Chariji - The Beauty of Sahaj Marg

Master (Chariji) in 1977   (Taken from “The pursuit of the inner way”)

Nature is beautiful. Great Artists, great scientists, great thinkers and philosophers have all expressed in words of moving rhapsody and inner ecstasy the beauty of nature as they have perceived it. As common individuals, we have also felt and experienced this utterly fascinating beauty in the various aspects of nature, though we may not have been able to express it as the great personalities have been able to. This is not for lack of desire to express the felt beauty and the resultant ecstasy, but merely because of inability to translate experience into language. Every individual has had such moments of revelation when the inner ecstasy could be expressed by nothing more than tears of joy, of happiness.

Further, where our inner person has developed in ourselves the ability to perceive this grand panoramic Beauty of nature, we find, often to our amazement, that the beauty which we perceive in the benign manifestation of nature is also present in the more awesome, frightening, destructive and violent manifestations of nature. When we begin to perceive this, understanding begins to develop in us that nature ‘s functions are at least in three directions, namely the creative, the protective, and destructive aspects. When this perception of natures‘s beauty becomes total, then there is neither love of beautiful -nor fear of the terrible.

At an advanced stage of perception, even that force of nature, the ultimate destruction which we call death, begins to lose its hold of awesome terror, and we begin to perceive the beautiful aspects of death. As we grow in our faculties of perception and understanding, death begins to have for us the fascination that any other aspect of nature has. Death becomes merely another phenomenon of nature, one of so many in its ever-changing aspect, all beautiful and all necessary. Indeed, at one stage we begin to perceive that in nature, whatever is necessary is necessarily beautiful, too.

In comparison with a vast, sky-embracing panorama of magnificent sunset, a tiny flower in a meadow does not attract our attention. But those who have learnt to perceive beauty develop the vision necessary to perceive beauty develop the vision necessary to perceive beauty not merely in the grand, the vast, but also in the tiny, invisible, too.

We then begin to understand that beauty is not dependent on the scale of manifestation. Beauty is independent of the dimensionality associated with space. So, scales of magnitude become meaningless. The tiny, the microscopic are as beautiful as the grand, the panoramic exhibitions of nature‘s beauty.

Then we find that this beauty is to be seen, can be seen again and again, day after day. We begin to understand that what was beautiful in its beginning yesterday is still beautiful today in its full bloom. We also see that what has withered after living out its life span also continues to be beautiful. So we perceive that the time dimension, too, has no hold on beauty. Anything beautiful continues to be beautiful, notwithstanding the factor of time, and the changes in its form and appearance. Then dawns the realization that beauty is a permanent and everlasting aspect of nature, and those who can see it, see it.

Nature is orderly. There is nothing unnecessary in nature. Each manifestation of nature occurs precisely when it must. Hence we perceive the system behind it, the system which governs the appearance and the disappearance of the various manifestations. And the existence of a definite system reveals to us the law of the operation of that system. This, in turn, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the laws must have a lawgiver, one who made the laws and set them in force. Such a lawgiver we call God, the Almighty, et cetera.

No system can be considered perfect where the results of its application result in imperfection. No can a perfect system be developed by those who are themselves imperfect. So, by observing the perfect results of the operation of any system, we are able to understand the perfection of the system operation behind the results, and then to perceive the perfection of the person who has designed the system which we see in operation. So, a perfect person alone can produce a perfect system which will give perfect results.

The person comes first, the system next, and the results last. Therefore, enlightened people worship God, not nature, because they saw the results only. Partial enlightenment, advancement, saw the emergence of worship of the forces of nature, a step higher up in the ladder of evolution. Subsequent advancement in the spiritual essence of a person took them beyond the powers of nature to the wielders of those powers, the sun god, the mood god the god of rain and so on. Yet further growth and maturity of a spiritual nature brings in the idea of one behind the many. And so, God, as distinct from the pantheistic vision, comes into the picture.

When we study the system of Sahaj Marg, we immediately appreciate its simplicity, its naturalness; and our experience has already taught us that true beauty, indestructible beauty, lies only in nature, in the natural. All that is natural is beautiful. So the first beauty of Sahaj Marg is its naturalness. It goes with nature. Every element of its teaching and practice are in tune with nature. Even the ultimate renunciation comes about naturally, without effort, without tension, without misery. We see that in nature, nothing seems to take effort as we understand it.

Everything is spontaneous, natural. Whether it be the emergence of a tiny flower, or the birth of a microscopic life form, or the grand and awesome serenade of thunder and lightning, all seem to operate without application of effort. They emerge naturally when necessary, when appropriate. So the primary beauty of SahajMarg lies in its utter naturalness.

As we go along the path of this sadhana, we see the Master, really ‘see’ him for what he is, what he has been all along, but which our limited vision made us blind to. We see in him the perfection which alone could have made it possible for him to develop the system which we have found in our own experience to be beautiful have been seen by us to be beautiful and perfect. So Master stands revealed as the perfect, and the beautiful.

Herein lies the beauty of Sahaj Marg. It is beautiful because the creator of the system, the system itself, and the resultant product of the operation of the system are all perfect, and hence beautiful. This is the beauty of Sahaj Marg.