The most natural Way

II

In our last meeting, I told you something about the Light of God and the Voice of God, both of which reside in the temple of God which we are. This is what the man of realisation would say, for He has actually experienced these within Himself. But it would be quite different with the man of intellect, with no face-to-face realisation of the Reality. He, with all his learning and knowledge only of outer forms and formalities, rites and rituals, knows next to nothing of Spiritual Matters and talks of things empirically on the human level. The man of Inner Attainment, on the other hand, besides ironing out apparent differences, grants us an experience of the Reality, dispelling all doubts; for when one actually see things for himself, one gets a deep-rooted conviction born of practical experience.

Christ tells us,

If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of Light.

The Light of God is within each one of us and so is the Single Eye. But how to develop the Single Eye and how to witness the Light of God is the problem within us, and none can solve these problems for us but a Living Competent Master Who, like Christ, has had an actual living experience of them in His own person and makes it manifest to us by means of actual experience.

All the scriptures at the most relate to us the Spiritual Experiences of the Masters: what They have seen within and how. Those who have not had the same experiences cannot even correctly interpret the scriptures to us. They would simply ramble and miss the most important part, for it is not a matter of intellectual grasp. The intellectuals often gather round the Masters, put silly questions to them, but what does the Master tell them? 

Once some learned people came to Shamas-i-Tabrez, a Persian Saint. He plainly told them, 

My friends, if you see the Midnight Sun, you are most welcome. If not, do not waste your time and mine.

The people were bewildered. What could He mean by Midnight Sun? They said,

The sun is only seen at daytime, not at night!

The Sage replied,

The sun I speak of never sets, and they alone behold its glory whose hearts are pure.

A very similar anecdote is recorded in the life of Guru Nanak, the Indian mystic. One night He declared that the sun was ablaze in the heavens. His family thought that He had gone crazy. When His beloved disciple, Bhai Lehna – Who was to succeed Him as Guru Angad –, came to Him, Guru Nanak repeated what He had said earlier:

The sun is ablaze in the heavens.

And Bhai Lehna at once said, 

Yes, my Master it is so.

– How far has it risen?

was the next question, and he promptly replied,

As far as You make it.

These instances I have quoted from the Holy Books. Now I will tell you a similar incident that occurred before my very eyes.

My Master, Baba Sawan Singh Ji, once during His last illness asked those around Him if people in the neighbouring towns could see the sun that He beheld. Everyone thought that He had lost His reason and the doctor in attendance, an eminent Swiss homoeopath, declared that the Master was suffering from uraemia, i.e., urine poison was affecting His brain.

When I visited Him in the evening, He laughed heartily and asked me the same question: 

Look here, the sun is ablaze in the heavens. Do the people living in other stations see that?

I told Him:

Master, distance is immaterial. A man may be living in America or in Europe. If he were to turn within, he will see the Light of God.

– That is right,

said my beloved Master.

References to the same Light may be found in the most sacred of the Vedic hymns, the Gayatri Mantra. It speaks of the savitar or the sun shining within, and exhorts the religious-minded to attend to the all-absorbing influence of that glorious orb, but how many of us who daily recite this mantra ever know its significance and practise what the Vedas speak of?

God is Light, more brilliant than the Light of countless suns put together, a Light that is at once uncreate and shadowless, very sweet, very soothing, a Light that never was on sea or land. It is always there. But externalised as we are on the plane of the senses, we cannot see It. To see It, we must invert and rise above the body consciousness. This is a practical subject.

An incident in the life of Kabir brings out the difference between a merely intellectual and a practical man very clearly. Once a learned pundit came to Him for the sake of pointless argument.

The Sage put him off, saying,

My learned friend, why argue when we can never hope to agree? You speak of something you have not seen, of something you have only read; while I speak only of that which I have seen.

Jesus Christ once said,

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.

One of the Sikh Masters also said the same thing: 

Listen ye to the true testimony of the Saints, for They speak of that which They have seen.

Of course the man who has seen the Reality himself will say,

I have seen it and I know what it is!

He speaks with confidence and conviction. There is force and weight in what he says. When one has experienced what he describes, the words spring from the abundance of the heart and they carry their own testimony. They have about them an air of certainty and definiteness that does not admit of any doubt and suspicion.

Kabir further says,

I tell the people to wake up from their slumber.

It means that we are asleep. But how? The fact is that we are asleep as regards the Reality that is within, because our Inner Eye has not yet been opened and we have not witnessed the Light of God. We have never risen above the body consciousness, never developed the Single Eye that alone pierces into the beyond. We are, as it were, asleep from within, and are identified with our bodies and the bodily impressions. We are leading a superficial life on the sensual plane. It is because of this that Kabir asks us to wake up from the deadly spell of the senses.

The Vedas also say the same thing: 

Awake, arise and stop not until the goal is reached,

meaning thereby that our goal is elsewhere and we are not even aware of it; and that it is high time for us to know of it and strive for it.

Thus we see that even the rishis of old used the very same words as Kabir.

Again the fifth Master of the Sikhs stresses the same thing:

Awake, oh Traveller! and hasten towards thy destination which is a long way off.

What a long journey we have before us! And yet we have no knowledge of it.