METHODS OF ATTAINMENT: THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION

Oriental philosophies recognize four important methods of yoga.

Yoga is the word which signifies “uniting with God.” From what has gone before in these pages, the reader will understand that unity with God means to us, the uncovering of the god-nature within or above, the human personality; it means the attainment and retainment in fullness of cosmic consciousness. We do not believe that any one retains full and complete realization of cosmic consciousness and remains in the physical body. The numerous instances to which we allude in former chapters, are at best, but temporary flights into that state, which is the goal of the soul’s pilgrimage, and the only means of escape from the “ceaseless round of births and deaths” which so weighed upon the heart of Gautama.

The paths of yoga then, are the methods by which the mind, in the personal self, is made to perceive the reality of the higher Self, and its relation to the Supreme Intelligence-The Absolute.

The various methods or paths are pointed out, but no one, nor all of these paths guarantees illumination as a reward for diligence. That which is in the heart of the disciple is the key that unlocks the door.

These paths are called:

Karma Yoga; Raja Yoga; Gnani Yoga; Bhakti Yoga.

Karma Yoga is the path of cheerful submission to the conditions in which the disciple finds himself, believing that those conditions are his because of his needs, and in order that he may fulfill that which he has attracted to himself. The admonition “whatever thy hand finds to do that doest thou with all thy heart,” sums up the lessons of the path of Karma Yoga. The urge to achieve: to do; to accomplish; to strive and attain, actuates those who have, whether with conscious intent, or because of a vague “inward urge,” devoted their lives to taking an active part in the material or intellectual achievements of the race.

There are those who are blindly following (as far as their mental operations are concerned), the path of Karma Yoga; that is, they work without knowing why they work; they work because they are compelled to do so, as slaves of the law; these will work their way out of that necessity of fulfillment, in the course of time, even though they blindly follow the urge; but, if they could be made to work as masters of the conditions under which they labor, instead of as slaves to environment, they would find themselves at the end of that path. Karma Yoga would have been accomplished.

“Work as those work who are ambitious” but be not thou enslaved by the delusion of personal ambition-this is the password to liberation from Karma Yoga.

Raja Yoga is the way of the strongly individualized will. “Knowledge is power” is the hope which encourages the disciple on the path of Raja Yoga. He seeks to master the personal self by meditation, by concentration of will; by self discipline and sacrifice. When the ego gains complete control over the mental faculties, so that the mind may be directed as the individual will suggests, the student has mastered the path of Raja Yoga. If his mastery is complete, he finds himself regarding his body as the instrument of the Self, and the body and its functions are under the guidance of the ego; the mind is the lever with which this Self raises the consciousness from the lower to the higher vibrations. The student who has mastered Raja Yoga can induce the trance state; control his dreams as well as his waking thoughts; he may learn to practice magic in its higher aspects, but unless he is extremely careful this power will tempt him to use his knowledge for selfish or unworthy purposes.

Let the student of Raja Yoga bear in mind the one great and high purpose of his efforts, which should be: the realization of his spiritual nature, and the development of his individual self, so that it finally merges into the spiritual Self, thus gaining immortality “in the flesh.”

Does this “flesh” mean the physical body? Not necessarily, because this that we see and name “the physical body” is not the real body, any more than the clothing that covers it, is the person, although frequently we recognize acquaintances by their clothing. Immortality in the flesh means cessation from further incarnations, the last and present personality including all others in consciousness, until we can say, “I, manifesting in the physical, as so-and-so, am now and forever immortal, remembering other manifestations which were not sufficiently complete, but which added to the sum of my consciousness until now I know myself a deathless being.”

To those who seek the path of Raja Yoga, we recommend meditation upon Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, of which there are several translations, differing slightly as to interpretation. We have selected some of the most important, from the translations by Johnston. They are designed to make clear the difference between the self of personality, and the Self, or atman which manifests in personality:

“The personal self seeks to feast upon life, through a failure to perceive the distinction between the personal self and the spiritual man. All personal experience really exists for the sake of another: namely, the spiritual man. By perfectly concentrated meditation on experience for the sake of the Self, comes a knowledge of the spiritual man.”

The wise person seeks experience in order that he may attain to the standard of the spiritual man; doing all things for the lessons that they teach; working “as those work who are ambitious,” and yet having no personal ambition. Looking on all life, and at the self of personality and knowing the illusion of the self he is raising the personal self to the spiritual plane; but always he has the handicap of the desires of the lower self, the personal, which “seeks to feast on life,” because it is born of the external, and its inherent appetites are for the satisfaction and pleasures of that physical self.

