Raja Yoga and Buddhi Yoga: Their Place in the Evolution
Yoga is the Path to Mergence with God. But what is God?
By this word people mean different things. Gurdjieff was quite right when he said that everyone has their own religion. Indeed it is difficult to find two persons who regard similarly their religious path, even if they belong to the same religious direction.
Some people use this word to denote a god-spirit from a mythological, fairy pantheon.
Or some groups of people knew concrete Divine Teachers — Representatives of God-the-Father — and worshipped Them [28].
But later — in India through Krishna, in Judaea through Jewish prophets, in China through Huang-Di, in Arabia through Muhammad — people got a more valuable — from the methodological standpoint — concept of One Primordial Consciousness of the Creator. Of course, in different languages It was called by different words. It is present in the deepest (related to the physical world) plane (layer, loka, eon) of the multidimensional universe. This understanding of the word God is the central one, and it formed the basis of monotheism.
Yet, there is one more monotheistic meaning of the word God: God as the Absolute, that is ALL (the Creator coessential with His Creation and thus composing with it One Organism).
It is possible to speak of God in personal aspect. Such approach is admissible within monotheism since the Universal Creator can incarnate Parts of Himself into human bodies. But here one has to be careful — to avoid becoming a worshipper of the material body of a Divine Teacher — instead of aspiring to cognition of Him as a Consciousness and to Mergence with Him in the Abode of the Creator.
The concept of God also includes His Manifestations as the Holy Spirit (Brahman). This concerns, first of all, unembodied Divine Teachers coming out from the Abode of the Creator into the Creation.
In order to be able to understand other people speaking of God and to make it possible for them to understand us, we have to keep in mind these differences.
Now let us come to the topic of Evolution.
The fullest knowledge about this can be obtained from one of the most ancient books — Indian Bhagavad Gita [25]. This book comprises spiritual talks of Arjuna with Divine Krishna. It is the Bhagavad Gita that gives the most comprehensive knowledge about what is God, what is man, what is the meaning of human life and what main laws determine the way of man’s evolution.
It is possible to speak of the evolution of humankind, the evolution of some particular person as well as the evolution of God. All this is very closely related, as you will see from the further information.
God’s evolution proceeds in cycles; in the modern astronomy they are called cosmic pulsation. In Sanskrit these cycles are called Manvantaras. Each Manvantara consists of Kalpa: the time period when there is a manifested world on the material plane and Pralaya: the time period when the manifested world disappears. In the Bhagavad Gita these stages are likened to a “Day” and a “Night” of Brahman (the Holy Spirit).
Each Manvantara begins with the “creation of the world” (in the Bible’s language) and ends with the “end of the world” — when the conditions of in the given part of the Creation are exhausted. God covers a certain cycle of His Evolution over each Manvantara.
Then the next “creation of the world” will follow, and it can be quite different from the previous one. One should not think that in the next Creation there will be the same Earth with the same physical bodies of humans and of other creatures. No, everything may be different and it makes no sense to guess at it.
By the beginning of each Manvantara God (in the aspect of Absolute) is manifested in His three main components:
a) protoprakriti — that is protomatter (energy which later forms matter);
b) protopurusha — that is the energy which, in the given Manvantara, will develop in conditions, created for this purpose in prakriti, by incarnating and forming souls; and
c) the Supreme Purusha — that is the Creator, who remains the Witness and Master of the purusha’s evolution in prakriti, the Goal of the personal evolution of each unit of life, the Supreme Teacher.
Krishna also includes in this scheme the Highest Purusha — i.e. Brahman (the Holy Spirit). (More detail in [29-30]).
As the result of each Manvantara, the Creator adds to Himself those units of purusha evolving in physical bodies which managed to go the whole cycle of their personal evolution and attained the Divine Perfection. Everything in the Creation is meant for that purpose. The meaning of everything is in this. The Evolution of God Himself goes through this and it consists in this.
This is the essence of everything taking place in the universe.
By the way, some mystics bring up the question of disappearance of time in meditations experienced by them, hence, they infer, objective time does not exist. No, it does exist. It just can be different. The earthly time is measured by periods of Earth’s rotation around its axis (24 hours) and around the Sun (year). These units of objective earthly time were divided by people into conventional units: months, hours, minutes, seconds. But on the scale of galaxies, the time is measured by Manvantaras.
