(Disclaimer: Not an official explanation. And not for the blindly-devout/superstitious sans experience or practice either.)
(Please read a beautiful quote below from Babuji first [1])
The Heartfulness/Sahaj Marg prayer is mysterious, many-faceted, and its effects change with practice and attitude. Its three lines are deceptively simple:
O Master, thou art the real goal of human life.
We are yet but slaves of wishes,
putting bar to our advancement.
Thou art the only God and power
to bring us up to that stage.
It has tied up abhyasis and preceptors in polemical knots while they strive to explain the seemingly straightforward meaning without coming across as proselytisers. Especially to those who either detest or avow this Commandment from the Old Testament: You shall have no other Gods but (or before) me.
I found it strangely inconsistent with Babuji's writings on Brahman in Reality at Dawn, where brahma-laya - devolution into Brahman - is termed the final state. He describes no God or Guru as an intermediary there.
Yet, a different perspective came up when the real goal was considered as a spiritual condition or state:
Master refers to the inner Master.
The inner Master in an abhyasi's heart is linked to the inner Master of a Guru.
A Guru whose inner Master is in brahma-laya can transfer, through this link, increasingly subtle experiences and conditions to a regular practitioner, as the practitioner advances.
For the Guru, brahma-laya is both infinite and dynamic. There is no final static state.
Inner Master-inner Master transfer is completely controlled by the practitioner's interest and regularity of practice. The transfer may then occur naturally and automatically by osmosis as the abhyasi matures and needs less hand-holding.
Interest leads to cooperation with the Guru.
Trust and faith develops from experience, leading to surrender (pejoratively known as blind obedience).
A practitioner who does not have sincere interest, cooperation, or surrender, unwittingly blocks, or cannot accept, what is transferred over the link.
And even if something does get transferred, it cannot be retained or assimilated. [2]
Babuji describes a simple algebraic expression for laya or merger: if A = B, and if B = C, then A = C.
Since there are layers of saṁskāras around the heart, with regular cleaning (by the abhyasi, preceptor, and Master in Sahaj Marg), the link becomes more and more clear, or less and less clogged. It is then able to transfer more and more faithfully what the inner Master of the Guru continually gets from the Source. Until, at the highest, A = B, and then A = C.
Algebraically, all very well!
But a jīva is subject to wishes and as long as he's a slave to them, he is unable or unwilling to co-operate, let alone surrender. How then can he progress? From practice, and practice alone, comes everything else. And this practice is nothing but simple attention, from irregular to regular meditation and thence to witnessing. Also called constant remembrance.
In sum, to get or attain a spiritual condition that is the base of all human existence, if I have a spiritual link with someone who has it, the most effective way for me to get that condition is by focusing my attention entirely on the link. Thus the "only God and power" bit. [3]
But only he who has cleaned his heart to that extent feels it coming therefrom,
while a common man engrossed deeply in material complexities feels it not.
He therefore stands in need of one of his fellow beings of high calibre to help him in that direction.
We may call him guide, guru, master or by whatever name we like,
but he is after all a helper and a supporter,
working in the spirit of service and sacrifice.
His role is by far the most important, for it is he who, as a matter of fact, pulls the real seeker up
and enlivens him with the light which is lying in him under layers of grossness.
~Babuji
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