The need to actually find an actual yoga master is one of the most critical things that a serious student must seek to do in order to be delivered a proper understanding of these yoga texts and to be guided in their practices, their spiritual practices. The ancient rishis and yogis, they had a very unique perspective of the world; completely different than the common person. The common person sees many things and assumes many things to be factual, when in fact much of the so-called truth that they accept is, in fact, illusory and incorrect.
A very powerful example is the idea of who I am. I can remember giving some courses one time in a school and so did a little test. You have the students write on a piece of paper, answer the question, "Who am I?" Describe yourself. Who are you? And so everybody gets to work and write down a whole number of things. By the time I collect them it's like the end of class. So I use this like an example. Okay, I come back to the class the next day and I am confronted with a bunch of traumatized students, not because of answering the question but something kind of tragic has happened. Like, if for example, one of their classmates was killed in an accident on the way home, and one of the places I was actually speaking was in a Catholic school, in a university, first year. In that university they had a chapel and as is the tradition in the Philippines they would have an open coffin and you've got this body presented there. And so in the classroom someone says, "Oh sir," you know, "Jennifer, she's dead. She's left us. She has met an accident yesterday on the way home,” and they say that they are having a service for her in the chapel a little later. Bring me there. So being a wise guy that I am unfortunately, I pull out Jennifer's little piece of paper, and it says, describes her name, and she says, "I am five foot three. I am a female. I am a Filipino. My complexion is brown. I have shoulder length straight hair. My eyes are dark brown." And we've got a whole list. “I weigh this certain weight,” whatever it's going to be. So I am looking at this, and then you can go over to the coffin, take a look in and check off each one of these things and it's all still there. So then, you know, you say, "Okay, don't panic! Everything is okay. Jennifer is still here. She hasn't gone anywhere. (laughter) You'd said she’d left. It's alright, there's no problem.” And so they're looking at you, like, “Whoa, what's happened to this guy? He's flipped out. He's crazy.”
But the question really is, “Who is crazy?” Who is crazy? This person has described themself and yet when we look into this coffin there is simply a dead body there and everybody, they understand instinctively, that there has been this radical transformation. At the moment of death, you will see the body becomes extremely unpleasant. You know this or not? Have you ever handled a dead body? I mean, and it's one thing if it's a relative but if you have to handle a dead body of someone you don't know, it's quite disturbing. It's disturbing and you have this deep sense of uncleanliness. If you had to handle a body and help somebody move it, and then somebody was going to hand you a sandwich, it's like, “Ummmm, just a minute. I'll wash," and it wouldn't be just one quick rinse, it would probably be really (makes sound of hard scrubbing) and then somebody is going to pass it to you and it's kind of like, "Ummm, do you have like a tissue or something I can put around that?" The idea of death is extremely disturbing and the body becomes, actually quite, I am going to use a strong word – repulsive - at death.
Even if somebody is deeply in love; for instance a husband and wife deeply in love with each other, supposedly. Let's say they really are, and then one partner dies and the other person feels very disturbed by it, but they could not spend the night in bed with this dead body. And if you attempted to, you would be considered like a freak, really weird. You would be really weird. And maybe if you were so mentally unbalanced and disturbed because of what's happened that you decided to do that one night, certainly by the next night you would probably be thinking twice. There are the occasional nutcase that you read about that preserves a husband or wife and keeps them at home for years, but people have this innate sense that at the moment of death, the body loses its attractiveness and becomes something that is somewhat repulsive even or very unpleasant. It's just become very disturbing.
The ancient sages they talked about death in a way that… something we are not so familiar with. Like in the West, and what's become common all over the world now, what's the first thing they do with a dead body? They refrigerate it and then they pump it full of chemicals and preservatives and if you don't do it, it's really an amazing experience, especially in a tropical climate. To watch a body, like twelve hours, fifteen hours, twenty hours after its death. I mean have you ever seen anything like this? It's really astonishing. The body begins to bloat, like seriously bloat. You couldn't imagine that it could get so big and then fluid starts leaking out of the nose and the eyes and the mouth and the anus, and it's just like, it's really gross.
