The following section contains the collected quotes from Satguru Sirio Ji and earlier Masters of Surat Shabd Yoga.
“Your word is light without a shadow. When it strikes you, it sounds like a trumpet, awakening the man from his tomb.” So this word is the God-Into-Expression power that manifests as Divine Light and Divine Sound. These are the two Divine links that bind man with the Divine. This Light manifests in the middle of our forehead at the Third Eye. This is the spot from where the soul exits the body. If the soul links and binds itself with the Light or the Sound—or both—it goes back to where this Sound and Light emanate. It’s like the rivers that eventually end up in the sea. Wherever rain falls, it eventually goes into a river, and from the river back into the sea. Therefore, if we fall into the river of Light and Sound, we may return to the Ocean of Light, which is the origin of our existence. Therefore, every meditation should be an attempt to connect the Surat with the Shabd, to bind and unite them. If you are able to connect and bind yourself with these, you actualize Surat Shabd Yoga, which is the union of Surat (attention) with Shabd (Divine Light and Divine Sound).
“The Path is a Path of Love. This is the Path of Guru Bhakti. It’s called Sant Mat, but it’s also called Guru Mat. Love plays a very important role here. Sant Ajaib Singh Ji used to say, ‘Do your meditation with love because the work that is done with love definitely pleases the Master.’ The Supreme Master, that is God himself, is the reality we must reach. However, it is helpful to begin by loving someone we can see with our eyes. Before we understand what the Supreme Guru or Supreme Truth is, it is difficult to love something unknown. So we begin by loving the Master in his physical body. This helps us develop a powerful love. It is on the wings of this love that we can fly back home. This is the dynamic of this Path. We first love the Master in his physical body, who represents our chosen divinity—the one through whom grace flows and reaches us. We create and develop this powerful love, and when it becomes intense, we will fly back to the Supreme Guru, the Supreme God, the Supreme Light. That’s how it works. When we have this love, we will also be able to practice what the Master tells us to do with love. And if we do it with love, according to Sant Ajaib Singh Ji, it will work. It will be pleasant. It will be accepted.”
“We sing the Holy songs to create an atmosphere, to charge up the atmosphere so that the mind becomes calm. If we sing such songs with full concentration, love, and devotion, then the mind becomes calm and meditation becomes possible. You can only meditate with a quiet mind, with a peaceful mind. You can’t meditate with an agitated mind. This is making the preparation ground for a good meditation. Master Kirpal used to say, “The singing of Holy songs before meditation helps develop receptivity to the Divine power, Divine energy.” And that’s another key factor in spiritual practice, which is to be receptive. Because we have to tune in with this Divine presence, we can do it only if we are receptive. This space is full of energy. It’s charged up with incredible energy. But we don’t perceive it unless we become receptive to it. And when we become receptive, then meditation just happens by itself. This is the purpose of singing the Holy songs.”
“Humility is the opposite of ego. Ego is disgusting. Humility is very beautiful. Sant Ajaib Singh used to say, you may do anything very beautiful, very special. But if you do it with a sense of ego, with arrogance, then it’s like preparing a beautiful dish and then throwing ash or mud on it. So, humility is very important. Humility makes a person very beautiful. Arrogance even if a person is beautiful makes him or her disgusting. So, it’s very good to be humble in the awareness that we are capable of nothing. Only God, only the Supreme Reality is the all-doer that brings all the blessing and goodness in our life. And also meditation, we don’t have to do with the sense of ego again. I am a good meditator. That’s not the way. Nobody can be a good meditator without God’s grace. Also when we sit in meditation, we have to do meditation with a deep sense of humility in the awareness that all the blessings come from Him and we are capable of nothing. We can make ourselves available only and the blessing comes from Him.”
“There might be several kinds of donors in this world. Those who donate money, those who donate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. And they’re all good, very good. Whosoever feels the need to share to donate to the needy, He’s a good man. It’s a sign of having a good heart, being a good man, a good woman, a good human being. But all these kinds of donors cannot be compared with the Guru that gives us what’s invisible. Transmits to us the spiritual perception, and enounces our inner perception to feel the Holy presence of God. Obviously, to the degree to which we are capable of. Sant Ajaib Singh always said there is never a problem with the giver, the problems are only with the receiver. And He used to say, somebody who is ready, somebody who has done already in his previous life, a great spiritual work, a lot of meditation, tuning in with the divine presence then when he comes in this world and takes another body, that’s a ready soul. It needs just a spark, and then it bursts and explodes. So as such a person coming in touch with the Living Master is like, He used to say, gunpowder coming close to fire, explodes right away. But most people are like wet gunpowder, and wet gunpowder does not explode. First, it needs to be made dry. It needs to be exposed to the sun’s rays to get dry. In the same way, we people need to be exposed to the rays of the sun of the Master to dry up, which means to be ready for a spiritual awakening, for a spiritual enlightenment. So we need to be patient with ourselves. We stand wherever we stand. We are wherever we are in our evolution. We can be neither forward nor backward. We are just where we are, and we are who we are. So we should accept ourselves and start from there where we are and keep growing, keep working on ourselves, and keep doing our spiritual practice, to sharpen our perception.”