Now let us consider the evolution of purusha.
It starts with formation of the first rudiments of the initially diffusive energy on crystalline lattice of planet’s minerals. And each mineral has the stages of its “childhood”, “adulthood” and “old age”, and then it comes to destruction, to “death”.
Then the formed lump of energy is incarnated into bodies of protozoan organisms, later into vegetal, animal bodies and develops in them from incarnation to incarnation.
Then evolution proceeds in human bodies.
That is each one of us, humans, has a vast prehistory of incarnations into various bodies. But some of us went through a number of human incarnations, while others became humans for the first time. And one should not expect that the latter can embrace the religious field of thinking. They lead a different life now, not because they are bad, but because they are young, whatever age of their present physical bodies may be. At some time in the future they will also become highly educated thinkers. And later they will possibly fulfill the supreme predestination of man — merge with the Consciousness of the Creator.
How to approach the realization of this supreme goal?
Jesus said: be perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect, that is, aspire to the Divine Perfection, become like God.
There is also the following precept in the New Testament: God is Spirit and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth [23,25]. That is man has to perceive oneself not as a body, but as a spirit, i.e. a consciousness, a lump of consciousness. And as a consciousness, man must build relationships with God-Spirit, that is with God-Consciousness, with the Universal Supreme Consciousness in order to achieve Mergence with Him as a result. In the Book for the Perfect of the apostle Thomas the following is said about this final act of human evolution: by making spiritual efforts man has to merge with the Father (in the book — “with the King”) and stay in this Mergence forever [54].
The Bhagavad Gita deals with the same subject to a far greater detail [25]. It presents the fundamentals of buddhi yoga — the teaching about work with consciousness.
There are also such words in it: if you devote the whole of your life without reservations to Me, you will finally come to Me being consumed by the Atman.
These are great and magnificent words, one of the best meditations brought to us by the Bhagavad Gita: we reach Mergence with God by letting ourselves be consumed…
This was emphasized not only by Krishna and Jesus: the same idea was achieved also by Chinese alchemists, Tibetan Buddhists, Mexican Indians-Toltecs, and Muslim Sufis.
So we have a real possibility to submerge forever in the Embrace of our Great Universal Beloved — in the Embrace of God! But for this, firstly, our love to Him must be strong enough and secondly, we have to become worthy of this Mergence, that is become perfect.
Now let us come back to considering the evolutionary chain: stones — plants — animals — human beings — God.
It turns out that stones have some kind of peculiar memory. And the one who has certain experience can read the information from stones’ memory. To ensure the result the following three conditions should be observed:
first, stones have to have some experience of communion with people. There are “unsociable” stones that are not “familiar” with people and never get into this kind of contacts. But stones that lay or were lying in busy (populous) places as for example near houses or in the places where people rest — those get into contact willingly;
second, the stone should be warmed by sun or, say, by fire;
third, the one who tries to come into contact with the stone has to be capable of entering the subtle spatial dimensions. This is achieved by methods of raja and buddhi yoga.
One can read the information, which the stone possess, the information about events, which it witnessed in the past, by shifting the concentration of consciousness on the subtle planes into the stone. For example, it is possible to go back to the time when the stone was lying on the seashore and gulls were flying over it… One may see episodes of war… It is possible to read strong human emotions from the stone’s memory… For instance, on the former Finnish lands of Karelian Isthmus, I found a stone that served as a bench near a house and witnessed a high harmony and love of a young Finnish family and later — its utter distress when Stalin’s troops approached and this family had to abandon their dear house… Many of my students could not restrain tears on this place…
Plants possess not only memory, but also emotions (of course, of their — “vegetal” — level). All of us, no doubt, heard or read about the experiments of Baxter, which later were repeated in many other laboratories of different countries. Their essence is in instrumental registration of the plant’s electrophysiological response to one’s emotion directed at the plant from a distance of a few meters; for example, an aggressive intent to sear its leaf…
Animals possess not only memory and emotions, but also intelligence; they can think.
As for the humans, they have additionally the possibility of development of consciousness. But one should not think that everyone has a developed consciousness. To gain it one has to go through a number of evolutionary stages in human bodies.
What is a consciousness? In the primitive atheistic materialism they spoke of “public consciousness”, or the term consciousness was identified with the term intellect. But in the fundamental psychology this word denotes a lump of self-aware energy. Drawing a parallel with Sanskrit — in it the mind is termed manas and the consciousness — buddhi.
