The Atma Jyoti Blog

A s the human being moves up the ladder of evolution, so the center of his consciousness moves into successively higher bodies. Those of the lowest evolutionary status are aware only of their physical entity and live as though that alone were real. Simple survival and physical maintenance are their sole drives. It is these people who demand that their religion promise them earthly benefits, an earth-type afterlife, and the eventual resurrection of the body and its possession by them eternally.

In the next step of evolution the individual begins to identify intensely with his feelings, especially his emotions, and gauges all things by his emotional reaction to them. This person demands that his religion will reunite him with his “loved ones” in “the sweet by and by” where he will be everlastingly “happy.”

On the next rung of the evolutionary ladder, the human being becomes identified with and absorbed in the senses, reaching out for more and novel sensory experiences. He demands that his religion take him to heaven where he will hear beautiful music, seek beautiful scenes, and eat of the fruits of paradise.

Stepping up to the next rung, the human being discovers the wonder of his intellect. Therefore he will demand of his religion–if he does not think he is “beyond religion” by virtue of his intellectual brilliance–that it explain everything to him and make all mysteries known so that there is nothing he does not “understand.”

Although physical, emotional, and sensory conditions may still greatly affect him, he has grown somewhat tired of them. But now he has this new toy, the whole new dimension of the intelligent mind, the ability to bring into his scope of perception ideas of things he never dreamed of in previous lives. And so he becomes like a bird that has been caged so long he only wants to fly and fly and fly in the realms of the intellect. Just as a person who has almost died of thirst tends to drink too much, or someone who has been starving tends to eat too much, in the same way the intellectual man ends up with mental indigestion.

There has to be more

Finally it dawns on him that playing with all those ideas has not really produced any change or gotten him anywhere. In other words, we can think and think about water, we can discuss water, we can learn its chemical formula, we can read books on water, but all that does not give us a single drop of the real thing. Sri Ramakrishna used to say you can squeeze and squeeze the almanac that predicts the rainfall, but you cannot get a single drop of rainwater out of it. In the same way, we cannot satisfy our hunger by merely reading about food-in fact, it will make us hungrier.

So in time we come to learn that abstractions are not enough. But most of the great teachers in the world have spoken in abstractions–at least publicly or through scriptures–on a very high and exclusively intellectual level.

What about the “how”?

Although the great masters might speak of what attainments are possible through the evolution of the human consciousness and urge people to move on higher to these states, the “how” has almost always in time been lost because people have preferred to hear the ideals rather than learn the process for their actualization. We keep a description of the goal, but we lose lose the map, so we cannot find the goal.

It is very inspiring to read such things as how the goal of the spirit is to be like the radiant drop of dew which drops into and merges in the infinite Ocean of Being, but how do you get to that Ocean of Being? It is thrilling to hear that he who knows the Immortal Being becomes himself immortal. But how will we accomplish that immortalizing knowing?

There must come a time when we leave the advertising aside and get busy
obtaining the product.

And that is when Yoga begins, for Yogananda often said: “Yoga is the beginning of the end.”

Further reading:

• Foundations of Yoga
• Introduction to Om Yoga
• The Science of Yoga, by I. K. Taimni