1752: Why Your Spiritual Checklist Might Be Working Against You
Wisdom of the Sages
David Ramella
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode Raghunath and Kaustubha ask a question that cuts to the heart of any serious spiritual practice: is my practice actually changing me.
Goodhart's Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The classic example: British colonial officials in India offered a bounty on cobra skins to reduce the cobra population, only to find that enterprising citizens began breeding cobras to collect the bounties. The measure designed to solve the problem made it worse. The Srimad Bhagavatam, an ancient Sanskrit text on Bhakti-yoga, offers a startling example through the story of the Brahmanas — learned priests who had checked every box, performed every ritual, and met every external standard yet remained spiritually shallow, while there wives, simple village women who had done none of those things, had quietly surpassed them in the spiritual depth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I was thinking about Joppa, right? |
| 0:02.5 | Like, it's a good example. |
| 0:03.5 | How our measurement replaces meaning. |
| 0:07.1 | Like, for example, in our spiritual life, this is in the way we set it up in our saddena. |
| 0:11.7 | We can do this all the time. |
| 0:13.8 | It's like, um, we start a practice. |
| 0:17.9 | We commit to chanting a certain number of rounds. |
| 0:20.3 | How about that? We're reading a certain number of rounds. How about that? |
| 0:21.1 | We're reading a certain number of pages, right? |
| 0:23.5 | We're fasting on certain days. |
| 0:25.7 | Yes. |
| 0:26.2 | And even though these are beautiful things and they're meant to uplift us and they're |
| 0:29.4 | tools and they exist there for the end game, which is, how can I open my heart? |
| 0:36.9 | Yeah. |
| 0:39.0 | And, you know, somewhere along the line, and it's subtle, and this is why it's dangerous, |
| 0:46.5 | because it's subtle, it can just sneak right in. |
| 0:48.3 | Somewhere along the way, the number becomes the thing. |
| 0:52.5 | Huh? |
| 0:53.0 | The number becomes a thing, and? The number becomes a thing. |
| 0:54.4 | And the external measure becomes the goal itself. |
| 0:56.7 | Did you finish your rounds? |
| 0:59.7 | Check. |
... |
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