian diet (no meat, fish, eggs or animal substances) confines us to a certain area of eating, stops us from creating further karma through being involved in the killing chain, and removes us from causing pain to living beings. The body too is made purer automatically because it is not filled with dead flesh, and the mind becomes calmer and softer without the aggravating influence of animals killed in fear.

We are asked to avoid alcohol, mind-affecting drugs, and tobacco because they disturb our brain, destroy discrimination, and are addictive. If we are addicted to something external, it becomes the focus of our attention rather than trying to raise the attention to the eye center.

Leading a clean, moral, honest life keeps us straight on the path of meditation and maintains good social relationships. If we’re tricky and can’t be trusted in this world, how can we be trustworthy if we go within? We’ll be misled very rapidly and willingly by the negative powers of the mind within. Dishonesty and lies are a distraction.

So the first three principles or vows help us to live lightly in the world, doing as little harm, mentally and physically, as possible.

After all, we are just passing through and don’t want to leave either monuments to ourselves or smudges behind.

These vows form a worthy basis for our real work as human souls.

Daily regular two and half hours (at least) of meditation: simran, dhyan, and bhajan – listening to the sound current. Baba Ji says simran is all we can do, but we must give time to bhajan even if the mind starts hopping about the minute we stop focusing on simran. In fact, Baba Ji has said that doing bhajan when we are hearing absolutely nothing is mental seva.

Baba Ji has also stated that everyone has heard the Shabd. Maybe while our bones were baking in the womb or maybe we haven’t recognized it.

Meditation is our real work. Sitting there as if dead. Baba Ji said we should just sit. Once we’re sitting, we have got something to do that has no connection with this world, it is a private activity where we are repeating words that don’t belong here, they are the names of the powers of the inner regions. Concentrated simran can only take the attention up because it has no connection with this world. The Masters constantly stress the importance of bringing the mind round and back to simran each time it wanders. The effort itself is like a scouring pad scratching away at the shrouds of consequences diverting the mind. Grace can then peep through.

It is strange, but we never feel lonely when we are meditating because our Master is with us whether we are aware of it or not. The soul knows, so we’re not missing friends and relatives at that time. That attachment to our Master and our meditation create detachment from the pains and pleasures of this world. If we have been fortunate enough to really feel the longing for our Master in his Radiant Form, bireh, then the whole world can disappear along with our worries and concerns. We can replace that pain and pleasure of the world with the painful sweetness of bireh.

As we get older, through knocks, shocks and disappointments, we gradually begin to realize our own insignificance and that the world will continue without us. Ego can vanish with dementia, disability and pain, or we can eventually rise above it through resolute meditation and steadfast simran.

Baba Ji once said that the ‘wage’ of meditation is love. The practice of meditation begins with seva of the mind – with obedience – but we become more attached to our Master, as Maharaj Ji stated:

When you fall in love with somebody, you automatically want to remain in the company of that person…similarly when you fall in love with meditation and you feel peace and bliss within, then whatever little time you can manage, you would at once like to attend to meditation, because you want to be there in that peace, in that bliss. It will increase by itself. You don’t have to put an effort then at all.⁷