Summary

The first half covers Sadhguru’s journey to becoming a yoga guru, the second half covers the body, mind and energy/spirit. Part biography, part philosophy. Each philosophical chapter has a practical exercise at the end.

Key Takeaways

To be added on a reread. See notes below.

What I got out of it

To be added on a reread. See notes below.

Summary Notes

The Four-Letter Word

Unfortunately, we have forgotten the real meaning of the word. “Guru” literally means “dispeller of darkness.” The function of the guru, contrary to popular belief, is not to teach, indoctrinate, or convert. The guru is here to throw light on dimensions beyond your sensory perceptions and your psychological drama, dimensions that you are currently unable to perceive. The guru is here, fundamentally, to throw light on the very nature of your existence.

Right now your problem is that you suffer what happened ten years ago and you suffer what may happen the day after tomorrow. Both are not living truths. They are simply a play of your memory and imagination. Does this mean then that in order to find peace you must annihilate your mind? Not at all. It simply means you need to take charge of it.

The other phrase that has hardened into cliché through overuse is “positive thinking.”

When it is oversimplified and used as some quick-fix mantra, positive thinking becomes a way of whitewashing or sugarcoating your reality. When you are unable to process real-time information and control your psychological drama, you seize on “positive thinking” as a tranquilizer. Initially, it might seem to imbue your life with new confidence and optimism. But it is essentially limited. In the long term, if you deny or amputate one part of reality, it gives you a lopsided perspective of life.

All these puerile philosophies come from the assumption that existence is human-centric. This single idea has robbed us of all sense and made us commit some of the most inhuman and heinous crimes throughout history. These continue to perpetuate themselves to this very day.

The only solution for all the ills that plague humanity is self-transformation.

Self-transformation is not incremental self-improvement. Self-transformation is achieved not by morals or ethics or attitudinal or behavioral changes, but by experiencing the limitless nature of who we are. Self-transformation means nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life.

Knowing this is yoga. One who embodies this is a yogi. One who guides you in this direction is a guru.

Guru is not the destination but the road map. The inner dimension is uncharted terrain.

Part One 

A Note to the Reader

I have never read any of the yogic treatises in their entirety. I never had to. I come from inner experience. It was only late in my life when I skimmed through some of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, those significant yogic texts, that I realized that I had a certain access to their inner core. This is because I approach them experientially, rather than theoretically. To reduce a sophisticated science, like yoga, to mere doctrine is just as tragic as turning it into a cardiovascular workout.

A philosophy or belief system can be old or new. But gurus are always contemporary.

If I promise to open a door for you tomorrow or I opened it for someone else yesterday, it is of no relevance. Only if I open a door for you today is it of some value.

The truth is timeless, but the technology and the language are always contemporary. If they weren’t, they would deserve to be discarded. No tradition, however time-honored, deserves to live on as anything more than a museum piece if it has outlived its relevance.

When I Lost My Sense 

Later in my life, I couldn’t help noticing that people coming out of restaurants always had more joyful faces than those coming out of temples.

That intrigued me.

While I was a skeptic, I never identified with that label either. I had lots of questions about everything, but never felt the need to draw any conclusions. I realized very early that I knew nothing about anything. That meant I ended up paying enormous attention to everything around me.

I also saw that language was no more than a conspiracy devised by human beings. If someone spoke, I realized they were only making sounds, and I was making up the meanings.

So, I stopped making up meanings and the sounds became very amusing.

When my eyes were open, everything intrigued me—an ant, a leaf, clouds, flowers, darkness, just about anything. But to my amazement, I found that with my eyes closed, there was even more that grabbed my attention—the way the body pulses, the way different organs function, the various channels along which one’s inner energy moves, the manner in which the anatomy is aligned, the fact that boundaries are limited to the external world. This exercise opened up the entire mechanics of being human before me. Instead of leading me to a simplistic answer that I was “this” or “that,” it gradually brought me to a realization that, if I were willing, I could be everything. It wasn’t about arriving at any conclusions.

Despite all my wild ways, the one thing I did manage to do in a strangely disciplined fashion was my practice of yoga.

Three months after starting yoga, my body started coming awake at three forty every morning, without any external prompting, as it does even today. After I woke, my practices would simply happen, no matter where I was and in what situation, without a single day’s break. This simple yoga—called angamardana (a system of physical yoga that strengthens sinews and limbs)—definitely set me apart in any group of people, physically and mentally. But that’s about all. Or so I believed.

I have never looked for anything in my life. I just look. And that is what I am trying to teach people now: if you really want to know spirituality, don’t look for anything.

What and why were never questions for me. How was the only question.

I built my poultry farm and I built it single-handedly, from scratch. The business took off. The profits started rolling in. I devoted four hours every morning to the business. The rest of the day was spent reading and writing poetry, swimming in the well, meditating, daydreaming on a huge banyan tree.

“Oh, we thought you’d make something of your life, but you are just wasting it.”

I took on the challenge. In partnership with a civil engineer friend, I entered the construction business. In five years, we became a major construction company, among the leading private contractors in Mysore. My father was incredulous and delighted.

Even if you get into yoga for the wrong reasons, it still works!

Human nature is such that we always yearn to be something more than what we are right now. No matter how much we achieve, we still want to be something more.

If we just looked at this closely, we would realize that this longing is not for more; this longing is for all. We are all seeking to become infinite. The only problem is that we are seeking it in installments.

The Way Out Is In 

An empty stomach is one problem: hunger. But a full stomach? A hundred problems!

Somehow, for a human being, life doesn’t seem to end with survival; life begins with survival.

Let us start with a single question: what do we consider to be a state of well-being? Very simply, well-being is just a deep sense of pleasantness within. If your body feels pleasant, we call this health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they become very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking: pleasantness within and without.

When pleasantness is within, it is termed peace, joy, happiness. When your surroundings become pleasant, it gets branded success.

No scripture or philosophy is needed to instruct you to be good to others. It is a natural outcome when you are feeling good within yourself. Inner pleasantness is a surefire insurance for the making of a peaceful society and a joyful world.

The only thing that stands between you and your well-being is a simple fact: you have allowed your thoughts and emotions to take instruction from the outside rather than the inside.

We need to understand that unless we do the right things, the right things will not happen to us: this is true not just of the outside world, but also the inside.

Moral of the story: bullshit may get you to the top, but it never lets you stay there!

The way out is a very simple change in direction. You just need to see that the source and basis of your experience is within you. Human experience may be stimulated or catalyzed by external situations, but the source is within. Pain or pleasure, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, happens only inside you. Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.

If you are aware, you can activate your system in such a way that simply breathing is an enormous pleasure. All it takes is a willingness to pay a little attention to the inner mechanism.

Most people think peace and joy are the goals of the spiritual life. This is a fallacy. Peace and joy are the basic requirements for a life of well-being.

Whatever you feel deprived of looks like the highest aspiration.

The thing to remember is that none of these will settle you in any enduring way. Human life is longing for unlimited expansion, and that is the only thing that will settle you for good.

