The Epistemology of Yoga

by Swami Krishnananda

When we progress in meditation, we have to pass through these stages—which have minor details, of course, and cannot all be described here. But the major side is a temptation of grand and attractive presentations of sensory test in every sense of the term—physical, astral and celestial included —then, a terror of death threatening from every side. Who can withstand all these things? Do we think that any one of us is made of such stuff that we can face these difficulties? They are not difficulties. That is a very poor word that I am using. They are much more than this. They are death itself, yawning before us.

In the Epics and the Puranas there are some graphic presentations of how we can be confronted—as, for instance, Surpanakha, as described in the Ramayana. She was the ugliest of persons one can imagine, a most terrible being, and she appeared as the most beautiful. And Putana, who is mentioned in the Bhagavad Purana—such a terrible ogress, frightening even to think of, appeared as the most beautiful being ever. We do not know how we can encounter nature, this creation.

I am reverting to the point that all this is so because we belong to two realms of being at the same time. This is why we have these difficulties. We belong to this world of relations externally—in space and in time, and in causal connections. We also belong to God, finally. So, there is a tug-of-war between these two natures, one pulling us from one side and the other pulling us from the other side. Therefore we are torn, as if people are pulling us from two different directions—one pulling this ear and another pulling the other ear.

If we have a good guide, a Guru, he will take care of us. Or, we may have such strength within us that we are strong enough to face everything, and we are positively convinced that God is appearing before us in all these ways—because God is all these and every other blessed way. That is not necessarily the only way in which we can think of Him. Every event is an event occurring in the realm of God. Everything that is visible to our eyes, as well as everything that is not visible to our eyes, belongs to the creation of God.

The reason behind our likes and dislikes, our satisfactions and our fears, is the type of special relationship that we establish with certain parts of nature due to our specified forms of individual makeup called prarabdha karma. The much spoken of prarabdha karma is not a thing or a substance. It is a kind of vehement force which ties up our individuality to this particular form of body and establishes sympathetic relationships with nature outside, corresponding to its own needs. Our present needs evoke certain sympathetic reactions from nature, and only these reactions and actions are our concerns. Everything not connected with this particular form or need of our body and our personality as a whole is rejected.

Hence, our world is only that circumscribed area which is requisite for this particular group of forces operating in our body, called the prarabdha karma. It does not mean that in other lives we will be asking for the same things that we are asking for now. Why go to other lives? Even in this very life, we ask for different things at different times. There is a flow of karma, like the movement of a river. It is not a static, stone-like cement pillar, and that is why there is a change of our attitude from day to day. Our likes and dislikes change. This happens because we are moving, experiencing, passing through various connections, just as we pass through various vistas when we travel on a long journey. When we are moving in a vehicle, we do not see the same thing always.Actually, this body of ours is a vehicle during this process of evolution. It is moving. Not merely the body, everything that we are—all the five koshas, everything that our constitution is made of—moves.

When we move, we begin to visualise many things. These visualisations are the so-called rebirths and transmigratory processes. But we cannot understand that we have passed through such vistas, that we are passing through some now and we have yet to pass through certain others, because we easily forget the past and we have no knowledge of the future. We have a little, blinkered knowledge of only the present circumstance.

Today I have spoken a little bit about the internal intricacies involved in the practice of meditation, which is not a very happy thing always, though it is going to take us to the happiest state or goal ever.

Now, we again take up the theme we were discussing previously, to continue its thread—namely, the stages of meditation, which are the stages by which we have descended into this present condition of ours through the process of creation. We are now human beings; and, there are beings lower than the human species—animals, plants, and inanimate matter of rocks, stones, and the like. Evolution seems to begin with inanimate existence, where consciousness totally sleeps. It is said that it wakes up into life in plants and the vegetable kingdom. It is in a dreaming condition, as it were, in the animals, and it is awake in the human state.

But it is not fully awake even in the human state. It is only awake to the fact of the finitude of human nature, and it is not awake to the future possibilities or potentialities of human nature. Descriptions of the higher stages are given to us in the Upanishads, such as the Taittiriya. Human happiness is supposed to be a unit, a little drop of the happiness that is possible in the higher realms, which are designated in the Taittiriya and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads as the realms of happiness of the pitris, the gandharvas, the devas, the angels or the celestials, the rulers of the gods, the masters, adepts, yogis, and incarnations—and, finally, of the Creator Himself. In Indian tradition, Brahmaloka is the highest conception of happiness—where everything is everywhere, and everyone finds everything at one place or at all places; space and time get abolished in an eternity and an infinity of self-possession.

