In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Svoboda talks about the concept of “Aghora,” and how it relates to the spiritual path.

My mentor, for his own purposes, would sometimes refer to himself as the Aghori Vimalananda. An Aghori is a practitioner of Aghora. Ghora in Sanskrit means terrible, terrifying, or unendurable, and Aghora means the negation of that because, generally speaking, the prefix a negates things in Sanskrit.

Aghora means a way of life, a set of practices that encourage a person to move from experiencing what human beings normally think of as unpleasant, undesirable, dangerous, frightening, horrifying, disgusting, and so on, and to become completely indifferent to that sort of thing.

This is why Vimalananda used to say that, for a good Aghori, there is ultimately no difference between water from the River Ganga, which many people regard as the most purifying thing in the world, and excrement, which I think we can all agree is an extremely impure thing that often causes other things to become impure. If a person is a serious Aghori, that person will have transformed his or her internal environment to such a degree that he or she could drink Ganges water or eat excrement and have exactly the same effect inside the system.

The faculty of discernment or discrimination is controlled by the fire element, and we decide whether something is desirable or undesirable with the help of the fire element. When the fire element has been completely transformed in the body, it can reach a point where it has no need to discern.

If the fire element in your organism has been developed to such a degree that you can digest anything – as was the case with Vimalananda’s guru, his Junior Guru Maharaj, whom I saw many times eating tobacco, not just spitting it out but eating and swallowing it – then the organism has been transformed. He had been able to transform his organism so that he could eat a deadly poison and have it benefit him.

That is the kind of internal alchemy an Aghori is searching for, but Aghoris do not limit themselves just to substances. They expose themselves to all kinds of activities. Anything that would ordinarily cause the organism to recoil in fear or resist out of disgust is something the Aghori attempts, at the very least, to be exposed to so that there will be no disturbance of mind when in that situation.

This is one of the important reasons Aghoris put themselves in places such as cremation grounds, śmaśānas, where there is great disturbance, great filth, and great violence happening to the organism, and which are regarded as extremely inauspicious places. The Aghori goes there to try to experience that reality fully and not be disturbed by the reality of death, toward which we are all headed, but instead to use that reality to assist the movement of awareness toward the One that is not limited by any qualities whatsoever.