Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste and welcome to another episode of The Esoteric Teaching. This time we’re going to talk about some questions that I received—wonderful questions.
I’m really happy to get the response of the community like this. It means I’m finally in the groove. I found the live wire. We’re doing something right. Keep them coming, okay? This is great. And I’ll keep talking about the Path.
I want to talk a little bit about my practice so that you have an idea what I’m doing. I told already in the episode on Holographic Meditation that I practice karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, rāja-yoga and jñāna-yoga simultaneously.
Well, what does that actually mean?
Well, karma-yoga. I start with karma-yoga. My space is clean. There are no outstanding issues, no worries, no problems. Everything is neat. I get up early in the morning, take a little tea and sit down to meditate.
So karma-yoga means if any of the conditions you need for meditation are not met, you have to take care of them. You also should be doing some service for society in general, selfless service for no personal benefit. Like these videos.
Karma-yoga generates good karma. That’s what it’s for. Without good karma, you don’t have a platform, you don’t have a foundation for the advanced stages of meditation. So once that karma is established, then what?
Bhakti. You have to have a guru. You have to be in love with your guru as well as respect them. And of course, they should be ideally the example of an enlightened being.
That’s why Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi is my guru. There’s no one in thousands of years as qualified as he is. Not even the Buddha. The Buddha had to go through many years of sādhana; Rāmaṇa became enlightened spontaneously at the age of 16.
There’s nobody that qualified. Maybe Jesus, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. But we know because he was still with us 70 years ago, and there’s people alive today who knew him. I stayed with some of them a few months back. So he is still very much available, very accessible through his energy, which is very much present in Tiruvannamalai.
So, okay, so I worship my guru. I think of him. I love him. And I worship God. My iṣṭa-devatā, Joga-nṛsiṁadev. So if you haven’t completed the practice of bhakti, at least up to the stage of rāgānugā; if you don’t know, if you don’t have a guru, or you don’t know who your iṣṭa-devatā is, or you don’t know how to worship them, I just don’t see how it’s possible to succeed in meditation.
Now, people, I know what you’re going to say. The Buddha never taught bhakti. No, he didn’t have to. Most of the monks who came to the Buddha and the householders were from brāhmaṇa families, or they lived in communities where there was a temple and worship was going on.
They had been trained in all this stuff already. He didn’t have to teach it because they already knew. And this is one of the things that has been lost by ‘buddhism’, by separating from the Vedic culture.
So the Buddha was teaching essentially rāja-yoga. And if you go look up any texts on rāja, you’ll find there very much the same thing Buddha was teaching. The difference is the Buddha relied exclusively on negative logic, via negativa. And the Vedic rāja-yoga is a mixture of negative and positive.
So then, about rāja-yoga, the Buddha’s path. I went on the Buddha’s path. So I can’t say a lot about the Vedic rāja-yoga because I’ve never studied it. I never practiced it. But on the Buddha’s path, there are four Path realizations, starting with Stream Entry. Stream Entry is the big dramatic one. Once you get that, the other three are much more subtle.
But you can’t even start to talk about jñāna-yoga until you have had at least Stream Entry, at least the First Path realization, at least the direct realization that consciousness is everything and everywhere, that everything is alive, everything is aware.
Once you see that, then it becomes possible to think about jñāna. And indeed, in my experience, after I had that realization, that’s when I started getting pulled by the Self. That’s when I started getting visions of emptiness and Brahman and things like that. Up until then, everything was duality. But still, that realization of that duality is a necessary prerequisite for the higher stages.
So then what? So once you get Fourth Path, then you can go right into jñāna-yoga. And my practice today looks like this. I’ll sit down, I’ll make sure everything is, all conditions are right, then I’ll worship my guru and my iṣṭa-devatā, Narasiṁha. And then I’ll go into rāja-yoga meditation and concentrate the mind until I’m seeing light.
The light comes through concentration, right concentration. And only then will I attempt the jñāna-yoga. So what does that mean? Jñāna means that we know, first of all, that we are the Self. That we’re not this body, we’re not this mind, we’re not this ego or this personality or any of the stuff associated with them.
In fact, all of that, and even the world, simply exists within awareness. And so the center of gravity of one’s awareness becomes the Self, Brahman, identified as “I-I”, pure subjectivity, no objects, no divisions. But it’s not oneness either, because on that level, there’s no two-ness to compare it to.
