When many spiritual paths say they are the best, how to choose our path?

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there are so many spiritual paths everybody claims that we are the best how can we know which we should follow broadly broadly spiritual paths can be classified into three main categories we could call it as exclusivist pluralist and inclusivist exclusivist means they say that we have exclusive rights on the spiritual path no one can attain spiritual enlightenment except through us now exclusivism strikes a rational mind as as exclusivistic why should anyone have monopoly on spiritual growth if the spiritual is ultimately connected with the eternal, is ultimately connected with god, is god the monopoly product of someone is the spiritual side reserved to someone it strikes us as fanatical say that someone one particular group has the only way the other but sometimes the extremes, if you consider pendulum one extreme is exclusivism the other extreme is pluralism pluralism means that oh there are many different paths and all paths are right now this may seem to be very tolerant but at the same time it becomes it reduces spirituality to importance because if somebody says my path is materialism, which means there is nothing spiritual and that is not compatible with spiritual paths, so to give a simple example of this now all of you are in university so if some university starts saying only those who get a graduation degree from our college only they are graduates everyone else is a hoax who gave you monopoly on that now there can be many universities but if somebody goes to the other extreme and says every building everywhere is a university you go to any building anywhere, just go there for 4 years, you will get a degree that is also not right there has to be some objective criteria by which we can evaluate, so how do we know something is a university objective criteria is it affiliated, is it certified, what is the caliber of the students what is the caliber of the faculty what is the caliber of the facilities what is the campus placement there are various criteria by which we could decide which is a good university and which is not at all a university or which is not such a good university so just as an uncritical acceptance of only one as right and uncritical acceptance of everything as right both are wrong there are objective criteria which have to be used so similarly if we want to look at spirituality, what we need to look for is how is spirituality affecting people the purpose I talked about Martin Luther King saying that we live in an age of guided missiles and misguided men so science can help us to make things better spirituality helps us to make people better make people better means it improves our inner character it improves our inner self mastery it helps us to become better, more tolerant, more sensitive more effective human beings so what is the effect of following a spiritual path on our own lives that’s what we need to see and that’s what others will see so the Bhagavad Gita which is an ancient yoga text it says that we can experience spiritual reality directly and the result of that experience is the transformation of character so if we see that some spiritual practice is making people better better not just in a sense of not just in a sense of just sweeter in talking but better in terms of having a clear understanding of things better maturity of dealing with things so going back to the therapy example when we want to go to a, when we are sick say our stomach is upset and we want to go to a doctor now is it that we need to explore all possible forms of therapy that are there in the world there is allopathy, there is ayurveda, there is naturopathy there is this therapy so many pathys are there is it that we say that unless I explore all the possible therapies I can’t know which is the right and so I will not take any treatment no then we will stay sick so what we do is we go to a doctor and we check whether the diagnosis makes sense so if say I got a stomach upset and the doctor says we have to amputate your leg what is this? it doesn’t make sense so we first evaluate whether what the doctor’s diagnosis is sensible or not and secondly if it makes sense then we check with the doctor ok if I take this medicine what will happen, if I take this medicine for 3 days your stomach will be perfectly ok we take it and then we see whether our stomach is better, if it is then we guess, this is a good doctor so essentially a good medical a good doctor the therapy will be sensible and verifiable same with spiritual path so when we we don’t have to explore all spiritual paths possible before we take up any path first we maybe attend a few talks, read a few books and check whether what is said makes sense that is sensible and after that if it makes sense then we can take the next step and see whether it is verifiable does it live up to its promise so if meditation is supposed to make my karma does the practice of meditation do that so if it is sensible and it is verifiable then we go ahead with it, if it is not sensible and verifiable we leave it Bhagavad Gita takes a very open minded approach where it says that at the end in the Bhagavad Gita it says that you can now decide what you want to do, deliberate and decide memory deliberate and now decide what you want to do so I feel three things that the spiritual path it should be based on objective criteria not just somebody’s claim that this is the only way or all ways are right and the objective criteria we can say in terms of the transformation in a person so we can look at how the people who are practicing something are in terms of their behaviour and character and we can look at whether it makes sense, whether it is sensible and whether it makes the change in us, it is verifiable based on that we can decide what to do Thank you very much Thank you very much let’s give a big round of applause one more time applause It’s an arrow fight so we will start serving out but he is available