The River of God
Michael Turner
© 2009 by Michael Turner
(Satsang given following reading of “The River of God” from Paul
Twitchell’s “Stranger By The River”)
One of the things I love about Stranger by the River is how it works
beyond the mind. It speaks directly to soul and helps to take you to
the place it is describing. It isn’t just a mental process. There’s
something in the rhythm of the words, much as with Rumi and Kabir,
that evokes the state of consciousness which Paul Twitchell was
describing.
Now I know Paulji’s been accused of many things, particularly getting
his information from elsewhere. But the energy resonating within this
book comes from one who only could have experienced that which he is
describing. It isn’t a research project. It isn’t a scholarly
analysis of somebody else’s works. It isn’t a rehash of previously
discussed philosophies. This is someone who devoutly sought spiritual
awakening and was blessed with powerful spiritual experiences, which
to me makes it priceless.
The chapter “The River of God” is hard to really talk about in the
form of a teacher doing a commentary because the experience of
beholding the river of God is vastly beyond “awe-inspiring” or
“breathtaking”. The magnitude of it is absolutely staggering. The
mind can’t even begin to grasp it. I don’t even attempt to grasp it.
I simply allow my conscious mind to have an understanding of it.
Realize that as soul you can travel back to the Essence of All and
that you can intuitively grasp the power of this Force that is
ringing . . . thundering . . . whispering from the Heart of All.
Reading this chapter reminds me of the first time I consciously beheld
the great vortex of God. It was so sublime, so incredibly peaceful in
its power. It was like this reality here that we call the real world
became transparent. There was just knowingness, beingness. I
retained the experience afterwards, aided by singing HU with gratitude
in my heart. In doing so I am taken back there, and moreover I bring
God here, which to me is the essence of the whole process.
Most people who are seekers on this level, who are really trying to
rise above body consciousness and explore and experience the inner
worlds, operate from a negative paradigm about this physical universe
and a negative paradigm about their own bodies. They are trying to
escape their bodies, escape their pain, the drudgery, the
gravitational pull of this universe. They believe that anything is
better. So for a lot of people who pursue this, there is a natural
tendency to become disconnected from the physical, to have a negative
value judgement about it and to try to avoid it as much as possible.
This attitude pops up in some people’s near death experiences. They
talk about being met by a being of light as they are lying on an
operating table and their brain and heart stop and for a while they
are clinically dead. They are so amazed at the wondrousness of this
experience, the beauty of this reality that they don’t want to go
back, which means they’re willing to die. They are willing to shut
off their body, abandon everything here on earth and just hang out in
this higher level of bliss than we have here.
Of course, the reason these experiences are called “near death
experiences” is that the people involved do come back. Their guardian
angel or spiritual guide basically lets them know that they have a
choice, but kind of gives them a nudge. Frequently their reaction is
kind of like “Oh man . . . do I have to go back? Okay, okay, okay.
I’ll go back.” Most people bring back a sense of peace and awareness
that there is more than this physical reality, and frequently the
experience is very transformative. But often, upon realizing through
direct personal experience that higher, more beautiful realities do
exist, they are also left with desire to leave their physical
existence and experience the bliss of the inner worlds on a full time
basis. This poses a challenge for a lot of spiritual seekers in that
they want to leave here. They want to get this life over with. They
hate this world, and so they tend to hang out more and more within.
That is one problem with the old paradigm from which we’ve operated in
this path for so long, especially in America in the last 30-40 years.
It’s one of leaving here to get there. And what we really need to
understand is that we are already there. We are already here. There
is no here and there. Anami Lok, the Ocean of Love and Mercy, the
Heart of God is a living reality here and now.
The point of having a physical body is to actualize God consciousness
and soul consciousness here and now as a total oneness Self. It’s
difficult for some people to grasp, but it’s really important. This
is because, generally speaking, anybody who has progressed in soul to
the point where they’re ready to study the LightSong of Shabda
directly is really pretty much done with their earth karma. In fact,
they could also most likely finish off their other levels of karma in
these other nonphysical planes.
But they choose to come back to the physical plane. One reason is
that the space-time continuum is much quicker here. Everything is
much more compressed. What might take an astral lifetime, which in
earth years may be a thousand years, takes only twenty or thirty or
fifty years here, a monthlong assignment on the astral or causal
plane.
