People say yoga is spiritual. How does yoga become spiritual, I do not understand. By practising some postures, can you become spiritual? By going to the gym, can you become spiritual? By holding your nose and breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, do you become spiritual? People think of yoga as something spiritual, but is it really spiritual? I would say, no. Spirituality in yoga comes much later. First comes the body, then the mind and then comes the spirit.
Let me be very clear, as long as we are engaged in the practice of hatha yoga, nobody is spiritual. We are just normal people practising some postures and feeling good about it, realizing the benefit of it on our body. The same thing with breathing techniques; we are learning how to inhale and exhale. We are learning to increase the lung capacity, as we do not use the capacity of our lungs completely. On average, the full capacity of our lungs is about six litres of air. We breathe only 500 millilitres, which is just a fraction of what we can inhale. We live our entire life only breathing in 500 millilitres with each breath. Out of those 500 millilitres, the actual air that goes into the lungs is 350 millilitres. The remaining 150 millilitres of air is in the dead space of the trachea. All of our life we are breathing only 350 millilitres of air, when the capacity of the lungs is six litres. When we learn how to breathe with the full capacity of the lungs, there is greater absorption of vitality and oxygen from the air that we breathe in. It is a boost to our pranic system, which is responsible for keeping us alive and healthy. So even, pranayama, asanas are meant to tune up the physical body.
Hatha yoga tunes up the physical body. Karma yoga tunes the physical body. Then we come to the mental aspect. In the mental aspect, people think of meditation as the practice which makes everyone spiritual, yet even that is a wrong concept. You can meditate on anything. You can meditate on infinite space, you can meditate on the sun, the moon, a star, a flower, on any object. You can even try to create the visualization of angels in heaven. That meditation is only visualization, nothing more than that. We have not followed any sequence in realizing the nature of ourselves and managing the upheavals of our life.
Even raja yoga is not spiritual. It is a way to bring peace to the human mind, which is struggling and going through all the stresses, confronting all the stresses, anxieties and tensions, and building up the faculties like awareness, positivity and creativity, that is the system of raja yoga. Only when we have gone through the stages of raja yoga, pratyahara, dharana, and cleared the mind of the rubbish that is there and experienced internal purification, a clean mind and a clean emotion, we enter into a spiritual dimension.
In the spiritual dimension, the first effort is to control the instincts of the mind. There are six instincts or expressions of the mind. The behaviour of the mind is guided by six principles: kama, desire and passion, krodha, assertiveness and aggression, lobha, desire and greed, moha, attachment and infatuation, mada, arrogance and assertion of ego, matsarya, competitiveness and jealousy. These are the six basic expressions of the human mind, and they have to be managed before having any higher spiritual experience. So where does this higher spiritual experience come from?
After having gone through raja yoga, when you enter from dharana into dhyana, spiritual awareness slowly awakens. The experience of spiritual awareness becomes easier, when you have pacified the agitations of the mind. Panchagni, the sadhana of the fires, is the way to show people that spirituality is not in asana, pranayama, yoga nidra or concentration. A different effort has to be made to control and rise above the mind. People think it is easy to cultivate spiritual awareness, however you have to change the entire programming of the mind and the senses.
Imagine yourself as a plug with two sockets. You plug yourself into one socket, which is the material world, the world in which we live, the world which we all want to enjoy, the world where we can be satisfied, content and fulfil all of our needs, aspirations and desires. We are all connected, our plug is connected, to this material socket. Yoga says to disconnect yourself from this socket, take that plug out and put it into the other socket. When you pull the plug out from the material socket, there is disconnection, and when you put it in the other socket, the spiritual socket, you are totally disconnected from your past. You are in a new energy source. Then spiritual experiences begin to happen.
