Spiritual Practice, Non-Attachment and Enlightenment

"Practice is the repeated effort to follow the disciplines which give permanent control of the thought-waves of the mind."

"Practice becomes firmly grounded when it has been cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly, with earnest devotion."

"Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from desire for what is seen or heard."

-- Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: 13-15 --

"The waves of the mind can be made to flow in two opposite directions - either toward the objective world ("the will to desire") or toward true self-knowledge ("the will to liberation"). Therefore both practice and non-attachment are necessary. Indeed, it is useless and potentially even dangerous to attempt one without the other. If we attempt to practice spiritual disciplines without attempting to control the thought-waves of desire, our minds will become violently agitated and perhaps permanently unbalanced."

"If we attempt nothing more than a rigid negative control of the waves of desire, without raising waves of love, compassion and devotion to oppose them then the result may be even more tragic. This is why certain puritans suddenly and mysteriously commit suicide. They make a cold, stern effort to be "good" - that is, not to think "bad thoughts" - and when they fail, as human beings sometimes must, they cannot face this humiliation, which is really nothing but hurt pride, and the emptiness inside themselves. In the Taoist scriptures we read: "Heaven arms with compassion those whom it would not see destroyed."

. . .

"Perseverance is very important in this connection. No temporary failure, however disgraceful or humiliating, should ever be used as an excuse for giving up the struggle. . . . No failure is ever really a failure unless we stop trying altogether - indeed, it may be a blessing in disguise, a much needed lesson."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," pp. 28-29.]

In the attached video, spiritual teacher Paramahamsa Nithyananda discusses the importance of practice in Patanjali's yoga sutras (above), highlighting the dangers that may arise when the spiritual aspirant employs spiritual techniques in practice without a true understanding of how and why such techniques are used.

In terms of practice being "cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly," Nithyananda stresses that this is not in sole reference to linear time, but is rather a recognition that, like the Buddha, the aspirant must realize and determine that 'practice' is a life-long commitment that must be continuously cultivated. The dedication of the spiritual aspirant must, therefore, be to the practice of 'being enlightened' rather than to that of 'seeking enlightenment.' In the end, even the desire to 'become' enlightened - like all other desires - must be dropped, says Nithyananda.

Know Thyself!: The Hidden Dimension of Consciousness

"Know Thyself!" is the great admonishment behind all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, for it seems that virtually all such traditions acknowledge that there is the small "self" or "ego" which we take to be "who" we are, and a hidden, transcendental "higher Self" which, though obscured by the ego's narrative, is the very essence of our being.

"Most people," observes the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents."

"People," he points out, "measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all this is not known, which also exists."

"What is commonly called "self-knowledge"," he notes, "is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen "with us" or "in our family" or among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand, one meets with illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities whcih merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case."

"In this broad band of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control," he warns, "we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what it is that is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 14-16.]

In "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" (written with Christopher Isherwood), Swami Prabhavanada notes that "(t)he external world even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman" (or true nature of our being). In short, we need to be "in the world" but not "of the world," as great sages and philosophers have told us since time immemorial.

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda observes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 24.]

But how to know this non-conflictive and acceptive consciousness of our inner being? Through introspection, self-examination and meditation is the answer found in virtually all traditions.

"(M)editation," Prabhavananda observes, "is evolution in reverse. Meditation is a process of devolution. Beginning at the surface of life," he explains, "the meditative mind goes inward, seeking always the cause being the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 41.]

Thus, to "Know Thyself!" one must move beyond the small "self" of the ego to the transcendental "Self" of one's own inner being.

Double-Mindedness: Disciplining the Ego

"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways"

-- James 1:8 --

Double, triple or multiple-mindedness is the ordinary state of the vast, vast majority of people. Yet, only a relatively few people - although perhaps that number is growing - even question the state of their consciousness and being in the first place.

