Bhakti Yoga

by

Mitch Hall,

Commentary on “Qualifications of Aspirant and Teacher”

by Swami Vivekananda

    As the pioneering teacher of Indian spirituality, Vedanta, and yoga to arrive in the West, beginning at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda left a legacy of many talks on a wide range of important spiritual topics. In the talk under review here, he identified the key qualifications of both the spiritual aspirant and teacher. As a devotee of Bhagavan Ramakrishna, he had direct experience of the practice of bhakti yoga, the path of love and devotion.

    For the spiritual aspirant, Vivekananda emphasized three primary qualifications, “purity, a real thirst after knowledge, and perseverance” (Vivekananda, pp. 28-29). He noted that, “none of us can get anything other than what we fix our hearts upon” (p. 29), and he saw the third qualification as “a struggle that may have to go on for hundreds of lifetimes” (p. 29).

    As for the teacher’s qualifications, he specified, in words reminiscent of a teaching from the Christian apostle Paul, that, “it is the knowledge of the spirit of the scriptures alone that constitutes the true religious teacher. Erudition and exegesis of scriptures were compared to being in a mango orchard and analyzing diverse features of the trees. By contrast, true spirituality was a simple matter of eating the fruit.

    The second qualification of a legitimate spiritual teacher, according to Vivekananda, is “sinlessness,” which he described as “purity of heart and soul” (p. 32). He envisioned the transmission of spiritual knowledge as a resonance phenomenon: “there must be the worthy vibration of spirituality in the mind of the teacher, so that it may be sympathetically conveyed to the mind of the taught” (p. 32). This perspective is consonant with recent neurobiological research findings about the direct, nonverbal, unconscious resonance that occurs between the right limbic hemispheres of a therapist and a client (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2000; Schore, 2003) and is fundamentally operative in the client’s emotional healing and learning process. It signifies that the therapist’s level of emotional health sets a limit for what the client may achieve through the mediation of this relationship. Vivekananda’s position on the sympathetic conveyance of the spiritual vibration is similar to Plato’s emphasis in his seventh epistle on the importance of a close, sustained association between teacher and student so that the spirit of philosophy could be transmitted.

    A third qualification for a spiritual teacher is that, “the teacher must not teach with any ulterior selfish motive--for money, name, or fame” because “the only medium through which spiritual force can be transmitted is love” (p. 33).  For Vivekananda, “religion is the highest glory of man” (p. 31). Therefore, the perversion of religion by a teacher with impure motives leads to “the great danger that, if he cannot convey goodness to your heart, he may convey wickedness” (p. 33).

    Many cases of serious harm caused by supposed spiritual and religious teachers come to mind in support of the importance of  this warning that Vivekananda wisely gave. The news media have publicized the tragedies resulting from gullible people following such sociopathic, necrophilic religious leaders as Jim Jones of the People’s Temple and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. The Catholic church in many countries has been beset by scandals involving coverups about priestly pedophiles who preyed mostly, although not exclusively, upon young boys.

    Personally, I knew, while she was growing up, an idealistic, intelligent girl, both of whose parents were sincere spiritual aspirants and meditation teachers. After graduating from college, this girl, by then a young woman, went to India to the ashram of her mother’s lineage. While at the ashram, the girl was raped by the young guru who, along with his sister, had been appointed to the leadership of the lineage upon the death of their internationally famed meditation teacher. That teacher had himself also been involved in scandalous behavior, according to press reports.

    I also personally knew in 1970 former followers of one of the most articulate, prolific, famed, widely quoted, and revered meditation teachers of the past half-century, whom I also met and visited in his home of the time. These followers were from the same country as this teacher, of worldwide renown to this day, and they had lived in spiritual community in the same house with him. When they raised questions about possible improprieties in his handling of charitable donations, this supposed spiritual master became enraged and placed a curse on the unborn baby in the womb of the wife of the lay leader of this spiritual community. He pronounced the wish that she give birth to a monster. When I spoke with her a few years later, she trembled and cried while telling the story of her shock and disillusionment. Sadly, it appeared that her young son had some sort of developmental disorder involving repetitive rocking motions and frequently falling and bruising his head. Vivekananda’s caution, “if he cannot convey goodness to your heart, he may convey wickedness,” is trenchantly relevant to these examples.

    For Vivekananda, the teacher plays the role of “eye-opener” for what lies within the aspirant’s soul already since “nothing can impart to a man a single grain of truth unless he has the undeveloped germs of it in himself (p. 34). He compared the relationship between spiritual teacher and aspirant as that between “an ancestor and his descendant” (p. 34). He believed that “without faith, humility, submission, and veneration in our hearts toward our religious teacher, there cannot be any growth of religion in us” (p. 34). Because religion “cannot be bought, nor can it be acquired from books,” he enjoined aspirants that “when that divinely appointed teacher comes, serve him with childlike confidence and simplicity, freely open your heart to his influence, and see in him God manifested” (pp. 35-36).

    In view of the above-cited examples of spiritual and religious teachers who abused their power over followers and caused harm, I am uncomfortable with Vivekananda’s call for spiritual aspirants to regress to a state of childlike dependence in relation to a spiritual teacher whom they believe to have the qualifications he identified. This appears to me to be unhealthy for both the aspirant and the teacher alike. When I attended a lecture by the Dalai Lama several years ago at Middlebury College, I found it refreshing to hear him chuckle while commenting that many people may have come in the hope that he could do something for them. He said he could do nothing for anyone in the audience, that we each needed to depend upon our own practice and the development of loving-kindness, compassion, and insight in our own lives. Similarly, when he was asked about how he would have raised a son, he laughed and said it was fortunate he never had a son because, with his temper, he may have caused harm. I appreciated such warm-hearted authenticity and humility. Personally, I do not feel it is salutary to imagine “God manifested” in any individual spiritual teacher. We are all human and therefore have our foibles, at the very least, no matter who we are. Nonetheless, the divine qualities of “truth, goodness, and beauty” to which Vivekananda alludes as the final words of this talk (p.36) may be celebrated with thankfulness wherever they appear.     



References

Lewis, T., Amini, F., & Lannon, R. (2000). A general theory of love. New York: Vintage Books.



Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.



Swami Vivekananda. (2008). Bhakti-yoga: The yoga of love and devotion (Twenty-ninth Impression). Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama.