Now Yoga but Why?

Spirituality is not some kind of path or philosophy to arrive at through thinking comprehending feeling and analysing. Should I be a Socialist or Capitalist. Should I become a vegan or should I stop smoking pot and playing video games. Should I join the Yoga school or learn Martial Arts. Should I do MBA from a premium institute or should I pursue medicine.

Life is simple I want something I work for it.
I need money I find a job, job gives me money.
I need intimacy, I find a partner and fulfil my intimacy needs.
I have social needs so I live in a society and follow the rules and protocols of the society to be accepted and welcomed there.
I have this inherent need to express love and affection so I make food for the guest when they come home and shower them with hospitality.

Most people want sports car , yacht vacations, world travels, new iPhone and pretty much everybody wants to be loved and admired (the more love and admiration the better).
Something or the other is out there and we need to work to get it.

Sadly though we carry that habit in the spiritual journey as well which makes things pretty messed up but that is an entirely different topic we will not address here.

But imagine if you had no such need, you did not want the new car, your neighbours compliment on your beautiful garden, more influential friends, status in the society, recognition etc...What if you did not want any of that.

Would you not feel like a complete idiot driving to office at 8:30 in the morning through horrible traffic to work on meaningless deadlines with people who were represented as a matrix on a spreadsheet.

And the biggest of all desires, having kids and giving them expensive education, saving for their university and generally giving them the best life, that is not only a desire but also a duty to a certain extend, also taking care of parents that is a huge obligation, now maybe parents are financially dependent on you or you have an emotional obligation to show them that you have a successful family or career.
The point is when you can shed all of these things, when you become wise enough to see that you are falsely identifying with the aggregate of all these concepts (and really these concepts are created by your ego to self validate its existence, because in reality it has no substance) these aggregates are all transient and they cannot possibly be you, then you can hope to start a spiritual journey.

Then the only thing left to do is to understand what is this that I am (and why a capital I).
'I am that' by Nissargadatta Maharaj, is probably the best description/summary/discourse on advaita. The first sentence of Patanjali's yoga sutra is half a sentence - 'now yoga'
that is to say - When you have arrived at the maturity to see that whatever you are identifying with, your job, your status, your role as mother or brother or whatever is not really you, then it is inevitable that you would want to investigate that 'what are you, who are you', that is when you start that journey...till then live your life, have fun and enjoy.

If this is not the driving force behind the spiritual journey, if the whole purpose of performing meditative practices is to become more efficient to perform the above roles better then it is not a spiritual journey, its a journey of self improvement maybe but nothing spiritual about it...because a spiritual journey is not about improving the self but about dissolving it.

Strangely as is usually the case with everything in life once we stop having the above agendas we actually end up contributing to those agendas in a more fruitful manner.
Buddha walked out of his house (actually a palace since he was a prince) the day his son was born, while on one level that is the most selfish action any father or husband or son or prince can do he did end up generating more compassion than any other living being.

Selfless service

Beyond a certain point, actually quite initially on the spiritual journey, progress is not possible unless one performs selfless actions.
Many organisations like the Ramakrishna Mission for example, give a lot of stress on social service. While the simple rational is that one needs a way to express the compassion one is developing within, another reason is that Karma Yoga is an essential quality that needs to develop.

Here is a snippet from the book 'The Subtle Art If Not Giving A Fuck'

The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.


To me this snippet clearly warns that unless the meditation practise is forcing the practitioner to get his Karma Yoga sorted one is probably going into a fools paradise.

What is enlightenment? Are you not enlightened?

I was asked a question "What is enlightenment, what is this abstract thing you seem to be striving for and are you not already enlightened?"

U.G. Krishnamurti might say that everyone is already enlightened and the only thing if at all blocking us from it is our yearning for it.
There are other schools of buddhism that claim that once one attains enlightenment one sees that everyone in the world is already enlightened.

I of course had my own answer for that ->

I am the most unenlightened person I know…I got angry at a guy blocking my way to the bike park today…if you sent me a message right now saying that I am an idiot I would probably be disturbed for the next 2 hour.

Enlightenment has many different levels as mentioned in the textbooks of Yoga schools…the state of turiya being the final state…buddhism has so much literature describing different levels of enlightenment…

There are 32 physical characteristics that appear on a enlightened person and if you go into the forest of Rishikesh today you will, if you are extremely lucky, meet few masters who are almost enlightened and have few of these physical characteristics…apart from physical characteristics there are so many other qualities as well for example it is natural for certain sidhis (supernatural powers) to come to an enlightened person, they can never die in an accident, even J Krishnamurthy had this sidhi…it would be impossible for them to have a negative thought towards anyone since a jnani sees all the time the unity of the world and knows that there is no other person to get angry at…an enlightened person would know exactly when he or she is going to die or when anyone is going to die, all enlightened masters communicate to each other through their subtle body and have complete knowledge of everything that is happening anywhere in the world…in fact most of these sidhis come much before enlightenment thats why we have people like Jaggi Vasudev who calls himself Sadhguru and an enlightened master but he is just a charlatan who has learnt to tap into these sidhis…the list of sidhis is endless, you just need to go to wikipedia and read up about some rishis who have lived in banaras in the last 200 years (since there would be very little record of saints living there prior to that).

Again not all schools are capable of taking the practitioner to full enlightenment…there are practices that can only take you to dev lokas from where you might have to return to the human realms eventually and then there are practices that can take you to brahma lokas where you can live in complete bliss without any body, in a state of pure mind till the end of the brahmand…but even these godly beings and beings in the brahmanic realms will die when the brahmand comes to an end…this is also mentioned in the books of most Yoga schools, that the brahmand itself is impermanent and brahma himself dies in the end and then a new brahmand will come into existence and new brahma will come into existence…but ultimate enlightenment is when the person disappears altogether i.e. not just get stuck in dev loka or brahma loka since even in these lokas one cannot escape the misery of death…that is the very core of indian philosophy, they all talk about how through practise one can free oneself from the endless cycle of samsara. Description of these lokas can be found here.

Me personally I am such an idiot that if I die today I will go into lower realms because I have negative thoughts, not very extreme like I don't want to kill anyone but simple one's like someone was disrespectful to me at some point and I would not want to say Hi to them if I saw them walking on the street…so personally i am not even searching for enlightenment…all i am trying is to make my spiritual practise strong enough so that at the moment of my death I fall into my spiritual practise and that will at least ensure I will return as a human and can continue my spiritual journey.

If at the moment of your death a person has even a slightest negative thought then it can take them to lower realms as mentioned here.