Which experiences are real?

Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas,

           Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Jaya Guru Parampara! Please accept my respectful obeisances!

           I am curious to know a particular fact. Srila Gour Govinda Maharaja said that we have no power to identify who our guru is and we can only pray to the Lord for showing us a real spiritual master. The person whom the Lord sends us we will instinctively recognize as the bonafide spiritual master. I realised what he meant the day when I came to this sacred sanga.

           However there are many people searching for spiritual masters who claim to have a similar experience on seeing their guru, who actually turns out to be preaching false philosophies. There are plenty of people who claim to have had experiences on seeing their 'guru' who is actually a fraud in reality and so they get cheated or become Mayavadis themselves.  Please note that Mayavada is a generic term that includes any illusory philosophy here. And there are many others who claim to have had some 'mystical' experiences and 'realised the Absolute' and they have become great material philosophers. Afterward they appear like great spiritual saints to us. This latter category of people are without exception either mystic yogis, impersonalists or highly degraded in their practices and philsophies.

            I heard that its because people wanted to get cheated and actually they are not interested in finding real guru. Is it a fact?  The experiences of the mundane mystics are so similar to genuine ones that I cannot tell them apart in cases. How do we know that our attraction to a particular person is material and not spiritual?

            More importantly I come to the present. Let us take our own spritual progress --- Sometimes we too have had some experience that looked like a realisation and it was not. It would be dangerous to fall for such pseudo realisations as truth.  Having said so much, how do we differentiate the real spiritual experiences from the fake?  The line is so thin that even after going through many evidences, I still cannot distinguish in complicated cases, including several experiences of my own. 

           As a matter of fact, almost all the realisations I had which were confirmed by all of you to be correct on and off this forum were on the mental platform and without the real spiritual substance, except for the rare diamond in the rough. So I feel that not being able to correctly identify our own experiences is more dangerous than all other dangers a sadhaka can face.

             To sum up : How do we identify which experience is real spiritual and which is mundane, both our own experiences and those of others? Even among those which are true, how do we know which realisations are at the mental level and which are fully spiritual? I write this because these things do happen to us and we have made mistakes and some people's mistakes are bigger than others'.

Unable to see the thin line between the real and unreal,

Srinath

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