What Happens When a Clinical Psychologist Meets an Awakened Teacher

“I’ve got a bit of a beef with psychology people because they don’t actually heal their own wounds, yet they come across as healers.”

When a clinical psychologist and a spiritual teacher sit down together, you might expect a clash. Two different worlds. Two different languages. Two entirely different ideas about what it means to help people. But when Dennis, a practicing clinical psychologist with over fifty years in the field, meets Vishrant for the first time, something unexpected happens. Instead of conflict, there is recognition. Instead of debate, there is a conversation between two men who have been circling the same questions their entire lives, arriving at very different answers, and yet finding extraordinary common ground. What unfolds is a raw and wide-ranging dialogue about psychology, awakening, the limits of knowledge, and the one thing both men agree matters more than anything else: love.

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The Problem with Psychologists

Early in the conversation, Vishrant says something direct.

He has a beef with psychology people. Not because psychology is worthless. But because psychologists, in his experience, don’t actually heal their own wounds, yet they come across as healers. Dennis, a clinical psychologist himself, agrees immediately. This is not a casual observation. It goes to the heart of something Vishrant has seen over decades of working with people.

The mind can study itself endlessly and still miss what matters most. Intellectual understanding of the psyche is not the same as doing the inner work required to actually heal.

A person can spend years learning about defence mechanisms without ever dismantling their own. They can write papers on attachment wounds without ever opening their own heart. And this, for Vishrant, is the fundamental limitation of psychology as it is usually practised. It stays within the mind. It analyses. It categorises. But it rarely goes beyond the mind to where real freedom and real love actually live.

From Street Thug to Seeker

Vishrant’s journey to awakening did not begin in a meditation hall. It began in chaos. He was Catholic. Boarding school. He loved Jesus. But he saw hypocrisy in the brothers and the way they behaved, so he left the church.

After school, he became a street thug. He joined a motorcycle gang called the Manning Boys and ended up running it. Then something happened that changed everything. His girlfriend at the time was talked into doing a personal growth course. It cost four hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. Vishrant thought she had been ripped off. So, he went in wearing black clothes and a studded belt, intending to get the money back. They talked him into doing the course instead. It was four days. Live-in. At one point the lights went out and a spotlight came on, directly on him. A facilitator used his psychological profile to work on him for twelve hours.

At the end, an old lady standing beside him said something he never forgot. She told him that when she stood next to him, all she felt was a rock. That he was dead inside. And she was right. Boarding school had turned him into a rock. The streets had turned him into a rock. That moment cracked something open. He swapped the studded belt and black clothes for a three-piece suit and went out selling personal growth courses. A new path had begun.

The Shark, the Regret, and the First Experience of Love

The next turning point came in the ocean. Vishrant was out on a boat with his girlfriend when a cyclone came in. Sharks were circling. He looked across at her and knew she was going to die. He knew they were both going to die. And he was responsible because he hadn’t checked the weather.

What he felt in that moment was tremendous regret. And while he was feeling that regret, something opened in his chest. For the first time in his life, at the age of thirty-three, he felt unconditional love. Everywhere. It didn’t last long. But it was unforgettable. Nine months later, still alive after being rescued, he looked at his life. He had all the toys. Cars. Boats. Penthouses. But no love.

Business had turned him into a warrior. Armoured. Defended. So, he walked into his multi-million-dollar companies, gave them to his staff, and walked out with nothing. He eventually went bankrupt. He even gave away money that was owed to him. Then he took off his shoes and walked around Australia barefoot for four years, looking for the only thing he believed was truly valuable. His heart. Everyone thought he had gone insane.

From Personal Growth to Higher Consciousness

Osho entered the picture before the shark event. Vishrant had been publishing a magazine called Addicts that went to rehab centres. During a turbulent period in his personal life, he found himself hiding out with the Rajneesh organisation in Fremantle.

During a group session, he had a vision. A huge water tunnel. And at the end of it, a little Indian man calling him forward. It was Osho. He took Sannyas. Swapped the three-piece suit for red clothes and a mala. That was the shift from personal growth into spirituality and higher consciousness.

Osho was a heart teacher, and it was through Osho’s teaching that Vishrant first realised he didn’t have any heart at all. He had been kind. Generous. But it was strategic. He knew that if he took care of people, they would take care of him. Real heart was something else entirely. And finding it became the central pursuit of his life.

The Limits of Rational Healing

Dennis raises a question that many therapists quietly wonder about but rarely ask out loud. Many in the psychology world see spirituality as suspect. Mysticism as irrational. And yet therapists pride themselves on always being rational and reasonable.

Vishrant’s response is gentle but clear. They try. But the rational mind, no matter how well trained, cannot take a person beyond the mind itself.

