How to Become a Spiritual Warrior

Tulsi Sahib asserts that all true saints and mystics teach the same truths, including the necessity of a living Master. His compositions frequently mention that his knowledge of divine laws and spiritual truths are based on personal experience, and that his experience is attributable entirely to the guidance given by his master:

I was inert iron, heavily laden with rust
  but in the company of my Guru,
  the philosopher’s stone, I was transformed into gold.…
For ages I was known as gold,
  but no more,
  for 1 am now the philosopher’s stone.

Tulsi Sahib is informing us that although the philosopher’s stone may turn iron into gold, his master transformed him into the philosopher’s stone itself. His guru, in other words, transformed Tulsi Sahib spiritually into his own form. Based on his personal experience, Tulsi Sahib extols the need for a true guru from whom one can attain the means to eternal salvation. Addressing Sheikh Taqi, the following ghazal illustrates this:

O Taqi, fix your gaze on the Master
  who has offered you his hand.
Do not be neglectful or give up if you wish to behold
  the splendour of your Beloved.
His mercy will protect you till you arrive at his court;
  there is no need for worry or fear.
Go straight and reach there, for this is the Master’s decree.
Mansur, Sarmad, Bu-Ali, Shams and Maulana –
  they all followed this same path with firm resolve
  in their hearts and reached their destination.
Love is the destination of this path,
  and reaching there is not difficult,
  for the one who removes all difficulty
  stands before you and has given you his hand.
Tulsi says: Listen, O Taqi, the inner secret is beyond
  all you can imagine.
Keep it safe – it points to the Most High.
_{Tulsi Sahib, Saint of Hathras}

Metaphorically, Tulsi Sahib is asking us to hold on tight to the master’s hand – the gift of Nam – and take full advantage of the priceless opportunity of being with the Beloved within. To give us confidence, he names other Sufi mystics, stating that with determined hearts, they followed their masters’ instructions completely and reached their destination. In the same way as we might vigilantly guard gold, diamonds, and other forms of outer wealth, Tulsi Sahib stresses that we should be protective over our inner wealth too. Now that we have found a true master, Tulsi Sahib begs us to have faith in him, follow his instructions, and begin our real spiritual journey inside.

He reassures us of the master’s protection; telling us not to be scared or worry because until we reach our destination, the master will forever remain at our side, holding our hand. Baba Ji gives us the same reassurance, explaining that we are never without the Lord’s grace. We don’t need to ask for it. Without his grace, we wouldn’t even be reading this text!

It’s not the absence of grace which is the issue but our inability to recognize it. Imagine, for instance, the following scenario: You wake up late one day and rush to get to work. Yet, no matter how hard you try to drive fast, you keep coming to red lights, forcing you to slow down. We can either view this as an inconvenience or we can see it as the Lord looking after us, slowing us down to keep us safe. We spend most of our lives worrying about the future or being perturbed by the past, forgetting to live in the present moment. However, our meditation, when practised daily, will strengthen us to such an extent we will be able to go through life with confidence.

Mystics advise us to lead a stress-free and relaxed life. Yet, given our entanglement in the world of mind and maya (illusion), how is it possible? Encouraging us to go directly to our destination, Tulsi Sahib urges us not to become distracted by trying to gratify worldly desires. The master has given us the key to God-realization. Our daily efforts will lead to the riches of our own mystic experience, and that experience will deepen our faith, supporting us until the end of our spiritual journey.

Elsewhere, Tulsi Sahib refers to a spiritual practitioner as a ‘warrior’. A warrior’s goal is victory. By taking refuge in the Satguru, we are learning how to battle with our mind and, eventually, bring it under our control. So, how can we become the type of warrior Tulsi Sahib refers to and engage in a daily battle with the mind? This is done by inverting the force of habit, so that it works for us, not against us. It means practising meditation day after day, persevering even on the days when we don’t feel like it, until one day, we’ll find we can’t help but want to meditate.

During the Master’s question-and-answer sessions, many of us share our anxieties about not being able to dedicate time to meditation, whether we are making any ‘progress’, and how difficult we find it to follow the path. The master replies by posing a rhetorical question to us: Is anything easy in life? At work, for example, we are ready to take on difficult tasks and spend countless hours, days, weeks, months and even years fulfilling them. Why not apply the same commitment and dedication to our spiritual journey? Tulsi Sahib’s ghazal is heartening, for he says that reaching our destination isn’t difficult because the Master has given us his hand.

So, let us ask ourselves, have we made the concerted effort our master expects? Did we dedicate two and a half hours of our time to meditation today? If not, let’s start tomorrow – with firm determination to keep the promise we made to our master when he initiated us – and become the spiritual warrior he wants us to be.