When Fanaticism Is Sold as Courage

 

A narrow alley in Varanasi at dawn, a shrine of Ganesha on the wall and a lone figure walking away into the light — symbol of leaving the structure while keeping the sacred.

The Boast of “Vīra-sādhana”

Every generation of seekers produces its own romance about danger.
In one era it is the mountain cave or the desert hermitage; in another, the rhetoric of breaking taboos and living “on the edge.”
Within modern esoteric subcultures this romance often takes a new form:
the claim that a true mystic must at least once become a sectarian — that genuine depth requires passing through the furnace of fanatic devotion.

The words sound audacious, even liberating.
They flatter both the speaker and the listener.
For the teacher who utters them, they transform a compromising past into a mark of initiation: the humiliations and excesses of cultic life are retold as deliberate tests, endured with the bravery of a tantric hero.
For the audience, the phrase promises shortcut access to the intensity of faith without admitting its cost.
The subtext whispers that only those who have burned in absolute belonging can later claim the freedom of enlightenment.
It is an elegant way of turning collapse into credential.

Such declarations carry a certain voltage when heard for the first time.
They smell of courage and non-conformity, of refusal to remain tepid.
Yet the glamour dissolves as soon as one looks closely.
To call fanatic immersion vīra-sādhana — heroic practice — is to confuse proximity to delusion with transcendence of it.
It aestheticizes loss of self-control and sanctifies the very mechanisms that destroy discernment.
Instead of revering sobriety, it worships intoxication; instead of humility, spectacle.

Behind the rhetoric of bravery hides a more prosaic need: to rescue personal authority from the wreckage of history.
When the guru or mystic who once belonged to a cult later boasts, “I entered and emerged untouched,” the subtext is self-protection.
He speaks not to illuminate delusion but to ensure that shame never sticks to him.
It is a narrative that allows him to stand on the ruins without acknowledging the bodies beneath the dust.

In truth, there is nothing romantic in cultic experience.
It is not a theater of valor but a machinery of dependency, a place where sincerity is weaponized and longing turned against itself.
To survive it may teach compassion, but the lesson is carved in scar tissue, not glory.
To mistake that pain for a badge of heroism is to falsify it anew.

The Psychology Behind the Boast

The impulse to romanticize delusion rarely begins in malice.
It begins in shame.
When a teacher or former initiate retells his cultic years as a “necessary stage,” he is trying to transmute humiliation into narrative order.
The mind cannot easily admit, “I was deceived,” or worse, “I deceived others.”
So it performs an alchemy of self-preservation: the error becomes experiment, the dependence becomes devotion, the collapse becomes initiation.
To call it vīra-sādhana is to lift the event from history into myth, where no accountability is required.

Psychologically, such reframing offers instant relief.
It allows the speaker to keep the mask of mastery intact.
The storyline goes something like this: “I went through the dark labyrinth consciously, tested every system, and returned with treasure.”
The ego feels invincible; nothing can stain it, because even its mistakes were “part of the plan.”
This is the hidden function of the boast — it protects the image of the one who always knew.

But underneath the posture of immunity lives the quiet terror of exposure.
Admitting that one was seduced by certainty or complicit in manipulation would dismantle the persona built around insight and control.
Thus the psyche invents a paradoxical defense: I was never truly lost; I was exploring loss.
It is the same mechanism by which abusers reframe cruelty as teaching, and followers reframe fear as surrender.
Everyone in the orbit agrees to call the wound an initiation, so that no one must feel the rawness of having been fooled.

There is another layer as well — the aesthetic one.
Within the modern spirituality market, ruin sells.
Stories of “descending into cults and coming out purified” appeal to audiences who crave both danger and redemption.
A teacher who can display the patina of scandal while claiming transcendence becomes irresistibly magnetic.
In that theater, authenticity is measured not by honesty but by the number of fires one claims to have survived.
And so, the myth of the victorious sectarian continues to circulate, shielding both speaker and listener from the ordinary truth that delusion, when entered sincerely, does not make one grand — it makes one human.

The Reality of Cult Immersion

Behind the rhetoric of heroic immersion lies a reality that few who glorify it have truly lived through.
Cults rarely begin as cages; they begin as homes.
They offer belonging so complete that one forgets the walls are closing in.
At first, there is warmth — shared purpose, common language, a sense of cosmic alignment.
Gradually, however, the air thins.
Independence is redefined as pride, discernment as disobedience, doubt as offense.
The same current that once uplifted begins to bind.
It is not rebellion that becomes difficult, but simple honesty.

