One of the first obstacles to pursuing yoga or spiritual

processes is the mental thought form which whispers in

our ears that it is not necessary to do any such thing.
When we see people living out their lives in the usual
fashion, with seemingly happy lives mixed with the
normal share of sorrows, we can quickly get trapped in
this kind of thinking. Since most of humanity is still caught
up in the emotional and physical aspect of pleasure, its
normal to think that since one is happy , what is the
need for any extra effort for something so grand as
liberation. Indeed mukti or liberation in sanskrit was the
founding principle of our culture. Everything a man or a
woman did, from the moment of waking up to the time of
sleeping was organized in accordance to this one goal or
mukti. It is a symbol of the times of we live in that today
we laugh at this word and think only nut-cases in saffron
robes pursue this objective. The concept of mukti in the
vedic era was slightly different from the form it took since
the dawn of the illusionist age of vedanta and buddhist
philosophies and if looked closely, the transformation is
not without proper reason. One of the most central ideas
in the Vedas is that of Rtam, meaning divine order or
rhythm. The Vedas are called Apurusheya, not by man. In
the esoteric sense, Vedas are found in a certain level of
reality high above this material plane. They are the
expressions of the DIVINE PLAN as it is encased in the
universal mind or Mahat and the Rishis who could access
this plane of consciousness in deep meditation revealed
them to man in symbols of sound. Here lies the origin of
the word Shruti or revealed. Now if the Vedas are
understood in their true sense, they describe in exacting
detail, the underlying order of the universe. They expound
the mind of Ishwara, the Purpose with which He founded
the system. This divine purpose has eventually to be
manifested in this plane of reality, the bhu loka or physical
plane. With this end in mind, the rishis or the progenitors
of man, led by the Manu set up the systems of society
along with the rituals and ceremonials to help bring the
plan down to earth. Thus the importance of the huge
number of rules which governed the life of the ancients.
Today they look stupid from the modern perspective but
its a grave folly to judge the past by the standards of the
present. They thought differently, felt differently and so
lived differently. Time is not a linear flow in either progress
or decline. There are always many complex forces
working themselves out in all periods of time and so
blanket judgements without having gone deep into the
heart of time are a mistake.

The vedic era was the first civilization to set up a social,

economic and religious system integrated to lead the
human being towards liberation and also manifest the
Plan on earth according to the Rta. We can see that
liberation was not an otherworldly aspiration. One did not
have to leave society by divinize it. With time, like
everything, the era lost the spiritual vitality which fertilized
the heart and soul of that civilization and the esoteric
content of the rites and rituals got lost, to be replaced by
a dead letter interpretation. Materialism took hold of the
minds of men and selfishness flourished. There are
accounts in the ancient texts about the arrogance which
had come to dominate the priestly class or Brahmins or
the brutality of the ruling Kshatriyas. In fact, one of the
avataras of Vishnu, Parashurama, incarnated to
exterminate 21 generations of Kshatriyas. This was the
situation in which the Buddha and Sankaracharya
appeared in the world scene. Looking at the pathetic
state of the vedas and the degenerate minds of the
public, it was obvious to them that resurrecting the old
spirit of the vedas was no more possible and they
preached withdrawal from the material plane as the only
solution to the problems of misery and everyday torture
which they saw. This is most evident from the emphasis
on suffering in the teaching of the Buddha, Sarvam
Dukkham. The vedantins were explicit in their rejection of
earthly existence. It was the right thing to do in an age
where existence had become a burden and still is. The
esoteric causes and the future course of Yoga has been
discussed in the earlier post but the essence of it remains
that Liberation whether in the Vedic way of divinization or
in the sense of withdrawal from the plane and subsequent
re-entering is still the only course of action for the present
man. Lets see the reasons for this.

