Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of the Esoteric Teaching.
Now, very important: before you watch this, if you haven’t watched the previous episodes, go back and do that. Here’s a link—because we’re going to talk about the high-level view, the Holographic Model of the Esoteric Teaching. And all of the material presented so far is necessary background for you to understand it.
So if you don’t see the other videos, you’re going to wonder, ‘What the heck is this guy talking about?’ And you’re not going to get it; you’re not going to get the benefit. So please, if you haven’t watched the previous videos, go back and do that now.
Okay. So all of you watching this have seen the diagrams and heard the explanations of the different categories of the Fall and the Path in the Esoteric Teaching. And you’ve also heard that this model can be applied to any method, any religion, any spiritual path. So now, how does that all work?
Okay, this is why I call it the Holographic Model. First of all, you have to know the trap. We’re in a trap. We are in a self-perpetuating mental conditioning that limits our consciousness and our agency, our power of action. So it’s self-perpetuating because as long as we go along with this conditioning, we can’t get out of it. We need some way to decondition ourselves.
So this is what Gurdjieff called “the terror of the situation”. In other words, as long as we go along with this conditioning, as long as we—as it could be said—cooperate with nature, with the world, there’s no hope of getting out of it; there’s no hope to attain freedom.
So what we want is a method that will allow us to get out of this trap. So if you’re in a trap, if you’re caught in a trap, let’s say in the woods or something, you have to understand how the trap works in order to spring it, to get out of it. Somewhere there’s a button or a trigger or a mechanism that you can work to release the trap and be free.
So that is also true of the trap of material existence, saṁsāra, birth and death. And if we don’t take advantage of this method, if we don’t release ourselves from the trap, it means we’re just going to go around and around saṁsāra indefinitely. I’m not going to say forever, because whatever has a beginning also has an end.
And someday you are going to realize the Self, you are going to become Self-realized. When? Well, that’s up to you.
So once you understand the trap, you realize it’s a process of becoming, where in the beginning we’re not anything as far as the material world or nature is concerned. So we go through a certain process of mental conditioning, of narrowing our consciousness, which results in accepting a physical form and an ego and manifesting in the material world.
This is called becoming, because it’s never static. We’re always changing, we’re always transforming, we’re always becoming something else. At first we’re just a fetus in the womb and then we get born, then we start to grow. So these are all transformations, transformations of the body and the mind.
When we reach adulthood, again we change. Our tastes, our priorities, our activities all change. So then what? Well, we get old and the body starts to decay. So at that time we also have to change. And finally there’s death, the final transformation of the body.
Now what happens to the mind at death? The mind is going, “Ah, we need a new body.” So what happens? You go off and make one.
We don’t know our own power. We don’t realize how strong we are. I’ve got to tell this story.
One time somebody gave me too much LSD. I thought I was taking like one dose, but it was something like eight, turns out. So I was tripping pretty hard. In fact, I was tripping so hard I went into this emptiness, a space with nothing—just blank, black emptiness.
And I said, “Uh-oh, now I’m in trouble.” And of course in that state I thought, “Well, I guess this is permanent,” you know. I couldn’t feel my body or anything. So I said, “Okay, well, I guess I’m just going to have to create the material universe all over again.” And so I started. I was working on it. And it would involve fractals and patterns and self-generating machines similar to the game of life and so on.
Well, I got as far as fish before I came out of it. I was making a nice fish, which of course was based on all the previous forms, beginning from a single cell. So yes, we can construct a body.
If we find ourselves out of the body, we have all the power we need, all the facility, all the intelligence. We just need the necessity to drive it. So this thought, ‘I am the body,’ is the root thought. And for the ego, ‘I am a separate individual.’ These are the root thoughts of the mind.
And so this thought has a predicate: ‘I am the body, I am this person, I am such-and-such a name, and my parents are so-and-so, and my work is this and that, and my wife is so-and-so, and my children are these guys and those guys, and all the people at work,’ and blah, blah, blah, it goes on and on.
