Category: Merging With Siva

Tuning Up With Haṭha Yoga

When we live in our personality, we are limited, but our individuality reigns supreme. A balance of actinic and odic forces running through the physical body bursts forth into individuality within the aspirant on the spiritual path. This cherished individuality, the feeling that you are the center of the universe, and your created world revolves around you, does not make one egotistical, but rather forms within the consciousness a deep humility, or a deep feeling of the realities of life, thus laying a solid foundation for meditation.

Haṭha yoga is a science of perfecting the physical body through the use of certain postures, or āsanas. In a deeper sense, it is a system of handling the physical body so that you are able to gain a conscious, actinic control of the odic forces of your subconscious mind. When the body is tuned up to a rhythmic pitch, you can single out the seeds of basic odic desires and destroy them.

The practice of haṭha yoga places the physical body in different āsanas in a regular, routine arrangement, so that the nerve currents in the body area are tuned up to a perfect pitch. No stretching, no straining, no pulling, no stresses. Once you have memorized the correct postures of haṭha yoga in their progressive order, you will find that after practicing them for only a few minutes, your mind will be able to concentrate itself without any effort whatsoever. You will be in an automatic state of subconscious concentration because you will have no nerve strain to distract your mind or bottle up the odic force. You will find yourself more alive consciously, and much more alive subconsciously, than you have ever been before. A child can do most of the haṭha yoga postures quite naturally. When you can, too, you will have that youthful freedom of mind-flow again.

Haṭha yoga, practiced correctly over a period of time, makes the mind so acute that you become able to “single out the seed of desire by disregarding all other corresponding erroneous thoughts.” In other words, in the practice of this science alone, the yoga student begins to burn out congested seeds of desire from within without even thinking about them. As you become more and more perfected in haṭha yoga, the odic forces, both passive and aggressive, become adjusted, balanced and controlled.

Through the practice of haṭha yoga, the physical body becomes a perfect vehicle for the mind to live in. The tensions which have been built up through the years become fleeting, and the mind becomes actinically alive. This enables the yoga student, as he presents himself to the yoga master for personal training, to single out the seed of desire and, in the light of understanding, destroy it. This retroactively brings forth a great wisdom through the conscious use of the subsuperconscious mind. When this happens, you don’t have to think to know. You know, and thinking is the result. Affectionate detachment from friends and relations is automatically accomplished, and a greater love for them flows in through actinic understanding.

Personality and Individuality

You can only detach yourself from your odic physical body when you know that a higher you exists, when you have gained stability by identifying yourself as actinic force. Don’t mistake your personality or ego for your actinic individuality.

Often the two terms individuality and personality are taken to be synonymous, but this is far from true. In classical yoga teachings we look at individuality as being the actinic energy, or the clear white light, the pure energy substance of the mind, which is constant, ever unfolding itself, peaceful and controlled. The personality we consider as the various masks or personae which cover the individuality. The personae which are heavy, dark and glued on to one’s face, so to speak, are those of an intense ego, congested odic force. They are most difficult and rather painful to drop off, or even to pull off. The personae which are transparent allow the clear white light from the actinic being to shine through. One can have many of these personalities and have fun using them constructively in the world, doing things of the world, always recognizing that the clearness of actinic vision shines through the mind-constructed personality of the individual’s race, occupation, social background and various accomplishments.

Many people become attached to their personality and suffer when it changes. One cannot, however, be attached to his individuality. In identifying the difference between personality and individuality, we can say that man’s individuality is the actinic, superconscious mind, which is constant, permanent, ever-unfolding and secure, and deep within, at a more intense rate of vibration than his odic conscious and subconscious mind, which make up the ever-changing personality. It is conceivable that man can have many different personalities, but he can have only one constantly unfolding individuality. And so it is the ego or personality masks we must identify as being the unreal and impermanent, and the actinic individuality as being the permanent, secure, ever-unfolding and refined actinic phase of the mind. This week do an internal concentration on the words personality and individuality. Try to locate your individuality by identifying your several masks or personalities that you have created in this life and write your findings on why you can get attached to personality but cannot get attached to individuality.

You perhaps have had a series of good, positive and constructive experiences. They have gone deep into your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind has reorganized itself, giving you a more positive, constructive, fruitful outlook on life. As a result, several weeks later your friends say to you, “You look different. Your face has a glow. You appear eight years younger.” These compliments also go into your subconscious mind, and you begin to feel good about your physical body. These good feelings, constructive, healthy feelings, again go into the subconscious mind and build from within itself a new atomic structure for the physical body. You take a new lease on life. Your body grows younger because your mind has had good impressions placed within it.