Psychology can help people understand their patterns. It can provide language for suffering. But understanding suffering is not the same as being free of it. Vishrant trained as a psychotherapist and naturopath himself, after his barefoot walk around Australia. He spent nine years doing trauma release work before awakening. He loved the work and the results were real. But he also saw its ceiling.

The same obstacles that block a person from perceiving love are the same obstacles that block enlightenment. And clearing those obstacles requires more than analysis. It requires openness. Vulnerability. And eventually, the willingness to surrender everything.

What Love Actually Is

This is the part of the conversation where both men lean in. Dennis asks what might be the simplest and most difficult question of all. What is love?

Vishrant’s answer is immediate. In his early experiences of awakening, he felt himself as the universe, and every particle of it was love.

Love is always here. We are simply not aware of it because we are locked in the mind. When we open, we perceive love everywhere. But love has only one quality. It loves. It doesn’t get jealous. It doesn’t get possessive. It doesn’t talk to you. Some people believe they can talk to their hearts, but that is the mind pretending to be the heart.

Love simply loves. It has no other qualities. And the only requirement for perceiving it is openness. When Vishrant was in the ocean, facing death, his defences dropped completely. And in that openness, unconditional love appeared. Openness counts for everything if you are pursuing love.

Ego, Fear, and What Disappears

Dennis asks about the death of ego and its relationship to truth. Vishrant is precise. He didn’t kill his ego. It disappeared after enlightenment occurred. After awareness found itself and locked onto itself, the ego simply wasn’t there anymore. There was an absence.

There is talking, but no sense of someone talking. Hand movement, but no sense of someone moving the hand. The ego died twenty-six years ago. And with it, fear. Fear and ego are tied together as survival mechanisms. When one goes, the other goes with it. People resist this because dropping ego feels like death. The survival mechanism fights against its own dissolution. But when you fall in love with love, Vishrant says, you will give up everything for it.

The Heart Path: Openness Destroys Ego

Dennis observes that Vishrant’s path is through the heart, and asks how openness relates to enlightenment.

Vishrant clarifies something important. Openness does not destroy ego directly. Openness facilitates love. To perceive love, we must be open. If we are defended, we block that perception entirely.

The way of the heart is to stay equanimous. Not to contract. To stay even-keel. A relaxed mind supports enlightenment. A tight mind does not. This is not a sudden path. It is gradual. It involves facing pain, processing it, and allowing it to move through the system. What is in the way is often trauma trapped in the body because it was avoided at the time it occurred.

Vishrant’s work helps people move through those pain bodies. Express. Feel. Heal. It is not glamorous work. But it is the work that clears the path.

Knowledge Is the Booby Prize

Toward the end of the conversation, Dennis asks what someone who genuinely wants awakening should do. Vishrant’s answer is direct. Find an awake teacher to show you the way. If you are lost in the jungle, find a guide who knows how to get out. There are traps in the spiritual world. Watch your teacher carefully. Make sure they are walking their talk.

Once you find someone you can trust, you have to trust them, because they will take you into the unknown, which is what we truly are. But there is one thing that will not get you there. Knowledge.

No amount of knowledge ever woke anyone up. Knowledge is the booby prize in higher consciousness. Dennis adds that knowledge can lead you to the edge, like reaching a cliff. But then you have to let go. Vishrant agrees. But he makes one correction. Don’t fall. Jump. Jumping is best.

What He Wishes He Had Known Sooner

Dennis asks Vishrant to look back. What does he wish the younger version of himself had understood earlier?

The answer comes without hesitation. If only he had found love as a teenager, he would have saved himself so much suffering.

Love is the most beautiful thing on this planet. Nothing is more beautiful. When you perceive love, you take care of everyone you meet. It is a beautiful way to live.

He didn’t find love until he was about thirty-four. He felt he had wasted thirty-four years. Dennis offers another perspective. Perhaps the contrast, the years without love, is what made finding it so significant. Vishrant considers this. Probably true. The difference between no love and full love was immeasurable. But suffering does not always lead somewhere better. Sometimes it just leads to more suffering.

The difference is acceptance. If we accept life as it is, we don’t suffer too much. If we resist life, we create suffering.

An Invitation to Find What Was Never Lost

When Dennis suggests that awakening feels like reclaiming something that was lost, Vishrant offers one final correction. You can only reclaim what was lost if it was ever lost. And it was never lost.

We simply never found it in the first place. We are already beingness. Already at the destination. Just not aware of it.

There is no door to pass through. There never was. There is only the willingness to stop, to open, and to discover what has been here all along. Sit in Satsang with Vishrant and experience this openness for yourself.

In the presence of an awakened teacher, something begins to shift. When we allow ourselves to truly open, something remarkable happens. Love does not need to be created. It simply appears when the walls fall away.