How to attain enlightenment

What I want to share with you in this essay follows on a previous essay on the subject of the necessity of starting where you are. In this essay I intend to outline a simple way of understanding the various types methods and approaches that are available to you to help yourself in liberating yourself and living wakefully.

In that previous essay I outlined three broad categories of perception and their associated states of being. Specifically, there is one state which is uniquely desirable which is characterized by such notions as bliss, harmony, naturalness, and abundance.

That “highest” state, which is called by various names such as ajata (uncreated) or samadhi (union) is both profoundly attractive and true to the very essence of our being and at the same time enormously threatening to our more common states of consciousness.

Those second two states of consciousness, in order of increasing density, are called dristhi-srishti (d-s) and srishti-drishti (s-d). D-s means that perception is form. And s-d means that material creation exists independently “out there” apart from me.

I proposed that when we can recognize that we are in a d-s state, we can best help ourselves by remaining aware of ourselves. But if we are in a s-d state, we are definitely going to want to take hold of some kind of useful process, method, narrative, or other form of authentic help to lift our state of consciousness.

In Hindu thought, these things we can take hold of to help ourselves are called yogas. Yoga has the meaning of union and is the root of the English word “yoke”, meaning to join together (as cattle are yoked together to pull something). So yogas are those ways by which we can yoke ourselves to the spirit, to the living reality, the all-in-all.

Therefore, in truth, these yogas provide means by which we can attain that highest state.

Swami Vivekananda played a very important role in bringing the systems of yoga to the West. He had a very unique training in India and he had quite a lot of exposure to Western thought, which I believe made him the perfect person to bridge the gap and bring knowledge from East to West in a way that was relatively easy for Westerners to digest. It was a spiritual science. That was the emphasis. Yes, it is spiritual, but it is also systematized and appeals to the Western rational materialist in a strange way.

Vivekananda presented the yogas as four-fold. And for our purposes, this is a useful way to organize it. So you needn’t think that Vivekanada was right or that he was an avatar or any such thing to appreciate the organization and the knowledge he has gifted us with. So on just those grounds alone we can have gratitude and receive the knowledge in that spirit.

The four yogas that Vivekananda outlined are as follows:

* Karma yoga

* Bhakti yoga

* Raja yoga

* Jnana (pronounced gi-yana) yoga

Karma means action. The theory of karma says that everything which happens in creation has a cause. The cause is some other action. That action therefore also has a cause. And that cause is also an action, which therefore has a cause, ad infinitum. Karma does not connotate bad. It just means action. Good and bad are judgments, not karma.

Now, obviously, when you follow this theory of karma to where it is obviously pointing, you will realize (if you are willing and ready to see it) that no action ever actually exists because there is no first cause since that cause would have to have a cause of its own. In other words, this leads you to the ajata vision. This present reality is undeniably real. But at the same time, the mind has gone silent because it is clear that no commentary could ever begin to approach the wholeness of this as it already is.

So that is one way to take hold of karma yoga. Just see that fully. And stay there. That is the fulfillment of karma yoga. And very fast.

But most of the time, people don’t seem to do that. So they need the remedial form of karma yoga. Which means that you should do stuff. Now, you might say, “But I’m already doing stuff. Does that mean that I’m doing karma yoga?”

And the answer to that is, no, you are not doing karma yoga unless you are doing the action with intention. And that intention should be one thing only. Call it God, call it Self, call it Kali (as did one of Vivekananda’s teachers, Ramakrishna)…whatever you call it, your intention is to do all action to serve that living presence.

But if you cannot seem to do that, which most people cannot seem to do most of the time, then you can do another more remedial form of karma yoga, which is do actions to serve others. Not to serve causes. Serve others. Be of authentic service to other people. This is called seva, or selfless service.

And lest you think that seva sounds unpleasant, keep in mind that this is a powerful practice endorsed by many traditions as having the potential for ecstatic union.

Incidentally, on that note, let me briefly mention that ecstatic union or samadhi is surely the naturally good state for humans. Surely that should be obvious that the happiness that we can glimpse just by imagining the possibility of ecstatic union proves its natural goodness. We are deeply attracted to it.

That divine union is truly natural. To the degree that we are not natural, we will not experience that samadhi. So that should be a wakeup call for everyone who is not experiencing samadhi. It means you’re lying. It means you’re hurting yourself. It means you’re numbing yourself and confusing yourself. But it’s not necessary that you should do those things. You only do them because you’re asleep to that degree with which you do those things.

