Faith, Fame and the Fragility of Spiritual Authority
How to Know God? It’s a book by Deepak Chopra that is still sitting on my shelf, weeks after the E-files came to light and rocked the conscience of the world. The initial outrage over what had transpired in those shrouded years is now slowly turning into sickness in the stomach. A vague sense of ennui is also creeping in after repeated exposure to the details of the crime, and it is only a matter of time before history absorbs the horrid episode into its black hole, the way it has done with other modern infractions.
The book brings back memories of a touristy moment from the past, which at that time didn’t carry the wild images it now evokes. A Caribbean cruise to the US Virgin Islands brought me visually in contact with Little Saint James - an island that was previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein. I watched the tiny patch of land from afar amidst the splashing waves and the rainbows they created in the air. All I knew then was that Epstein was a sex offender who had died in prison by suicide. It was all that the rest of the world too was privy to. Today that moment lies etched in my mind as a testament to human depravity that cannot be easily described in words. What unsettles me more than the geography of that island is the radius of influence it concealed. The book on my shelf suddenly becomes an extension of that memory and a reflection of our collective naivety about people we revere. When a man like Deepak Chopra, whose writings on consciousness and transcendence have travelled into millions of homes, including mine, is mentioned in proximity to such barbarity, I am forced to confront a question we rarely ask: do we often mistake the messenger for the message?
As a spiritual seeker for more than two and a half decades now - following scriptures and drawing lessons to navigate this mortal realm - I have come to realise that the men who tend these instructions to us are in no way God. Neither are they God men. They are mere conduits carrying sapient thoughts; people who possess higher intellectual registers than common men. Their philosophies are often gleaned from years of study and not necessarily acquired from an experience of self-actualisation. They are, at best, scholars, and not divine substitutes. That they are not infallible, we must know. Knowing this, we must listen to their spiritual rhetoric with the wisdom to differentiate insight from individual, and charisma from credibility.
I am not sure about the western world, but we Indians have a cultural tendency to deify our spiritual teachers. It is a sentiment we adopted from the very scriptures that the teachers instruct, but how many times have we seen the moral collapse of new-age spiritual figures in our country! How many self-styled God men have been convicted of sexual crimes in the recent past! Deepak Chopra spoke for decades about ways to elevate human consciousness, but he did so from the position of an intellectual and not as a deity from inside a sanctum sanctorum. To place him, or anyone like him, beyond scrutiny would be our error. Undoubtedly, someone whom the world deems a guru carries the responsibility of living by example and leading us to liberation. When his name appears in dubious moral territory, our trust in wise men is irredeemably broken. It also establishes that people who teach us how to know God can also be tempted to tread the path of profanity. Our outrage is justified, but in some ways, the pain we feel comes from our own lack of judgment. The power of discernment should lie with us, like the mythical swan (hamsa) that could separate the milk of virtue from the water of vice.
The writer is a Dubai-based author, columnist, independent journalist and writing coach; views are personal
