When my cousins and I were kids around 8 to 12 yrs old (about 60 yrs ago
for
myself) we used to play this funny little game we made up.
We would all sit in a circle and take turns making up a sentence and as we
repeated it, we would drop one word each time until there was nothing but
silence left. We would always give the person speaking our full focus and
attention.
We would sit there for a time in the silence and look around at each other
until someone started giggling and then we would all break into peels of
laughter and it would be someone elses turn.
There was definately something powerful going on because when we looked
into
each others eyes, it was like we could actually see and feel the silence
inside the other person.
Here's an example of the kind of sentence we used: (the dots represent the
silence aspect)
.......I'm Dick Blisters and I live in Birch River
.......I'm Dick Blisters and I live in Birch
.......I'm Dick Blisters and I live in
.......I'm Dick Blisters and I live
.......I'm Dick Blisters and I
.......I'm Dick Blisters and
.......I'm Dick Blisters
.......I'm Dick
.......I am
.......I
........
......
....
...
..
"Michael Turner" <Michael112658@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1194563842.424081.196760@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
CELESTIAL WORD
- by Michael Turner
© 1999, 2007
(The following was originally published in the November 1999 edition
of "The Sonic Spectrum". It is based upon the transcript of a satsang
I gave on August 15, 1999, following reading from the chapter, "The
Celestial Word" in Paul Twitchell's "Stranger by the River".)
Sit upright. Close your eyes. Focus your attention forward, between
the eyebrows at the Tisra Til. Three times, sing "Hu," a love song to
God. Go within. Meditate. May the blessings be.
The title of the chapter, "The Celestial Word," sums up what it's all
about. It's about the Word. What's the path about? It's about the
Word - the Light and Sound of God, particularly the Sound.
It starts with a feeling I think everybody can relate to on some
level. It's that feeling or perception that draws you to this path in
the first place. You start hearing an inner sound like the wind. You
know it's not the wind, but you're not quite sure what it is; and it
eats at you a little bit. It's something that doesn't fit into your
operating paradigm for reality. So you try to figure out what it is;
then you try to forget trying to figure out what it is.
When you're really ready for this path, the Sound is something that
will stay with you. It won't let you rest, because you as soul are
tapping into It. You are actively beginning to get a taste of the
Holy Spirit and experience It. Soul wants to know. More im****tantly,
it wants to get home; and you start really getting into this path when
you start hearing that beacon call from Home.
Most people have some sense of the Sound, but they usually just ignore
It. There are all sorts of things that get in the way of your
attention. But after a while, the Word begins to speak to you more
and more clearly, and you can't ignore It, because It's the Sound of
the Eternal.
There's a great line right here: "All men could hear it, if they would
stop and listen. Only some hear it more clearly than others. That
is why you hear it tonight, because your spiritual ears are open."
This is so true. It is a basic rudiment of the path that we talk
about in Satsang, regarding what "Surat" means in "Surat Shabd
Yoga."
"Surat" is our attention, or more specifically the attention of the
soul. Usually, our attention is dragged outside and down by our
minds, our emotions, and the sensory input we receive. It is
completely inundated with information, a cacophony of sounds and
lights and sights and smells and feelings and perceptions and all
sorts of things that keep the brain on a permanent scramble/unscramble
basis, trying to make sense of all the data that's coming in. As a
result, it takes conscious effort to tune out the sensory stimuli and
mental stimuli, and tune in the Sound.
There has been a focus in some circles for about 30 years now in which
people have been using isolation tanks for sensory deprivation. The
way it works is you lie in a pool of body-temperature salt water in a
dark enclosure. There is no outer sound or sight or simulation of
your outer senses because the water is exactly body temperature, the
saline factor is so high that you float, and it is completely dark.
This can be a good start for some people, as it can start them on the
way towards inner exploration. But what it generally shows them is
simply an act of mind. They tune out the body senses, then the mental
senses come into play, and the mind has all kinds fun. But grokking
the mind is completely different than grokking the soul, which is a
self-aware particle of pure, eternal love.
We are God's instruments for love. God sees the world through our
eyes. God loves the world through our hearts. That's how It spreads
Its love, and it's very im****tant. We each have to find our own way
home for ourselves.