The reason why everyone is not naturally enlightened is simply this: people have categorized the world into good and bad, God and Devil, high and low, sacred and filthy, pure and impure, heaven and hell. These are parallel lines that will never meet.

Once you have fractured this existence within yourself, there is no way to reach a state of enduring well-being and freedom.

When it comes to our inner nature, there is only one governing principle: borderless unity. Our physical and social worlds are governed by boundaries. Our inner world needs none. To attain the ecstasy of borderless unity, which is our natural state, all you need to do is live by the guideline that all human experience is generated from within—either with the support of external stimuli or without. That is all.

What he imparted to these disciples was an unimaginably profound system of self-exploration and transformation, based on the radical premise that it is possible for a human being to evolve consciously. Unlike biological evolution, which happens without our conscious participation, spiritual evolution can happen consciously. All it takes, Adiyogi told us, is willingness.

If we were to distill the essence of his wisdom in a few lines, it would be just this. Up and down, good and bad, sacred and profane: these are all assumed. But inward and outward: this is the one context we are sure of, the one context we can work with. This is Adiyogi’s most significant contribution to humankind and it is a profound and enduring one: “The only way out is in.”

If you go outward, it is an endless journey. If you turn inward, it is just one moment.

Design Your Destiny 

To mold situations the way you want them you must first know who you are.

Who you are is not the sum total of accumulations you have made. Everything that you currently know as “myself” is just an accumulation. Your body is just an accumulation of food. Your mind is just an accumulation of impressions gathered through the five senses. What you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you.

Who then are you? That is yet to come into your experience. That is still in an unconscious state. You are trying to live your life through what you have gathered, not through who you are.

Even now you are choosing your life, but you are choosing it in total unawareness. But whatever you do in unawareness, you can also do in awareness. That makes a world of a difference. It is the difference between ignorance and enlightenment.

When pain, misery, or anger happen, it is time to look within you, not around you. To achieve well-being the only one who needs to be fixed is you. What you forget is that when you are sick, it is you who needs the medication. When you are hungry, it is you who needs the food. The only one that needs to be fixed is you, but just to understand this simple fact people take lifetimes!

The spiritual process is not about imposing your ideas on existence; it is about making yourself in such a way that the creation and the Creator, and every atom in this existence, cannot help yielding to you. When you pursue your own likes and dislikes, you feel alone in this vast existence, constantly insecure, unstable, psychologically challenged. But once existence yields to you, it delivers you to a different place of grace—where every pebble, every rock, every tree, every atom, speaks to you in a language you understand. Every moment there are a million miracles happening around you: a flower blossoming, a bird tweeting, a bee humming, a raindrop falling, a snowflake wafting along the clear evening air.

There is magic everywhere. If you learn how to live it, life is nothing short of a daily miracle.

You need to do the right things if you want results. Judgments about good and bad are essentially human and socially conditioned. These are fine as social norms. But existence is not concerned with these conclusions. Existence is not judgmental. It treats all of us the same way.

No Boundary, No Burden 

Let’s put the question more precisely: who is responsible for the way you are right now?

Your genes? Your father? Your mother? Your wife? Your husband? Your teacher? Your boss? Your mother-in-law? God? The government? All of the above?

The condition is a pervasive one. Ask someone, “Why are you in this situation?” Pat comes the response, “You know, when I was a child, my parents…” The same old story, with just a few variations.

There is an ancient science of how to create misery, and one in which human beings need no encouragement whatsoever. There is almost no one who is not an expert. Passing the buck is what you do in a hundred different ways each day. You have collectively refined the old blame game into a fine art.

The quality of our lives is determined by our ability to respond to the varied complex situations that we encounter. If the ability to respond with intelligence, competence, and sensitivity is compromised by a compulsive or reactive approach, we are enslaved by the situation. It means we have allowed the nature of our life experience to be determined by our circumstances, not by us.

Being fully responsible is to be fully conscious.

Responsibility simply means your ability to respond. If you decide, “I am responsible,” you will have the ability to respond. If you decide, “I am not responsible,” you will not have the ability to respond. It is as simple as that. All it requires is for you to realize that you are responsible for all that you are and all that you are not, all that may happen to you and all that may not happen to you.

What most people forget is that the past exists within each one of us only as memory.

Memory has no objective existence. It is not existential; it is purely psychological. If you retain your ability to respond, your memory of the past will become an empowering process.

But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus.

The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a vast difference between the two.

The most horrific things in life can be a source of nourishment if you accept, “I am responsible for the way I am now.” It is possible to transform the greatest adversity into a stepping-stone for personal growth. If you take one hundred percent responsibility for the way you are now, a brighter tomorrow is a possibility.

People often confuse responsibility with reaction. We have already demonstrated earlier that there is a world of difference between the two. The first is born in awareness, the second in unawareness. The first is born in consciousness, the second in unconsciousness.

The first is freedom, the second enslavement.

Responsibility and action belong to different dimensions. The ability to respond gives you the freedom to act. It also gives you the freedom not to act. It puts you in the driver’s seat of your life. It empowers you to decide the nature and volume of action you want to undertake.

Responsibility is not compulsive action; it offers you the choice of action.

How does one upgrade one’s inner technology?

We will look at this at length in the following chapters. But a fundamental step would be to recognize consciously just this: “My ability to respond is limitless, but my ability to act is limited. I am one hundred percent responsible for everything I am and everything I am not, for my capacities and my incapacities, for my joys and my miseries. I am the one who determines the nature of my experience in this life and beyond. I am the maker of my life.”

There is no “yes” and “no.” There is just “yes” and “yes”! The choice is yours.

Sadhana

Don’t simply believe what you are reading. The only way to find out whether something is true or untrue is to experiment with it. Stop the internal debate and simply put it to the test. The yogic path is not a path of inherited belief; it is the path of experiment.

Here’s a practical way to begin.

When you have your next meal, do not talk to anyone around you for the first fifteen minutes. Just be in active conscious response to the food that you eat, the air that you breathe, the water that you drink.

As I have said earlier, your entire system is responding anyway. Just become conscious of it. This apple, this carrot, this piece of bread—don’t take them lightly. If you do not eat for a couple of days, you won’t think about God. You will only think about food. This is what is nourishing you and making your life right now. This is the very substance of your body. Respond to food absolutely, with total attention.

This fruit, this egg, this bread, this vegetable—they are all a part of life themselves, but they are willing to become you. Would you be willing to do this for anyone? You are not willing to lose your identity and merge into anyone. You are not even willing to surrender your little finger for someone else. Momentarily, you surrender just a little, usually when you need something. Your love affairs are the product of very calculated surrender. But food, which is a life unto itself, gives itself up completely to become a part of you.

“…And Now, Yoga” 

The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence.

The many fluctuations of the outside world have their impact on each one of us. But yoga is the science of creating inner situations exactly the way you want them. When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions beautifully within you, naturally the best of your abilities will flow out of you.

Yoga tells us that we are actually composed of five “sheaths,” or layers or, more simply, bodies.

The first sheath or layer to which yoga draws our attention is the physical body—the annamayakosha, or more literally, the food body. What you call the “body” right now is just an accumulated heap of food. It is the product of all the nourishment you have ingested over the years. That is how it gets its name.

