FOREWORD
Many
people make commentaries
on
the Yoga-Sutra. So far in my
examination of English texts there has been no
person qualified to do so, especially from cover to cover. To write a
Yoga Sutra commentary covering every verse of
this profound and mysterious work is quite a statement! Men should
not propose to write a full commentary unless they have real knowledge
of every one of
its verses. As Ramakrishna and his disciple Master Mahasaya used to say:
"Is
it such a small thing?"
In
my case, I do not have real personal knowledge of every
one of its verses. For example, I've never had the interest in floating
in the air or understanding the speech of animals. My samyama is not
perfected. However, I do
have insight into some of its verses, and some of the
important ones. Plus I see
how
desultory are most
commentaries available in English. That even applies to every Indian
commentator I've read save
Vyasa. Even, astoundingly, Sankara. At this time I am focusing
on verses
that need the most correction or where I feel I can make the best
offering. I am not an intellectual or a pundit. I am a mere devotee of
my guru and seeker of The Lord.
God
is joy, which the yogis of India call ananda
or bliss. The Lord is also the Power of all healings, protections, and
solutions. Yoga, or God-search, unveils Him. Christians know all this
in their bones. This Yoga-Sutra is for them.
After
many years of
thinking that I might be able to improve on commentaries available,
then refraining, then considering it again, I am ready. But most
of my life, when reading most Yoga-Sutra verses, my reaction was:
"I
don't know
what it's talking about!"
Oh, I could see that many others
thought they knew. But I knew that I didn't know. For example, samadhi was at a
distance, a far cry. How to make any comment about samprajnata samadhi
vs. asamprajnata
samadhi
as every W.A.B.Y. entrepreneur from Boulder to
Santa Monica seemed able to happily do? (Is it such a small thing?)
Still I knocked my head against this unique scripture.
Truly, it is absurd to write a
commentary on the Yoga-Sutra if not having experienced even the lowest
form
of samadhi (sabija
samadhi, in which the heart pleasantly stops beating, breathing
ceases and one can happily exit the body)
at least once, and know how he got there. For many years I
knew I
could
not speak about these things from experience thus had no
authority to speak. Then even later with guru's grace, the Sutra verses
-- across some 20 translations I'd collected -- remained confusing or
opaque. I worked my way and toiled with the scripture, returning to it
now and then. When I was a child, I wouldn't go to Kindergarten unless
mother pressed my pants, I had a top button to button, and my hair was
well-combed and in place. When I was a teenager, I wouldn't present a
song at a dance unless we had every part rehearsed, even a synthesizer
or piano on the stage if it was present in the original. When I took
French, I wasn't satisfied unless I could read the religious language
of the Bible in French -- though it was not part of the course. And
long after years of
intense seeking, long after my nose was reddened from the equalized
breath, and the pranava
beating my doors, and had tastes of both, and my hair
was turned White -- I did not feel I was worthy to comment on the
Yoga-Sutra. I remained timid and humble
before Patanjali's sublime text.
Finally came a day when, thanks to my guru's grace, plenty of
suffering, and the littlest bit of ardor completely unworthy
of the Lord, I picked up some old copies and
realized: "I understand
this." I also began to see clearly: "This translation is bad,"
and further: "This
commentator has no clue what this verse is about and is
blowing smoke."
I could see clearly that the western translations that we have
available are very poor. They are, by-and-large, filled with an
author's indulgence of his own trifling "spiritual" fancies,
more
conversational filler
than yogic insight, often yogically useless, and some are downright
degenerate.
Indeed, it was because of necessarily pompous commentaries seen
elsewhere which I considered
absurd and offensive in their lack of insight, concerned with the
fortunes of my people, that I commenced writing this text, once one of
a
hundred prospects banging about in my back drawer. I
waited until I had something to say and knew what I
spoke of. I am glad
I didn't say a word until I was an old man.
There
is one basic reason that few insightful and engaging Yoga-Sutra
commentaries exist, and it is simply this: Those who realize it's
subject matter lose the inclination to write or teach, and in some
sense even
the ability. The great
avadhuta and yogi Nityananda wrote no books. He was too
detached
from
everything, had spent his life wandering, and rarely felt like even
speaking. Likely, he would have not had the motivation or interest to
sit down and write an organized book. And yet random comments by
Nityananda unlock riddles of the Yoga-Sutra. The same can be
said
of
Ramana
Maharshi, who didn't bother himself to write any text. There is a
wonderful verse in the Bhagavad-Gita that says:
"And when he is
satisfied
in the
Self, by the Self, for him there is no longer any work to be
done."
The
God-lover is relieved of duties and work.
One reason
they become disinclined is because they realize the world as
a projection
of themselves; it's flaws -- including "the unsaved, the ignorant" --
they realize are
their own remaining impurities. They come to know how to help the world
by mere thought or, better yet, by the simple continuation of
their
own self-purification. The world saves
itself as we purify ourselves. All boats rise. And if one cares about
his race, and I do just as I care about my family, the boats of his
race also are refurbished and rise on his waters. The whole world saves
itself as he saves himself. This
is the realization of the yogi. This
is also the meaning of the Bhagavad-Gita's perplexing
line, untrue by any ordinary analysis:
"The
whole world follows the sage."
He
who realizes the world as his own projection gets to watch the world
follow his own path sure as the sunset, purifying itself as he
purifies. Part of his own world-dream upgrade is
seeing others do his teaching for him, whether by his will or just as
pleasant relief from teaching duties.
Sometimes Lahiri Mahasaya, the Yogavatar of Benares, when surrounded by
the various pilgrims to his apartment, would direct somebody to speak,
saying "I'll teach through you." Truly, the closer one comes to the
Divine mystery the more loathe he is to speak and write.
Part
of that state is the realization "There's
nobody out there;
there is nobody to save. All is well, all is Brahman."
This attitude
comports with Sankara's ideal (yes, old bloodless Sankara) of the
realization of the falsity
of external existence, which I will summarize here:
"You had been thinking that
there was a
world full of problems, including sorrows and worries. But all that was
only a stick on the path ahead which, in the dusk, you had
mistaken for a snake. There are no problems, and there isn't
even
any real creation. It's just a dream you are having. Each night you
realize this over again, but somehow you
forget during the day."
By
enjoying this realization often, plus contact with the subsuming
transcendental perceptions of yoga, the motivation to
teach gets attenuated. Thus we could say that the yogi is
occasionally tricked into
teaching
by falling into a deluded state as he alternates. Every now
and then that sage
gets deluded and thinks of the world. He worries about the people and
thinks, "Well, the
thing that will help all the best is divine
knowledge."
And so it is that Nityananda occasionally wandered into
the home of some devotee and began to say things. Thus we have the
"Chidakasha Gita," a collection of utterances when he got in
the mood for this. And we have other recorded sayings by other
yogins, all fragmentary, from those times they did
get that
delusion. The cases where we have samadhi-yogins
writing material
that is coherent and impressive are the very verses of the Upanishads
themselves, and the very
sutras of the Yoga-Sutra. What grace it was for these men to
write these verses! Though my life has been unfortunate in human terms
it was at least rich with scripture thanks to these men who cared
enough to write. (Oh, to sit with an Upanishad in my hands!)
For them, it is both a deigning and an effort of love.
But thankfully their world-turned delusion occurred often enough to
help us. Even a sage at times feels the call of external
duty. And
the more men seek God
the more free and invincible they feel in doing external duty. What
changes is that he does it fearlessly and more effectively, while he
knows God has him and his race in his
Hand, and all will be well.
Yet it's the
very nature of the path that most of
what a sage and Knower knows remains unwritten. The tradeoff for his
descending silence is that whatever he
does say
or write, imbued with the shakti, will have effect. Just like
those
random utterances of Nityananda so long ago, when he happened to get
into the mood, and walked into some forgotten living room and said a
few words. Today those are divine manna for the God-seeker answering
many questions and even providing revelations about this very text, the
Yoga-Sutra.
But
the more one knows the secret that the Yoga-Sutra describes, the less
he will speak or write. Think about the ultimate goal of yoga! The
ultimate goal of Yoga, according to the
Yoga-Sutra, is a state called kaivalya.
The word
literally means "isolation." The Upanishadic term similar to kaivalya
is aparsah
yoga. Asparsah
yoga means that yoga (that state) that doesn't
touch upon or have any relation to any other thing.
This ideal, very similar to the kaivalya idea, is
promoted in the Mandukya
Upanishad.
All
you who go to the studio for prettier bodies still interested in
yoga? (If it sounds alien, it's not. Each of us goes through that state
of oneness with God nightly in the state of dreamless sleep.) For this
reason the
world does not have very many good commentaries on the Yoga-Sutra.
Those who penetrate it lose the desire to speak and the sense of need.
Who
is there to speak to?
Once he slips off
that ridge into the Holy City, he will likely no more write.
They may
occasionally still get interested in "helping their
world-dream" but not in the usual way, and their ways of
helping
the world become
unlimited, beyond the ken of ordinary men. A sage can breathe
virtue into the
world, and fire into the wicked. Thus it is that legitimate, coherent
Yoga-Sutra
commentaries will come from
the denizens of a
certain Borderland.
Once
I approached a siddha from India, an incarnation of Divine Mother. I
lived in California where everybody who ever visited India came back as
an incipient guru and started going on tour.
Many
of these uncooked quasi-pundits cycled through my town of Ojai
on a regular basis, or nearby Santa Barbara. The American
gurus were the most specious, the furthest cry.
They consider the
real Indian knowledge; the genuine yogic attainments, to be optional. 'After all, we're Americans, we
are more advanced!' seems
to be the attitude. There is, indeed, a certain hypocrisy in western
culture mavens who love to dabble in the religious cultures of other
people: They carry an assumption that western ways are superior, and
that old ideas such as the distinction between men and women, or even
morality as appearing in these religions, are errant throwbacks where
the locals have not "progressed" yet. Samadhi? Probably some other
primitive misunderstanding. They seem to most value India for new
philosophical perspectives, not realizing that, as Swami Vivekananda
said, "Religion is not
beliefs. Religion is realization."
But for a westerner
just returned from India, any interesting new philosophical
view or patter is sufficient to put them
into a big white chair, perhaps beside a vase
of flowers,
speaking nothings
--- with pauses for profound effect --- to religiously-destitute
Californians. (The western so-called Advaita teachers who streamed
through were particularly absurd.) It's also a neat trick if you can
disavow guruhood, and its obligations, while receiving the
guru-adulation of guru-hungry westerners. Even the big chair and the
rose. America's tacit gurus are, by-and-large, mere interlopers and
pilferers of the dharma, not having even attempted to
penetrate basics. They are, for the most part, practitioners
of
religious chicanery. They generally do not pay obeisances to
the
Lord, making their teachings sterile at best and sidetracking their
followers at worst.
I was a devotee of
Yogananda,
contented, and happily using his techniques. But now and then I'd see
some flier. My guru always visited
yogis and
sages. The Yoga-Vasistha advocated it. And I had a bit of free time.
Yet in my 15
years of living in California, I only went to see two. I didn't waste
my time. They were both Indians.
The first was Paramahansa
Prajnananda.
He was a disciple of Hariharanda
who was a direct disciple of Sri Yukteswar, so he was of my same
lineage. I was astounded at the boon of his coming to Ojai. I was
pleased to bring flowers, chocolates, and a fine cut crystal bowl for
his crew which
they set decorously beside the yogi and his German
monastic sidekick. It
was evident to
my eyes that Prajnananda was steeped in bliss, a genuine yogi.
After his talk
I stalked him like a cat. He was sitting alone at a table. The
thing was held at the Ojai Women's Center, so nobody seemed much
interested in this ascetic, celibate, and mind-sacrificer. It was my
luck! I wanted to ask a particular question that had long been
bothering me about the meditation technique we probably shared: "What
should one do with
the mantra when the need to breathe goes away?"
He seemed
bemused and
delighted. "Who initiated you?" he asked. I told him
Yogananda, in
a dream. He gave a
great laugh. As he did he swung his arm, smacking me hard on the
back with the palm of his hand. That
was his only answer. The one westerner I attended in those years was
Krishna Das, who does not style himself a teacher but who as a genuine
bhakta, is, and who leads devotional religious Indian singing. It
was a
wonderful gathering. The religiously hungry White people of Santa
Barbara threw themselves into the singing just as if they'd
become their European ancestors in church. No doubt it
was sad that they now sang religious lyrics in a foreign
language, but it was beautiful just the same to see the
unkillable
religious impulse of the White Europeans still popping up through their
own concrete. I approached Krishna Das when it was over and he smiled
at me as I did. I quick touched his feet, saying "I touch Neem Karoli
Baba through his devotee." He beamed, showing how the
bliss of bhakti
enlarges one beyond narrow identifications. Just as I honored India's
Godmen through that proxy and symbol, and honored the Christian God by
kneeling before statues of saints in quiet childhood churches,
I
felt that when Hariharanda slapped my back I was slapped by Sri
Yukteswar himself, and all of India.
The second guru I visited was the siddha
Karunamayi. This
was in the Unitarian Church
across the street from Alameda Park in beautiful Santa
Barbara. Upon
a
mere sight of her face and eyes on a poster I
had known what she was. I had no doubt. In the church I was full of bhakti
for her. I pondered the gracious Hindu conceptualization of God as
Divine Mother. Indeed, since God created both fathers and mothers, He
must contain the attributes of both. I pondered her identity, in
reputation, with the mind-construction known as "Lakshmi." (Everything
out there is a mind-construction and conditioning. But some mind
constructions, such as the goddess of arts and music, are pleasanter
than others.) While
I sat there waiting for her to arrive I mentally tried to connect with
her, only
meditating, and
trying to stay in kumbhaka to
make myself worthy to meet her. A 30-something woman was next to me in
the
pew, an acquaintance,
dressed fashionably in all the proper flouncy white Indian
robish thingies that California women love to wear at guru-events. She
was trying to chat me up. Seeing me communing
with Karunamayi's
photo she said: "You
won't talk? That's just a photograph of a woman. I'm a real
woman
right beside you." She was pretty. Had long brown hair.
Had been to visit me. Even
had a southern accent. But I considered her behavior embarrassing.
Besides,
this was a church! You don't chit-chat in a church! You
think about God! So I continued to think of the
guru, and thankfully she was soon hitting on somebody else.
In
my life I had become a "defender." I came to always be defending
something I considered indispensable to the
people's well-being.
When in the 6th grade I defended the smallest boy against continual
harassment by a red-headed bully who was the pre-eminent school "jock"
and basketball star. I had said I'd beat him up if he did it one more
time, and I followed through. After I had him bloodied beneath me on
the ground, he never harassed the boy again. Now in
adulthood I
had also changed my astrological natal chart such that my house of
life-role (the 10th) was ruled from the 8th. This is the Scorpio house
of shared things, shared bodies, shared wealth, and shared values. Thus
I found I was always defending the moral tradition of the White
Europeans. I was always defending the good of Christianity. I found
myself defending the critical elements of the Yoga of India, such as
renunciation and Brahmacharya. And I found myself defending the very
bodies and minds of my own European people -- their genotype,
reputation, and genetic memory. The thing I've always wished to defend
the most was the religious path that leads to God-knowledge and
prosperity for all who endeavor. In the Hindu lexicon I came to relate
strongly to the "Kyastriya" or "warrior" class and stage of life. The
Kyastriya, in the Hindu tradition, is the defender of the people and he
does this most centrally by defending the moral order that protects and
gives prosperity to his people. I was all about defending. And an
interesting point is that just moments before meeting this siddha from
India, this samadhi saint Karunamayi who I didn't know but already
believed in -- I defended her and her work.
For
as I sat in the church there was a loud voice out in the lobby
disturbing the sacred atmosphere. Some man was carrying on a long
conversation with somebody about self-help, psychology, and all the
various counselors and programs he had been through, dispensing his
wisdom and opinions on these California/Esalen subjects. I wondered why
he had no respect for this event or the people entering a sacred space
for a sacred experience. I immediately went out to the lobby and found
him standing in the middle of the lobby as people streamed in. He was
dressed all in white like Karunamayi's staff, and I assumed he was
indeed staff and had authority. He was a very large man, about 250
pounds, with long white hair and a beard. Later on I ended up at
private retreats with Karunamayi where a no-talk rule was to be
observed. This large man would always be there, dressed in white like
staff, and singularly breaking the no-talk rule, talking quite out loud
and encouraging all others to break the silent discipline. I didn't
know this about him at the time, I just knew that he was being rude and
disrespecting the atmosphere. So I went out and said to him -- in a
clear voice intending that all others would hear me confront him -- "Is
this a church or a bar?" And I walked away. He was then shamed
into relative silence and the group enjoyed some moments of quiet
before Karunamayi arrived. This was to be one of several
confrontations eventually had with this fool.
I was satisfied and
now back in my pew. Soon
the siddha came in. Her path had been strewn with flowers by a
red-headed woman devotee in White. She gave a talk.
I don't remember any of it. I just
tried to stay in bhakti throughout. At a certain point a religious
person realizes that meditation itself is more nourishing than words.
After her talk there was the
possibility to go up to her and have an audience. A line formed. I
had been invited to hand the guru a card, if I liked, on which I could
write a wish.
I
had long sought samadhi
to end my suffering. I
had heard so
many stories of great gurus in India able to grant the experience of
samadhi to aspirants. I knew by instinct that she was one of those.
That's what I wrote, in my most careful print lettering. Naively
but completely sincere, my card requested that she allow me to have the
highest samadhi, nirvikalpa.
A greedy child full of faith, I even included a 2nd major
request. I centered a greeting line at the top in the prettiest and
clearest lettering I could manage that conveyed my
confidence in her: "Thou Art Shiva!" I really meant it.. I knew that
she was Shiva. Likely, nobody else did.
I
sat
down beside and she remained standing. Oh,
what a luminous moment in my memory! The pews were filled with Santa
Barbarans looking on. It felt like she received me well
and
I was at ease. As she read my card she had a radiant expression. While
reading, she gently touched the top of my head in an
exquisitely mother-like way.
I looked into her mellow smiling face as she started to address me. Her
voice came
to me musical,
tremulous, and hushed as if telling me a secret. And
she seemed joyful as she said: "My
son, all these
things will
come true for you, and very soon."
Childlike faith gets
a man the farthest in religious life. We
were never in better condition than when we had childlike faith. And
yet how many the pigs who want to damage the faith capacity
of children! Faith is instinctive knowledge. Normally
Karunamayi would hand the devotee's wish-card back to them.
But mine
she kept. (She kept my card to herself every time I ever handed her
one, save once when she was displeased with me.)
It
came to me 21 days later. I had been reading about the natural and
instinctive nobility of the
male; how he
sacrifices himself to serve and protect his women and children.
As I followed the story, a madman was stomping through an office
building in San Diego executing people with a shotgun that could blast
through locks. Two newlyweds worked in the same building. Knowing the
killer was executing people, and that he was coming down his wife's
hallway, he ran there. He reached her in time to cover her
body with his
and take the shot.
Suddenly full spontaneous
yogic pratyahara. All the air in my lungs somehow vanished. Immediately
my chest felt strangely cold, immense, and empty like a
great, silent and empty warehouse.
At the very same moment a great wave of bliss touched my back.
It
was like the great Blue Whale of bliss brushing the
back of a tiny bliss-minnow who thought he was the biggest bliss fish.
I thought I knew bliss, but this was something of another order, a
swirling ocean of joy, and immediately I was losing consciousness,
sinking. I had the immediate desire to fight for normal consciousness.
First, I felt
threatened by it. I had not experienced such bliss. I reacted to it as
a threat to my very identity. Second, I had been
leaning back
in my rickety wooden chair like a teenager. As it came on I started to
fall back. I instinctively pulled away from the luminous rush,
shaking it off in a way that amounted to sheer refusal, simply
to prevent the calamity of
falling
backwards smack on my head. All these perceptions and reactions
happened in
a second of time. It may have been intended thus.
Still
in my chair and steady, the subsuming bliss cloud seemed gone. But
something had a grip on my mind and
wanted to turn it away from the world in some physical, decided way.
My consciousness kept
receding. Then commenced a game of
tug-of-war with God. It tried to turn my mind away from the world
again
with force: I pulled it back staring intensively at things in my room.
Each
time it tried to drag my mind and perceptions away
from
the
world my lungs also went dark. I feared it as death; I responded to it
exactly as if it was
death. So I only
fought
it. I fought wildly like a man who feared water when his
instructor tried to push him in. Everything about this place it wanted
to take me was unknown, and by some deep instinct I knew that I would
emerge from it profoundly altered; that I could not emerge from it the
same person, or even a functional person in the way to which I was
accustomed. Still it wouldn't let go.