"The Voice of God is man's divine link with the Almighty." That's so
simple. That is the path, right there. It does not get any simpler.
When I first read that, I knew. I wasn't quite sure what I knew, or
how I knew it, but I knew. This sentence states the ultimate reality
in so very few words. "The Voice of God is man's divine link with the
Almighty." It is incredible in its simplicity and its truth. It's
the foundation of every religion that's ever been, every poem that's
ever been, every heart that's ever been. It is simply the wave of
love, the Voice, the Sound, always resonating, always singing, always
loving.
That's all the Word does, is love. All It ever does, has done and
ever will do, is love. It doesn't operate from will. It doesn't
operate from desire. It doesn't set out to bless us or punish us. It
simply flows, out from God and back to God. Our state of happiness or
unhappiness, ease or dis-ease, is simply a reflection of how closely
we are in harmony with the Wave.
Another beautiful comment in the chapter follows this. It's another
great spiritual truth about the nature of Naam and this world. "It is
the true Spirit Current, and it's like the great river yonder. For if
you try to divert it one way, then it flows another. Stop it, and its
wastes will overflow the banks. So it is better to open your
spiritual ears and listen to the music of the seven spheres as it
flows through you. Open yourself and your heart and your soul to It,
unafraid and gladly."
It's amazing that something as simple as the River of Spirit is so
continuously subjected to strife, to schisms, to new religions, to
competing paths, to people saying, "My God is bigger than your God.
My Master is bigger than your master. My Shabd is bigger than your
Shabd." And yet people do it over and over and over again. A great
human vehicle comes along and the River flows through that person
because he or she is a well-tuned instrument for Its purpose, for Its
way. They express It well. They harmonize with It well.
Eventually after they leave the scene there is some sort of temple
constructed, a church built, and people start trying to build a dam
around the River of Spirit, saying, "Ah yes. Our teacher was the one
great, true teacher. This was the teacher of all teachers. This was
exponent of all exponents. So we will build a monument to this. And
we will house the great Spirit Current in this monument, so that
people will always know that this is the one true monument."
It's just like if you try to take any great river and dam it to
intensely. Take, say, the Colorado River and the Hoover Dam. There
are sluice gates and release valves that let the water flow through.
It runs generators and things likes that. If you simply have a giant
mass of concrete trying to hold back the river, eventually it would
overflow the dam. It would eat away at the banks around it. It would
undermine it, until finally the dam was destroyed, or the river cut an
entirely new channel.
This is something that the Current of Spirit always does. It doesn't
care what a person's name is, what country they live in, what culture
they belong to. It's just flowing. And when you try to contain It,
It will simply (not out of malice or displeasure with your actions,
like It's trying to punish you) find a new avenue for Its expression
because that's what It does. Put an obstacle here, and It will go
around. That's the way It always has been.
So we do the best we can, in this moment in our lives, who we are now,
studying this means of self-knowledge and God-realization, to
harmonize ourselves with the Spiritual Current. We need to work with
a teacher living here and now and who is a living, harmonious
instrument for Naam's expression, and use that as a focusing point to
immerse ourselves in the River of Spirit. Who knows what's going to
happen in five minutes? Who cares what happened a week ago? The
im****tant thing is being here and now in Naam.
Paul makes several good points in this chapter. It's almost as if it's
a Cliff's Notes version of the entire book, because there are some
major keys here about the inner Light and Sound, like this next one.
It's something that every Master I've read talks about at some point
when they discuss the Light and Sound.
Paul basically says that the Light is there for you to see where you
are going, and the Sound is there to guide you back. Charan Singh
once used the analogy of being lost in the forest after dark and
trying to find your way back to your cabin. If you're a ways away
from the cabin in a dense forest, you're not going to be able to see
it even if it has a light on. But if there's music playing in the
cabin, you can hear it, and you can walk towards the music. Now, you
know how forests are. There are branches that get in your face and
tree roots and things like that. So you have to have a flashlight in
order to see where the roots and branches are. If you're stuck in the
forest too deep where you can't clearly see the edge of it, the
flashlight won't do you any good in actually getting out of the
forest; you can walk around in circles. But if you're hearing the
sound coming from your cabin, that will give you a beacon to walk
toward and then you just use your light to make sure you don't trip
over anything. In a nutshell, these are the twin functions of the
Light and Sound.
