This is a phenomenon.

Spiritual folks who end up being completely ridiculous twats in their situation.

Take an Angulimala – who was a dacoit terrorizing and cutting off people’s fingers.

Or the hunter fellow who went and offered meat and unbelievable tamasic stuff to the shiva linga.

Then that fellow who crushed his own child doing some chores fully immersed in bhakti.

Or a Gandhi who full of some spiritual zeal wants to give away loads of money from India to Pakistan during partition negotiations. Or that he asked women to sleep naked around him? Or didn’t give his wife a little bit of painkiller during her painful death?

So what do we do with these ridiculous twats? Not only do they cause trouble to others. They even turn a lot of people away from “spirituality”.

Genuine spiritual folk would turn sceptics. Sceptics would turn scoffers. Scoffers will become haters. And so on.

As I had mentioned earlier, imagine what the pious, genuine monk will feel when an Angulimala gets enlightened in a moment. While he/she after years of rigor and “good karma” seems to be nowhere!! 😁

(Angulimala’s story)

What can we do?

We can only cultivate our understanding of this. Become more accepting towards this phenomena because it is so.

In fact, this is one of the reasons I feel Indian lore and culture is brilliant. Because of the innumerable variety of yogis and spiritual folk that our culture paints for us through stories. There are all sorts of yogis – angry ones, happy ones, naked ones, violent ones, misguided ones, gullible ones, egoistic ones….. all sorts.

So, for us all, there is a way. And on the way, we may not necessarily be a socially “good” person. (On similar lines, I had written spirituality is not social service)

However, by and large, all spiritual paths will advocate social goodness and love because that is practically the most sensible path for the masses. The other paths are for the few who may inevitably have to take those ways.

These other paths of violence or anger or hate which are socially harmful are not advocated in any way. However, they may or rather will happen for certain section of people.

Why does it happen?

The way I see it, we are all on an inner journey. Plethora of impressions. Plethora of desires and unfinished debts and ongoing cause and effect stream. Inevitably, we may come to certain crossroads. We need to make certain choices – consciously or unconsciously.

When someone is on a genuinely spiritual path – these crossroads may happen with higher intensity. Because inevitably they are asking for a lot of stuff to get over in their life. And for matters to truly get over – they have to happen with a certain intensity.

Movie break 😉

If you have seen the movie Jab We Met, in order to get over her heartbreak, the heroine Geet had to reach the moment where she calls the boy and abuses him. Basically, an intense anger / emotion has to come out. Then there is a release. As we see later in the movie, she was still not completely “over” him.. but the intense emotion allowed her to get over the stagnating situation she was in.

However, if this same outburst had been 20x (random number) more intense, she may have gotten over the guy completely. She may have even gotten over all guys and been ready to become a roaming ascetic like Akka Mahadevi. If it was 100x more intense then she may simply left her body.

So, spiritual seekers may, depending on their set of karma, experience intense events and emotions in their life. Inevitably, they may become socially conspicuous due to this in the social situation.

While a bhakt like Narsi Mehta who roamed around like a poor, good for nothing fellow may be easier to understand. Definitely, when we think of an Angulimala or a Raavan for that matter, we wonder what the crap. (Yes, Raavan was depicted as a villian in Ramayana, but let’s not forget he was also a great Shiva Bhakt). In fact, so many of the villians in the ancient lore have been great bhakts themselves. So clearly, our ancient lore is telling us that spiritual seekers can easily become twats. So much so, that Gods will come down to vanquish them. Phew. Privilege?

“Don’t judge someone’s spiritual process by their behavior. The spiritual process is beyond the ways of body and mind”

Sadhguru JV

Plus, the flipside,

Look back to some terrible blips we may have done/been and know that in larger picture of spiritual progress it must have played some role… good or bad.

This is why I had said earlier, we shouldn’t regret stuff. Cause we simply don’t know whether a particular event was good or bad in the bigger picture.

Until we are enlightened. After which we could see the various plethora of implications of a particular action and proclaim some judgement on it. Though it might be irrelevant then.

So basically, yes spiritual folk can often be ridiculous twats. But it is most likely only until they get enlightened.

Let’s get back to our sadhana. 😉