Abhyasi Self Study Course
Cleaning
Introduction
The impressions of the past, engraved upon mind and memory, have to be erased. Such impressions are the source of present thoughts and actions. Therefore as long as they persist, action along certain lines is compulsive. The cleaning of the system is thus of paramount importance. A bottle which contained oil can be cleaned comparatively easily to become a milk container. But how does one clean a scratched gramophone record? However much we may wipe it, or clean it with detergents, it still continues to play the same jarring tune. Of such scratches and deep cuts is our life composed… The needles of our individual destinies run but in those same worn grooves, repeating everlastingly the same disappointments, the same failures and misery, and the same degradation and corruption. The cleaning here has to go deeper. It involves a remolding of the system to re-create a new record capable of playing the sublime music that the Maker had originally impressed upon it's unblemished surface.
Sahaj Marg lays the greatest emphasis upon the need for such cleaning. All impressions which lie in us, created by our past thoughts and actions, have to be cleaned out thoroughly. The Master does this by using his spiritual power to liberate us from our buried impressions. When this is done we take new birth, as it were. We are spiritually reborn. Superficial physical cleanliness of the human system will not avail us. A deeper cleaning is essential to rid us of the burdens of the past, and these burdens of the past are nothing but the impressions that we have graved upon ourselves by our wrong thoughts and actions. Such cleaning is therefore liberation from the past in a very real sense….Once this cleaning is effectively undertaken by a Master of spiritual caliber, we enter into an unconditioned present. (The Principles of Sahaj Marg Set 1, Volume 1, "Need for Need", p. 60)