Lesson from My Master

My Master taught me a lesson:
“Any moment you are negligent
in remembrance of God
is a moment spent in denial of God.”
These words opened my eyes to reality,
and I fixed my attention on the Lord.
I then placed my soul in his protection
such was the love I cultivated in my heart.
Having thus bequeathed my soul to him,
I died before death – to live in him.
Only then did I attain the goal of life, O Bahu!
_{Sultan Bahu}

“Any moment you are negligent in remembrance of God is a moment spent in denial of God.” With this powerful statement, Sultan Bahu cuts right to the heart of the matter – right through the everyday worries, right through periods of doubt and longing, right through our concerns of “What do the Masters say about this? About that?”

First, he tells us that this lesson comes from the Master. This reminds us that the Master is the beginning and end of this path. What he says is what we need to do, no matter how daunting, no matter how difficult. The Master’s lesson, Sultan Bahu says, is this: The reason we are here is to remember God – not just in morning meditation, not just at bedtime, not just in times of trouble – but every moment. Anything less is a moment spent in denial of God.

How hard this is, yet we are told it is possible. We are addicted to thinking. Yet, like all addictions, this constant mind chatter is self-destructive. Of all the thoughts that go through our minds, most are unproductive – worrying, going over and over things that have already happened, stressing about what will happen or might happen, imagining scenarios of one kind or another. It seems unproductive to spend time in unhappy and stressful thoughts. We could be spending that time in bliss and stillness and peace. But we have forgotten happiness and have become habituated to suffering – self-inflicted suffering. Sultan Bahu reminds us that these moments of mind chatter are moments when we are in denial of God.

Have we forgotten that we came from God, that we basically are made of God-stuff, and that remembrance of God is remembering ourselves, our real selves? We are lost here, lost in the illusion that we belong to a world of pain and suffering, that we belong in a life where love is temporary and imperfect. We have forgotten that not only do we belong to a place of love and ever-growing bliss – in fact we are ever-growing bliss. We are God, we are that perfection, but we have forgotten this. And we have forgotten it so thoroughly, so completely, that remembering it is an intense effort, a struggle, the hardest thing we will ever do. We talk about living in the world of illusion, but we don’t really believe it. We have forgotten that it is just illusion. Our thoughts are illusion. Our lives, our past memories, our future hopes and fears are illusion. There is only God. We strive to remember God because we think we don’t know who he is. But we do know him; our true self knows him. We’ve only forgotten.

The first verse of the Adi Granth is called the Mool Mantra, the root mantra. The verse begins: There is but one God.

One God – that’s all there is: one God, only God. In the footnote to this line in Jap Ji: A Perspective, the translator explains that “There is but one God” doesn’t mean only that there is one, rather than two or three or four gods, but that nothing else exists besides or outside of God. Master often quotes this and similar lines in his satsangs. This is the most important thing to know – and not only know, but to live – to remember every moment of our day. We are what we think. The Buddha says:

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you …

Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.
_{Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha, rendered by Thomas Byrom}

Happiness doesn’t lie outside of us. And misery doesn’t either. Suffering does not come from our relationships, our illnesses or our life situation. No event can make us happy or sad. Happiness lies within us. We can choose to be happy by thinking positive thoughts, by focusing our attention on the oneness within. Or we can choose to be miserable by thinking negative thoughts, by trying to control our outside world rather than our inside world. Now this choice, too, is an illusion – happiness and suffering are illusions. In reality, we are one God, one love, one Shabd, but because we are so strongly associated with the duality of illusion in our lives, we need to work from where we are.

It may help to understand why we are enmeshed in this illusion. We are stuck in this cycle of thinking and suffering because we think that by scheming and stressing we can keep control of our lives.

It’s been said that every thought we have is an attempt to defend our ego. This seems extreme – but think about it. Sometimes we are being productive, planning and thinking to achieve a goal, to produce something, but this is to make money or do something that will win us esteem or give us pleasure. Most of the time we are thinking unproductive thoughts in the lame attempt to defend ourselves – thinking about how someone did this or that to us, how someone was unfair, how we were hurt or persecuted, what we can do to counterattack, what we should have done or said, and what we will do or say next time. We all have listened to the rubbish our mind puts out.We know how illogical and absurd and inefficient it is – just the same hurts or disappointments and anger and worry, over and over. What do we have to do to stop this endless vicious cycle? We just have to stop it! And we have the tool our Master has given us to stop it: we have the gift of simran.

Once at Dera a young man talked to Baba Ji about his failure to do simran during the day. He said that he starts out with this firm intention to keep his attention in simran. He leaves the house, locks the door, and then drops his keys, and there goes the simran. He said he has tried and just can’t do it. After bantering back and forth with the Master about whether or not he could do his simran, the young man finally said, very softly, “I can do it.”

We are all like this young man. We have tried and failed, tried and failed. But our Master doesn’t care about whether we succeed or fail. He only sees our effort. We can do it, though maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in ten years. When another young man complained that his mind was so strong, his thoughts were so strong, that he couldn’t control them, Baba Ji just laughed and said something like: You think your mind is strong? It is nothing compared to the power of the Shabd!

Master will see our struggle and effort and unleash the power of the Shabd, but he can’t do it too soon because the mind will then think it has done it.

The Master often asks something like: What’s so difficult about meditation? You just sit down, close your eyes, and let go! But how do we let go? How do we deal with our psyche’s natural need to hold on to our thoughts, to defend and protect ourselves?

Sultan Bahu gives us a clue:

… and I fixed my attention on the Lord.
I then placed my soul in his protection –
such was the love I cultivated in my heart.
Having thus bequeathed my soul to him,
I died before death – to live in him.

So what do we have to do? We have to fix our attention in the Lord and place our soul in his protection.

The only way to escape our thoughts, to identify with our quietness rather than our ego, to let go of the need to defend ourselves, is to put ourselves under the protection of the Master. This is why the Master is the be all and end all of the path. Our ego knows only how to defend, and our only recourse is to put ourselves – our safekeeping – in the hands of the Master. And how, exactly, do we do that? This short prayer by Saint Teresa of Avila was found on a prayer card in her breviary after her death:

Let nothing disturb you;
Let nothing dismay you.
All things pass;
God never changes.
Patience obtains
All that it strives for.
He who has God
Finds that he lacks nothing.
God alone suffices.

Once we truly put ourselves under the protection of the Master, we have everything we need. Everything. We start to build an unbreachable fort, where nothing can hurt us, where all we need is God, where God alone suffices. We see everything in life as a gift from our Master. We don’t fight our fate but truly live in his will and remembrance, and truly find it sweet.

All we have to do is to follow the advice of Sultan Bahu, who followed the advice of his Master: fix our attention on the Lord and place ourself under his protection – one-pointed attention on one God, one power, one love.