In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Robert Svoboda explores what Aghora really teaches.

Vimalananda used to say frequently the end can never justify the means the end is the means. Whatever means you use to get to an end is going to determine your end because of the law of karma. Now, what a lot of people have concluded by thinking in these terms is that the end of performing Agorha sadhana is that you should be living in the Shan in the cremation grounds, and that’s where you should be when the reality is that agorha is not about the cremation ground per se.

Agorha is all about, A-gorha anything that is terrifying to you, anything that seems indigestible unable for you to withstand or comprehend all of those things, you have to find some kind of way of aligning with and the best way to do that is to recognize that you, yourself are going to die and whatever seems like the most critical and the most heart wrenching and the most difficult situation you may be in, in this lifetime, whatever it may be, is going to be limited by the limit of your lifetime.

Your end is the funeral pyre. The end of everything else that is troubling you in this lifetime is the funeral empire. So the point of being in a cremation ground is to recognize, number one, that you’re gonna die, and number two, that everything that seems so important to you is not going to be important at the end.

At the end, one thing is gonna be important and that what direction you’re going in so nowadays, if I look on YouTube, for example, and I happen to search for Agorha I see all kinds of guys wearing a garland of skulls, and then they’re sitting around and they’re talking about this, and they’re talking about that, and they’re playing the part. Maybe some of them are serious Gorhi but they’re still playing the part of being an Aghori. What’s really going to be the test for them is going to be the test of fame.

For example, all of this is going to go out on YouTube. People are gonna come looking for them, and then those people’s karmas, as they interact with those people, are gonna start affecting them. And then how is that going to be so the cremation ground is a means. It’s not an end, but it should work in the direction of determining the end and what end should it be determining that you internalize the cremation ground. There’s a movie that I saw probably almost 40, 40, 30, 40 years ago called The Deceivers, a Merchant Ivory film starring Pierce Brosnan and Saeed Jaffery and at one point say, Jaffery says to Pierce Brosnan.

Who is a, a British officer trying to infiltrate the tugs. He talks about how if you eat the sacred gord, the sacred jaggery, you’re going to move into that you’re going to expose yourself to the world, the world of Kali. And at some point in the movie, Pierce Brosnan does that, and then he becomes connected to that world. And at one point in that movie, what they say is because of love for you, oh Kali, I have made my heart a cremation ground.

This is what the purpose of Agorha is, not to sit in the cremation ground and show off and drink cheap liquor and pretend to be some kind of impressive yogi. The point is to internalize that so that you recognize that the entire world is a flame. Everything you see is being resolved into something else. Everything you see has an end already existing for it, and that thing is just moving in the direction of that end. And you want that cremation ground not to be external to you.

You want that cremation ground always to be inside. In your heart, and you want to always be on that pyre releasing everything that you think is part of you in the direction of who your ishta devata, who your guru, whoever it is, that is the direction you want to go in you’re relinquishing everything in the direction of that reality.