To follow up on the last article, let’s see what the tradition says is a problem and will cause failure in yogic practice, and what I found out.

If I had to sum up the traditionally described modes of failure, and if I don’t attempt to be too abstract or formal, it would go more-less like this:

Attachment. This is pretty straightforward; one is attached to the worldly things, doesn’t wish to let go, and thus either abandons spiritual practice or fails in it. My experience: yes, that’s a very common mode of failure. Basically, one gets interested in yoga, practices until their attachments are tested, and then invents this or that excuse to end the practice, or remains involved with the “movement” as a mere formality, but does absolutely nothing that would result in actual spiritual advancement because that would threaten their attachments.

Moral failure. This is also straightforward – if one becomes, or fails to stop being cruel, evil, a liar, fornicator, thief, murderer etc., they won’t make spiritual progress, and at worst will become practitioners of dark magic. My experience: unfortunately, this is also common. I could probably classify it under “attachment” as well, but since it’s attachment to very dark modes of behaviour, it deserves its special category.

Blasphemy. One invents imaginary failures of his guru, proclaims himself to be God or an enlightened master without proper qualifications, starts accepting students and invents his own theology that is centred around his own failures and hallucinations, proclaiming them special virtues. My experience: yes, this indeed happens, but I’m not sure if it’s a cause of a downfall or merely an ego-preservation strategy.

Lack of dedication. One lacks devotion to God, desire for liberation and spiritual improvement, loses focus and discontinues spiritual practice, or continues lackluster practice that fails to attain any results. My experience: yes.

Fanaticism. One practices too much and hurts himself, or goes around making foolish and exaggerated claims about virtues of his practice without actually attaining results himself. My experience: yup, that’s a thing, unfortunately.

Impurity. Eating meat, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, having sex, having lots of money, basically refraining from recommended ascetic practices. My experience: I actually never encountered a mode of failure of this type, which is funny because according to what people usually believe, one would think that this would be the main mode of failure, but it never is. If anything, people fail for other reasons, and then later degrade into abominable behaviour. Eating meat and having sex proved to be a non-issue, unless connected with other problems, such as having sex with a person that is trying to attach you to worldly things and won’t let go. Drugs are a bad idea in general but I never had an experience with someone who abandoned yoga because they wanted to take drugs or drink alcohol. It’s usually some of the aforementioned modes of failure as a cause, and debauchery as a consequence.

Hubris. Thinking you are so advanced you can perform immoral and sinful acts and count on the yogic technique, guru and God to save you. My experience: yes, this kind of a thing happened so often it looks like a pattern, and people tend to treat sin as an energetic impurity that can be easily remedied with yoga, while it is in fact a cause of strain within the soul and causes its fragmentation and inability to practice yoga properly in any way afterwards. Also, intentionally doing that is a sin against both guru and God and causes one to perceive them in a disrespectful manner, thus renouncing their authority and being unable to receive help.

So, other than this list, what would be my personal observations? Well, one of the most pernicious issues I faced is the propensity of students of yoga to create cult-like environments even when the guru has an obvious dislike for this behaviour and warns against it. Trying to establish and maintain “pecking orders”, or hierarchies of seniority and dominance, trying to assert their relevance to the junior students, abusing their assumed authority within the group to either play ego games with the new students, or get them to have sex with them and so on. This stuff kept repeating so much that I think it’s one of the most basic human patterns of behaviour, and it caused all kinds of trouble and mischief. It sometimes worked out fine as a form of social bonding or finding a compatible mate within the group, but regardless of the possible benefits it universally distracts everyone from actual spiritual practice, and the whole thing degrades into a cult. Apparently, spirituality isn’t a team sport. Specifically, the issue of an “idiot senpai”, more accurately a person who is a student for a longer time regardless of actual accomplishments, and who tries to impose himself as some kind of an intermediary, proxy guru, giving the less experienced people all kinds of advice, hints and alternative teachings, or even make sexual advances, is an endless cause of mischief. Apparently, being in some kind of a spiritual organisation or a movement makes people feel special and important without any good reason, and this becomes a cause of downfall for themselves, and is a nuisance to others.

