Commentary on the text “Yoga Vasistha,” Chapter Six, “Methods of Worshiping God” (Deva Puja)
Shiva continues to instruct Vasistha.
God continued:
“One should worship at all times, remaining completely equanimous toward pleasant and unpleasant perceptions.”
This phrase should be remembered: “...completely equanimous toward pleasant and unpleasant perceptions.” If you adhere to the instruction contained in this phrase, it is the key to the single “taste.” This world is arranged in such a way that it contains plenty of both pleasant and unpleasant perceptions. Those who dwell in ignorance, absorbed in illusions, are troubled by unpleasant perceptions and passionately crave pleasant experiences. This happens because of the natural tendency to divide reality, accepting some things and rejecting others. But a yogi following the path of liberation must do the opposite. This is the true practice leading to liberation. Whenever you remain calm in the face of unpleasant or pleasant perceptions and seek that one integral Consciousness which unites them, you are truly performing tapas, the sadhana of the single “taste,” and making progress. But if you allow yourself to become troubled by them, you lose your spiritual power and follow a path opposite to the path of liberation. When Shiva says, “One should worship...,” this emphasizes that the relative mind should remain devoted and faithful to the higher Self.
We often lack faith. Without faith, contemplative practice degenerates, becoming a play of clarity, an exercise in intellectual sophistication. Without faith, a person wanders into a dead end, relying solely on their own understanding. Then their clarity can sometimes seriously confuse them. By contrast, when faith is present, clarity as such assumes a subordinate position. Clarity is useful in the relative dimension, but in the absolute sense, within the view, clarity has no role to play, because clarity operates with dualistic categories. Clarity is playful discrimination, whereas faith is an element of absurdity, paradox, and irrationality. This is precisely why true contemplative presence merely begins with clarity but does not end with it. It is founded specifically on faith.
Shiva says:
“Everything should be regarded as good and blessed (or everything may be regarded as a mixture of the divine and the diabolical).”
“Everything should be regarded as good and blessed” does not mean that we may confuse rotten food with wholesome food and think, “Well, all of it is good and blessed.” Although some siddhas attained the single “taste” in precisely this way. First of all, one must learn to regard everything as good and blessed at the level of the view. If you do not attain pure vision, you will always harbor doubts, negative judgments, and suspicions about others. You will always have a “worm” in your soul gnawing away at you from within. Instead of making progress, you will be preoccupied with this “worm.” But pure vision means that all the “worms” have left your soul, at least at the level of the view. You truly believe in the profound goodness underlying every living being, every person, and every phenomenon. You truly perceive the pure nature of reality. And even if you do not yet perceive it fully, even if it is sometimes not apparent, at the level of the view, conviction, and faith you possess an absolute certainty in the pure nature of reality.
“Having understood that everything is the one higher Self, one should worship this Self in such a spirit. One should look calmly through that which is pleasant and beautiful, and through that which is unbearably unpleasant. This is how one should worship the higher Self.
Stability and Depth of Practice
The level of your practice is determined by the degree of your stability and reliability. Much can be entrusted to one who has attained depth in practice, because they possess stability and take responsibility for their choice, their decision, and their sankalpa. They are faithful to their ideals and do not change their convictions or principles. Why? Because they make their choices from an inner depth, and nothing is capable of shaking that depth. A person who does not make their choice from an inner depth, however, is highly unstable and uncertain. They often betray their principles; their judgments are one way at one time and different at another. That is precisely why it is important to attain such inner depth.
Views of historical processes often change. At one time, everyone admired our past. Then opinions changed, and everyone began spitting on it, saying how terrible it had been. After a while, people begin thinking again: “Perhaps it was not so bad after all.” This is very strange, because the past remains the same. People cannot intervene in the historical process of the past. Yet in just twenty years, observing assessments of the historical past, I have seen its perception change at least three times. This means that people lack true depth in assessing the historical past, so their opinions depend on events, circumstances, and the prevailing climate. But a yogi perceives things on an entirely different level, one that lies beyond cause and effect and the past.
