Never have there been so many people living on the planet wondering, “What is the real goal, the final purpose, of life?” However, man is blinded by his ignorance and his concern with the externalities of the world. He is caught, enthralled, bound by karma. The ultimate realizations available are beyond his understanding and remain to him obscure, even intellectually. Man’s ultimate quest, the final evolutionary frontier, is within man himself. It is the Truth spoken by Vedic ṛishis as the Self within man, attainable through control of the mind and purification.
It is karma that keeps us from knowing of and reaching life’s final goal, yet it is wrong to even call it a goal. It is what is known by the knower to have always existed. It is not a matter of becoming the Self, but of realizing that you never were not the Self. And what is that Self? It is Paraśiva. It is God. It is That which is beyond the mind, beyond thought, feeling and emotion, beyond time, form and space. That is what all men are seeking, looking for, longing for. When karma is controlled through yoga and dharma well performed, and the energies are transmuted to their ultimate state, the Vedic Truth of life discovered by the ṛishis so long ago becomes obvious.
That goal is to realize God Śiva in His absolute, or transcendent, state, which when realized is your own ultimate state—timeless, formless, spaceless Truth. That Truth lies beyond the thinking mind, beyond the feeling nature, beyond action or any movement of the vṛittis, the waves of the mind. Being, seeing, this Truth then gives the correct perspective, brings the external realities into perspective. They then are seen as truly unrealities, yet not discarded as such.
This intimate experience must be experienced while in the physical body. One comes back and back again into flesh simply to realize Paraśiva. Nothing more. Yet, the Self, or Paraśiva, is an experience only after it has been experienced. Yet, it is not an experience at all, but the only possible nonexperience, which registers in its aftermath upon the mind of man. Prior to that, it is a goal. After realization, one thing is lost, the desire for the Self.
Many people think of the realization of timeless, formless, spaceless Paraśiva, nirvikalpa samādhi, as the most blissful of all blissful states, the opening of the heavens, the descent of the Gods, as a moment of supreme, sublime joyousness; whereas I have found it to be more like cut glass, diamond-dust darshan, a psychic surgery, not a blissful experience at all, but really a kind of near-death experience resulting in total transformation. The bliss that is often taught as a final attainment is actually another attainment, Satchidānanda, an aftermath of nirvikalpa samādhi, and a “before-math.” This means that Satchidānanda, savikalpa samādhi, may be attained early on by souls pure in heart. It also means that one need not gauge the highest attainment on the basis of bliss, which it transcends.
In my experience, the anāhata chakra is the resting place of dynamic complacency, of thoughtful perception and quietude. Those of a lower nature arriving in the bloom of this chakra are released from turbulent emotions, conflicting thoughts and disturbances. This to many is the end of the path, attaining peace, or śānti. Once one attains śānti as just described, in my experience, this marks the beginning of the path, or part two, the second level. It is from here that the practices of rāja yoga take hold, once śānti is attained. In the anāhata chakra and viśuddha chakra, Satchidānanda, the all-pervasive being of oneness, of the underlying being of the universe, is attained, experienced.
But unless brahmacharya, chastity, is absolutely adhered to, the experience is not maintained. It is here that relations between men and women play an important part, as in their union temporary oneness occurs, followed by a more permanent two-ness and ever-accumulating distractions, sometimes along with insolvable difficulties. Those who practice sexual tantras, seeking Self Realization through this path, will agree with this wisdom.
Does Self Realization bring bliss to the realized one? Self Realization is in several stages. Realizing oneself as a soul—rather than a mind, an intellectual and emotional type, or a worthless person—gives satisfaction, security, and this is a starting point. Realization of the Self as Satchidānanda gives contentment, a release from all emotions and thoughts of the external world, and the nerve system responds to the energies flowing through the viśuddha and anāhata chakras. Realizing the Self that transcends time, form and space, Paraśiva, is a razor-edged experience, cutting all bonds, reversing individual awareness, such as looking out from the Self rather than looking into the Self.