The second layer is the manomayakosha, or the mental body. Today, doctors are talking a great deal about psychosomatic ailments. This means that what happens in the mind affects what happens in the body. This is because what you call “mind” is not just the brain. It is not located in any single part of the human anatomy. Instead, every cell has its own intelligence, so there is an entire mental body, an entire anatomy of the mind.

The physical and mental bodies are like your hardware and software. Hardware and software cannot do anything unless you plug into quality power. So, the third layer of the self is the pranamayakosha, or the energy body. If you keep your energy body in perfect balance, there will be no disease in your physical or mental bodies.

However, there is a fourth layer called the vignanamayakosha, or the etheric body. Gnana means “knowledge.” Vishesh gnana means “extraordinary knowledge”—that which is beyond the sense perceptions. This is a transient state. It is neither physical nor non-physical. It is like a link between the two. It is not in your current level of experience, because your experience is limited to the five sense organs which cannot perceive the non-physical. Those who report near-death experiences are those who could have slipped accidentally into this state. Such an experience occurs when, for some reason, people’s physical, mental, and energy bodies have become feeble. If you learn to find conscious access to this dimension, there will be a quantum leap in your ability to know the cosmic phenomenon.

There is also a fifth sheath, the anandamayakosha, which is beyond the physical entirely.

Ananda means “bliss.” It has nothing to do with the physical realms of life. A dimension that is beyond the physical cannot be described or even defined, so yoga talks about it only in terms of experience. When we are in touch with that aspect beyond the physical, we become blissful.

It is not that a bubble of bliss lies within your physical structure. It is just that when you access this indefinable dimension, it produces an overwhelming experience of bliss.

When you touch this dimension beyond definition, the impact of time and space is obliterated. This accounts for the many stories of yogis sitting unmoving for incredibly long periods of time. This is possible not because of physical endurance, but because in these states, they are not available to the process of time.

To experience well-being all you need is a certain mastery over these three dimensions of body, mind, and energy.

How does one reach this ultimate union?

Yoga tells us there are a few fundamental ways. If you employ your physical body to reach this ultimate union, we call this karma yoga, or the yoga of action. If you employ your intelligence to reach your ultimate nature, we call this gnana yoga, the yoga of intelligence. If you employ your emotions to reach your ultimate nature, we call this bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. And if you use your energies to reach the supreme experience, we call this kriya yoga, the yoga of transforming energies.

Yoga is, quite simply, the science of bringing the four idiots together.

Part Two 

Body

The Ultimate Machine

The most intimate part of physical creation for all of us is our own bodies. The physical body is the first gift of which we are aware. It is also the ultimate machine. Every other machine on the planet has come out of this.

The yogic sciences, as explained above, do not speak of the mind or the soul. Everything is just a body—whether it is a food body, a mind body, an energy body, an etheric body, or a bliss body. There is a deep wisdom in this approach. It does not allow us to escape into deluded psychological states or into flights of metaphysical abstraction. It grounds us firmly in the tangible, even as it leads us into subtler realms of physicality and, gradually, into the beyond.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” 

There are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings —to preserve and to expand—are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body.

If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, then instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension.

Sadhana 

You may have noticed this about yourself: when you are feeling pleasant, you want to expand; when you are fearful, you want to contract. Try this. Sit for a few minutes in front of a plant or tree. Remind yourself that you are inhaling what the tree is exhaling, and exhaling what the tree is inhaling. Even if you are not yet experientially aware of it, establish a psychological connection with the plant. You could repeat this several times a day. After a few days, you will start connecting with everything around you differently.

You won’t limit yourself to a tree.

Life Sense: Knowing Life Beyond the Senses 

The sense organs are limited. They can perceive only that which is physical. If your perception is limited to the five senses, naturally the scope of your life will be restricted to the physical. Additionally, the senses perceive everything only in relation to something else. If I touch a metal object and it feels cool to my fingers, it is simply because my body temperature is warmer. Suppose I lower my temperature and touch it, it would feel warm to me.

They give you a distorted impression of reality because they are entirely relative in their perception.

The human predicament is just this: the very seat of your experience is within you, but your perception is entirely outward bound.

The only reason it has been inaccessible is that you are either busy or preoccupied with what is happening outside or far too engaged in your own psychological drama. It is just a lack of attention which has denied people the possibility of discovering what lies within.

Sadhana 

Start by paying attention to everything you think of as yourself just before you fall asleep: your thoughts, your emotions, your hair, your skin, your clothes, your makeup. Know that none of this is you. There is no need to make any conclusion about what “you” are or what “truth” is. Truth is not a conclusion. If you keep the false conclusions at bay, truth will dawn. It is like your experience of the night: the sun has not gone; it is just that the planet is looking the other way. You’re thinking, reading, talking about the self, because you’re too busy looking the other way! You haven’t paid enough attention to know what the self really is. What is needed is not a conclusion, but a turnaround. If you manage to enter sleep with this awareness, it will be significant. Since there is no external interference in sleep, this will grow into a powerful experience. Over time, you will enter a dimension beyond all accumulations.

Listening to Life 

Hatha yoga is not exercise. It is, instead, about understanding the mechanics of the body, creating a certain atmosphere, and then using physical postures to channel or drive your energy in specific directions. This is the aim of the various asanas, or postures. That kind of posture that allows you to access your higher nature is a yogasana. It is the science of aligning your inner geometry with the cosmic geometry.

To put it in the simplest way, just by observing the way some people sit, you can almost know what is happening with them, if you have known them long enough. If you have observed yourself, when you are angry, you sit one way; if you are happy, you sit another way; if you are depressed, you sit another way. For every different level of consciousness, or psychological state, your body naturally tends to assume certain postures. The converse of this is the science of asanas. If you consciously get your body into different postures, you can elevate your consciousness.

As you move into deeper dimensions of meditation, your energies will surge upward, opening up more profound dimensions of experience. It is very important, therefore, that the pipeline of the body is conducive. If it is blocked, it will not work. And so, preparing the body sufficiently before one goes into more intense forms of meditation is very important. Hatha yoga ensures that the body takes the upsurge of energy smoothly and joyfully.

Hatha yoga is being imparted as an end unto itself, rather than as a preparatory system.

Sadhana

Another way of listening to life is paying attention to it experientially, not intellectually or emotionally.

Choose any one thing about yourself: your breath, your heartbeat, your pulse, your little finger. Just pay attention to it for eleven minutes at a time. Do this at least three times a day. Keep your attention on any sensation, but feel free to continue doing whatever you are doing. If you lose attention, it doesn’t matter.

Simply refocus your attention. This practice will allow you to move from mental alertness to awareness.

You will find the quality of your life experience will begin to change.

Downloading the Cosmos 

Sadhana 

Sit in any comfortable posture, with your spine erect, and if necessary, supported. Remain still. Allow your attention to slowly grow still as well. Do this for five to seven minutes a day. You will notice that your breath will slow down.

What is the significance of slowing down the human breath? Is it just some respiratory yogic acrobatics?

No, it is not. A human being breathes twelve to fifteen times per minute, normally. If your breath settles down to twelve, you will know the ways of the earth’s atmosphere (i.e., you will become meteorologically sensitive). If it reduces to nine, you will know the language of the other creatures on this planet. If it reduces to six, you will know the very language of the earth. If it reduces to three, you will know the language of the source of creation. This is not about increasing your aerobic capacity. Nor is it about forcefully depriving yourself of breath. A combination of hatha yoga and an advanced yogic practice called the kriya, will gradually increase your lung capacity, but above all, will help you achieve a certain alignment, a certain ease, so that your system evolves to a state of stability where there is no static, no crackle; it just perceives everything.

Intensity of Inactivity 

If you want to know effortlessness, you need to know effort. When you reach the peak of effort, you become effortless.

The very essence of dhyana, or meditativeness, is that you push yourself to the highest possible intensity where, after some time, there is no effort. Now meditation will not be an act, but a natural consequence of the intensity that has been achieved. You can simply be.

Morsel of the Earth 

The most fundamental mistake that most of us make: the fact that we view the ingredients which constitute our body, like earth, water, air, and food, as commodities and not as an organic part of the life process.

Now if I say it is going to rain, ninety-five percent of the time it will. This is not astrology or magic, but a surmise based on the minute observation of a completely different level of the human system and its ongoing transaction with the planet, the air, and everything around. If it is to rain today, some change will happen in your body. Most urban-dwellers cannot feel it, but many rural people all over the world do sense this. Most insects, birds, and animals can feel it. A tree for sure knows it.

In Sync with the Sun 

The surya namaskar is an important process to enable that to happen. On a rudimentary level, it is a complete workout for the physical system—a comprehensive exercise form without any need for equipment. But above all, it is an important tool that empowers human beings to break free from the compulsive patterns of their lives.

There are variations of this practice, depending on an individual’s aspirations. Someone who seeks muscular fitness can practice a basic process that is known as surya shakti.

Through practice, if one attains a certain level of stability and mastery over the system, one could be introduced to a more powerful and spiritually significant process called the surya kriya. While the surya namaskar is about balancing the two dimensions of sun and moon (or masculine and feminine) within the human system, the surya kriya is about connecting these two fundamental divisions for further spiritual growth.

Elemental Mischief 

But in yoga both the human body and the cosmos are based on the magic of only five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and ether.

Maybe your desire is individual or maybe it is universal. But whether you want to realize the full potential of this human mechanism or merge with the larger cosmic mechanism, you need a certain measure of mastery over these five elements. Without this you know neither the pleasure of being an individual nor the bliss of uniting with the cosmic.

The body is like a doorway. If you are always facing closed doors, then for you a door means a deterrent. If doors are always opening up for you, then for you a door means a possibility. They say how long a minute is essentially depends on which side of the bathroom door you are! Those inside say, “Just a minute, I’m coming.” That one minute, for the person outside, is an eternity!

Every spiritual practice in the world is related in some way with organizing these five elements. The most fundamental practice in the yogic system is bhuta shuddhi—the cleansing of the elements in the physical system so that they work in harmony. All yogic practices are essentially derived from the cleansing of these elements. The basis of individual existence is actually memory, which penetrates deep into these five elements.

When the Shit Hit the Ceiling 

Relief from something that you cannot hold within you is always the greatest pleasure, isn’t it? Whatever that thing may be!

Food as Fuel 

Ask the body what kind of food it is most comfortable with, not your tongue. The kind of food your body feels most comfortable with is always the ideal food to eat. You must learn to listen to your body. As your body awareness evolves, you will know exactly what a certain food will do to you.

Sadhana

Most people can bring down the quantum of food they are eating to a third and be much more energetic and not lose weight. It is just a question of how much receptivity you have created within yourself.

Accordingly your body receives. If you can do the same amount of work, maintain all the bodily processes, with thirty percent of the food that you eat, that definitely means you are running a much more efficient machine.

In A Nutshell 

Consuming anything in seed form can greatly enhance human health on many levels.

As far as possible, soak the nuts that you intend to consume in water for six to eight hours, especially if they are dry nuts. All seeds have a certain natural chemical self-protection. Soaking in water will flush out these toxic substances and bring them to the surface, and these can be eliminated by peeling off the skin of the nut. Additionally, soaking them helps lower the concentrated protein content which sometimes makes them difficult to digest.

Hell’s Kitchen 

In yoga, there is absolutely nothing religious, philosophical, spiritual, or moral about the food that we eat. It is only a question of whether the food is compatible with the kind of body that we own.

Digestion Drama 

The human problem is not enough attention, but too much information.

Sadhana 

The consumption of a spoonful of clarified butter (ghee in India) on a daily basis a few minutes before a meal does wonders for the digestive system. If you eat clarified butter with sugar, as in sweets, it is digested and turns into fat. But clarified butter without sugar can cleanse, heal, and lubricate the alimentary canal. Additionally, the cleansing of the colon will immediately manifest as a certain glow and aliveness in your skin. Even those who prefer not to consume dairy products could experiment with this because clarified butter passes through the system largely without getting digested.

Evolutionary Code

If you must eat non-vegetarian food, the best would be fish. Firstly, it is easily digestible with very high nutritional values. Secondly, it leaves the least amount of its imprint upon you.

What is meant by this?

Our bodies—all that we eat, excrete, and what eventually gets cremated or buried—is just earth. The software within your system determines that if you eat a fruit it is transformed into the human body, and not into a monkey or a mouse. The efficiency of your system obliterates the other software that transformed soil into a fruit and arrives at a new software that will make a fruit into a human form. For more evolved creatures, particularly mammals, their software is more distinct and individuated. This makes it harder for your code-breaking system to erase the software of the creature that you consume and to overwrite it with a new software.

Among the animals, fish, being one of the earlier forms of life upon this planet, have the easiest software code for our system to break and integrate into ourselves. Animals that have more intelligence, particularly those that are capable of a variety of emotions (such as cows or dogs), will retain their own memory systems. In other words, we are incapable of completely integrating more evolved, intelligent, and emotionally endowed creatures into our systems.

In earlier times, in communities that were more in tune with the earth, people could hunt and eat animals and work out the consequences through enormous amounts of physical activity. But given the largely sedentary lives people lead nowadays, the acidity produced by such a diet could contribute greatly to the unexplained levels of stress that are being widely experienced today. Additionally, large animals, particularly cows, are aware of their impending slaughter well before it happens. Consequently, they experience high stress levels, which generate a tremendous amount of acidic content in their systems. This, in turn, has its own adverse impact on those who later consume the meat.

Gastronomic Sense 

If you observe the natural cycle of the body, you will find that there is something called a mandala. A mandala is a cycle of forty to forty-eight days that the human system goes through. In every cycle, there will be three days on which your body does not need food.

The day the system says “no food” is a cleanup day. Since most people are not aware of which day their body should go without food, the day of Ekadashi was fixed in the Indian calendar. Ekadashi is the eleventh day of the lunar segment and recurs every fourteen days. It is traditionally regarded as the day to fast. If some people are unable to go without food because their activity levels demand it, or if they do not have the appropriate spiritual practice to support it, they can opt to go on a fruit diet.