Connection with the Aryan Civilization
By taking Refuge and connecting to the spiritual lineage of the teaching, you establish a connection with the siddhas. The siddhas exist within the context of the Vedic tradition. The Vedic tradition itself is based on the teachings of the ancient rishis (sages). The ancient rishis themselves are representatives of the descendants of the civilization of the ancient Aryans. And when we come into contact with the teaching, we become part of the civilization of the ancient Aryans, the civilization of the gods that existed in the Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga. Fragments of the Aryan civilization remained in the Kali Yuga as well. It is believed that, before the onset of the Ice Age, the descendants of the Aryan civilization lived in the region of the North Pole and the circumpolar regions of Russia, where the so-called Airyanem Vaejah (Aryan Paradise), or the pure land of the Aryans, was located. Some ancient sources say that this was the land of the Hyperboreans. Only after the Ice Age did the remnants of Aryan civilization begin to spread across the globe, giving rise to various peoples and leaving fragments of their culture from Yakutia to Germany, India, and Iran. For example, traces of Aryan civilization have been discovered in the Murmansk region, on Khortytsia Island near Zaporizhzhia, in the Arkaim area, and in many other places. We are descendants of this Aryan civilization, since it gave rise to the Slavs, the Germanic peoples, Pakistan, India, and Iran.
I think that in 2008 we will attempt an expedition to the Khortytsia and Arkaim regions for the purpose of conducting ethnographic, archaeological, cultural, parapsychological, and extrasensory research in these places, so that we may gather material on the Aryan-Vedic civilization ourselves. Similar research will also be conducted on the territory of “Divya Loka.”
When we follow the spiritual path, we do not merely become monks; we enter into the worldview of an entirely different civilization. It is very important to understand what this civilization of god-men was like and what worldview they held. And if we want to understand this worldview, we need to understand the worldview of Vasishtha. If we had such a worthy past, then it is very important that we ourselves should be worthy successors to such a civilization of god-men and the gods themselves.
The disciples from Zaporizhzhia are planning to establish the “Arya Veda” Vedic center near Khortytsia Island, at the site of this research, according to a plan developed by the monks. I think this is not happening by chance, since, according to the law of karma, certain causes exist that ripen into particular effects.
The Vedic civilization of the Aryans is a mandala of gods and god-men whose sacred purpose, unlike that of modern society, was knowledge of the Absolute, continuous development, and self-perfection. Such a civilization was always built upon the worldview of the rishis—its founders. And Vasishtha is one of the fundamental founders of such civilizations.
Worship Without Distinctions
Shiva says:
“One should abandon the divisive notions of ‘this is me’ and ‘this is not me’ and truly, directly understand that ‘all this is indeed Brahman,’ the one indivisible and infinite consciousness. In this spirit, one should worship the supreme Self. Always, in all forms and their modifications, one should worship the supreme Self with everything that has been received by you.”
When you receive a teaching, it is very important to be guided by the transmission. While engaging in spiritual practice, we often have various experiences of emptiness, clarity, and so on. But all these experiences can be valuable in themselves only if we navigate them correctly. And navigating them correctly is possible when you work with the transmission, when you engage with the texts and apply both the transmission and the texts in your life. What does it mean to apply the transmission in life? It means living in the spirit of samaya. If you do not live in the spirit of samaya, you miss the transmission even if you hear everything perfectly. The spirit of samaya means not merely hearing the teaching, but living by it, believing in it, practicing guru yoga, and benefiting from it. Working with texts means that studying sacred texts develops into constantly referring back to them as you practice.
Why do difficulties with “pure vision” sometimes arise? Because we do not believe in the instructions and do not apply them. Even when there is a specific practice, this “little worm,” this devious mind, usually says: “But how can this be...? I don’t see anything pure! I look, but I don’t see it! Of course, it all sounds very beautiful, but I don’t see it.” And you will not see it until you change yourself! With such an approach, do not even hope to see it. Something within you must change radically; you must reach a different level of view, because you will not see anything through the eyes with which you are now trying to look. You must look at the teaching through the eyes of faith, devotion, and correct practice; and if there are deviations in your practice, how can you see? None of this will happen. It is as though you were trying to call Ananda Lila but dialed the number of a subscriber in Volovo. Pray tell, how are you going to reach Ananda Lila? You are dialing the wrong number from the outset. In the same way, “pure vision” arises here as the result of the correct practice of guru yoga, correct contemplation, and correct understanding. I assure you that it is possible to see everything if you follow all the instructions and practice correctly.
The first step here is shraddha (faith). Then comes the correct application of the instructions. If you apply them correctly, you do not feed the worm of doubt within yourself, nor do you feed the worm of impure vision—it simply disappears. Despite this, you always retain discriminating wisdom and do not lose it. But your view changes radically. You must truly say: “Oh, my dear mind! Do you really want to keep playing these foolish games? If you want to continue, you will have to forget about liberation. But if you truly want to attain liberation, you need to stop all these games and try to genuinely understand what pure vision is. You need to stop being captivated by your own clarity and try to understand what the spirit of self-liberation and faith is.”
Thus, Shiva says:
“Always, in all forms and their modifications, one should worship the Supreme Self with everything that has been received by you.”
