only bow down to the shabda.

We call many things normal, natural, essential, and necessary. These are the four words Maya uses to keep you here. Only the Shabda is actually all four.

by dr. Papneja

There are four words used to justify every engagement that keeps you bound to this world. Four words that sound like wisdom and function as chains. Normal. Natural. Essential. Necessary. Understand what these words actually are and you will understand what Maya actually is.

Think of the things in your life that you have decided cannot be changed. The food you eat. The sleep schedule you keep. The conversations you cannot end. The habits you return to. The obligations you cannot release. The relationships you maintain past the point of truth. If you examine the justification for each of them you will find one of these four words underneath it.

It is normal to want this. It is natural to need this. This is essential to my functioning. This is necessary given my circumstances.

These are not observations. They are agreements. Each one is an agreement to stay where you are. And Maya — the world of engagement, the force that keeps the soul oriented outward — requires nothing more of you than your agreement. The chains are not heavy. They are soft. They sound like reason.

Let me examine each word precisely.

normal

Normal means what most people do. It is a description of the average. The average person is deeply engaged with the world, rarely touches stillness, and never makes contact with the source. Normal is not a guide to what is possible — it is a description of what has been accepted as the limit.
When you call something normal, you are agreeing to stay within the average. The Shabda is not in the average.

natural

Natural means arising from nature — from the body, the instincts, the inherited patterns of the organism. Many things are natural. Hunger is natural. Fear is natural. The impulse to belong is natural. The Shabda is also natural — more natural than any of these, because it is the nature of the soul before the body overlaid its requirements on top of it.
The word natural is used to protect the habits of the body from the inquiry of the soul. But the soul’s nature is older and more fundamental than the body’s habits.

essential

Essential means cannot be removed without loss of function. Most things called essential are preferences that have been reclassified. The coffee you say you cannot function without is essential in the same way — it is an adaptation the body made that was then declared a requirement. Real essentials are few.
The Shabda is the only thing that is essential in the actual sense — the only thing whose removal leaves the soul without its source.

necessary

Necessary means required by the situation. This word is the most powerful of the four because it shifts responsibility to circumstances. I am not choosing this. The circumstances require it. This dissolves the agency that the path demands you reclaim. Nothing in the world is as necessary as it presents itself. The circumstances change. The necessity was a story.
The Shabda is necessary in the way that breathing is necessary — not because the situation requires it but because without it the soul is suffocating slowly and calling the suffocation normal.

Normal, natural, essential, and necessary are excuses we use to bow down to Maya. They are the language of submission dressed as the language of reason. Every time you use one of these words to justify not moving toward the Shabda, you have bowed down.

This is not a call to abandon the world. The world is yours. You belong to it and it belongs to you — not because you earned it but because once the source is found, the creation comes with it. Enjoy what is here. Use what is given. Be fully present in the life that is yours.

But know the order. Know what you are bowing toward and what you are bowing away from in every choice. The world will always present itself as more urgent, more necessary, more real than the inward turn. This is its nature. It is not lying. From its own perspective, it is entirely correct.

The Shabda is the only thing that is actually normal, natural, essential, and necessary.

It is normal because the soul’s orientation toward its source is its most fundamental state — more fundamental than any of the patterns the world has overlaid on top of it.

It is natural because it is what the soul is before the body’s requirements become the soul’s identity.

It is essential because it is the source of the belonging, the love, and the rest that every other pursuit is trying to approximate.

It is necessary because without it the soul does not know what it is or where it belongs — and a soul that does not know where it belongs will accept the world’s version of belonging in its place, indefinitely, and call it a life.