“Master gives us the medicine of the name of God or the Naam of God and tunes us with Him.”
“The real seeker of truth would always get up early, at least at dawn. When the energy is peaceful and harmonious. One is rested after the night’s sleep, the mind is quieter. It is a moment in time in which night meets the day. So it’s like, springtime. It’s like being born. And that’s the most favorable time for sitting in meditation. So one gets up with joy, with the pleasure of doing this practice that takes one above this purely physical awareness and consciousness into an at least more peaceful, more profound space within oneself. So one sits down in meditation and praises this indelible, infinite being: Please, I have all my limits. I am a human being. You know what it means to be a human being. So please consider my limits and be merciful, be gracious. Manifest in me your Light.”
“Whether we believe in it or not, if we have experience with it or not, prayer has a great power. It moves reality. It changes reality.”
“A true seeker of Truth, every morning will wake up at sunrise, sit down, sing songs praising the Almighty, and peacefully try to manifest the Divine Light. For a spiritual person, this is nourishment. This is what keeps him or her alive. When we have contact with the Inner Light, then we are alive. When we lose contact, then you are like spiritually dead. Therefore we want to keep ourselves alive and nourish this spiritual craving that we all should have and we all need. Therefore, we should not miss a day of trying to tune in to the Divine energy, and the Divine presence, and find our peace, our inner joy, and inner satisfaction. This will allow us to have a much better quality of life and be blessed, and inspired.”
“When we sit down to meditate, we turn to the Supreme Being, to the Invaluable Being, and we pray. I sit here, begging for Your love, begging for Your Light. Please manifest them within me. Bless me. Uplift my being. Let me experience something of Your infinite reality. Let me perceive Your Holy Presence. Let my body, my tissues, and my cells be saturated with Your Light and love. Lighten my mind. Help me understand the deep truths of existence. Lead me from the human to the Divine. Let this life of mine be blessed, fulfilled, and successful. Don’t let it go by uselessly.”
“So what gives purpose, what gives flavor and value to life? It’s the inner contact that we are able to establish with the Supreme Sadhguru. Master Kirpal said, “Without your life and soul mean nothing”. So we have to get to this intensity. An intense love for the Supreme Being, for our Sadhguru that allows us to say this with all sincerity. My life has value when you’re there. When you aren’t there, my life is worth nothing. That means that we cherish so much the perception of this Holy presence. The beauty that prevails when the Beloved is present. And the ugliness that is there when He is absent. Of course, we amuse ourselves through many things in life. But as far as this source of joy and outer pleasure has a meaning for us, then it means we still have a long way to go. It’s okay to be happy with life, but our real longing and yearning, have to be constantly directed towards attracting into our perception, into our life this Holy presence. So these people who have this kind of belonging like Master Kirpal said: “They are the spiritual people”. Those who love to have the spiritual perception. Those who like to feed themselves spiritually with the Light of God. Here also, we can measure where we stand considering how much we find pleasure in the outer world and how much we find pleasure in the inner world inside of ourselves. What we like the most? What’s most important for us? It has to grow, has to develop, has to become very intense. It has to become, as Mansur Kripal put it, a ruling passion. A ruling passion for God. So any meditation sitting we do, it’s adding something. It’s a way of increasing, and improving. This is our longing. This is our ruling passion. So the more we feed ourselves with the Light of God, the more hungry we become. Because there is never enough.”
“Freedom is the capacity of living any situation without wanting it to be different. With full acceptance, accepting life with open arms, in whichever shape and form it comes. That’s freedom.”
“The good life, though highly desirable and indispensable, is not an end in itself. The goal of life is something different. It is an ascension from the plane of relativity and physical existence into one of absolute being.”
“The way for transcending desire, he will know, is not through repressing it, but meeting it squarely and overcoming it.”
“To know all life is to discover a new bond between oneself and the rest of creation.”
“To reach the still-point which holds in itself all actions. The point where to have nothing is to possess everything.”
“Whether it is Light, whether it is Sound, whether it is just a powerful perception of His Presence. It’s all good, it’s all Him. It comes the way we are able to welcome this Presence.”
“So all this: our body, this building in which we are, it’s all atoms, but we perceive it as solid matter, because we are stuck in this level of consciousness, which is physical. But if we withdraw from this physical consciousness and go into a deep state of meditation, we’ll see that it’s all vibrant, that it’s all Light. This body is Light and this building is also Light and the whole world is Light. But to understand this intellectually, it’s not enough. Scientists do understand this intellectually, but they don’t experience it as a level of consciousness.”
“Now we may be convinced that we live just one lifetime, we may be convinced that we live more lifetimes, whatever we want. From this perspective it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we try to realise this Supreme Truth in this very lifetime.”
“Everything is sacred. Everything has a lot of meaning. Let’s relate to life like this.”