Slow Enlightenment

A blues musician once said, “If you haven’t had a bad time in life, just keep on living.”

What he meant is what all the mystics tell us: It’s impossible to get permanent peace and happiness in this imperfect world, this plane of duality, of light and dark. If we live long enough, we will suffer. The purpose of saints, they explain, is not to make this world perfect, nor to make us happy. Rather, they come to take us out of this world of suffering, back to the divine source from which we’ve come.

Despite the impossibility of finding lasting peace here, we always look for it. After all, the mind is hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But pleasure is temporary and pain unavoidable. We are trapped by the karmas that we ourselves have created.

The saving grace for us is that, regardless of the weight of our karmas, the soul has a natural instinct to return to its source. No matter how much we may try to suppress it, our yearning for God is built into us, even deeper than our desire for pleasure. Our soul is a ray of divine light and thus yearns to be reabsorbed into that divine energy. That yearning, with God’s grace, forces us to seek our spiritual home and return there.

Our spiritual awakening starts to take practical shape when we come in contact with true masters. Their advice and guidance are at the highest spiritual level and yet at the same time utterly practical. They take into consideration our human nature, the divine design of this creation, and our accumulation of karmas over countless lifetimes.

This awakening is slow by necessity. We must completely shift our orientation from the outer world to the world within, from the outer music of the physical senses to the inner music of the Shabd, which pulls us in and up once we still our mind at the eye centre through meditation.

In the book Die to Live, someone asks why meditation takes so long, and Maharaj Charan Singh replies: “We can’t even extend our imagination to grasp how long we have been here in this world and how many karmas we have been collecting in every life.… Naturally it has to take time.”

It’s built into the process that we must struggle to turn our attention within over the span of a lifetime. If it happened quickly and easily, we would take it for granted, or think that it was our efforts alone that resulted in success. If there was no struggle to attend to meditation and live the Sant Mat way of life, would we value the privilege of meeting a true master and receiving initiation?

In Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh (also referred to as the Great Master) further explains the slow pace:

Saints have to deal with human nature. If they ask a person to leave kam all at once, before initiation, we know he cannot do so. They attach him to Nam. There is something for him to look up to now. He has heard of the magnificence of Nam from the saints. A tiny spark is kindled in him. He gives it some attention. The days are passing. Partly through receiving knocks (sickness, death in the family, demands on purse, shocks to pride, etc.), partly through age, partly through satsang, partly because he has passed through some of his pralabdh karma (fate), and partly through devotion to Nam, his attention is slowly contracting. So, by the time he reaches the end of his days, he is almost ready to go up and grasp Nam.

First, we hear about Nam and the masters, who unlock its mysteries for us. Then we start attending satsang, which reminds us of our heart’s desire and how to achieve it. At satsang we’re reminded of what’s true, what the teachings are. And every day we attend to our meditation, follow the other promises we make at the time of our initiation, and do our duty in the world – as family members, employers, employees, friends, and colleagues. This is how we slowly clear our fate karmas to lighten our load. We’re undergoing the cleansing that will purify us enough to give and receive the spiritual love that we crave.

At the same time, we’re also receiving knocks, as Great Master calls them – illness, disappointments, hardships, humiliations, losses. These all serve the purpose of pushing us to turn within. We’re getting older, at first dealing with the challenges of establishing careers and starting families, later with the challenges of aging bodies. Life is hard work; fighting the mind is hard work; and we get tired. All these things, over time, begin to detach us from the pleasures of the world that we used to enjoy.

All these factors together are slowly contracting our attention and pulling us within, preparing us to “almost grasp Nam” by the end of our days. This is the journey of a lifetime.

Great Master goes into even more detail about why our awakening takes so long:

The spirit has lived in bodies for ages, and its connection with the body has become so perfect that the withdrawal looks almost abnormal. But that is through ignorance. It falsely believes the body to be home, and when the spirit learns that its home is not in matter but that it is imprisoned by it, and that now in the human form there is the chance to break this connection, it wakes up, and the longing to ascend is aroused. It gains strength slowly. Rising and falling and struggling against mind and matter, it makes headway up with the help of the saints. The rise and fall are natural and so is the struggle. For that which is achieved after struggle gives strength, self-reliance, and incentive to go ahead. Achievement thus obtained is lasting and can be reproduced at will.… It takes time, and slow progress is better.
_{Spiritual Gems}

Rising and falling, struggling against mind and matter, the soul begins to make headway, with the Master pushing and pulling us along. We’re not even aware of all the ways that he does this, of how his pull to merge with him shapes our lives.

We don’t realize the enormity of what the masters do with us, for us, and to us to enable us to wake up spiritually – the enormity of being released from mind and matter, after our souls have been trapped here for innumerable lifetimes. We’re like toddlers demanding to understand nuclear physics, but we can’t even walk or talk or feed ourselves yet.

We need to take a breath and try to appreciate the miracle we’ve been given, which is admittedly hard because the mind isn’t designed to understand it.

Yet here we are. Our longing, our loneliness, our suffering motivates us. Our awe in the face of the Master’s love and charm motivates us. We get inklings along the way that lead us to believe that this path is true. And we receive shocks that spur us onward.

Here’s Great Master again, in Spiritual Gems:

When love begins to run smooth, the charm is gone, and life becomes a monotony and a routine. Some shock is necessary to break the monotony. A period of disappointment intervenes often in the life of the devotee. This is desirable. It has a purpose. It gives the shock. After a time spent in disappointment, the intensity of love for spiritual uplift increases. A temporary obstruction in the path of determination gives it momentum to proceed ahead.

We need to be shocked out of our stupor. Periods of disappointment and temporary obstructions are the shocks we need to wake up, to increase the intensity of our longing for spiritual uplift.

The fact is, we will receive only that which pulls us back to the Lord. We don’t need to fear the obstacles and hard times we encounter in life or be overwhelmed by them. They’re part of our story, steps in the process of realizing our true self, our true divinity. In fact, they are confirmation of the Lord’s love for us. He wants to save us from suffering, so he sends us true masters to haul us homeward once and for all. Rather than complaining, “Oh Lord, why are you doing this to me?” we should – metaphorically speaking – be dancing in the rain with our arms outstretched shouting, “Bring it on!”