A Facebook Skirmish

Well, frankly speaking I once eyed her with the typical utilitarian artistry of a man of literature who thinks the motive behind ‘eyeing her’ is different but in reality it’s just the same with every man. We the different kinds of men beat the bush in various ways to woo a woman. And she replied, or responded, in the typical thoughtful grooves of a woman trying to surpass all that makes us mean and dirty, that is, spirituality. So you have to handle her on her own pitch.

One feels lonely even in the ambient corridors of spirituality. Be it spiritualist or materialist, all of us have this deep sense of incompleteness that forces us to connect with people. Social networking offers a great avenue to connect with hundreds even thousands of people. We put up hysterically screeching profiles, looking for refreshing drizzle of the best of the lot connections, present ourselves as verily special. But when we meet face to face, almost all of us turn out to be scarcely somethings. Relationships suddenly bloom and quickly die. Then disappointments follow. Blame games pour. In the virtual world it’s the super-humanity that rules.

We become friends on Facebook and I DM her and present my extended best variant that may suit her spiritual taste. I have read enough books on spirituality to talk meaningfully to any full-time sadhak on the path. There is no end to prattle about the innermost innumerable conjectures about the unknown. The material talk may have its end but the invisible has no limits. God’s merciful, gracious clairvoyance showers enough inspiration on us to give a nice exercise to our tongue about talks and discourses regarding the metaphysical elements.

Drawn by the mystic whispers of the East, she was here to detain the worldly desires forever. She arrived here about a decade and half back, landing in the arms of a gaily chiming India as a doctoral student of the teachings of a prominent saint mystic of ancient India. A cantering youth, bashfully spontaneous, possessing vague visions and little-little illuminations in her green eyes. A lyrical youth ready to face the charming, fresh vicissitudes of life in India and its fabled mysticism. She headed for a town in Haryana where the saint’s mutth was situated. They showered the most cordial spiritual wherewithal upon her. The mutth secretary arranged her stay at a nearby dharamshala. She looked a shining and mystifying goddess.

The dharamshala manager was brightly talkative outside and darkly silent inside. Her first night in India looked set for a good start, after the day full of warm welcome and cordial smiles. The weather had caught wintry wheels and the clean bed bore a nice light blanket. The kind manager ensured that she got the best room and the best bedding at the charity lodge. Maybe he meant it for himself also. As the night grew darker and more silent, the bustling loquacity in the manager scampered away and dark silence took hold of him. He was drunk. She was startled as he tried to break the door to give her company in the bed. She was scared beyond imagination. The door at least was what it looked, very strong. She was safe. He left throwing cuss words. She knew India offered the best and the worst side by side. There was no middle way.

In her early forties now, she had lines of age and spiritual labor on her face. India and Indianness had hilarious, tragic, soothing, bruising rhythms. She fell in love with India. A kind of Indophile addiction, a love and hate relationship side by side; strong enough not to allow her to get back to her east European country and stingy enough to keep her pained and challenged in many ways.

She met this Gujarati man at an ashram. An interesting man: a spiritual braggart, toing and froing between materialism and spiritualism, churned by contrary currents; an exotic oriental contradictory checker-work. He played well and before she knew he had won the game. In a flashing metamorphosis she was his wife now. It’s an enormously transient world, a fleeting stage. Characters, scenes, lights, shades keep on changing.

The marriage was convenient at both ends. She needed it on papers to get extended visa rights to stay in India as the spouse of an Indian citizen. Maybe that was her primary reason to fall in this secondary love to keep her primary love of India and its spirituality. He of course, like any other Indian, grabbed his chances of having a white woman as a sexual partner, the fulfillment of age-long fantasies founded by the strong power-colors of porn movies coming from the West. Her long-sustained lassitude, a spiritual languor, a kind of its own sedative without taking any substance of abuse, would have kept traversing across various ashrams, Himalayas and sea-sides in India. But one fact stood as a salacious breach in the paragraph of their story. She could never feel in the safe vaults of matrimony, either document wise or emotion wise. She was on a dicey wicket. The paper of course kept renewing her visa and maybe that was the basic reason she digested the fact that she was the part of bigamy, a second unknown invisible wife. He was already married when he enticed her into marriage.

So she would never be able to go to her house to which she was entitled. His first wife and kids were the biggest boundary she ever faced. She was scared of them. So for the higher purpose in life she accepted to be his keepsake. She stayed at ashrams. He paid off and on, mostly as a kind of return for satisfying his body’s requirement, the rest she earned as a translator. Most importantly the marriage certificate allowed her to stay in India. Then over a period of time she was almost independent managing her own budget through translations and other work while following her path of spirituality. Whenever he caught up with her, which was rare these days, she had to let him in because on papers he was still the husband.

All this had augmented the bitterness that she was running away from her native place. She was full of satire and sometimes even scorn for the Indians in general; rightly so, given her bitter experience of Indian matrimony. But then she would not leave India either. ‘It’s my karma to go through all this here!’ she said resignedly once when I raised the topic of leaving India and stay with her own people.