So we have—or we think we have—relationships with all these things, even though they’re actually simply products of our imagination.
That’s all right. You know, a dream seems real when you’re in the middle of it. So let’s take it—not for me, huh, but for you—if you’re not enlightened, the dream seems real, doesn’t it? Seems solid.
So let’s not go into all the detailed arguments about that. We’re going to do that in a later series. But what is going to help you get out of it?
Is it going to help you if I say, “There is no dream, there is no individual self, there is no mind, there is no body, there is no world?” Like the Zen people do, or like some Advaitins do—Krishnamurti comes to mind. “There is no mind, there is no method, there is no meditation, there isn’t anything.” Is that really helpful?
No.
And few, if any, of Krishnamurti’s disciples attained enlightenment. Why? He was talking over their heads. He was talking, giving them the view from his point of view. From his point of view, that’s perfectly fine, because you don’t want to get caught in the trap again.
So you just say, “No, it doesn’t exist.” And it doesn’t, from the point of view of Brahman. But from the point of view of a conditioned being, this stuff is real, it’s solid. So we have to start from there.
If becoming… I mean, if the Fall is a process of becoming, that means that is the trap. So the way out of the trap is to undo the process of becoming. Does that make sense? That’s why we study the Fall.
The different stages of the fall have to be undone, in the proper order, like a combination lock. If you know the numbers of the combination, but you put them in the wrong order, it’s not going to open the lock. Similarly, if you try to do these methods out of order, or in the wrong way, it won’t work.
And we see this time and time and time again, that people, especially they become identified with one method, they’ll become fixated on a particular style of meditation, or sādhana. And they’ll think that it’s everything, and it’s going to give them enlightenment.
And it doesn’t. They get stuck. Then they feel like, “Oh, it’s all useless.” And they go back to being an ordinary conditioned being again. Maybe later on, they’re suffering so much, they’ll try again. And they will. You will. You’ll try again and again until you get it.
Well, why not just get it now? Why not get the Right View now? Then it will make your practice so much easier, more efficient, and faster. That’s what this Esoteric Teaching is all about. And this is going to be the context for all our teachings in the future.
So please, get a really good view, a really good handle on it, and try to understand how this is all working.
So OK, becoming means transformation. Not of consciousness, because consciousness is Absolute. Consciousness, or actually awareness without an object, is eternal and absolute. So don’t worry about consciousness in the beginning; but the body and the mind are transformable.
And they have been transformed, and we see it in our lives, coming from youth to adulthood to old age and death and so on. So how do we transform our body and mind from someone who is trapped to someone who is free? It’s another process of becoming, isn’t it?
So the same process that results in our being trapped in the material world, that is the process of becoming or transformation, is also the process that leads out of it. So how do we do that?
We apply the same stages of becoming to the problem of unconditioning ourselves, removing the layers of restriction on the mind and awareness, removing, in technical language, the vāsanas and upādhis, the tendencies and the limitations, the coverings, superimpositions on the original awareness, unconditioned consciousness.
That’s what sādhana is. So we have to transform our body and mind, actually it should be the other way, the mind and the body, to that of a sādhaka, a sādhu—a person who is expert in life and the transformations leading to enlightenment.
How do we do that? Well, the first item is Right View, right? That’s what this series is for. To give you the Right View on enlightenment.
Now why do I call this the Holistic Model? Because the way I’ve been presenting the Esoteric Teaching so far is in a linear model. You get Right View, then you get initiation by your master, then you go into karma-yoga, samādhi-yoga, rāja-yoga, jñāna-yoga, and then you get enlightenment somehow or other.
Well it’s not so simple. Consider for example the way you are right now. The way you are right now, you have a body and a mind. The body is doing its thing and the mind is doing its thing, simultaneously. The body is circulating the blood, breathing, digesting food, and so on. And the mind is thinking and feeling, remembering, imagining, desiring, and so many other things.