Think on this. Be renewed by a change of your mind, and seek for the constructive experiences with a positive reaction. Allow the reaction to bear fruit within the subconscious mind. Concentrate and feel the good feelings permeating the nerve currents running through the physical body, thus being renewed actinically from within. Good feelings are like food to the physical body. Food from deep within the nervous system, fed out through the circulatory system, right out to the skin, makes for an inner glow which can be seen on your face and through the rest of the body. This constitutes happy organs. In other words, all of the organs of the body are working in perfect timing, one with another, being proportionately fed by actinic energy and the vital odic forces. A good, well-balanced “force diet” makes for healthy organs and controlled, calm, central and sympathetic nerve systems.

Expressions of Actinic Force

Did you know that the physical body reflects the higher states of your consciousness and actually registers the flow of actinic force? There are advanced yogīs who can look at the physical body of a beginning seeker and observe how evolved he may be on the spiritual path. He would also be able to intuit from his observation the remaining subconscious seed experiences that yet must be worked out either physically or mentally.

Your physical body will express the highest that is within you when the actinic forces are flowing freely through it. Often the physical body reflects the lower nature when the odic forces are turbulent and in or out of control. The best way to keep the actinic force flowing through the physical body is practicing the art of giving, doing little things for others that you have not been asked to do. This keeps you creative, and being creative is actinic, superconscious and religious. Giving, doing without thought of return, affectionate detachment, creates an odic vacuum which your actinic, spiritual forces flow into and fill. As you practice this bhakti and karma yoga art, your relatives and friends, even strangers, will recognize your unfoldment, for the actinic forces, the real you, will permeate your physical body, making each of your features alive.

Here is a five-minute routine for rising in the morning that will help keep the actinic forces flowing. 1) As soon as you awaken in the morning, take a deep breath, slowly exhaling. Say aloud, “Jaya Gaṇeśa! Anbe Sivamayam, Satyame Parasivam.” Then, to move the vital health body into action, stretch out the fingers of both hands so that the palms are flat, then close the fingers into the heel of the palms pressing with a firm pressure, and scrape the fingertips up the palm of the hand until the fingers are again extended straight. Do this several times with a firm, even pressure. This stimulates the vital prāṇic body and the subtle nerves. 2) Again extend the fingers of both hands out straight. Slowly move first the little finger in toward the palm of the hand, followed by the next and the next, making a fanlike motion until all the fingers are again parallel and pressing into the heel of the palms. Again scrape the fingers up across the palm of the hand and extend them. Each finger is connected to vital nerves which govern one of the organs of the body. Through stimulating the movement of the hand, you are actually organizing and awakening the odic forces in the entire body. 3) The next exercise is also done before you get out of bed. Clasp the hands behind the neck and with knees straight and toes pointed, raise the body, touching the right elbow to the left knee. Lower the body slowly to the prone position, then raise again and touch the left elbow to the right knee. Practice this each morning, to strengthen the abdominal muscles and stimulate visceral activity, until you can do sixteen to twenty repetitions with ease. 4) Next clasp the hands behind the back of the neck, lifting the head up six or eight inches, pulling the elbows down toward the chest. 5) Next, rotate the ankles around and around. Do this eight or ten times, then point the toes down, pull them back, down and back. These exercises will contribute to moving the vital health body into action. They bring vital health odic force and prāṇa into the muscles, the bloodstream and the vital nerve currents of the body. This entire series of exercises should take about five minutes, after which time you should feel like jumping out of bed and facing an actinic day. This series of exercises immediately breaks up the astral congested, instinctive odic forces of the mūlādhāra that may have accumulated during sleep, flushing the vital fluids into the circulatory system and on into the muscular structure. A strong, healthy body is an emblem of a stable, well-balanced conscious and subconscious mind.

Meet Your Physical Body

Introduce yourself to your physical body by looking into a mirror today, a full-length one if possible. Say to yourself aloud, “I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body.” You will immediately see this to be true if you approach the mirror and stand before it with these two thoughts in mind. Then listen to yourself saying, “I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body.” The physical body is only one of the vehicles through which your highest being functions. To gain a concept of how much greater you really are, you must first begin bringing those several vehicles under your conscious control. This is done first by using the power of understanding, which is about fifty percent of the application of control when it comes to the world of the mind.

Quite often new aspirants coming to me to enter the classical yoga path will say, “I am sick of this body and its desires. I want to renounce it and live entirely spiritually.” There is nothing wrong with such a resolve, except that usually the aspirant really means, “I have no control over my body. I don’t understand it, nor any of my emotional drives. They control me, and somehow I can’t get away from the consciousness of them.”

As long as you react to your physical body, despising or cherishing it too much, you cannot progress well in sādhana or religious life. However, through the practice of concentration of the flow of thought forces, and through the deliberate use of your willpower, the power of cognition, deep understanding will unfold within you, acting as a controlling agent of the odic forces that sometimes can be so turbulent.

As an exercise in concentration, locate the different parts of your physical body through feeling while sitting still. Feel all of your muscles. Feel each bone. Locate them with your mind’s eye. Feel every organ, your heart, your liver, etc. Feel your circulatory system, the warmth, the flow. You are using the feeling faculties of the subconscious mind, the part of the subconscious that governs the involuntary processes of the body. The other part governs the involuntary processes of the mind, such as habits. In feeling the various parts of the body you are actually becoming consciously conscious of odic force, using the aggressive vibration of this force to become conscious of the physical body.

