For someone who has attained yoga and is actually awakened, inaction or ceasing action is said to be the means. In other words, once you are awakened to the nature of reality, when through an experience of pure consciousness you can be in the present moment, then you allow the universe to do its thing. All of the deep inner mechanisms of the mind and ego, of the senses and the prāṇa, all of these things will flow on their own once you have done the initial work required. At that point all you have to do is to continue to get out of the way. So if you are still a beginner in practice and the mind is held captive by conditioned experiences, conditioned thoughts, then your work is to observe those patterns of conditioning. When you have opened up the central channel of the body, and the blockage of the kuṇḍalinī at the lower opening of the central channel has been removed so that the prāṇa spontaneously enters the central path, then the practice is merely to relish the openness of the aesthetic experience. Beware: the ego structure is clever in its means of avoiding dissolution. Many yogins like to imagine that they are advanced to the point where inaction is their path. In actuality they lack the ability to focus the mind like a laser, to see through the games ego plays in their mind, and to be content and clear even as the dark shadow side of their fakery is exposed.
The classic systems of yoga are accompanied by all kinds of images that are traditionally associated with them. There is the image of the ascetic living in the mountains as a hermit, or of the meditator sitting for days and days on her deerskin, or of the yogi doing postures—sitting twisted up like a pretzel outside of his cave. Yet all of these associations leave something out because they are only descriptions of what is happening from an outside point of view rather than the internal experience of the yogi. The joy of yoga lies in finding your true self and the freedom that this affords. As you practice yoga you begin to realize that so many other beings, just like you, are still caught in the tangles and turnings of what is referred to as the wheel of saṁsāra, the wheel of conditioned existence. Then you begin to have insight into the fact that no matter how thorough the description, or how complete the methodology, no words and no theory can really express how to attain the freedom of yoga. The insight afforded through yoga is a completely unique and personal experience. Within the classical yoga systems, one of the key elements essential to attaining this form of enlightenment is that of surrender, which is often described as surrendering to God. Another method for attaining enlightenment is to simply drop the seed of your concentration, if you have such a seed, into not-knowing. Essentially these are the same thing because if you are to surrender, you must trust the nature of reality. You must give up your theories, techniques, and methods so that you can be free and present to simply be with whatever is appearing in the immediate experience of the moment at hand. The question, of course, is how to do that. In fact there is not really a specific formula that insures you will know how or be able to give up theories, techniques, or methods. The same is true, for example, if you are learning how to create art from a talented artist. The teacher can show you all sorts of methods and techniques, but she cannot really offer you a specific method or technique that insures you will become a great artist. Instead you must take the teachings and you must apply them; you must grapple with applying them to absorb their meaning and their application. To become a great artist yourself you must work at honing your skill so that eventually you have assimilated the knowledge to the point that you know, almost instinctively, how to apply your knowledge in the action of creating art. This struggle with knowing what action to take, the toil of finding the right technique or method so that what to do next is clear, is at the root of Arjuna’s dilemma throughout the entire story of the Bhagavad Gītā.
To Arjuna the normal description of meditation made it seem like an arduous and nearly impossible discipline to follow. He said, “The mind is fickle and wavering, as difficult as the wind to control.” Also, extended meditation is for people with no responsibilities, no crises, no families to feed, and no cousins and teachers needing to be killed in battle. Kṛṣṇa assures Arjuna that holding the mind in meditation is possible—even in the most difficult situations—through continued practice and nonattachment. Someone who is not connected through to ātman will find yoga difficult, but for one who is united with the ātman, yoga is possible by skillful means. Skillful means, upāya, is the real art of work or practice: it ultimately connects us to the world through the intuitive vision of the ātman. The depth of the whole experience of reality can turn us away from any convoluted preoccupation with our own practice that might sidetrack us. The vision of the ātman can come only when the mind is calm and clear, as in meditation. The techniques of yoga and meditation—the balancing and the counterbalancing, the return to the breath, the gathering together and letting go—are the work. They produce a clear sky in which there is a possibility for insight into the ātman. The insight is not the direct result of any given technique. It is more like an irresistible intuitive sense; the “aha!” of a lighting flash, the unexpected integration and beauty of existence, the vision of the ātman in all beings and of all beings within the ātman. The discipline of meditation is merely an invitation, the accommodating space for the lightning. What ātman is or means must be experienced. It is not just the simple images or concepts of it that we carry in our minds for the convenience of avoiding our circumstances and reassuring our ego.
