Yoga and Sahaj Marg

We are very pleased to be here in the First Spiritual Science Church of Washington and my Master is particularly happy to be with you because the summum bonum of his existence is the propagation of spiritual training, spiritual practice supported-only supported-by the necessary degree of spiritual teaching-if I may call it that, because we do not believe that spirituality needs any teaching behind it. Our fundamental belief is that spirituality is a practice unnecessarily supported by theory except where our intellect demands stimulation, satisfaction and justification. In fact, one of my Master's cardinal teachings is that the simpler the mind the more, if I may use the word, rustic the mind-of the villager, ploughman-the more suited it is for spirituality; because in such minds there is that innate closeness to the Divine, to nature, to truth, which sophisticated living often robs us of very tragically. So we do not believe much in talking, but unfortunately some talking is necessary because people would like to hear what we have to say about it. The essence of his teaching is, practise and experience, read and enjoy. Reading can give enjoyment, practising can give experience. After all spirituality is a path of evolution, and evolution is progress which must be felt and experienced. That is one of the aspects of this training.

The other thing is, how to distinguish spirituality as such? Because we find in our travels all over these countries of the West that very often most people do not really know what spirituality means. For instance, we have heard people saying, "Oh, he has such a beautiful spiritual face," or "That lady is feeding so and so-she is such a spiritual lady," and remarks like these, remarks made with kindness, made with all charitable feeling and made with human sympathy, but applying meanings to spirituality which are not covered by the performance of such people. My Master says spirituality has to deal with the soul and the soul alone. It has nothing to do with the body; it has nothing to do with the intellect; it has nothing to do with the mind and other paraphernalia of human existence. He alone is spiritual who seeks the Ultimate consciousness or the Godly consciousness in himself, and strives to unite his personal individual consciousness with that Ultimate consciousness. This is spirituality. And one who strives in such a way alone can be called a spiritual person. The rest are covered by religion. Ethics, morals, codes of behaviour, laws, these are all covered by religions. And as my Master has often said, religions divide, spirituality unites; because it is a fact that we have each our own religion, and each religion says that its god alone is the ultimate God and, "Thou shalt worship no God but me," and that sort of thing. Therefore, when we come to religions, they have always sought to divide man from man, brother from brother. Whatever be the reason, it is not the fault of religions themselves because religions never taught that. But the teachers of religion, the guardians behind the religions, these have always had this sort of conflict created between man and man. But when we identify the Ultimate as a nameless, formless and attributeless Divine, then we cannot identify my god or your god in a specific way, and differences are removed. So we believe that in spirituality, when we come to the spiritual practice, all men and women become brothers and sisters, and equal in the eyes of God, and not till then.

Another important lesson of my Master is that where religion ends there spirituality begins. I am sorry if I am upsetting some apple carts here, but this is his teaching and it is my business to tell you what he teaches. You have invited us to speak to you and I owe it to you to tell you what he really teaches. His teaching is, where religion ends, there alone spirituality begins. This is because religions play what we may call, for lack of a better term, a kindergarten role in man's evolution. They take up the baby, the human baby, at birth into their fold, baptize it, give it initiation and absorb that child, absorb that human soul, into the corpus of their own society so that it can be brought up with love, with devotion as is necessary to develop it into an adult. And in the course of this training they give it the ethical, the moral instruction that it needs to fit it into society as an acceptable member of that society, so that wittingly or unwittingly it does not transgress the laws of its particular society. However, we very often find peculiar, shall we say, opposition between the codes and laws of one religion and the codes and laws of other religions. One religion says, "Thou shalt not kill." Another says that on the feast day you must eat the meat of a freshly killed goat. Therefore, these laws are, by and large, environmental developments at an epoch in history when certain laws had to be created as needed at that time, in that place. We believe that such religious laws do not hold for all time, because as time changes, as societies change, as environment changes, we have to change with it and our laws have to change with it. For instance, as my Master says, in Islam there is a law which says if you waste water you shall have to pay for it, for the simple fact that Mohammed the prophet was born in Arabia which is a desert country, where water is perhaps more valuable than gold. Now it would be absurd to impose that law in the lake districts of your own country where water is plentiful. What I am trying to pinpoint is that religious laws are localized sets of values created for that society, for a specific epoch, for a specific place. They are not in any sense eternal. So religion develops in us these localized sets of behaviour patterns by imbuing us with those codes of conduct and those codes of behaviour, fitting us into society.