And another note about that is that samadhi is not limited to a state experiencing while sitting cross-legged with eyes closed. That is one class of samadhi. But Ramana told of many classes of samadhi. The “highest” of these is Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi is that in which the state of samadhi is maintained unbrokenly regardless of experience. In other words, the experience is not separate from the awareness. Divine union. Yoga.

In other words, you can be truly fulfilled and truly at peace not merely as a result of having the wholeness of reality align with your idea of how it should be. Rather, the seamless wholeness of life Is simply being.

One major obstacle, of course, is the attachment to the false selves we think we have to maintain. Every time we attach to a self-image or self-concept instead of the seamless wholeness of which those are aspects, we fracture our perception and cast ourselves into hell. And the postmodern hell is a hell of unthinkably infinite hostile emptiness. So we recoil in horror and tend to grasp ever more franticly at the images and concepts apart from the whole, which sends us more deeply into hell.

So we need yogas to help us. Without the yogas, we will tend to continue to fall into our vision of hell simply because that is the dominant energy on the Earth. But when you stop thinking of Earth as a planet on the edges of a vast and terrifyingly empty universe and instead think of it as a living Elemental Being, a Goddess, then something remarkable happens. A ray of cosmic light pours into hell and right into your soul and you realize in your very being that you are not alone. You know it in a way that no one can talk you out of because it is more real than anything anyone could say to you. And that light attracts you and you keep connecting with it and loving it, and it fills more of your life, shining even on the dark and ugly bits and making even your sins a blessing.

That is bhakti yoga. Bhakti is the yoga of love and devotion to the Divine Being. And it is beautiful. It is the yoga of the heart. It really does reveal a blessed divine light right here in this life. In Bhatki yoga, one’s devotion draws the Divine Being more richly into the experience of the devotee. Where the devotee had been hardened by skepticism and cynicism, bhakti softens the shell and tenderly sooths and draws out the soul from the interior into the sensual world which is now saturated with Divine Being.

Bhakti yoga is not the adoration of a god who exists only in the mind or only in heaven or only in some other realm. Bhakti yoga is the intimate relationship with Nature herself. It is to touch and be touched by Nature and to know yourself as inseparable from her. And therefore, bhakti yoga is worship of what we could call archetypes. And at the highest level, all archetypes are known to resolve into one Divine Being with all the archetypes as the “parts” of her body. Since Nature is immanent (it’s unavoidably real here and now), our present experience (both sensual and cognitive and otherwise) is her body. And that includes everything we think we experience as discrete things, places, events, people, qualities, the conceptual component parts of things, etc. So, for example, one aspect of the Supreme Goddess is Earth (both as a place and as an element). Another aspect is Abundance. Another aspect is Beauty. Another aspect is Time. Another aspect is Mother. Another aspect is Father. There are, I suppose, infinitely many aspects. I don’t claim to be a great seer, and I don’t know what the great seers have said in that regard, so I might be wrong. But there are certainly a lot of aspects.

And you can worship any of them. In fact, you DO worship many of them. But you don’t know it usually when you’re doing it. I’ll explain that more in a moment.

First, you need to understand that to worship is to give your attention and devotion to something. And Hindu thought tells us of what they would call a natural law, which is that what you put your attention on grows. We see that this seems to be true in our natural lives. If I don’t give any attention to roses, they won’t grow. If I give just enough attention to plant the rosebush, maybe some roses will grow, but maybe over time it won’t do so well (though it also might do well…so there’s an important element of Fate at play here too, not just forced attention). Yet if I continually give it the right kind of attention, it is likely to continue to grow in the sense of growing into its essence fully expressed, not necessarily endlessly growing bigger.

Now, ask yourself: what do I tend to give a lot of attention to day after day? Maybe you’ll see that you give a lot of attention to worry, fear, anxiety, stress, resentments, etc. And then notice that surely commensurate with your attention, those things have indeed grown in potency and frequency in your life. Sometimes those things grow so much that they virtually block our view of any other possibilities, any alternatives beyond our narrowly-defined idea of reality.

So then I’m saying you’ve been worshipping worry, fear, anxiety, stress, etc. And to the degree that people collectively worship certain archetypes or forms of the Divine Being, the world is made into a temple of that deity. So that our present collective world seems to be littered with temples of Fear, Hostility, and the like.

