Best Of

Lately I have been wondering whether reading about spirituality actually helps you in any way. Over the last fifteen years I have been reading almost exclusively about spirituality — I dropped almost all tv, the news, games, magazines and papers, fiction — and have covered many authors, from Osho to Thich Nhat Hanh to Sogyal Rinpoche to Tony Parsons. And while many things fell away in the beginning, over the last five years I don’t feel changed or closer to the further shore.

I feel a bit like the Swami in this story…

“A swami came to visit me. He was eighty years old and had quite a few followers. He came into satsang and said to me, please don’t talk to me about Yoga, I have read all the books and know all of that. So I said, that’s fine, I won’t talk about Yoga. But what about all the other things you’ve brought with you, all those other methods and techniques? Let me help you carry them outside, then you can come in again without them. So I helped him to the door, and he stood outside for maybe five minutes, turning this way and that. Then he came in and said, it’s amazing. Later one of his students came to me and asked, what have you done to the swami? He has rejected all dharma’s.”
— H. W. L. Poonja

I have said in the past that spiritual books help you keep a certain spiritual focus. That may be true in the beginning of your journey, but I am not so sure whether it is helpful once you’ve reached a certain ripeness.

It’s as if all the methods in the books don’t really help beyond a certain point, and lately I have just felt moved by the YouTube videos of Vladimir of the ‘Increasing Frequency’ channel. These are a kind of travel vlogs, very heartfelt, in which he visits tempels and pilgrimage places in the mountains of India and Nepal. In sympathy with him I have started taking cold showers first thing in the morning, and the first dip of my head under the cold stream gives me a kind of sense of not-being.

Maybe I will start paying more attention to that. “Enter Zen from there.”