What happens when we come into adult state? And shall we say now we have to face God on our own? It is all right as a child to be led by the hand, to be taught. But there comes a time in our life when, as adults, we have to face the situation. We have to evolve, and we have to face the situation with our families, with our wives and with our children. My Master believes it is at that stage that spirituality takes over from where religion has left off.

In religion we are taught to worship a God outside us or external to us, what we call the theory of emanations. God is outside in his heaven, somewhere far off, unattainable, unachievable; the journey is very far; the travails are many; the renunciations called for are tremendous. This is the sort of worship that we are taught. From that external worship of Divinity which we put into forms of the Divine, we have now to transfer it to the concept that God is within us, too. If God is omnipotent and omnipresent there is no reason why God should not be in us, as He is in everything else. So religion leaves and says good-bye, and mysticism must now take over.

In mysticism we have the approach to the eternal presence of the Ultimate in our own heart as the spark which we call consciousness. This is the spark or the voice of God present in us. In most cases, unfortunately, that spark seems not to exist, for the simple reason that it has been covered over by ignorance, covered over with conduct which is not conducive to its development. Therefore, all that is necessary is to uncover it. Remove the covering of ignorance, of all conduct, and there the light begins to glow again. So spirituality means first the concept that God is in us, to be approached by the inward practice, so that our communion with the Ultimate should be an inner communion with Him by us, rather than an external communion or form of worship of a Divinity that exists outside us. Spirituality does not say that God does not exist outside us. But what spirituality says is, when He is inside you why take all the trouble and all the expense to go to all those places of worship when He is right inside you.

There have been times in history when churches have been razed to the ground, when mosques have been razed to the ground, and when temples have been demolished. Then where will we worship? We are not dependent on all those temples and churches for our worship. If that were the case, religion's case is indeed a very sad story. So there must be the Ultimate available to us as a ready reckoner, as a permanent reference, and He is inside us- this is what spirituality teaches us.
Now this science of spirituality which we call mysticism in the West, we call yoga in the East or, to be very precise, yoga in India. Yoga means the union of the individual consciousness, the individual human consciousness, with the Ultimate, cosmic, Divine consciousness. Really yoga does not mean anything else. Of course many yogas are taught these days, the yogas of the body, the hatha yoga, yoga of mantras or mantra yoga, laya yoga, kundalini yoga, and in fact a whole spectrum of yogas all trading under the name of yoga but not conforming to the original definition of yoga as propounded by the Vedic seers who coined that word. I am not criticizing this. It is the original Vedic seers who are criticizing this misuse of the word yoga, because we have to reestablish truth.

One of our Divine incarnations, avatars as we call them, Krishna, has very specifically stated that whenever there is disruption of dharma, of right conduct, of right living, and when society needs to be corrected, and right has to be reestablished, "I come again and again." In Hindu religion we do not believe in a personality coming once and for all. I am not talking now of spirituality. We believe that as time demands, as the needs of the time develop, the Ultimate presence can descend on this planet of ours again and again at His choice. It is His choice to decide where He will descend, how He will descend, in what form He will descend. If the Ultimate is illimitable and unconditionable by us, surely He has the free will to decide where He will descend, in what form He will descend and at what time He will descend. And He does this precisely to reestablish truths which have become corrupted by the very establishments initially created for the propagation of those very truths.

All great men have taught great sciences of living, sciences of the soul; but when they disappeared and two or three generations of disciples handed on their tradition, corruption was inevitable, distortion was inevitable, in practice, in theory, in the very foundations of these practices. And it is not the fault of the disciples either, because when you talk you know how even a motor car accident can be misrepresented and misreported from one to the other, to the third person. It is human nature, and we are all human beings. We generally tend to magnify, we tend to personalize what we have seen or what we have heard, and transmit that personalized concept of what we have seen or heard or listened to, and therefore it happens not wantonly, not intentionally, but nevertheless inevitably. So teachers have to come again and again to reestablish in us the truth which was lost but which existed and prevailed once upon a time.

