Spiritual Liberation Is a Long Game

The Shabd masters are not interested in giving people spiritual experiences; rather, they want us to live spiritual lives: to spiritually develop and transcend our desires, attachments, and karmas so that we can be liberated from the cycle of transmigration in which our souls have been emmeshed for countless lifetimes.

For us, the emphasis is not on temporary enlightenment but on permanent liberation. This path is not just about sound and light, the masters have told us. Rather, it is a long game. It needs to be, because we have spent eons being reborn in this creation due to our actions pulling us back here to reap their consequences, lifetime after lifetime.

Real spiritual progress happens when the mind becomes stable, when our life changes. If we are becoming more peaceful, tolerant, and kind, for example, this is a sign that the Master is working with us. Light, sound, visions – these can attract the soul, saints tell us, but the mind may try to hold onto them and stop there. The real work of the soul, we’re told, is to transcend even these experiences and become stable in supreme love.

How does that happen? Maharaj Charan Singh is quoted in Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. II:

Through meditation our own attitude changes towards everybody, and we feel that bliss and happiness within ourselves…. Meditation helps us to get that peace, bliss and contentment from within. We don’t get so easily upset. We take life easier and accept God’s will as life comes.¹

Maharaj Ji said that the purpose of saints coming to this world “is to change our very attitude of life, to detach us from this creation and attach us to the Creator…. We are awakened from deep slumber by the mystics. … [They] come to give their teachings, to change our attitude and approach to life.”²

Finally, he told us: “Master is concerned with what way the soul spiritually develops. He gives the source of strength to the soul to spiritually develop within so that it is transported to the level of the Father and get released from the mind and thus from birth and death.”³

We are undergoing a gradual reorientation from the outer world of cause and effect to the inner world of pure love and permanent peace. Baba Ji has a refreshing suggestion for what our attitude toward life should be while we undergo this transformation, this slow awakening to the supreme love of the Shabd within. He says that the Lord has sent us here to learn, that learning is the beginning of our spiritual development on this path.

Learning requires humility and surrender, as does following this path. In the beginning, when we ask for initiation, we are admitting that we are ignorant and want to learn about spirituality. We recognize that we need a teacher who has traveled the path we want to follow.

When our soul finds its guru, we commit to this path and make merging our soul with the Shabd the purpose of our life. We are spiritual babies then; we have no idea how completely unequal to the task we are. But soon enough we learn the extent of our ignorance. Surely this is part of our learning process. We are humbled when we discover how much we don’t know, how feeble our efforts seem to be.

This may be part of the master’s plan, that our spiritual liberation is a long game. In Philosophy of the Masters, Vol. III, Maharaj Sawan Singh, wrote:

If you go to the door of the Lord or the Master, go as a beggar. There is no one else before whom one should bow. He is the only one who can listen to the prayer of one who is caught in the whirlpool of Maya. He is the only one who can put healing ointment on the heart that is bleeding from attachment and greed. It is only He who can revive lost hopes. All these qualities exist only in the Lord, or in His other form, the Master. He heals bleeding hearts by sending them the current of his inner consciousness.⁴

Great Master goes on: “For this reason a disciple, whether near or far from his Master, should give up all intellectual cleverness, surrender his mind and body to him, and place all his sufferings before him.”⁵

Surrendering our minds and bodies to the master simply means following his instructions: doing our meditation every day; being lactovegetarian; abstaining from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco products; and living a moral life. It doesn’t necessarily mean listening to the sweet sounds of the Shabd or meeting the master’s radiant form. Again, this path is not about having spiritual experiences but about living a spiritual life. In the words of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

To start out with, the only thing that is supreme on this path is our own ignorance. The power of supreme love—the Shabd—is pulling us toward a mystery. We can’t see beyond our own headlights. Until we know something—anything—we are asked to trust the one who has taken us under his care. Hazur Ji has referred to faith as the art of walking with someone while holding hands in the dark. This is the beginning of surrender. A child, even when in a dark room, knows that her mother is sitting outside, so she is not afraid. In the same way, we are told, the soul can feel the presence of the Guru; and so, we begin to entrust ourselves to him.

Baba Jaimal Singh wrote to his disciple, the Great Master: “The Satguru, in his Shabd-form, is always by your side…. Every moment he is calling us within and showering us with his protection and grace.”⁶

Faith is the scaffolding that can support us until we have direct experience of the truth of this path. A child is carefree when he knows that all his needs will be met by his parents. How much energy might we feel, how much gratitude, how much trust, if we stopped depending entirely on our own resources? If we just got out of our own way, dropped our shame and guilt, our insecurities and fears, and let ourselves lean on the Lord and Master the way a child depends on its mother?

As Maharaj Ji wrote in Light on Sant Mat: “By simran and bhajan we learn to put faith in a higher power, then the burden is shared, and that makes us feel lighter.”⁷

Trust is a delicate thing. It’s intimate. It’s not easy to let go of our defenses and open ourselves to anyone, what to say of the Master. It happens over a lifetime. Our part is to attend to our meditation and be good human beings. That is how we can begin to place our trust in him and experience for ourselves what he is doing for us. Eventually, our trust will turn into love.

We can accomplish so much when we know we are not alone. The more we lean on him, the lighter we feel. The more we place our trust in him, the stronger we become. Then we can accept what he sends us and do what we must: our bhajan and simran. This is the essence of the long game of spiritual liberation.