What are the indications of a Paramhamsa?
The Paramhamsa carries neither the dand (staff), nor the hair tuft, not the holy thread nor any covering. He feels neither cold nor heat, neither happiness nor misery, neither honor nor contempt etc. He should be beyond the six billows (hunger, thirst, grief, delusion, decay and death) of this world ocean. Having given up all thought of calumny, conceit, jealousy, ostentation (display of one’s own spiritual practice before others to please them, to gain name and fame), arrogance, attachment or antipathy to objects, joy and sorrow, lust, anger, covetousness, self-delusion, elation, envy, egoism and the like he regards his body as a corpse, as he has thoroughly destroyed the body idea.
Being eternally free from the cause of doubt and of misconceived and false knowledge realizing the Eternal Brahman, he lives in that himself, with the consciousness- “I am He, I am that which is ever calm, immutable, undivided, of the essence of knowledge-bliss, That alone is my real nature.”
That Jnana (knowledge) alone is his shikha, that Jnana alone is his holy thread. Through the knowledge of the unity of Jivaatman with Paramatman, the distinction between them is wholly gone too. This unifications is his Sandhaya ceremony.
-Paramhamsopanishad, verse 2