Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of the Esoteric Teaching. Today I want to talk about the Dynamics of the Path.
So far we’ve been presenting this Esoteric Teaching as more or less of a linear sequence. Well, first you go through the Fall a bunch of times, and come around and take birth again and again, until you finally get sick and tired of it, and then you decide you’re going to do something about it.
And so you try to approach the Path. What happens? Does anybody just start on the Path and then get Right View right away, and get initiated, and then go up through all the yogas step-by-step?
Hardly ever. Only in very rare individuals does this happen. And that’s because they’ve been on the Path already for lifetimes, and they already know it. It’s in their bones.
What usually happens is that someone will begin the Path and then fall down. What’s the difference between the Fall and falling down? Well, the Fall happens because of ignorance, and falling down happens because of lack of Right View.
So what happens when someone falls down? Well, it depends on where they Fall from, and how much credit or how much experience they have in the previous stages of the Path.
Someone who’s just starting out—who is, for example, entering into conventional religion after having been, for all practical purposes, an atheist, you know, just following their senses around and getting beat up by karma and stuff like that—and they say, “OK, I’m tired of this. I’ve hit bottom. Now I’m going to get religion.” And so they go into ordinary religion.
And do they reach Right View? No, not a prayer. Why? Because in ordinary religion, there is no Right View. Right View is only available through esoteric religion and a realized teacher, a Spiritual Master.
So until someone comes to the point of accepting a Spiritual Master—a real Spiritual Master, not a phony one, not a commercial one—but an actual realized being as a Spiritual Master, he’s going to fall down because in religion there are so many rules and regulations.
Religion is based on morality. Morality is like “Do this, and don’t do that.” In yoga, morality is called yama-niyama: what to do, what not to do. So a person who tries to raise themselves up to realization through ordinary religion is going to hit a point where it doesn’t work anymore.
And then they have a couple of choices. They can go into denial and say, well, it doesn’t work because of this or that other excuse, and just keep doing what they’re doing, even though it’s ineffective. Or they can, if they’re more honest, they can go back to where they were before.
And we see this happen all the time. It happens on a daily basis with some people and it happens on a regular basis with others, that they’ll get into religion and start to study the books and do some of the practices and all, and then they’ll give up.
Now I use the choice of words here deliberately, ‘that they’ll give up’. In other words, it’s not due to any fault in the process of religion. Rather, they have not integrated their experience properly to understand what really happened. What really happened was they had insufficient knowledge for Right View.
So of course the process wasn’t working. What happens? They go back to being an ordinary person. In other words, they go back to the Fall.
Now why is this called falling down? Because they were on a higher platform. They were on a platform that does lead to Self-realization eventually. They were on the Path, at least to some degree. And then they fall again back into the Fall—that’s falling down.
Okay. So the reason we arrange the steps of the Path in the way they are is that this is really the way it plays out in life. Now of course, Ulladu-narpadu, Bhagaāan’s masterpiece of the instructions given to the karma-kandīs, is just the perfect expression of the Path. And it also puts these yogas in the proper order.
In other words, you take instruction from a Spiritual Master until he’s satisfied with you; then you get initiation. Whether initiation comes by a ceremony, in which case it’s mostly incomplete, or whether initiation is spontaneous and inner, coming from the caitya-guru, the guru in the heart. Then it’s real. Then it’s authentic. And then one can go on to the higher stages of Karma-yoga.
Because in karma-yoga, what is going on is one is creating the platform for further Self-realization. So in karma-yoga, one does one’s duty. And duty is defined in terms of four orders of life and four social classes, varṇāśram.
Āśram means brahmacarī, gṛhastha, vāṇaprastha, and sannyāsa, the four stages of life: student life, household life, retired life, and renounced life.
And the four varṇas are the brāhmaṇa-varṇa, kṣatriya-varṇa, vaiśya, and śūdra-varṇas. Now, in modern times, these have become solidified and objectified into hard-coded castes. But this is wrong. What does Bhagavad-gītā say?
cātur-varṇyaṁ mayā sṛṣṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśaḥ
“Guṇa and karma, by quality and work, I have divided them.”
They’re just classes. They’re just categories. They’re just types, so that you can know what type of person you are, or what type of person you’re dealing with, and what their duty is or should be; because the rules or recommendations of the scriptures differ in terms of the different classes.
This is so common sense. The kind of person, for example, who is not fit for anything other than to serve others is a śūdra. And society is comprised of more than 90% of this type of people. They can only follow. They’re not fit to lead. And if they do happen somehow or other to get in a position of leadership, like in the U.S. today, it’s a disaster.
So we see that when a person is not fit to lead, their dharma is to follow. And who do they follow? People who are more intelligent. People who are more able. This is a natural thing in life. It happens anyway. We’re just giving it labels. We’re just giving it tags, concepts, so that we can understand what’s going on.
So in karma-yoga, one is supposed to do one’s duty, whether to follow others and work for them, or to make business and make money, vaiśyas, or to administrate and lead society as the kṣatriyas, or to get knowledge and to lead, to be an idea or thought leader. That’s a brāhmaṇa. So these four classes exist anyway. We’re just giving names to them.
