Love is the Reality

RUSSELL PERKINS

based on a talk given September 16, 2001, at Sant Bani Ashram, Sanbomton, NH

Many people have requested, and indeed I have felt an inner command also, to consider the thoughts of the Masters in connection with the events of the past week (the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in New York City & Washington, D.C.). What does it all mean, where and how does it fit in with everything else that the Masters teach? I will start from the personal and proceed to the general.

I want to read a letter that Master Kirpal wrote on October 9, 1961, which is two years before He was was here in October 1963. The letter was addressed to me. I'm reading from the October 1974 SAT SANDESH, where it was published at a time when the sangat was in terrible disarray and despair, because Master Kirpal had left the body two months earlier. In the magazine I put an editor's note with the letter:

"This beautiful letter has been a constant source of encouragement and consolation since I received it thirteen years ago this month." (Now, of course, it is exactly forty years ago this month.) "I had written Master in a mood of deep despair over having wasted two years of my life away from Him and over the fear of nuclear war, which seemed imminent. Some readers will recall that "year of the fall-out shelter," when we were being encouraged to accept the inevitability of wholesale catastrophe, and solid citizens were debating the ethics of shooting their neighbors if they dared to encroach on their shelters. The absurdity of the world and the whole worldly outlook, on which I had staked my identity, came home to me in an awful rush, and the Master pulled me back to Him in the space of one afternoon. But confusion, resentment and despair remained: How could God let things like nuclear wars become so probable? How could He create such a world? Out of such a mood was forged the first honest letter I ever wrote to Master; this was His reply."

* * *

You Need Not Worry About Anything

I am glad to find that you have achieved a stable existence in a small rura1 town and have learnt the trade of a printer to carry on a smooth life. A settled and peaceful life is a helping factor for the spiritual undertakings. My best wishes are with you all.

I am sorry that you had for some long time past neglected your meditations and grown careless in diet and generally lost interest in spiritual things. I am glad that you are again meditating, and have taken a turn for your spiritual side. This will stand in your good stead. You should not take things only from physical angle. While one has to perfonn physical duties, the duties towards one's own self and God are not less important. "Is not body more than raiment and life more than the meat?" "What does it profit a man if he gains the possessions of the whole world and loses one's own soul?" The physical life together with all its possessions and allurements is subject to decay and disintegration. The precious moments of earth life spent in the holy meditations are superbly best utilized and are a step in the right direction towards one's eventual return to one's True Eternal Home. Whether by ups and downs of the world or inner yearnings one is fortunate to tread on this Path of deliverance.

You have got the sacred books and at present are reading Naam or Word. What you read in these books is to become a part of your life and this you will achieve step by step if you are regular and devoted in meditations and develop within from day to day. Man is the noblest of all creation and the highest ideal in this body is to meet the Lord and for that purpose he has to know himself first. Self-knowledge precedes God-knowledge. Man has made wonderful progress physically and intellectually but his spiritual side has been ignored. He is gaining control over the forces of nature in the shape of Hydrogen bombs etc., which are threatening the destruction of all mankind. Had he gained self-knowledge before having this control of forces of nature, these very things would have gone to the service of mankind. These weapons are being used for gaining supremacy over the others. Even the darkest clouds have a silver lining somewhere. To err is human; by suffering one learns a lesson and tries to avoid sin and

looks for virtuous life. This threat of destruction will go a long way to change the trend of humanity for the better: to live and let others live too. Providence has His own miraculous ways for guiding the destiny of Child Humanity. But the fact remains that "A living Master is a Great Blessing" and all those coming under His protective care and guidance will pass off unscathed by following His commandments, viz., "Love God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy strength," and "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

