The Hallmark of Perfect Spirituality

Spiritual life starts with Sadhana - regulated practices under the guidance of an authentic spiritual teacher for purifying the mind and increasing our attachment to the Supreme. In it's maturity, spiritual life goes beyond regulations into the realm of constant spontaneous engagement. Regulation is required to deliberately engage the mind in spiritual ways when the mind is not completely spiritualised. But when the mind is fully attached to the supreme, it never wanders into non-spiritual or anti-spiritual thoughts.

Ironically, the spiritually perfect people never shun their regulations thinking that they have gone beyond them and become perfect. This is because spiritual perfection is symptomised by extreme humility where one thinks oneself as the most incompetent spiritualist.

Being humble, the true spiritualist has eternal gratitude for the spiritual master and continues to follow the regulations laid down by him, never thinking that he can ever go beyond them. This also sets the proper example for others.

On the other hand, an imperfect spiritualist falls prey to his mind and ego's desires to become perfect and starts thinking that he has become perfect. So he artificially leaves spiritual regulations and starts living by the dictations of the mind thinking himself to be beyond regulations. This causes other immature people to shun regulations as well and lead an arbitrary lifestyle falsely thinking that it is spiritual.

The most fundamental and essential regulation of spiritual life is to chant the Holy Names of God under the guidance of an authentic spiritual teacher. By garnering all our humility, we should take time out, sit at one place, and daily chant the Holy Names on a rosary (chanting beads) a fixed minimum number of times. During chanting, we should not let our mind wander to anything else. Taking exclusive time out daily for chanting and chanting specifically on beads sitting at one place as instructed by the spiritual teacher are expressions of desire to become a humble servant of the Holy Name. Our spiritual advancement and sustenance depends almost wholly on our sincerity and humility in chanting the Holy Names.

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

In this world, spiritual perfection is not about being regulation-less. The mark of a true spiritualist is that he not only follows spiritual practices sincerely, but also dedicates his life to the spiritual upliftment of all others. This spontaneous intense compassion for others, in the specific form of teaching spiritual life to others or setting the perfect example of humility, merely as an instrument of the spiritual teacher and God, is the hallmark of a perfect spiritualist.