Be in the world but not OF this world!

“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 learnt some preliminary rules and regulations and then they ship you off to the Military Training Base. There the real grueling  begins.  You are exercised beyond exhaustion, you are put under constant stress, you are given hundreds of strict rules and regulations to obey under all circumstances, you are shouted at and humiliated, you are criticized and failed at even your perfectly completed assignments, you are watched round the clock, all your freedom is stripped away…. you are tested to the max every step of the way to see if you will give up and quit…you are basically cut off from all your comfort zones. Primary purpose for this is to ‘break’ you, to test your determination and strength, to crack your identity of whoever you thought you were so they can 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 Spiritual Awakening experience and the little honeymoon with the bliss-self the real 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 again and again and again 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, your judgements, your 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 always testing you too. The biggest difference between Life testing you and Master testing you is that Master erases the pain of the suffering you go through whereas Life basically leaves you to figure it out on your own to resolve the past pains.  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 ceaseless 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 Witness Consciousness. 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 own inspired actions and words can surprise you
• You fall in love with your own company and deep silence
• Your become more intuitive
• You begin to sense Energy more intuitively.
• You drop the effort of having the need for someone to ‘understand’ you.
• You realize that you and everyone is dynamic Being 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.

After I posted my article on June 8 about my Cosmic Self Experience :  God is Love-My Divine Experience some questions were sent to me. I hope to answer some of those in this post.

After March 1998 experience (and actually before too) by 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 occured 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 all I wrote in them. Perhaps lot of babbling- since I didn’t know what I was  writing about were ‘spiritual experiences’ :-))

Over the course of following years grueling spiritual military boot camps were showered upon me. This is while I went through life taking care of household, family, job, Energy Healings, Spiritual Counseling, Sadhana. Major shifts were happening within.

As 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 can hold, catch you and throw challenges at you in perfect synchronicity simultaneously while watching you from His Cosmic Inner Being all the time regardless where he is physically)

For those who can understand Hindi language, here is a song sung by my Guru Ji- Dastoor-E-Muhabbat. He explains that you have to go through painful challenges to be able to drop your body-mind-ego-identity in order to merge with the Divine. This life altering task can get accomplished only with the Grace of a True God Realized Master.

Whenever a few times I did mention to my Guru Ji of my Supernatural Experiences he would dismiss it nonchalantly as, ‘Yes, it happens. Just keep doing your Sadhana (Spiritual Practice)”.

In retrospect I know that my Guru Ji didn’t want me to give any importance to the experiences because focusing upon them can stop spiritual progress. Instead of  dropping the ego-mind the ego gets even stronger. Just like when you take an Antibiotic medicine course of 7 days. You are told to complete the course even though you are feeling much better within 24 hours. If you stop taking the medicine mid-course then the germs attack back double strength.

HOLY COW!! I must have passed some exams because in March of 2011 my Guru Ji told me to start sharing my insights. He said, “Light others with your own lighted candle”. One of the many things he mentioned to other devotees about me is, “Ritu is in this World but not of this World”.

So I’m sharing!  Please also visit and ‘like’ Facebook community page: www.facebook.com/spiritualroute

Post your questions, comments and insights so we can all enjoy the Divine bliss by being in the World but not of the World!!

Om Shanti,Shanti,Shanti

Ritu

www.spiritualroute.com