If we give more value to a thing than is intrinsically due it, the fear of its loss will be considerably out of proportion to the actual facts. You need not worry about anything. Being under the protective care of the Great Master Power, you are really a blessed soul, having always at your disposal the facility of drawing on that Great Power. The way how to do it is already with you. If you will just walk one step, He will come down a million of steps to pull you, help you and guide you at every stage. You have simply to tune your receptivity to the fountainhead. The way to do it is to faithfully obey Him and devotedly carry on as enjoined. All action has corresponding reaction. An individual action has an individual reaction. Collectively people are asked to do ethical actions. This brings up good collective reaction. Reverse of it produces collective bad reaction. Nature has its own way of correcting and fulfilling reactions of individual good and bad action. Likewise collective reactions are to be fulfilled. One may not be able to truly understand the depth of these things for his perception and understanding is limited to gauge these depths. Internal ascension into higher regions opens our vision to see things clearly. We should, therefore, strive fully, honestly, faithfully and diligently to proceed within. Those who are earnest and devoted are crowned with success. Many things become clear which otherwise with all the reasoning and intelligence will be at best hazy and foggy. But to those who are regularly devoted to meditation in the accurate way their inner development takes them face to face to the radiant form of the Master within, in which God Power appears -- Who talks to them as we taJk outside, guides them in all matters -- when the time comes for their leaving the physical body He tells them that they have to go. There is nothing strange in it. It is every day happening.

The spiritual aspirants inculcate a sense of aversion for the sensuous pleasures as they have tasted the elixir of Naam within with the grace of the Master. All beauty and glory lies within and if you will please be lovingly devoted to your holy meditations in an accurate way as discussed in a copy of brief instructions which I enclose for your guidance, you will find that you will be benefited immensely with His grace.

So please be lovingly devoted with deep faith and sacred earnestness. Master Power working overhead will be extending all feasible help, grace and protection....

Master covers a lot of ground in that letter, and I will get back to some of His points a little later. I do want to convey something to you which is important, I think, and it is very personal, but at the same time it is in my heart, it seems very definitely for the sangat as a whole, and this is the way it worked with me. Everyone has their own story, and I know that this story I'm about to tell you had its parallels with a number of other people, too, because it is very true that the Master Power is extending all feasible help and protection.

September 10, the day before Sant Ji's birthday is a very bad day for me, personally. It's the day on which my wife Judith died, and the fact is she actually died about an hour or so before Sant Ji's birthday began, between 10:30 and 11 :00 at night. Each year has been difficult. Last year there was an unveiling of a portrait and the dedication/open house at Pyareo Home on that day, and that was helpful. But this year it was very hard, and I was struggling all day long. This was also the first day of classes for me at Sant Bani School. I was struggling all day long with feelings of negativity, of anger, of resentment, or distrust, despair; you name it, whatever it was, it was there. I attributed it entirely to the day that it was. Even though my life has taken a very sweet turn in the last six months, as most everyone knows by now, and I am engaged to be married again, it doesn't mitigate the grief that I feel still at Judith's departure.

Anyway, the first thing that happened was that evening I looked out the back window of my bedroom, and at first I attributed no significance to this at all, and maybe there isn't any; but thinking about it later, it appeared to me as the first of the signs. There was a baby deer outside my window. My window looks onto a fairly large, grassy lawn-like expanse, which then borders on the woods, and deer have been there a number of times since I've been in that house, but not for quite a while. I had never seen a baby deer alone ever, with a wide open space, no other animals around, no parents, nothing; and this is the wrong time of year for young deer. They're born in the spring, and this one was obviously a fawn; his legs were very long and awkward.

He was extremely sweet, and he was playing, eating grass and playing, totally without a care in the world. I looked all around for the older deer that I've always seen with young ones, and there weren't any. It was like he was all by himself there in the grass without a care in the world. And I loved him.

I looked at him for about twenty minutes, then things came up and I had to do things, and later he was gone. But I was still very negative and very angry, and I still attributed it to the day.

When I went to bed I was in a terrible place for a satsangi, really, just a terrible place, and I went to bed and I slept a few hours, and I was up at 2:00, still in the same mood, and I didn't want to meditate. I really didn't want to meditate, I wanted to do anything but meditate, and I wanted to sleep. I wanted to forget, but this was now Sant Ji's birthday, so I postponed it for a while, and then I very reluctantly and very angrily sat. I emphasize this because it's important to know that what happened had nothing to do with any position or place that I was in. In fact, it would seem as though it would be the exact opposite. Anyway, people, I have to tell you that grace was showered on me that night, and Master took me into His lap and showed me many things. The grace that came was unbelievable, considering especially where I had been at, where it started.