In our own system of Sahaj Marg we have this unique feature of the transmission by the guru or Master, of his personal yogic or spiritual energy-it is not psychic energy, it is spiritual energy-into the heart of the aspirant. We call this yoga Sahaj Marg, which means the natural way to Realisation, because my Master teaches that God is simple and, therefore, the way to reach him must be simple. As he puts it very tellingly in one of his books, if a pin falls on the ground you do not need a crane to lift it up, you stoop down and pick it up. And when people ask how to achieve this God, he says, turn your face away from yourself and there is God waiting for you. It is not as simple as that! But it implies a change in one's mental standpoint or outlook. Divert your attention from the external world and there you are in the internal. There are only two sides, the external and the internal. And when we divert our attention back inward where it belongs, that which resides inside must manifest itself, as everything outside us manifests itself to our vision when we turn our attention outwards. There is no logic which says that a similar thing should not happen when we turn our attention inside.

Just because people have taught us God is difficult to achieve, God is power-mad, He is crazy, He is waiting to punish people, so we are afraid of Him. Our approach to God is one of fear. All religions say that God is love. But in no religion is there a man who can approach his God with love. I know because there have been instances when people have had to spend a night in a church or inside a temple and they are aghast at the very idea of having to sleep inside a temple. They worship and offer prayer and sometimes make fantastic offerings of their wealth, but one night in a temple, I cannot yet find a person who will sleep there for one night. If your God is there who is almighty, all powerful, all love, who is our protector, what is this fear that makes us stay away from this place? We are, therefore, afraid of God, in all religions without exception. I often tease my friends and say, "Well, suppose the particular God to whom you are praying, whether it be Christ or Krishna, or anybody else, suppose He were suddenly to manifest Himself in front of you and say, 'What do you want?' you will run scampering. There will be a massacre perhaps. But God is love!"

Spirituality tries to put the approach back in its right perspective that we must love God because He is inside us. He is not something external to us waiting with a rod in his hand to punish us for our transgressions. He is inside us and being inside us if He punishes us, He has to endure that punishment Himself whether He likes it or not. Because that which is inside must suffer as much as that which is outside does. When my skin suffers, my body suffers; when my tooth suffers I suffer with it, and I do not see how God can escape that suffering. So when we turn our mind inwards and approach Him with this love, then there is no question of suffering and there is no question of punishment. The Godly spirit, that spark of Divinity enshrined in our hearts, then begins to be fanned by the breeze of our love, and as it grows, the voice of conscience begins to develop again. We call this the flowering of the consciousness.

Conscience in our terminology, according to my Master, is nothing but the growth of a superior consciousness in ourselves. And when this real conscience develops, we find that true morality develops, true ethics develop, not because some church says so, or the police say so, or the government says so, but because my inside tells me, "This you shall do and this you shall not do." So, love breeds communion with the Ultimate, that communion makes Him grow in us. This breeds ethical and moral living, and we find that as we progress, increasingly higher states of consciousness become ours. It is difficult to say what these states of consciousness are because it is like a bank of clouds, the lowest one hiding the rest, and if you fly up in a plane and go above, then you find it is light above though it is dark below. But one has to fly to see this phenomenon. Even when it is darkest and it is raining, you go up above that and there is light, brilliant sunlight. So we have to pierce through this cloud, this cloud of ignorance, the first cloud which limits us as human beings, and prevents us from flying into the Divine realms which inherently are our birthright whatever be our race, colour or anything else.

