Many devotees cite personal experience as the foundation of their conviction in a particular guru or spiritual path. Some may never have even met the guru, who might have lived in a bygone age, and yet they remain convinced of the guru’s continuing power to protect or “save” devotees in a near-miraculous way.

But is a personal miracle really a miracle?

When someone insists that their unique experience proves something extraordinary, they are effectively asserting a personal miracle—an event so improbable that it appears to defy ordinary explanation. What goes unnoticed is that this also amounts to claiming a kind of special qualification for having received such a miracle.

I once met a psychiatrist in Mumbai who shared an interesting observation. Many of his patients claimed to have experienced miracles or to converse directly with God. Having witnessed such claims daily, he concluded, with a touch of irony, that “with a high probability, miracles do not exist.”

The human mind yearns for the miraculous. We see this in the fascination with superhero movies. But in the field of religion, this yearning can take things to illogical limits. See this youtube video as an example. The power of auto-suggestion and confirmation bias can turn intelligent people into gullible people, devoid of the power to reason.

Asserting personal miracles from rare events.

Before becoming convinced of one’s own experience of personal miracles, it might be useful to ask: what is the probability of a very rare event occurring just by chance? Here is Littlewood’s law:

From wikipedia:

Littlewood’s law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a “miracle“) at the rate of about one per month.

Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one “event” per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.

As a result, a human will in 35 days have experienced under these suppositions about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days’ time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.

Here are some types of miracles generally claimed because they are expected to be very rare events.

1. Opening a random page in a book and finding exactly what one needed to read.
2. Thinking of a long-forgotten friend and suddenly hearing from them.
3. Seeing the guru appear in a dream to offer guidance.

Before interpreting such events as personal miracles, one should give a thought to Littlewood’s law.

For example, if one reads 600 pages a month, and suppose there is one distinct topic every three pages, and one thinks about 200 distinct topics in bhakti randomly per month (6 distinct topics a day), then one is likely to turn to a page which mentions exactly what one was thinking about once a month. Or if one was constantly thinking about one’s guru everyday, then the mind will generate dreams involving him or her in some way or the other. But Kṛṣṇa and the guru surely have better things to do than weave our dreams.

Asserting Miracles from Large Numbers

When large numbers of people adopt a spiritual practice, this is taken as evidence of its miraculous power. But scale proves nothing. When any movement, religious or otherwise, reaches millions, a few are bound to respond deeply. That is the law of large numbers. I would guess that a much larger fraction of those who have read Harry Potter have become die-hard fans than those who read the Gītā or Bible.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the far greater number of cases where nothing happened at all. For every person who claims a life-changing experience, there are thousands for whom the same book or teaching produced no effect whatsoever. The supposed miracle lies only in our minds; we recall the few striking cases and forget the far more numerous ones where nothing happened.

But doesn’t bhakti provide experience in the here and now?

So what about all the talk of ‘experience’ in bhakti? Rupa Goswami delineates the expected outcomes of sādhana bhakti as follows. sādhana bhakti is:

1. kleśaghnī, and
2. śubhadā

kleśaghnī = kleśa + ghnī, which means ‘destroyer of suffering’. śubhadā means bestower of auspiciousness.

Therefore, the expected outcome for a sādhaka during the process of sādhanā is as follows:

• Destruction of suffering.
• The arising of auspiciousness.

These outcomes have nothing to do with personal miracles of the above type.

What can a sādhaka objectively assess to be true? 

A sādhaka can reasonably evaluate whether a guru is qualified in knowledge and training. Has the teacher studied with a learned guru for years in the traditional disciplines—Sanskrit grammar, Nyāya, Vedānta, Pūrva-mīmāṃsā, Sāhitya, Sāṅkhya, and Yoga? Has the teacher systematically learned the Sandarbhas, the foundation of Caitanya Vaiṣṇava thought, from his own teacher?

A disciple can also assess whether the guru’s teachings are self-consistent and coherent, as are the writings of the Gosvāmīs. And a qualified guru should be able to address all questions grounded in śāstra, and not dismiss them with “You are not qualified to know.” If even a sincere disciple is not qualified to ask, who is?

The risk of mystical claims

Most other forms of assertion in spiritual life are, at their core, assertions of mysticism. Yet how can anyone verify a claimed mystical experience ? One cannot. Bhakti is a private path; whatever one may experience along the way is meant to remain private. To speak of such things publicly, or to use them to persuade others, is contrary to the instruction of Śrī Jīva Goswami.

When a sādhaka proclaims mystical experiences as evidence of the truth of their guru or path, the risk is twofold. First, such claims mistake mystical experience for the genuine fruits of sādhana, which are clearly described in śāstra. Second, they ignore the simple fact that all experience is subject to the same laws of probability that govern ordinary life.

Summary

Coincidences are part of the ordinary texture of life. The mind, however, is quick to interpret them as messages, signs, or divine interventions. The distinction between coincidence and miracle, then, is in how we interpret it. Bhakti does not depend on such interpretations. Its strength lies in clarity of understanding, steadiness of practice, and the quiet transformation of the heart.