If you force yourself to fast without preparing your body and mind sufficiently, you will only cause damage to your health. But if your body, mind, and energy are properly prepared with the necessary practices, then fasting can be of much benefit to you.

When you are very hungry all your body wants to do is eat. Just wait for two minutes; you will find that it will make a big difference. When you are very hungry, you are the body. Give it a little space and suddenly you are not just a body.

Gautama the Buddha went to the extent of saying, “When you are badly in need of food, if you give away your food to somebody else, you will become stronger.”

Sadhana 

Just experiment. Start with twenty-five percent natural, uncooked, or live food—fruit or vegetables— today, and slowly push it up to a hundred percent in about four or five days. Stay there for a day or two, and again cut it down by ten percent and in another five days you will reach fifty percent raw food, fifty percent cooked food. This is ideal for most people, who wish to be active for sixteen to eighteen hours a day.

Remember, if you eat cooked food, it may take you fifteen minutes to eat a meal. If you eat raw food, you take a little more time to eat the same quantum of food, because you have to chew a little more. But the nature of the body is such that after fifteen minutes the body will tell you that your meal is over. So people tend to eat much less and lose weight. All it takes is being a little more conscious of how much you are eating.

Restlessness to Restfulness 

Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.

An average person’s pulse rate on an empty stomach would be in the seventies or even eighties. For a person doing the right type of meditative practice, you will find that the pulse rate would range between the thirties and forties. Even after a good lunch it would stay in the fifties. This is just one parameter that indicates the level of restfulness that your body is experiencing moment to moment.

What the body needs is not sleep but restfulness. If you keep the body very relaxed through the day, your sleep quota will go down naturally.

How much sleep does your body need? It depends on the level of physical activity you are engaged in. There is no need to fix the quota of either food or sleep. To program the calories you must consume and the number of hours you must sleep is a foolish way to handle life. Let the body decide how much it should eat today, not you.

Sadhana 

If you sleep without a pillow or with a very low pillow, which doesn’t allow the spine to get pinched, the neuronal regeneration of the brain and the cellular regeneration of the neurological system will be much better. If you sleep without a pillow, it is best to lie on your back in a supine position, rather than on your side. Lying in this position is referred to in yoga as shavasana: it enhances the purification and rejuvenation of the body, promotes the free flow of movement in the energy system, bringing relaxation and vitality.

Carnal to Cosmic 

Ana pana sati yoga is a process that initiates you into a conscious and profound involvement with your breath, and shows you how the simple incoming and outgoing breath can become a source of nameless ecstasies.

Sadhana

The simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!

Hormonal Hijack 

Your body is just a loan from this planet. What you call “death” is just Mother Earth reclaiming the loan that she offered to you. All life on this planet is just a recycle of the Earth.

Fear is a result of the incompleteness of your existence. If you have not explored life in its magnitude and multidimensionality, but have limited yourself to the physical body, fear is a natural consequence.

Mind 

Miracle or Mess?

An intellectual understanding that is not backed by experiential knowledge can lead to mind games and deceptive states. But if oneness becomes an experiential reality, it will not produce an immature action. It will produce a tremendous experience of life that will leave you transformed forever.

Universality is not an idea; it is an existential truth. It is individuality that is an idea. Yoga is simply chitta vritti nirodha. That means, if the activity of your mind ceases and you are still alert, you are in yoga.

Thinking Yourself Out of Life 

Sadhana 

You could try this simple practice. Set your tap in such a way that only five to ten drops fall per minute.

See if you can observe each drop—how it forms, how it falls, how it splashes on the ground. Do this for fifteen to twenty minutes a day. You will gradually become conscious of many things around and within you that you are completely unaware of right now. This simple exercise can initiate a process of sensitization and clarity and accomplish much more than you can possibly imagine. In this simple process, you are actually exploring one limb of yoga referred to as dharana, which means “that which flows.” It is not the water we are referring to here. It is your attention, and, in turn, your consciousness. The attempt is to make your attention flow and connect with its object—in this case, water. This is not an exercise in observation or appreciation. It is an exercise in attention—in turning what is sporadic and intermittent into a flow. (In the larger scheme of things, the water and you are already one. Your individuality is only your idea.)

The Grime of Identity 

Sadhana 

Just sit alone for an hour. No reading, no television, no phone, no communication, nothing. Just see in the course of this hour what thoughts dominate your mind—whether it is food, sex, your car, your furniture, your jewelry, or anything else. If you find yourself thinking recurrently about people or things, your identification is essentially with your body. If your thoughts are about what you would like to do in the world, your identification is essentially with your mind. Everything else is just a complex set of offshoots of these two aspects. This is not a value judgment. It is just a way of knowing what stage of life you’re at.

How quickly you want to evolve depends on your own choices.

Soak the Intellect in Awareness 

In the yogic system of classification, the mind has sixteen dimensions. These sixteen fall into four categories. There is the discerning, or discriminatory, dimension of the mind or the intellect (buddhi); the accumulative dimension of the mind, or memory (manas), which gathers information; and what is called awareness (chitta), which is beyond both intellect and memory. The fourth dimension, ahankara, we discussed earlier—the aspect of the mind from which you derive your sense of identity.

The accumulative part of the mind is, to put it simply, just society’s garbage bin. It is merely a heap of impressions you have gathered from outside.

The same intellect can be sharpened if you allow it to soak in the other aspect of your mind—your awareness, chitta. If you want to reach your ultimate nature through the mind, you need to make the intellect truly discriminatory, in the ultimate sense. This does not mean dividing everything into good and bad, right and wrong, high and low, heaven and hell, sacred and profane. Instead, all it means is learning to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true.

Learn to place your intellect in the sheath of your awareness rather than in the sack of memory and identification. Once you do, this tremendous instrument can cut its way effortlessly toward the ultimate.

Awareness Is Aliveness 

Awareness is a process of inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence. You cannot do it, but you can set the right conditions so that it happens. Don’t try to be aware. It will not work. If you keep your body, thought, emotion, and energies properly aligned, awareness will blossom. You will become far more alive than you are right now.

Sadhana 

If you are aware at the moment of death, you will be aware beyond death also. Start practicing with sleep.

Sleep is nothing but temporary death. Every night you are presented with a tremendous possibility—the possibility of becoming aware of the dimension beyond death.

You can try this experiment tonight. At the moment that you move from wakefulness to sleep, make an attempt to be aware. This practice can be done in bed. If you can be aware of the last moment when you make the transition from wakefulness to sleep, you will be aware throughout your sleep.

You will see it is a lot of work. So here is another thing you can do. If you are used to waking up to an alarm, substitute it with a sound, a tune, or chant that reminds you of your awareness. You can easily train yourself to make this association. It can become an alarm for your awareness.

Of course, you cannot use an alarm to go to sleep! But the fact of the matter is that unless you completely dis-identify from your body, it is not easy to move consciously from wakefulness to sleep.