There are two ways to disconnect. One is the hard way, which has been followed by spiritual traditions all over the world to renounce everything and join a community which has spiritual aspirations. In the West, we see people leaving society and joining a monastery, a seminary, and living the life of a monk with the right disciplines. In the East, we find people leaving society and joining the ashram and learning how to live. When this type of situation, which is common in the world, is seen, spirituality is considered to be a rejection of the social and adoption of the spiritual or religious. That is also what people relate to since that is the only condition they have seen in their lifetime. You leave your home and society and join a monastery or seminary. You leave your home and society and join an ashram. That is one aspect.
Then, there is another level of teaching which connects us to spirituality, no matter where we live. That has been the teaching of saints and sages, masters and yogis throughout the ages. Christ did not advocate renunciation. He simply advocated, ‘Be a good person. Be a good Samaritan. Help everyone. Help those who are sick. Help those who are hungry. Help those who are in need. Then you will come closer to your father, God. Believe in God.’ That was the main teaching. Later on the human mind made it much more complex, when, after the death of Christ, his teachings were made into a belief system and a religion. The same thing happened with Buddha. Buddha did not establish a religion; he simply explained the method to overcome the human suffering and to attain nirvana, peace. Buddha’s teachings were made into a belief system and a religion after his death. Religions do not reflect the true teachings of the person whom the religion professes to follow. A collection of different conventions and traditions create religion, and that is different to the teachings of the master.
Swami Sivananda had renounced his family, home and everything, because of the lifestyle that he liked to live, and his followers also had renounced family and society to live a lifestyle which they liked. Here in Munger, the sannyasins live a lifestyle which they like, yet the expression of spirituality only happens when you express positivity, harmony and peace in your life. By putting on a dress, one does not become spiritual. If you put the skin of tiger on a donkey, will the donkey become a tiger? No. Only the garb and covering is there, yet the nature, the behaviour, the mind-set and the language of a tiger is not there. Instead of roaring, the donkey will bray. Although it may be covered with the skin of a tiger, it is not a tiger.
You can be initiated into anything that you desire, but you will never become that, until you bring about a qualitative transformation within yourself. That qualitative transformation means that you change your language instead of braying, roar. You change your diet instead of eating grass, eat fresh meat. I am talking not of you. I am talking in relation to the donkey. Like this, gradually everything has to change. Everything has to change. The DNA has to change. The genetics have to change, and that is the most difficult sadhana.
The Panchagni sadhana represents that. The heat in the centre is about eighty, eighty-five degrees centigrade. At thirty- six degrees, thirty-seven degrees, forty degrees, it becomes uncomfortable and we want to cool ourselves, go into an AC room, sit under a fan, take a nice shower and we make every adjustment to remain comfortable. When Panchagni sadhana is being done, the heat is so much that you have to take your mind away from the experience of heat. If you focus on the heat, you cannot sit, especially in eighty, eighty-five degrees. The resident sannyasins, when they used to come, could hardly stand in the sun on the hot floor, but I had to sit there for eight hours. The heat from the front fire would go to the back, the heat from the back fire would come to the front of the body, the heat from the right fire would go to the left, the heat from the left fire would come to the right, and the heat of the sun would come straight down. It was like a bombardment of heat from every dimension.
If you can sit there at peace with yourself, that is transcending something very definite, heat awareness. Surprisingly, when you ignore the heat and you remain focused on something different, unaware of the heat around you, the state of mind is that of dharana. If you fluctuate even for one moment, you won’t be able to sit. Swami Sivanandaji has done it with much more ease, my guru has done it with much more ease, yet when I used to do this sadhana, I had to take my mind away from the body. Let the body burn, but dis-identify with the body. If there was any identification with body, I would have got up and gone away from that fire and heat. If there is no body-consciousness, then no matter what is happening out here, you are at peace inside. That is the disconnection of the senses from sense objects. That is the state of final pratyahara and dharana, and this allows you to overcome the fires that burn within such as jealousy, anger, hatred, dejection, depression, anxiety, greed, desire. When these behaviours of mind are stilled, you see the light of the spirit. When you see the light of the spirit, you can also communicate with the higher powers and energies.
9 April 2023, Pratyahara and Dharana Training, Ganga Darshan, Munger