And the four stages of life—student life, married life, retired, and renounced life. These are going on anyway. So try to understand. These are just guidelines to try to help us understand what is our dharma, what is our duty. And we should perform that duty without attachment.
That’s why it’s karma-yoga. Why? So that we have the facility to perform the higher stages of yoga: bhakti, rāja, and jñāna.
Now, bhakti-yoga, there are three stages in bhakti-yoga. Vaidhī-bhakti, which is rules and regulations, rāgānugā-bhakti, which is spontaneous ecstatic love, and ananya-bhakti. Ananya bhakti means that one does not see God as a separate being, but as the Self.
And we’re going to do a series on bhakti and go into this in great detail in the near future. So I’m not going to go into it much now. But these are stages similar to the categories in the karma-yoga stage.
And if one cannot complete the realization of the stage he’s in, guess what happens? He falls down back into karma-yoga. Just as if one cannot complete the tasks or duties of karma-yoga, he falls down back into needing instruction from the Spiritual Master until he gets it right.
Similarly, someone who graduates from bhakti naturally into rāja-yoga will go from worshiping God in whatever form or formless aspect he chooses, into meditation. And by that meditation, he becomes empty. And this is the whole realization of rāja-yoga. The Buddha’s teaching fits nicely into the category of rāja-yoga.
What happens if someone fails at meditation? They fall back down into bhakti. If this happened to me—all of this happened to me, all of this happens to everyone on the Path—they may not realize it.
Sometimes if it’s an especially egregious Fall, they may go all the way back to ordinary life. But still, these cycles, these stages are the Path. There’s no getting away from it.
So if one goes through all the stages of yoga—karma, bhakti, and rāja, then he becomes eligible for jñāna. Jñāna is the stage of realization. It’s the stage where one becomes empty through meditation, rāja-yoga, and then is filled up again from within by God. And so this is the highest, the final stage.
If one has jñāna, then one is always in bliss, in ecstasy, and not due to thinking, “Oh, I’m in love with God, and God is protecting me,” and like that, “God is reciprocating,” but that “I have become empty, and God has filled me with His own Self, and I am He, I am That, tat tvam āsī.
This is the highest stage.
Now this stage is barely conceivable or maybe even inconceivable to someone in the lower stages. But yet we see that before one can reach this stage, whether in this life or in some previous life, one has to go through the other lower stages and attain perfection in those stages.
So, this is the Path. The Path is dynamic, it’s not static. The Path is cyclical. It’s not linear. That’s why we talked before about holographic. It’s multidimensional. It’s not simply linear. And all these things are going on.
I’ve experienced them all in my life. I don’t want to tell you my life story because it’s none of your business, but I walked this same Path, and I fell down many times, and so will you.
So if a person takes a position, a hard position, in any of these categories, this is the problem. If and when he makes a mistake and falls down, he will not be able to adjust.
For example, if a person takes a position in a spiritual organization of a certain teaching, let’s say bhakti-yoga for example, and then they fall down, well, it’s very hard for them in the beginning to admit it, because now their social standing, maybe their livelihood, their place of residence, and so on, depend on their keeping that stage of bhakti.
Now, it also works in reverse. When a person graduates from bhakti and they go to a higher stage, just by the nature of the process, they may have a hard time recognizing or admitting that what’s happening. Because again, in order to actually advance to that higher stage, they may have to give up everything external and move to a different platform in life.
So this is the problem. This is the problem with externalizing, objectifying, and having hard beliefs about one’s status of life, about one’s process of Self-realization. That one should always be a little tentative, ready to revise one’s belief and one’s image of oneself, depending on what happens within, depending on what happens in the inner life. One should be ready to reconstitute, refactor, and adapt the external life to fit.
That’s actually karma-yoga. If someone has successfully finished karma-yoga, they will have the ability to be independent and to determine their own course in life. And that way, when the inner circumstances change, they can adjust the outer circumstances to match and to support them.
For example, when I was a Buddhist monk, I knew that someday I would reach a stage where I would give up being a monk. So I never gave up my pension. I never gave up my independence, emotionally or intellectually. And so when that stage came, when I had realized Fourth Path, and I realized, “Wow, I got this! I’m out of here,” then I immediately was able to drop being a monk. Although it took some time to make the adjustment, I was able to make the adjustment.
Whereas others who reached the end of their being a monk, an honest monk, will still keep the outward aspects of that monk lifestyle, will still maintain some position in some organization that is not real, it’s not authentic, because they haven’t finished their karma-yoga.
So the next step for them would be to go back to karma-yoga, finish that up and gain their independence so that they can go through the rest of the stages without any problem.
And similarly with the other steps. If one fails at meditation, he has to go back to bhakti. If one fails at jñāna, he has to go back to meditation.
So, confirmed. Kind of windy here today.
So what we have to do is to look at the Path in perspective, and not be identified with a particular stage or a particular practice. And this will allow us to adapt as inner circumstances change and to reach the final stage, which is Self-realization, realization of Brahman.
Om Tat Sat Om Hariḥ Om