Experementing Spirituality

Association with spiritual people is supposed to be a great thing by many. It may be true if you are lucky enough to see spiritually elevated persons and keep company. True spiritual masters are species facing the threat of extinction. You'll see a lot of people claiming to be ascetics, yogis, and sanyasis, but close examination would prove that they're nothing but fake. Some seven years back, some of my friends introduced me to a lady who was supposed to be in an elevated state. She was somewhat in her middle age, and appeared not to take care of any external activities. Her half closed eyes always seemed to be in a blissful state. Initially, i never saw her speak! When she needed to communicated something about philosophical queries, she did it through gestures. When i first met her, a saffron clad young disciple was attending to her. “I am her sevaka (servant), nothing more; my sadhana (spiritual exercise is serving her”, he used to say. Later it turned out that this woman was pretending not to talk and experiencing bliss, and her disciple had criminal antecedents.

Unfortunately we don't have meters to check the spiritual authenticity of people. Had there been some hall marking for real saints, things would have been much easier. From my experience, here is one thing you can put to test. Check yourself if you feel your mind is calm and still near a person. If you feel it, that is one indicator of that person's genuine. Still, there is no way to ascertain at first sight how far a person has progressed spiritually. Our mind always tends to deceive us by jumping in to conclusions which may not be true always.

A true master would be always loving, free from material attachments. I have experienced peace and protection of love in front of a saintly person. It was only after meeting that person that i had to review many of my preconceived notions about spiritual people.

Hamsa Yoga

Yesterday, I was privileged to attend the family meet of 'Hamsa Yoga Sangh', an organization of people who follow a particular breathing technique, headquartered at Kochi. The chief instructor, or 'kulguru' as the disciples call him, was my old acquaintance. Some forty odd people had assembled there to discuss their particular spiritual path, which they claim to be unique. The chief instructor knew a lot of techniques. In spite of such rigorous and regular breathing exercise, most people who have assembled there seemed to have lacking openness of mind. Anyway, i have decided to learn more about the system from him, and experience it myself before dubbing the technique as useless.

Someone there spoke about aura and 'Kirlian photography', and even called a man to the dais to show how much positive aura that man had! "See it, it's 6 inches of aura", he told the gathering. But no one including myself could see a trace of any such thing. At last he concluded that only people on a higher spiritual plane could sense and see aura. Later when I met him alone, I took the liberty to enlighten him on Kirlian photography stating that science circles consider it as something psuedo. He began to brawl shouting words like Russian, science, communism etc, which i decided to ignore. Finally, I advised him to read something and try to become calm.

Earlier, this man had introduced himself to the crowd as a doctor, which many people instantly believed! The man, according to the information I got, was nothing but a company employee, who has never received scientific training in any of the medical science branches.