God did not create Himself for any one race or any one country or any one set of people. He created everything and if He created everything, everything is His whether we like it or not. And in ourselves it is spirituality. We are only seeking to cease being our own and to become His. This is what surrender implies. Surrender says, "My Lord, I am no longer my own as I thought I was, I am now yours, do unto me as you will." This becomes possible when there is love, not when there is fear. When there is fear we cannot surrender. We may talk of surrendering. We can surrender only our arms, as one set of forces does to the victorious. So surrender in those terms means victory and defeat. Here, surrender of the soul to its Creator is only returning to Him what belongs to Him. There is no question of victory or defeat. On the contrary I would consider it our victory over Him, because we are able to persuade Him to take us back when all our life we have been trying to run away from Him, to negate His very existence. So in that sense every soul that can go back to its maker has won a victory over its own maker by persuading Him to take it back in spite of all transgressions, of misdeeds, in spite of saying that God does not exist. This is the general picture that emerges from my Master's teaching.

Now what about his particular teaching of yoga? It is based on the old system of raja yoga with which I have no doubt you are all familiar. Raja yoga has unfortunately been translated by many persons, eminent ones too, to mean the way of kings. It does not mean anything like that. It means king among yogas. That is, it is the kingly path, that which is at the highest level of practice. It is at the very summit of yogic practice. It is king among practices-that is raja yoga. Raja yoga deals with the mind. It has nothing to do with the rest of the human system, physical, anatomical, intellectual or otherwise. We believe, raja yoga believes, that it is in the mind that everything originates in the human body, whether it be behaviour or non-behaviour or anything like that. Intellect, body, emotion-everything is guided by the mind. My Master says that mind is what destroys us but mind alone is what can regenerate us into the spiritual welfare and spiritual well-being of communion with the Ultimate. So the mind must not be destroyed. It is the only means of communication with the Ultimate and also with the lower self so that the diversion of the mind again is what is necessary. Turn it from here to there. As the Hindu scriptures say, we are like the lotus with its bud pointing downwards and which, as it develops, turns up and opens up to receive the nectar of Divine Grace. This is very common symbolism with which I am sure you are all familiar. The turn from the downward pointing to the upward pointing is yoga, the ability to receive grace as it comes into us.

So, yoga is a diversion of tendencies of the mind, from the externalization of its action, its field of activity, to an internalization of at least a part of it to begin with. Now we are only externalized, or most of us are only externalized. In the beginning we seek to divert a little of it inside and by contact with what is inside us, the bliss that is inside us, we wean the mind away from the outside. Not by strict and rigid adherence to commandments which impose a tremendous strain on us, or renunciation which is almost impossible. True renunciation is impossible. We may give up our wealth, but when you have it in the thought it is almost as bad as having the wealth. And it has the complication that we have the feeling of having renounced, and then ego develops-"I have renounced." So egoism develops. Therefore, renunciation has no benefit when it is an imposed renunciation. But when the tendencies of the mind are slowly turned inwards, and the mind is itself attracted by what it finds inside, the outside world loses any charm that it has had up to now. And by the very loss of that, there is renunciation. That is, instead of our giving up the world, the world gives us up! Because now the mind is no longer externalized, it does not go out.

This then is what my Master teaches: first turn the mind inwards. Now what is the way to do this? Sit in meditation, because it is only in meditation that we turn the mind upon ourselves. When I say ourselves, I do not mean this self (the body) but the inner self. We do this in our system of Sahaj Marg which my Master has evolved as a very simplified technique of meditation. We do not meditate on the psychic points of the body, we meditate on the heart. He prescribes meditation on the heart. He says the heart is the seat of life. According to all religions it is in the heart that the Divine resides. And physiologically, it is from the heart that circulation flows and everything else happens. If this point, the most important point in the human system, can be enriched and purified, then it must permeate to the rest of the whole system without our having to bother with the other parts, like the head, the muscles, the feet and so on. It is a radiant flow from the center outward, from the center to the whole system, whereas in traditional practices the external change is drastic, overnight. Shave the head, put on yellow robes and have some beads in the hand and we are yogis! But what about the internal change which is the real transformation of man? This is not transformation but only change of attire. I can appear in a white suit at one moment, and in a black suit the next, or in yellow robes within a few minutes. This is not transformation. It is acting. Like the actors on the stage who walk behind and change their dress suitable to the part they have to play. But many of these yogis, and I have spoken to many of them, will tell you that even after twenty years of violent faith, violent religious practices, violent renunciation, subdued lives, some of them do not even feel that they are ready for meditation. And this is tragic. It is no joke when you hear people talk like that. I have spoken to people who have worked in an infirmary for three years, then in a kitchen for three years cutting up vegetables and washing pots and pans, and then they go into the laundry for three years. They pass through this rigmarole of so-called preparation of the soul for meditation and before they know where they are, there is possibly no possibility left for meditation at all. So we asked Master what is needed, or what is the preparation needed for meditation? He said, "Sit and meditate, that is the only preparation." Meditation is a simple thing. It is something to do with the mind and does not need any violent exercise or preparation.