Even though Arjuna understands this aspect of the ātman, his understanding is not complete, so Kṛṣṇa brings us back into the story by revealing himself personally as the supreme ātman within whom all beings dwell and who is in the heart of all beings. Here the poetic beauty of the Gītā unfolds the vision of Kṛṣṇa as everywhere and as all things. In one of the hundreds of verses on how or in what to contemplate the ātman he says, “I am the taste of water; I am the light of the sun and of the moon . . . the sound in the ether . . . the fragrance of the earth,” examples that could unfold endlessly. In fact they are doing so now in the world around us. Noticing any of the phenomena pointed out by Kṛṣṇa, having our minds captured by anything that presents itself, and perceiving what we notice in the radically different context of it being the ātman or Kṛṣṇa himself, allows us to see it without the habitual overlay of concepts. Meditation can begin at any of these points. Any of the endless ordinary or extraordinary experiences that we might have can be reframed so that they appear as new and interconnected manifestations of Kṛṣṇa. Phrases like “I am time” or “I am the light in fire” serve as potent mantras to allow us to meditate with close attention on our raw sense experience. The endless manifestations are good news! They give us limitless opportunities to practice the seemingly difficult discipline of meditation.
Having revealed that he (Kṛṣṇa) is all phenomena (even the internal mental qualities that surround Arjuna), he declares that love or bhakti is the heart of the method of yoga and the realization of yoga. These four verses from the tenth chapter are considered to be the core of the Gītā:
I am the source of everything; from Me all flows. Knowing this, the awakened ones [buddhas] endowed with a meditative state, adore Me. Their whole mind enmeshed in Me, their prāṇa going to Me, they are satisfied and they delight in awakening each other and speaking constantly of Me. To them who are constantly linked in yoga, who worship filled with affection, I give the yoga of intelligence [buddhi yoga] by which they come to Me. From compassion for them, I, dwelling in their hearts, destroy the darkness born of ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge [jñāna]. (X. 8-11)
These verses reveal that it is compassion and surrender that generate the lightning that crosses the gap between us and others, between knowing and the unknowable, between technique and realization.
At this point within the Gītā, understanding exactly who and what Kṛṣṇa is becomes even more important. The text goes on with hundreds of examples, saying that he is “all devouring death,” that he is, in fact, your very own self, and that his “divine mani
festations are infinite.” Arjuna, dangling on the edge of realization, is still slightly overwhelmed, if not by his predicament on the battlefield, then at least by the extended personality of his friend and charioteer. The variety of manifestations, explanations, yogas, and things to see are hard to comprehend and remember. At the beginning of the eleventh chapter, Arjuna asks to see Kṛṣṇa’s opulent, princely form, his real nature. Perhaps Arjuna was thinking that one form would bind them all and put his own heart at rest.
Kṛṣṇa immediately responds to Arjuna’s request—” Just see my hundreds of thousands of divine forms!”—and then he gives to Arjuna an immediate vision of all of the different gods and goddesses that he embodies. He shows Arjuna that he has limitless numbers of mouths and faces, as well as unlimited arms that spread out to infinity. Arjuna is awestruck, noting that all of these are incredibly radiant and bright, as if thousands of suns had arisen simultaneously into the sky. What Arjuna got was a full blow, a direct showing of the expansion of the world process. The teaching was no longer verbal or intellectual but direct and visceral. By letting go of his own story, his own fears and preconceptions, by being blown for an instant into the present moment, Arjuna touches into a true radical mystical experience, which starts to transform his entire existence right from its deepest root. But soon, in the midst of this mystical experience, he becomes confused once again because he begins to analyze, think, and worry. He becomes frightened because he starts to understand that in order to accept the reality of Kṛṣṇa’s universal form, he must accept the dissolution of his own immediate, familiar world, his own form; he must let go of his ego. This vision of the universal form, is ultimately the vision of the impermanence, interdependence, and interpenetration of all things. It is the experience of the great matrix of open awareness.