Become The Watcher

We must be aware that it is only reawakening consciousness into a natural state, and that there is nothing mystical, difficult or inward that has to occur to hold an awareness of the inner and outer simultaneously from one central point in the mind. It is only because one is not accustomed to thinking in this way that it may seem difficult. But little children are in this state much of the time, and it is natural to them.

The beginning stages of watching the mind think I shall describe as similar to sitting quietly with your eyes open and, while not thinking about anything in particular, simply looking at what is around you—all of the time feeling somewhat empty on the inside, but seeing what is in front of you, to the left side of you, to the right side of you, above you, below you, and knowing what each object is, but not thinking about any object or collection of objects. Your eyes are watching; who lives behind them is the watcher. The objects that the mind perceives are similar to thoughts.

When you close your eyes and begin thinking about the objects you have been looking at, duplicating your surroundings in your mind by creating thought pictures of those objects, there is a deeper you who is the watcher of those thoughts. This you can practice all through the day almost anywhere you are. It takes no particular skill or practice. It can be done at any time. You are simply becoming conscious of the natural processes of awareness, consciousness and thought which have been going on day after day all through your life up to this point.

Each time you practice being the watcher, using the method just outlined, as soon as you begin to succeed, you will immediately receive the impact of realization of the extent of involvement in the external mind that had occurred between these periods of practice. You will find that the more you practice regularly, increasingly, more frequently, you will remember to continue “the witness” in the midst of daily life—while riding in conveyances, talking with people, shopping in crowded stores, even in the midst of a disagreement or at the pinnacle of a creative flow. “You,” the watcher, will preside, and in presiding will carry that inner presence so necessary for a full and fruitful life.

With this in mind, be encouraged, for we must remember that total involvement in the externalities of the mind seems to be the cultural trait of this century. Therefore, it may take a few years to change the pattern. To send awareness soaring within to home base is not easy when the rest of the world is plunging in the opposite direction. If at first you only succeed a few minutes a day being able to watch the mind think or watch the eyes see, that is sufficient, as long as the practice is regular and consistent, day after day.

Other kinds of practice previously outlined in the sādhana of this book will strengthen this ability and increase your capacity to maintain that equal balance between the inner and the outer, if performed with regularity. This intricate study of awareness steadied versus fluctuating thought can only be pursued by taking the slow and sometimes arduous approach, not being overly enthused by success or discouraged by failure.

Seeking a New Perspective

In the philosophical-theological perspective of the mind which I call mūlīf, we see thoughts as traveling from one to another. This is what they seem to do, from one point of view. They not only travel from one person to another, but are seen to pass rapidly before our vision, ever demanding and commanding our awareness to travel with them. We are then faced with the tedious task of quieting the mind by endeavoring to control these thoughts. Through breath control and various forms of prior understandings, which are cumulative as we persist in the performance of our sādhana, the deep, mystical perspective which I call shūmīf soon situates individual awareness deep enough within ourselves, undisturbed by physical or emotional upheavals and intellectual tangents, that the world of thought may be viewed as stationary, and it is awareness that moves from thought to thought, scanning and registering what it sees. This, as I have mentioned before, is the perspective to be sought and attained through the performance of sādhana.

Remaining in one place in the inner depths of the mind, totally aware of being in that one place, as well as aware of that which is happening about you, is the state to be attained and maintained throughout your life. By being the watcher, ignorance is dispelled, emotion is quelled, and the foreboding stampede of excitement is subdued. By being the watcher, the overview of life is precise, and an equal balance between the inner and the outer is maintained.

During the course of this practice, you may feel totally apart from what you had come to believe were the realities of life. It must always be remembered that an initial dissatisfaction had occurred, compelling the search within to begin. It was this dissatisfaction that first consciously established the deep, inner state of being able to watch your mind think and experiences occur. But this state, once attained, is not easy to maintain. Practice is needed to give confidence and accept new habit patterns in the outer realms of daily expression. The practice is the constant pulling of awareness within, and from there, that one central point, looking out upon the mind. Only in performing this act time and time again does success come and stay.

If you have never experienced watching your mind think, observing your emotions play, watching your body move while living within it, then you may find it difficult to conceive of this state of perpetual permanence within one central point deep within.

As we have to start somewhere, let’s begin with the body. The eyes watch the hands at work, and while doing this, we can think about the hands. Also, one step deeper, it is possible to think about the eyes and inwardly observe the mechanism of sight. There is a “you” in there that is observing this mechanism of sight, the eyes, the eyes seeing the hands, the thoughts about the hands, eyes and sight. This “you” is the watcher, the witness—the state that the mystic is consciously conscious in. Becoming conscious in this state through this one simple practice is possible for short periods of time, and once you have understood the principle involved, success is assured.