You may not be able to directly change other people. And fortunately, that’s not your job. But what is possible is to change your own worship. You can choose to worship Truth, Peace, and other deities who speak to your soul.

When you worship the deities who speak to your soul, you must approach them sincerely and humbly. Don’t have the attitude of “you owe me something!” Instead, look for them. They are just waiting for you to find them. Their temples are here, hidden in plain sight. You have to learn to see in the right way. Then you see your Beloved in your very world. You see your Beloved in every moment, every experience. You cannot see your Beloved in this way if you insist on your idea of the Beloved. You must get to know her.

Practically-speaking, this can take many forms. In Indian traditions there are deep levels of knowledge about many of the deities as well as technical knowledge about the attributes, character, elemental affinities, color affinities, and their manifestations as sound. A lot of that knowledge is extremely powerful and can be easily misused and harm the practitioner. So in general, it is important to practice those things under the guidance of a highly knowledgeable teacher who you trust completely.

But that does not exclude you from bhakti yoga. If there are any forms of the Divine Being which speak to your soul, worship those. They could be traditional forms such as Gods or Goddesses from any tradition, including Christian. There is also a tradition in India of worshipping the sadguru (teacher of truth) in this way, which is said to confer the same benefits as worshipping the supreme Divine Being directly. That is often somewhat difficult for our Western sensibilities, but it is one option. But bhakti yoga needn’t be deist in that conventional sense. If the sky speaks to your soul, worship the sky. If the ocean speaks to your soul, worship the ocean. If time speaks to your soul, worship time. If love speaks to your soul, worship love. Incidentally, all these – sky, ocean, time, and love – have traditional archetypal forms personified as deities in various cultures. So the benefit of looking to those traditions is that they give you a rich amount of support for deeper reflection and worship. The traditional symbols and images of avatars, Gods, and Goddesses are powerful methods of divination in the sense that they can help you to see your essential self and access divine union simply through contemplation. Yes, that includes the Christian cross.

The main thing I want to emphasize is this: know what you are worshipping and be sure that you are worshipping what is truly speaking to your soul. If you worship things simply because that’s what others do and you don’t want to stand out or be weird or rock the boat or look like a fool or be wrong or any of the millions of other shallow excuses we let rule our lives, then you’ll get more of those things, and your life will affirm the qualities of what you worship.

The examples of this are endless, but I’ll give you a few to make it clear. One might be a person who worships a particular form in a particular way because of cultural norms – such as worshipping a patriarchal vengeful God who threatens eternal damnation if you don’t comply perfectly with his every whim – even if that does not truly speak to your soul. Or on the flip side, a person could find that such a God truly does speak to their soul, but because that form of the divine is not held in high esteem by the person’s peers or family, they don’t worship their authentic form of the divine.

Another example might be a person whose soul sings at the mere thought of a forest, but day after day they go to a job doing something that sucks their soul just to make money to pay for their housing and food so they can keep working the job they don’t want to work. Meanwhile, their soul withers, and the forest remains a dream divorced from the sensual reality. They haven’t realized the dream. They just dreamt it. And the difference is night and day. Because a life merely dreamt is no life at all, and the soul will be malnourished from such abuse.

Another example might be a person who has a song in them left unsung for fear of ridicule, embarrassment, shame, criticism, etc. Another example might be a person who leads the charge on some “great social movement” only because they get a cheap thrill from the sense of power, but the actual practices and even the many of the principles of the social movement are actually abhorrent.

It’s what almost everybody is doing all day long

And bhakti yoga is the remedy. If your soul is withering, you need bhakti. Look to your heart and listen to what is true. Listen to the message as it thumps its truth in the physical heart and as it whispers that same truth to the soul. One unanimous synchronicity of spiritual aliveness. Then stay true to that.

Don’t betray your Beloved because you are afraid or weak or feeling sorry for yourself. Love your Beloved so much that you confess it all. Confess your fear, weakness, and self-pity. Confess it and give thanks for you are not alone and you are comforted.