But to comprehend this in fullness is possible only for those who have developed themselves as consciousnesses with the help of the methods of buddhi yoga. Only for them the consciousness is an empirical reality rather than mere a word. Even in India there are religious schools for whose followers consciousness has not become a reality yet, and the word buddhi they interpret as supreme mind. The same error is typical for translations of the Indian philosophical literature (see [28-29]).
So consciousness is energy, and one of the man’s tasks is to develop, increase the amount of this energy to the cosmic scale, doing it in the highest, subtlest planes of the multidimensional space, so that later, having destroyed own “I” with the help of special techniques of buddhi yoga to infuse with the consciousness into the Consciousness of the Creator.
Practical experience of our School demonstrates that an individual normally has the volume of consciousness approximately of the size of a tennis ball. But after a few courses of buddhi yoga, one can reach any point within the bounds of Earth and space around it with the crystallized (i.e. developed) consciousness. (Of course, not all who came to the first course are capable to achieve this). Such an effect is achieved through the methods of increasing the mobility of consciousness, along with making it more subtle, and later by “growing” (crystallizing) it with the help of special techniques — first within the bioenergetic shell around the body (cocoon), and then — outside of it.
The main provider of energy for the consciousness being crystallized is ordinary food. That is the energy released in the process of biochemical conversion of prakriti particles in our bodies is used for forming the lower purusha at first and then — the Highest Purusha. That is what incarnations are needed for, in particular. And that is the reason why the evolution of human consciousnesses can not proceed in the non-incarnate state.
Once again — purusha “feeds on” prakriti in order to grow. For this purpose the whole material Creation exists — to place material physical bodies in it, to give them the mechanism of self-reproduction, and to grow in them the energy of purusha.
But to grow the lump of consciousness is not easy: this is not at all a mechanic process. To make it all clear, let us consider in detail the problem of man’s evolution in a series of incarnations.
There are many schemes of people’s psychotypes that reflect the stages of psychogenesis. The simplest scheme is the description of gunas in the Bhagavad Gita.
The first guna is tamas, that is darkness, stupidity, ignorance.
The second one is rajas, that is the stage when man starts the active process of self-development, transcends dumb primitiveness, grows as a fighter, and then — as a leader, organizer of other people.
The third guna is sattva, that is purity, harmony, bliss, happiness.
But Krishna taught in the Bhagavad Gita that one should not be fall into the trap of (entrapped by) sattva because sattva become an attachment due to the happiness that man experiences on this stage of development. Krishna calls to disengage oneself resolutely from sattva and go further — to the Creator — through further efforts on self-transformation.
But it is not possible to bypass the guna of sattva, since it is the only one that can secure man in subtlety and harmony, in peace.
Just the same it is not possible to bypass the rajas guna since it is in it that one develops vigor, gains the power necessary for further advancement. Sattva in man has to be supported with the power and vigor developed in the rajas guna. Sattva has to be powerful.
In the past I made several serious mistakes in estimation of the abilities of some of my students, when I mistook the ones who were weak in energy and intellect, but had achieved subtlety thanks to taking our first courses, — for those possessing the true sattva. These people fell very painfully down to their initial tamas when the work with them in our School ended. They were not capable of standing firmly on their feet yet.
Thus I had to conclude the following:
first — it is necessary to discern true sattva from the tamas dressed up with sattva;
second — the serious spiritual work is not meant for the weak;
So instructors of the high stages of yoga must thoroughly survey the psychogenesis of their students: whether they have mastered rajas, whether they have become firm in sattva, and so on.
At that it is helpful to determine the students’ psychotypes by applying several different scales to them. This allows one to get a more full picture and avoid mistakes.
We have considered already another scale — Indian varnas as they are outlined in the Bhagavad Gita.
According to this scale, at the beginning one belongs to the varna of shudras. These are incarnated young souls. Such people are capable of nothing on their own. They need to learn from more mature (psychogenetically) people, helping them in their work.
Then one becomes a vaishya having developed the intellect so that becomes able to start own business, becomes a craftsman, farmer, merchant and so on.
Having developed oneself in the preceding varna one naturally comes to the varna of kshatriyas, that is one becomes a leader, organizer, a selfless fighter.
