Some people might ask why I haven’t revised or outright removed my old books, since I know they contain errors.
The thing is, yoga isn’t about a “correct teaching”. Yoga is a process of transformation, and therein lies the rub. When I was still intensely practicing it, I understood how my perspective changed since a year ago, and how I would now find it very hard to understand my former position and give proper advice; I’m becoming too far removed. Different problems, different methods, different understanding, different structure of higher and lower bodies. I made a decision to write it all down as soon as possible, so that I wouldn’t forget, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to pass the knowledge on, and it would again be lost, and everybody would have to start from scratch, like myself. The danger of too high a teaching is that the first step is in the clouds, beyond reach.
The fact that it contains some wrong beliefs is not really a problem. I contained even more wrong beliefs before I wrote it, and yet here I am now, not because I had the right beliefs, but because I followed the right process and had the right understanding – that it isn’t about espousing all the right beliefs, or by doing all the right things all at once. It’s about focusing at the right goal, about being able to transform, to abandon beliefs and form new ones as needed, because you change. In the beginning, and in fact in most of the process, you can’t have a correct understanding of God, because of what you are and what your nature is. You understand that God is awesome, but you can’t really formulate a proper understanding of what that means. What you can do is focus on God regardless, and practice purifying energetic techniques to make non-God stuff on you break up, purify on a particle level, and become closer to God stuff. God is not merely something far that you occasionally see; God is someone you become by following a process.
Yes, my first books contain flawed teachings, but they all contain correct understanding that resulted in much better teachings later on, as the process was given time to transform the slow physical matter of my brain. Yes, those old teachings were flawed, but do have in mind that they are the teachings of Vedanta for the most part, but already upgraded by the practical understanding created by the purification of the elements, initiation into Vajra and a glimpse into the higher substances that I couldn’t yet wield, but which I knew existed. They are flawed by my current standards, but they are better than anything else, and all the techniques and methodology were already perfectly formulated; what I lacked was the exact theoretical understanding of what’s going on. I just knew what you had to do to get results. Also, it’s all written by a version of me that still remembers what problems I had, how I had to solve them, and it’s all more “human” than anything I would write now. I wouldn’t dare to touch the old materials and “improve” them, because the very part that could help an ordinary human become a yogi could be lost, because I could accidentally “upgrade” something to a point beyond ordinary human understanding.
On the other hand, the books I write now are possibly more understandable, because you can explain better when you have a more complete understanding. Where I used to fumble around issues, trying to explain something, I now have a clear, straightforward and simple theory. So, it’s not as simple as it might seem – start with the old books first, and gradually work your way to the current ones. In fact, the opposite might be the best – start with the newest books with the best theoretical understanding behind them, and then work your way back through the older ones, to see how I got there, what I initially got wrong, how I revised it and why, and get to the point where you can do something, yourself. Because, what does it even matter which teaching is more correct and which book is better, if you yourself are not there? You can sit on the fence and watch me struggle with things, and wait until the end to see what comes of it all, but it’s a bad idea since you get to be firmly entrenched on square one decades later. It’s much better to try and fail ten thousand times, than to be safe doing nothing.
