‘Wake up and run!’

A Talk given on Return from India by Fletcher Lokey

One of the most precious jewels that I discovered in India is that the Greatest Happiness of all is that happiness which comes from trying to do the Master’s will. It’s a hard thing; yet if we just make the effort to do it, the rewards seem to come of themselves. There was one very sweet experience, rewarding for me because I had the good wonderful Grace while I was there of being able to serve Master in the work, a great deal of which was aimed at trying to help everything run smoothly.

Great numbers of people who are greatly enthusiastic about being there with the Master often require a little bit of shepherding, so one of the things that we asked one day at Dehra Dun was that people, rather than following the usual practice of immediately jumping up when Master was finished giving darshan and following Him out to the car and following the car back to the house and crowding around Him, would please just remain seated and make a path down the middle and let Master walk out; and as soon as He had gone, we should get up quietly and go our ways. We asked this because large crowds were beginning to arrive for the Sawan Singh Bhandara which was just a couple of days away, and we hoped we could give a good example. So we made this request that people would do that, and after darshan Master got up and a way opened up in the middle, and He walked down and He greeted everyone and when He came to the end, people were still seated – generally we would have been all up and pressed around Him.

And He turned around and He looked and He said,

All seated? How well!

and walked out.

He was so pleased! Such a simple thing as that, and He was pleased. We had shown Him respect; what we did was more respectful than the outer show of crowding around trying to get one inch closer to the physical body of the Master; and He was pleased.

You know, on the physical plane there is nothing that is quite as much pleasure as having the Master’s darshan. There is nothing like it, but it is a physical level thing; and the thought occurred to me that, as much pleasure as we get from that, yet it is possible that the actual benefit from being somewhere else – of giving that physical level pleasure up in order to follow the Master’s wish – could very well be greater. The whole game – the whole work that we are trying to do is to get Home, to get back to the Father. Whatever gets us back to the Father the fastest is what Master wants for us the most. Any time we put in effort toward that goal the Master is most pleased with us; but we are at the level of understanding where we can only see what is pleasing to us; and as I said, on the physical level there is nothing that is more pleasing than to sit in the presence of the Master.

One of the things that came up out of the conference was that there were huge numbers of people there and, as time went on, it became apparent that many of them were hoping to stay as long as they could; it’s natural. Who is there who really wants to leave the Master? And it became apparent that Master in His own quiet and loving way was asking people politely to please think about going Home. So there was this very sweet day when a group of people were going back to Delhi in order to voluntarily move their departure dates forward. So there were eight or ten of them, and after meditation and questions and answers and a short heart-to-heart talk, Master said,

Yes, you are going now; well …

and He asked an Indian man who was there to please sing a bhajan for them; and he sang a very beautiful song.

I found out afterward that it was a song written by Master Himself, and He gave a translation of it after the song was over; it was about the yearning of the child disciple to be with the Father, the Master, and it was so sweet. He was – I can’t describe it; He was talking in a way that I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Him talk before. There is no way that I can describe it except that He was very soft and gentle and sweet; perhaps He was feeling a yearning for His Master at that time.

One line of the song stuck in my mind – I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, it was so beautiful. He said in the song,

Oh Master, that place where You reside is such a beautiful place, even the shoes of the Master are more fortunate than me; they are always at His feet.

So He went on talking about how beautiful it is to have yearning for the Master, and He began talking about how it’s a gift of the Master to put us into that yearning; and He told the people as they were leaving,

You are going away because the Master loves you very much. He wants you to have that yearning; that pain is a gift from the Master.

Those people were voluntarily surrendering the opportunity for a few more days or weeks in the presence of the Master in order to follow what they perceived to be the Master’s wish. In response to that, the Master came out and directly told them that He was sending them away because He loved them so much. Because more important than being in the physical presence of the Master and having His blessed darshan, better than that, is to be in His will – whether we see it or not. It’s like in order to regard something as being beneficial to us we want to make sure that we see the benefit coming – that it comes in a way that we can see and understand. To give up the desire to have it that way is very difficult; it’s an act of faith, an act of trust.

