Our present position

Words or action?

A ferryman came upon a man floundering and splashing in the water. Leaning far out from his boat towards the drowning man, he called out, "Take my hand."

   " I am suffering! " cried the man, continuing to thrash about in the water. "you have no idea how I suffer!"
    "Just grab my hand", said the ferryman.
    " Oh, " the man moaned as he flailed about, " how I long to be back on dry land."

Leaning further out and stretching out closer to him, the ferryman said, "Just take my hand hold on. I'll pull you into the boat."

     "Why has this happened to me?" The man wailed as he went on thrashing around. "It is so unfair ( blub, blub) that I should have fallen ( blub, blub ) into the water."

If you or I were the one in the boat, stretching out our hand, trying to help the drowning man, wouldn't we be tempted to shout in total exasperation,

       "COME ON, MAN - TAKE MY HAND. GET REAL!"

Get real! What does that expression mean to us? In today's world it usually implies: Stop kidding yourself. Get a grip on who you are and your situation. Wake up to your reality.

In spirituality, it means all this and more. It also means walking up to what actually is real at the deepest and ultimate level.it means doing what we need to do to experience that reality. It means living that reality, becoming that reality. It actually means God-realization.
Our situation is not so different from the drowning man in the story. When the master tells us to attend to the meditation practice, he is saying, "Here, take my hand . Hold on to it." In other words: Wake up. Attach yourself to Shabad so you don't drown in the vast ocean of life.

As our master tells us over again: The real guru is Shabad; the real disciple is the  attention attuned to Shabad.
The Shabad is the hand of the Lord, stretching out to us. We have only to grasp that 'hand' and hold on to it instead of floundering and thrashing about, and we will be drawn into a higher level of consciousness.

Happily for us, the present master has not thrown up his hands in exasperation, saying, "Come on , MAN. Get real!"
Instead he teaches us.

He asks: what do you want? What is your objective?

He says: Every action can take you toward your goal, or away form your goal.
Are we heading in the direction our master has shown us?

He appeals to our common sense, asking: if your destination lies to the north, and you spend all day walking south, how can you hope to reach your destination?

He tells us we're like patients who go to the doctor - the disease is diagnosed, medicines are prescribed, but then we don't take the medicines and remain sick. We're like hungry people who read recipes but do not take the trouble to cook the food and eat, so naturally, we remain hungry.

How often have we heard the present master say these things?  We hear his satsangs - how fervently he pleads with the sangat to attend wholeheartedly to the daily meditation practice - that is, to grasp the hand is ofering is.

Do we not feel ashamed when the master has to plead with us? Our living, loving master is all mercy and kindness. How far do we take our heedlessness that he has to resort to scolding us in satsang? How dumb, and foolish , and childish, and self - obsessed are we?  What does that say of us as disciples?

However, Sant Mat is not a path of wallowing in feelings of shame and guilt. It is a path of action. It is not path of flowery words about love. It is path of action. It is not a path of theories and concepts about the divine. It is a path of action.

As the present master has often said: If you give me words, I'll give you words. If you give me action, I'll give you action.

            The choice is ours.
              
                RADHA SOAMI JI

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