I’ve seen a recurring error in some yogic and pseudoyogic groups, which basically sounds like this: spiritual growth means to raise the specific energy of your soul, therefore we’re going to teach people how to “raise their energy level” by feeling some kind of euphoria, reconstructing the feeling of love and elation, and this is going to have permanent beneficial consequences as long as they manage to persistently keep their energy at a high level and avoid the dips into depression that seem to happen invariably, probably due to some karma or another.
The energetic dips are not the result of any kind of problem with the practitioner. They are a perfectly normal result of having spent your energy reserves and having your depleted system function on a lower energetic level. The problem is with this entire approach, which is false, misguided and basically devised by idiots.
Don’t tell me it’s originally devised by Jesus or Yogananda or whomever. I don’t care how famous the idiot was, I just want to tell you he didn’t know shit about how human energy system actually works and what’s the difference between having a subjective perception of high energy, and having your soul built from actually high substances.
I know where the idea came from. When you have a strong spiritual experience, it leaves a residual charge in the lower energetic bodies, spinning them up to the highest capacity they can possibly take, making you feel almost as if you could walk on air and glow in the dark. So of course the first thing the first stupid fool thought of was “oh great, if we could re-create that glowing energetic feeling that accompanied the spiritual experience, maybe we’ll re-create the spiritual experience itself”.
Yeah, maybe we’ll re-create the feeling of flying in a plane by making airplane noises with our mouth and spreading our hands like wings when we run across a meadow like damn fools. That’s how cargo-cults are made. A stupid ape thinks he’ll re-create a thing by re-creating as much of the phenomena that accompanied the thing as possible. It can’t hurt, right? Except it can.
You see, the fact that a plane makes a noise while it flies doesn’t mean that you’ll come close to flying by making noises. You’ll probably just strip your throat raw. The fact that spiritual experiences are accompanied by bliss doesn’t mean that you’ll re-create a spiritual experience by re-creating bliss. You’ll just pump your personal energy into a futile effort, drain your system and cause depression. Read my lips: it doesn’t fucking work.
What those bliss-provoking techniques are trying to do is increase the energy level of the pranic body, and then stimulate the heart center, the anahata cakra, on that high energy octave. The theory is, since the heart center is supposed be very spiritual, this will produce a spiritual experience. The rationale for this is that the heart center is exploding with love and bliss during and immediately after the spiritual experience, so this center must be very spiritual. The problem is, during the spiritual experience your cock also gets hard, or your pussy wet, depending on what you have. It doesn’t mean those parts are abnormally spiritual. It just means they did what they are supposed to do when extreme energy is flowing through them. Everything just lights up, which is what it’s supposed to do when connected to a very powerful energy source. However, the immensely bad state of heroin addicts should suffice to convince you of the futility of the approach of chasing perfection through pleasure. Heroin activates extreme levels of pleasure, and the spiritual result of this is your destruction. Also, raising the energy level of the pranic body isn’t the best idea on how to approach spirituality, because the teenagers bursting with vital energy that forcefully manifests through the heart center and sexuality aren’t really what you would call spiritually inspiring people. More likely, they are very energetic animals, and if anything their increased animal energy stands in the way of actual spirituality, in a way similar to which strong light pointed into your eyes wouldn’t actually help you see better.
If anything, old people seem to have a better connection to spirituality because their vital, animal energy has been depleted, their spiritual connection to the world has weakened, and as a result you can almost feel the otherworldly presence in them, because they are more there than here. It is especially the case immediately before death.
So, essentially, building up the animal energy layer, also known as the pranic layer of the heart center, will in the best case scenario return you to the spiritual state of an infatuated teenager bursting with sexual hormones, and then drop you into depression once your energy has been depleted.
Another flaw of the approach is that it assumes that raising the amount of prana that flows through your system will increase your spiritual level. It won’t. It doesn’t actually influence your soul in any way, it affects only the part between your soul and your body, and it does it in such a way that it actually blinds you spiritually. It’s literally like trying to see better in the dark by pointing a flashlight into your eyes. It’s worse than useless.
If you want to increase your fundamental spiritual level, this is not the way to approach things. You have to approach it directly, on the spirit level, not on the prana level or emotion-level, essentially the lower astral. To put it bluntly, if you want to get your cock hard, the best approach is to talk to the woman you really like. You don’t approach things from your cock, you approach them from your head. If your head is in the right place your cock will know what to do without any assistance from you. Conversely, for women the right way to get your pussy wet is to see the right man. There’s absolutely nothing on the pussy-level that you need to do.