There was a very sweet exchange that I had with Master. Toward the end of the time that I was there, one of the jobs that I was doing occasionally was to count the hands of the people as they raised their hands when Master asked who has seen this Light, who has seen that Light – after the meditation sittings.

So this morning I was counting, which is difficult in a large crowd with some hands going halfway up and some of them all the way up; as you are counting you come to one and you say, ‘Did I count that one or not? I don’t know’ – so in this particular category of Light I counted and said,

19, Master;

and I looked at the sheet and I saw Him writing out ‘21 .’

I figured, well, there were some people sitting behind me that I didn’t see or something. So the next category came and as I was counting I fumbled again, and the thought crossed my mind, well, I missed it, but so what? that’s the best I can do, I’ll get as close as I can; and I went on counting.

I said,

32, Master.

He looked at me and said,

Count correctly, please.

I said,

Did I count incorrectly?

He said,

Yes,

to the great amusement of the crowd. So again, in the next category, the hands went up. I tried to count, and I said,

36, Master,

and He said,

40.

He said,

I count too, you know.

What could I do? I knew He was right. – You know, we so often slip. We realise so many times that Master knows what He is doing, that He really is competent, He really is aware, He really is in charge; yet when we forget that, we slip right back into thinking that He is just a man there. So many times I saw Master finish the counting for all the categories in a large crowd of 50 or 60 or a hundred even, and then He would point to someone out in the crowd and say,

You what did you see? Your hand didn’t go up!

He would do that time after time; He really is aware!

Anyhow, the next morning after this little experience of counting wrong and being corrected, I was very, very careful about my counting, and I counted very slowly, very precisely, and I said,

21, Master.

And He looked at me and said.

Ah, you’ve become accurate.

It was a little thing, but you know – I may have sounded as if I was criticising people before for enjoying physical level contact, especially personal attention contact, with Master – it’s just as sweet as it can be.

There was another real jewel of understanding that I’ve come away from India with. Because of my job of keeping track of people – their names, departure dates, etc. – I had to talk with people constantly. And in the process of doing that, I heard so many people, so many times, say things that were the same things that I was saying to myself all the time. We have troubles; everybody has troubles; that’s true; but I found that so many people had exactly the same problems and they were expressing those problems in exactly the same words as I was to myself. And when someone says that, you want to say to him, ‘You too?’ All of a sudden it becomes so clear that it’s not as big a problem as you thought it was. I heard Master say so many times that every man’s problems are the same; when you see everyone in the same rut, it makes your ruts seem smaller – as if to say,

You are having the same problems? Somebody is fooling both of us somehow, somewhere …

There was for me a very moving and gratifying experience involving another person who was having difficult problems, and it was so beautiful to see the problems worked out. There was a man who had been initiated during Master’s 1972 tour, in Washington, and he came on the 9^th of March; and since I had the job of the guest book, I greeted him and we began talking. It was so sad; he had been initiated in Washington, but he told me that he had already been initiated by another master before that, and he was travelling around, going from place to place, earning some money here, taking a train there. His plan was to spend a couple of months, maybe even a couple of years, going around India and visiting various ashrams, and get initiated by as many masters as he could. It was a very difficult thing to listen to, because you feel like grabbing him by the lapels and saying, ‘Please, dear brother, you just don’t understand.’ But I thought, Oh dear Master, please do something. He was a very nice guy; I liked him right off.

As time went on he seemed like he was going through some difficult things inside; I didn’t know what. One day he went up to talk to Master after darshan:

Master, I’ve been using – I was initiated by You in Washington, but I was initiated by another man before; since I’ve been initiated by You I’ve still been using the same mantra the first man gave me.

Master said,

What?

and began to question him – who was this other Master? what did he teach? why did you come to me for initiation? And He came down very – not sternly, not coldly, but very firmly and directly, and said,

You must make up your mind.

He asked him if he thought he was the gainer or the loser by coming to the Master’s Path;

You must make up your mind what you want and you must row in one boat.

Afterward I saw the man sitting back in his seat, and he was in tears and sort of shaking, and had a very strange sort of not-here-at-all look in his eyes. I so much wanted to help him; but really what could I say or do? It was something that really was in Master’s hands; I just hoped and prayed for the best for him.