Having become quite distraught and overwhelmed at the sight of Kṛṣṇa’s universal forms and with his hair standing up on end from the experience, Arjuna finds himself right back in the same dilemma as at the beginning of the book—sabotaged by his own mind. Again he asks Kṛṣṇa to show him one single but familiar form. Kṛṣṇa obliges and shows Arjuna his form as the god Viṣṇu. Viṣṇu has a beautiful, smiling face, he wears a most elaborate crown and has four arms: one holds a discus, and the others a lotus flower, a mace, and a conch shell. This form of Viṣṇu represents a religion, a social order and a way of life with which Arjuna is familiar, so he begins to relax a little. He thinks that he has “got it,” that he can pigeonhole his experience of Kṛṣṇa into the form of Viṣṇu. This of course is comforting to Arjuna, but it again causes him to miss the opportunity to drop deeply into what is actually being presented to him and to truly experience the form. He misses the way these sacred figures of the gods are structured, how their forms are designed to induce a mystical experience. Even though he is more comfortable upon seeing the four-armed form of Viṣṇu in front of him, Arjuna is still not fully relaxed and satisfied. So Kṛṣṇa again reveals his natural form, the medium-sized, normal human form, that is even more familiar—simply Arjuna’s old pal Kṛṣṇa. Even though Kṛṣṇa’s skin was a stunning dark blue, he is familiar to Arjuna, and Arjuna is finally happy.
This part of the Bhagavad Gītā story can be understood in many ways. One interpretation is that what we consider to be ordinary is actually the most sacred of all. There is the story of the student who asked his great teacher, “How big is God,” and the teacher replied that god is completely middle sized. It is the nature of mind to interpret our immediate, everyday experience as being too ordinary and too mundane to be sacred. Yet perhaps the most profound, immediate experience of God is an experience of what is happening right here in the present moment. Therefore, that which is arising, which is right in front of our eyes, is to be chosen as the object of meditation, and it is to be observed without comparing it to an idealized form. Sitting in a church and being spontaneously inspired by a ray of light is miraculous, and the same level of deep truth and inspiration could be had while standing in a subway station, reading the newspaper, or arriving at the summit of Mount Kailāsa in the Himalayas. Of course some circumstances are more conducive to inspiring a mystical experience than others, but it is the mind completely merging with whatever is arising that allows for that state of mind to arise. At the end of the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa explains that the only way for Arjuna to see his final, natural form—Kṛṣṇa’s form as Arjuna’s best friend, the form with which Arjuna is completely comfortable—is through bhakti, or through love. He points out to Arjuna that this natural form is whatever is appearing right in front of your eyes and elaborates by saying that bhakti is something that is not attainable by following the Vedas or through sacrifice, nor is it attainable by karma yoga, by jñāna yoga, or dhyāna yoga. Bhakti is not hypocritical piety, condescending compassion, or sucrose self-conscious chanting. Bhakti is something beyond methodology; it is merely the nature of pure love.
Another reason that it was difficult for Arjuna, just as it is difficult for us, to see that whatever was in front of his eyes was a form interpenetrated by all other forms, was that such a vision reveals to you—just as Kṛṣṇa revealed to Arjuna—the universal form as the network of your very own body. When we enter the matrix of the body, deep into the central channel, the experience is so vital, so raw and immediate, so joyous, that the mind’s ideas about what the world is and its concepts about who we ourselves are fall away because the reality of the universal form is so much more amazing. It is natural for the mind to become terrified by this insight because it (and in particular the part of the mind known as ego) has all kinds of deep hopes and desires that are very well formulated as to its importance in the scheme of who you are. The mind has great plans to torture you for the rest of your life with these ego-centered ideas. If the yogic process actually succeeds in bearing fruit and showing you the nature of reality, then the mind will not be able to make you suffer anymore. Thus as a means of its own survival, the mind is programmed to interpret even a deep mystical experience in such a way as to guarantee that you will never have another one. It is almost as if the mind—for its own survival—must play a game of avoidance with profound insight into the nature of reality. Ultimately, calm observation of this game itself becomes a crucial element of a mature yoga practice.
