A FAITH THAT SUSTAINS

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

91. A FAITH THAT SUSTAINS

You are the most fortunate human individuals on earth in that in this present incarnation you have been brought into the life spiritual. You have been drawn towards the Eternal, and you have been endowed with aspiration, a spirit of enquiry, and discrimination between the real and the unreal, between the eternal and the non-eternal, between the permanent and the evanescent. You have been endowed with discrimination and dispassion—priceless blessings beyond compare. You are most fortunate, extremely blessed in that you have been brought into this way of life, directing your entire life towards the Supreme, and have been provided with all facilities for your evolution, all conveniences. You also have inconveniences, obstacles, difficulties and problems so that you may know how to deal with and overcome them. Due to them you may evolve spiritually, round off your angularities, arouse into wakefulness your inner resources. So, you are fortunate to have all facilities, all conveniences and also all inconveniences which are blessings in disguise—seeming problems but means for evolving further and further. They are necessary ingredients for arousing from within you your inner resources: endurance, common sense, innate wisdom to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones, innate wisdom to look at things from a different angle. Thus, in every way you have been provided with everything required to move towards divine perfection—which is your destiny. Therefore, great has been the grace, greater still has been the blessings, and greatest of all has been your determination to stick it out in spite of all apparent adamantine obstructions and obstacles: “This is all part of God’s divine plan for me. I accept it in toto and deal with it with wisdom, understanding, patience and perseverance as did the real seekers of yore in times bygone, those who reaped the benefit, the golden harvest of such perseverance. “I have total trust in the Divine. When He has called me into this life, He will never abandon me. There is a meaning and purpose behind everything that He is now making me undergo. Deep within me I know that in all these things He is by my side. The Divine never abandons. Believing in Him, no one is lost. Placing one’s hands in His hands, one is sure of being guided to the destination. When He has called me to this life, He means me to live it to the ultimate end. I have set my hands to the plough and there is no turning back. I shall persist, persevere, until I reap the golden harvest.” Such indeed is the stuff of those who achieve, those whose lofty, inspired examples of what a seeker should be fill the Upanishads. Therefore, I ask each one of you to persist, persevere, look not back. Forge ahead! Live in the Divine. Be aware only of the Divine. Think only of the Divine. Set your mind, intellect, heart, your entire being, upon that one and only Reality of which you are an inseparable part, with which you are essentially one. Have your being fixed upon the glorious destiny that is yours as a birthright, that is nothing short of Divine-consciousness which is beyond all limited states of awareness, beyond time and space, name and form, and beyond this little, petty, false, deceptive human identity. This human identity is the greatest of all obstacles. It is the last to be overcome, and, truth to tell, the one and only obstacle. All other obstacles are offshoots of this one, great obstacle—the “I”. “Then shall I be free, when ‘I’ shall cease to be. I am my problem. I am the shackles that bind me, the chains that hold me bound. I am samsara, I amprapancha, I ammaya. I am my bondage. “But for me, I am ever free. I am never bound. I am eternally pure, awakened and divinely perfect. I have neither birth nor death nor old age nor disease. That is me. But ‘I’ stands in the way of realising the me that I am in reality. Mano buddhy ahankara chittani na’ham, chid-ananda rupah sivoham sivoham (I am neither mind nor intellect, nor the ego-sense, nor even the mind-stuff. I am of the form of pure consciousness and bliss. Verily I am all auspiciousness and bliss). All that I think I am, all that I am bound up with, that I am not.” May the Divine continue to shower grace upon you as it has been showering upon you since birth into this present physical body. Unknown to you, the Divine has been shaping you gradually for this noble, sublime life through various means from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood. He has been working, directing, moulding, putting opportunities in your way, bringing obstacles, giving bitter experiences so that you may realise what life is, and bringing noble experiences so that you are confirmed in your faith in the goodness of God, in the goodness of human nature.

As a mother does for a helpless infant, He has brought you all that is needful, preparing you for this glorious renunciation, preparing you for this glorious nivritti marga, the path that leads beyond time into eternity, the path that leads to the Eternal Reality. If you look back you will understand many events that you did not understand. God does more miracles through painful and unpleasant experiences than He does through sunshine and picnics, through pleasant experiences. When we understand, we are filled with gratitude, and we wonder why we did not understand. You only have to look at the present world and you will know what you have been liberated from. Therefore, we are filled with a deep emotion of humble acknowledgment of His perennial grace, a recognition of His ever-present grace and blessings in our life. For verily I tell all of you here that the Divine has lifted you up from unrealities into the Reality. Verily I assure you that He has lifted you up from darkness into Light. And this is tri-vara-satya, thrice true. In truth and in fact, He has lifted us up from spiritual death into that flowing stream, that great upward movement unto immortality and everlasting life in the eternal Divine-consciousness that we call Brahman or That or Allah or Nirvana or the Kingdom of Heaven—a state of perfection. He has lifted you up from unrealities unto the great Reality, from darkness unto Light and from death unto everlasting Life in that state of awareness that we call by all these various terms. Rejoice, be humble, be grateful, and stop not till the Goal is reached. Do not move in any other direction. Do not lose any opportunity. Do not allow a single moment to pass by without keeping up with this ascent of the spirit unto its own, unto its native state, unto its eternal natural condition of satchidananda-consciousness, which is the only real thing, that abides forever, that exists always. Live in the awareness that God is here and now. He abides within you, and you ever abide in Him. This is the only truth. All others are figments. They are fancies and fantasies. The only truth is the here and now God and the fact that He abides in you and you abide in Him. Live in this truth! Glory be to each and every one of you! Glory be to God who has thus graced you!