Acharya Prashant: We seem to have romantic fantasies even in spirituality. We have been fed a lot of spiritual notions it seems. We carry images, rather long videos, of how a really spiritual person is like. Steady, firm, unwavering, unshaking, doing the right thing without the least trace of discomposure, fantastic, heroic, super heroic… That’s what we want—superhero movies! Juvenile, so very juvenile.
What’s your take on a spiritual master? Some kind of a Batman, able to conquer everybody without getting even the slightest bruise? That’s what you find in superhero movies, right? All the bad ones of the world are standing against your superhero, and they are carrying AK-47s, machine guns, Sten guns, Tommy Guns, and a few nuclear reactors. One or two bombs won’t suffice, so they have brought along a dozen reactors and uranium and plutonium enrichment plants as well, so that bombs can be delivered in real time!
And then, your stud, without so much as blinking his eyes, just whistles and blows them away. That’s what the movies have fed you, right? And either willingly or subconsciously you have extrapolated the same story to the spiritual domain.
How does the parallel scene look like in the spiritual domain? Here is your realized master, and in front of him are standing all the bad chaps: kāma, krodha, mātha, moha, lobha, māyā, mātsarya, bhaya, and they are carrying all the destructive weapons possible: property, sex, allurement, prestige. Those are the nuclear weapons, you see, to destroy you internally.
