Baking the Cake of Our Consciousness
Spiritual awakening is about realizing who we really are. Saints tell us that embedded in our everyday reality is a field of pure awareness consisting of love, intelligence, and peace. However, we don’t have access to this true reality because we’re conditioned to believe only our physical senses; so, if we don’t see, hear, feel, smell, touch, or taste something, it doesn’t exist. Our attention is riveted on people, objects, and places, and our obsessive attachment to our goals, plans, and problems traps us in this dense material plane of creation.
The saints tell us that the reason we suffer is because we focus most of our attention on ephemeral things of this world. To end our misery, we need to turn our focus inward to what is permanent, through the practice of meditation.
To begin this process of reversing our attention, we must think objectively instead of reacting on autopilot, defaulting to our long-held negative mental patterns. We start with good intentions and clear resolutions, but the gap between our former self and the new self is so uncomfortable that soon we slip back into old habits and give up.
Most of us try to change by substituting positive thoughts and feelings for negative ones, hoping that this will transform us and make us happy. This is a good start, but it’s difficult to sustain. Instead, we must permanently raise our level of consciousness. One could compare this transformation to baking a cake – a consciousness cake.
Imagine that we’ve decided to make an amazing cake with the best ingredients in the world. First, we visit a remote monastery in Eastern Europe to purchase expensive flour that’s been hand ground by monks chanting holy scriptures as they were grinding the wheat. Then we fly off to Hawaii and hike three days to a sacred waterfall near a volcano to find a unique type of sugar. Next, we travel to South America to purchase rare chocolate harvested by a hermit living in the rain forest. Then we’re off to Switzerland to buy butter from cows that children prayed over so that the milk would vibrate with divine energy.
Finally, we fly home with all these valuable ingredients and invite all our friends over. We dazzle them with stories of the adventures we had gathering these rare ingredients and show them selfies from the exotic locations we visited. We get super-excited reliving our journey and the encounters we had with all the mysterious and wise people we met along the way.
There’s only one problem: where’s the cake? The cake is not the exotic ingredients or the challenging trip to procure them. It’s not photos, techniques, or affirmations about how delicious the cake is going to be. The cake is the result of what happens when certain ingredients are mixed together and baked at a particular temperature. We need heat to bake the cake; in our case, it’s a kind of inner spiritual heat produced through meditation, which melts away our impurities and reveals our true form, the soul.
The saints give us foolproof instructions for how to bake our consciousness cake, but some of us haven’t followed their recipe. Others of us are at various stages in the baking process. Many of us are impatient, constantly opening the oven door, doubting the entire baking process and asking, “Why is this taking so long? Why does it have to be so hard?”
Well, we’re in a hot oven, so it’s not going to be comfortable. The saints, however, are expert bakers. They are in charge: it’s their recipe, their timing, their decision about which ingredients to use, and their judgment on when we are done. They caution us to keep on baking. When our cake is done, everything we started with will be transmuted. The process of spiritual baking will make us so delicious and sweet that the Lord will not be able to resist us.
The saints shift our consciousness at a fundamental level. They do not focus on making our egos feel better or improving the outer trappings of our lives. Rather, their purpose is to transform us so that we achieve self- and God-realization.
But making changes and breaking free of our negative patterns is hard. Scientists say that by the time we’re 35 years old, 95 percent of who we are is a set of memorized behaviours, emotional reactions, beliefs, and attitudes that function subconsciously like an automatic computer program.
So, if we are so heavily programmed, how do we break free from our past conditioning and our limited thoughts and beliefs?
The answer is that we can’t do this on our own. This is where grace and love come in. It’s the divine design of creation that the Lord exerts a constant magnetic pull on his beloved souls scattered throughout creation and clothed in various bodies. That magnetic pull is love, which is also called Nam.
Our effort to practice meditation and live the teachings will help push the needle of our consciousness toward the magnet of Nam. Then, through God’s grace, we will experience the magnet’s pull, permanently transforming us through the radiant light and sound of Nam.
Mystics tell us that joy is our true nature, while suffering is the activity of the ego. We don’t experience joy because we identify with our lower egoic mind, which is constantly seeking or resisting and is dominated by layers of discontent, tension, and other negative emotions. Some of the signs that our lower mind is dominating us are: We’re afraid to be alone without constant stimulation, sensual gratification, and distractions. We live in a state of anxiety, fear, and uneasiness. We disdain the shortcomings of others and ourselves. We strive to be unique, right, and special. We’re resentful and easily hurt, and we create stories and build cases to justify our desires and weaknesses. We’re totally engrossed in getting what we want and avoiding what we don’t want, no matter the cost. And finally, we feel justified in complaining and groaning when life and other people don’t bend to our will.
It’s our own mind that creates our unhappiness. But as we wake up to the reality that this nightmare is of our own making, we begin to realize that if we want lasting happiness, our primary purpose must be to let go of all our negativity and return to the Lord. Doing this isn’t easy. It’s usually a slow and sometimes frustrating process, complicated by our many attachments, compulsions, faulty attitudes, and life’s ups and downs. In from self to Shabd, the author writes:
Our transformation begins when we become aware of where we keep our attention. For most of us, our attention is in the drama of our karma. We are more interested in manipulating our karmas than in accepting them. We are more interested in having and doing, rather than in being. Having and doing do not lead to peace of mind. Being does. If we would only give half a percent of our time to that which could awaken us from this dream, we would have been awakened by now. But unfortunately we keep all our attention in our human experience. We can change that, but to keep our cool in the face of terrible circumstances is a state achieved only by doing daily meditation and lots of simran during the day. Only with such daily discipline can our mind become anchored in the peaceful serenity of Shabd.
Sant Mat is a mystical path beyond the limits of ordinary experience. We can’t realize the presence of the inner Master unless we radically shift our energy from an outward to an inward focus. Until we do the necessary inner work, all talk of spirituality is pointless. However, let’s not approach this as just another task on our to-do list. Meditation is a gift, an oasis of awareness, and the nourishment we badly need to heal our restless, suffering mind and spirit.
The saints come to break us out of the prison that is our mind by shaking up our fixed ideas and challenging us to focus on something real and true. When we finally wise up, we realize that if we want to stop suffering, we must stop relying on the world outside of us and instead depend on the Shabd Master within us. Only then will we get serious about doing our spiritual work because we finally accept that it’s the only sane choice we have; if we miss this opportunity to break free, we will continue to suffer.
Let’s face it: we live such small lives, clinging to everything and everyone. All the while, the treasure of the Lord’s love is permeating us and the very air we breathe, just waiting for us to surrender to it. We are invited to return home to the peace of our being. Though God appears hidden to us, he has left a shining trail of love that brings us right to his door. Love is the portal, the key, and God’s greatest gift to us. All we can do is thank him for his mercy and follow the instructions given by the saints.