Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to the introduction to the Esoteric Teaching. This has been a long time coming, and I’m very happy to present the result of my fifty years of research.
So what is the Esoteric Teaching?
Esoteric is an adjective, meaning:
intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or interest. Some synonyms are obscure, arcane, recherché, rarefied, recondite, abstract, enigmatic, inscrutable, cryptic, delphic, incomprehensible, opaque, impenetrable, and mysterious.
Well, it’s not all that weird, and part of our research has been to bring it out in an easily understandable way.
So let’s go into it. What is the Esoteric Teaching?
In simple words,
the Esoteric Teaching is the Absolute Truth: the origin and destination of all authentic spiritual and religious paths, and the context that gives them meaning.
You may have some questions about this, and that’s why we make these videos to explain it.
So what is the Esoteric Teaching?
It is the background. It is the space or the context in which all the different religious and spiritual paths exist. It is the context that gives it the meaning.
What is the meaning? Well, actually the Esoteric Teaching is only communicated in silence. It’s inexplicable in words. But we can tell a story, and the story will point towards the meaning, just like a finger pointing at the moon.
I call this story the cycle of life. What do we mean by the cycle of life?
Let’s start with the yin-yang symbol. Everyone’s familiar with that, because the Esoteric Teaching actually is non-dual. No differences, no yin or yang.
But when we move into manifestation, when we come into life in the universe, we introduce duality, and the fundamental duality is between yin and yang.
And actually we begin from yin, the dark force, and that’s why it’s called the Fall. What is the Fall? It’s the movement into manifestation. And what comes after that is called the Path, and that’s the yang force, the light energy moving back towards nonduality.
So the yin and yang are the dark and the light, the Fall and the Path, and this is the fundamental story behind all religions and all spiritual paths. That we were in a state of perfection, the nondual state, Brahman, then there was a fall and because of that we’re suffering.
And what does suffering mean ultimately? That ordinary life leads to death. We want to cling to life, but we can’t; we get kicked out.
So this is a message. This is telling us something. It’s telling us there’s a whole other side that we’re missing. And what is that? The Path, the spiritual life, which leads to Self-realization.
Actually realization is not a perfect word, but neither are any of the other words we have, so we’re going to have to live with that as the best alternative. So the Path leads us to Self-realization, just like the Fall leads us to death. The Path leads to eternal life. That also is an improper terminology, but it’s the best we have.
So what is the Fall exactly? The I Ching says all change occurs in six stages, and the seventh brings return. So the six stages of the Fall are gestation, birth, growth, sex or reproduction, production of byproducts, work, decay, and finally death.
Now most people go around and around this same circle, this same cycle of life, from conception to death, and then at death the material body falls off.
This is called the annamaya-kośa, the food sheath, but the other sheaths, especially the manomaya-kośa, the mind body, remains, and in their mind body the previous life’s impressions are recorded and compressed into a seed, and that seed becomes the conception of the next life.
And that’s how we carry our karma, that’s how we carry our conception of who we are, our desires, and so on into the next life, and then the whole cycle begins again, unless one is fortunate enough to meet or contact a guru.
Guru means heavy—heavy with realization, heavy with knowledge. Not ordinary knowledge based on words, based on the mind, but real knowledge, which is experience of the Absolute, Self-realization.
So again, it’s a process of six stages, and those stages are instruction, initiation, karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, rāja-yoga, and jñāna-yoga, leading to Self-realization.
So these six stages are a reflection, or actually a complimentary, of the six stages of the Fall. How does that work?
Jñāna-yoga is the complete removal of all vāsanas and upādhis in the mind, all the mental tendencies inherited from the previous life, along with the coverings, the limitations of the different wrong views that we inherited from our previous actions.
That leads to full Self-realization. That is the aim of this teaching, that is the aim of this channel. On this channel there are many playlists, video series covering all these subjects having to do especially with the path.
The beginning of the path is covered in the first several series of videos, and the middle of the path in the next series, and finally the jñāna-yoga path as taught by Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi is covered in the most recent series.
So please, avail yourself of this teaching, look deep into this knowledge, and then look deep into yourself and realize, experience, the Esoteric Teaching.