Blocking Out God: The Obstacles to Yoga

"The obstacles to yoga - such as acts of violence and untruth - may be directly created or indirectly caused or approved, they may be motivated by greed, anger or self-interest, they may be small moderate or great, but they never cease to result in pain and ignorance. One should overcome distracting thoughts by remembering this."

-- Patanjali, Yoga Aphorisim II:34 --

"Yoga," the word for religion in the East, is derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English word "yoke." It means to "tie" or "unite" - in this sense to unite or tie the inner Godhead with the Ultimate (which is God, Allah or Brahma) in consciousness - just as the yoke ties the oxen to a cart.

In "How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," Swami Prabhavananda (along with Christopher Isherwood) observes that, "Everything we do, say, or think, or even indirectly cause or passively sanction, will inevitably produce consequences - good, bad, or composite - and these consequences will react in some measure upon ourselves. Our most secret ill-wishes towards others, our remotest permission of evil done to others, can only end by hurting us, by increasing our own ignorance and pain. This is an absolute law of Nature. If we could remember it, we should learn to control our tongues and our thoughts."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," pp. 146-147.]

Thus, it is through our thoughts, actions and words, whether active or passive, which either connect us with the Godhead or sever our ties altogether. This is the nature of our karma - the law of cause and effect.  "As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is." (Proverbs 23:7)

"Every sin must be atoned for," writes Eric Butterworth, "(and) all karmic debt must be paid. "However," he notes, "the choice is ours whether we work it out in the cycle of retribution, through prolonged suffering "in the furnace of affliction," or whether our payment of debt is through the discipline of rising above the consciousness from which the act was committed into the freedom of spiritual understanding where we go forth and "sin no more."

"This," Butterworth notes, "is what Jesus called "forgiveness." It was the key to His tremendous ability to be instrumental in changing the lives of people. It is the key to healing and overcoming for us."

But, "(a)ll this notwithstanding," he observes, "we cannot overlook the underlying truth of the law of karma, the law of compensation. For it is basic in your life and mine. As we think, speak and act towards others, so will others think speak, and act toward us. As we give we receive. What we do to others comes back to us in some way at some time." (Emphasis added.)

[Eric Butterworth, "Discover the Power Within You," p.137.]

Thus, our inherent unity (or "yoking") with the Ultimate, the Ground of Being, Brahma, Allah or God, may either be severed by our wrong thoughts, speech and actions, or it may be renewed through the right thoughts, right words and right acts which raise our consciousness above the mundane to the divine. This is the reason behind the admonishment to "judge not, lest ye be judged," and the meaning of Jesus' observation that "my yoke is easy, and my burden light." His yoga, or religion, is "easy" in that all that is required is a shift in the focus of our consciousness, and the "burden" of such yoking is what the Buddhists call "the clear light of being," the Christians call "the mystic union," the Hindus call "moksha" and the rest of us simply call "enlightenment."

We are only separated from such clear light of consciousness by our thoughts, words and actions, but these are our karmic debts that must - and will - be repaid, in one form or another. Our task is to discharge such karmic debts, and thus unblock our pathway to such higher consciousness, by practicing right thoughts, right speech and right action.

On Desire and Desirelessness

"Desire is a subject upon which . . . true views can only be arrived at by an almost complete reversal of the ordinary, unreflecting opinion.

-- Bertrand Russell --

A seemingly unquenchable desire is the baseline state of the ego. Physical desire thwarted by circumstance or other people breeds anger. Sexual desire unfulfilled breeds lust. Existential desire unexamined breeds further ignorance as to our human condition. And these three states - anger, lust and ignorance - are, of course, the 'Three Poisons' which the Buddha identified as the ties that keeps the unawakened being bound to the wheel of samsara (continual rebirths) in a state of dukkha, or suffering.

Who amongst us has not been convinced at one time or another that obtaining that new car, house, job, new lover etc., would fulfill us? And who, two, three or six months later, has not been just as seemingly unhappy and unfulfilled after obtaining our heart's desire? And who amongst us has not struggled with the existential struggle over the inevitability of our own death? All these struggles, blind alleys, and frustrations are a result of our unexamined desires.

