Excerpt from "Meditation in Sikh Religion"

Divine Love

Our Minds, like our bodies, have developed primarily in practical relation to the external world, and we cannot possibly escape from or cope with and conquer the conditions thus imposed upon us by ourselves alone, except by the help of the powers that be, who placed us here.

We are interwoven with the sense-world is ruled and the laws of nature by which that sense-world is ruled. We are ourselves a from our separateness, nor purify ourselves from the stains we gather by coming into contact with it, nor freely and fully protect ourselves from the blows it ministers to our incipient souls without willing. Something that happens outside of us must cause something to happen inside of us. The whole universe is for us, and all the events and circumstances are for us; all things are for us; they have something to tell us, because all things have a meaning which God has placed in them for us to learn by relating them to us, by facing them, or by being forced upon them or they upon us.

We want to know how to bent this world to our wills or, as the next best thing, how to adjust ourselves to the world, so that we may be able to make the best of the world. There is the burden of all this weary, unintelligible world; we dare not deny it. We see it waiting for every man at his appointed hour. But who has tied it upon our backs forever as a thing from which seemingly there is no escape? Who has brought to pass that the weary weight never leaves us?

Opposite our window we see a rose bush. One of the thinkers, or a cult, informs us that the rose bush is “a construction of the mid.” Another, that it is a “a projected idea.” Still another says that it is “an illusion of mind and maya.” Now, if any such interpretation of the rose bush is playing us a trick. We take the rose bush for just what it declares itself to be.

Are we not right in supposing that a thing can manifest itself only by coming in its true colors? If it comes out in false colors and shows itself as something other than it is, then the proper name for the process is not manifestation but masquerading or, pardon our plain language, laying.

In what ways is man’s within related to world’s without, and vice-versa? And how must he rightly relate himself to it? Has the world on its own part an answering “attitude” toward the enquiring mind, analogues to that a person who has a meaning to impart to others and is taking the necessary steps to get this meaning recognized?

No object can stand before the bar of thought and maintain the character of an unknowable. Were it not for our perception, the outer world would not exist for us, which is very far from saying that it has no existence of its own. What is a fact for man depends upon his apprehending faculties. Were the object unknowable, thought could not apprehend it. The worth of things and our powers of recognizing and explaining them or accounting for their existence are dependent on the enfoldment and growth of the soul; that for which the capacity and susceptibility it not developed within cannot be recognized, explained or appropriated from without for the enrichment of personality.

The abilities or energies of any people have much to do with the effects upon them of outer environments, foreign peoples or civilizations, and circumstances. What is stimulus and education for one may injure another. Some primitive tribes have gained little except disease, depression, and dead, from contact with civilization. Why go to history to discover truth? The degree of truth in history is the same as the degree of truth in the historian.

The habitual flow of the mind is toward the world without, not toward the world within. Even if one succeeds in turning the mind away from the world and concentrating it on the self, it breaks loose and wanders back to the world. Why has the world such a hold on us, and who has put this maya-moha – the love of the world—in us, for what purpose?

Can thoughts regarding realities that confront us from within be denied admittance by a mere fiat of our wills? Also, can anyone question the reality of the inner self within? If he did, he would at once put himself out of court to be able to raise any question at all, and must admit that he exists. Which of these two worlds is real – the world without of environments and ceaseless happenings, or the world of the archetypal ideals and the self within? Are we not most of the time desiring to get hold of something from without or to get rid o something from within, and are we not most of the time unhappy?

In the world without, all things ceaselessly flow; and in the world within, are not continuously being strengthened or weakened by what we experience without? Thus we find weight is given to the qualities of flux and abidingness at eh same time. Thus two orders of recognizable or consciously active experiences work constantly upon each other. The direct apprehending of facts affects the growth and form of our apprehending of facts affects the growth and form of our apprehending of facts affects the growth and form of our thoughts and principles, while our principles and thoughts affect each fresher apprehension of facts and act more on the world of facts. By the overcoming, a union indeed is maintained between our past and our present, between what we were and what we were and what we are and are somewhat emergently becoming.

Is it not the world, with its vast riches in the form of experience free of access to all who could use it, quickened by the sense of growing life from within, which demands not to be explained only, but to be enriched by every contribution which experience can pour into our bosoms? Should we not open our inner eyes to see and our arms to receive whatever gifts are held in store for us by the inexhaustible riches of God and His universe, manifested for the growth of souls?

Some call the world a system, soul’s nursery, training place for humanity, an organism, a school, a workshop, a battlefield, a mine, a scene, a background, a phantasm, a lie, a myth, an illusion, or even a cementery, a penitentiary. We do know they are all true; as we are, so is our world. Immersed as we are in the atmosphere of this limited and temporary purpose, we want no other view, and can’t have it. But the advancing soul for richer experiences bursts and overflows every logical dam by which intellect seeks to confine it. Experience is always new, and our metaphysical bottles are always old. Let each one live his own life, and die his own death—suffer as well as enjoy. There are native human rights, and no one may with impunity shield another from them. Let each one learn to stand by and not interfere. Each step forward is experience—in consciousness – makes a further advance inevitable, until he has learned to sanctify every relationship. Then problem-solving will cease to be the central business of the mind, and glorification will begin, with a search for the permanent amid the changing. And Holy Nam, the Living Word, is the only form of the Eternal Being in which the permanent stands permanently expressed.

If nature produces all things, we cannot escape the conclusion that our theories of their production are themselves natural products. How can we free ourselves from nature’s bond and bondage and become her masters and not remain slaves? We ask the philosophers, who explains how all things come in, not to forget to explain how he happens to come in himself and what in the total production is the significance of his part. The idea of outwitting nature at her game is extremely popular and thoroughly characteristic of this industrial age. How can own “make” anything of that whose final nature one does not understand?

Things are as they are; new names do not alter them. Evil is evil, pain is pain, death is death, and it is only in accepting them in their naked reality that religion can be true to itself. Let the gloom thicken, and her radiance then will glow like the noonday.

Life, like the pendulum of a clock, swings between two poles—the pole the pole of desire unsatisfied, unsublimated, which is pain and frustration, and the pole of desire satisfied, which is ennui. The more one looks forward to anything, the less satisfaction one finds in it when it comes. In continual becoming, without ever being, it ceaseless wishing and never feeling satisfied, there is neither peace nor joy. There is no inspiration in endless change, but there is inspiration in endless progress, and progress is when one approaches, nears, blends, and becomes unified with God, who alone is perfect and without change in Himself.

Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind was born in the state of Punjab, India, in 1892 and educated at khalsa College in Amritsar. His early teachers were the Sikh pundits of his community, especially his father, Sardar Boota Singh Thind, whose living example and spiritual teachings left an indelible blueprint to the knowledge of God, and whose legacy Dr. Thind spent a lifetime fulfilling. He was inspired to visit the United States to fulfill his destiny as a spiritual teacher upon reading the works of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Dr. Thind arrived in America in 1912, and spent the rest of his life lecturing throughout the United States and publishing nearly a doze books.

Title: Meditation in Sikh Religion

Author: Bhagat Singh Thind

ISBN: 978-81-7822-344-5

Price: Rs. 195

Publisher: New Age Books

Distributor: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

E-mail: nab@newagebooksindia.com

Website: www.newagebooksindia.com

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