Rebecca Jane

31 of 31 Questions for Reflection. Today’s question is inspired by reading Dṛg Dṛsya Viveka: An Inquiry Into the Seer and the Seen alongside Sankara’s Brahma Sutras.

What questions arise when I focus on “Brahman” as an object of Vedanta meditation?

Since 2013, I had been seriously involved with a style of yoga called kundalini. This method teaches many powerful techniques that use kriyas, pranayama, sacred sound current chants, and obedience to the Sikh guru as its means of transforming the body – mind complex to overcome psychoses and live with more freedom and ease. The yoga manuals in this method described great benefits of the kriyas: beautiful and convincing words effectively tried to “sell” these challenging exercises by claiming that practicing them can give anything from getting better sleep to improved digestion, to a glowing complexion, and even super human strength. And yes, I have enjoyed benefits from the practice, though not always the ones that were listed in the manuals. One thing the kundalini teachers always celebrated was living a heart-centered life. My teacher billed herself as a “heart-centered” teacher. And no doubt she is. I hold nothing against her and have the utmost respect. And the plea I make here is not necessarily directed at my teacher, but at the culture of “heart-centered.” Yes, be heart-centered, but please do so with equal respect for the head and love for knowledge and reason.  

The problem with this heart-centered approach is that too many people in that community vilify the intellect. They poo-poo the book worm. They resent the inquisitive mind (sure sign it’s a cult). I have heard too many teachers say, “get out of the head, and get into the heart.” But then when the venerated leader (yogi bhajan) of that so called “heart-centered” community turned out to be a criminal, it was high time to ask why and how we were all so ignorant about his secret scandals. Turns out ignorance flourished deep within that heart-centered community that claimed to teach “the yoga of awareness.”

It is time to seek the real “yoga of awareness.”

So many people who practiced kundalini, who had not been so encouraged before, finally started to ask questions. They started with “Where did kundalini yoga’s originator, yogi bhajan, get these yoga kriyas from? Did he make them up?” He had claimed the practice was ancient and the downloads came from the Akashic records. Nowadays the leaders of the method are simply removing yogi bhajan’s name from the books and still teaching the same stuff; but with all that scandal underneath, can the method still be effective? These months later, after studying in the Sanskrit-based tradition, I see that yogi bhajan is not mentioned or even known in the wider and deeper levels of yoga study and yoga history? He came from Northern India, a Sikh. He must have gotten his ideas from Indian traditions reaching back to the Upanisads, the Vedas, all the sutra literature; but he never mentioned this. Plus, yogi bhajan himself was not much of an intellectual powerhouse. Now we’ve heard that one of his secretaries wrote his Ph.D. dissertation for him(?). Most of yogi bhajan’s lectures that we listened to in the yoga teacher training are incomprehensible drivel. And no one in the Sanskrit or scholarship realms ever mentions him. On a YouTube recording of a lecture he gave in April 2020, Swami Sarvapriyananda mentions in passing, “I think I’ve heard there is even a style of meditation related to the Sikh tradition called kundalini yoga.” In other words, Swami Sarvapriyananda had never even heard of Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. This makes all the veneration of that thug that we were encouraged to do in the trainings all the more farcical.   

So, I’ve abandoned kundalini yoga, burned my teaching certificates. Instead, I read Astavakra Samhita. It’s taking time, heartache, and further training and coughing up more resources to learn Sanskrit. Part of me wonders what is the point and complains I am too old and who has the time or resources to learn Sanskrit? But Edwin Bryant asks us, “What else are you going to do with your time? Watch TV? Socialize? Make svadhyaya your social life!” He’s right. Anyone want to create a svadhyaya group with me? So, it’s true, it doesn’t take much to study this stuff. The Astavakra Samhita costs $6 from Vendanta Press. Chant it in the morning. Enjoy the true “yoga of awareness.”  

I am so relieved to read Swami Vivekananda’s Jnana-Yoga, and I am grateful to be reading the Upanisads with Professor Edwin Bryant. Study with swamis and professors should help me get back on track.

Vivekananda writes, “There is room for an infinite amount of feeling, and so also for an infinite amount of knowledge and reason. Let them come together without limit: let them run together, as it were, parallel with each other.” And reading Sankara’s Brahma Sutras, where he talks about ways in which reasoning corroborates with heart truths through hearing the texts (Sravana), thinking about their meaning (Manana), and meditation on them (Nididhyasana). And then he writes, “This leads to intuition. By intuition is meant that mental modification (Vritti) of the mind (Citta) which destroys our ignorance about Barhman. When the ignorance is destroyed by this mental modification in the form of Brahman it is called Bramakara Vritti.” He goes on to say, Brahman, which is self-luminous, reveals Itself in ordinary perception. This means that the truth is arrived at through reasoning. Brahman is perceived as real or even more real than this cup of coffee that I am drinking. Brahman is mentally cognizable. Brahmakara Vritti is what made Sri Ramakrishna see the Goddess Kali as more real than he could see young Narendra standing beside him. Brahman becomes a perceived experience, not a belief, not an intellectual idea, but a lived reality.

Bramakara Vritti is a beautiful Sanskrit phrase that I shall slowly figure out how to write it in Sanskrit and then write it over and over in my notebook. Please forgive my errors, my life as a slow learner, my questions if they have offended.           

Meditating on Brahman, a Jnana yogi might ask: “If there is infinite room for feeling in the heart and for being heart-centered, isn’t there also infinite room for knowledge and reason? Can a yoga industry that seems too attached to platitudes, asanas, superiority complexes, and exploitation seek a truer balance of head and heart, seek an intelligent desire for Bramakara Vritti?”

30 of 31 Questions for Reflection. Today’s question is inspired by reading Dṛg Dṛsya Viveka: An Inquiry Into the Seer and the Seen alongside Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

What questions arise when I focus on “samadhi” as an object of Vedanta meditation?

Patanjali’s yoga sutras teach us that when we still the fluctuations of the mind, consciousness abides in its own nature. This is the goal of yoga, to abide in pure consciousness. It’s not easy to get there even with years of practice and strict adherence to the eight limbs. The yogi likes her cave because she can easily remain absorbed in pure consciousness (in nirvikalpa samadhi: absorption without an object). Evolved sages like to spend time in meditation, absorbed in this state.

One such sage was Swami Vivekananda, whose name was Narendra when he was a boy. Once upon a time, young Narendra was traveling with his family, and he saw a giant bee hive high up on a wall of a cliff. He wondered over how old that bee hive must be, and that wonder sent him into a state of super-consciousness, where his whole being was lost in wonder and awe at the Divine. Another time, he was meditating in Cossipore gardens and sensed a powerful light around his head. He entered deep samadhi, and when he came out of it, he did not feel that he had a body. He walked around for a few days after in  a very uneasy feeling  like he had no body.

Nirvikalpa Samadhi is a state of consciousness in which the relative reality dissolves into the Absolute. Patanjali’s yoga sutras teach that only after a yogi has stilled the fluctuations of the mind, then consciousness abides in its own nature, and this is the goal of yoga. Vedanta says that consciousness is always abiding in its nature and the only problem is to remove one’s ignorance of that ever-present, ever-pervading pure consciousness. A yogi in a cave who experiences hours and hours in deep samadhi may think that a swami who spends hours and hours reading books and doing philosophy is missing the experience. But that swami abides in consciousness through a philosophical understanding that Brahma is never separate from material reality. Instead, material reality is not as much with us as someone like William Wordswoth may have expressed in his poem “The World is Too Much With Us.” That’s Vedanta. The material world is not with us nearly as much as Brahma is with us. Pure consciousness, pure being, and pure bliss are the most real experiences in every moment, whether we are deep in meditation or deep in study or deep in ritual or deep in prayer or deep in service or deeply in love or dreaming or fast asleep. Brahma is most real in every experience. Once Sri Ramakrishna saw an umbrella open and close and it sent him into samadhi because it reminded him of the creation and dissolution of the universe. It can be as simple as that, and it happens to us all the time.    

Meditating on samadhi, a Jnana yogi might ask: “Vedanta says once we remove ignorance, it is easy to always realize we are immortal consciousness. Can social media help us see immortal consciousness? Keep wondering, daughter: for whom does scrolling and liking posts inspire nirvikalpa samdhi?”

#AdvaitaVedanta #Stories #NirvikalpaSamadhi

29 of 31 Questions for Reflection. Today’s question is inspired by reading Dṛg Dṛsya Viveka: An Inquiry Into the Seer and the Seen alongside Caitanya’s Śikṣāṣṭakam.

What questions arise when I focus on “devotion” as an object of Vedanta meditation?

Long ago, Caitanya was a great sage, an incarnation of Krishna. He gave eight verses that teach seekers how to live as a lover devoted to service to the divine. The first verse describes the effect of chanting the maha mantra: Hare Krishna. It’s very poetic: “May Krishna sankirtana be supremely triumphant. The chanting of the names of Krishna cleanses the mirror of the heart. It extinguishes the great forest fire of samsara. It bestows moonlight on the white night-blooming lotus of supreme benefit. It gives life to the young bride of wisdom. It increases the ocean of bliss. It bestows the taste of the highest nectar at every step. It cleanses the mind completely.” (trans. Edwin Bryant).

Back in New York City, I used to visit Dharma Mitra’s yoga studio where Krishna Das would play his harmonium and chant the Hare Krishna mantra. This was in 2002 when Krishna Das was not as popular as he is today. It was an intimate setting. It was blissful. Those kirtan sessions started me on this path with a full and open heart. Since then, I have attended many of his kirtan sessions and witnessed his following grow so much larger. Eventually, I saw he was playing at a Bhakti fest in Joshua Tree, California in 2012. I attended. That festival is where I found Kundalini Yoga in a Kia Miller class. Then, I went to Sat Nam Fest 2013 in Joshua Tree where I felt that Krishna Kaur was my teacher. I felt an intense pull: I must train as a yoga teacher with her.

This past year, I abandoned my role as a yoga teacher. I have been studying Yoga Philosophy with embodied philosophy. The program offers a variety of teachers who are both scholars and practitioners of yoga, none practice kundalini yoga. Over these years, I have practiced hours of White Tantric yoga; I’ve attended Summer Solstice Sadhanas in New Mexico; I’ve visited the Himalayas; I’ve bowed at the Golden Temple in Amritsar; I’ve studied Gurmukhi and Sanskrit. After all this, I am happy to finally find Advaita Vedanta. I hope this philosophy can be my spiritual home. Advaita Vedanta feels so pure and straightforward for me. I am tired of whistles and bells. For now, I feel like saying this: forget yoga’s accoutrements: the music, the festivals, the trainings, the pilgrimages, lulu lemon, and cults of personality. Goodbye to all that!

I simply enjoy the Path of Knowledge. For now, I remain devoted to the Path of Knowledge.    

Meditating on devotion, a Jnana yogi might ask: “Yes, embrace cultural humility, practice sadhana, chant divine names, bow to sacred shrines, see god in all hearts; but doesn’t she still feel that the best way to inspire devotion within is through questions, through stories, through dialogue, through language study? Who says a path of inquiry cannot bestow nectar and make the hairs stand on end in ecstasy?”