The first possible moment that you come awake, see if you can become consciously aware of something— your breath or your body, for instance. This will help you later when you want to go to bed.

If you achieve waking with awareness and moving from wakefulness to sleep in awareness, you are deathless. This means that when it comes to shedding the body, you will do it in full awareness. Even getting close to that moment will change the way your body and mind function.

Knowing Without Thought 

Have you ever watched a beehive closely? It doesn’t matter whether you have studied the most advanced level of engineering, there is still something to learn from a beehive. What a fabulous feat of engineering it is! This is truly the best apartment complex you could imagine, exquisitely designed and structured, and amazingly resilient. In no kind of weather have you ever seen a beehive falling off a tree, have you?

Although it is a magnificent piece of work, do the bees have engineering plans in their heads? No. These plans are there in their bodies. They know exactly what to do because of a blueprint in their systems.

Spiritual knowledge or “knowing” was always transmitted like this—not by thought, not by word, but in the same way that bees transmit the understanding of how to build beehives across generations. Once this knowing is transmitted or “downloaded,” as it were, everything that you need to know is right within you.

I make a distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is essentially accumulated information. All information is only related to the physical nature of existence.

Knowing, on the other hand, is a living intelligence. With or without you, it still is. You are either in it or you are not: that is the only choice you have.

Sadhana 

Just work at removing from the mind the idea that thought is intelligence. The whole process of creation, from a single atom to the cosmos, is a fantastic expression of intelligence. Right now within your own body, there is a throbbing intelligence that is the very source of creation. With the overrated intellect that you own, can you even understand the activity of a single cell in your body in its entirety? The first step toward moving from the trap of the intellect to the lap of a larger intelligence is to recognize that every aspect of life—from a grain of sand to a mountain, a drop to an ocean, from the atomic to the cosmic—is a manifestation of a far greater intelligence than your minuscule intellect. If you take this one step, life will start speaking to you like never before.

Believing versus Seeking 

If you want an element of spirituality to enter your life, the first thing you must do is drop these rigid ideas of virtue and vice, and learn to look at life just the way it is.

Morality always differs from person to person, according to time, place, situation—and convenience. But wherever humanity has found its expression, at any time in history or in any culture in the world, it has always been the same and will always be. On a superficial level, in terms of our values, morals, and ethics, each one of us may be different. But if you know how to pierce a person deep enough to touch this humanity, each one of us is the same.

The spiritual process is always a quest. There is a significant difference between believing and seeking.

Believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realized that you do not know. This brings an enormous amount of flexibility. The moment you believe something, you bring a certain rigidity into the very life process that you are.

This rigidity is not just in attitude; it percolates into every aspect of your life and is the cause of an enormous amount of suffering in the world. Human society reflects the inner experience of human beings.

All that is considered to be negative in the world actually springs from limitation. A limited identity that we impose upon ourselves is what sets us up as “me” versus the “other.” It is in this space of division and separation that all crime and negativity is born. So, striving for the infinite is an insurance against all negative tendencies. As a race, humanity now needs to liberate life, rather than control it. From limitation to liberation—this is the way.

The Wishing Tree 

Your mind can be in five different states. It could be inert—meaning, it is not activated at all; it is in a rudimentary state. If you energize it, it becomes active but scattered. If you energize it further, it is no longer scattered, but starts oscillating. If you energize it further, it becomes one-pointed. If you energize it still further, it will become conscious. And if your mind is conscious, it is magic; it is a miracle; it is a bridge to the beyond.

A well-established human mind is referred to as a kalpavriksha, or a wishing tree that grants any boon. With such a mind, whatever you ask for becomes a reality. All you need to do is to develop the mind to a point where it becomes a wishing tree, rather than a source of madness. A mind that can manifest whatever it chooses is described in yoga as being in a state of samyukti. This is a skillfulness that arises out of equanimity.

Once your thoughts get organized, your emotions will also get organized. Gradually, your energies and body get organized in the same direction as well. However, the order in which you address these dimensions could vary, depending on what you are ready for.

Once your thoughts, emotions, body, and energy are channeled in one direction, your ability to create and manifest what you want is incredible.

There is an alternative to faith, which is commitment. If you simply commit yourself to creating what you really care for, now once again your thoughts get organized in such a way that there are no hurdles. Your thoughts flow freely toward what you want, and once this happens, the manifestation of your desire is a natural consequence.

To create what you really care for, your desire must first be well manifested in your mind.

Is that what you really want? Think this through carefully. How many times in your life have you thought, “This is it.” The moment you got there you realized that was not it at all! So, first explore what it is that you really want. Once that is clear and you are committed to creating it, you generate a continuous process of thought in that direction. When you maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, it will manifest as a reality in your life.

Knowing and Devotion 

The yogic culture offers two ways to reach the ultimate state: becoming everything or becoming nothing; the path of gnana, knowing, or the path of bhakti, devotion.

If you want to experience shi-va, or the dimension beyond the physical, you either come to terms with the laws that govern the non-physical realm or you dissolve into this dimension, because it spells freedom from the laws that govern the physical realm. If you want to experience a mountain peak, you either elevate yourself to that level, or simply look up.

These are the two fundamental ways.

Through knowledge, you aspire to meet “that which is not” face-to-face. Through devotion, you strive to obliterate your limited and rigid persona and move toward a more flexible state from which you approach the dimension beyond the framework of your likes and dislikes. These likes and dislikes are the very basis of your persona. The endless nature of human desire is an expression of longing for infinite nature or life beyond physical existence. Infinity and zero are just positive and negative expressions of the same reality.

Devotion means dropping the dualities of like and dislike, attachment and aversion. It means “what’s fine” and “what’s not fine” do not exist for you anymore; everything is fine.

Since ancient times, devotion has been seen as the most important spiritual path, because it is the quickest. But it has its own pitfalls. The path of knowing is harder, but it is an “eyes-open” path. Devotion, on the other hand, is an “eyes-closed” path. With knowing, every step you take, forward or backward, you know where you are going. With devotion, whether you are moving toward your liberation or you have fallen into a pit, you have no clue.

Devotion is a tool to transcend the dual nature of logic. But instead of transcending logic, one may end up denying logic altogether.

So, standing on a stable platform of logic before going into the fluid state of devotion becomes important.

Conversely, many people believe that devotion has no place in the logical realm. But this is not true. Logic is essentially a cutting tool, an instrument of discernment. If your logic is like a machete, when you consider something, it will fall into two pieces. But if the scalpel of logic you employ is very finely honed, you can cut through something, and still seem to leave it in one piece. When a fine swordsman uses his sword to cut a tree, it is said even the tree should not know; it should still stand as one. If your intellect becomes this refined, you will find devotion fits in perfectly with your logic.

If you want to experience a mountain peak, you either elevate yourself to that level, or simply look up. The devotee knows that if you manage to ascend to meet the peak, you still only stand beside the peak. But if you become the valley, you hold the entire mountain in your lap.

Love Mantra 

Love is not something that you do; love is the way you are.