In his great book, "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," (written with Christopher Isherwood), the Vedantist monk, Swami Prabhavananda observes that if you were to look into the mind of most men or women it would look something like this: "Ink-bottle. That time I saw Roosevelt. In love with the night mysterious. Reds veto Pact. Jimmy's trying to get my job. Mary says I'm fat. big toe hurts. Soup good. . . . etc., etc."

If an individual were to vocalize this barrage of thinking which is the ordinary state of our human, egoic consciousness, we would call him or her mad. Yet this is the ordinary way that most people think. Caught up in the inner dialogue of the ego, they may be compelled to say or do virtually anything; although fear, or perhaps their conscience, usually prevents them from doing so. They are, quite literally, "double-minded" and, hence, "unstable in all their ways," because they are more or less unaware that beneath the raucous thought stream of the ego there is only the clear being of higher consciousness and awareness.

"The truth," says Prabhavananda, "is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves - despite our daily experience to the contrary - that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a very small portion of our waking hours. More usually we are in a state of reverie - a mental fog of disconnected sense-impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort, excitement or ease."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How To Know God," pp. 58-59.]

The practice of yoga, like all esoteric religious or spiritual paths, is directed towards stilling the thought-waves of the egoic mind, and, by doing so, realizing the essence of one's being that lies beneath the ego's thought stream. "Who," asked Jesus, "ever added one cubit to his stature by taking thought?" (Matthew 6:27).

Prabhavananda and Isherwood, like other commentators on Patanjali's yoga aphorisms, use the metaphor of a lake to describe the effect of our egoic thinking. The lake is our mind, and when waves of thought muddy that lake, we can no longer see to the lake bottom which is the true essence of our Being. The job of the spiritual aspirant, then, is to still the thought waves in the mind so that he or she can realize their essence. For, at heart, we are all inseparable from the Ground of Being that permeates and sustains the universe, and we are only separate from that Ground of Being to the extent that we allow the reverie of thought to stir the waters.

When we discipline the mind through meditation, prayer and the frequent recurrence to the contemplation of our Being (or the Ground of Being) we become stable. When we don't, we again become "unstable in all our ways."

Advaita Vedanta and Non-Duality

In "A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga," (available at Gutenberg.org, here), author William Walker Atkinson, observes:

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and name is but a phenomenal or shadow-world - a show-world - back of which rests Reality, called by some name of the teacher. But remember this, all philosophy that counts is based upon some form of monism - Oneness - whether the concept be a known or unknown god; an unknown or unknowable principle; a substance; an Energy, or Spirit. There is but one - there can be but One - such is the inevitable conclusion of the highest known human reason, intuition or faith."

Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886)

All the world's great wisdom traditions ("Hear, O' Israel, the Lord, thy God, is One!"), as Atkinson notes, devolve back into an understanding of non-duality, an understanding that there is no separate existence apart from the Whole, the Ground of Being. But, perhaps, the concept of non-duality is nowhere more deeply examined than in the Advaita Vedantist tradition of India, particularly in the Shankarya school.

Explaining the non-dualistic philosophy of Shankara (a.k.a. Samkara), Vedantist teacher, Swami Prabhavananada (in "The Spiritual Heritage of India") observes:

"The world, according to Samkara, 'is and is not.' Its fundamental unreality can be understood only in relation to the ultimate mystical experience, the experience of an illumined soul. When the illumined soul passes into transcendental consciousness, he realizes the Self (the Atman) as pure bliss and pure intelligence, the one without the second. In this state of consciousness, all perception of multiplicity ceases, there is no longer any sense of 'mine' and 'thine', the world as we know it has vanished. Then the Self shines forth as the One, the Truth, the Brahman, the basis of the apparent world."

"The apparent world, as it is experienced in the waking state, may be likened, says Samkara, to an imagined snake which proves, on closer inspection, to be nothing but a coil of rope. When the truth is known, we are no longer deluded by the appearance  - the snake-appearance vanishes into the reality of the rope, the world vanishes into Brahman."

[Swami Prabhavananda, "The Spiritual Heritage of India," pp. 283-284.]

The following video serves as a brief introduction to the Advaita Vedanta, and introduces its many teachers, old and new, including Shankara as well as the late Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta.

Vedanta: The Teaching of Yoga, or 'Yoking the Mind'

Perhaps the world's most powerful wisdom tradition - or, if not 'powerful,' certainly the most 'thorough' and 'ancient' - is that of Vedanta, also referred to as the 'Advaia Vedanta,' or 'vedAnta.'

With its foundations in the Vedas of ancient India, the world's oldest known spiritual teachings, and the Upanishads, the later but still ancient metaphysical interpretations of the four known Vedas (the Rigveda, Yagurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda), as systematized by the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali some 2,400 years ago, and as expounded by the great Indian philosopher of the 7th-century, Shankara, the Vedanta yields a complete teaching on the metaphysical (as well as physical) reality of 'non-dualism.'

In order to become an Advaitist, and fully grasp the Vedanta's teachings of radical non-duality, however, one needs to cultivate and nurture what Dr. Kuntimaddi Sadananda of the Advaita Academy calls 'the four-Ds' of Shankara, namely:

• 'Discrimination' between what is eternal and what is ephemeral;
• 'Dispassion' to reject that which is ephemeral in order to gain that which is eternal;
• 'Discipline' of the mind to divert it from trivial or ephemeral pursuits in life in order to conserve the energy to pursue that which is eternal; and, finally,
• 'Desire' strong enough to motivate one in that pursuit without getting discouraged by any type of obstacles that arise.

Acharya Sadananda

Dr. Sadananda notes - as excerpted in the on-line magazine, Non-Duality - that "if one does not have these four-fold qualifications, he has not prepared his mind for the knowledge of vedAnta." However, he further notes, "(t)he mind that has acquired these four-fold qualifications is a ‘pure’ mind that is ready to ‘take off’ when the vedAntic teaching is imparted by a competent teacher."

Dr. Sadananda also suggests that it is the third of these "four-Ds" - the "discipline of the mind" - that is most critical to the would-be Advaitist's progress in Vedanta. It consists, he notes, "of six (all-important) subsidiary disciplines for uncompromising commitment" to the study of Vedantic teachings.

These "six subsidiary disciplines" are, of course the six branches or "limbs" of yoga that Patanjali explores in his yoga aphorisms. ('Yoga,' which is derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English word 'yoke,' is synonymous with 'religion' in India, and consists of 'yoking' the Atman, or personal 'godhead' of the individual, with Brahma, the ultimate substrate which pervades and supports the entire manifest universe, as well as the unmanifest.)

"(O)ne has to listen to vedAnta from a competent teacher (shravaNam) and reflect on it until all doubts are fully resolved (mananam) and finally contemplate on this until the teaching has been fully assimilated (nidhidhyAsanam)," Sadananada observes. "Listening to the teacher is sufficient if one has all the pre-requisites. For those who do not have the prerequisites, the other two are required until conviction takes place in the mind - a conviction that what vedAnta says is indeed true to the letter."

This is, indeed, in line with the teaching of Sri Swami Satchidananda when he remarks, in his exposition of the second of Patanjali's one hundred-plus yoga sutras ("The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga."), that "(f)or a keen student this one sutra would be enough because the rest of them only explain this one."

"How to Know God,"
by Swami Prabhavanada
and Chirstopher Isherwood

For his part, Swami Prabhavananda (author, with Christopher Isherwood, of "How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali") compares the mind to a clear lake that has become muddied with relentless waves of barely conscious thought. It is in learning to still the mind, so that the sediment raised by the actions of the barely conscious mind settles out, Prabhavananda saysthat one learns to practice yoga, or "yoking."

But in order to realize and effect this, it is clearly evident that one must learn and practice a 'discipline' of mind in order to "divert it from trivial or ephemeral pursuits in life," as Sadananda says "in order to conserve the energy to pursue that which is eternal."

Nature of the Ego: "Lions All Around Us"

In one of the best lectures I have had the pleasure of attending, Dr. Bruce Perry (a devlopmental neurobiologist) spoke of humankind's evolutionary context as hunter gatherers in an environment where stressor events were intense but far between. Someone would shout, "Lion!." and the 'wary' lived to pass their genes on to the next generation. The 'slow' were an evolutionary dead-end . . . i.e., lunch.

His point, however, was that our bodies and brains have not evolved significantly since then (except, perhaps, for the weeding out of the slow and tasty). As a result, we go through our modern life with a huge volume of stimuli that we "need" to pay attention to - co-workers, cell phones, traffic, bill statements etc., and our psyches are screaming, "Lion! . . , Lion! . . . Lion!," on a more or less continual basis. As it turns out, we are not really built for the way that we now live.

Modern humankind therefore tends to be in an almost continual "fight or flight" modality, with little time in the "rest and digest" mode where we formerly spent the vast majority of our time, evolutionally speaking. (Indeed, studies of modern hunter-gatherers show they spend very little time foraging and a great deal of time sleeping.) The result of all this? It appears to be a mind in a perpetual state of alert motion, ever searching for (or manufacturing) "something" that requires our further attention and further thought. This "mind" is, of course, the human "ego" (or small "self") that we mistake for our only identity, and an 'individuality' that is separate and apart from everything and everyone in the outer world.

And, of course, "the ego" is always restless, looking for lurking "dangers" and for opportunities to gratify its instincts. (As such, it is small wonder that virtually all the "news" we consume is bad news, and "sex" still "sells," no matter who is doing the peddling or what is being peddled.)

In a now classic translation and commentary of Patangali's 'Yoga Aphorisms,' Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda (of the Ramakrishna Order, now the Vedanta Society) discuss the operation of the unawakened mind of modern man, noting:

"The truth is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves - despite our daily experience to the contrary - that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, if at any given moment, we could take twenty human minds and inspect their workings, we should probably find one, or at most two which were functioning rationally. Most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a small portion of our waking hours. More usually, we are in a state of reverie - a mental fog of disconnected sense impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort or ease. The remaining eighteen or nineteen minds would look something like this: "Ink-bottle. That time I saw Roosevelt. In love with the night mysterious. Reds veto Pact. Jimmy's trying to get my job. Mary says I'm fat. Big toe hurts. Soup good. . . ." etc., etc. Because we do nothing to control this reverie, it is largely conditioned by external circumstances."

This was written in 1953, long before the true beginning of the Information Age, with its multiple demands - human and electronic - for our attention playing through our psyches, turning the gentler "reverie" that Isherwood and Prabhavananda describe into a mental landscape of, "Lions, lions . . . everywhere, and never a moment of peace."

There seem to be two conclusions, and one synthesis of conclusions, that one can draw from this. Either the human mindscape (and thus the "reality" we create for ourselves) is getting much worse; or, because of an increasing (and, not uncoincidentally, interconnected)  awareness of the inner mental disharmony our global culture creates, things are getting much better.

The synthesis, paradoxically, is that things appear to be getting both much better and much worse simultaneously. And, as Eckhart Tolle observes in an audio interview (below) which he gave on the afternoon of 9/11/2001, "Even the Sun Will Die," things have to get worse in order for them to get better.



Tolle and other spiritual teaches, both now and in ages past, all say that there is a tipping point, a 'critical mass' of consciousness, so to speak. Hopefully, as they predict, we are nearing a point where the collective consciousness of individuals who are "awake" and not in a state of "reverie" will trigger a global awakening. Certainly, with the interconnectedness that virtually all of humankind now has at least some access to, when (not if) this occurs, it will be very rapid and, one suspects, astonishing spiritual awakening.