GODS GRACE - A TIME FOR THANKSGIVING “In the fullness of time, when it so pleases God, He brings about a meeting between a jiva and a Sant Satguru, who establishes his contact with Naam – the power of God or God in action – the Primal Sound Current, wherewith a jiva is gradually led on and on until he reaches the source and the fountainhead of Shabd or the Sound Current. It is through the grace of God alone that one is initiated.” - Kirpal Singh (Teachings of Kirpal Singh: Part 3. Pg. 117) Gods Grace is something that we’ve heard about all our lives. Most of us have gone to Sunday school, celebrated Thanksgiving, seen “Its a Wonderful Life”, and all those old holiday movies. And we always said grace at the dinner table. Unfortunately, it almost became hokey to talk about grace and holy gratitude for a while because in the last few decades people became more and more aware of the difficulties of this world, of the suffering in it. Especially in America, it became fashionable to be cynical. I think one of the reasons for the upheavals we had in the 60’s was that people were brought up with the Sunday school, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra depiction of America. But then through the evening news and other media they became aware of starvation in Appalachia and disease and racism, right here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the best of all possible worlds, and a certain cynicism set in. I have heard more times that I would care to count, “If God has Grace or love for us, why is there so much suffering? Why are there so many difficulties in our country and on this planet?” Theologians have struggled with this for a long time. Some people respond that, “Well, you suffer because you’re meant to” or “Youve been bad” or “Life is suffering”. But what it really comes to is that this is a world of duality, this is a world of friction and abrasion and conflict and resistance, not unlike isometric exercises. It’s high density, high mass especially compared to other, inner universes which are a lot more subtle. Yet because of the intense friction that occurs here, when youre dealing with friction and resistance, it is more of a challenge to maintain your spiritual awareness, your spiritual balance. Yet the rewards for doing so are infinitely greater than living in a so-called paradise where everything is beautiful. In some ways, the conflict and difficulties of our lives are great examples of God’s grace, because it is through working with resistance that we grow, develop spiritual strength and polish astounding. You wouldnt see this brilliance when looking at a ruby to begin with. And if it could complain, it would be screaming, “What are you doing to me?” It’s not unlike Rumi’s tale of the chickpea and the cook, the gist of which is that the chickpea jumps out of the soup pot and says to the cook, “Why are you boiling me? What are you doing?” And the cook responds, “I’m doing this to give you flavor. I’m doing this to bring you into a higher state of expression.” Kirpal Singh’s son, Darshan Singh, said that our difficulties in life are another example of God’s grace, because frequently it is only when we are encountering difficulties that we turn our mind to God. When we are happy we are frequently thinking about everything but God. But when things get tough, when we are suffering in some way, we become very devotional. We start praying for the end of suffering. It’s funny. Here it is Thanksgiving, and there is so much to be grateful for, yet many of us don’t see it. Im grateful for you being here. I cannot tell you all how good it feels to share evenings with friends and make new friends. It’s amazing how we all learn from each other. That’s one of the blessings of having a planet and this society to be in. It’s another example of grace that we are given each other in whom we can see the Light of God in their eyes, and hear the Song of God in their voices and children’s laughter. Yet it is also sometimes difficult, because of all the challenging things that happen in life. It can be difficult to have gratitude, because frequently our prayers tend to be “Why me?” We ask for a better job or to relieve the pain that is hurting us, or stop bad things from happening to us. And sometimes, as the challenges come fast and furious, it is easy to get overwhelmed by them and be aware only of the hardships of life, forgetting all of the blessings we are offered every day. One of the essences of this path of Shabda Meditation is learning to deepen our devotion to the Divine, and a key to this is through gratitude. My Master, Darwin Gross, once wrote a song called “It just is,” which opens with the words, “Thank you, with Love”. “Thank you” is a great mantra because when you say, “Thank you” your spiritual heart opens up and it is through the spiritual heart that love flows. I’m not talking about emotional love (although thats an aspect of it), but real spiritual love. It’s this wave of spiritual love that lifts us up and takes us back home to ItSelf. It takes us back home to our true nature, which is what we call self-realization. It takes us back home to God, from which it originally comes, a process known as God-realization. By practicing gratitude, by saying to people you meet on the street, “I love you”, silently through your eyes, or saying “Thank you”, you open the inner doorway and divine love comes through. In doing so, even in a difficult situation (you might even say especially in difficult situations), you feel better in the process. It may sound selfish to say its all about feeling better, but one of the things that I believe is that people should understand on this planet and in this society that an open, loving, enlightened perspective feels better. It makes you happier than being uptight. A lot of people are unfortunately on control trips. A lot of people use fear to gain political success, to gain leverage and power. They think that prosperity is based on control, that it is based on manipulation. People have this thing on this planet (I guess it’s all part of living in the material world) where they want things to enhance