To experience the bliss of God is to realise God. The trouble is that we are unable to experience unbroken communion with God. The thirteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart [1] once wrote:
We ought not to let ourselves be satisfied with the God we have thought of, for when the thought slips the mind, that God slips with it. What we want is the reality of God exalted far above any thought…
How true this is! For every satsangi it is our greatest wish to be lost in God in all our activities, not only when we do prayers but also in our daily work and even when we are asleep, such that Maharaj inspires us in all that we do. We wish to gain a realisation of God, which is integral with our consciousness so that we don’t need to think of God. However, we have suffered thousands of births and until now have associated wholly with our physical bodies. We have been conditioned by our desires, our beliefs and our ego. All of these act as obstacles to living in God.
Maharaj has stated that we must become brahmrup and worship God. However, when we are plagued by our negative traits then it is virtually impossible to do so. How can we become purified, attain darshan of our atma and behave as brahm? I had these thoughts, which I wrote in this poem [2]:
I try in my mind to think of the God of Heaven,
But the darkness is great,
My thoughts are too numerous and vivid,
And like a thundering waterfall
desires pound me,
Where is the God I long so much
to know?
By His grace, like clouds clearing
after a storm,
I hear Him say, here I am, here I am
in My most beloved Saint.
By His great mercy, Maharaj has promised that gunatit saints will remain on this earth and through them He will redeem us. These gunatit swaroopo, such as Param Pujya Pappaji, are brahm personified. In them, God dwells with all His divinity and powers. If we truly live according to the wishes of the manifest form of God and we make that brahm swaroop our own soul, living in him and for him, then we ourselves will become brahm. Therein we would have constant darshan of Maharaj experiencing the eternal bliss of God.
What does this mean in practice? Not only must we remember Pappaji in all our activities but also we must check our daily routine and habits; is what we do going to enhance our bhakti or will it slowly slacken our commitment to God?
We are already taught to pray to Pappaji first thing every morning asking Him to stay with us and to protect us, and in the evening to thank Him for the same. Before we start any activity we should also pray that He guide us in that activity. For example at work we may pray “Pappaji this is your seva, guide me in what I must do and protect me, or please come with me in this meeting and guide me”, or at home “stay with me whilst do this housework”, or “Maharaj tame jamo” etc. These may seem like trivial things but Pappaji wants us to remember Him in everything we do, then he will stay with us, guide and inspire us, only then will we imbibe His qualities and become gunatit.
When we become busy in the days activities then sometimes it is difficult to remember Pappaji in this way. But at the very least we must try to fall back into His murti at the end of any activity or at the end of the day either by doing jap or murti ni smurti so that maya does not penetrate us as per Vachanamritam G I 32.
Therefore the only quick and guaranteed method to experience the bliss of brahm and achieve God realisation is to surrender fully to the Gunatit saint.
[1] F.C Happold, Religious Faith and Twentieth Century Man, Penguin Books, 1966.
[2] Poem written by S Gandhi