There are many boons after this transforming experience, if repeated many times. One or two occurrences does make a renunciate out of the person and does make the world renounce the renunciate, but then, without persistent effort, former patterns of emotion, intellect, lack of discipline, which would inhibit the repeated experience of Paraśiva, would produce a disoriented nomad, so to speak. Therefore, repeated experiences of the ego-destructive Paraśiva, from all states of consciousness, intellectual, instinctive, even in dreams, permeates the transformation through atoms and molecules even in the physical body. It is then that the bliss can be enjoyed of Satchidānanda—and simultaneously, I would say, Satchidānanda and the rough, unrelenting, timeless, formless, spaceless Paraśiva merge in a not-merging way, such as light and darkness in the same room. This is different than the concept of sāyujya samādhi, which is maintaining the perpetual bliss within the fourth and fifth chakra and stimulating the sixth and seventh. For this to be maintained, a certain isolation from worldly affairs and distracting influences is required to prevent the reawakening of previously unsatisfied desires, repressed tendencies or unresolved subconscious conflicts.
Someone asked, “If realization in and of itself is not blissful, then what impels a soul that has arrived at bliss to strive for further realizations?” We are all moving forward to our ultimate goal of merging with Śiva. Bliss quiets the senses. It is the natural state of the mind when unperturbed by previous desires unfulfilled, desires yet to be fulfilled and the desires known to not be fulfillable. As long as the anāhata and viśuddha chakras spin at top velocity, the senses will be quieted, few thoughts will pass through the mind unbidden, and the understanding of the Vedas and all aspects of esoteric knowledge will be able to be explained by the preceptor. Many choose to remain here, as the explainers of the inexplainable, and not go on—deep into the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh chakras, into the beyond of the beyond, the quantum level, the core of the universe itself. There comes a point when the powers of evolution move one forward, and even these desireless ones desire the greatest unfoldment, once they have found out that it is there to be desired.
Realizing Paraśiva is merging with Śiva, but it is not the end of merging. At that pinpoint of time, there are still the trappings of body, mind and emotions that claim awareness into their consciousness. Ultimately, when all bodies—physical, astral, mental, even the soul body—wear out their time, as all forms wear out in time, bound by time, existing in time, as relative realities, then viśvagrāsa, the final merger with Śiva, occurs, as the physical body drops away, the astral body drops away, the mental body drops away, and the soul—a shining, scintillating being of light quantums—merges into its source. As when a drop of water merges into the ocean, it can never be retrieved, only Śiva remains. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.
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.
For those in kriyā, darshan is not only the physical sight of the stone image in the temple. It is also an inner communion, a receiving of the blessings and the messages and the rays of Second and Third World beings, who are actual conscious entities and whose consciousness is canalized through the sacred image by esoteric temple practices. This is a deeper perception of the darshan of the Deity. Other forms of religious expression naturally come forth for the devotee in this stage of unfoldment, such as attending pūjās regularly, chanting, undertaking pilgrimages to temples and holy places and studying the scriptures.
Midpoint in this stage of development of the soul, the devotee may psychically experience an aspect of God that he has been worshiping in the temple. He may see the Deity in a dream or have a vision of Him during a quiet period when he is sitting with his eyes closed after a pūjā. After this experience, he centers his life fully around God and learns to psychically attune himself to His darshan, His will. Once he fully understands his religion, if he has sufficient means he may express his eagerness to serve through building a temple, or participation in such a project. Indeed, this is the great culmination of kriyā. It is through the devotees in the kriyā, or bhakti yoga, stage of the unfoldment of the soul that we have all over the world today magnificent Hindu temples, built by people who have performed well, who have controlled their thoughts and actions, who have understood the laws of karma and the penalties of wrong action. They have avoided wrong action not out of fear, but because they have evolved into performing right action. Having released themselves from the dense fog of the instinctive mind, they can now build temples of great beauty which reflect the beauties they have discovered within themselves in their personal communion with God, who to them is not an awesome master who might punish and discipline, but a loving father.
As he matures in kriyā, the devotee unfolds a more and more intense love of God, to the point that he may well shed joyful tears during intense moments of worship. When that love is constant from day to day, when it is strong enough that he is capable of surrendering his individual will to God’s Cosmic Will, then kriyā or bhakti yoga has reached its zenith. This giving up of his own will is a slow process as he unwinds the last remaining strands of his external will from the instinctive mind. His will was born of intellectual concepts, and these concepts, too, he releases unto God, feeling within his inmost being that he knows little of the grand mysteries of existence, an admission he could not make earlier. He realizes that he receives his inspiration, his energy, his very life, from God.