We do not say to look upon the body with its needs and its desires, as an enemy to be overcome; or that its allurements are dangerous although pleasurable. No. We say to the student, “control the desires of the body. Make them do the bidding of the Self, because it is only by so doing that you can gain the immortal heights of god-hood, looking down upon the fleeting dream of personality, with its so-called pleasures, as a bad nightmare compared to the joys that await the immortals.”

Therefore, concentrate upon experience for the sake of the Self that you are, and learn the lesson of your experience, throwing aside the experience itself, as you would cast aside the skin of an orange from which the juice had been extracted. Don’t fill the areas of your mortal mind with rubbish-with memories of “benefits forgot;” or loves unrequited; or friendships broken; or misspent hours; or unhallowed words and acts.

Cull from each day’s experience all that helps to develop the spiritual man-all that will stand the test of immortality-kind words and deeds; principle maintained; a wrong forgiven; a service cheerfully extended; a tolerance and generosity for the mistakes of others as well as for your own. These seem small things to the personal self-the ambitious, the gloating, the sense-desiring self of the personality; we scarcely take them into account, but to the Self that is seeking immortality, these are the grains of wheat from the load of chaff; the diamond in the carbon; the wings upon which the spirit soars to realms of bliss.

Meditate upon this sutra.

“By perfectly concentrated meditation upon the heart, the interior being, comes the knowledge of consciousness.”

The heart is the guide of the inner nature, as the head is of the outer. Love, the Most High God, is not born in the head, but in the heart. The heart travails in pain through sorrow and loss and compassion and pity and loneliness and aspiration and sensitiveness; and lo! there is born from this pain, the spiritual Self, which embraces the lesser consciousness, enfolding all your consciousness in the softness and bliss of pure, Seraphic Love-the heritage of your immortality.

Meditate long and wisely upon this sutra.

“Through perfectly concentrated meditation on the light in the head, come the visions of the Masters who have attained; or through the divining power of intuition he knows all things.”

There is a point in the head, anatomically named “the pineal gland”; this is frequently alluded to as the seat of the soul, but the soul is not confined within the body, therefore, it is in the nature of a key between the sense-conscious self and the spiritually conscious Self; it is like a central receiving station, and may be “called up,” and aroused to consciousness by meditation. Realizing and focusing the light of the spiritual nature upon this part of the head, opens up those unexplored areas of consciousness in which the masters dwell, and the student knows by intuition, which is a higher aspect of reason, many things which were heretofore incomprehensible to the merely sense-conscious man.

The spiritual Self is not a being unlike and wholly foreign to our concept of the perfect mortal-man; all the powers of discernment which we find in mortal consciousness are accentuated, intensified, refined; all grossness, all imperfections and embarrassments removed; pleasure sensitized to ecstasy; love glorified to worship. “Shapeliness, beauty, force, the temper of the diamond; these are the endowments of that body.”

The spiritual body is shapely, strong, beautiful, imperishable, as the diamond, with all its brilliancy. No vapory, uncertain, or unreal being, but the Real, with the husk of sense-consciousness dropped off, and only the kernels of truth buried in the chaff of Experience, retained from the experiences of the personal self.

“When the spiritual man is perfectly disentangled from the psychic body, he attains to mastery over all things and to a knowledge of all.”

The spiritual Self, the cosmic conscious Self, must not be confounded with the psychic body, which is formed from the emotions-passions; fears; hatreds; ambitions; resentments; envy; regrets. Know thyself as a being superior to all baser emotions, and the mastery over them is complete. They are not destroyed, but converted into love-the everlasting Source of Life.

“There should be complete overcoming of allurement or pride in the invitations of the different regions of life, lest attachment to things evil arise once more.”

It is said that the disciples, seeking the paths of Yoga, reach three degrees or stages of development; first, those who are just entering the path; second, those who are in the realm of allurements, subject to temptations; third, those who have won the victory over the senses and the external life-maya; fourth, those who are firmly entrenched behind the bulwark of certainty; the spiritual being realized: cosmic consciousness attained and retained.

“By absence of all self indulgence at this point, also, the seeds of bondage of sorrow are destroyed, and pure spiritual being is attained.”

Self-abnegation and self-sacrifice have ever been the way of spiritual development; but we are prone to misunderstand and mistake the true interpretation of this admonition; men shut themselves in monasteries and women become nuns and recluses as a penance, in order to purchase, as it were, absolution (at-one-ness with The Absolute, which knows not sin); this is not the point intended here. Spiritual consciousness can not be bought; the desires of the personal self may be sublimated into divine force and power, through recognizing the desires of the self as baubles which attract and fill the eye, until we fail to see the glories of that which awaits us.

“Thereafter, the whole personal being bends toward illumination, full of the spirit of Eternal Life.”

Here again, we have assurance that the spiritually-conscious man, the “luminous body” is not a being apart from the self that we know our inner nature to be, but rather it is the inner Self even as we in our ignorance and our lack of initiation, know it, raised to a higher realm of consciousness; our desires refined, spiritualized, made pure, and our faculties strengthened and immortalized. We do not withdraw from experience but we draw from Experience the lesson-the hidden wisdom of the initiate.

Meditate upon these sutras.

“He who, after he has attained, is wholly free from self, is set in a cloud of holiness which is called Illumination. This is the true spiritual consciousness.”

This aphorism is self-explanatory. He who attains illumination, and afterward lives and acts from the inner consciousness-the spiritual man, is free from the desires of the sense-conscious life, with its consequent disappointments; he sees everything from the spiritual, rather than the mental point of view, and understands the phrase “and behold, all was good.”

“Thereon comes surcease from sorrow and the burden of toil.”

The one who has attained cosmic consciousness, acting always from the Self, and not from personal desires, is set free from karma; he has fulfilled the cycle; he makes no more bondage for himself; he is free and is already immortal.

“When that condition of consciousness is reached, which is far-reaching, and not confined to the body, which is outside the body and not conditioned by it, then the veil which conceals the light is worn away.”

The acquisition of spiritual consciousness, Illumination, endows the mortal mind also, with a degree of power sufficient to penetrate the veil of illusion-the maya; the disciple then sees for the first time, all things in their true light. The separation between the personal self, and the spiritual being that we are, is so fine as to be like a cob-web veil, and yet how few penetrate it. The suddenness with which this awakening (for it is like awakening from a dream of the senses), comes, startles and surprises us, and then we become astonished at the transparency of the bonds that bound us to the limitations of the mortal, when we might have soared to realms of light.

“By perfectly concentrated meditation on the correlation of the body with the ether, and by thinking of it as light as thistle-down, will come the power to traverse the ether.”

The Zens say that the way of the gods is through the air and afterwards in the ether. This means that we must evolve from the physical to the psychic, and thence to the etheric or spiritual body. This is the way of the many. It is only the few who attain to perfect spiritual consciousness while manifesting in the physical, but these do not have to undergo “the second death” which is the dropping off of the psychic body, and assuming the spiritual body. They attain to immortality in the flesh, (i.e., in the present personality).

“Thereupon will come the manifestation of the atomic and other powers, which are the endowment of the body, together with its unassailable force.”

The body here referred to, it must be borne in mind, is the etheric or spiritual body, which possesses the power to disintegrate matter; the power to annihilate time and space; so that he may look backward into remote antiquity and forward into boundless futurity; or as the commentator says, “he can touch the moon with the tip of his finger”; the power of levitation and limitless extension; the power of command; the power of creative will.

These are the endowments of the spiritual body with which the disciple is seeking to establish his identity-that he may overcome the second death and become immortal in consciousness, here and now.

Of this spiritual, or etheric body it is said, “Fire burns it not; water wets it not; the sword cleaves it not; dry winds parch it not. It is unassailable.”

Meditate upon this sutra.

“For him who discerns between the mind and the spiritual man (the Self) there comes perfect fruition of the longing after the real being.”

When the disciple has once grasped the fact that he is a soul, and possesses a mind and a physical covering, he has entered on the way of Illumination, and must inevitably reach the goal; then shall he find “perfect fruition of the longing” after the perfect Self, and its complètement in union with the love that he craves. “Have you, in lonely darkness longed for companionship and consolation? You shall have angels and archangels for your friends and all the immortal hosts of the Dawn.”

Such are the Yoga sutras, or aphorisms, as enunciated by Patanjali.

If the aspiring one were to give up a whole lifetime to their practice, gaining at last the consciousness of immortal life and love, what a small price to pay.

Raja Yoga with its methods and exercises, is the path of knowledge, through application; concentration; meditation.

The practice of Raja Yoga will lead the student to the path of Gnani Yoga; and to the realization that Bhakti Yoga, the way of love and service will be included, not as an arduous task; not as a study, or as a means to an end, but because of the love of it.

Gnani Yoga comes as complementary to practice of the sutras because knowledge applied for the purpose of spiritual attainment brings wisdom. Gnani Yoga, then, is the path of wisdom. The follower of Gnani Yoga seeks the occult or hidden wisdom, and always has before him the idea of whether this or that be of the Self, the atman, or of the self, the personal, gradually eliminating from his desires all that does not answer the test of its reality in spiritual consciousness; he welcomes experiences of all kinds, as so many lessons from which he extracts the fine grain of truth, and throws aside the husks; he accepts nothing blindly or in faith, but “proves all things holding fast to that which is good”; not that he lacks faith, but because the very nature of his inquiry is to discover the interior nature and its relation to God.

There are many in the world of to-day who feel the urge toward the path of Gnani Yoga, because of the conviction that is forcing itself upon every truly enlightened mind, that civilization with all its wonderful achievements, does not promise happiness, or solve the question of the soul’s urge. In short, the educated, and the well conditioned, if he be a thinker, and not submerged in maya, lost in the personal self, inevitably finds himself searching for the real in all this labyrinth of mind creations and sea of emotions, and then as a rule, he seeks the path of Gnani Yoga, because his intellect must be satisfied, even though his heart calls. The mystic, the teacher, and the philosopher are following the path of Gnani; so is the true occultist, but many who deal in so-called occultism are employing knowledge only, entirely missing the higher quality-wisdom.

Bhakti Yoga, the path of self-surrender; the thorny way through the emotions; the “blood of the heart,” is the short cut to Illumination, if such a thing could be. But there is no “short cut”; nor yet a long road.

Some one has said there are as many ways to God as there are souls. And yet, all persons who are on the upward climb, are demonstrating some one of these four paths, or a combination of the paths. It is, however, a significant fact that we do not hear anything of the great intellectual attainments of the three great masters-Krishna, Buddha and Jesus, but only of their great compassion; their wonderful love for mankind, and all living things.

St. Paul, who was probably an educated man, as he held a position of prominence among those in authority, previous to his conversion, laid particular stress upon the love-nature as the way of illumination.

And Jesus repeatedly said “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” What is the law? The law of evolution and involution; of generation and regeneration; when the time should come, that Love was to reign on the planet earth as it does in the heavens above the earth, then should the kingdom of which he foretold “be at hand,” and in conclusion of this to-be, Jesus promised that the law would be fulfilled when Love should come.

So Swami Vivekananda in his exposition of Vedanta declares:

“Love is higher than work, than yoga; than knowledge. Day and night think of God in the midst of all your activities. The daily necessary thoughts can all be thought through God. Eat to Him, drink to Him, sleep to Him, see Him in all. Let us open ourselves to the one Divine Actor, and let Him act and do nothing ourselves. Complete self-surrender is the only way. Put out self, lose it; forget it.”

Let us substitute for the words “God,” and “Him,” the one word Love, and see what it is that we are told to do.

Love of doing good frees us from work, even though we labor from early dawn until the night falls; so, too, if we have some loved one for whom we strive, we can endure every hardship with equanimity, as far as our own comfort is concerned. Few human beings in the world to-day are so enmeshed in the personal self as to work merely for the gratification of selfish instincts. The hard-working man, whether laborer or banker, must have some one else for whom he struggles and strives; otherwise, he descends to a level below that of the brute.

This is the reason for the family; the lodge; the community; the nation; there must be some motive other than the preservation of the personal self, in order to develop the higher quality of love which embraces the world, until the spirit of a Christ takes possession of the human and he would gladly offer himself a sacrifice to the world, if by so doing he could eliminate all the pain from the world.

How natural it is to feel, when we see a loved one suffering, that we would gladly take upon ourselves that pain; the heart fills with love until it aches with the burden of it; this love enlarged, expanded and impersonal in its application is the same love with which we are told to love God, and to “do all for Him.” Do all for love of all the other hearts in the Universe that feel as we feel when their loved ones suffer-that is the way to love God-it is the only way we know. We only know divine love through human love: human love is divine when it is unselfish and eternal-not fed upon carnality, but anchored in spiritual complement.

The story of Abou Ben Adhem ("may his tribe increase”) tells us how we may know who loves the Lord. The angel wrote the names of those who loved the Lord most faithfully and fully, and coming to Abou Ben Adhem asked if he should write his name, and received the reply that he could not say whether he deeply loved the Lord, but he was quite certain that the angel could “write me as one who loves his fellow-men.” And, lo! when the list was made and the names of all who loved the Lord recorded, Abou Ben Adhem’s name headed the list.

The Vedanta philosophy teaches non-attachment and Vivekananda himself says: “To love any one personally is bondage. Love all alike then all desires fall off.”

To love only the personal self of any one binds us to the sorrow of loss and of separation and disappointment; but to love any one spiritually is to establish a bond which can never be broken; which insures reunion, and defies time and space.

We can not love all alike, though we can love all humanity impersonally. All desires that have their root in the sense-conscious plane of expression, will fall off when the heart is anchored in spiritual love; but let it be understood that spiritual love is not opposed to human love; we do not grow into spiritual love by denying the human, but by plussing the human.

Spiritual consciousness is all that is good and pure and noble, and satisfying in the mortal and infinitely more. It is the love of personal self plus the Self-the atman.

Love is never unrequited. It is never wasted; never foolish. Love is its own self-justification; if it be real love, and not vanity, or self admiration, misnamed, give it freely, and don’t ask for a return; don’t ask whither it leads; only ask if it is real-if the love you feel is for the object of your love, or if it is for yourself-for you to possess and to minister to your pleasure; ask whether it is from the senses or from the heart.

The way of the Bhakti yoga, is the way of love and service, because service to our fellow beings, is the inevitable complement of love. Where we truly love, we gladly serve. It has been said: “The chela treads a hair-line.” That is to say, the initiate must be prepared to meet defeat at every turn. Not defeat of his object of attainment, but the personal defeat that so many seek in the delusion that the world’s ideal of success is the real success.

In conclusion we can only repeat what has been told and retold many times by all inspired ones, of whatever creed and race; namely, think and act always from the inner Self, cheerfully taking the consequences of your choice. Let not the opinions of the illusory world of the senses balk and thwart you. Let not the “worldly-wise” swerve you from your ideal and your faith in the final goal of your earthly pilgrimage-the attainment of spiritual consciousness in your present personality; this is the meaning of immortality in the flesh Doubt not this.

Make love your ideal; your guide; your final goal; look for the inner Self of all whom you meet. “Learn to look into the hearts of men,” says the injunction in Light on the Path; dismiss from your mind all the accumulation of traditional concepts and prejudices that are not grounded in love, and above all falter not, nor doubt-no matter what seeming hardships you encounter in your earthly pilgrimage; they are but the Indian-clubs of your soul’s gymnasium-Experience. “Meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat these two impostors just the same.”

Triumph and Disaster as seen with the eyes of sense-consciousness are both illusions; but don’t for this reason cease your work. The phrase “you must work out your own salvation” is true. So also, you must be willing to do your part in working out the salvation of the world; salvation means simply the realization of the spiritual Being that you are-the attainment of that state of Illumination which guarantees immortality.

Experience teaches one important lesson: Our sense-conscious life is filled with symbolic language if we have the inner eye of discernment. An unescapable truth is symbolized in our daily life by the evidence that we get nothing for nothing. Everything has its price.

Immortality godhood, will not be handed to you on a silver salver; neither can any one withhold it from you, if you desire it above all things. And, altho’ it has its price, yet you can not buy it. A seeming paradox, but the Initiate will see it all clearly enough when the time comes.

“He who would scale the Heights of Understanding
From whence the soul looks out forever free
Must falter not; nor fail; all truth demanding
Though he bear the cross and know Gethsemane.”

The discouraged student says to himself: “If Truth demands such sorrow and sacrifice as this, I will not serve her. It is a false god that would so try his devotees.”

Have you not said it?

The toll you pay is not to the Divine Self within, but to the “keepers of the threshold,” that guard the entrance to the dwelling place of the Illuminati.

Earthly lodges and brotherhoods are symbols of the higher initiations.

There is a common mistake in the idea that the invisible states of consciousness are chaotic, or radically different from the visible.

“As below, so above, and as above so below” is an aphorism constantly held before the eyes of the would-be initiate. Each of whom, must interpret and know it for himself.

If the student finds the Raja Yoga sutras difficult of comprehension or of practice let him meditate upon the following mantrams:

I know myself to be above the false concepts which assail the personal self that I appear to be. I am united with the All-seeing All-knowing Consciousness.

I abide in the consciousness of the Indestructibility and Omniscience of Being. I rest secure and content in the integrity of Cosmic Law which shall lead my soul unto its own, guaranteeing immortal love.

I unite myself with that Power that makes for righteousness. Therefore nothing shall dismay or defeat me, because I am at-one with the limitless areas of spiritual consciousness.

My mind is the dynamic center through which my soul manifests the Love which illumines the world. Only good can come to the world through me.

Much that is called Mental Science, New Thought and Christian Science has for its aim and ideal, avoidance of all that does not make for personal well-being, and worldly success. Avoid this ideal; distrust this motive. Be ever willing to sacrifice the personal self to the Real Self, if need be. If the ideal is truly the desire for illumination, and not for self-gratification, the mind will soon learn to distinguish between the lesser and the greater. Have you longed for perfect, satisfying human love?

You shall have it plussed a thousand fold in immortal spiritual union with your god.