External worship does not guarantee enlightenment; what matters is HOW it is done

Om Swami

(from "If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir")

Om Swami: Baba was sitting on the floor, dressed in his black robes. He was wearing the tripundra, a religious mark with three horizontal lines and a small red dot, on his forehead, and his beautiful, matted locks flowed down his back. The door opened and the construction workers came in. They wanted their outstanding wages. Baba and the men had a disagreement over the wages, and he suddenly started hurling abuses at them. I had never seen a sadhu swear and was appalled as the abuses became more graphic and ugly. Trembling in fear, the workers left quickly. I was confused. I didn't know what was more appropriate: to leave when I wasn't asked for or to sit while he was furious.

...Baba never spoke about the successes he had in various sadhanas or if he did complete them all, but he had spent his entire life in nothing but sadhana, except for the last few years when he got caught up in the expansion of his ashram. He had spent eight years in Kamakhya, the foremost tantra peetha, the land of tantric practices. In line with the austerities of hatha yoga, he had also done a number of practices including pancha-agni-dhoona, where the practitioner draws a circle, seats himself in the middle, and lights a fire in the four directions along the circumference of the circle; the fifth fire, the sun, burns above. Baba would do this for forty days during the height of summer from noon until 4 p.m. Pancha-agni-dhoona bestows upon the practitioner complete control over the fire elements in the body.

In the rainy season, Baba practiced jala-vihara, water wandering, during which he simply lived under a tree. In the winter, he did jala-dhara, water flow, by sitting under a leaking pot of ice-cold water. He would sit naked while 108 pots of water would be poured over his head from midnight until 4 a.m. These methods help the seeker gain complete control over the water element in his body. Baba also had done the khadeswari sadhana, where he did not sit down for nine years at a stretch. For more than forty years, he had been on phalahara, a gluten-free diet. Since starting his special diet, he had only drunk water from the Ganga. He was given the title 'tantra samrat', emperor of tantric practices, by the elite congregation of tantriks.

There was not a tantric sadhana in any scripture Baba hadn't done. All in all, his accomplishments were quite impressive. With all this sadhana, though, Baba remained an angry man. Watching him, I learned a powerful lesson: religion and religious rituals and practices do not get rid of the restive tendencies of the mind because it isn't just about practicing ritual or sadhana. What matters is how they are done, and with what intent and sentiment they are performed. Above all, spiritual evolution requires hard work on the self, on one's fears, patterns, and conditioning. External worship does not guarantee one will rise above one's ego or 'negative' states such as anger, hatred, or guilt. In fact, at Baba's ashram, the more religious a devotee seemed, the more rigid, narrow, and egoistic I found a person to be. 

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Vira Chandra: 

vīryaṁ vinā yathā ṣaṇṭhastasyāpyastyatha vā balam |

mṛtadeha iveyaṁ syād bāhyāntaḥ parikalpanā  ||  (Tantraloka 5.158)

"Just was without virility a man is impotent, and without life the body is dead, so is the external worship (without inner spiritual feeling)."