We are in the depths of the forest, down here on earth. We're way
deep in the big muddy. Simply working with the light, even the cosmic
light, will not get us out of the psychic regions of duality, because
the light that we're seeing emanates from the mental plane and so all
we're going to see, if we're lucky, is something that will guide us
back to the mind. If we only rely on our own efforts, using the light
by itself, and without a guide, we'll still be walking around lost.
The inner light might be a bright flashlight, it might be a high beam
halogen, but even then, it will give you only an extra 20 feet of
clearance in the woods, as opposed to say, the 10 feet you have with a
regular flashlight. If you want something that will really get you
out of the forest of the lower worlds and back home to the Creator,
focus on the Sound.
Of course, sometimes the mind can ricochet the sound around too. The
mind is like a combination giant mirror house and echo chamber that
reflects the sound in the same way it reflects light. That's when you
need to tap into the Shabda, the one Shabda, and have a true guide who
will take your hand and say, "It's over here. Keep focusing on the
sound on the right, and let it lead you to the center. Don't focus on
the left; that takes you back down to the lower worlds. Focus on the
middle and then go up and in." If you simply hang on to the hand of
the inner master, unwavering (kind of like Lois Lane holding on to
Superman's hand in the first Superman movie when they are flying
together), the guidance will be true and focused and you will
gradually melt more and more into the wave of love, the wave of Divine
Sound.
As you unfold into self and God-realization, the Master will anchor
you on to the Light and Sound of Sat Purush's Sat Naam, the True Word,
and make it a clear transition from here to there... or perhaps I
should say, from here to here. This is part of the process and you're
getting to experience that. You come right back to square one and
you're just the same, only different. You're back to being a real
person. You will know when people are going to be receptive to
talking about Spirit, and when they aren't. If they are not into it,
all you have to do is smile. Your eyes and the smile and the tone of
your voice make all the difference.
Often, the most spiritual thing you can do for any person you see, is
simply open up to Naam, look them in the eyes and smile. Smile with
your heart. Smile with your soul. Don't say anything more than
"Hi." Just say "Hi," and smile. The River of God will flow through
you and touch any person you meet, and It will lift them up in It's
own way. If nothing else, maybe they're having a bad day and suddenly
when you smile at them, they smile back, and they feel happy.
There's a lot of talk in Sant Mat literature about inner bliss. When
you find the inner regions and really focus there, you will find
fountain springs of inner bliss. I think there might be a tendency to
think of that as being like a giant lotus blossom, lotuses that are
10,000 feet across, you know and you're just sitting there with
fountains of ambrosia pouring all around you kind of bliss. Now, that
is part of it; but inner bliss can also simply be having something
that sparks Divine Love inside of you, and makes you happy.
We spend a lot of time in this life not being happy. Sometimes it's a
necessary lesson. But when you can tap into that inner joy or
happiness, it's a beautiful thing. When you really start merging with
the River of Spirit, that's when you start moving into becoming a co-
worker with God, becoming an instrument of It's expression. Just by
being. Look at somebody and say, "Hi, how are you? That's great." or
"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you feel better. Have a great
day."
Simple things like that will lift people up and bring God into their
lives, and almost invariably do far more for their spiritual
upliftment than talking about the path. People who want to hear about
the path will let you know very clearly. People will say "You seem to
be so happy. You seem to be so together. You've got all this stuff
going on in your life; I'd be freaking out, but you seem to be very
calm. What's your secret?" Or you might in passing mention the fact
that you meditate; letting it casually slip out. Those who are
receptive will say, "Really? You meditate? What kind of
meditation?"
It's easy to want to talk a lot about the path. I know it's a phase
that I went through. These days, I'm a great fan of the Law of
Silence. Simply by being, observing, and loving - you will know.
People will know. Often, there will be an attraction, and they will
want to be around you. In this way, by merging with the Celestial
Word, you become a radiant, harmonious, expression of God.
Thank you.
Michael Turner
"Those who have communed with the Word,
their toils shall end,
and their faces shall flame with glory.
Not only will they have salvation, O Na****,
but many more shall find freedom with them."
- Guru Na****, Jap Ji - Finale
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SFS
alt.meditation.shabda
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