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Be Sensible
Some people rationalize that Swami will protect them from their mistakes and so they do not need to pay much aention to careful discernment. It is true that Swami protects us, but he also allows us to learn the hard way to develop a refined conscience. It is extremely dangerous to relinquish exercising our own discrimination when reading signs, yet it is surprising how many devotees make this error. Such dangerous beliefs must be dropped.
I treated one seeker, a young man, who practiced seeing special meaning in outer signs and then acted bizarrely upon what he thought was the meaning of these signs. For instance, upon seeing a dog he thought, “Swami is telling me not to be like a dog,” and he decided to fast and in this way overcome animal qualities. He became weak from not eating. Then he saw a reflection of the sun in a well and decided that he should sit in direct sunlight all day without moving. Next he began to think that stones in the road were stars in the cosmos and that the way he walked around them would control the movement of cosmic events.
I must emphasize that this young man had never shown signs of psychiatric illness prior to coming to India and had been successful at school and work when at home. However, by misinterpreting signs and not using good, grounded judgment, he quickly became wildly psychotic. He tore off his clothes, yelled, and thrashed about in public until the police had to restrain him. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital and soon stabilized aer being medicated. His eating and sleeping were normalized, and he was encouraged to use common sense and good discrimination, and to give up reading signs.
We must be wary of relinquishing discrimination in favor of aachment to strange and fanatic ideas and behaviors. Our spiritual development rests on the strengthening and refining of our conscience and mind.
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