Comments & Notices

Judging from letters we receive from time to time, the purpose of Satsang in the Master’s system is often misunderstood. Fundamentally, it is an instrument to aid remembrance – a Sacred Forum, in Master’s words, where all meet to sit in sweet remembrance of the Master as well as to increase their understanding.

Satsang, in other words, is primarily a remembering meeting, where the Truth of Inner Experience is reinforced through the outer senses – one of the three pillars of the Path, along wit the daily Spiritual Practices and self-introspection. It is ‘not’ – again in Master’s words – a place for gossip or social get-togethers. … social chit-chat is to be avoided .. when Satsang is finished, everyone should leave.¹

These instructions do not always appeal to everybody; but once we understand that, like Master’s other instructions that, they are not arbitrary fiats handed down to make us unhappy, but are helping factors on the Path, then how can we not follow them? – not because we are forced to, but because we love the One Who asked us to do it. The following passage – from the discourse ‘Change your Habits now’ in the February 1971 Sat Sandesh – explains the matter:

So your purpose in coming to Satsang is to imbibe the Love of God, to sit in His sweet remembrance, to unite with Him. All things past and future, all irrelevant matters, can be dealt with in your own place of residence. Come, but come with the very best of intentions. Bring the remembrance of the Lord with you, and take it with you when you leave. Do not listen to other’s conversations and do not talk to anyone unless it be about the Truth. You will thereby gain full benefit from Satsang – otherwise the years will pass by without any real advancement.

Even though you may not understand all that is said, yet if you sit with full attention you will profit by it. If your thoughts are somewhere else, not only will you lose, but other people will also be affected by the impure atmosphere you are creating, for thoughts are living and possess great power. Regard the Satsang as a place of purity; do not talk or think of anything but God, and whosoever attends will be blessed by the uplifting atmosphere. We do not go to Satsang to meet our friends or to socialise.

Since Satsang is primarily a remembering meeting, then the content of the Satsang is of the first importance. On this subject, Master has said – in a letter to an initiate, first published by the New York Satsang:

Books written by the Master should be read in the Satsangs, as these give a clear-cut view of the subject, as also carry the Life-Impulse of the Master and as such will bless the dear ones with right understanding of the Holy Path. Relevant portions of the books of other Master, viz. Kabir, Nanak, Christ, etc., dealing with Sant Mat, Surat Shabd Yoga, may also be referred to where necessary. Books written by other writers on these may be studied by you if necessary individually at home, and not at Satsang. – Please follow this scrupulously.

Of course, material written by disciples which accurately conveys something of the Love and Power of the Master and therefore helps in remembering is not forbidden; Master specifically approved the reading at Satsang of Sat Sandesh articles of this type during a Question & Answer session in Anaheim last November; as He pointed out at the time, many of those articles are gone over by Him personally. But it is obvious that the great majority of the content of any Satsang should be Master’s words; that’s only common sense.

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Stephen Cummings has sent a remarkable excerpt from ‘East West Journal’ (April 1973) regarding the experiments of Cleve Backster, the man who first hooked up a plant to a galvanometer and observed that the readings he took corresponded to his own thoughts about the plant:

Acting on a whim, he [Backster] hooked up an egg to the polygraph. After an hour recording time, Backster was examining a graph of what seemed to be a heartbeat of an embryo chick, three to four days old, the cycles indicating a 170 beat/minute frequency.

This egg, though, was non-incubated, unfertilised, fresh from the grocer. Microscopic analysis revealed no physical or circulatory structure which should account for the pulsations […]

‘Is there,’ Backster wonders, ‘an “energy form blueprint” providing a rhythm and patterns about which matter coalesces to form organic structures – a force field that [Western] technology hasn’t […] known to exist? Does the “idea” of an organism precede its material development? Perhaps this is evidence for what the Bible and Plato say: In the beginning was the Logos – the structuring principle or thought form of the entity to be.’

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Footnote: 1) Quoted from ‘Receptivity.’