their lifestyles. They measure their own self worth through external gratification, through external possessions, and there tends to be an ethic of “I’ve got mine, now you get yours”. It’s amazing. Fortunately, not all politicians are this way, and some choose to focus on hope, gratitude and grace, instead of fear. And this is a very, very good thing. I used to work in a bookstore back in the 1980s, and a lot of books came out which dealt with keys to corporate success. One famous one was “In Search of Excellence”, and there was a whole bunch of others as well. They focused upon successful thinking and how successful businesses worked. And of the themes they kept reprising was how successful businesses allowed employees maximum flexibility. They looked to employees’ creativity on an individual basis, and tried to take their natural talents and see how they would work within a given corporate body. They believed that every person had a gift he or she could offer to the whole. Companies that did this increased their own success. They made employees happy. Employees stayed on longer and bottom line profits increased. Gross sales, if they were marketing consumable products, increased, profit margins increased, and everybody was happier. This was the result of allowing creative energy to flow through the corporate organism. This is a basic law of success. Yet I’m amazed how, decades later, with countless seminars and weekend retreats that have been given, and lectures and videotapes that have sold through magazines and TV infomercials, that the ongoing paradigm is still very much one of control and, from an employer’s standpoint, the expendability of employees. People actually still operate from this old mode of fear and control, which is so silly because what happens when you get into this mode of being and thinking is, you tighten up. You constrict. It’s just like a clenched fist. You constrict the blood vessels so there is less spiritual energy that can flow through. And it’s the Spiritual Current that nourishes us, just like our blood nourishes our arms and our legs and our entire bodies. So people may think theyre being successful but overall they’re only hurting themselves. It’s just like how we see ourselves in other people’s eyes. Anything we hate in other people is usually something about ourselves we despise. It is important to realize that we are all particles of God, and that every person we project negativity upon is really just another way we project it back upon ourselves. The LightSong of Divine Spirit has taught me this lesson over and over again. When I’m angry at somebody at work, if somebody pushes my buttons and I get into a reactive mode (even if it might appear to be justified), it just ricochets right back on me. It’s like an instant karmic mirror. So to me it’s not cost effective. If I feel irritable, I have to deal with it. I don’t deny it if it’s occurring. But to get angry on any level is not cost effective. The outcome for me does not warrant what is put into it, because I feel ill afterwards. It comes back to gratitude. If you open your heart to love and to graceful living, you will begin seeing that everything, even the stuff that’s thrown in your face sometimes, is a gift. It’s all just mirroring ourselves, which is in turn mirroring God. We learn to come into balance with Divine Consciousness. And we learn that it’s not God personally coming down on us, like some guy on a throne casting lightening bolts saying “Im gonna get you”. It is just the law of this universe of action and reaction that whatever we put out comes back to us. If we unite ourselves with Divine Love, if we just merge into, melt into love, then there is ultimately no giver or receiver. There is just Love that is loving and continues to love. And that is really one of the core principles of developing into God realization, realizing that we are all part of the same wave of Love and we can melt into IT and let Love lift us up. Any questions? Q: To me it looks like people are not content with just existing or being born, or even having anything. They expect everlasting life after this life. It’s like a greed thing. It’s not like a loving thing, it more a love of greed or something. People not happy being themselves or being here as a person with their family or whatever, they still want something in the afterlife . . . M: That’s because ultimately what we’re really seeing is just the reflection of a soul wanting to expand. Really, it comes from our desire to grow and prosper and flower, but we are programmed through living in these worlds of duality to be shortsighted and to externalize our validation to objects and other people. As Ann Wilson Schaef once wrote, we live in an addictive society fundamentally based upon desire, and the external fulfillment and gratification of desires. What are we taught? We are taught to desire things. If you look at any of the great religions, the Masters say the same thing: desire is the ultimate motivating factor. It is a magnetic force that keeps us bound to this mode of action and reaction, and a continual dynamic of exponentially increasing desires. It is a core addiction from which we operate. The whole key to liberation is when you realize that ultimately there is nothing to desire, because it already exists. Desire implies there is something you don’t have, something you are not. The saints say that, in order to truly start on the path to God, you have to desire God like a drowning person desires air. You have to crave the nectar of God like nothing else. And yet, when you rise up into the spiritual wave of Divine Love, you get to a point where you have to let go of even that desire for God. You just have to relax and let the River carry you in, until you realize that you and the object of your desire are one – and you reach a state of desirelessness, ultimate gratification, ultimate gratitude. You realize you already are and have everything anybody could possibly be and want. Sometimes I look around and see people who are hung up on their acquisition trips. They’re really into power, status and prestige. It reminds me of