Swami Sivananda the great Vedantin Sage used to always

say, The purpose of life is God Realization. Without
going into the very needless debate of western Theodicy
as to whether this God is a external entity or not, a debate
which exists simply because of a lack of real knowledge
about the structure of reality, I shall try to explain the true
meaning of God realization. In India, we have 33 crore
gods, but none of them is the One True God who is the at
the same time, immanent and transcendent. The
intellectual puzzle that this creates says more about our
intellect than about God. When a Yogi talks of Realization,
we should immediately understand that he is talking of
Consciousness. The purpose of life is not to SEE God but
to Realize God. Realization is something that an individual
can achieve only within himself. Another word which the
Kashmiri Shaivites use for this is Pratyabhijna, or
Recognition. One recognizes his or her own divinity. You
realize your own essential Unity with the Divine. Since
these are all Yogic realizations, the mind is not really of
any use since the intellectual principle is below the plane
of reality where Divinity is met. In Yoga the highest reality
is not the Mind, but Sat-Chit-Ananda. Its the Triad of Truth
where one reaches at the culmination of his search. This
truth has been spoken of millions of times by all who have
reached the Shores of Liberation or Nirvana. The real
question we are trying to answer is whether it is
necessary to try for this goal when life is going on happily.
Happiness or sadness in any life is a result of karma so
instead of just feeling happy or sad, it is wise to know the
causes behind both of these states of mind. This is a very
good first step in realizing the truth of the outer events. A
sincere search and reflection on the lived life itself is good
enough to set one upon the search for Truth. Because no
matter what one says or feels about life or liberation, one
thing we should always seek is the Truth. As the Rig Veda
says, Satyat Nasti Paro Dharmah, There is no religion
higher than the Truth. The search for Truth is its own
reward. It does not have to have any other side
accomplishments. If we observe our own lives with
objectivity, it becomes clear that we dont run our lives.
We cannot control what we think, we are sad because of
outer events in which we dont have any say and we dont
know when we will die. We do not know why we are born
and why we suffer. We do not know why some people or
things we love or want, we never get. Of course we can
find some immediate or vyavaharik causes but they
dont satisfy us. We get angry and cause enormous harm
to others which we live to regret or fall in the grip of lust
without having any control really on our actions. It is
possible to make all of this very normal and part of life
but that does to solve them. It manages them at a
emotional level or at a survival level. In the end, life is
finished, we are dead and we dont know why. Living like
this is worse than living like an animal because the animal
is not burdened with questions like man is. It is a creature
of instinct whereas man is fundamentally a creature of
thinking. The very word man comes from the Sanskrit
word Manushya. whose root is the word Manas or the
mind principle. Not using the very source of our identity in
investigating our own lives is surely the greatest insult to
the beings who gave us this mind. It is known in esoteric
circles that Man was not always a thinking animal. That it
was a great act of compassion on the part of Divine order
of Beings called Agnishwattas who arrived from other
planes of existence to give man the power to
conceptualize and think. So we have to think through the
nature of human existence and our lives with more depth
and attention. If we dont think now, we will have to come
back to learn on this very earth once more.

