The Journey Called Yoga
To the meditating yogī, darshan is more than a communication radiating out to him from an external God or Mahādeva. It is a radiant light shining from the sanctum sanctorum of his own sahasrāra chakra. Worship for him becomes completely internal as he follows that light, that darshan, seeking to know its source. In yoga, the devotee worships the transcendent aspect of God. He strengthens his body and nerve system. He disciplines the energies of mind and body. He learns to regulate his breath and to control the prāṇas that flow as life’s force through his nerve system. In this process, the kuṇḍalinī śakti is lifted and the multi-petaled chakras unfold in all their splendor. The subtle realms within the devotee are revealed layer by layer as he methodically perfects attention, concentration, meditation and contemplation.
Lord Śiva now brings the earnest devotee to meet his satguru, who will guide him through the traditional disciplines of yoga on his inward journey. It is his spiritual preceptor, his guru, who takes care that he avoids the abysses and psychic pitfalls along the path.
In this stage of yoga, the devotee looks upon God as a friend, a companion. He strives with a diligence and energy he never knew he possessed, with a dedication he once thought impossible, and as he strives his willpower is awakened. Finally, one day, in his first samādhi, he penetrates to the essence of being. In this ultimate experience, which remains forever beyond description, he has reached the union which is yoga.
Returning from this state of ineffable fulfillment, the devotee brings back into his life a new understanding, a new perspective. He is never the same after that experience. He can never again look at life in the same way. Each time he enters into that God Realization, that samādhi, he returns to consciousness more and more the knower. His knowing matures through the years as his yoga sādhana is regulated, and as it matures he enters ever so imperceptibly into the fourth and final stage of unfoldment, into jñāna.
One does not become a jñānī simply by reading philosophy. That is a great misconception. Many people believe that you can spiritually unfold or evolve into a jñānī through reading books, through understanding another’s unfoldment or performing meditations that he once performed. Understanding another person’s wisdom does not make us wise. Each has to experience the fullness of the path to enlightenment himself.
The jñānī becomes one who postulates that what he has himself realized are the final conclusions for all mankind. His postulations are filled with assuredness, for he has experienced what the Vedas, the Āgamas and the Upanishads speak of. He has awakened the power and force of his own realization. He knows. He becomes the embodiment of that knowing, of the Truth he once sought as something other than himself. He finds within the scriptures confirmation of his realization echoed in the verses of ṛishis written at the dawn of human history. This matured soul sees reflected in their writings that same state of complete merging with the Divine that he himself has come to know as the timeless, formless, spaceless Absolute which he once worshiped symbolically as a stone image in previous life wanderings within the instinctive mind, or avoided and resented because the temple to him represented an awesome and fearful threat to his impurities.
He has removed the veils of ignorance, removed the obstacles to understanding. He has come into his true being, union with God, union with Śiva, and in this serene state he sees God as his beloved, as that which is dearer to him than life itself, as he is consumed by that all-encompassing love. There is for him no more an inner and an outer life and consciousness, for they have melted and merged into a single continuum. He is That, and for him it is clear that all are That. Unknown to himself, he has become the temple of his religion, capable of imparting knowledge merely by the power of his silent presence. He has become the source of light and darshan which radiate out through the nāḍīs and prāṇas of his being. This great soul is found in his reveries sweeping the temple floor, polishing brass lamps, weaving fragrant garlands, expounding smṛiti and being the humble Sivanadiyar, slave to the servants of the Lord, as he lives out the final strands of karma of this last birth.
The final conclusions of the world’s most ancient religious tradition, the Sanātana Dharma, are that mankind is on a spiritual path as old as time itself, that this journey progresses from birth to birth as the soul evolves through the perfection of charyā into the perfection of kriyā, and from there into the perfection of yoga, emerging as a jñānī. This is the path followed by all souls. Whatever religion they espouse, whatsoever they may believe or deny, all of mankind is on the one path to Truth. It begins with the dvaita of charyā and ends in the advaita of jñāna—the advaita postulated in Vedānta and in the Śuddha Siddhānta of Śaiva Siddhānta.