A woman tells a story about sitting downstairs in a rented California house while an old Kashmiri man sat upstairs, and how she would find herself stoned out of her mind — staring at flowers like a stone person — just from being one floor below him. She had taken nothing. His presence did it.1
The man was Swami Lakshmanjoo, the last great teacher of nondual Kashmir Śaivism, and the stories Selvalingam relays about his final American years are almost all like this. He licks a melting popsicle in a supermarket and drops into samadhi while the ice cream runs down his arm onto the floor. He goes into ecstasy in a department-store perfume section and the teenage sales clerks, catching whatever it is, start spraying scent into the air around him.2 The tradition has a name for the state he was established in: madhula avasthā — the condition of intoxication, spiritual drunkenness.3 And it has a claim attached to that name that this page exists to examine: the state is catching. You can get the high off the person who has it, the way you can get warm standing next to a fire you did not light.
This is a devotional source, and it should be read document-don't-endorse — these are reverent anecdotes, recorded as the tradition's self-understanding, not as verified events.
Madhula avasthā is the Śaiva name for established spiritual intoxication — not a passing ecstasy but a settled condition a saint lives in.4 The distinctive claim layered onto it is contagion: that this intoxication radiates, and that people near such a person catch a "contact high" without any practice or substance of their own.5
Selvalingam frames it almost clinically: "the moment someone goes into spiritual ecstasy, it's like a flower blooming — the fragrance is unmistakable. All around, everyone gets this contact high."6 The borrowed vocabulary is deliberate. He uses the language of drugs — contact high, stoned, intoxicated — to describe a transmission that involves no drug at all. The state passes through proximity. The proof he offers is the unlikeliest witnesses: the J.C. Penney perfume clerks and the Safeway shoppers who had no framework for "samadhi," no reverence prepped, no idea who the old man was, and still caught it. They did not need the concept. They recognized the joy directly and reached for it.7
That is the load-bearing detail. If only devotees caught the high, you could call it suggestion — they came expecting it. The clerks came expecting a Tuesday shift. Their catching it, in Selvalingam's telling, is what moves the claim from "the faithful feel uplifted" to "the state is genuinely transmissible."8
Selvalingam grounds the contagion in a theological claim he borrows from the Dakshineswar saint's teaching on the boat. God is everywhere, yes — but not evenly. There are "different degrees of manifestation." In the body of a holy person, the manifestation of God is particularly strong.9 So the saint is not a generator making something new; he is a thin place, a spot where the omnipresent thing presses through more densely. Stand near the dense spot and you feel more of what is actually everywhere.
The metaphor Selvalingam relays for this is the landlord on his estate. God, like a rich man, can theoretically be found anywhere on his vast property — but your best bet is the drawing room, where he sits and receives guests.10 The devotee's heart is the drawing room. Go there and you are most likely to find Him in. The contact high is what happens when you walk into the drawing room: you are now in the room where He actually sits, so you feel His presence at full strength instead of as a rumor.
There is a second mechanism, and it concerns the catching. Selvalingam says elsewhere that to contemplate the divine mother's qualities is already to imbibe them — the devotee takes on the qualities of the object of devotion.11 If merely thinking about a quality transmits it, then standing in the radiant field of someone who is that quality transmits it more directly still. The contact high is the short, involuntary version of a long, deliberate practice. The clerks did in thirty seconds, by accident, a faint version of what a lifetime of sādhana does on purpose.
This page gives the vault a concrete model for transmission that is not verbal and not ritual. It bridges the intoxication cluster to the guru cluster: the contact high is, in miniature, what the tradition claims a guru does at full strength — communicate a state by presence rather than instruction. It supplies the experiential evidence behind abstract claims about darśana (the seeing of a holy person being itself transformative) and behind the idea that proximity to a realized teacher is itself a method. And it gives <a href="/concept/intoxication-reclaimed" class="void-link">Intoxication Reclaimed</a> its most vivid case: a man so established in spiritual drunkenness that strangers caught it like a scent.
Of all the Lakshmanjoo anecdotes, Selvalingam lingers on one that shows the contagion at its most distilled. Swami Sivananda introduced Lakshmanjoo to an audience as "the lion of Kashmir" and invited him to speak. Lakshmanjoo gave a brilliant talk on nondual Śaivism — and then the talk itself tipped him into spiritual ecstasy. He went silent. A single tear fell from his eye. The whole room hushed. And Sivananda pointed at that one tear and said: "See, see, see? That is the roar of the lion."12
Read what is happening as transmission. The "roar" is not the lecture. The lecture was the warm-up. The roar is the tear — the wordless overflow of a state — and Sivananda's point is that this silent overflow carries more force than all the eloquent words that preceded it. Selvalingam glosses the state as "extroversive — it projects outward, and everyone is taken up in that bliss."13 So the tear is loud. It fills the room precisely because it is not addressed to anyone; it is the state spilling its banks, and the spill is what the audience drinks.
This is the contagion model stripped to its essence. No teaching content passes in that moment. No instruction, no doctrine, no technique. What passes is the state itself, leaking out through a tear, filling a silence, taking up an entire room. Sivananda's three "see"s are the witness's astonishment at watching transmission happen with the words turned off. The lion's loudest roar is the one nobody hears with their ears.
You are in a room with someone who is genuinely, quietly lit up — not performing it, just full of it — and you notice your own state changing without deciding to change it. Your shoulders drop. Something in you that was clenched all day lets go. You did not do a practice. You walked into the room and the room did something to you. You catch yourself reaching, the way the perfume clerks reached, toward whatever this is — wanting it, not yet knowing its name. And then the recognition: this is what the tradition means by the drawing room. You are not generating peace; you have stepped into a place where it was already concentrated, and you are feeling, secondhand, the full strength of a thing you usually get only as a faint signal. You let yourself receive it without grabbing — because grabbing is exactly how the clerks would have lost it. The discernment you carry out is small and durable: states are catching, you have been catching them your whole life from whatever you stood near, and the only real question is what you choose to stand near.
