Forgetfulness

We are all suffering from the same curse. We are all under a heavy spell of forgetfulness. We live in this world without any real idea of our origin, our true home. Like sleepers, we wander from one dream experience to another. We carry within ourselves a great restlessness and dissatisfaction, yet the nature of our illness escapes us. Things only begin to change when we are lucky enough to come in contact with a perfect living Master. It is only then that we begin to get a notion of what it is to be awake, a glimpse of what it would be like to experience life fully.

The Master is many things to us - a teacher, a helper, a guide. His brightness and joy attract us, yet do we really know who he is? What does the dreamer know of the awakened one? When a little baby is fast asleep, look how tenderly the mother caresses him in order to wake him up. The Master’s great gift to us is that of personal spiritual awakening. Who knows by what great good fortune we made contact with our Master! At some point in our lives we just knew that the message was clear to us, we realized it was the Lord’s desire that we should become spiritually conscious. It was all a gift.

We have all known those moments of exaltation in the Master’s presence when love became not a dream, but a living, loving experience. The Master is our focal point. Our love for him enables us to experience a spark of that divine awareness. During those moments we are awake, alive. The truth of the mystics is real and true to us. The desire to go home is reborn in our hearts. We make all kinds of promises at those times (which the Lord, no doubt, knows we will never be able to completely fulfil). Like a baby, we open our tiny eyes and look lovingly upon the face of our mother, and know great happiness at the sight of her.

But look how quickly we fall asleep again. One moment we are wide awake - and the truth pervades our consciousness, our hearts are full of devotion - and a short while later we are dreaming again. How quickly we make dream-stuff of the Master’s message. The truth becomes reduced to the little rituals we develop around Sant Mat; the half-remembered moments of joy become the basis of a folklore about darshan and the Master’s grace. We venerate the box in which the jewel is kept, and forget to wear the jewel itself. Worst of all, we forget to meditate; we sink back into a way of life based on our old selfish impulses and lose contact with our inner source of happiness.

The state of spiritual awareness is a living thing. We are obliged to constantly struggle to keep ourselves afloat spiritually. If we let ourselves slide, in no time at all we are back asleep. The only way we can keep ourselves awake is to make that daily contact with our Master through meditation. To remember the Lord with our full attention is the secret. Meditation is nothing but remembering him. The five holy words the Master gave us at the time of initiation are the spell-breakers. Curiously, at different times, these words have different significance to us. When we are not meditating frequently, we find them hard to repeat and they remind us of our ingratitude. But when we are able to focus on them properly, we find them sweet with his forgiveness. There is a brightness in those moments of remembering the Lord. The words become delicious, enlightening points of contact with the Master, each word like a spiritual embrace. There is a thrill in the sense that we are in contact with such a being, and we feel deep fulfilment when we experience a response to our devotion. The Master once said to a disciple who was obviously deeply in love with him, that these words of simran can be the deepest expression of our love for him.

From time to time, most of us feel that the Lord made a mistake in initiating us. We notice that we do not seem to have any of the characteristics of a true devotee; our spiritual fire has been all too quickly extinguished. At such times, it is hard for us to raise our eyes towards the Lord. But we should not forget the depths of the mother’s love for her child, or forget that we were fast asleep when the Master first touched us with the kiss of spiritual awakening. The Master’s love for us cannot be extinguished - it is just for us to struggle to end this state of suffering and work towards the time we will be with him forever.

All our questions and prayers are answered inside only if we have learned the technique of turning our attention inward at the eye centre. We have to delve deeply into our own selves and once this habit is formed we become immune to whatever befalls us or comes in our way in this world. We become resigned to the will of the Lord and give up entertaining any desires of changing our fate karmas. What we call frustrations, are then no longer capable of upsetting our balance of mind. On the contrary, they drive us more intensely towards our Master inside. The eye centre becomes our haven, where we can retire for rest and quiet whenever we like. Simran and bhajan with faith and devotion is the method by which this attitude can be attained.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Quest for Light}