At this stage of kriyā the devotee learns patience. He learns to wait for the proper timing of things in his life. He is in no hurry. He is willing to wait for another life, or for many more lives. There is no urgency. He trusts God and trusts the path he is on. He settles down, and his life comes into a balance. He observes that he is in an evolutionary process along with thousands and millions of others. He embraces other devotees with renewed love and appreciation. He patterns his life in such a way that the temple is the hub of his culture, his religious activity and observance, his very thinking. From the temple or his home shrine, he goes forth to spend his days in the world, and to the temple or shrine he returns from the world. His life comes and goes from that sacred place.
In the stages of charyā and kriyā, the deep-seated impurities of the mind are cleansed as past karmas are resolved and a foundation laid for the third stage on the divine path, that of yoga. Yoga is a very advanced science. It cannot be sustained except by the soul that has unfolded into the fullness of charyā and kriyā and maintains the qualities of service and devotion as meditation is pursued. The devotee who has served God well now embarks upon finding union with God in his sanctum within. He remains enveloped in the darshan of the personal Lord he carefully cultivated during charyā and kriyā, and on the power of that darshan he is drawn within by the Primal Soul Himself to rarefied states of consciousness and the stillness of meditation.
The sequential pattern of evolution is experienced by each individual in a microcosmic sense in each lifetime. Even if they have been experienced in a previous life, the lessons contained in each stage are, in a sense, relearned in childhood. If we have previously learned them, then they will be quickly mastered. But if we have not learned these lessons in another life, we draw to ourselves in this life the experiences that we need to do so. This knowledge is an inheritance that comes along with the physical body. In other words, experiences from other lives affect the patterns of experience in this life. With basic inherited knowledge, the soul develops an intellectual mind through the good graces of its own personal karma and destiny, provided his intellectual mind is in accordance and in harmony with the precepts of his religion. If not, he has problems. Those problems can be overcome, but they are problems while they are being overcome. If his beliefs are not in harmony with his religion, that conflict can stagnate and congest his natural advancement and must be resolved before he can move on to the second stage.
In the stage of charyā, similar to karma yoga, the devotee naturally awakens a desire to work for the sake of work, to serve for the sake of service. He does this in his daily life and through helping in the temple in practical ways—through sweeping the marble floors, polishing the brass oil lamps, weaving fragrant garlands for the pūjās, helping other devotees in their lives, and in general through a humble and unseen kind of service. This humble service is itself a means to break the stagnant congestion of erroneous beliefs. Worship during the charyā stage is entirely external, yet it is entirely meaningful to the devotee. In charyā the devotee looks upon the stone image in the temple sanctum with his physical eyes, and to him darshan of the Deity is the physical sight of the stone image of God.
As the devotee unfolds into the next stage, of kriyā or bhakti yoga, he will want to worship and serve in the temple in more internalized ways. He will seek to understand why a stone image is a stone image, why stone images are needed at all. He will begin to think about the purpose of worship, the meaning of worship, the experience of worship. He will wonder to himself about the ancient customs and protocol and why these customs are followed in his community. He will delve into the scriptures, learning and studying about his religion. Singing the sacred hymns, chanting the names of the Lord and performing japa will become an important part of his devotion, which is partly internal and partly external. Devotion will well up from the recesses of his soul as he purifies himself. His heart begins to open as he evolves out of the instinctive mind into a spiritualized intellect, an intellect that is developed from within himself. His instinctive nature is subsiding, and his intellectual nature is emerging as he comes into a full understanding of the laws of karma. As his intellect controls the instinctive mind, he understands for the first time the cause and effect, the action and reaction, of his physical and mental activities.
Kriyā blossoms into its fullness when there arises in his heart a desire, a strong desire, to know and experience God, to penetrate into the realms of consciousness and reality beyond the physical plane revealed by his grosser senses. He expresses this desire through continued worship in the very special environment of the Hindu temple or his home shrine. He worships the personal aspect of God, and his attitude is no longer one of fear, of a servant to a master, as it was in charyā. In kriyā he looks upon God as a dutiful son to his father. He perceives that God is his personal Lord, concerned for the welfare of mankind, and he approaches God in a human, personal way. He wants to serve God not because he fears the consequences of being an infidel, but because he wants to be in harmony with a higher reality which he reveres, to be attuned to the darshan of the Deity.