But more important, the point of soul-realization in the physical body
is getting all the bodies attuned; not just the etheric body, not just
the etheric and the mental bodies, not just the etheric, mental,
causal and astral bodies, but all the bodies. Tune all of the bodies
to Naam, and bring them all into harmony with Naam and each other.
Why?
A) Because it’s a tremendous challenge, which makes it much more
worthwhile. If you can pull it off here, you’ve done it; and
B) It’s an act of love. You have incarnated here many times. It is
an act of love for the physical universe and of its citizens for you
to become a living embodiment of the Holy Spirit.
When you become a living embodiment of the Holy Spirit you act as a
transmitter of It. Spirit, even though It is everything you see, can
only express ItSelf in a really strong sense through humanity, through
a conscious, living human being. So the more points of human
expression Naam has, the greater the bandwidth It has and the greater
the ability It has to purify and cleanse and uplift the whole.
There’s a corollary to this that God created soul so that It could
learn. The only way for God to really see this universe, to know what
this universe is like, is through the eyes and lives of the souls who
are in it. The more souls who are awakened to themselves the more
chances God has to witness all the variables, and to spread Its
grace.
It is a real challenge to balance here, to allow the River of God to
flow through you and maintain your balance. That’s why the path of
the Shabda, while very powerful, is also very gentle and very
gradual. That’s also why it is highly advisable to have a living
Shabda master to help you, to choose one with whom you harmonize and
create that bond of filiality with that soul and follow it through.
It is important to have a human point of spiritual focus because the
Shabda is the most powerful spiritual force that is, and it’s really
easy to get overloaded and freak out. A lot of people have. Some
have it and lose it, some have it and get it back.
Most freak out on some level a little bit, but that’s another part of
the challenge of staying in balance. When you get a taste of the
Divine Elixir and begin to experience the Kingdom of God it’s easy to
want to drop out of your normal life and completely immerse yourself
in spiritual studies. But trading in your day job to live in a cave
or a monastery or a bus – anything along these lines – is not going to
help you, your brothers and sisters, or even serve God for that
matter.
It’s not that hard to sit in a cave or a hermitage and meditate 24
hours a day. It’s not all that different from being stoned all the
time. As far as I’m concerned, people who are proud and are renowned
for spending days and days in deep meditation are not that different
overall, in terms of balance, from somebody who is always drunk or who
does twenty bong loads of pot every day. Both are immersed in inner
bliss and oblivious to the outside world and its demands.
However when you do this, you’re not dealing with the now. You’re not
interacting with this world. You’re not participating in society
expressing your spirituality in your job and obligations and family
and children. With the Shabda, you can receive it but you have to let
it pass through you. If the Shabda fills you and there’s no outlet,
It will stop flowing through you because you will be full to the brim
and there is nowhere else for It to go. It will start flowing around
you. It will flow anywhere It wants to. So you have to keep emptying
It out. As Rumi says, empty the wineglass so it can be filled again.
Take the cap off the end of the hose. Open the window.
A corollary to the metaphor of sitting in a cave is that it’s easy to
fully experience the Shabda on the Soul Plane, or even the Etheric
Plane, where there is very little matter or psychic energy involved.
You can bask in glorious radiant love energy, and be totally self-
absorbed. But that’s the way the whole thing started – eighteen
trillion souls hanging out in the spiritual worlds, just basking in
Divine Glory, drinking their Shabda cocktails with the umbrellas in
them, kicking back on their beach chairs, working on their spiritual
tans in the light of Sat Purush, and just enjoying pure bliss. It’s
easy to passively enjoy divine bliss. It’s harder to be an active
vehicle for it.
That’s where the whole tempering process of living an active human
existence comes in. There’s a story about Paul Twitchell after he
went through the experience of going to the God conscious state. He
refers to it here in “Stranger by the River”, as well as in “Dialogues
With the Master”, and most prominently in “The Tiger’s Fang”. He made
many journeys into the higher worlds in the late Fifties in the
company of his Master, and yet he came back and still had physical
challenges. This was before he really started teaching this path on a
serious basis.