My experience was when I first went to India, I was living out in an ashram in a place called Mayapur, in Bengal. And there was the Bangladesh war. There were, like, ten million refugees that came across the border and so it was like, every train station was just filled with people sleeping on the platforms, and the railway tracks were used as the bathrooms. So there were piles of stool everywhere, and there’s flies and disease and poverty. People that came from really, you could see, genteel backgrounds, you could see by the type of clothing that they had, were now reduced to incredible poverty and every day you see people dying, like, you cannot imagine how many people you see dying and it's just like, shocking.
So what they would do if you would go to ride the train in the morning to go from Calcutta up to Krishna Nagar you would come out and when you get near the train station you see these little lamps. They've got a little clay dish with a wick on it and it's burning, burning oil, and they put them out beside any dead body because there is this dump truck that comes by at about five in the morning picking up dead bodies. A couple of guys swing it like this and then whooosh up on top and there is somebody else there, and there is a mountain of incredibly bloated dead bodies. This is the hard core reality. This is really experiencing death in a way that a lot of people do not have the opportunity to do, and it's quite an eye opener, to say the least. You get to see the reality of this moment of death and the consequences, what happens, at least in relation to the body.
So if we were asked the question, "What is it exactly, that is the difference between a dead body and a live body? What is the difference?"
This question is the foundational question for really what yoga and what self-realization is all about. But what is the difference? Somebody is going to say, "Well one of them moves, the other one doesn't." But what if it's in a coma? If a person is in a coma, they ain't moving. Are they dead? The answer is no. So okay, that doesn't do it. What is it? What is it that is the distinctive difference between a live body and a dead body? And to make it easy we will reduce it to one word. This word is purusa which actually means the person. Many people have ideas, like you see it’s very common within Christianity, within different religious denominations, and different religions, there is this kind of like vague, very vague concept, of the soul. But if you ask people what exactly the soul is, it’s kind of like, you know this, really it's a serious unknown. What is the soul? So I really don't like actually using the word ‘soul’, because it so misunderstood.
The Sanskrit word is atma. The atma means, literally means, the self. The self. So the body is never really considered the self. The person that resides within the body and temporarily uses the body is the actual self. The body does not have personality. Personal expression, individuality, it does not actually arise from the body, even though each body is quite different from each other. The real individuality comes from the atma itself, from the actual living being, or we might call it the spirit soul. I mean we put those words together because some people have a very vague idea of spirit, some people have a vague idea of soul. And there is this idea that many people have that the soul or the spirit is kind of like the energy source. And that is true, but it’s also not a very good way to understand things because most people think of an energy source as being impersonal. A battery is an energy source. Does anybody want to hang out with a battery? Go to a movie with a battery? Sit down and discuss some wonderful novel that you have read with a battery? You know, it's not going to go very far.
So it's just like you see on these TV commercials the, what is it? Duracell, whatever. They’ve got this bunny, you know, this rabbit with the cymbals, boom boom boom, you know, and it lasts forever, you know. It just goes on and on and on, but if you take the battery out, then the toy kind of falls over and it’s sort of like, pretty useless, and you look at the battery and you go, "Wow, that looks pretty useless, too." But if I put them together, “Wow, now I've got something.”
So there is this misconception that it is actually the combination of the atma and the body that gives you a person. That is actually completely erroneous, completely erroneous. The body by nature is impersonal. You want to check out what a body is like? Okay, watch when somebody dies. Let's not cremate that guy or bury him or pump him full of formalin or refrigerate him. Just put him out on the grass and watch what happens.
There is no personality there. There is nothing attractive there whatsoever. Yet we will see that almost everyone, the vast, vast majority of living beings are completely covered by this idea that this body which I have on and I am temporarily using, is me. This is me. And I relate to the world, I seek happiness, I seek fulfilment, I seek love, I seek all of these things, through this medium and in relation to this medium. This is one of the greatest tragedies ever. It is the most sad; it is a desperately sad and tragic thing that people are completely caught up in this idea.
The actual saintly persons, the great yogis, the spiritual teachers, their hearts are simply overwhelmed with sadness just by gazing out upon the world and seeing the way in which things are moving, seeing the way in which the living beings are completely lost, taking this idea of this current life as total reality. They have a completely different perspective, they have a completely different view of things and this process of spiritual realization, the process of yoga is for the purpose of bringing a person to the platform of coming to realize their actual spiritual identity and to begin to live another type of life, a life that is not simply meant for death, but a life that is filled with spiritual purpose; spiritual purpose and tremendous fulfilment.