The hardened soul who needs it most will resist it most, thinking that it must “all be self-deception” and think themselves too educated for such primitive nonsense. But their heart is hard and they hurt so badly, and this is the best remedy if only they will start sincerely and then continue. Confess to your Beloved that you don’t believe. Confess that you are afraid to be a fool. Confess that you fear your weakness. Confess that you are terrified of being alone. And feel the truth of being fully received without any judgment. For your Beloved does not judge. Your Beloved accepts you unconditionally. And you’ll see that it is really real. It is true. It’s honestly real. Just not in the way you thought it would be.

Let’s next look more closely at raja yoga, which means royal yoga. As I understand it, this is how Vivekananda described to the yoga of Patanjali. I have not read any of Vivekananda’s writings extensively, so I don’t know all the details about how he defined raja yoga, but I do know about Patanjali’s yoga.

Patanjali’s yoga is a system of eight steps leading to divine union. The first few steps are moral precepts and specific suggestions for purification of the veils that cloud spiritual vision. The moral precepts are non-violence (ahimsa), truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), practicing the Presence (brahmacharya is sometimes translated as continence, and it is misunderstood to mean avoidance of sexual activity, but Brahma means the Divine Being and acharya means one who practices and teaches, so it’s not really about sexual activity as much as it is about remaining committed to the Divine Being through all activity and non-activity), and non-grasping (aparigraha which is sometimes translated as non-convetousness). The suggestions for purification are things such as practicing contentment and studying the Scriptures. Seva (selfless service rendered to the Lord) is also a method of purification.

Please understand that none of this has to look like something extraordinarily difficult, strenuous, or unpleasant. This is not about doing penance. It is about letting your soul be unburdened of the unnecessary baggage you’ve unwittingly carried around. It is a joyous thing. When done correctly, it is entirely wonderful. It simply means that when you observe that you are indulging a habit of violence within yourself – violence in your thinking or intentions, for example – that hurts you and it is antithetical to the life of the soul. So in noticing that, you can begin to choose non-violence, which is not so much about your outer actions as it is about the violence or non-violence within your psychic system. That violence is ultimately anti-life, and if you indulge the habit, you are worshipping that self-violence which hurts you. So it is a great relief and blessing to learn to soften and release that self-harming fixation and to open to a life-affirming reality.

The third step is the practice of physical postures, which are called asanas. These are the kinds of things you see people doing in yoga classes – “warrior pose”, “sun salutations”, and the like. And this step is to prepare the body for doing the next step, which is energy work called pranayama (literally control or harnessing of life energy) which may involve breathing techniques, visualization techniques, energetic seals, and so forth for the purpose of regulating the energy in the various bodies (the yogic system speaks of five bodies or sheathes which surround the soul) which will allow you to feel better so that you can proceed to the remaining steps. (I believe that for most of us, Somatics in the tradition of Feldenkrais and/or Thomas Hanna offer a more suitable substitute for asanas [or at least a prerequisite to the practice of asanas], and I have published many episodes of a series called Move Into Stillness on my YouTube channel which explores this subject is much more detail. One such video which gives perhaps a good introduction to the subject is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyEaq_Q8538. And on the subject of pranayama, I have another series on YouTube called Bliss Techniques, and you can find the first in a series covering a basic pranayama technique called uddiyana pranayama here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnKOx-yOUc)

Again, you don’t need to think this has to be exotic and rigidly defined. The basic idea here is that if you aren’t feeling good in your body and energetically, you’ll have a hard time with meditation, which is the remaining steps of the process Patanjali defines.

Patanjali defines meditation in multiple steps steps. First is the withdrawal of the senses. This doesn’t mean that the registering of sensation has to stop. Rather, the belief that “I am a separate observer of these senses which are of the exterior world” must become transparent. You need only recognize that these divisions in consciousness are false and that there is an as-yet unknown mystery happening and that you cannot grasp it with the senses. Rather, you can know it intimately “interiorly”.

What follows are dharana (concentration) which naturally leads to dhyana (meditation properly, which is a blissful experience) and then that is followed by samadhi. The samadhi of Patanjali’s yoga may be of various classes, but eventually it must yield sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi. Basically, this is a progressive absorption and union.

Obviously, the raja yoga path is somewhat technical and step-by-step. This is an excellent path for those who need discipline. If you struggle from a lack of good discipline in your life, perhaps this path can be very helpful. It is also very helpful when one is not feeling inspired to seva or bhakti. In such a case, perhaps going for a conscious, slow walk followed by some conscious, slow, satisfying breathing which clears and calms the mind and body followed by meditation in the form of watching the breath or silently reciting an inspired phrase or gazing at a single point or even lying down on the back and deeply relaxing the body while remaining fully awake (called savasana or corpse pose) even for just a few minutes could bring refreshment to the soul…at least a brief pause in which you allow yourself to merge with the natural essence of yourself in silence and full appreciation.