I’ve been thinking about something recently.

I’m not sure I ever explained why exactly did I do certain things in a certain way in my early yogic practice – all people know was that I did something, then I changed it, and I never explained my actual thinking behind the decisions.

You see, the way I started yogic practice was pretty interesting. I won’t go into great detail, but I had no guidance other than books, and my pretty advanced knowledge of autogenic training, so it was a given that I had to experiment in order to establish what actually works, in the sense of achieving presence of God, and transforming my consciousness and energy system in order to be able to bear God’s presence and eventually be God’s presence. The problem is, the books I had contained mostly the very general instructions, and not of the kind that actually had anything to do with yoga itself – it was mostly how one should behave, what kind of emotions to avoid and what kind to stimulate, be vegetarian, celibate, non-violent, kind, don’t do drugs, alcohol, don’t smoke and so on. It all sounded pretty much like standard religious moralizing, and I initially put it all in a “nice to know, but it’s not a cause-side but effect-side of any spiritual equation”. However, the texts that talked about yoga always talked about dangers of practice, and it was mostly “if your system is not pure enough, the increased energy level will either burn you up, or it will cause energy detours from the main nadis into the smaller ones, which will cause overloads and serious damage”. Since I initially had no experience with energy overloads of any kind, I filed this as “exaggerated”. That is, until I had an experience during meditation, where I didn’t actually “hear” the “OM sound”, it was more like feeling it with both body and mind, and it was something that felt so strong I really got scared that if it got stronger it might break me like a twig. At another instance, I had the experience of ananda, divine bliss, which was so strong that it felt like orgasm multiplied by a nuclear blast, and I’m not even exaggerating much here – it felt like something that could evaporate me if it got any stronger. You can imagine how I started taking the warnings very seriously after those two experiences. I also changed my approach to the things I couldn’t personally verify to “obey everything first” from “try to confirm everything first”. You see, the problem with the “try to confirm before obeying” is obvious – you might die, or at least experience some mode of failure. There were obviously all kinds of factors there that I didn’t understand, and since I worked from books alone without any personal guidance from anyone, after several very powerful experiences I decided it would be a very good idea to reduce my chances of sudden death or terrible failure by respectfully obeying all instructions given by authoritative persons, especially if the instructions overlap.

You see, yogis try to make yoga popular by saying it’s a spiritual science, but that’s not exactly true. It’s more of a proto-science, the way people experimented with herbs to figure out what’s poisonous, and what has medicinal properties. You experiment with something, you observe the results, but there’s a limit to what kind of experiments you can make and it never reaches the requirements for a proper science where you can isolate active compounds and test them in vitro and in vivo to figure out what does what exactly, and in what circumstances. The “gold standard” for yogic proto-science is “I did x and reached a spiritual experience, so if you try to reproduce x, you will also likely reach a spiritual experience”. The problem is, “x” is usually a complex thing. What did he actually do? He was a hermit who lived in some cave, ate whatever fruits and herbs he could find around, didn’t have sex, did some physical exercises, did some pranayama, did some prayers, chanted some mantra, visualized something from the scriptures, and some combination of the above worked and he experienced something transcendental. Not knowing what exactly worked and why, he passed it on to his students and told them to just do what he did, and it will work.

