— a deeper look at the stage of enrichment described in https://www.vira-chandra.com/2025/07/when-soul-goes-critical-tantric.html
There are no cheat codes for what really matters. No spiritual life hacks. No shortcuts to becoming whole. There is only the slow burn — the long, painful, unglamorous process of becoming who you already are, after everything false has been peeled away. And that peeling? It’s not poetic. It’s not blissful. It’s not something you’d post a photo of with soft lighting and a yoga quote. It’s terrifying. It’s humiliating. And it’s holy.
Most people don’t walk this path. Not because they’re weak — but because the world offers easier options. You can take a pill. You can download an app. You can fly to Peru and drink the jungle. You can reframe your trauma in a shiny Instagram carousel and call it healing. And if that brings relief, truly — no judgment. But there is another way, and it is not beautiful. It is the way of staying exactly where the pain is and letting it do its work. It is the way of staring at your worst mistake and not flinching. Of waking up in a warzone — literal or emotional — and still choosing love when everything in you wants to close.
In a previous post, I wrote about the process of spiritual enrichment through the metaphor of nuclear physics — how a soul cannot “go critical” unless it is refined, separated, and concentrated beyond its natural state. This piece is its counterpart: not about detonation, but about the fire before detonation. The long season of burning. The part no one celebrates.
Saint John of the Cross wrote of this in The Dark Night of the Soul. He compared this divine purification to the way fire transforms a log of wood: first it dries it out, then blackens it, then burns it, then makes it luminous — until nothing of the old substance remains. Not even the shape. Not even the memory of moisture. Just fire.
“For this Divine purgation is removing all the evil and vicious humours which the soul has never perceived because they have been so deeply rooted and grounded in it… And, as it sees in itself that which it saw not before, it is clear to it that not only is it unfit to be seen by God, but deserves His abhorrence…”
What he describes is not low self-esteem. It is not shame. It is the horror of standing in front of something vast and pure, and realizing how long we’ve mistaken noise for silence, sentiment for love, pride for devotion. The closer we come to the real, the more violently the false recoils — and we recoil with it, because we’ve grown used to its company. And then, painfully, over years, it is burned away.
This process doesn’t make you holy. It makes you humble. Not the sweet kind of humble that gets praised — the shaking kind, the kind that leaves you unable to form a sentence when someone asks, “So how’s your path going?” Because all you see are ashes, and a fire that hasn’t stopped, and you don’t know what’s left of you anymore — except that it’s not what it used to be. And maybe that’s enough.
There are people who talk about transformation like it’s a spa treatment. There are influencers who say “shadow work” and mean journaling with incense and bath salts. But this is different. This is the real thing. And it is so utterly unmarketable that even your ego doesn’t want it. There is no aesthetic to it. No Instagram caption. It’s 3 a.m. and you can’t sleep. It’s saying no when it costs everything. It’s showing up again and again when no one sees you, no one thanks you, and nothing feels “aligned.”
And in time — not quickly, not dramatically — something changes. You stop looking for proof that you’re progressing. You stop needing signs. You stop arguing with the process. You just let it burn. Not because you like pain — but because you’ve learned that real peace isn’t the absence of fire, but the absence of resistance.
So yes — there is a miracle. But it’s not the one you expected.
You are still here.
And something in you is glowing.
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