So all of that drops away, and there’s simply “I”. This is the most wonderful state. And so realization of jñāna means that becomes our natural default state, that when you relax everything, that’s where your attention goes. That’s where the mind and consciousness are rooted.
Now, of course, actually, consciousness is rooted in the Self anyway. But when we realize it, then it becomes our natural state, or it’s always been our natural state.
Damn, language is just such a hassle.
But when we relax, if we haven’t realized jñāna, our natural state is going to be extroverted in consciousness of objects. But when we have realized jñāna, our natural state when we relax is rooted in jñāna, rooted in the Self. We relax into the Self. And that’s the most wonderful state.
I mean, that is just… it becomes an effort to break out of it, to drag yourself out into external consciousness and deal with the world and the body and the mind. It’s distasteful; but one does it in order to do one’s duty.
So in other words, the practice has these layers. It’s not like you get finished with karma-yoga and then you do bhakti-yoga. And when you’re finished with bhakti-yoga, then you do rāja-yoga.
No, no, no.
They’re all going on simultaneously. You see, the mind has to be given an object. It requires an object. Consciousness needs an object. The mind needs something to do, something to play with, a mantra, something.
So I’m sitting there. Once I’m in my seat, in other words, my spine is straight, everything is lined up. If there are any big energy surges, I’m in the right posture to handle it. My mantra is going. And then and only then do I attempt concentration. Because I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Kuṇḍalinī could come up any second. I have to be ready for that. So concentration means then I become one-pointed, focused and then the light comes.
What is the light? The light is the illumination of awareness reflected in the pure mind. So if the mind is not pure, if the mind is not full of love, full of compassion, full of beauty, poetry, music, how can it reflect the pure light of the Self? It’s not possible.
If there’s any coverings of material identification or mental agitation, negative emotion or so on like that, you won’t get the light. If you haven’t completed your bhakti, if you haven’t satisfied your spiritual master by following his instructions, I don’t see how there’s any way that…
And this is why these Buddhists and people like this are not getting realization. They think they can just jump into meditation without doing any of the prerequisites. I’m sorry, it’s not going to work.
And the same goes with people who pretend to follow Rāmaṇa. They don’t really do any bhakti. You know, maybe their karma-yoga is in pretty good shape. But a lot of them, when they’re not here, they eat meat or they take drugs or they have all kinds of sex.
I mean, it’s even going on in the temples. People are cruising, trying to pick up sex partners right in the front of Rāmaṇa’s temple. My God, how can they expect any kind of realization or any kind of progress?
No, they’re going to be like that friend of mine from New York, who’s been meditating for 25 or 30 years and he’s never seen the inner light. He’s never gotten Stream Entry. He’s never had any kind of deep experience. He’s still working on his childhood family emotional traumas. The poor rascal.
And then he’s mad at me because he wanted me to edit his book. And I said, well, before I’m going to edit your book for continuity, I got to fix these like 500 little tiny grammatical and punctuation mistakes. You know, and yes, I’m going to charge you for it because you didn’t do a good job editing. So he got mad at me and took the job away.
Good.
This is the kind of thing, you see, people will sit down for meditation and they haven’t done their homework. They don’t have the background. Just like he wanted me to edit his book, his manuscript, but he hadn’t done his homework. He hadn’t hired a good copy editor to clean it up first. So if I do it, I’m going to charge him 50 bucks an hour, you know.
So it’s the same way with teaching. I’ve been very frustrated trying to teach people because they haven’t done their homework, and their homework could take years.
They have to clean up their act. Karma-yoga. They have to find a guru. Not me. I’m not. I’m not applying for the job. Thank you very much. Find someone more qualified than me. Rāmaṇa, for example, or Ñānananda Thero. These are good people and they’re realized and they’re senior. So why not take shelter of them and worship them properly?
We’re going to do a whole series on bhakti soon, because I can see there’s a great deal of misunderstanding, and it’s stopping people from meditating.
So now I’m out of time and I didn’t get to the questions. So I’m going to have to do another episode. Anyway, keep the questions coming. I love it.
It really gives me a lot to go on because if you have a question, it probably means there’s 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 other people who have the same question, but they’re afraid to say anything.
So send it to me. I’m not going to bite you already. Send it. Send me the question and I’ll get around to it as soon as I can. I’ve got a whole stack of them lined up.
Om Tat Sat. Om Hariḥ Om.