By Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj
The Light and Sound is a stream of love. When we meditate, the divine love of God touches our soul. It permeates our being and fills us with love and bliss. Contact with this rapturous power transmutes us into itself. As a result, we become more loving. We develop a sweetness and kindness that radiates from our very souls.
In this state, we no longer become involved in vices that blemish our souls. We develop a loving heart and cannot injure or hurt anyone. We can only speak kind words and perform kind deeds. We become more peaceful and less susceptible to anger. We become sweet, loving and humble. As Sant Darshan Singh would often say, “When we are lost in the love of our Beloved, where is the time to think of others? Where is the time to engage in gossip and criticism?” By losing our heart and soul in the love of the Creator, our life becomes more spiritual and more sublime.
Daily meditation helps us counteract the negative influences and impressions we receive during our day-to-day life in the world. The pull of the world is very strong and we need all the help we can get to keep us moving towards our goal. Our soul which is of the same essence as God finds bliss in the presence of pure consciousness. Once we taste the divine waters of the inner Sound Current, we want to drink of it more and more. This turns our attention towards the goal of traveling to the heavenly regions. We lose our attraction for outer enjoyment. We are also saved from the negative traits that accompany each outer temptation. When we are not caught up in worldly desires, we have less anger, less greed, less egotism, and less possessiveness. Since our goal is to reach the inner world, all the negative habits sparked by worldly attachments slowly begin to fade away.
An indispensable factor for treading the way back to God is to develop ethical virtues. One way of developing ethical virtues is simply to dive into the sea of love and become so absorbed that we have no time or interest to get involved with negative habits and failures. We will become so lost in the love of God that we will not have the time to criticize anyone or get involved in petty disputes. We will have no time to fight over possessions. Instead, we will be interested in uniting our soul with God and spending time in those activities which will speed us toward that goal.
Until we reach that state, we have to consistently weed out our ethical failures one by one, day by day.
These are replaced by the positive virtues of nonviolence, truthfulness, purity, humility, selfless service, and the maintenance of a vegetarian diet. We will want to avoid hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol which are deterrents to our goal of becoming more conscious. As long as we continue to have failures in these categories, we are besmearing our souls with more and more blemishes and more and more karma. At the end of each day, we need to evaluate our thoughts, words, and deeds and become aware of our failures in each category. We then resolve to do better the following day and eliminate these deficiencies.
If we wish to reach God in this lifetime, we should spend daily time in meditation. We cannot undo our long, long past, but we can take charge of our future. We can use our discrimination to make choices that will help our soul to reach its eternal goal in this lifetime. The spiritual adepts have given us a blueprint for our personal transformation. It is up to us to take the first step. (www.sos.org)
