There’s something that always bothered me in New Age spirituality, and that’s the expectation of having a joyride if you’re on the right path. If you’re having bad experiences of any kind, essentially if you’re not in a state of constant euphoria, you’re doing something wrong.

I don’t know who actually came up with this kind of hippy theology, but I have several issues with it.

First, it has no basis in reality. Spirituality isn’t a simple function, like what you have in a pressure cooker and the dependence of pressure within the vessel to duration of exposure of vessel to heat. Unfortunately, some people see it exactly like that: you have exposure of soul to positive forces and there’s an expectation of a gradual increase in spiritual states as a result. This completely ignores the non-linear mechanisms, such as the karmaśayas, or astral/causal larvae in a different terminology. What those things do is lose containment when you raise the energy level of the surrounding spiritual substance, and they release the low-energy content into the main soul-mass, resulting in a profoundly traumatic experience. If one is not prepared for such events and does not possess tools and skills necessary to deal with them in a constructive manner, the result of such a sudden exposure to high spiritual energies might be profoundly negative, putting one in a much worse place than the one he appears to have come from. A thermodynamic analogy would be a system in which you have accumulators of low energy, such as polar ice, and when you increase global temperature, you don’t have a linear temperature rise across the system because what happens is that polar ice breaks, falls into the ocean, is taken by sea currents to the warmer waters, where it melts quickly and lowers the temperature of the surrounding ocean and decreases its salinity, which can produce a collapse of thermohaline circulation and, as a result, a drop in global temperature. That is actually known to have happened historically and is called a Dansgaard-Oeschger event. So, if a realistic physical thermodynamic situation doesn’t match the expectation of linearity based on a super-simplified model of a pressure cooker on a stove, I don’t know why some people thought that human spirituality would. Unfortunately, most people who are into spirituality have very limited understanding of science and as a result their expectations and models of reality are quite naive.

Second, it can seriously traumatize people if their experience doesn’t match what they were led to believe is the norm of spiritual progress. If they expect linear growth of euphoria and what they get is a short period of euphoria followed by very nasty things, they might be completely unprepared and unable to deal with the unpleasant turn of events and the end result might be much worse than it could be if they were given a more realistic set of expectations.

Third, it’s a new invention that completely ignores the experiences of saints. For instance, John of the Cross actually named the unpleasant part of the spiritual path “the dark night of the soul”, and contrary to most beliefs it doesn’t mean “depression”, and it isn’t necessary just outburst of a low-energy astral larva. Sometimes, it is required for a spiritual person to go through certain experiences without assistance from above, because apparently you can’t learn how to solve certain problems if God is carrying the majority of your burden. Sometimes, such “dark nights” can span for decades, during which a saint needs to learn how to remain focused on God without God’s revealed presence, assistance or comfort, through prolonged periods of time. This doesn’t mean that the saint had spiritually fallen; in fact, his actual strength may be vastly greater than that of someone who is apparently euphoric. This can be illustrated with an example of a freight train. It can appear to be slow compared to a car, but if you account for the weight it is pulling, you get a more realistic picture of the power involved. Caitanya, too, talks in volumes about maintaining a loving relationship with God in His absence, when He is not apparent to the bhakta, and about service in separation. Rather than being a state of spiritual downfall, this seems to be part of the process of spiritual maturation, where a shallow ecstatic state gives way to a more profound, complex understanding of things that is not really possible if the shallow but pleasant emotions never have a reason to subside and reveal the underlying structure that needs reconstructive work.

Fourth, I am deeply skeptical of pleasure as a metric of spiritual progress, since that would tend to give credence to an opinion I once heard, that most spiritual seekers happen to be drug addicts that seek a drug-like experience by non-chemical means. If God is a substitute for heroin, how is that form of spirituality different from any addiction to pleasure which is satisfied by pleasure-inducing chemicals? There seems to be a test of sincerity that can explain at least a part of the “dark nights of the soul” – if one seeks God for the pleasure that accompanies the experience, he will be disillusioned by such an experience and will go and seek his pleasures elsewhere. If, however, one is here for wisdom, reality, truth and other more profound aspects of the Divine reality, he will go through the painful part of the path if not gladly, then with acceptance. As men will sometimes go to war together knowing that they will die, so will a saint follow God into the valley of death if need be. The thrill-seeking hippies will go elsewhere, which might contribute to the set of reasons due to which they don’t seem to end up with much to show for, as far as spiritual achievements go.

Spirituality is not a pleasure cruise, where you need but to sample one’s degree of bliss in order to know his progress on the path. Reality doesn’t look like a promotional leaflet of some cult, where you have a bunch of happy idiots faking bliss in order to attract converts. Rather, it seems to be an invitation to bear your cross and follow God to the place of crucifixion. Yes, God is immense pleasure. However, God is also truth and wisdom and clarity and the ability to bear immense loads and survive great evils and end up wiser and deeper than before. Learning God isn’t a path from lesser to greater bliss, it’s a path from lesser to greater existence, during which your entire personality may have to be broken and reconstructed out of better stuff, and that can hurt like bloody hell.

If someone is telling you that it isn’t supposed to hurt and that spiritual pain means you’re doing something wrong, he either doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about or is being deliberately deceptive. If you need to reconstruct a car engine in order to tune it, expectation that it will continue to go faster throughout the tuning process is sheer folly. Not only will it not go faster, it will not go at all because it will be in pieces, because it’s being worked on. It will go faster once it’s reassembled and put back into function on a higher level of capability. It is similar with yoga; during the process of spiritual reconstruction, you can look completely wrecked and in total disarray. You don’t just improve linearly, there are points of significant improvement separated by periods of reconstructive work during which you look and feel like shit. That’s just how it is, and if anyone is telling you otherwise he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.