I got up to walk around. I
looked around at things
trying to keep keep "a
world" in view. But it wouldn't let go. My mind kept turning away from
the world. I went downstairs and ate food. Then I went to sleep to make
it stop. As I went to sleep it continued to pull me into a thought-free
state, and the only thought I could think was a vague "I exist."
The next day I
had to cancel all my astrological readings as I fought. I could not put
my
mind on charts or even keep the world in view and the repeated stoppage
of my heart was frightening me. I wonder how I was able to walk around
my house. The push-pull went on through the next
day with me fighting. Sometimes though walking and functioning
my
mind could only manage a vague sense of "I exist." I
remember walking around and being aware "I'm in my room, in that world"
but it was barely seen, and I was aware that I had no heartbeat. The
lack of heartbeat, and the feeling of a great cold cavern where my
chest was. There
was a bliss, but it was very highly pitched, not the rich and opulent
bliss
of the first. It was like a bliss that I wasn't really experiencing. It
was like deep, dreamless sleep while awake but I was not experiencing
any Brahman who was "a mass of consciousness," because I struggled like
a frightened cat to hold onto the perception of my room and the world.
The "me" part
didn't even particularly enjoy it. Yet my consciousness kept pulling
away from here, from my room, from the mountains. It wanted
to make the world
to disappear. It wanted to plunge me in that Ocean. All I did
was fight back.
I never let it take me
wherever it was trying to take me. I fought it like a wild cat. I
didn't want
the world to
disappear. Because of the first savikalpa bliss I knew by some sure
instinct exactly where it meant to take me, and by just as sure an
instinct that I would never be the same. I already loved meditation too
much. I already was getting drunk with Aum, sometimes gasping for air,
and
barely functional. I
already
had a hard time paying bills, making money, meeting deadlines,
or even answering the phone. And
I had four youthful children who still needed my attention and care. A
bone slips out of a joint once and it keeps slipping. A record skips
once and it keeps skipping there. A drink is taken once and you take
another one. And once plunged into genuine samadhi, a dam has been
broken. As
it returned for me the
next evening-fall, and the world began to recede, I began to beg God to
stop. I knew that I was rejecting it. As I now spoke to
God out-loud, I felt ashamed and abashed but certain in my plea:
"I
am used
to this. I am used to being able to look at other thing as separate. I
still like the prospect of setting a grandchild on my lap, pointing at
a
distant star, and telling her about it as if it is something separate."
I don't know why I thought these things, but this was my excuse and
plea to the Lord. There was an instinct that if I gave in to this
power I would be, in
the metaphor of Ramakrishna, "out of the game." That I would no longer
be living a human life. There was a solid instinct that if I allowed
this thing to take me, I
would never again be able to view any thing as
separate.
Immediately after my plea out loud, it released me. The
battle was over.
"Who,
save myself, is fit to know that god
who
rejoices and rejoices not?"
First
Katha Upanishad, Verse 2:21
Who will
want nirvikalpa
samadhi? With no "other" to see. A bliss so
highly pitched it's beyond human registration, and nothing sensed
but a void and a nascent "I." Who desires turiya? We all get
it each night in
deep,
dreamless sleep. All
is withdrawn into the spider.
And the spider sits alone. It
is likely the place of all power. But what everybody in this world
seeks is
the bliss of the savikalpa
state,
the bliss of dreams, of riotous cosmoses, the
bliss of Saguna Brahman,
the Lord. The bliss that roils and churns,
full of light, boons, laughter, and joyous corrections. That is the
drunken state in between this and that highest
nirvikalpa. Everything anybody pursues in this world is
pursued
for getting one more little taste of that dualistic bliss of ananda,
from which we come. It is the space in-between, the stage on the way
up, and down between waking consciousness and turiya that makes the
saints cry. This is the bliss of God, Saguna Brahman, The Lord. Does
God
even want us to have nirvikalpa? What
human beings crave is the dualistic bliss of Saguna Brahman, of the
created world. I find I choose "Isvara and I."
I
remembered Karunamayi's words.I saw what nirvikalpa was. I
also
saw what savikalpa
was. Then I was
ambivalent and regretful. I
knew I was a fool to have fought it and sent it away.
Yet I was relieved. So all this is real! I had
arrived up at the crest of a long-sought ridge, looking down
upon the Promised Land.