Having gained the supreme spiritual knowledge and went practical religious path first as a disciple and then as a religious leader, man attains with the help of the methods of buddhi yoga the Nirvana in Brahman, becomes a brahman, a representative of the highest varna. (One may speak of potential brahmans, that is of people who have reached in the psychogenesis the stage where it is possible to become a brahman in the current incarnation).
Let us review now one more scale of psychotypes.
In the beginning, one is aware of oneself as of the physical body only. This takes place both in psychogenetic and in ontogenetic youth. And this in necessary: a child has to learn first living on the Earth, on the material plane, developing through this. Children should not be taken away from the physical plane with by teaching them, for example, complex meditations. They also should not be initiated to the religious truths too profound for their age.
Let me repeat once again: any individual, first, has to gain strength in interactions with the physical plane — gain intellectual power, knowledge, experience of solving arising problems. Only after this one can safely engage into serious spiritual practice. Only those who have learned to stand firmly on their feet can be selected for such practice.
So, man on the first stage sees only the material plane and perceives oneself solely as a material body.
The second stage is called the astral plane. On it people start to understand and feel that there is more to the physical matter. They begin to feel non-identity with the physical body, make attempts to gain better understanding of this by means of the mystical practice, in particular. They are not capable of perceiving the Divine levels of consciousness yet, since they are not subtle and cannot enter these levels. Thus they often get involved in relations with non-incarnate beings of the coarse spatial dimensions and sometimes consider them as their “teachers” and often as “God”.
The cosmic astral plane is the abode of the least developed, least evolutionary advanced non-incarnate beings, including people.
It is the state on the subtlety-coarseness scale habitual during the life in the body that defines where the soul finds itself after death of the body — in hell, in paradise, or in the Creator’s Abode. That is why the salvational tendency to avoid gross emotional states and to make the consciousness more subtle is of so great importance from the evolutionary standpoint. Lust, anger, and greed are the threefold gate of hell and those who get rid of these three — they make their own good, said Krishna [25].
Hell is the coarsest non-material layers of the multidimensional universe, the destiny of those who have developed in themselves the hellish qualities during the life in the body. This can result from neglect of fighting one’s own vices, active cultivation of them, as well as from interest in studying hell and attunement with its inhabitants.
That is why it is most advisable for everyone to “pass” the astral stage of the development, on which it is very easy to slip off into hell, as quickly as possible. For this purpose, one has to pay the most serious attention to ethic work on oneself in accordance with the commandments of God.
The evolutionary stage following the astral plane is the mental plane. People come to this stage when they begin serious intellectual search of the Highest Truth and develop the intellect through this. In particular, one has to understand that on the Path to God, to happiness the ethics should be given the most serious attention. A person preparing mentally for the further spiritual work is a representative of the mental plane.
Those who have achieved a high stage of ethic purification, who have cognized the subtle states of consciousness, and have become steady in them — those are on the next stage — on the supramental plane.
The next stage is the subdivine plane. It is the abode of true spiritual leaders.
After this man ascends to the stage called in Sanskrit Brahman, or the Holy Spirit in English. Who are they who have attained this stage? — Those entered with their developed, crystallized consciousnesses into the Consciousness of Brahman, and, at that, this state has become habitual for them.
Through further efforts on oneself one can reach the last stage — transfer oneself as a consciousness into the Abode of the Creator and merge with Him. Thus man finishes personal evolution, personal ascent. Then one learns to live in the Abode of the Creator and to act from it.
According to another scale of psychotypes, on the spiritual Path man is a disciple at the beginning. Then man has to become a householder — a grihastha. In the narrow sense, a grihastha is the one who got a family, have learned to support oneself and other people. In other words, a grihastha is the one, who has developed oneself to such an extent that is capable of doing this. In a wider sense, a grihastha is a person-organizer of the social scale, for example, a good director, a political leader and so forth.
The grihastha stage incorporates two stages of the varna scheme of psychotypes : vaishyas and kshatriyas.
The next stage is sannyasa, when one has to abandon the “fuss”, in which he or she has been developing up to now, and has to be face to face with God, being busy only with spiritual service and walking the Straight Path to Him.