Notice that Shiva does not say that one may worship in some forms but not in others, or that one may do so only under certain circumstances. He says that one should always worship the Supreme Self. Always! If we understand the meaning of this word “always,” our impure vision begins to self-liberate from the very outset, and our illusions and doubts also disappear. We worship what is right and wrong, pure and impure, what we like, and even what we do not like. The very fact of worship keeps our act of worship always open to the Supreme Source, which means that the blessing never runs dry. Moreover, when you worship in adverse circumstances, the flow of blessing grows stronger. Those who do not understand this pay too much attention to the relative, failing to understand that negative conditions can be used perfectly well for progress. And even if something happens, it is not your problem. Rather, it may be someone else’s problem.
Shiva says again:
“One should worship the Supreme Self, abandoning distinctions between the desirable and the undesirable, or even retaining such distinctions but using them as materials for worship.”
This is a very subtle point. Look, Shiva says that one should worship (that is, remain in a state of openness, self-surrender, and self-transcendence), abandoning the distinction between what one likes and what one dislikes. And then he says: “...or even while retaining such distinctions, but using them as materials for worship.” That is, even while retaining this playful distinction, one should also make it an object of worship. In other words, on the relative level, you may engage in the conceptual activity of the mind associated with discrimination, but this activity of the mind is playful; it too is a way of worshipping in this manner.
Natural Enjoyment Without Striving
“Without striving and without rejecting anything, one should enjoy everything that comes naturally and effortlessly. One should not become excited or depressed when encountering insignificant or significant objects, just as neither the sky nor space is affected by the various objects that exist and grow within that space. One should worship the Higher Self without psychological distortions through every object obtained effortlessly, simply through a concurrence of time, place, and action—regardless of whether it would ordinarily be considered good or bad.”
What does this mean? It means that when the weather outside is bad, you worship through your sensations of discomfort caused by the bad weather. When you undergo any good or bad experiences, you worship through those experiences. What does it mean to worship? It means that the perception experiencing this is reunited with the primordial light of awareness, with the space of the pure Self, attunes itself to its descending power, opens itself to it, and surrenders to it.
Shiva says:
“In this procedure of worshipping the Higher Self, whatever object is mentioned as necessary for worship has the same nature as everything else, although everything may be called by different names.”
Whatever object is mentioned, it has the same nature as everything else. Whatever happens, whatever sensation you experience, it does not change your consciousness or affect either your meditations or your view. It is simply something you offer to the primordial light.
We often say that under favorable conditions we are in the right state, and therefore we can integrate and remain in presence. But when the conditions change even slightly, we can no longer do so. Our task, however, is to begin under sheltered conditions and progress to a form of contemplation capable of contemplating or worshipping under the most difficult circumstances. The “tempering” stage in the teaching of the 16 kalas embodies this very principle of worship, whereby you can contemplate under conditions that may seem unfavorable, distracting, or excessively disorienting.
Equanimity as Nectar
“Tranquility and equanimity are sweetness itself, and this sweetness transcends the boundaries of mind and senses. Whatever is touched by this equanimity immediately becomes sweet in itself, regardless of how it may be described or defined.”
I would probably translate “sweetness” here as “nectar.” And whatever is touched by this equanimity immediately becomes nectar in itself, regardless of its definition or description. If you are in the right state, then everything that touches you takes on the nature of such nectar and becomes favorable. A practitioner’s spiritual level can be determined by whether everything that touches them is transformed into something pure and positive, whether it becomes nectar or not.
What does “becomes nectar” mean? It means that as a result of the interaction between consciousness and energy and their integration, a transmutation occurs, causing the space to be purified and harmonized, relationships to improve, and perception to change for the better. Everything around you improves and becomes harmonized. For example, you saw that a bathhouse had burned down, but your consciousness merged with it, and as a result, a temple arose. You saw that someone was in an unstable state, but your consciousness merged with them, and they left inspired by you. You see that an organization has some systemic problem in its relationships or material sphere, but your consciousness merges with it, and the problem turns into a mandala, into something highly organized, beautiful, and harmonious. You see that there are problems in your body’s chakras or channels, but your consciousness merges with them, and the chakras or channels are purified. You saw a poorly edited text, but as a result of integration, the text came out perfect because your consciousness instantly transformed it. You heard false notes, integrated with them, and as a result, the music became perfect. This is what it means to turn everything into nectar. That is, whatever your consciousness touches—prasada, the organization of work, and so on—everything turns into nectar, into something auspicious that raises the level of energy and self-organization.