Immediately I
saw in my mind a traveling family, like gypsies. They
had spent
their
whole lives traveling, on their way to some Holy City.Not
only had they
always traveled, but their parents before them too, and their
grandparents. Traveling towards the Holy City was all they'd known.
They
were part of a long line that knew nothing but
travel, seeking, hoping to find a Holy City. Seeking was all they knew.
That
was me,
and that was
all of us. Then one day
they come over a ridge and Lo! they see that magnificent city. Its
beauty is unearthly beyond description. They can see
it
contains amazing denizens they've never
known, contains potencies, powers. They look at each
other. Each other
and their well-known life is all they've ever known. Everything will
change once they enter it. No
more life of the road. Everything
about life will completely change
once they plunge into it, everything -- family relationships, habits,
duties, limits, rules, routine.
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Following Karunamayi
to the seaside, Oxnard,
California. I'm in the
brown shawl.
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There is a moment of
decision then. To
rush headlong into that Great Unknown? Or, wait... perhaps to set up a
camp there by the edge of the
city, and make small
sorties into its outlying edges, getting to know the occupants
and rules more slowly. The city's not going anywhere.
That
was the decision I made, to
live on the borderland.
Later
that same year I went to attend a retreat with Karunamayi at a hotel in
Oxnard, California. I wondered if she knew -- if she knew what had
happened to me. The legend around her -- the testimonies of so many
devotees -- suggested she did know all things. I wondered if she would
be proud of me, or ask me about my samadhi experience. Finally the time
came when we were all, dressed in white, allowed to form a line
and pass by her one at a time in a reception line. I always
got
emotional when I came close to her, just like bereft child finding his
missing mother. As I came close she glowed and said "You are a sage
from birth." At that event I had the experience of seeing obvious
blue-white light around the sage at all times. It came out 3-4 inches
from around her body. The 2nd time I approached her in the line she
said "This is your last incarnation." I didn't like that idea.
This life has been to absurd, painful, and ignominious. That's all
there is? This was the beginning of disagreements and tiffs I was to
have with the siddha.
Thus I experienced
also
"survived" Nirvikalpa, bestowed by a sage at my sincere request. This
was not to be my only experience of the thing that the
Yoga-Sutra discusses. But now samadhi is hard work! All uphill
climb. =9o)= Still, I enjoy the languorous walk, learning the way,
observing the sights.
Oh, I
have since sometimes rued my decision,
knowing all would have been well had I trusted. I would have
had
to end my old life, but God would have provided. Perhaps the
experience will never come again in this life, but that is acceptable.
I know what the nature of the decision is now, and the nature of the
trust required. Maybe this is the way it always happens in the
long karmic development
of souls, that some siddha, when it is time, gives you a taste? In any
case I plan, daily,
what
will be my reaction next time whether here or on death. And at least I
can hear that city, and smell it. There is always Aum, and bindu. What
more? And I can
definitely still write. I
am 100 percent certain that had I accepted it at that time, had I let
it take me, I would never have written the present book. I would
not have been able to do so.
The
world needs a better
Yoga-Sutra commentary, and the Christian Churches must be saved by
returning the central Christian ethic to God-search here-now,
so
that the Greatest Law may be fulfilled. It took 15 years' more
meditation, plus immersion in the Upanishads and the writings of
Sankaracharya, before I felt able to write a commentary on the
Yoga-Sutra. I waited until it was easy. The first thing I wanted to do
was to show that Patanjali's verses are in a flawed order.
Long
I have felt that simply placing the
Sutra verses into a more coherent order would help clarify their
true content.
Oh, what delight! This re-ordering of the verses, threading verses with
naturally
connective content and sectioning subject categories into better
wholes, is part of
the contribution I planned to make. This reordering of verses alone
will allow the more open-minded and daring students of the Sutra to
comprehend this ancient scripture in a new and better way.
Along with my own verse renderings
and explanations, I will
sometimes feature for comparison translations by
Dvivedi,Leggett,
Taimni and
others where
their version is valuable or testifies to verse content .
I
am fully cognizant of the implications of writing a commentary on an
ancient text that catalogs the essences of religion, the
experiences of the greatest mystics, which deals with final
enlightenment, and even miraculous powers. I am also aware of the
absurdity, recklessness, and even mendacity of the commentaries that
are
so blithely written and just as blithely published today, many of them
by writers who never had much interest in Yoga to start with, but
stumbled wide-eyed upon the text as mere W.A.B.Y enthusiasts. I trust
the real yogins of the world will find this text not in those
categories.