He was still learning. He was recovering from a divorce, and trying
to find a job that suited him. He was trying to bring this God
consciousness into balance with the rest of his life, and it was a
real struggle for him. In fact it remained a struggle the whole time,
even when he began teaching under the auspices of being the “Living
Eck Master”.
Paul Twitchell wasn’t infallible. He was always being tested. Every
master is. Every individual is, whether you call yourself a master or
a lawyer, a ditch digger, a musician or a short order cook. We are
being tested on every level, and it’s not a matter of God being a
taskmaster giving you these assignments and saying, “Now what’s 2 +
2?” or giving you mathematical word problems or anything like that.
It’s just Spirit nudging you into harmony.
It is a natural process of discovering how close you are to being in
balance. You may swing too hard to one side and bump into something
and then swing too hard to the other side and bump into something
else. But the more you become one with Shabda, the more you find
yourself naturally in alignment with Divine Love. You can feel when
the strings of your other bodies are out of tune, and more than that,
you begin to find yourself enjoying being in tune more.
Your strings are bound to be out of tune sometimes. Ask any guitar
player. You finish a great jam, and you realize your A string is just
a little bit tweaked. You’ve stretched it a little too much. So you
have to stop for a second and tune it and make sure everything is back
in harmony. Then you go back and play some more. The same thing is
true with keeping your physical, astral, causal, mental, etheric and
soul bodies in tune. As long as you’re working in the worlds of
duality, because of the intense pressure and density of these regions,
that’s always going to be a challenge, no matter what your state of
consciousness.
The other thing I want to talk about is the River of God ItSelf. It
astonishes me sometimes how simple this path is. This is an extremely
simple spiritual path. You basically learn to listen to the River of
Sound and follow It back Home. You take the boat of consciousness to
the Ocean, and the master is the captain at the helm of the boat, kind
of like Rebazar Tarzs navigating the little boat across the sea in the
opening pages of “The Tiger’s Fang”.
Once you learn this process, you realize it is basically just a law of
spiritual physics. This is one reason why I really try to avoid a lot
of religious rhetoric or traditionally spiritual terminology. It’s
not the big emotional thing that people look at in terms of religion,
and it’s not some big philosophical concept or anything like that. It
is just a matter of letting go to the River, the River of God, and
that River will, by Its very nature, lift you up and take you home.
As you go higher, as you get into more rarified conditions which
involve less and less matter, you will find yourself jettisoning
things that hold you back.
You might say the River gets shallower and shallower so you must
become lighter and lighter. You discover that, like in a hot air
balloon, you have to get rid of weight to get up higher. You will
find that emotions have weight, memories and habits have weight,
thoughts have weight, even subconscious desires and motivations have
weight. It’s not that a particular desire or thought is good or bad
per se. These are dualistic concepts.
The fact is that attachment to any thought form, memory or emotion or
motivation or physical object has mass and weight and you have to let
go of all your attachments to truly experience the Eternal. You can
get glimpses of It. You can let go momentarily. People do that.
That’s what near death experiences basically are. But to really live
in the Eternal down here, you must learn to detach yourself from all
these things.
This is what Rebazar Tarzs referred to as having no opinions, being
neither for nor against anything. Many seekers I’ve met take that to
mean don’t vote or be involved in society. Some people say “I don’t
read the paper anymore. I don’t watch the news because it’s just
dualistic. I don’t want to be involved in dualism. I don’t want to
descend to that level.”
The fact is, you are currently living in the physical universe. This
is it. Things happen and you must make choices, which is another part
of the challenge: realizing that you have preferences. Every
individual is unique, and it’s alright to have differences of opinion,
and even vote for one candidate or another in an election. Just don’t
get really attached to it if your side wins or loses. I remember when
I finally voted for a presidential candidate who won. I started
getting really ecstatic, screaming “We won! We won!” Then Spirit
nudged me back to balance and my attitude shifted to, “Cool. He won.
Rah.”
Politics and philosophical debates are just like baseball or football
or Monopoly or anything else. They are just games. This can become a
really fine point of balance, because you can be obsessed with and
attached to your opinions (or any other aspect such as your memories,
habits or pleasures).