the line from “The Ballad of John and Yoko” which says, “Last night the wife said, ‘Oh boy when you’re dead, you don’t take nothing with you but your soul. Think!’” You can have everything possible in material possessions, and yet you’re still going to leave them all behind. It brings to mind the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, wherein these people come across a great edifice, kind of like the monolith in “2001”, and nobody knows what it is. On its facade is a sign that reads, “Ozymandias”, and commands you to bow down to this great edifice of a past leader – “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair”. Yet in the end the poem shrugs its rhetorical shoulders as if to say, “Whatever”. For none of them had any idea as to whom this person was. He died thousands of years ago and left a statue. But he’s still dead. Its a funny thing. When you find God, which is truly your divine nature, everything comes into perspective. Then you’re able to function in the dance of life and enjoy it, participate in it. There’s nothing wrong with this per se. You dont have to be an acetic living in the woods somewhere in order to find and actualize God. There’s nothing wrong with having a nice car or a well paying job if that is the way that you can help express the spiritual energy in a certain context. This is a key to co-workership with God. Each of us has within us our own creativity, our own interests, our own things that turn us on. This is something I keep coming back to. Some of us are bakers, some are lawyers, some are ditch diggers, some are computer programmers, some are firefighters, some are letter carriers. Each of us has something that we do, and it is through our unique, personal creativity that God and Divine Spirit reach out and touch others. If the Divine Purpose wants to touch a couple of souls in an office building who are awakening and blossoming into their Godhood, one way it does this is through a spiritual co-worker who also happens to work at that company. By this person being an open, creative instrument for Divine expression, the Spiritual Current just passes through their eyes and their beingness and helps awakening souls around them. If that person was an acetic and lived in a cave somewhere, he or she wouldn’t be working in the real world and people in the world would be cut off from this moment of Divine Grace. So God expresses ItSelf through all that It flows through. This is the greatest wealth a person could possibly imagine. There are great stories of Sawan Singh when he was the living Master in India. He would be holding Satsang with 10,000 people at the Dera (the ashram where they had the meetings), and there would be bank presidents sitting next to sadhus, who in turn were sitting next to craftsmen and people who were extremely wealthy, people who were former rajahs and kings and princes. They were all people whose inner sight and inner hearing had been awakened. They had realized that their Satguru had arrived, that their ticket home was here, and He was the conductor on the train of life taking them back. Sawan passed from this scene in 1948 after initiating about 85,000 souls, and satsangis like Kirpal Singh and Charan Singh began teaching the path of Surat Shabd Yoga and offering Holy Naam initiation. After they departed, other people began doing it. It’s a continuous thing, one of the great gifts of God to humankind, and one of the great examples of Gods grace. We are greatly blessed by the fact that the Lord always expresses ItSelf to human beings through other human beings. This gives us a living example of God-in-expression which is on our level, not removed somewhere in an ivory tower or a cave, or confined to the dusty mists of history by a book or a different plane of existence. Every day, since humankind first became conscious, there have been living, human instruments of God-in-expression, which is something that Im very grateful for. If we can just awaken people to this basic fact, we would see a whole lot less negativity and desire-based action in the world, including the work environment. And we would come pretty close, as close as well ever come, to heaven on earth. Q: You don’t think it’s a flaw in human nature or character, to be like that? For example, Adam and Eve, they lived forever, they lived in paradise and they gave it all up, it still wasnt good enough for them. M: Well, what the story of Adam and Eve is really talking about is that original paradise which is the level of pure spirituality, the Soul Plane, the Kingdom of Heaven. That level is the True Home, Sach Khand. Below the world of Sach Khand are the worlds of duality, extending from the mind on down through the causal, emotional/astral and physical bodies. By partaking of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, what that really means is that soul took on a mental body and became aware of duality. Through it’s own curiosity, it became stuck in the wheel of cause and effect. I wouldn’t call it “fault”. If anything, I might call it “shortsighted”. Most people tend, at some times in their lives, to be shortsighted. It’s part of human nature. It doesnt make them necessarily bad. We are all like fruit on a tree in the process of ripening. Some are more mature and closer to being ripe than others. Is a little bitty green apple that’s unripe bad? Or is a tomato thats still hard and green bad? No. It might not be edible . . . yet. But it is potentially edible. You just have to give it time . . . to bask in the sun . . . and drink the water of life . . . and it will turn into something . . . of great beauty . . . which is the destiny of all souls. “The saving grace comes through contact with Naam, and continuous cherish of His love and saving grace in turn helps the other way. Both grace and Naam work in reciprocity and help in developing each other.” - Kirpal Singh (pg. 118) In the LightSong of Eternal Love, Happy Thanksgiving!!! Michael spiritualfreedomsatsang.org - Blog *© 2014 by Michael Turner
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 20:37:39 +0000
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