To all these devotees, in their different stages of spiritual evolution, Lord Śiva is the Supreme God. To the first, He is the Primal Soul, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of existence. To the second He is the Primal Soul as well as Pure Consciousness, the substratum of existence, the divine energy coursing through and animating every atom within the microcosm and the macrocosm. To the third He is the manifest Primal Soul and Pure Consciousness and the unmanifest Absolute, Paraśiva, that transcends form itself. These three perspectives are not exclusive of one another, but encompass one another as the lotus of the mind opens to an ever widening understanding of God. Each is true according to where the devotee is on the path.
This Eternal Path is divided naturally into four separate categories. The Bhagavad Gītā—the popular book which you all know from your studies in Vedānta and which has made Hindu philosophy well known in America—defines these as four separate nonprogressive paths, called karma yoga, bhakti yoga, rāja yoga and jñāna yoga. In Āgamic scripture these are defined a little differently and are considered to be four stages of a progressive path, termed charyā, kriyā, yoga and jñāna. These are all Sanskrit terms. According to the Āgamic tradition, these four categories are the natural sequence of the soul’s evolutionary process, much like the development of a butterfly from egg to larva, from larva to caterpillar, from caterpillar to pupa, and then the final metamorphosis from pupa to butterfly. Every butterfly, without exception, will follow this pattern of development, and every soul will mature through charyā to kriyā, through kriyā to yoga and into jñāna. Charyā, or karma yoga, may be simply defined as service. Kriyā, or bhakti yoga, is devotion. Yoga, or rāja yoga, is meditation, and jñāna is the state of wisdom reached toward the end of the path as the result of God Realization and the subsequent enlivened kuṇḍalinī and unfoldment of the chakras through the practices of yoga. The soul does not move quickly from one stage to another. It is a deliberate process, and within each stage there exist vast libraries of knowledge containing the sum of thousands of years of teachings unraveling that particular experiential vista.
The evolution of the soul through the stage of charyā, or service, may itself take many, many lives. We see people every day who are working to be of service, to be more efficient, to be more useful to others. They are not necessarily inclined toward devotion, yet they may be deeply concerned with humanitarian programs, with selflessly helping their fellow man. An entire life may be spent in charyā, and the next life and the next. It is a slow process, with its own timing. Not every stage of experience can be accepted at once.
The path of charyā begins with the avoidance of wrongful action, and can be likened to the early training of a child in which he is told, “Don’t do this. Do this instead. Don’t behave in that way. This is the proper behavior.” In early life, a child learns what is right by being told what not to do. In spiritual life, too, we have these avoidances, these restraints. The seeker is advised to avoid over-eating, criticism of others, anger, hatred, envy and deceit. This gives him guidelines that stabilize him in the beginning, controlling the instinctive mind. These inner reins help him to know what is right, help him to control his karma and educate his intellect by laying a foundation of quiet within the instinctive mind, a foundation upon which the intellect may build a knowledgeable structure.
Charyā is the state of overcoming basic instinctive patterns and learning to work for the sake of work rather than the fruits of our labor. It is the simple fulfillment of right action and the first step on the spiritual path in our religion. Our duty to our parents, to our community, to the wife and children, to the temple in the town or village—all this must be fulfilled for charyā to be perfected. One goes to the temple at this stage of unfoldment because it is expected of him. He goes there not to practice yoga, not to evolve a personal relationship with the Deity, but because he must. It is his duty. His instinctive mind at this stage of his evolution is so strong that it must be governed firmly by external laws, external forces. He either obeys or suffers the consequences of disobedience. It is his fear of the consequences that motivates him more than anything else. Certainly he may feel guilty or fearful when he approaches the temple, for he is aware of his own transgressions and omissions. But little by little he gains confidence and understanding. His conscience begins to take the place of outer sanctions and gradually becomes his guideline. Whereas before he never felt guilty even for his worst transgressions, now he begins to feel remorse for misdeeds. Tendencies toward selfishness lose their hold on the devotee as he strives to become the perfect servant to God and mankind.