One of the truths which was known in the past but not
known now, is that life between incarnations is spent in a
plane of reality called Devachan which is a level of
consciousness where we reap the fruits of earthly life
and come back to continue it at a later life. Now reaping
here means the assimilation of the essence of life. We can
say its a place where we experience the True content of
the substance of our last earthly life. The True content is
not the happiness or sadness as we felt in on earth, but
the abstract substance which those experiences gave us.
This abstract substance cant be experienced by most
human beings since we dont think so deeply about our
lives except philosophers. For most people, death is the
friend since it liberates them from the unconscious maze
of happiness and misery in which they swim from life to
life without knowing why. Here we come to the root
reasons for seeking liberation. Liberation is frequently
mistaken as some place out of this world where we will
reach. In a sense it is right but in a much bigger sense, it
is wrong. Liberation is not a place, its a state of
consciousness. Its as much here as there. As Yoga
knows, reality as we seen in our conventional ways, is an
illusion. There are 24 inter-penetrating spheres of
consciousness including our own plane of material reality.
Thus liberation is an inner sanctum and not some location
in space and time where one has to travel. So when
Sivananda spoke of God realization, he was in yogic
terms, speaking of rising to a level of consciousness
where we unite with the creators consciousness which is
also the true essence of our own consciousness. The
thought can be staggering at the first glance but if we
investigate the our own reality and life, we will be led to
this truth in both experiential and intellectual terms. The
real question is, if not liberation, then what ? Then this
unconsciously lived life where outer events will keep
pounding us day in day out, where we will be faced with
some rewards for hard work which will be gone before
they arrive. In the end death, and in essence, a life lived
without examination. Many things can be forgiven but the
cardinal error or not having known oneself cannot be
forgiven. In the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna says a very
important truth when Arjuna asks that why should he
strive for action when he can rest and seek peace, why
should he fight for Dharma when he can renounce
everything and sit in a peaceful forest ? Krishna says that
whether he likes it or not, action is happening all the time
within him. His eyes are seeing, his ears are hearing, his
mouth is eating food. So action in inevitable in this world.
In fact the very meaning of the word, Jagat or world is
that which moves. Ja-that and gat-which has movement.
We are part of a changing process and if we dont control
our movements, nature will ensure itself that we move. In
yogic terms, this means that we should assert control on
our movements instead of unconscious forces within us
which will make us angry, kill, hurt and trouble ourselves
and others. Every moment of our lives is a battleground
where forces are set up in the cosmos which will
determine our future lives in accordance with the
inexorable law of Karma. Thus it is most essential that we
recognize first the forces we are setting up and then
control or transform them so that we dont live to repent in
this or another life. The question of who we are then is a
knotty one and philosophical as well as Yogic texts will
describe this important truth very well. If we have to
control our emotions, by definition, we are separate from
our emotions else how can be assert any force. In
ordinary terms, we are only aware of that fact that we are
not our body since we can decide to move our hands and
walk or sit when we want. But this is also a greatly difficult
realization today because we dont really want to believe
this basic truth also given the amount of attention given to
the body today in all spheres of living. But moving on, the
question of controlling the three spheres of physical,
emotional and mental processes, automatically assumes
that we are separate from all of them. One who
understands this truth is already far advanced in
controlling his or her nature and consequently, his or her
destiny. The point is, this is the most basic of strivings. We
are always exerting ourselves, either by conscious will or
by forces which we dont recognize in us. When one
speaks mindlessly, he is seeking a release of an internal
tension which has no other outlet. Now if the person is
reminded that he is blabbering, the usual reaction is one
of offense, but is it not true that he did not have control on
his speech ? A sober understanding will reveal that it was
indeed the case. So is the case with most human action.
So the ordinary life itself has a lot of deep knots which
must be investigated because since movement is the only
truth, we should at least guide those movements by Will
and not flow with them. Today flowing is a maxim of the
times indicating a iron grip of the astral or emotional
forces on the consciousness of mankind. This is so
because when we flow, its only emotionally that we are
satisfied. Many times, we come to regret the flowing when
our sober mind has had a chance to reflect on the events.
The road ahead for man is very hard indeed as until the
mind is in control and the emotions stabilized, there is not
even the hope of engaging in true striving for liberation.
One of the cardinal requirements for the Jnana Yoga path
of Vedanta was the faculty of Viveka or discrimination. It is
sometimes assumed that Viveka is a mental faculty but it
is not. Only after the higher intuitive mind or Buddhi has
been developed by meditation, one can venture to
awaken the Viveka. Its essentially a faculty of the psychic
being inside us. Its the awakening of a form of energy
body within which is beyond the lower mind. One with
viveka does not act from the mind, his very being
separates the true from the untrue and this in an yogic
evolutionary perspective. He will pursue those goals
which will evolve him and reject those which will regress
him. Only after these basic practices have been done
was an aspirant inducted into a study of the Vedas and
Vedanta. Its imperative that we seek those lofty goals
again so that the dark veils of matter that has come to
drown us in delusions can be lifted once again.