Man is very low in the stage of evolution. He has not reached the crown of this process. Man is not the crown of creation yet—though he has the consciousness of being some such thing in the future. The finitude of our human nature, of which we are now intensely conscious, is also an indication of the latency of the perfection that is within us. As human beings we have some aspirations, together with our foibles. There is something good in us, together with many things that are bad. This goodness in us is an aspiration for the higher possibilities to which consciousness directs us when it becomes rarefied into spiritual aspiration.

The Yoga Vasishtha also tells us that there are seven stages of knowledge. Everywhere, we are told of the seven stages. The desire to be good and to do good is the first stage in spiritual life—subecha, as the Yoga Vasishtha puts it. Many people do not have even the desire to be good. They do not know what it is to be good. The idea itself does not occur to them; they are like animals. They live a natural life of impulses, for the satisfaction of the senses. But, there are some people who cogitate: “It is good to be good.”

The second stage is where we deeply think over the ways by which we can be really good: “How can I be good? What is the meaning of ‘good’? And how can I do good?” These investigations come under the second stage, called vicharana. This is the language of the Yoga Vasishtha. Subecha is the first stage, and vicharana is the second stage.

The third stage is one of sadhana, or direct practice, where the mind gets thinned out. This stage is called tanumanasi, the attenuated condition of the mind where things become less and less attractive and the world does not fully satisfy us any more. In the animal condition of human life, everything seems to be satisfying. We are very happy with all things in this world. But when we feel that the things of this world are not going to satisfy us, that there is something wrong with them, that there is a defect in things—and we are seeking something which the world does not give and cannot give, we are in the state of tanumanasi.

The first three stages mentioned—subecha, vicharana and tanumanasi—are considered to be the stages of sadhana, or spiritual enterprise. The Yoga Vasishtha is very quick and rapid in its enunciation of the stages, but these three stages are filled with many details of spiritual practice, or sadhana—especially the third one, because the Yoga Vasishtha seems to suddenly jump from the third to the fourth stage. It tells us that in the fourth stage, called sattvapatti, we have flashes of divine light. This is, at least for many of us, a very far-off stage. We do not seem to be having flashes of divine light so easily.

The Yoga Vasishtha tells us that in the fourth stage, sattva manifests itself. Sattva is another name for light. We are mostly in a morbid condition of rajas and tamas—full of desires and sleepiness, torpidity, etc.—but when sattva predominates and to a large extent subdues rajas and tamas, its percentage gets enhanced and its light is visualised internally as a flash of lightning which comes and goes. This is the fourth stage, called sattvapatti. When the flash of lightning—which is a symbol or insignia of divine manifestation—is felt, we begin to taste it as a great delight. It is not merely a light to illumine things outside. It is not like a candle flame, or even like sunlight. It is not a light which illumines objects. It is the light emanating from the Self; so, it is very tasty to the senses. There is a condition described in the Vedanta texts as rasa svada—the involvement in the taste, the delight, of this experience.

It is said that we should not go on tasting this delight, because it is only a flash and it may come and go. If we are concerned too much with the taste of this experience, we may forget that there are also higher stages. We may even get attached to the taste. This should be obviated with diligence. In a few verses of the sixth chapter of the Bhagavadgita, some reference to this condition is made. We have to be detached even from the sensation of delight because we are still in the lower stage, and any kind of delight which is appreciated by the self-sense should not be regarded as a complete experience. The self-sense still persists because we are going to experience this light, and as long as this persists, we have to be guarded.

There should be a detachment, or an asamsakti, even to this flash and the joy that accompanies it; this is the fifth stage mentioned in the Yoga Vasishtha. Then, the glory descends. God takes care of us, as it were. From all directions, angels begin to appear before us—not as persons, but as powers of nature who have unmasked themselves and are no more masquerading in the form of sense objects: persons and things. These persons and things that we see in this world today are masquerading angels. They appear deceptive because of the masks that they are putting on. The masks will be removed in the sixth stage, called padartha-bhavana, where the true realities behind the persons and things of the world will be visualised.

Sometimes a mother tries to terrify her child by covering her face with a cloth and making a sound like a devil, and the child is terrified. It runs away, not knowing that it is its own mother that is coming. When a mother is in a playful mood, sometimes she does this; but then she removes the veil, and the child comes jumping back and sits on the mother’s lap. Similarly, now the angels are terrifying us in the form of the things that we see with our eyes; and then they will unmask themselves and show that they are friends, not enemies. For us, these are all theories only. We seem to be very far away from the stage when the angels unmask themselves.

The true form—the padartha, or the substance of things —will be revealed to us in the sixth stage; and then they will embrace us, but not as human beings, because even the mask that we are putting on now will be removed. Thus, it is an embrace of soul with soul that is the merger. That is Nirvana; that is the extinguishing of this temporal flame of individual existence, to which we have to ascend through the very stages by which we descended.