Restoring Trust

Masters assure us there is no counting the innumerable spins we have taken on the wheel of life and death. First we didn’t want to come here at all, and now, it seems, we seldom want to leave this physical plane. We have had so many lifetimes here and all have stolen precious remembrance of our higher selves. We have forgotten our origin and our place as true lovers of the Lord.

The Sufi mystic Sultan Bahu captures our spiritual condition:

Unknown to me now are the mysteries of my Lord –
 my origin I have all but forgotten!
The temptation to eat the forbidden fruit
 put the noose of destiny around my neck.
Once I sang like a nightingale in my Lord’s garden –
 trapped in this mortal cage, I now flutter with pain.
Discard love for everything else from your heart,
 and pray only for his grace to call you back, O Bahu.
_{Sultan Bahu}

To better understand how our comings here have robbed us of our true identities, Baba Jaimal Singh says in Spiritual Letters:

The day the individual being, … that is, the soul, separated from Sach Khand, and the Shabd-dhun, that very day its trust in the True Lord … was also severed. The Shabd-dhun looks after it all the time, but it does not realize this because its love and loyalties are deeply entrenched in mind and maya.… But what kind of a love is this that has made it unable to understand its own loss? That loss it considers to be a gain.

The Master is telling us the spiritual quality of inherent trust is crippled in every soul here in creation. We all lack trust in the Lord. Therefore, our source of strength, and our overall capacity to trust and to love have been greatly compromised. Without trust in the Lord, we can’t trust anything in life – not others, not ourselves, and certainly not our own minds.

We are fortunate because there is nothing our Beloved does not know about us. He knows and accepts our strengths and our weaknesses. After all, we are only living out our scripts; every factor of our lives has been endorsed by him. He is not bothered by any of our mental prattle. This is why he reminds us that we are not the mind. Rather, to our Master, we are only love. In fact, the only sin we can ever commit against the Father is to not attend to our daily meditation.

Anger, greed, attachment, lust, and pride – each of these has played a significant role in forcing us to be born again on the wheel of eighty-four species. We have come to this world in all shapes, sizes, and species. We have been all forms of animals, fish and fowl, and while in human bodies we have been every nationality and gender. We have been brilliant scholars and full-fledged imbeciles. We have ruled as benevolent kings and queens and we have died to be reborn as thieves, coming back to rob the very kingdoms we once ruled.

Throughout all these incarnations, our mind has always been the dictator, judge, and juror who ultimately sealed our fate to return again. Adding insult to injury, this very mind that we claim as an intimate part of ourselves is, at best, fickle. Repeatedly, it proves it has no loyalty to or love for us.

Our actions determined what our own fate would be; we willingly wrote it with our own handwriting in our book of karmic destiny. Thankfully, through the grace and love of the Lord, nothing can permanently tie us to this world. We are slated by the Lord to return home. We can hasten or delay our progress; it’s up to us.

We will never get past the sights and sounds of this world until we consistently make every effort to still the mind and control the senses. It is the mind’s job to be chaotic and so we must surpass the mind’s efforts and gain mastery over it and our senses.

Only our Master can help us transform this ocean of karmic tears into an ocean of spiritual bliss. By the Lord’s personal invitation we were sent into this creation, and now, by his personal invitation, we are being invited to return back to him. Our daily meditation honours our Master’s wishes.

Baba Jaimal Singh reassures us with the following words:

The Satguru, attaching the disciple again to the same Shabd-dhun, will guide him back to Sach Khand. So the disciple’s trust that remained broken in life after life has been restored by the Satguru.
_{Spiritual Letters}