Sadhana 

Love is never between two people. It is what happens within you, and your interiority need not be enslaved to someone or something else. Try this for fifteen minutes or so: go sit with something that means nothing to you right now—maybe a tree, a pebble, a worm, or an insect. Do it a few days in a row. After a while, you will find you can look upon it with as much love as you do your wife or husband or mother or child.

Maybe the worm does not know this. That doesn’t matter. If you can look at everything lovingly, the whole world becomes beautiful in your experience.

Devotion: A Dimensional Shift 

Most people live cautiously, measuring out their love and joy in sparing doses for fear that it will run out. The most generous way to live is to set an example to the rest of the world by living life full-throttle and beyond all limitations.

Belief is just like morality.

People who believe something often think they are superior to others. All that happens the moment you believe something is that your stupidity acquires confidence. Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination, but they generally go together. If you start looking at the world around you, you would clearly understand that what you know is so minuscule that there is no way to act with confidence. A belief system takes away this problem; it gives you enormous confidence, but it does not cure your stupidity.

Akka Mahadevi 

Akka continues to be a living presence in the Indian collective consciousness, and her lyrical poems remain among the most prized works of South Indian literature to this very day.

Embracing Mystery 

It is only a juvenile intelligence that analyzes things and arrives at a conclusion. If your intelligence is sufficiently evolved and mature, you realize that the more you analyze, the further away you are from any conclusion.

If you go deeply into any aspect of life, you will move further and further away from any conclusion. Life becomes more mysterious than ever before. The more you delve into life, you see that it is an endless and unfathomable process. You cannot get it because you are it.

When you realize experientially that every atom, every grain of sand, every pebble, every piece of life from the smallest to the biggest is unfathomable, you will naturally bow down in utmost devotion to everything. If you simply sit here and breathe, you will know life better than through any deep analysis.

The difference between an idiot and an enlightened being is thin. The two often look similar, but they are actually worlds apart. An idiot is incapable of drawing conclusions. A mystic is unwilling to draw conclusions. The rest have glorified their conclusions as knowledge. The fool just enjoys whatever little he knows and one who has seen life in its utmost depth enjoys it absolutely. The rest are the ones who constantly struggle and suffer.

Sadhana 

When you experience something as far bigger than yourself, bowing down will naturally occur to you. If you want to become a devotee, at least once an hour in all the waking moments of your life, put your hands together and bow to something. It does not matter who or what. Don’t choose. Whatever you see, just bow your head—whether it is a tree, a mountain, a dog, a cat, or anything. This need not be a physical act; it could be internal action. Just do it throughout the day, once an hour. See if it can become once a minute. When it becomes once a minute, there is no need to use your hands and body; simply do it within yourself. Once that becomes your way of being, you are a devotee.

Even if you spend a lifetime, you still won’t understand a leaf, an elephant, an ant, or an atom. You are incapable of figuring out even a molecule of DNA. Everything you cannot grasp is in a higher state of existential intelligence than you are. When you see this—really see this—you are a devotee.

A devotee is someone who is willing to dissolve into the object of devotion. If you are a devotee of life, you will become one with it. Don’t be an outsider to the life process. Become a devotee. Dissolve.

Energy 

Following the Pranic Trail

Yoga means to experience the mental and physical process distinctly, not as the basis of yourself, but as that which is caused by you. If you manage these two instruments of body and mind consciously, then your experience of life is one hundred percent of your making.

Pain Not Suffering 

Pain is a natural phenomenon, and it is good. Without it you wouldn’t know if your leg was chopped off. But suffering is another matter altogether. Pain is bad enough;

why make it worse with suffering? Suffering is entirely self-created. And every human being has the choice: to suffer or not to suffer. It doesn’t take much intelligence to choose the latter.

The Karmic Conundrum 

What exactly is karma?

“Karma” literally means “action.” Action is of three kinds. It could be in terms of the body, mind, or energy. Whatever you do with your body, mind, or energy, leaves a certain residue.

This residue forms a pattern of its own, and these resultant patterns stay with you. When you gather a huge volume of impressions, slowly these shape themselves into tendencies, and you become like an automatic toy, a slave to your patterns, a puppet of your past.

Karma is like old software that you have written for yourself, unconsciously. Depending on the type of actions that you perform, you write your software. Once you write a certain type of software, your whole system functions accordingly. Based on the information from the past, certain memory patterns are formed and keep recurring. Now, life is just cyclical.

Vasanas, or tendencies, are generated by a vast accumulation of impressions caused by your physical, mental, and energy actions. What you call your personality is just an expression of these tendencies.

The quality of your life is always decided by how you experience life, not by what life offers you.

Your software is not in itself the problem. It turns into a problem only if it becomes the ruling factor in your life. To talk of good karma and bad karma is like talking of good bondage and bad bondage. There is no such thing. Karma is just your own creation.

If you want any kind of transformation, any kind of forward movement in your life, it can only happen if you break the cyclical patterns of karma. Anything that is cyclical suggests constant motion, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Sadhana

When you realize that all your material achievements are of value only in comparison with those who don’t have them, this is joy that springs from another’s deprivation. Can you really call this joy? Isn’t it actually a kind of sickness? It is time everyone addressed this. If you were alone on this planet, what would you want for yourself? Ask yourself this question and see where it takes you.

Try this. Sit alone for five minutes and see what your life would be like if you were absolutely alone in this world. If there were nobody or nothing to compare yourself with, what would you truly long for?

What would really matter to you if there were no external appreciation or critique? If you do this every day, you will become aligned with the longings of the life that you are, rather than the accumulated karmic mess that you believe you are.

The Mechanics of Life 

Fundamentally, kriya means “internal action.” An internal action is one that does not involve either the body or the mind or the physical dimensions of energy. As we have established earlier, the body and the mind are yours, but still external to you. You have gathered both from the outside: the body is an accumulation of food, and the mind an accumulation of ideas.

Even the imprints upon the energy body are an accumulation of the impressions of the five senses. When you have the ability to perform action with the non-physical aspect of your energy, then it is termed a “kriya.” All this may sound somewhat esoteric, but only if you are inducted by someone who has mastery over the realms of energy will it become possible for you to practice a kriya.

If your actions find outward expression, involving body, mind, and the physical dimensions of energy, that is karma. But if you turn inward and perform an action beyond all dimensions of physicality, that is kriya. Karma is the process of binding you. Kriya is the process of liberating you. The most significant aspect of yoga is always to perform action beyond the physical dimensions of energy. Among the four dimensions of physicality, you are most conscious of bodily actions, less of the mental, much less of the emotional, and negligibly of the energetic. The moment you learn to perform action with the non-physical aspect of your life energy, you suddenly move to a new level of freedom within and outside of yourself.

Kriya yoga is a very powerful way to walk the spiritual path, but at the same time it is tremendously demanding.

When you are given a certain kriya yoga regimen, you have to follow it. You may understand the need for the discipline as you go along, but it can never be fully explained.

And if it has to be explained, the essence of the kriya will be lost. This is because kriya is a tool to transcend the framework of logic and experience in order to access those non-physical dimensions that are considered spiritual or mystical.