If, as is possible, we "master" desire, writes William Irvine, "we will experience what . . . has been the goal of most of those who have thought carefully about desire - a feeling of tranquility . . . marked by a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living - that despite our circumstances, no key ingredient of happiness is missing."

"With this sense," Irvine observes, " comes a diminished level of anxiety: we no longer need to obsess over new things - a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen - that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly, if we master desire, to the extent it is possible to do so, we will no longer despise the life we are forced to live and will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."

[William B. Irvine,"On Desire: Why We Want What We Want,"pp. 6-7.]

To master desire, however, requires a radical acceptance of what is, an attitude of unconditional love without conditions or even objects, an attitude I have described elsewhere as an acceptive consciousness which is as different from our ordinary, egoic self-consciousness, as such self-consciousness is from ordinary, unreflective animal consciousness.

One of the best aspirations for such a state of total acceptance and unconditional love is from an anonymous writer who observed:

"(A)cceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place thing or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment."

"Nothing, absolutely noting," he notes, "happens in God's world by mistake. . . . (U)nless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes."

Paradoxically, to no want to gain, become or hold onto anything is itself a desire, if such is an aspiration for the future. If it is not an aspiration, but one's state of desireless being here and now, it is not. "We either makes ourselves happy or we make ourselves miserable," said Carlos Castenada's spiritual teacher, "the amount of effort is the same."

Gurdjieff and Heightened Consciousness

"It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning."

-- P. D. Ouspensky --

In the attached video, the Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham examines the "Fourth Way" teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, an enigmatic yet enlightened teacher who burst onto the spiritual scene in the first half of the twentieth-century. Gurdjieff's teachings express the truths found in ancient religious and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives, and are as current and relevant today (if not more so) as they were when Gurdjieff and his many students (including P.D. Ouspensky) formed various wisdom schools to pass on his esoteric teachings.

"The idea that we are not awake but live in a partial dream state from which we can awaken opens on to radically new horizons," Nottingham observes. "The illusions we foster concerning ourselves melt in the light of increased consciousness, and we awaken to new dimensions of reality that set us free. We are then able to relate to the world around us without our usual defenses, and masks, and confusion, which constitute so much of human interaction. We also become capable of a new kind of compassion."

"Ultimately," he notes, "this third state of consciousness which is our birthright (i.e., heightened consciousness beyond sleep and ordinary wakefulness) frees us from the unnecessary agonies of a little ego always struggling for self-importance and gratification, and awakens us to new insight and understanding. The world becomes a different place and we become far more than our imaginary 'selves' ever dreamt of. The potential for happiness, fulfillment and genuine usefulness to humanity are now tangible realities."

"This use of attention," he points out, "is similar to the 'Watch of the Heart' of early Eastern Christian spirituality and the remembrance of God of the Sufi mystics. To be aware of a higher reality while dealing with ordinary reality requires an effort of awareness, detachment and concentration that is the result of long practice."

Eric Butterworth: 'Discover the Power Within You'

If I were asked what my religious bearing was years ago, I would have declared myself an atheist. After all I had grown up in the West, and though my mother was a Christian Scientist, it was a decidedly scientific household. Not having much religious instruction myself, I had formulated a typical quasi-anthropomorphic view of a God "out there." And while I was told that God was "omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent" such words had little or no meaning to me, and I rejected (as I suppose many others have) the notion of some Old Testament-like patriarch who was invisible, and presumably, external to the universe. I had no knowledge that, as Jesus succinctly put it, "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). In actual fact, then, I was agnostic, i.e., one who does not know or have first-hand experience of the divine.

If I were asked today what my religious bearing is, I would say that I am a Transcendental Realist, having experienced glimpses of a higher state of consciousness where the universe is atemporal and a unitive whole beyond the ordinary egoic state of self-consciousness.

In writing of such inner, religious experiences (phenomena discussed at length in William James' great work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience") Carl Jung observed: "The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal," Jung notes, "by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond mere rationalism."

As a decided scientific rationalist at the time of my first such glimpses, I was fortunate in coming to understand the nature of these experiences to have not only two older friends who were experienced and self-realized spiritual seekers to direct me on a voyage of self-discovery, but also to have a psychoanalyst who could attest to the veracity of such experiences and could contextualize them into what I already knew of consciousness from a scientific perspective. Were it not for their assistance, it would have been all too easy to dismiss these incidents as madness - divine madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless.

