The spiritual journey is all about letting go of fixations, and, strangely, it becomes one of our biggest fixations. The course correction of social behaviour is easy. We are being watched by so many people around us, and if we deviate from socially accepted norms, they will warn us. They understand socially accepted behaviour, and we also acknowledge that they know, and therefore listen to their warnings and correct our behaviour. If somebody does not listen, the Law and State come to the rescue. There are the Bhartiya Nyaya Samhita and many other laws in India that provide punishment for behaviour such as nuisance, criminal assault, trespass, theft, defamation, and so on.
The problem with the spiritual journey is that it is an inner journey. Most people in society do not undertake this journey and therefore are not aware of the same. Further, since it's a unique journey for each individual, there is hardly any way to assess whether we are on the right track. That's why it is often said that one should have a guru on this journey who has himself travelled and can guide us. What should be the first and foremost quality of the guru? The gurus should be completely free of the fixations. Because if the guru himself is fixated, these fixations will get passed on to the disciples many times. Most gurus available in the urban set-up have their own organisations. In most cases, some realised soul set up these ashrams, and now the third or the fourth generation is running the ashrams, whose level of realisation is nowhere near the realised soul, and that's why they end up passing their own fixations to the disciples. Even if it is a first-generation ashram, the organisation is a separate entity; therefore, its survival and expansion become the guru's primary purpose. The individual's growth is suffocated beneath the heavy load of the organisation's ego.
Most realised souls had gurus who never formed an organisation. Swami Vivekananda had Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who was a guru of 16 monastic disciples. He knew that the guru needed to be aware of the ins and outs of the disciples' spiritual progress, too, and that's why he did not spread himself too thin. Paramhansa Yogananda also had Yukteshwara Maharaj as his guru, who could guide him on every step. Mahendra Gupta ji writes in his book, Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna, that Ramakrishna Paramhansa was more desperate to find Swami Vivekananda than Swami ji was to find Ramakrishna. That's a different guru-and-disciple relationship. That's not available at scale, and one has to be really prepared to get that kind of guru.
In the absence of a guru, or in the presence of a guru for whom the organisation is primary, the spiritual journey may really go astray. It is because when we enter the inner world, the normal logic does not operate. It is like entering the quantum world where normal logic fails. When we observe the electron, it behaves like a particle; when we don't, it behaves like a wave. In the inner world, too, when we observe with the ego present, things look very different; when we observe egolessly, they look very different. But the problem is that "ego" often creates an illusion of its disappearance, and in those moments, it is present in its strongest form. Most people who embark on the spiritual journey have profound experiences. But in most cases, these are their mental projections. In fact, the leading psychoanalyst, Mr Sudhir Kakar, has written a book on Ramakrishna titled "The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism". This is a detailed psychoanalysis of Ramakrishna's experiences. He has also written a book on Osho, titled "Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World". It's wonderful to read about these experiences from that psychological angle and realise that the boundary line between the real experience and hallucination is so narrow.
Mingyur Rinpoche is one Buddhist monk whom I have met 4 times in my life and, in fact, had quite long discussions with on all these occasions. He has also been associated with Daniel Goleman and has offered his brain for neurological experiments. In the book "Science of Meditation," Daniel Goleman devotes an entire chapter to experiments on Mingyur. In 2002, at the request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche travelled to the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behaviour at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, neuroscientist Richard Davidson—Daniel Goleman’s longtime research partner and co-author—scanned Rinpoche's brain using fMRI and EEG technology. At the time, Rinpoche had accumulated an estimated 62,000 lifetime hours of meditation practice, making him an ideal subject for studying extreme neuroplasticity.
When I first met Mingyur in Bodhgaya around 2018, I asked him this question specifically. How should a person know whether he is moving on the right path or if he has developed a hallucination about his inner journey? He gave a very simple answer. He said that one has to keep watching his reactions to the situations. If he is behaving with more equanimity and love, and if compassion is growing within for all beings, then he is on the right path. Generally, as we move along the path, we become confined to a select group of people who conform to our views and sometimes to our "hallucinations". There is no doubt that we will not waste time when we realise that routine gossip is a waste of time. But, at the same time, the disappearance of sensitivity towards the external ecosystem is also a sign of spiritual arrogance. As we mature spiritually, we will remain aware of the external ecosystem while retaining that inner awareness. We will understand that every being is a soul or part of the same consciousness, but has somehow become fixated on the role, and therefore will always be available to help him come out of that fixation. That inner equanimity, with love and compassion, rather than exclusion of others, is the key.
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