And what of jnana yoga? This is what could be thought of as the philosophical approach. Ramana Maharshi is considered by many to be a supreme exemplar of the love of jnana (wisdom), which is what philosophy means. So we have to understand what this actually means in practice. Because jnana yoga is not merely reading about or hearing about ideas. It starts there, but it does not end there and is incomplete if it remains there.

The first part is hearing or learning of the truth. In this context when I speak of truth, I mean the truth of Divine Being. That means you have to hear the message that you are not separate from Nature Divine. You and Nature are one. There are not two. There is one, and it is both you and Nature.

But your present beliefs differ from that truth. So at first you cannot believe it. You cannot see it. You don’t really know it. So you must puzzle over this. You must observe very carefully in direct experience to see whether this could actually be true. So you must watch for every possible evidence that arises which might disprove the truth which has been told to you.

You will have thoughts and sensations which you will – out of habit – believe must be proof that you are separate. But you must carefully see what is the evidence that this belief is true. And as you look honestly and persistently, you’ll see that there is no actual proof. It was only an assumption.

Eventually, this persistent careful observation reaches a tipping point in which it will occur to you that you could potentially go on seeking to disprove the truth indefinitely, but intuitively you sense that the truth really is the truth. In this moment you are at the edge of the mind. The analytical mind has a limit, and you’ve encountered it. You will see that there is a fundamental choice available to you: you can hold to an old (but unproven) belief in limitation and pain, or you can let go and embrace and be embraced by wholeness.

At that moment, the invitation is to let go. This is a kind of death, and so there is often some apprehension. But as long as one is persistent and sincere in the inquiry, eventually the painful restriction of the old perception becomes too great and one can no longer justify holding on to it.

What I have just described is perhaps the purest form of jnana yoga. And this will give good results fairly rapidly. This is the basis of Ramana’s instructions given in “Who Am I?” Ramana tells us to watch carefully for every arising thought and we will see that there is a subtle thought which underlies all the other thoughts. This subtle underlying thought is called the “I thought”, meaning the assumed sense that the thoughts and experiences belong to me as a separate self. Ramana tells us to watch for where the ”I thought” comes from, and we will see that it arises from the formless silence of what he calls the spiritual heart, which is not a location but the very essence of being.

If you can successfully do that, I recommend that you do. It is very direct and simple. If you can avoid any further complications in the inquiry, that will be good. However, most of us don’t seem to be able to keep it so simple. We find ourselves quickly lost in thought and distracted by the dozens of competing feelings and desires bubbling up at any given moment.

So for those of us who struggle to keep it so simple, we need a more remedial form of philosophy. And fortunately, there are long-standing traditions – both Eastern and Western – in philosophy which can offer potential help in this regard. One difficulty, of course, is that because these philosophies are relatively complex, there’s a relatively greater chance of getting lost in thought and abstraction rather than clearing away the confusion. However, there is also potential value in the study of this more remedial form of philosophy. It is well beyond the scope of this essay to go into any detail on this matter, but it is an important topic which deserves much more consideration. As such, I will take this up in subsequent essays and I also intend to examine this subject in much more detail in an upcoming video-based program.

I cannot say whether Vivekananda’s system of organizing yogas is perfect or complete. But it is certainly a useful starting point and helps us to better make use of those yogas which might be of greatest benefit to us based on temperament and other factors. Some people are naturally more suited to bhakti, for example, and may find that bhakti provides a complete means for discovering fulfillment. Others may find that jnana is their true calling.

Yet most of us will find that some combination of these yogas – different methods at different times – will be most valuable. So don’t artificially limit yourself to thinking that you must choose one and one only while excluding the others. Ramana is considered by may to be the supreme lover of wisdom, and yet Papaji (who was a devotee of Krisha and an incurable bhakta) was able to accept Ramana as his sadguru because he was able to recognize that same love of the divine in Ramana. So don’t think that anyone is purely a jnani or purely a bhakti or whatever. Everyone is all, but we each are uniquely composed.

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