In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores how to know whether you are progressing in your spiritual practice, or sadhana.
The first thing you should notice is that if you are doing a spiritual practice that is actually doing something useful for you, it should be becoming more like second nature. There should be a certain amount of muscle memory. You should sit down in your usual place, in your usual meditative posture, perhaps with your usual incense, and whatever it is that you may be reciting or visualizing.
The more that you do that, the more it should assist you in becoming focused, calming your mind, and entering into a state of mind that supports your practice and helps you align with the supreme reality. That is the number one thing that should happen.
The number two thing that should happen is that your life should become more difficult. But you may say, “I am doing good things. I am being a spiritual person. My life should become easier.”
No, that is not what should happen. And why should that not happen? It should not happen because you are beginning to work through the various karmas that have accumulated.
My mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, used to say that when we talk about enlightenment, what this really means is that you are lightening yourself of the burden of the karmas that are obstructing your perspective on reality. The lighter that burden becomes, the clearer things become.
But to go through that process encourages the things that you have to experience, and according to Lord Saturn, you have no alternative but to experience them. You are going to start experiencing them more and more.
This is what our Guru Maharaj was known for. People would come to Vimalananda and say, “I want to meet your Guru Maharaj.” He would say, “Only do that if you want your life to go to hell.” Because Guru Maharaj will make sure that all of your bad karmas come out first, so you can deal with them, and then you will be better off.
So be prepared for that. Do not assume that because you start reciting something or singing some bhajan, that your life is going to become easy. It will eventually become easier, but it will become easier in the sense that you will gain greater equanimity.
You will gain an awareness of how, and this is something that I have worked my way through life to understand, that because I am by nature a very irritable person, it takes a lot of energy to be irritable.
As you make spiritual progress, you realize, why should I use energy to be irritable, to react, and to do all these other things, when in fact I could use that same energy to keep myself in a place of equanimity?
One of the definitions that Bhagavan Sri Krishna gives in the Bhagavad Gita for yoga is to have a condition of samatha, a condition of equanimity.
No matter what is happening, no matter who you are meeting, and no matter how you are interacting with others, the greater you can maintain your equanimity, the greater progress you have made in your sadhana.
No matter who cuts you off on the freeway, no matter who attempts to scam you, or no matter what kind of situation occurs, the ability to maintain your equanimity is a sign of progress.
In fact, it has been said that as long as you can still be thrown off your balance and lose your equanimity, there are still things that you need to work through.
As you continue your sadhana and spiritual practices, you will also notice that you can clean up many of the negative aspects of your reality and personality. But there will always be something deeply set within you that you will need to continue working on, perhaps indefinitely.
As that tendency becomes reduced, and as you are able to avoid falling into that particular pattern and remain there for less and less time, you will know that you are making progress.