I am occasionally asked whether one can be enlightened without practising yoga.

This looks like a simple and straightforward question, to which I was initially inclined to answer “yes”, but something about it bothered me and I’m not really happy with this answer, so I thought about it more.

You see, there are obviously people who embody and manifest very high spiritual states, and produce artefacts that are the peak accomplishments in their respective genre, for instance Mike Oldfield, whose example I usually cite. There are also saints of various religions who didn’t practice yoga in the narrow sense. There are also people who had spiritual experiences without any practice whatsoever.
On the other hand, every piece of spiritual skill and knowledge I possess is a result of some difficulty I had to overcome, problem I had to solve, attack I had to survive, and so on. It’s not like those things are a luxury, defined as things you fuck around with in free time because you’re bored. It’s either that I had to learn how to deal with spiritual trauma without going crazy, or deal with high spiritual energy without going crazy or dying, or clean up some nasty karmic structure, create an energy structure, survive a spiritual attack by a malevolent entity, communicate with high spiritual beings, learn when I am being deceived by Satan and demonic entities, and so on. Every failure to develop and use things that can only be qualified as spiritual yoga, would mean failure to overcome an obstacle, failure to solve a problem, failure to receive and interpret a message from above, failure to see through a deception, and basically get wrecked in a really bad way. Even while developing all kinds of skills and understanding, I still got wrecked occasionally. I have absolutely no doubt that without developing such skills, my path would have either ended or gotten sidetracked.

So, what about Mike Oldfield and similar people? Well, I will only remind you that Mike Oldfield spent a large portion of his life being brainwashed by psychiatrists, who convinced him that he’s nothing special and he’s very careful to mention that his major flaw is to think he’s God. Having this in mind, I will hesitate to consider him an example of spiritual success without yoga. More likely, he’s an example of someone who would have greatly benefited from both yoga and proper understanding of spiritual theory.

It’s unfortunate, but my answer to “how did person x attain great results without yoga” is “they probably didn’t”. Yoga isn’t just a method of attaining a spiritual state; were it so, I would say that people can attain spiritual states of all kinds in various ways that only occasionally include yoga by any definition. However, yoga is also a weapon and a shield. It is a weapon in the sense that skill and knowledge allow you to do things to the world and to other beings and entities, and shield in the sense that it gives you skills that protect you from both the world and other beings and entities. It allows you to successfully navigate hostile territory, and this world, if any, meets the requirements splendidly. Have in mind that I started yogic practice in 1993, and attained initiation in Vajra – let’s not mince words, and instead call it attainment of buddhahood in the body – within four years. The rest of my time here was spent doing things that required great purity, skill and persistence, and this resulted in acquisition of great knowledge. Can I imagine someone like Oldfield solving a problem such as an explosion of a contaminated “jewel” that created deadly black shards of super-concentrated karmic matter? No. Can I imagine someone untrained figuring out how to “open” a structure that requires “bombardment” with immense number of mental objects in order to overwhelm it, throw it out of balance and find a “key” that opens it and allows it to dissolve, and then actually cleaning up the mess of poisonous karmic substance that resulted from its dissolution? Not really. Basically, I can imagine untrained people trying to deal with complex spiritual issues by failing repeatedly at them until they eventually die depressed and defeated. An untrained person can have a spiritual experience and learn from it and be inspired. If this inspiration is serious enough, this will result in attainment of yogic skill and formulation of theoretical knowledge. Basically, you can attain knowledge of yoga without previously knowing any yoga, to which I can personally attest. However, if you don’t develop skill, there’s only so far you can go and so much you can do, and you’ll most likely keep bouncing off the same level 1 obstacle in front of you for your entire life. So, the answer to “how did the saint x manage without knowing any of this”, the answer is “he didn’t”. He didn’t get far enough, or did and failed. Maybe some people’s lives are simple, and they merely focus on one aspect of God in meditation, attain enlightenment and don’t have to de-mine Satan’s pit. Good for them, I guess, but the corrupted jewels I had to deconstruct usually came from good and gentle saints who had insufficient skills and knowledge to protect them from some kind of deception, they got killed, their energy was used to power some trap here, and I got to clean up this mess, and my level of skill just happens to be what it takes. Anything less, and you can’t solve problems. Much less, and you get killed and recycled. So, it is true, you don’t need yoga to attain realization of God. Maybe you’ll never encounter any problems you have to solve, maybe Satan will never try to trick you, maybe his scripts will not try to deceive and destroy you, maybe you’ll just happen not to get confused about anything because the right answer will just happen to be the only one you encounter. Maybe, but not in this world. In this world you need weapons and shields or you’re absolutely guaranteed to get fucked.