In the world of spiritual journeys, I encounter a lot of timepass. (For those who don’t know the word, it’s Bombay lingo for useless activities one does to pass the time.)
Spiritual entertainment
People encounter spiritual teachers and love listening to their talks. And then some of the students take off on journeys of entertainment. One year, it’s going to a retreat by one teacher in some temple town, followed by a week-long retreat of yoga, meditation and chanting of shlokas in a hillside ashram in Rishikesh or Wayanad. The next year, there’s a three-day workshop in a luxury hotel in South Bombay in January, and joining a bhajan group in July. This group meets every second Saturday in the home of some society lady or other, in Bandra, Juhu or Cuffe Parade, and some very spiritual sadhvi‘s services are engaged to lead the gathering in soulful renditions of bhajans. Each bhajan session ends with exquisite snacks and rejuvenating tea.
The next year begins with a shift of attention from bhajan singing, onto the next new thing. More spiritual teachers and guides. More workshops and retreats and wellness camps. And the journey continues.
I find it heart-breaking that people do this even after finding a master like my master. They attend his retreats in far-off countries, though he shows up for an equal number of retreats in more humdrum places in India. They come out of the retreats and decide to enhance their routine by adding strange rituals which involve ringing of bells, lighting of incense, and other sundry rituals.
I can sympathise with spiritual aspirants who have learned rituals from their parents and grandmothers, and faithfully follow those rituals at home — they have encountered no better. I find it heart-breaking that people actually spend three days at a retreat with a genuine self-realised yogi and then go home and feel the need to add rituals to their daily routine, based on stuff they’ve heard from random friends.
I can’t but explain their doings as spiritual entertainment. These devotees or yoga aspirants are all searching for the next new thing. I’m sure these things hold meaning for some seekers. I have no patience for them.
Spiritual socialising
There is a big social angle to this entertainment. I find quite often that a social circle forms around regular attendees of a teacher’s retreats or workshops. These attendees show some or all of the following signs:
- Some are proud of how long ago they started attending this master’s retreats, and how few they have missed
- Some are proud of how they are part of the master’s inner circle and have their own private practices. One devotee was very proud that he walks past the room where the master is staying early in the morning during every retreat, so that he can greet the master before the crowd has gathered.
- Some are very keen to socialise with other attendees, exchange notes about the lodging and food arrangements at previous retreats, and inquire about each other’s family members. You can see them eagerly gossiping around the morning and afternoon tea sessions.
There are devotees of my master who narrate, with self-conscious pride, how they lick the remnants of my master’s lunch plate clean after my master has had his lunch at a residential retreat. These devotees are so proud of their exceptional show of devotion and piety.
Spiritual tourism
A variant of spiritual entertainment which adds the additional entertaining aspect of travel to the mix.
- Visiting the cave where Shyamacharan Lahiri meditated
- Visiting all sorts of burial places, ashrams or monasteries where various spiritually advanced souls spent their time
- Attending retreats by spiritual teachers in places at least a few thousand kilometres from your home town
- Temple hopping: the most common form of this practice. Basically, throw in a temple in your vacation plans, and it becomes a nice cocktail of holy entertainment. Be sure to do justice to the awesome food available in stalls around the temple. Buy some rudraksh garlands from shops nearby. Get some prasad for folks back home. Come back to your home town and narrate stories of how “spiritually charged” that temple was, how it made you feel drawn to it.
No time is spent in reading, or thinking about, what these spiritual teachers actually said.
My master has said publicly, over and over, that he looks forward to the day when a disciple will feel that he (master) is repeating himself at every retreat, and stops coming to more retreats. His public talks with these remarks are available on Youtube. A more explicit discouragement for the practice of blind attendance of retreats is hard to imagine. But the retreat junkies keep going.
Spiritual bypassing
This is the serious stuff. This is a kind of side-stepping of real spiritual growth.
You encounter people who will say, with an air of wisdom, lines like “What cannot be cured must be endured”, or “Oh, it’s all in God’s hands”, or other similar statements. But these people do not really feel this way in their daily little activities. For them, these lines are conversation pieces. Anyone who can really believe that everything in his life is in God’s hands does not need any further spiritual guidance — he’s already seen whatever there is to see.
The problem with these people is that they do not confront their own minds, their own choices, their own desires and fears, in the light of these statements which they quote. They use these statements to side-step the real challenges of spiritual growth.
For instance, take the line, “Everything is God’s will.” Someone who genuinely tries to contemplate this line while seeing a loved one suffer through a painful disease will be put under tremendous psychological stress trying to reconcile God’s will with the apparent suffering he sees. He will ask bitter questions about God’s benevolence and kindness, about the unfairness of suffering faced by innocent people, about his own helplessness in the face of God’s stubborn will. This distress is not easy, it can tear us apart psychologically. Spiritual progress only happens when you walk this path. The only way out is through.
Those who can cross over to the other side of these beliefs, and can reconcile the irrationality and caprice of the human experience with a clear view of the Absolute Truth, can genuinely say, with real understanding, “It’s all God’s will.” You don’t need any rituals, any anointment, any holy water or rudraksh beads, to reach that understanding. Either you have it or you don’t.
There are people who will spout lines like “It’s all one.” This is the fundamental perspective of advaita vedanta — the universe, and all shapes and forms in it, are not separate entities, it’s all just one. There are no separate drops, it’s all water. But there is a vast difference between just quoting the line “Everything is one” and realising it and living it in one’s life. There are people who have learned some pieces of the advaita vedanta perspective, who will be passive when someone hurts or cheats them. They will then justify their passivity by saying “It doesn’t matter whether it’s him or me — it’s all one anyway.” They use this line to justify their passivity, sometimes even their cowardice. Someone who has truly realised the core truths of advaita vedanta will not hesitate to act and take on the aggressor or the cheat in the best way needed to bring down their adversary. Those who have realised God do not hesitate to act in their material lives.
It is said by a lot of ancient texts and accounts of masters that God can be known right here and now — there is no need for any practice, any regimen, any hard training and discipline, to see the Absolute Truth. This sort of opinion has become a very fertile ground for one class of so-called spiritual seekers to say that they have found The Truth. They do not need to strive, there is no need for any effort. This is the fool’s guide to nirvana.
Spiritual bypassing is very insidious. It’s our ego’s defence mechanism to protect itself. Real spiritual progress is (a) very difficult and distressing along the way, and (b) rips apart the ego, leaves no place for it to hide. Half knowledge, intellectual understanding of words, is a fertile ground for the ego to defend itself by spiritual bypassing.