Unfortunately, there are systems which teach that it is necessary to prepare the mind, when meditation alone can prepare the mind. It is meditation which prepares the mind, but we believe that by external association with activities such as required charities, sympathy and love and devotion, we prepare the mind. But it is very often a funny thing that in them there comes a hatred for the very thing which they do. If you are made to nurse a person whom you cannot nurse, and you are put into a nursing capacity, I doubt if even one out of a thousand will come out of it as purified and clean in the soul as people pretend that they do. Whereas, when we purify the mind and shear it of all the superfluities of good and bad, the opposites as we call them in Hinduism, the dvandvas of existence-good and bad, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance-when the mind is shorn of these attributes of our day-to-day existence, then it knows neither opposite. It does not know what is good nor does it know what is bad. It instantly does the work which is necessary and gets back into itself.

By this training of yoga, we are therefore made capable of working without either attraction or repulsion. We are made capable of existing without love or desire, hatred or antagonism. Because we are in communion with what is inside ourselves, the Ultimate, that association alone becomes valuable to us, and the rest of the world ceases to have any meaning for us. Therefore, all tendencies, all attributes, all desires and hates, all these are struck off. And, as my Master says, this is real renunciation. Not the giving up of wealth or the writing of a cheque to some mission and ending it all. That is not renunciation. So when we develop by spiritual growth, we renounce without really knowing that we are renouncing. By enriching ourselves and coming closer and closer to the Ultimate within ourselves, we become more and more dependent on that inner self. We seek His guidance, we seek His advice, we obey His voice when He speaks to us; and as this dependence on Him increases and it becomes Ultimate, it becomes surrender. It is surrender without surrendering; it is renunciation without renouncing; it is truth without seeking it. So all this becomes possible through the simple act of meditation.

As I told you, we meditate on the heart imagining that inside the heart, by the presence of the Divine, the Ultimate, the heart is illuminated. We try to hold this thought for about thirty minutes initially when we sit in meditation. We close our eyes and sit comfortably so that the body does not interfere with the mind. That is all that is required. According to Patanjali himself, asana is something which is steady and comfortable. "Sthiram sukham asanam," this is what Patanjali has written. So we sit comfortably as we normally sit, and allow the body to rest in itself so that the mind can act in its own way. Hold, or try to hold, this thought that there is illumination in the heart. If other thoughts come into the mind-as they surely will, because they are welling up from inside ourselves, they are not something which is imposed from outside, they are our own thoughts seeking to come out now that the mind is pegged onto something else-we allow them to go by not attending to them, by ignoring them. It is one of my Master's important techniques that if you do not attend to thoughts they have no power. It is our attention which gives to thoughts the power they hold over us. So we, in meditation, do not attend to these thoughts, we allow them to drop off by themselves. This is the technique of meditation that we are required to practice.

Now I come to the very important role of the Master in our meditation. There have been many masters and there will be many more masters. But most masters teach us theoretically. They show us what to do, but beyond that their assistance does not extend. In India we recognize three types of masters. One is like the hen which lays an egg and must sit on it to hatch it out. That is, physical contact between the Master and the disciple is necessary, without which they cannot interact on each other. The second type of master is like the fish which lays its eggs in the stream and goes round and round them, keeping away marauders. That is, there is visual contact. So without at least visual contact such masters cannot interact with their disciples. The third and highest is supposed to be like the tortoise which goes onto the bank, lays its eggs in a shallow pool, covers it up with sand, goes back into the river and mentally looks after it-by transmission or whatever you may call it. So we recognize basically three types of masters: the hen, the fish and the tortoise types. To which class a particular guru conforms is something that you can decide for yourself.