That’s not really science, but that’s what I had to work with. As I learned more, I could tweak things and isolate the active component of the practice, but the real question is, what would I recommend to a beginner from my current perspective? I was talking about vegetarianism with my wife, and explained why I was a vegetarian initially, and told her that I’m not sure I would be willing to gamble with someone’s life even now, by recommending any detours from the process I personally followed in the beginning, because there’s a serious difference between introducing things later on, as you have a volume of personal experience and power, and doing it in the beginning, when any deviation can cause either absence of experience altogether, or an experience so extreme it can either damage you, or cause such trauma that you will subconsciously try to avoid experiencing anything similar in the future. So, yes, I eat meat now, but would I recommend a beginner yogi to eat meat, as I do now, but not as I did when I was a beginner myself? You see my point? Yoga is not something where you can do whatever because none of it works anyway. The “problem” is that it very much works, but the exact parameters and circumstances vary so much between individuals that it’s safest to try to equalize most of it first, in order to reduce the number of variables. Also, the humility required for one to obey the guru and the tradition is also a factor that contributes to a good outcome of the practice, because it means that your energetic system is properly aligned. Arrogance is a symptom of dangerous misalignment, and contributes to bad outcomes. By arrogance I mean the attitude that you are in a position to second-guess the guru, and cherry-pick the stuff you’re going to obey or ignore. In the beginning, only absolute humility, respect and blind faith works, because you’re too ignorant to be able to make any judgment about anything. Only after you’re experienced, powerful and holy enough to have full mastery of something, to the point where you understand how things work, is when you can gradually change things, see what’s irrelevant, what can be done better, and what is actually harming your progress. An advanced yogi has such “density” and purity of his soul that he can rip through “reality” the way a supermassive black hole bends space around it. Stuff that could completely perturb a beginner is of no consequence to a master. That is not to say that a master has no problems at his own order of magnitude, but that is a different matter entirely; it’s comparable to Jesus having a problem bearing the sins of the world, and an ordinary person having a problem controlling their attention and avoiding distractions. To a master, a certain level of disturbance and impurity absorbed by the physical body is something he can perceive, wait until it passes, possibly repair the damage and proceed with whatever he was doing before. To a beginner, the same level of disturbance and impurity can distract him to the point where he completely loses his inner spiritual bearings, “forget” the spiritual content of a mantra and be unable to find his way again. Where a nuclear submarine might not care about the waves, a small sailing boat must pay utmost attention to the conditions of the sea. “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” sounds very unpleasant to the egalitarian minds of today’s men, who might think it encourages moral relativism, but it is in fact a great truth. A great master of yoga can absorb and neutralize immense kinds of energetic damage, where a normal person’s soul will disintegrate on a mere contact with a problem orders of magnitudes weaker. A normal person would strive for years to attain darshan of spiritual states and substances that a master wields. At some points in my advanced practice, I actually practiced exposing myself to outside noise and interference to harden the inner core of my meditative state against it, with the result that I could do spiritual initiations in a crowded bar. A beginner must absolutely avoid this kind of interference and noise in order to establish the spiritual connection first, then slowly strengthen it, and then gradually introduce all kinds of noise to check his resistance, and even when you’re able to resist almost anything, it doesn’t mean that you should bathe in filth all day. Resisting harmful interference requires an expenditure of energy and effort that might be better used for something more constructive. However, trying to copy a master’s behavior rather than obey his instructions diligently is a very foolish thing for a student, because I can tell you with absolute certainty that a student is simply unable to understand the complexities behind the instructions, and trying to think about it is a wasted effort. For instance, Romana once came home completely disturbed, I took a look at her and told her to take a shower and wash her hair immediately. She resisted because it made no sense to her, at which I raised my voice and told her to obey me immediately. She did, and she felt much better, which is when I explained that she was under an astral attack by a malevolent person, and since she had all kinds of contaminants on her pranic body, the astral connection held on quite firmly, and the easiest way to break it was with water, because water for some reason binds well with prana and can break the impure structures away, allowing your spirit to create a fresh and pure layer, which is why ritual baths for spiritual purposes are so fundamental in Hinduism. I didn’t have the time to explain all this while she was under a foreign influence and taking damage, because her mind wasn’t working properly and talking to her would have been a wasted effort. However, when she obeyed my order, her condition improved and she came to her senses, which is when I could provide an explanation. This is why obedience is obligatory, and understanding is optional for a student of yoga. For a master, however, understanding appears as a result of practice, and becomes a foundation of his philosophy and teaching, but instinct informed by the inner spiritual connection with God is always the foundational mechanism of his decision-making.