“They break you to remake you” is what I heard about Military Boot Camp! So here you are- you’ve passed all the Entrance exams, you’ve learned some preliminary rules and regulations, and then they ship you off to the Military Training Base.
There the real grueling begins. The training exercises you beyond exhaustion puts you under constant stress. You are expected to follow hundreds of strict rules and regulations to obey under all circumstances. The trainers shout at you and humiliate you. They criticize you and fail you at even your perfectly completed assignments; you are watched round the clock, all your freedom is stripped away.
The training tests you to the maximum every step of the way to see if you will give up and quit. You are cut off from all your comfort zones.
The primary purpose of this is to ‘break’ you and test your determination and strength. The intention is to crack the identity of whoever you thought you were so they could re-mold you into a strong soldier.
When I heard of all this Military Boot Camp training process, I immediately said, “That’s just like the Spiritual Training Boot Camp”!
Once you’ve passed the entrance exams, i.e., you’ve had a Spiritual Awakening experience and the little honeymoon with the bliss-self, the actual grueling begins.
The fire has been lit, and the Spiritual Master’s job is to burn you off and strip you of your previously held identity.
He tests you repeatedly as long as is needed or as long as you don’t throw in the towel and quit on him.
He systematically slams you out of your comfort zone to kill your mind-ego. He creates circumstances around you that in itself will crack your identity.
You have to throw away all the junk in your mind – your conditioning, judgments, and latent tendencies (Sanskars and Vasanas).
You go through extremes- Extremes of dark nights of the soul and raptures of ecstasy. Although, even when you go through dark nights of the soul, if you hold on to your faith, you will clearly feel your Master’s loving hands holding you all the way.
Once you successfully pass through any of those tests, the Master, like a magic eraser, erases the pain you went through during the tests and trials. How Awesomely Magical is that?!
You see, whether we like it or not, life is constantly testing you too. The most significant difference between life testing you and Master testing you is that Master erases the pain of the suffering you go through. In contrast, life leaves you to figure it out on your own to resolve the past hurts. I’d say it’s an infinitely better deal to go through an Enlightened God Realized Master as your Shepard!
As you are going through the trials that reshape you and help you drop your mind-ego, some of the side effects are:
- You get less and less sucked into the ongoing drama of life.
- Even if you get pulled in, it’s easier and faster to swim out of the muddy, dirty waters
- You grow into Spirit-self observing the human-self Witness Consciousness (Saakshi Bhaav). Your Cosmic Self becomes a silent witness of your body-mind Self.
- You live more and more in vast Empty Alive Space where you know that you don’t know anything and there is nothing to know
- Your inspired actions and words can surprise you
- You fall in love with your own company, and deep silence
- You become more intuitive
- You begin to sense Energy more intuitively.
- You drop the effort of needing someone to ‘understand’ you.
- You realize that you and everyone are dynamic Beings through whom the whole Universe is manifesting itself.
- You realize that Life/Creation is LIVING through you, and to the extent you get the mind-ego out of the way, it will be able to express itself.
I received some questions after posting my article on June 8 about my Cosmic Self Experience: I AM-spiritual experience-God is love. I hope to answer some of those in this post.
After March 1998 experience (and actually before too), by the constant grace of my Guru Ji, Yogiraj Swami Mohan Das Ji, I had countless Supernatural/Divine experiences that revealed many dimensions of Self.
I never had any identical experience. Some were similar, but none were identical. I had no prior knowledge or mental concept of the nature of experiences, so they were unknown to me. They always occurred unexpectedly. I was so innocently ignorant that I didn’t know at that time those were ‘spiritual experiences.’ I didn’t discuss them with anyone. I did, however, report happenings to my GuruJi in India in a letter each month. (I wonder if these letters will materialize one day? I have no recollection of what I wrote in them. Perhaps a lot of babbling- since I didn’t know what I was writing about were ‘spiritual experiences’ :-))
Over the following years, I was showered with grueling spiritual military boot camps. While I went through life taking care of household, family, job, Energy Healings, Spiritual Counseling, Sadhana. Significant shifts were happening within.
As the ego-mind is crushed, squashed, and splattered into pieces, you yo-yo between vastly varying degrees and periods of inner darkness and blinding light, feeling pits of hell and unfathomable depths of heaven, misery, and mind-blowing rapture! ..(only a True Enlightened God Realized Master could hold, catch you and throw challenges at you in perfect synchronicity simultaneously while watching you from His Cosmic Inner Being all the time regardless of where he is physically present)
For those who can understand the Hindi language, here is a song is sung by my Guru Ji- Dastoor-E-Muhabbat. He explains that you must go through painful challenges to drop your body-mind-ego-identity to merge with the Divine. This life-altering task can get accomplished only with the Grace of a True God Realized Master.
Be IN the world but not OF this world!
Blessed Be,
Ritu