People on the kriya path have a completely different kind of presence about them because of the mastery over their energies. They can dismantle life and put it back together. If you are pursuing the path of gnana, for example, your intellect could become razor-sharp, but there is still very little you can do with your energies. Similarly, on the path of bhakti, or devotion, there is nothing much you can do with your energies. (Nor do you care, because the intense sweetness of your emotions is all that matters; you only want to dissolve into the object of your devotion.) If you are on the path of karma, you can do many things in the external world, but you can do nothing with yourself. Kriya yogis, on the other hand, can do whatever they wish with their inner world, and achieve a great deal in the outer world as well.

The Energy Labyrinth 

The yogic system offers us a comprehensive and elaborate view of the anatomy of the human energy body. It has mapped seventy-two thousand channels (or nadis, as they are called) in the energy system. The prana, or energy, moves through these channels. These seventy-two thousand channels spring, in turn, from three basic channels. The channel on the right is known as pingala, the left is known as ida, and the central is known as sushumna.

These three channels are the basis of the energy system. Pingala is symbolized as the masculine and ida is symbolized as the feminine. “Masculine” and “feminine” do not refer here to biological differences, but to certain qualities in nature that have been identified as such. These qualities are represented by these two channels.

“Chakra” means “wheel,” and has a very specific meaning and significance in the yogic system. These days there are “wheel alignment centers” that claim to balance your chakras, clear your blocks, and heal you of ailments, past, present, and future. Lots of people are “doing” chakras these days. It has become a huge fad, but it can be dangerous. It is time to approach this very subtle subject with care and precision.

The nadis do not have a physical manifestation. If you cut the body and look inside, you will not find them. But as you become more aware, you will notice the energy is not moving at random but in established pathways.

There are 114 chakras in the body. Two are outside the body and 112 are within the body.

Among these 112, there are 7 major chakras. For most people, 3 of these are active; the remaining are either dormant or mildly active. You do not have to activate all 114 chakras to live a physical life. You can live quite a complete life with just a few of them. If you were to activate all 114 chakras, you would have no sense of body at all. The purpose of yoga is to activate your energy system in such a way that your body consciousness is constantly being lowered, so you can sit here in the body, but are no longer the body.

What exactly is the role of the chakras within the system?

There are seven fundamental chakras: the muladhara, which is located at the perineum, the space between the anal outlet and the genital organ; swadhishthana, which is just above the genital organ; manipuraka, which is three fourths of an inch below the navel; anahata, which is below the point where the rib cage meets the diaphragm; vishuddhi, which is at the pit of the throat; agna, which is between the eyebrows; and sahasrara, also known as the brahmarandra, which is at the fontanel on top of the head (where newborn infants have a soft spot).

The chakras are the seven different dimensions through which your energies find expression. Experiences that happen within you—anger, misery, peace, joy, and ecstasy—are different levels of expression of your life energies. If your energies are dominant in muladhara, then food and sleep will be the most dominant factors in your life. If your energies are dominant in swadhishthana, pleasure will be most dominant in your life; this means you enjoy your physical reality in many ways. If your energies are dominant in manipuraka, you are a doer; you can accomplish many things in the world. If your energies are dominant in anahata, you are a very creative person. If your energies are dominant in vishuddhi, you will develop a powerful presence. If your energies are dominant in agna, then you are intellectually realized. Intellectual realization can bring you to a certain state of peace and stability within yourself, irrespective of what is happening outside of you.

Sadhana

By focusing at a point six to nine inches away from the region between your eyebrows for twelve to forty-eight minutes, with your eyes open, you can realize the nature and structure of your individual chakras (depending on the duration and your level of focus). This perception can help in stabilizing the random movement of chakras in the human physiology due to stressful external situations. This is just one aspect of a very sophisticated form of kriya yoga that allows you access to your inner akashic, or etheric, dimension.

Uncharted Path

The sixth limb of yoga is referred to as dhyana, or dhyan, which is essentially about transcending the boundaries of one’s physical and mental framework.

Dhyan traveled from India to China along with the Buddhist monks, where it was referred to as Ch’an. This yoga traveled through the Southeast Asian countries to Japan and became Zen, and found expression as a whole system of direct insight without an emphasis on doctrine. Zen is a spiritual path that has no scriptures, books, rules, or rigid practices; it is an uncharted path.

The first recorded use of the method we now call Zen happened almost eight thousand years ago, well before the time of Gautama the Buddha. King Janaka was a brilliant man and ardent seeker, burning with the longing to know. He had exhausted all the spiritual teachers in the kingdom. None of them could help him because they were all born out of the book. He had still to meet someone who came from inner experience.

This is what every spiritual practice is about. When you want to attain yoga or Zen, you have to drop your load, discard everything on the way, remain free, stand upright. It is important. With your load, you may never do it. And what is the goal of yoga? Consciously take on the whole load once again. And now it no longer feels like a load!

Sacred Science 

Consecration, or pratishtha, is done in various ways, but generally by using rituals, mantras, sounds, forms, and various other ingredients. Constant maintenance is required. The rituals in the temples are not for your sake; they are to keep the deity or energy form alive.

Sadhana 

If you learn how to use the five elements in a certain simple geometric formation, you can create a highly beneficial energy space for yourself. Here’s a simple exercise you can try.

Draw a figure like the one below with rice flour or some kind of grain. Place a small ghee, or clarified butter, lamp in a plate full of water at the center. Place a flower in the water. You have now created a geometric form, using water, fire, and air. The flower in the water represents the earth. Akash, or ether, is, of course, always present.

Try this simple process every evening. You will find the energy of your room altered in a subtle but powerful way. In this manner, you can uniquely empower your home or office on a daily basis.

Mountain of Grace 

Mount Kailash (the mountain peak in western Tibet that is regarded as a sacred place of immeasurable power and antiquity) is the place where the maximum amount of knowledge has been stored for a very long time in energy form.

Kailash is the greatest mystical library on the planet. Almost all the religions of the East hold it as highly sacred. Among Hindus, it is traditionally regarded as the abode of the great god Shiva and his consort, Parvati. The Buddhists hold it holy because three of their great Buddhas are believed to be living there. The Jains believe that their first great master, or tirthankara, attained liberation there. The Bon religion, which is the original religion of Tibet, also considers it deeply sacred.

The Way of the Mystic 

What is this self-realization? you might wonder. After all, all that most people are looking for is health, well-being, wealth, love, and success. Do you really need self-realization?

The more profound your understanding of the human mechanism is, the more magical your life will be. In every culture, there have been a few people who performed certain actions that made others believe in miracles. All these actions that are known as miracles are just born of a more profound access to life that some have enjoyed. That access, as I have said time and again, is available to everyone who cares to look deeper.

Tantra: A Technology for Transformation 

Today there are too many people claiming to be gurus, but all they are doing is rehashing the scriptures. A true guru’s work is to overhaul the entire human mechanism from acquired cyclical patterns of karma toward its ultimate possibility. It is like a mechanic’s job, removing karmic warts! If there is no tantra or technology in him, you cannot call that person a guru.