It’s about spirit. It needs to be in touch with God, and then the energy will normally flow through the right places. Your head needs to be in the right place. You don’t approach it from your genitals or from your heart; those things are secondary organs, that manifest the spirit when it’s in the right place, but the only thing you will get by trying to stimulate the lower centers such as the heart, is spiritual emptiness and depression. It’s actually worse than masturbation, because masturbation at least works, and this doesn’t. This is more like an addiction to destructive drugs – same concept, but less effective at inducing a temporary high. It’s about as spiritual as injecting yourself with heroin.
I don’t know if you can believe it, but I actually prefer having my pranic levels on a low baseline when I try to see extremely high and sophisticated things, at the utmost limits of my capacity. A heightened pranic or emotional level is merely a distraction, it doesn’t mean a high spiritual level, it means a high level of physical interference and noise and it just gets in the way, like strong noise or light, or like sexual arousal would get in the way if you were trying to understand how quarks change colors. “High” is not a universal metric; strong emotions and strong mind are independent and usually mutually exclusive things. The same goes for animal vitality and spirituality; they just don’t go well together. There’s an exception, though – an orgasm can be accompanied by a very deep spiritual surge in the right circumstances, because it’s more about discharging the vital energy than accumulating it, and it’s more about peace than excitement.
So, instead of trying to go “high”, try going deep, into calm and depth and clarity, and just feel the deepest aspects of God without trying to masturbate the lower energies into reproducing anything, because this entire approach is so fucking useless.
Danijel are you suggesting in this article that a practice such as pranayama should be ignored?
Ignored? No. Understood properly, yes. There are several approaches to pranayama. One is to balance and calm down the pranic flow and thus influence the mind. If done properly, it can be very useful. The other approach is to enhance the capacity for handling prana, to overload and overcharge the pranic body in attempts to cause an ecstatic state. In very limited ways it can be useful, but potential harm outweighs potential benefits and I do not recommend it.
Essentially, the techniques of yoga approach the problem of citta-vrtti-nirodha from some point – they either try to control the body in order to influence prana and spirit, or they approach prana in order to control the body and spirit, or they approach emotions in order to control the prana, spirit and body, or they approach the mind in order to control the emotions, prana, body and spirit. Some in fact directly influence the spirit in order to control all the lower layers. It is my experience that, whichever approach you choose, you need to be proficient enough in all other approaches in order to be able to alleviate tensions, remove blockages and understand what’s going on.
Having all that in mind, I disagree with almost everything that is being taught in practically all schools of yoga today. Most of it is not only theoretically wrong, but it’s also more harmful than useful. From my experience, the yogic approach of trying to calm the mind at all will cause severe blockages and strains within the system and is likely to cause mental and emotional breakdowns later on. The Buddhist approach that I learned from an advanced vipassana practitioner, where you actually seek traumatic points within your consciousness in order to stimulate suffering and basically drain the toxic stuff from the system, instead of trying to attain peace, is far superior, because as you drain the trauma-nodes, also known as kleśas in yoga, you relieve the intrinsic causes of emotional pain and trauma, which drives most of the stressful citta-vrtti momenta, and as a result you attain peace without working at it directly. However, if you simply try to calm the mind down without actually solving the problems that cause it to be messed up, you just compress the junk to the “walls” of your consciousness with the result of things exploding sooner or later.
This is a longer answer but if I just said that I’m very skeptical about pranayama without actually saying why, I wouldn’t really be saying much.
To be honest, I discovered the method myself and the Buddhist in question confirmed that it’s identical to what he himself was taught, but it sounds more mysterious and fancy if I say I learned it from him. 🙂
Danijel I would love to write to you sometime via e-mail if you have the time.
I can very much see how the method of suffering and emotional pain may work, it’s something akin to a prolonged NDE when it all becomes too much the ego accepts, surrenders, lets go, dies and then the divine light/grace can be seen (communion,yoga etc.).
No, it’s nothing like that, at least from what I understood from the NDE testimonies. This is the process that is comparable to the way a mechanical watch unwinds, gradually, by relieving the mechanical tension stored in the spring through the cogs, where an escapement serves to restrict the speed of unwinding to a linear time-function. The human energy system has such an “escapement”, of which Yogananda spoke some when he mentioned the rotation of energy around the spine on a daily basis, and the way his kriya-yoga serves to accelerate those rotations, allowing the energy to unwind more quickly.