So, do you have to go back and forth from the body to the mind to get all this done? No. It’s happening simultaneously.
So this is why I call it the Holistic Model. Because in the Holistic Model, the functions, the ordinary functions or conditioned functions of the various cakras are replaced by unconditioned functions that puts them in relationship with the Absolute. This is the key to enlightenment, that all these functions have to go on simultaneously.
Okay, we are going to go into this in great detail in future videos. So now I am just trying to give the high level view, 30,000-foot view, how this looks. Okay, so just as we have the body and the mind functions going on in parallel, similarly in sādhana, we have these karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, rāja-yoga, and jñāna-yoga going on simultaneously.
If you examine your consciousness—just sit down and look at your consciousness—you will see it has different levels. On one level, you are the absolute, you are Brahman on the highest level.
That level is there all the time. But then we cover it up with these other levels that are conditioned to various degrees, all the way down to, ‘I am the body:’ this piece of meat, this bag of bones, this lump of flesh, how far can you get from “‘“I am the Absolute, I am Brahman”? How far away could you get?
So we have the unconditioned Self and the conditioned self going simultaneously. The Fall and the Path are going in parallel all the time. So the process of sādhana is to replace the processes of the Fall with the same processes of becoming in the Path that lead to liberation.
That’s why they’re called yogas. Yoga means linking—linking with what? Linking with the Absolute.
So karma is conditioned action, but karma-yoga is action that leads to liberation. In the same way, bhakti-yoga; everyone has love and sex and lust, but when that’s transformed, it becomes bhakti. Bhakti is love of God, ultimately love of the Self.
So in the same way, rāja-yoga, all day we’re thinking so many things. This chatter in the mind is going on and on and on, yakety-yakety. So what to do? Rāja-yoga, which naturally comes out of bhakti-yoga when it’s done correctly, leads to meditation on emptiness, realizing silence, stillness of the mind.
This is very nice, very pleasurable, and that, of course, leads to jñāna. Jñāna means knowing. Knowing what? Knowing the Self, knowing the reality.
So the holistic view, the Holistic Model of the esoteric teaching is that all this stuff is going on simultaneously. And we could say that the Fall is an additive practice, an additive function. You’re taking the original Self, the being, the unconditioned being, and you’re layering these layers of conditioning on top of it, upādhi, superimposing these different layers to cover the original consciousness, and result in the consciousness of bondage, of saṁsāra.
Whereas the sādhana is a subtractive process of the same nature, peeling these layers away one-by-one until one comes to the original Self. That is Self-realization.
Now, after enlightenment, does everything just go away? No. The body is still going on. The mind is still going on. But we know that we are not the body and mind: jñāna. That’s the meaning of jñāna: it’s a point of view beyond the conditioned body and mind.
So the sādhana externally continues. That’s why, you know, I still sit every morning. I still chant mantras, and it’s beautiful. I enjoy it very much. But I have a point of view; I have a platform, a place to sit beyond that. And that is, of course, my real nature. That’s enlightenment.
So I don’t want this to get too long. There are going to be a lot of videos coming after this that explain it in extreme detail.
But I wanted to have one video where I just rap, and I don’t have to follow a program or these very limiting illustrations, which are only like 2D, you know, and really try to give you the view of the whole thing in 3D or 4D. That this process, the Esoteric Teaching, can be used with any religious view. Any process of Self-realization fits into it somewhere.
But what are we really trying to do? We’re trying to undo the conditioning that led to being stuck and trapped in saṁsāra. So that is the nature of sādhana, the subtractive process of removing these levels of conditioning one-by-one, from gross to subtle. Just like the process of becoming in the Fall led from subtle to gross.
We’re going to reverse the whole thing and remove these layers of upādhis and vāsanas until we get to the real Self, the unconditioned being. And that is Self-realization.
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat. Om Hariḥ ĀŪṀ.