There are some religious trends where people believe that it is enough only to pray, day after day, a few standard prayers, lament over own faults, take part in some religious ceremonies — and nothing else is needed. They even bar children from sports, reading books other than religious ones, going to cinema, watching TV… This perniciously affects the children’s development. Why? Because man represents not just a single growing feature but a great number of them. An excellent simile is found in the Bhagavad Gita: man as a field. This field is covered with sprouts each of them symbolizing a feature, quality, characteristic, property. And every one of us has to come to the Perfection not through one feature, but through the whole field. Each good quality has to be grown to maturity, and all the weeds have to be rooted out. Only a complex development makes it possible to advance on the Path quickly. That is why one has to experience sexual love, maternity or paternity, change as many jobs as possible — in order to learn more, travel on the Earth — to observe the life of other nations; one’s body should be strong and developed, for only in a harmoniously developed body one can go successfully though the stages of the Spiritual Path.
That is why sport is essential for man, especially when the body is young.
One needs to go also through dynamic, rhythmic dances because they help to develop the ability of being energetic. People lacking this ability cannot succeed on the Spiritual Path, for they have no inner power.
And one’s education has to be broad as much as possible, since the development of Wisdom starts with accumulation of specific knowledge.
When people asked me formerly: what should we read? — I answered: everything! Read even the leading articles of the Pravda newspaper — to learn to distinguish false from truth, to develop in oneself the capability for critical evaluation of information. Through this one develops Wisdom.
Wisdom is a) possession of a large amount of various kinds of specific knowledge, including the supreme one, plus b) the ability to use and integrate it and the ability to create intellectually. Each one of us has to become a creator! This quality is mastered on the stage of grihastha. It is not possible to become Brahman without having become an intellectual creator on the grihastha stage.
Let us note the fact that the technically and scientifically developed modern society provides its members with richest possibilities for developing the intellect. The progress of science, no doubt, activates significantly the evolutionary process.
And now let us discuss the psychoenergetic aspect of spiritual development, spiritual work. It consists of three stages:
Among the tasks of the first stage is putting the body and its energetics in order. This stage implies in particular getting rid of various kinds of diseases. These tasks can be accomplished by the methods of hatha yoga and, for example, with the help of dynamic exercises of the Chinese gymnastics, or some European gymnastic systems and so on.
The second stage, that of raja yoga, implies special work on cleansing and developing specific energy systems of the organism — chakras and meridians and also refinement of the consciousness. Among other things, one has to learn:
1. To move with the lump of consciousness from one chakra to another. The criterion that the exercise is done correctly is the ability of looking from the chakras.
2. To work with the microcosmic orbit, what facilitates cleansing and refinement of the energies inside the body and the cocoon.
3. Make the sushumna and the middle meridian clean [26].
If a student has mastered this and is ready to proceed with the work (in keeping with the intellectual and ethical criteria; this depends to a big extent on student’s psychogenetic and ontogenetic age), the work can be continued within the framework of buddhi yoga. It consists of the following stages:
1. Withdrawal of the consciousness from the body into the cocoon, distributing it there and then — dividing the cocoon into two parts — the upper one (the region of the head and neck) and the lower one (the region of the trunk and legs).
2. Development of the lower bubble of perception in the scale of the planet by filling the planet’s form with oneself as a subtle spiritual heart.
3. Cognition of Nirvana, including its dynamic aspect. Mastering the state of Nirodhi through the meditation of total reciprocity. At that, one achieves the stage of “non-I”. All this and the subsequent is possible to achieve only through transforming oneself as a spiritual heart, and doing it in the extent described above.
4. The advanced consciousness of a spiritual warrior who has mastered the state of a subtle spiritual heart, which can be easily expanded beyond the bounds of our planet, merges with various manifestations of the Divine Fire (one of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit) and with other subtlest aspects of the Absolute, except for the Creator in His Abode [30-31,33].
5. Having cognized empirically the entire structure of the Absolute [30-31,33], the spiritual warrior is accepted by the Creator in His Abode, gradually accustoms oneself to the state of Mergence with the Creator and then acts from it in the world of evolving purusha. The latter is possible from the unembodied state, and also from the state of one’s possessing a physical body.
So we have considered the place of raja and buddhi yoga in the Evolution of consciousness. We started this analysis from the point when individual forms of life come into being and traced their development to the very end that is when they lose their individualities in Mergence with God. They come out from Him in one quality and come back into Him in another, new, perfect one.
This is the Evolution of God. And this is our place in it.