I've experienced this before: the mercy of God in all its fullness. And I took it as a personal thing again, because this has happened to me before. Is the Master forgiving me for my feelings and actions, etc. of the day before? Is He telling me it was all right and loving me? Was it just what the Master does -- He loves us, He forgives us, and He doesn't hold things against us? That's what I took it as, but when I came out of meditation I couldn't believe that it had happened, considering where I had been. My mood was totally transformed, and I was in absolute awe at the mercy and grace of such a Master.

[Later,] I had turned off my radio just before events started to happen, because I found the news boring and irritating. Several hours later, a sister called me from far away and told me what had happened, and that's how I learned of the attacks. But it took me several more hours before I realized that the experience that I had had early that morning was a direct commentary on what was going on outwardly, too, and that it wasn't just for me.

Then later I talked with another satsangi who told me a very similar story to mine that she had had, an almost identical experience; it was in terms connected with her life, but there it was. It was not different than mine. And then I heard of another satsangi in another part of the country who had had a very similar experience; again, each time anger, bitterness, and resentment was then dissipated by an overwhelming experience of love, and mercy, and grace.

I do believe that Master is telling us, "All right, this is happening, these things are there. There is evil in the world, there is suffering in the world, there is torment and terror and despair in the world. All these things are there, and some of them are there in our lives even without terrorist attacks, but it's all right. Remember what you are really after." Remember the bhajan that I talk about so often. "Kirpal gave only this message and even the wind also teaches us this. If we keep walking while doing the Simran, the destination will come to us by itself."

We need to remember what we want, what we are for, who we are, where we come from, what we are really after. Yes, this is the physical plane, it's the world of the Negative Power, and in the world of the Negative Power all actions have a reaction. Master was getting at that in the letter that I read, too. There are individual reactions and there are collective reactions. In any incident like this, we have to distinguish between the two.

The people who died, it was their time to die. It doesn't mean that the collective impact had anything to do with anything they had done. It was their time to go, and the Lord of Judgment used that kind of method for them. We can remember this, too. Master used to point this out -- that whether we die in a car crash, a plane crash, a nuclear explosion or have a heart attack -- we die and we go within, and the Master is with us and we continue on and we have not come to the end of anything. If we are not Initiated, still something like that happens. We continue on whichever way we were going. The fate karma of this life comes to an end. Collectively, of course, it's another thing.

None of the above makes it any easier for the families and loved ones of the victims; their suffering is enormous. Nothing is harder in this world (in my experience) than losing someone who shares your life. Anything we can do to help them, any sympathy we can give them, will be very pleasing to the Master.

I said I would go from the personal to the universal. The following is Sant Ji's "Prayer for Peace," a talk which He gave before meditation on January 1, 1991. Many of us will remember what happened at that time. This was, of course, the beginning of the Gulf War, and I believe it actually started the following day, but Sant Ji knew very well what was happening, and these were His comments on that War, which [the U.S.] waged on Iraq at that time:

Good morning! I wish all of you, your families, your country, and all the human beings on this world, a very happy New Year.

I wish and pray to God Almighty that the clouds of war which are hovering over this world may be removed with His grace and that all of this world may have a very happy New Year.

This whole world is the home of the Master, this whole world is like the country of the Master, and you know that if one child in the home is unhappy or suffering, the father is affected by it, he is also unhappy, he also suffers. In the same way, if there is any trouble anywhere in the world, the Master is also affected. So I pray to God Almighty, again and again, that He may protect all of us, giving us His gracious hand, that in this Iron Age He may protect these souls of the Iron Age. I bow down in front of Him again and again; I lay myself down in front of Him again and again with the prayer that He may protect all of us.