As a voracious reader, I had dismissively read a modest amount about Christianity and portions of the Bible, just enough to try and debunk what committed religionists were talking about. Thus, I was fortunate, indeed, in having one of my more experienced friends lend me a book that discussed the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus, as he tried to show me the significance of what I had experienced. And although today I am not a Christian (or, more accurately, although I am not exclusively Christian), I still find this book to be an invaluable aid in understanding myself and my fellow man.

Written in the 1960s by Eric Butterworth, a Unity minister, "Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within" is a precursor to the many spiritual/self-help books that are available today, but one that puts Christianity into a perspective that is still relevant to a person with a deep appreciation of all that science has revealed and continues to reveal today.

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Eric Butterworth
(1916-2003)

"Life is growth and unfoldment, and is lived from the inside out," Butterworth observes. "How few people really know this! The average person lives his life from the outside in. He frustrates his potential when he lets his level of consciousness be determined by what people say, what conditions appear to be, what he reads in the newspapers. He becomes little more than a barometer that registers the conditions of his world. Then he is caught up in the dilemma of whether to conform to the world around him or to spend his life resisting it."

"Jesus," he points out, "came declaring, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). It really doesn't matter what happens around you or to you. These things are in the world, and you can overcome the world. All that really matters is what happens in you or your thoughts about conditions and people. And you can control your thoughts, for you are the master of your mind - or you can be."

"There is a belief," Butterworth observes, "deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the human race that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - you can't change human nature. Reject this for the great lie that it is," he urges.

"When you catch Jesus' concept of the Divinity of Man," Butterworth notes, "you see that you not only can change human nature, but this is whole object of the Christian teaching. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up" (John 3:14). And you are that son of man and you can transcend your basement experiences and come to live in the upper rooms of life."

"Jesus' message of the Kingdom is the message of wholeness," he points out. "We are forever seeing only part of life and concluding that the part is the whole. This is a great problem in formulating religious views. Shelly says that religion is the perception of the relation in which man stands to the universe. But that perception is an individual experience. Someone communicates his perception to another and we are on the way toward the creation of dogma. In time whole bodies of people accept a "perception" that is given to them secondhand. They might even insist that there is no individual perception, or think of such an awareness, or firsthand experience, as a "work of the devil.""

"The word 'religion' means to 'bind together'," Butterworth notes. "It is a relationship, an awareness of man's unity with the great creative force of God."

"The church has a vital place in the life of man," Butterworth concludes, "but not as a supermarket in which to pick up take-out orders of faith and prayer. The church," he declares, "must be a school in which the individual learns the Truth of his unity with God, of his own divine sonship, and of the Kingdom of Heaven within him. Like any place of learning the church must seek to make itself progressively unnecessary, to help people to become self-reliant. In other words, if the church is doing its job sincerely, it will be forever trying to put itself out of business."

[Eric Butterworth, "Discover the Power Within You," pp. 226-227]

Carl Jung and Gerald Heard: Instinct, Evolution and the Enlargement of Consciousness

"Nothing estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."

"The result is that modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself - a capacity largely dependent on environmental conditions, the drive for knowledge and control of which necessitated or suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resource."

"This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conceptions of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality."

-- Carl Jung --
("The Undiscovered Self")

Gerald Heard
(1889-1971)

In his magnus opus, first published in 1939, "Pain, Sex and Time," philosopher Gerald Heard traces the evolution of man's consciousness, and the attempts he has made to evolve or dilate consciousness beyond the ordinary and limited  self-consciousness of the human ego, to a higher acceptive consciousness that is, Heard asserts, mankind's evolutionary imperative.

Yet, as this next evolutionary step will necessarily be psychological rather than physical, Heard points out that a conscious effort is needed to evolve consciousness beyond the current self-conscious state typical of the species in this epoch. Historically, he notes, pointing to past efforts to raise consciousness, this has been the exclusive domain of esoteric teachings and mystery schools. In reading his account of the historical attempts that were made to evolve consciously, one wonders, how Heard (who passed away in 1971) would interpret the widespread interest in conscious evolution that has been exhibited at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

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In reading Heard, one is struck by the similarities of views he shared with Jung. But while Jung asserts that "modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself," Heard notes that a much greater effort is required to achieve a far greater result.