Within such environments, the psyche slowly reorganizes itself around survival.
Thoughts are filtered, emotions edited, instincts distrusted.
The individual’s worth depends on conformity to the group’s myth, and the loss of autonomy is disguised as surrender.
To live long inside this atmosphere is to experience a subtle form of possession — not by deity, but by ideology.
The world outside turns gray and meaningless; one’s entire being revolves around the movement’s rhythm, its rituals, its hierarchies.
And when that spell finally breaks, the return to ordinary life feels less like liberation than amputation.

Those who escape often find themselves walking through years of debris:
broken trust, lost friends, hollow faith, recurring dreams of a world that once explained everything.
Nightmares linger for a decade or more, replaying scenes of belonging and betrayal until the body itself stops expecting another command.
Even when healing comes, it comes as silence, not triumph.
What was called “devotion” must be slowly separated from dependency; what was called “grace” from manipulation.
The process is painstaking, unspectacular, and largely invisible to others.

There is nothing romantic about this.
Cults provide a temporary architecture of meaning, but they collect their payment in the currency of the soul.
The warmth they offer in the beginning must later be repaid with years of cold reconstruction.
To survive such a system may indeed forge depth, but it is a depth born of grief, not of glory.
To call it vīra-sādhana is to mistake a scar for a medal.

The Misuse of “Vīra”

In Sanskrit, vīra means the courageous one — the hero who faces terror without retreat.
Within the older tantric vision, vīra-sādhana never referred to bravado or flirtation with danger for its own sake.
It meant the inner willingness to meet fear, desire, and death directly, without disguise.
The vīra is not the one who enters the fire and boasts of emerging unburnt;
he is the one who enters knowing that he may not return, and if he does, speaks softly.

To equate cultic fanaticism with vīra-sādhana distorts this lineage of meaning.
Fanaticism is not courage; it is intoxication.
It demands neither clarity nor love, only obedience.
True vīratva—true heroism—appears not when the seeker throws himself into collective frenzy,
but when he resists the hypnosis of belonging and remains lucid amid contagion.
It is the heroism of sobriety, not of spectacle.

The counterfeit version thrives precisely because it is easier to perform.
One can cultivate the look of daring—speak of breaking taboos, of walking the edge—while remaining perfectly safe inside an identity that worships extremity.
The genuine vīra has no such mask.
He does not mistake excess for depth or danger for transformation.
He acts without audience, often unseen, and his courage leaves no poster behind.

Reclaiming the word requires quieting the noise around it.
Heroism in the spiritual sense is not conquest but endurance: the capacity to keep perceiving truth even when every comfort of belonging has dissolved.
Measured against that standard, the boast of “positive results” fades to something small — a story told to hide the fear of genuine exposure.
The path that truly deserves the name vīra-sādhana is not the one that dramatizes delusion, but the one that walks through disillusionment with open eyes.

Few Saints of the Cage

Hagiographies of the saints rarely contain chapters about membership in organized cults.
One searches the histories of mystics in vain for tales of belonging to movements run by committees, bylaws, or charismatic hierarchies.
The great exemplars of inner freedom—whether Bhāgavata saints, Christian hermits, Sufi wanderers, or Tantric adepts—may have brushed against institutions, but they did not awaken inside them.
Their realizations erupted on the margins: in deserts, forests, temples, prisons, or quiet homes, not within bureaucracies of devotion.

There are exceptions—Bijoy Krishna Goswami’s early entanglement with the Brahmo Samaj, for instance—but such episodes appear as preludes to rupture, not as models to imitate.
When organization hardens into ideology, inspiration departs.
The few who pass through sects and later flower do so despite the structure, not because of it.
Their sanctity begins the moment they stop performing belonging.

This simple observation dismantles the myth that fanatic environments serve as necessary training grounds for realization.
The historical record suggests the opposite: the more regulated the faith, the rarer the awakening.
Communal discipline can polish conduct, but it seldom births vision.
Where institutions promise safety, grace demands exposure; where the crowd demands obedience, the soul begins to starve.

The Quiet Truth

When all the masks fall, what remains is simple: there is no glory in delusion.
To survive fanaticism is not a mark of courage but of mercy — mercy undeserved yet given.
Cults can provide warmth, structure, even glimpses of transcendence, but the price is always the same: the slow erosion of one’s ability to trust the inner voice.
What begins as surrender ends as dependence; what appears as discipline often conceals fear.

Grace, when it comes, does not vindicate those systems; it rescues despite them.
It pulls a few half-burned souls from the wreckage and lets them breathe again, not so they can boast of immunity, but so they can testify to the cost of illusion.
True vīra-sādhana is not immersion in darkness for spectacle’s sake — it is the willingness to face disillusionment without turning it into a legend.

To romanticize the cage is to dishonor those still trapped within it.
To speak honestly of it is to return the experience to its rightful scale: a painful human detour, sometimes redeemed, never to be glamorized.
What deserves reverence is not the plunge into delusion, but the quiet strength it takes to walk out and keep the heart open.