At present, as you know, everyone in this world is frightened; as you know, the superpowers are standing on piles of dynamite and you never know what is going to happen. If at this time God does not shower His grace upon us, if He does not protect us, then you can very well imagine how much the human beings will be affected and how much loss can happen if He does not shower His grace upon the people. So once again, it is our prayer in front of God Almighty that, giving us His support, He should cool down the minds od the people and He should shower grace upon all the people, and He should bring peace to the world. *

* Printed in SantBaniMagazine, January 1991, p. 16.

Now, of course, peace did not come to the world at this point, although I am not saying that Sant Ji's prayer was ineffective. I think in fact that in some ways it was very effective, but we all know what happened. The United States fought Iraq over what seemed to us at the time to be a very legitimate issue, namely the protection of Kuwait. However, in the course of that war, the casualties of the Iraqi army were well over 100,000; the casualties on the American side were something like 19 or 20. In addition thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians died, both during the war and in the ten years of sanctions that have followed. American collective policy did not care about that.

But Osama Bin Laden, who was living in Saudi Arabia at the time and who had been fighting [earlier] for the Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan [against Soviet occupation] did care about it. The Gulf War was the turning point for him, according to what people have to say. He did not see the way we saw; he saw it from the point of view of the millions of his people, Muslim people, Arab people, dying as "collateral damage," in the words of American military experts. So he is paying us back. He's wrong; it's always wrong to pay back. Each time we pay back, we increase the ante, it goes up. Whatever our leaders feel compelled to do, they have to do that, and it's not a good thing from a country's perspective to let people get away with this kind of thing. They have to protect the people in their country, and it is our patriotic privilege to support our country as it tries to protect itself from this kind of thing.

But it isn't going to be easy, because of the karmic implications. You know, if you're a person, the more power you have, the more bad karma you pile up. Master Kirpal talks about it in The Wheel of Life. He said a person accumulates good karma, enough to make him a king. He becomes a king and then he has a lifetime being a king, which earns him enough bad karma to send him to hell. That's the pattern. You get the power, the power allows you to do what you want; you do not see the perspective of the people that you are pushing around, and then you have to pay for that. It's true on an individual basis, but it's also true on a national basis.

Sant Ji, in His prayer, was speaking from the point of view of the people over there in the rest of the world. He loves us in America for sure, but He cannot help but identify with the people who are going to be bombed. If you remember, He postponed the West Coast Tour that was originally scheduled for that year. At the time He said that air travel would not be safe in this country, and that terrorism would be happening as a reaction to the Gulf War. It is possible that His prayers and His introspection did cause a long postponement of that, because it didn't happen back then, of course, but it's happening now. It may be where the country is at, but where individuals within that country are at is precisely where they are supposed to be in connection with spiritual growth, living out their life in accordance with their karma, etc.

The Master Power, the love of God, the Mercy of God is there, and all of us have access to it, just as Master wrote me, "If you take one step toward me, I take a million steps toward you." I remembered that, I did my best, and everything He promised me in that letter, He has made come true. He was not talking empty talk, and it's still true. We don't know what's going to happen.

You know when I first went to India, Master Kirpal had a cook who lived at the Ashram in Delhi. He was a Nepalese, from the country of Nepal, called Ghorka. When he was a boy, he was not initiated, he did not come from a satsangi family, he was not even living in India, he was living in Nepal, which is a country bordering India in the Himalayas where Mount Everest is. Sawan Singh used to appear to him in the middle of the night and ordered him to wake up and meditate. Of course, he didn't know how to meditate from the point of view of other people, the way we're taught, but Sawan Singh apparently gave him enough instruction within so that he could do it. His mother used to come in and find him sitting on the floor in the middle of the night, and she would order him back to bed. Then he would say, "No, if I don't sit up here, the old man with the stick will beat me." She didn't know what on earth he was talking about.

Anyway, he went very far within that way. During the Indian - Pakistan Wars of 1948, Sawan Singh gave him intense inner direction, and he saved countless lives, both of combatants and of civilians. He served as some kind of aspy, and he was constantly in touch with Sawan Singh. Apparently Sawan Singh used him as His eyes, ears, arms and hands, because He Himself was very ill in His last illness in Beas. Eventually he got to Delhi and met Master Kirpal Singh, Whom he understood was the current Master, the One through whom Sawan Singh was working, and he was initiated formally and served Master Kirpal for much of his life.