Essentially, both his kriya, my techniques and vipassana work with the “escapement speed” and handling the increased energy flowing through the system with such accelerated release. This, of course, is only the part of the technique that can be verbally described, because later on, as a yogi becomes more proficient, he learns much about the functioning of the kalapas and their aggregation, structuring, shape and behavior that is so much outside of normal human experience that it can’t really be verbally explained. I use metaphors and images about crystals and light-forms, that can occasionally ring a bell to a fellow practitioner, but it’s important to know that I’m describing the techniques as I used them 20 years ago, and not what I’m doing now. Only the most basic things are still close enough to common human experience to be verbally communicable.
“you actually seek traumatic points within your consciousness in order to stimulate suffering and basically drain the toxic stuff from the system, instead of trying to attain peace, is far superior, because as you drain the trauma-nodes, also known as kleśas in yoga, you relieve the intrinsic causes of emotional pain and trauma, which drives most of the stressful citta-vrtti momenta, and as a result you attain peace without working at it directly.”
Well this sounds just like my NDE which contained significant psychological trauma the only difference is I did not have to stimulate suffering it was happening before my eyes, result was peace, the light, merging into oneness etc.
“Essentially, both his kriya, my techniques and vipassana work with the “escapement speed” and handling the increased energy flowing through the system with such accelerated release.”
I’m not well versed with Yogananda however I don’t recall him actively seeking to stimulate suffering points in one’s consciousness? Is yogananda not the kundalini way?
“This, of course, is only the part of the technique that can be verbally described, because later on, as a yogi becomes more proficient, he learns much about the functioning of the kalapas and their aggregation, structuring, shape and behavior that is so much outside of normal human experience that it can’t really be verbally explained.”
I actually do understand this to a degree and I agree.
I only said that Yogananda talked about the energy system’s “escapement” speed. What he did with it is another matter.
Danijel if you don’t mind I’d like to get in touch with you about this discussion.
I do mind.
I will actually elaborate on that. You see, in the other thread you keep insisting that I accept the possibility that I’m a crazy person. In this thread you wish to talk to me about sophisticated yogic issues. I have no interest in this level of a conversation. I would rather that you conclude that I’m crazy and I don’t know what I’m talking about, and go your own way, instead of wasting my time here, because I would rather talk to people who *are* sapient enough to be able to tell the difference and who could ask me things that are beneficial both to them and to others. But the eternal circle of “but how do you know you’re not crazy” as a response to any statement that I make is the opposite of useful. Make up your mind instantly and either get the fuck out or start taking shit seriously, because I have no patience for fools.
Danijel, at no point have I ever insisted you are a crazy person, I had infact said that:
“I don’t deny your knowledge is spot on but I thought you might be aware of this.”
What I have tried to suggest to you is that the saviour/christ complex maybe systemic to those who achieve higher states of consciousness and communion but that this maybe a pitfall, a serious pitfall when it comes to ego, and the following is a very telling statement:-
“Because apparently I’m the only one who has the combination of authority, skill and power to do anything about it.”
Let me remind you that Jesus and Buddha both fell into the same category of saving souls from suffering and being one with the divine etc. and they were not crazy.
I had hoped you would have read that through what I was writing and I don’t deny or believe that you are this “one” that is not up to me.
The same phenomena certainly does occur to many people who we call “crazy/mad” but they are experiencing what maybe surmised as a fractured mind, so that latent faculties normally restricted bubble up to the surface, you gave some very good examples.
“Crazy people report having talked to God. Saints also report having talked to God. It’s not the similarity that’s important, but the difference: in case of the crazy people, what they report is not true.”
Actually it’s quite possible that those crazy people have.
“When a crazy person says there are people following him and trying to harm him, what makes him crazy is not the statement, but its factual inaccuracy.”
The phenomena they are experiencing may well be past life regression or visions from the astral plane etc.
Actually when the mind becomes unstable higher realities are experienced in an uncontrolled fashion and we call them crazy, but there is method in the madness. How many psychotic people report being Christ, it is actually very common.
My point is such a belief could be systemic but not unique (to use a bad example Neo one of the many One’s in the film the Matrix who are actually a systemic anomaly and not the only one).