Some people are attached to their pain. Most of us have been hurt at
some time in our lives and a lot of people as they move into their
late twenties start building up scar tissue and walls to shield them
from further hurt. Once you get into your thirties and forties, you
can recognize the people who really have a sense of Spirit and love in
their lives, whose attraction to the zest of life, and their love of
life, is greater than their attachment to their wounds.
Some people make their pain their best friend, their most loyal
friend. For some people a bottle of beer is their best friend, or a
joint or a cigarette. Why? Because it’s familiar, secure, stable and
constant. It’s something they’ve relied upon for a long time.
Friends, jobs, relationships come and go, but our habits stay with
us. They come to be our most dependable and enduring friends.
This goes back to our discussion a few weeks ago about letting go.
People are taught in this universe to externalize, to base their
existence and their sense of self-worth on external factors. Self-
validation is derived from all kinds of things: who has the best VCR,
the whitest teeth, the freshest breath, the more attractive spouse or
better job. People base their self-worth on these things. It’s
really a tragedy, because these are all things that are temporary and
yet so many people feel lost without their outer accouterments.
But if they would do the spiritual exercises of Shabda Meditation, if
they would but commune with the Word (as Guru Nanak so beautifully put
it) on a regular basis, they would realize that as soul, as a unit of
conscious Divine Spirit, they are eternal. Then they could enjoy life
without being shackled to all of the outer manifestations of it. But
that’s just one of the tricks of the Kal in this universe to keep us
distracted.
Somebody once asked me at work if I knew the meaning of “sin”. He
said, “Michael, what does sin mean?” I replied, “Distraction.” He
said, “No, no, no. What does it really mean?” I asked him, “Well,
what do you mean? To me it means distraction.” Well he started going
off on the Aramaic roots of the word “sin” and how the Aramaic
definition of sin is “to miss your mark,” like an archer missing the
mark on target and not hitting the bull’s eye, and I said, “Yeah,
distraction.” Kal, the lord of the mental, astral and physical
regions, uses our minds, emotions, habits, memories and physical
senses to distract us from God, so our attention is not focused
properly, it is not on target.
This is one of the reasons why I’m trying to find new semantics for
this path. When you say the word “sin”, it evokes an emotional
reaction. Anything that distracts you from your goal you will
eventually want to let go of on some level. It’s not a matter of good
or bad. You can be an absolute glutton for food, or a horrible
boozer, or obsessed with your cars, or a workaholic, or an overly
ascetic mystic, or a pious vegetarian. If it keeps you distracted
from God, you will eventually have to let it go.
The goal of soul is to go back home to God and the Eternal Kingdom of
Heaven. It’s really no big deal when you let go and let the River of
God lift you up. You can do it now. You can do it a hundred
lifetimes from now. It doesn’t matter. Spirit is patient, loving and
kind. It’s willing to wait and give you as much time as you need to
be comfortable with the letting go process. When you are ready, It
will embrace you, lift you up and take you home.
That’s one of the reasons we always have a living master on the
planet. When one finishes his or her shift, the next one comes on.
They’re just hanging out, doing their thing. Some of them are open
religious teachers and some are mechanics, like Donald Shimoda in
“Illusions”. They just bide their time. There are always souls,
sometimes just a handful and sometimes several big handfuls, who are
ready for the next step, ready for that trip back Home. When they’re
ready, the master is there to lift them up and take them home.
That’s one of the nice things about the whole process of spiritual
unfoldment. That’s why I have to laugh when I hear somebody say, “You
need to do this or that. You need to have a large organization. You
need to file these legal writs or do any number of things to keep the
teachings alive, to make sure the teachings don’t die if you die.”
But the teachings will endure. Not because the teachings of Divine
Spirit, the Shabad Dhun, have been institutionalized into a self-
sustaining corporate or religious organization, but because there is
always, at all times, somebody to pick up the slack. It’s just the
way it works. If Eckankar or ATOM or Radhasoami Satsang Beas or
Science of Spirituality or Spiritual Freedom Satsang imploded
tomorrow, if they all went belly-up, it wouldn’t matter one eyelash’s
worth of difference. Spirit will always find a new living human
instrument for Its expression. God is eternal. Spirit and Divine
Love are eternal. And so are you.
Baraka Bashad!
Michael
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SFS/
alt.meditation.shabda