But the next day I thought I would offer him just one little piece of advice; I wanted to say,

If you really want to know what to do, if you really want to satisfy your questions about it, Master has said: practise it, do it for one month, follow the instructions explicitly – do your meditations regularly, faithfully, accurately, follow the commandments, keep your diary – and see at the end of the month what’s there.

I started to tell him this, and I said,

Give Him just one month –

and he said,

That’s all right; I gave him ten minutes last night. I’m satisfied.

And from that time on you never saw such an enthusiastic satsangi. When he left, I asked him what his plans were; for all I knew he was still going to go around India.

He said,

I’m going straight home, get a job and settle down.

I felt so good; the man was so sweet and so much wanted to have something higher in life; and now by Master’s Great Grace he was steered a little bit straighter.

I myself went there with very strong preconceptions. It’s funny; we insist on having conceptions of what the Master is like, what the Path is like; we insist on having a picture of it, and we work through that – that paints the scenery for us and provides the framework for the rules that we select to live by day by day. But really it’s a matter of letting these things go and simply following directions. Master doesn’t make any mystery, any secret, of what it is that He wants us to do; He puts it out there in plain English. But we take those things and, as He has often said, we fit them to our own ideas.

Anyway, I went there with problems – exactly the same problems that so many others were there with – and there were painfully difficult feelings inside, and I was looking for a great gift of Grace. I came there looking for that gift, wanting it, wanting Master to do everything for me. And the very first night I was there, at darshan, Master came in and sat down and said,

Yes? Any questions? Anything?

And right behind me there was a girl who immediately said,

More help please, Master!

in a very devoted way. And Master looked at her right in the eye, right over my shoulder so that I knew that He was answering my own question, and said,

Are you ready to receive?

– so direct, not in any way cold, but it was almost the heaviest thing that I have ever heard.

I was there looking for the gift,

Whenever you like, Master, go ahead and give it to me,

and He just told me – if you are ready to receive. The Master really is competent; He knows what He is doing; He knows us inside and out; and when we think, please give me something, Master, I want it – it’s as if to say, Well, maybe He doesn’t know that I really want this or maybe He’s not aware that I really need this so much. It’s as though we don’t really have faith and trust in Him, that He will give us what we need; we have to go and beg and plead for it.

Once He said that when He was a disciple He never once asked His Master for anything, anything at all; and He said,

Do you think that the Father will withhold anything that you need? There is a father with two children. One child says,

Father, please give me food and clothing and shelter,

and the father gives them to him; but the other son who doesn’t ask for them, yet he gets them just the same; he gets them without asking.

So I held up my hand and asked Master:

Well, can we not, Master, then, ask for at least help in our Spiritual Progress – I mean, to ask and pray for Your help in that way?

Because I understood that it’s not necessary to ask for lollypops or help with the mortgage; but I wanted to ask Him about those things that were really beneficial because so many times I had tried to pray for those things. He looked at me and He said,

What did I say?

I said,

Well, Master, You said that You never asked for anything.

And He said,

Well?

It’s a very hard thing; it’s a Gurumukh thing to do; and yet there is no effort that goes unrewarded, there is no step forward that is not met by more steps forward from the Master.

He has given us as a general rule for living our lives that you never lose anything when you give. The thought occurred to me one day – how much more then, to give to the Master? Would we lose anything? And what Master wants us to give is our very selves – our egos.

One of the things I’ve heard Master say so many times:

Now I give you the cure for all these ills, I give you the answer to all your questions, I give you the solution to all your problems; and that is meditation. You are given contact with that direct Power from God which is all the food that you need.

I had heard Him say that so many times, and every time you nod – yes-yes – but it’s one of those things that if you can understand it a little more than you did before, it’s like seeing it for the very first time – it’s like a complete revelation; and even just one little step higher than that is again a complete revelation in itself. And I realised that all these problems that we are confronted with, all the problems that we carry along with us all the time, all the problems that I took with me when I went, were really and truly answered by doing what we are supposed to do.

Master said something one day that struck me, and as I was keeping a little journal I entered it that evening when I was writing out my thoughts.