"If we are to advance through the evolution of consciousness beyond self-consciousness," he observes, "to reunite consciousness now divided into the self-conscious and the sub-conscious, and so bring about a new and single quality of awareness and being, there is required of us a peculiar and rare quality of attention. It must be intense but without effort and strain. It must be that over-plus of evolutionary energy which we call curiosity, and the German tongue calls Neugier, the new appetite, raised to what Plato called illuminating wonder."

"Indeed," he notes, "because we are now so deeply prejudiced in favour of the assumption that it is only possible for one real experience to be presented to us, and that can only be the world of common sense, the necessary state of mind required for enlargement of consciousness must be one which is even without expectation."

"We are waiting," he points out, "for an experience of which we have no conception from the past, and that being so, any clear expectation must distort or even completely inhibit a radically new awareness."

Thomas Merton: On Zen Insight

In his book, "Mystics and Zen Masters," Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton had the following observations to share about the "insight" grounding Zen Buddhism:

"The Zen insight . . . consists in a direct grasp of "mind" or one's "original face." And this direct grasp implies rejection of all conceptual media or methods, so that one arrives at mind by "having no mind" (wu h'sin): in fact, by "being" mind instead of "having" it. Zen enlightenment is an insight into being in all its existential reality and actualization. It is a fully alert and superconscious act of being which transcends time and space. . . . The Zen insight is the awareness of full spiritual reality, and therefore the realization of the emptiness of all limited or particularized realities."

"One might ask," he continues, "if our habitual failure to distinguish between "empirical ego" and the "person" has not led us to oversimplify and falsify our whole interpretation of Buddhism. There are in Zen certain suggestions of a higher more spiritual personalism than one might at first sight expect. Zen insight is at once a liberation from the limitations of the individual ego, and a discovery of one's "original nature" and "true face" in "mind" which is no longer restricted to the empirical self but is in all and above all. Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us."

"This is not," Merton notes, " a pantheistic submersion or a loss of self in "nature" or "the One." It is not a withdrawal into one's spiritual essence and a denial of matter and of the world. On the contrary, it is a recognition that the whole world is aware of itself in me and that "I" am no longer my individual and limited self, still less a disembodied soul, but that my "identity" is to be sought not in that separation from all that is, but in oneness (indeed, convergence"?) with all that is."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 17-18]

In the short, yet insightful introduction to Zen Buddhism, below, it is observed that "the search for self-realization is powered by our anxieties and our fears which feed our ego, causing frustration with our daily life: selfishness, jealousy, anger and hate which unconsciously serve to protect us, and in doing so set us in opposition to everyone and everything. To awaken to this realization is the practice of Zen."

Our Thinking Makes It So

"Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so."

-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 -- 

"Thinking acts like a veil," observes the late spiritual teacher, William Samuel. "Look at a flower. We see it now. We behold its form now. We are aware of the flower, right here, right now; but suppose we think about something else while looking at the flower. Think about that big bill that is past due and worry a little. What seems to happen to the awareness of the flower? We are not as aware of it as before, are we? We are looking at it with eyes that hardly see. It seems fuzzy, hardly noticed, but the same rose is there; the same beauty, the same form the same grace and magnificent delicacy is right before us to be beheld and enjoyed, but we hardly see it. We are too busy worrying about the bill. We are too busy thinking."

"The bill is not now," Samuel points out. "All that is now is the awareness of the rose. The rose in all its loveliness is now. The bill is nothing more than a memory that is not in this now-awareness unless we choose to put it there."

"We see that thinking is like a film spread over the eyes; like a mist that covers the whole face of the land, like a veil; like looking at the flower - and everything - through a mirror darkly."

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That it is our thinking that colours our life, that it is our thinking which makes things appear to be "good or bad" is a universal truth, much older than Shakespeare. It is one of the central truths of the ancient Ashtavakra Gita, and it is the central message of modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle. "Thinking without awareness, is the main dilemma of human existence" Tolle observed in his best-selling book, "A New Earth."

If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free, and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying is true, "Thinking makes it so."

[Ashtavakra Gita, 1.11]

In the video, below, Tolle talks about our collective addiction to the excessive thinking that robs us of all peace and beauty.