We believe that my Master has this capacity of transmission because we have all felt it ourselves. What he transmits is his own spiritual energy which he has got access to by virtue of his own yogic accomplishment under his own Master. It has opened up in him the possibility of transmission which was rediscovered by his Master after many many centuries of lost wisdom. It has been rediscovered that one human being can transmit to another this energy which is not limited in any way just because it comes from a human, but is really unlimited, because by virtue of its real nature it is connected with the Ultimate source of all energy. Therefore, this transmission has no boundaries, it has no limits, there is no end to the amount of transmission that can take place or, if you like, the quantum of transmission that can take place. It is, therefore, possible to transmit to one, or to a hundred, or to millions, there is no limit. Also he can transmit here or he can transmit to a person wherever he is.

By this transmission, the Master is able to put into our hearts his own energy. That is, now we have the possibility of growing by someone else's energy which is put into us. We are helped with a crutch. Instead of being dependent on ourselves, we have now become dependent on him. Because he gives that food for the soul which we need to quickly develop, quickly develop beyond what we believe to be the possibility for human beings hitherto, precisely because he is able to put his wealth into us. It is as if we get a million dollars, we become rich overnight. We do not have to work for it. If somebody gives me a million dollars, I am a millionaire. He makes us spiritual millionaires, as it were, by putting into us his own wealth of spiritual attainment. This is something which I hope you will all agree to experience because normally we talk a little and then we meditate for half an hour, during which my Master will be transmitting.

This transmission gives us the possibility of growing without limitations. Secondly, it erases by his power all past impressions which we have built up in our minds-impressions of good, impressions of bad, it does not matter which. Because impressions condition our behaviour, impressions condition our existence. In that sense the past is a burden on us. Every day we are adding more impressions, and therefore we are increasing the burdens on ourselves. Every day that lapses is one more day in the past. Thus we are adding to our burdens instead of decreasing them. My Master is able to decrease this, and often eradicate it completely, by his own power whereby he removes all impressions of the past from the mind. It is a liberation from the past assisted by his own transmission which infuses us with his spiritual energy for our own growth, and therefore the possibility of our development has no limits. My Master says that if there is an earnest practitioner it should not take more than seven months to reach the Ultimate goal of human life, and in any case it should not take more than three years. But I suppose it is a sad commentary on even his own disciples that there are many who have not done it after years and years of practice.

What he needs most is not our wealth or our physical energy or anything like that but a simple measure of co-operation, that we sit in meditation for the prescribed period and allow him to work on us with his transmission. And it is here the trouble comes, precisely because it appears so ridiculously easy for such an important and almost unachievable aim hitherto, that our mind cannot reconcile the easiness of the system with the difficulty of the attainment. We ask how is this possible? How can it be so, when all these centuries we have been told that it is so difficult? We can say nothing but sit down and try. And having said that I now request my Master to give you all his transmission because this is all that we can do, to sit down and try.
We do not ask for faith because my Master says faith is impossible in the beginning. Anybody who says, "Have faith in me and I will lead you to your goal," is saying something which is impossible, because faith can come only out of experience. But we do ask for a measure of trust in the beginning. Trust those who are associated with you, who talk to you about Him, and then your own experience will ripen that trust into faith and ripen faith into surrender. This is the way of surrender-trust, faith, surrender. If anybody says that he has faith in someone in the very beginning, he either does not know the meaning of faith or he is blatantly lying. Nor is the person who asks for faith in the beginning doing the right thing by the person from whom he is demanding it, because it cannot be done. This we believe. So we ask you to start with a little trust and if it ripens into faith and surrender, surely you will benefit by it. We will now sit in meditation for about thirty minutes and after that if there are any questions, we will be very pleased to answer them.

Thank you.

Taken from an article originally written by Shri. P. Rajagopalachari, President of Shri Ram Chandra Mission. Published in "Principles of Sahaj Marg, Set I. Pages 35-50". For more information of the mission and Sahaj Marg system of Raja Yoga meditation, please visit www.srcm.org