He said,

There are two worlds; there is one above the eyes, and there is one below the eyes;

and that night He said,

If you will go above, this world will disappear,

and I nodded, I said yes-yes, and I put it in my journal because it sounded like an important thing to hear and an important thing to remember. All these things that we keep, all the little incidents, all the little cosmic things that Master says, we note down in our memories and we jot down in our notebooks; and they stay in our memories and in our notebooks. But anytime that you have even a tiny little practical experience of those things of which Master speaks, then you remember that you have heard them millions of times before and you just shake your head and wonder how you never heard. You never heard because you just never had practical experience of it, that’s all.

And that same understanding was then brought back to what Master has said so often, that meditation is the answer to all these problems. And it had just never occurred to me that what He meant was: It will not answer your question, it won’t solve your problems, it won’t pay the mortgage – but what it does is to put those problems in their proper perspective. Those questions are questions at their own level; if you see even a smidgin higher than that level the problems don’t go there. The things that we go through in physical life are not useless and purposeless – if they were, we wouldn’t be going through them but they belong in one place; and if even for a moment you can be disentangled from them, then for that moment they vanish. Then when you see them again, you say,

Ha ha, problem, I saw you vanish; I know you’re not real!

For as long as we see clearly, it’s so clear; and when we remember that clarity, we can have the benefit of it. If we forget, then we simply work again from that level and again the problems are real, they cause pain, they cause worry, they make us unhappy.

All the happiness that I found while I was there, and all the happiness that I have brought back, all stems from one thing: having had a little bit of experience of doing what Master has been trying to tell us to do all the time. When you are in His will, when you are following instructions, you are happy every minute; when you are not, you are not always happy. Nevertheless, it’s an easy thing to forget; and unless you hang onto it every minute you can slip back and the mind goes downstream by its very nature.

It makes daily life into something different than it was before. It used to be that meditation was an ingredient in the makeup of the day-to-day life. You get up in the morning, you meditate some, you have your breakfast, you go to work, you come home, you read a book, meditate some, go to bed, try to get up again in the morning. Whereas now it should be that daily life is just an ingredient in meditation. Meditation is the real life and daily life is a part of that.

There were two answers Master used to give to the questions about difficulties in meditation; either

No, no, no, that’s the wrong way of doing it; please put your whole attention into the center,

or,

Look to your diary, please.

Failure to follow instructions is the source of all our difficulties: either we are not doing the meditation right or we are not doing things right during the day, and the two are part of a continuous one. The daily life is just the higher life brought down, working on a different level – when we are not directly trying to contact that.

So these are the things that Master by His Grace saw that perhaps He could give me. All the difficulties, all the pains and troubles that I was carrying with me simply disappeared into thin air. For a time I walked closer to the Truth than I had been before, and I was just all happiness; and every time that I remember that, I become all happiness again. It sounds strange to say, ‘Gee, I’m glad to be back,’ because we are supposed to want to be in India all the time; but what we want is to be with Him, and to be with Him does not mean to be in India: to be with Him means to be in His will. And it flows so powerfully; when you have it, you just want to run so fast, as fast as you can, to keep it.

Master told one lady who asked Him for a message to take back,

Tell those who are asleep to wake up and tell those who are awake to run.

There was one French lady, so sweet, she didn’t speak a word of English; when her departure time came I took her the guest book and got somebody to explain to her in French what was wanted – name, departure date, and the section for remarks, whatever she wanted to say. So she went and consulted with her French-speaking friend who knew a little English and composed what she wanted to say: I watched her writing in English.

She wrote,

I dance my happiness.

And I just feel that same way; I thank the Master for all these things and thank God for the Master. All these things are freely given; it should be as plain as day to all of us that Master loves us so much that there is nothing we can’t have, if we will just follow instructions. Would He hold it back?

What does He want? – to take us back Home. He has been there, He knows what it’s like, that’s the only thing that He wants for us; and there is nothing that is held back. It is so plain and clear. So … I have been filled with happiness – so much that you just wish your heart were bigger so that it could break more.

The last words that Master said to us before we left were:

When you go back, people should see that you are a changed man; people should see by your behaviour that you have been here.

And then He said,

God bless you all.

It’s just such a precious thing to have, and I thank you for your patient listening; because when the heart is full all it wants to do is run over and give to everyone else. Thank you.