I was dubious whether the same space where I work, shop and dodge advertisements could hold such power, but I dedicated myself to the practice anyway. At the end of the program, the other remote attendees and I experienced a kind of spiritual transmission en masse and over Wi-Fi.
The internet can be a treadmill of spiritual seeking, just as it is for medical diagnosis, but this process felt unexpected, like arriving at something real. Nevertheless, when the ritual ended, the reverie began to dissolve. I closed the Isha window and there was my desktop, speckled with bills and other icons of anxiety. Is the spiritual threshold just an open tab, hiding an inbox of spam? Or was I just a sucker? Sadhguru had me right where he wanted me: confused.
I continued the practice daily with careful precision and after months, felt a little better, as I often have with meditation. I kept on for a year, adding more advanced Isha practices, but felt none of the bliss described in so many Reddit testimonials. Furthermore, problems arose in relation to this work: neurological, muscular and psychological, and I began to feel that the training had not prepared me for these possibilities. Sadhguru warns of the dangers of yoga gone wrong, and yet he offers these practices to anyone able to pay.
While I had initially asked whether spiritual transmission could occur online, I now wondered whether it should. Sadhguru describes many of the Isha practices as “occult,” a controversial word associated with esoteric traditions like tantra in the East and Theosophy in the West. Sadhguru told me the occult is “a slightly more advanced technology” that you can use to develop seemingly supernatural skills. These methods go far beyond the postures of a yoga class and reprogram the mental, spiritual and energetic systems of the body, a transformation for which Westerners can be unprepared.
Online, spirituality and meditation are often proclaimed as tools for success. But intensive spiritual practice is mysterious and unpredictable and may not always lead to society’s ideas of self-improvement. By definition, the immaterial realm obeys different laws from the material world, and our new technology is not equipped to contain it. In fact, spirituality’s great value to humanity may actually lie in its immortal resistance to the trends of culture. The internet puts social media and therapy apps on the same plane. It anticipates our desires and convinces us that all knowledge is just a click away. But as any guru will tell you, mystical truths are not information, and inner work is always inconvenient.
Source photographs for illustration above: Sujit Jaiswal/A.F.P., via Getty Images