Out
of respect to India I have deposited some of my qualifications to mount
such an endeavor in the Appendix at the end of this book.
As
I type these words God roars His approval.
Religious
knowledge has been
my prime goal since a young age. However, in the final analysis there
is only one reason I am
able
to write such a text and offer anything decent to the
world, and one reason only:I attained the grace of a great
son of India and guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, destroyer of my
sorrows.
Om
Guru! Jaya Guru! Om.
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The
Guru is God. Whatever good there may be in this text is
solely
originated from Him, who took me on when I was unworthy, and cast into
me His divine spark. He
Himself wanted to write a Yoga-Sutra commentary like this.
Reincarnation of Arjuna the warrior, formerly
of England, this my timid
offering before your throne and the lineage that cascades
down from Mahavatar Babaji of the Himalayas Himself. Whatever good
it contains for humanity and the Europeans is solely thy gift.
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This
text, after the salvaging my gurudeva did with the
wreckage
of my life, the boons bestowed, the transcendental protection granted,
and the favors shown -- is the one bid I have in my coffer to
present a token of thanks. Let it be, also, my bid for a real
Yoga-Sutra commentary by a westerner, and a thanks to Mother India.
I
have confidence that old lovers of the Yoga-Sutra will rediscover it
anew here.I pray that young White Europeans who've not yet
embarked on the quest for the Holy Grail will find in
this
text a friend-for-life. And it would not be fit to not devote this
text, also, to my root guru and Grandfather guru Jesus Christ, satguru
of the White Europeans and my people, who set me on the firm pathway to
all that is here.
Jai
Guru, Jai Jai! All Hail the Satguru! Om, Amen
How
lucky was I to be born a Christian and born into the European Christian
culture! Or even to have been graced to walk into a fine Christian
church even once. This text would not exist save for that. I claim both
the bhakti-yoga of Christianity and the Yoga of the Yoga-Sutra, because
they are the same, and the first came from the second. This I attest
The
winds of guru's grace blow beyond the little fences the small-minded
people erect to constrain him. The Indian hardwood dividers you see
along the sides
of the
page once belonged to Paramahansa Yogananda. How did I get them? I
don't know. I didn't seek them out. But now I meditate beside them.
During that time I was living in a residence that looked exactly like
his own. Why? I didn't seek it out either.They came
into my hands by serendipitous grace, at the same time that the
Chintamani came to me. It was physically handed to me through the dream
state the night after I
visited
His
gardens, then lost from my pocket. Later reading the Yoga-Vasistha and
the Crest Jewel of Wisdom I realized that it was Philosopher's Stone of
legend.
The
Hindu scriptures call it the Chintamani. It's a real thing.
I
hadn't sought it. But I did feel bhakti and
expectation in those gardens.
Bhakti
is everything, and it's why Christianity is so great, and is eternal
yoga.
I
asked him in his garden for a sign of our connection. And maybe it's
only that,
that token given to me so strangely and briefly held in my hands, that
gives me the temerity and nerve to do the strangest thing I thought I
could never do: Write a commentary on Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra for my
guru. I am comfortable with it finally, because there is nothing more
important in this world, for a people, than to seek God-knowledge. Thus
I put in my oar for my peoples' boat, and whatever other peoples may
benefit. Thank you, India, for keeping the Dharma alive this long.
I
write this from the Saint Francis Apartments in Portland, Oregon in the
month of October, 2011, The Year of Our Lord. I was lucky to be born a
Christian and with a devout father who made sacrifices to locate his
sons just one block away from the beautiful Saint Augustine's church,
open twenty-four hours a day for any devotee. I go back there in my
mind daily, and it was the Christian religion that set the true yogic
flagstones of devotion, prayer, and asceticism under my feet. I
have confidence that
all God-seekers and students of Patanjali's great
religious work will find themselves inspired and quickened anew by this
new commentary on the Yoga-Sutra by an undeserving and flawed devotee
of Paramahansa Yogananda, who was a lover of the Christian churches and
praised and affirmed their own imperishable yoga.
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