The contact-high model curdles in predictable ways:
You start chasing the radiator instead of the warmth. The contagion is supposed to point you toward a state you will eventually grow yourself. A practitioner who only ever wants to be near the saint, collecting contact highs like a tourist, has made the transmission a destination instead of a doorway. Selvalingam's whole substance-discernment elsewhere warns against exactly this — getting hooked on the borrowed high and never building your own.14
You confuse catching the state with having it. The clerks caught Lakshmanjoo's bliss for a few minutes. They did not become realized. Mistaking a contact high for an attainment is the spiritual version of thinking the smell of bread is a meal.
You fake the fragrance. Selvalingam notes people can fake this kind of ecstasy — but "you can always tell the real thing because there's a spiritual contagion."15 The diagnostic cuts both ways: a state that does not spread to anyone in the room is suspect. Performed ecstasy is odorless. Nobody downstairs gets stoned.
You fetishize the eccentricity. Lakshmanjoo washing dishes in a swimming pool, demanding a baby stroller, worshipping a plastic home-good shaped vaguely like a liṅgam — Selvalingam relays these as the antics of a man too absorbed to track convention.16 The failure is romanticizing the strangeness as the point. The tradition's own anti-fetishization rule applies: do not glamorize states of imbalance, and seek help in genuine psychosis rather than mistaking it for sainthood.17
The source is devotional and second- or third-hand — Selvalingam relays stories he heard from Usha, from Swami Bhajanananda, from George.18 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE and 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING both apply; these are hagiographic anecdotes recorded as such.
The sharpest tension is the one Selvalingam himself flags. The contagious-high model romanticizes states that, described coldly, resemble dissociation or psychosis — a man oblivious to his surroundings, unable to walk or speak normally, beating a disciple with a stick over a beef pizza.19 Selvalingam preserves rather than resolves this: in the same breath he both reveres Lakshmanjoo's intoxication and insists we must not fetishize mental imbalance, that people experiencing psychosis should seek help, that "we don't want to fetishize madness."20 He draws the line at divine madness versus debilitating madness — a distinction in degree, he says, not always in kind — but he does not give a clean test for telling them apart from the outside. The reverence and the caution sit side by side, unreconciled.
Open question: is "spiritual contagion" a real transmission, ordinary emotional contagion (which psychology documents), or expectancy and suggestion dressed in Sanskrit? The perfume-clerk detail is offered as the control case — strangers with no expectation — but it is an anecdote, not a study. [SPECULATIVE] on the mechanism.
Selvalingam braids two saints together to make the contagion claim, and they converge with striking exactness across a century and a continent. The Dakshineswar saint, on the boat, supplies the theory — God manifests in different degrees, densest in the devotee's heart, the drawing room of the estate.21 Lakshmanjoo, in a Safeway, supplies the demonstration — the densest spot made literal, a man radiating a state strong enough to stone strangers.22 One explains why proximity should work; the other shows it working in a frozen-foods aisle. The convergence is the argument: a nineteenth-century Bengali Śākta and a twentieth-century Kashmiri Śaiva, from utterly different lineages, describe the same phenomenon — the saint as a thin place where the omnipresent presses through. Where they differ is register, the Bengali all theological gloss and the Kashmiri all wordless overflow, but on the core claim that holiness is catching they speak as one.
To `The Addicted Lover and the Impotent Lover. Depth psychology describes the addicted lover as someone who cannot generate an inner state and so must keep returning to an external source to feel it — borrowing aliveness they cannot produce. The contact-high model contains exactly this danger in spiritual dress: the devotee who only ever catches the saint's high, never building their own, is the addicted lover transposed onto the guru. But the handshake earns its keep through the contrast, not just the parallel. In the psychological case, dependence on the external source is the pathology to be outgrown. In the Śaiva case, Selvalingam frames the borrowed high as a legitimate starting point — a doorway, provided you eventually grow the state yourself — while flagging the very same failure (chasing the radiator forever) that psychology names as the disease. Put together, they sharpen a question neither resolves alone: when is leaning on an external source a developmental scaffold and when is it the addiction itself? The tradition and the clinic agree on the trap and disagree on whether the early dependence is ever benign.
To `Habituation and Interruption. Behavioral mechanics studies how a sudden break in expected pattern — an interruption — drops people into a momentarily open, suggestible state, scrambling the autopilot so a new input can land. The perfume clerks are an accidental field case. Their Tuesday-shift autopilot meets something with no slot in it — an old man weeping in samadhi over a melting popsicle — and the sheer pattern-break opens them. Into that opening, Selvalingam says, the state pours.23 The behavioral frame supplies the missing first step the devotional account skips: why were the strangers receptive at all? Not faith, not framework, but interruption — their habituated expectation shattered, leaving a gap. The insight the pairing surfaces is uncomfortable and clarifying at once: the conditions that make a person open to a saint's transmitted bliss are structurally identical to the conditions a skilled influencer engineers on purpose — a broken pattern, a suggestible gap. The contemplative reads the open state as grace received; the mechanic reads it as a window that can be opened by design. Both are describing the same hinge in the same human nervous system.
Sharpest implication: holiness, in this tradition, is not a private achievement but a broadcast — a realized state leaks out of the body and changes whoever stands in range, which means proximity is itself a practice and you have been absorbing the states of whatever you stand near your whole life.
Generative questions: