Ashtanga Yoga - The Intermediate Series. Gregor Maehle

tends to attach itself to the next object that arises, it cannot without training stay focused on the subject, consciousness. The mind will go after tangible or experiential objects (wealth, power, sex, fame, and so forth), because the subject, although the giver of infinite ecstasy, is intangible. This means that the untrained mind will abandon the mystical experience, even though this is the opposite of what must happen. You need to stay in this state with your eyes wide open, your hair standing on end, and your brain on fire for at least several hours. Some texts hint at a minimum of three hours. Buddha sustained his mystical experience for a whole night; it was more than a decade before Ramana Maharshi could speak and act conventionally after his experience.

      Understanding Samadhi through Indian Spirituality

      The eternal state of infinite consciousness and deepest level of reality is called Brahman. The Brahman has two poles, Shiva and Shakti. Shiva, which we may call the male pole, is pure consciousness. Shiva stays forever uninvolved, witnessing the world from Mount Meru (Kailasha), not unlike a distant father who watches with bewilderment his wife running a household consisting of six kids, two cats, and a dog. Mount Meru is represented in the microcosm of the individual as the crown chakra. On an individual level, Shiva represents consciousness, which looks down from the crown chakra (the Mount Meru of the individual), witnessing and being aware of thought and action. We cannot reduce Lord Shiva to this metaphorical meaning, however. He is all that we can imagine him to be, all that we cannot imagine, and both together; he is also none of these and all of what is beyond.

      Lord Shiva’s consort, the goddess Shakti, has a different temperament. She creates, sustains, and reabsorbs the entire creation through her various movements. The movement of creation is her descent from consciousness into matter, a movement that is called evolution. She descends from consciousness (her union with Shiva) into intelligence (buddhi), which is represented in the body as the ajna chakra (third eye). From there she descends into the space/ether element, which is located in the throat chakra (vishuddha). From here she crystallizes through air, fire, water, and earth, which manifest in the microcosm of the individual as the heart (anahata), navel (manipuraka), lower abdomen (svadhishthana), and base (muladhara) chakras, respectively.

      When she dissolves and reabsorbs creation, Shakti is called Kundalini, and her ascent is called involution. The yogi lets Kundalini rise to the crown chakra, where the original unity of Shiva and Shakti is experienced, yielding the ecstatic state of samadhi.

      When the goddess descends she leaves a particular trail, along which we can follow her back home. She does this by using the essence (tanmatra) of the previous chakra to create the next lower one. By taking this essence and reabsorbing it into the higher one, we lift Shakti up from chakra to chakra. This process is referred to in the scriptures as bhuta shuddhi (elemental purification). It can be performed in two ways, either in meditation or in samadhi. The meditative bhuta shuddhi is a typical daily ritual performed even nowadays by many devotional Indians. If it is performed in samadhi by a mind that has become able to create reality, the purification of the elements results in an involution back up through the chakras that leads to divine revelation in the sahasrara (crown chakra) — the realization of pure consciousness. When this state is finally made firm through repeated application, it is then called kaivalya, or liberation. It is so called because it frees us from the bondage of conditioned existence, allowing us to abide in the limitless ecstasy of infinite consciousness.

Only then, when all eight limbs are mastered in simultaneous application, are they finally discarded, and all exertion abandoned. As mentioned earlier, Patanjali calls this process paravairagya — complete letting go. We also find this process enshrined in the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krishna states that by knowing the Supreme Brahman all one’s duties are discharged.¹⁸ Once the divine view is had, there is no more plan or structure. From here, life is infinite freedom and unlimited spontaneity.

      Until that point, however, effort and willpower are the means by which you progress. This means keeping one’s ethical precepts (yama and niyama) in place, assuming Padmasana or similar suitable postures (asanas) in the technically correct fashion, entering kumbhaka (pranayama), drawing one’s senses inward (pratyahara), concentrating on one’s meditation object (dharana), receiving a permanent stream of information from it (dhyana), and finally establishing an authentic duplication of that object in one’s mind (called objective or cognitive samadhi). In this traditional way yogis have practiced for thousands of years. Only today do people believe that one can discard or shortcut any lengthy preparation.

1 The term rishi is inextricably linked to Veda. You won’t find a Buddhist rishi or a Tantric rishi.

2 The Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad is the oldest, largest, and most important of the Upanishads. The genealogy of teachers listed in this Upanishad spans approximately 2,500 years.

3 Samkhya Karika of Ishvarakrishna, stanza 64. The Karika is today considered the most important text of Samkhya, as all of the older texts are lost. Samkhya is the most ancient Indian philosophy, one of the six orthodox systems of Vedic thought (darshanas).

4 Western scholars date him from 788 to 820, but this view is increasingly criticized. Indian tradition holds that he lived well before that date. His birth name was Adi Shankara. In India he is known as Shankaracharya (the teacher Shankara). In the colophon of his texts he often called himself Shankara Bhagavatpada, after his teacher Govinda Bhagavatpada.

5 Yoga Sutra I.23.

6 Bhagavad Gita III.3 ff.

7 Bhagavad Gita II.45. The Vedas’ chief concern is here said to be the accumulation of material or spiritual merit. The Lord, however, wants Arjuna to abide in Brahman, beyond loss or gain.

8 The Cambridge scholar Elizabeth De Michelis’s excellent study The History of Modern Yoga reveals how and through whom many of our modern ideas of yoga were introduced from Western and Christian sources.

9 Discriminative knowledge (viveka khyateh) is the result of the last and highest cognitive (objective) samadhi. Cognitive samadhi is, however, superseded by the still higher super-cognitive (objectless) samadhi.

10 For a detailed description of each of these observances, please see Ashtanga Yoga: Practice and Philosophy, pp. 216–17.

11 For a description of the doshas, see David Frawley’s Ayurvedic Healing: A Comprehensive Guide (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), p. 3.

12 Yoga Sutra I.30.

13 Bhagavad Gita II.58.

14 The term deva (divine form) unfortunately has been