Going within is not something irrelevant, as Master Kirpal points out in the letter; it's not irrelevant to anything. It's the thing that makes sense out of everything. Years ago, when I was about nineteen or twenty, I used to go to a counselor. I've referred to him in Satsang before. He was a very wise man, whose name was William Carr. He was called a therapeutic counselor, and I was actually sent to him by the professor of psychology at Gordon College, where I was studying. He was very unusual. He had studied with Krishnamurti and other people, too, although I didn't know that for a long time. He told me many things that later I only heard again when the Master told me, and many things also that I discovered in books that I read when I started seeking. I went to him for a year and a half, and then later when I began to seek after truth and I ran into ideas, I noticed how many of them were like things he had told me. I went back to him a few times, and I questioned him about his sources and stuff like that. Then I was initiated in May 1958, and that summer was really quite wonderful for me. I had a lot of grace with meditation; it was very easy and very enjoyable, and I loved it.

Then somehow in the fall, something happened; I don't know what. It was one of those shifts in perspective that we have all experienced, which we can't explain, but which, when they happen, it's like everything that we have formerly believed in, loved, and valued, is called into question. It's like we suddenly start doubting it all, but there's no real reason. Nothing has changed outwardly; something has changed within us. So I experienced that and I began to not want to meditate, and I began to doubt everything; and I decided to go back and see my friend, the counselor.

He knew that I had gotten initiated and that I was on the Path, and we had a wonderful talk that night. He talked to me so lovingly and so wisely, and he said, "You know, doubt is like a man on a branch of a tree, sawing the branch off. You saw, you work and work, and all of the sudden you've crashed." Then he said, "In this world, it seems to us that things are happening everywhere, and that it's important to take part in those things, to matter, to count; when we're sitting in meditation, it seems like we're totally out of it, that it doesn't accomplish anything, that it's not relevant to anything. But in reality, when we sit in meditation, we are striving for the increase of consciousness, and there is nothing else that this world needs more than an increase of consciousness. It is exactly the right remedy to apply, no matter what the problem is." He restored my perspective, and when he finished talking, he said, "Why don't we sit in meditation for half an hour before you go." We did and it was wonderful; I left so happy and so restored to where I had been.

What Master says in that letter, is precisely what Mr. Carr told me that night. No matter what is going on outside, and we may be compelled or feel compelled to do things in connection with it, to help people, to support people, whatever -- all of that is very important and valid, but above everything else, beyond everything else, beneath everything else, the substratum of all that is, the thing that makes it possible for us to really contribute the way that Sawan Singh used Ghorka during the India-Pakistan War, is to go within. The further we go within, and the more we come to be with the Master, the more we will understand, the more we will see, the more we will be able to rise above the things that cause us to be separate from others, the more we will experience the oneness of humanity, the more we will understand Sant Ji's prayer.

As to why it happened on Sant Ji's birthday, I don't know. This is a cause of some anxiety and some worry to people, who are not sure what to think. Is it an inauspicious thing? Unspoken maybe is the question: "Is it some kind of bad joke of the Negative Power?" I don't think those questions mean much. From my point of view, I've been struggling with that for three years. You know, why did Judith die a few minutes before Sant Ji's birthday? From that time the celebration of His birthday has never been the same for me. Now it will never be the same for anyone. From my point of view, it isn't that different, because when Judith died it was like the whole world died, as far as I was concerned.

I don't know. Not everything do I understand, I assure you, and I often know very little, and really I don't know anything now, except that I know that the mercy and love of God is the Reality of the universe and that if we go deep enough within, that is what we find. And that is the purpose of life. Other things, maybe many other things, anything that works against that, is irrelevant to the main thing. People do, and always have, and will continue to blow each other up, and kill each other off, and sometimes we may be among those that that happens to, but it does not mean that in the heart of our hearts, the soul of our soul, that the love of God is not what we find there, and that it is not available to us; because it is available to us. It is our heritage, our birthright, as Master Kirpal often said.