We talked over phone a few times, had some comments on each other’s status and posts on the social media. I also had been dumped by my highly glamorous girlfriend recently and was looking for some balm on my heart. Maybe the women on the spiritual path will be stable and big-hearted enough to let me shed a few tears in their arms, I thought. So I expressed willingness to meet. She was equally eager for the very same. She invited me to meet her at Pune. But I couldn’t go. Then she explored the possibility of spending some time in the Himalayas. Again to my bad luck I wasn’t free, or maybe I didn’t put up a full try because I was thoroughly scalded by the fire of break-up and was just trying to get involved with a women, believing a woman’s place is filled by a woman only, just on the principle of it.

There were a few other very nice and charming women who offered to put poultice on my bruised heart. But after interacting with them I found that they were all looking to ‘receive’ some dose of love and material support to heal their own wounds. Two broken people hardly make a good match. Moreover, I somehow liked the sweet pain of lost love instead of a fresh dose of love in hand. She recognized this half-heartedness. To make a point that it’s very easy to get handsome, long-haired spiritual type guys in India, she posted pictures of her new partner. A man would always feel jealous.

Then she got busy with the new shape and size of her life. I got even busier with a burnt heart that strangely seemed to fuel my creativity. So we were mere Facebook friends now. Hardly any WhatsApp messages these days. And with all the doors closed to anything beyond the bracket of FB friends, we could now afford to hurl naked opinions on each other without caring for any diplomatic courtesy.

I had put up the link for a spiritual workshop arranged by an eminent spiritual master on my wall.

‘Oh… I think you need to be careful with promoting this guy!’ she wrote on my wall.

‘Let me be vigilant about my own mind and save it from judging a fellow traveler on the path,’ I shot back.

‘Yes, that should also work. But doesn’t some kind of judgment naturally precede our decision to promote something?’ she asked, turning me a judgmental guy in one stroke. 

Then I used my full ego-driven pen and verbosity to pour a lecture in whats and whys of judgment: ‘Yes, that’s positive, constructive judgment, which opens one to further possibilities. It’s far more suitable to help one reach nonjudgmental stage. Negative judgment on the other hand is driven by an emotion of discomfort and dislike, a kind of reaction that somehow limits one to further possibilities of equanimity of mind. In any case you are free to be careful of the ‘guy’. In India we have faith. And as the concerned spiritual master himself says: “How to decide whether a guru is real or fake? In your current dimension and plain of existence, it is impossible to know a real one from the false. The nagging doubts and apprehensions will always come to haunt your logic. Misgivings will infect your mind until you have developed and evolved a faultless and profound faith. A type of unwavering trust in which it hardly matters whether the guru is a swindler or a pure enlightened one. In this state, irrespective of whatever happens, your trust in your guru is unshakable even if there are opposing proofs. Unless you evolve into this kind of deep state, the qualms and distrustful conclusions will continue rocking the boat of your spirituality. Please enlighten me, even if the spiritual master is a thoroughly rascally man, how will you even come to know about it? Because your own benchmark, standards and parameters of judgment and evaluation are incorrect and fake in themselves. You possess a fragile stick. Tell me, how will you even break the stone of untruth, lies and fibs in others? It’s a merely a matter of either you feel calm and restful with the guru or you feel restless, apprehensive, suspicious and insecure. That’s all that you have in this matter. You cannot just formulate an outlook about it. Unsurprisingly there are so many religious heads and gurus, of all types sham, semi-sham, genuine, semi-genuine who thrive and abound in this vast land of faith and spirituality where the masses possess a tendency to believe. So once again I ask the question, how will you know whether a guru is fake or real?” So dear spiritualist, kindly reply to his query, reply to your own self because your own self has created a doubt. It’s about you, not him. It has nothing to do with him. It’s your doubt, your judgment poured by your own self in the form of a query, whether he is true or fake.’

My thesis had the desired effect. She didn’t reply to this; because there wasn’t anything to reply. My ego felt triumphant. She always sounded a very confident woman; her east European pronunciation, carried on a louder pitch, always looked to overwrite what the other person was saying. I think she was too eager to nail the point and present the ultimate truth herself. Her letting off won’t placate my ego still looking for more wordy victories. So I try to nail down absolute truth on my wall. I was sure that it would niggle her and she will react. So here I go:

‘Skepticism, coming in the garb of our logical and analytical skills, very easily—even before we realize—changes into cynicism, moodiness, being negatively judgmental. It then feeds the bitterness and restlessness inside, very potent tools for sustaining the sweet addiction to ego. I would say even blind faith in fake gurus on the spiritual path, in comparison to the habit of having doubts born of past life experiences, phobias and insecurities, is far more effective on the spiritual path. No wonder, as per the Indian tradition of Bhakti Yoga based on unquestioning faith, so many unquestioning, illiterate, poor people—even those who followed the so-called fake gurus—crossed the stream and reached the bank of self-realization. Because it’s always about ‘your’ faith and never about the object of your faith.  One’s faith makes her, not the object of faith.’