“Only that is true worship which is performed in a state of calmness, like space, when the mind is at rest without the slightest movement of thought. While abiding in such a state of calmness, the wise one can experience the infinite within, even while outwardly engaging in natural activities, without desire or rejection.”
Calmness of Mind and the State of Space
Calmness of mind means that you have no chaos of surging thoughts, no rajas. Monks used to knock very insistently on my door and then rush in, saying, “Swami! Do you know what happened?!” And I would say, “Stop, stop, stop. Let us repeat all of this in a different state.” But I have not seen this for the past five years, which means that the level has changed dramatically. You already have calmness, and this means there is no chaos of thoughts. When there is no chaos of thoughts, there is a mirror of clarity; that is, you can abide in the state of space. And when you abide in the state of clarity and space, you experience the infinite within, even while outwardly engaging in natural activities, and this experience of the infinite does not disappear.
To meditate on the supreme Source and abide in the natural state means to experience the infinite within yourself every second. In essence, it cannot be otherwise, because we are infinite. Although we have a finite body and a finite mind, in our essence we are nevertheless infinite beings. To abide in the state of sahaja means to be infinite. One who is finite is unhappy. One who is infinite is truly liberated and possesses supreme happiness.
Worshiping the Higher Self Through All Actions
“In that case, misunderstanding, foolishness, and the sense of ego do not arise even in a dream. Remain in this state, O wise one, perceiving everything like a child. Worship the God of this body (the intelligence that pervades it) with everything that time, circumstances, and your surroundings bring you. Be calm and relinquish desires.
God continued:
Whatever you do, whenever you do it or refrain from action—everything can be used to worship God, who is pure consciousness. Regarding all of this as worship of the higher Self, which is God, He rejoices.
Like and dislike, attractive and unattractive—these are merely words that have no existence outside the higher Self. Even the concepts denoted by the words “independence,” “poverty,” “pleasure,” “pain,” “mine,” and “others” are in fact worship of the higher Self, because the intelligence that gives rise to these concepts is also the higher Self. Knowledge of the cosmic Being is the only fitting method of worshiping Him.
It is only this supreme Self, or cosmic Consciousness, that the expression “this world” points to. Oh, what a mysterious wonder it is when this supreme Self, which is pure consciousness or intelligence, seems to forget its own nature and becomes individual consciousness in relation to itself.”
Whenever you act or communicate, you should ask yourself: “Am I worshipping in this way at this moment? What am I doing right now?” Sometimes we simply feel like talking, distracting ourselves, or indulging in fantasy. But these things can be done in two ways. The first is to follow Vasishtha’s instructions—that is, even when you speak or fantasize, you still turn it into worship, and then it becomes an action performed in true presence. The second is not to turn it into worship, but to do it in the ordinary, profane way.
Mastery in Monastic Practice
A monk is one who should dread profane actions. A monk should aspire to become a master of practice. And a true master values his reputation among practitioners because he respects himself. It is unbecoming for a master to make the same mistakes as a dilettante; otherwise, he will fail to prove his competence, disgrace himself, and lose his reputation. A true master is always ashamed to make even the slightest mistake, not because the rules demand it or for the sake of prestige, but simply because such actions are unworthy of him. A monk striving to become a master should always avoid profane actions—that is, he should not act without such worship or contrary to Vasishtha’s instructions. Likewise, as you become masters of monastic practice, you should also avoid profanity in your actions. And profanity can arise only when this principle of supreme worship is absent, when your actions take place without the blessing of the higher levels of consciousness.
The term “worship” is not often used in Laya Yoga. Shiva uses it. The most important thing is to understand that it is our relative mind that worships our supreme Self. It worships the supreme Self through self-surrender, devotion, and the severing of selfish hopes, fears, and attachments.
Overcoming Attachments
Our selfish hopes, fears, and attachments often hinder such worship. Something happens, and our past experiences or attachments manifest themselves, giving rise to clinging, attachment, anger, and so on—in other words, to that which obscures this very principle of worship. It is precisely here that it is important for a monk, as a master of contemplation, to recognize such a mistake in time, not to yield to the lower impulses of his soul, but to turn all of this into a process of worship as well.
One teacher had a disciple who had already attained the level of a mentor himself. While traveling, another teacher praised him and spoke very highly of him. The disciple told his teacher about it. But the teacher rebuked him sharply and said: “I see that you are very pleased with this praise! But do not become too attached to it; instead, be modest and humble.”
You should dread both criticism and praise to which your mind becomes attached. As soon as a state outside such worship arises, in which something is pleasant or unpleasant, a true master should immediately avoid it as a profane perception of reality.