You have certainly reacted in a very egotistical way that much I can tell, which should give you some food for thought.
Perhaps let’s leave it at that…
…I sincerely wish you all the best.
I saw that some of you here apparently tried to take a look at the things I was talking about, in particular the “jewel” and the remaining stuff around it. It’s dangerous to try, so don’t. The guys “up there” have set up certain protections as to prevent harm to innocent onlookers, but the situation is so chaotic, nobody can make any kind of firm guarantees since this shit is the essence of bad, and it’s in a very unstable state at the moment.
I was thinking how the thought of you has changed, you sound more subtle and closer like a life-line, something to be meditated upon and not be scared of, less like thunder or Devpuruji. The feeling of you has changed a lot lately. You say you’re under “heavy load” stress, but you feel to the rest more awesome than ever. I was thinking “How can anyone be like that, do all that?” It’s like you were saying about Babaji’s last days, but more inspiring. Especially more helpful than some Silmaril.
Oh shut the fuck up.
But it’s true. I should know, you’re on my mind a long long time and I know what I sense. There’s like a new debth of field, I didn’t mean to suck up to you or insult you, I just wanted to convey that I sense that some negative pointer of this world to you is definitely gone, seeing from outside and not knowing about SK. Sorry I’m like a mosquito, but you and Romana were the inspiration for my creative work.
I see that you’re trying to annoy me to the point of banning you and it’s working.
It’s curious how you say you actually prefer having lowered pranic levels when you’re trying to get in touch with something very delicate. I guess it kinda makes sense, but I definitely imagined you as enormously energetic workaholic who does dozens of different things on a regular basis.
The thing is, I think I never got through any kind of euphorically emotional roller coster phase of life, not even when it’s expected to do so, like already mentioned teenage age. It even puzzled my mother.
It turns out, that’s not a very good thing, because for quite a long time now I’ve been suffering from depression, to the point of clinical depression and suicidal thoughts in the last few years.
I never got to fully understand what exactly went wrong, but I guess it all started somewhere around late grades of elementary school, slowly taking place and gradually becoming suffocating over time.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with some anxiolytics like alprazolam and they do work to some extent, numbing intense sense of unsatisfaction, but at the same time numbing mostly everything else, so you just don’t give a shit about anything at all – it’s obviously not especially good nor a permanent solution for anything. It does have its place under the sun thought, and it’s definitely better that any kind of “natural medicine” mumbo jumbo.
Of course I invested a lot of time thinking about human psychology, trying to figure out what the hell is happening, and to this date I’ve managed to crystallize a few mutually excluding theories, and few of them which I can combine. For example, one of them is just preset inborn melancholic temperament that left open gates for some other vulnerabilities to which some other people would be perhaps mostly immune, such as being given cruel hysterical parents who did exactly nothing I’ve instinctively expected them to do, and were doing exactly the opposite most of the time. But those are all just vague assumptions. Basically, the only good thing that I can extract from my life so far is having enough money, and especially having it in abundance this year. Still, this doesn’t help shit.
So, to get to the point. Since you seem like the perfect consultant for something like this, having detailed understanding and experience with all kinds of emotional states, what would you say about this kind of situation, what would be the most probable cause for prolonged depressive episodes? Maybe I’m asking for too much because ten depressive people can have ten completely different reasons that brought them into that condition. But still, it’s worth a shot; maybe I’ll hear something interesting and important that’s obvious to someone else and I didn’t figure it out before.
You’re depressed because you miss something you remember from beyond, from what I can feel. However, I’m not really tuned for seeing things of that kind right now. My current configuration is endurance under extremely damaging loads, not sensitivity and resolution. In any case, I am yet to encounter a case of a depressed person in heaven, so it seems to be a natural reaction to this place, at least if you’re smart enough to see where you are.
re: my pranic level, I really do many things at apparently same time (actually I switch between things, doing each at maximum focus) but that is unrelated to the pranic level. If you know those types who are “pumped up and bursting with energy”, I’m nothing like that. I minimize physical influences in order to have my “feelers” and command lines extended. The girls say that sitting in my chair feels quite interesting, the residual link-prints and all. 🙂
The thing that actually crossed my mind when I read your question was “you miss God”. Take it for what it’s worth, considering that I actually shouldn’t be answering questions of that type.