It was meant for her. Me the ever-existent egotist knew the little guy ego in her will surely put her on the edge and accept this challenge to nullify my claim to truth by her counter punch. She came in shining armor to slay my irrational euphemism and whimsies. Maybe she had just come out of meditation and gave a solid punch that shattered my wall for some moments.

She wrote: ‘There is a difference between skepticism and discernment, right understanding - viveka. And as sadhaka you are supposed to use it as “viveka is considered to be one of the four qualities necessary for a spiritual aspirant”. Having blind faith will lead you to nowhere. Or more precisely, it will lead you to manipulators and lies, which is opposite to Truth. You say “no wonder, as per the Indian tradition of Bhakti Yoga based on unquestioning faith”, this is not truth, as you will see from few pages from Vivekananda’s Bhakti Yoga I will share in next few comments. It can give you also some “template” how to discern real guru from fake one. Apparently there were many fake gurus in Vivekananda’s time as well. Do you really think the situation has improved since then?’

She then forwards twenty pages from Great Vivekananda’s master work. A bombardment, a fiendishly fierce attack of holy words quoted from the books of one of modern India’s prominent spiritual masters. My thorny earthworks fell flat. My creaking cart and rudimentary bow and wooden arrows decimated by her shiny scriptural chariot with a medium-sized catapulter attached to it. What would I even say against the great man’s words? That would be like an earthworm picking up weapons to fight a python. I changed tactics and shifted pitch to fight as a shameless escapist, a kind of guerilla warfare.

Here I go: ‘By the way I prefer to read the chronicles of blind followers. They are interesting. Super-words aren’t for me. Sorry I will be skipping all these pages you have forwarded with a bruised agitated ego. I feel better with blind faith like most of we Indians do.’

She knew by evading the holy words I had robbed her any chance of victory by logic: ‘Alright, as you were asking me for my view in one of your previous posts and now you don’t feel like reading it. I don’t think we can have any fruitful discussion. So I would stop it here as your comments are passive and aggressive anyway and I don’t enjoy this kind of energy in discussions anymore. Have a joyful life.’

I knew I had lost. But I won’t accept her win and gave a parting shot like a soldier does aimlessly before hitting dust. I wrote:

‘Exactly the same feeling here...as Indians we have a rich tradition of faith, which we call blind faith in the absence of exact words. But the main thing is bhaav. And this bhaav is so strong that even when we don’t follow a particular guru still we would spare calling that guru as “that guy” and warn others about him. You should know he has at least planted millions of trees, saved soil and millions carry a smile on his account with full blind faith. And what do we novices like you and me do? We just debate. I don’t know about you but I have planted just hundreds of trees out of which just a dozen survive. Sadhguru is an institution maker and has changed the lives of millions for the better and his so-called blind followers (in your lingo) have planted millions of trees. That’s sufficient for me to salute him and touch his feet. I am not a spiritual judge like certain people who would seek the certificate of authenticity. I primarily demand questions from my own self. When I get negatively judgmental of someone, I ask myself why I do so. I always had it in mind. I have seen some of your sarcastic words about the Indian character in general. It shows certain complexes, certain bitterness. I think we talked a few times on phone and I felt very negative strains in you, a kind of ego that wants to cut the other person’s words to prove your point. Why I’m so shamelessly frank? Naked opinions are far better than any polished and pampering words. At least think about it, why you create such an impression. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has given you such a feedback. These words aren’t to hurt but to remind you that ultimately it’s only about one’s own self. It’s not about fake or real gurus, not about quotable holy words. Main thing is why we negatively judge. Just mere pious sounding word “viveka” won’t be sufficient to ignore all these negativities in the self that once again hide behind such nice words. As concerns my aggressive words, our gurus used to beat us here in India. Aggression in the matters of gurus teaching the students, as such, is not as catastrophic word here as it might be in your part. We have a tradition of sages who kicked, pulled ears, shouted and even slapped to bring the errant kids onto the path when required. Our village teachers in school pounded like we were bulls. And believe me there is no ill-will. We smile and touch their feet when we meet. Now only an Indian can relate to this. Your laws in your country will find it a jailable offence. So any difference that you feel, after reading this, is born of cultural difference. Maybe you cannot relate to it the way Indians will, so no hard feelings. It’s a little nudge at the ego only. Feel its pulse and have a joyful life.’

And even the mere FB friend status vanished. A few kind-hearted Indians liked my post to show solidarity with me. Still kinder ones read the trail of comments and liked and loved my last comment taking it as their fellow Indian’s victory. I don’t know about her but I feel it that I stand thoroughly vanquished by my own ego. If not for the ego why would one unnecessarily write such long lectures on the FB wall?