Part of the confusion for Arjuna, as it is for any of us who seek clarity of mind, arises from the fact that there are many approaches, many methods or schools within the system of yoga, that can lead to an enlightened state of being. Within any school of practice there is also always the danger, especially for the narcissist, that the path itself can be turned into a tool for building the ego rather than supporting its dissolution. In fact, within virtually any approach it is far easier for the ego to enhance itself than it is for the methods of the practice to serve their purpose as a means for exposing how the ego functions. This is due to the activity of mind as explained within the Sāṁkhya system: the mind relentlessly creates symbols and images for whatever it is doing, and then the very same mind confuses the symbols it has created for reality or the actual process for which the symbol stands. It is probably the most human and unavoidable temptation to take whatever school of yoga we like and then trivialize or vulgarize it by turning it into an escape—a means of entertainment, a building of the ego, or a means of avoiding reality.
The process by which the mind confuses us into shying away from the mystical experience is that it mistakes the content of our experience with the true nature of the experience itself. This is basic ignorance: we confuse the symbol we associate with the mystical experience for the actual experience. What eventually leads to freedom or to a mystical experience and the taste of enlightenment is not the specifics of the content of your mind but instead the ability to have insight into the vibratory or temporary nature of that content. In this way, any and all content reflects the reality of pure open consciousness and could, therefore, lead to an enlightened state. This insight into the natu
re of what is arising eventually leads to freedom, to a mystical experience, and to a taste of enlightenment. However, the mind’s function is to see and reinterpret the content of thought, so it naturally identifies with specific content then makes a symbol for it, thereby unwittingly short-circuiting the mystical experience in order to do its job well—in order to keep our experiences explainable, categorized, indexed, and useful to the ego.
For example, you go to a church on a bright morning and you sit down in a pew as someone plays Bach on the organ. As you listen, a ray of sunlight streams in through a panel of stained glass. The light reflects on the floor, and suddenly you feel an incredible, endlessly precise sense of harmony. Your hair stands up on end, your tongue is for once quiet, and your inner ear opens to all sounds. You have a mystical experience, the quintessence of the aesthetic experience! Soon thereafter your mind starts to try to understand the experience. It adds up all the information it can about what just happened, and in so doing it identifies the specifics of the experience with the content of the experience. So you walk out of the church and take note, “Oh! That was a Methodist church [or whatever denomination it was]. Then your mind wants to repeat the very same experience by somehow arranging an identical content the next day. The following day you go back to the same church and sit in the same seat next to the same window, and you wait for the same ray of light to pass through the glass and inspire you. What we always discover, however, is that our experience never quite matches our image of the experience, and the precise harmony of the mystical experience we had before eludes us. Even though a perfectly great set of new circumstances might be presenting themselves, conditions that might inspire a completely different form of a mystical experience, we miss the experience because we are waiting for yesterday’s circumstances. Waiting for an image of what we imagine the aesthetic experience to be, we miss what is actually arising right under our very own noses that might inspire us anew. We find ourselves again torn by the gap between what is actually arising as our immediate experience and what we think should be arising as our mystical experience. It turns out that as part of a healthy ego function, the mind is programmed to play this very game with the profound insight into the nature of reality. Rather than theorizing about this tendency of mind, instead of trying to squelch it or to get rid of the ego, observing the game itself, without a need to get rid of it, can be the part of the practice that leads to deep insight.
The Mirror of Yoga Page 15