Meeting the spiritual light
What is the point of spending hours on our Yoga mat?
We need not necessarily look for a goal in Yoga practice, even if along the way it brings us a great deal, such as well-being, relatively good health, the chance to step out of the loops of the mind and to calm our anxieties, our agitation and our pessimistic views of life and the world.
Certainly Yoga allows us to live a conscious life, and in that we could find a real goal for Yoga, but personally I glimpse much more...
Yoga prepares us to face death and the passage through the Bardo (the in-between), between two lives or between 2 states.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of this precisely.
It speaks of 3 precise stages.
The first is the encounter with the pure light and the possibility of merging into it.
The second is the encounter with the archetypes that have marked our existence: so someone who believes in Jesus may meet Jesus and be judged by the 10 commandments, or a Buddhist will be in the presence of the great buddhas, more or less wrathful, etc.
The third will be the choice of a new womb, to enter samsara again and live a new material life...
It so happens that "missing" the first stage comes from not being able to bear dissolving into this pure light (the clear light of the Buddhists) because of our attachment to our existence.
This attachment will make us see the light as something too dazzling, too strong, and we will want to flee.
The same goes for missing the second stage, which would also allow us to free ourselves from the round of births and deaths (samsara): our attachment to our feeling of existence prevents us from recognising the completely illusory nature of all these apparitions and will make us flee these places with fear in our belly.
Then the spirit will fall into a kind of more or less lucid sleep, where fear and flight will push us to quickly find a womb so as to feel safe in matter, and so to reincarnate.
In this last stage, it is being repelled or possessed by the sight of a couple embracing that will make us take a particular attitude, pushing us to love a man or a woman, or to be jealous of a man or a woman.
How will Yoga help us in these stages?
Yoga allows us to free ourselves little by little from attachment to our body, then to our mind, and finally to our feeling of existence...
By practising Yoga we meet a great many altered states of consciousness, which allow us to accept a thousand and one small disturbances or strange situations in the way we feel our being, our character and our body.
Passing through the fire in Yoga (for those who dare venture there!) breaks the feeling of "assembly" we have with our existence and allows us to step out of our ignorance, which is believing we are this body and thinking of ourselves as this body.
Then one day the practitioner is lucky enough to see the "Clear light". On seeing this light we are surprised and shaken once again.
In this shaking we should again see that the "congenital" bond between spirit and body, the one that creates the ego, is stretched and weakened.
The traditional texts tell us that the practitioner becomes more luminous and more subtle, sleeps less, and manages their energies much better, to the point of sometimes developing certain powers...
So on this path of practice and knowledge we acquire the mental strength to stay calm when the fire is there, when we are shaken, and this is fundamental for getting through these stages as well as possible. The vibrational rate of the individual rises and comes closer to the clear light.
By seeing the light and merging into it more and more during our lifetime, on the day it stands before us we will be able to remain neutral and open to it, for it is nothing other than our true deep nature, and so merge with it. For those who have truly experienced this in their life, it will be simpler still: simply a vibrational osmosis already present, here and now!
For those who "miss" this stage, the next one is that of the ghostly apparitions of our own beliefs, which we must treat as mirages while remaining as calm as possible. Then, as in a dream, they will disappear and let us enter the light that underlies all of this. This work can already be done here and now.
Finally, if we "miss" these two stages, we will still have the possibility of returning to samsara while trying not to fall into just any world, again remaining calm and observant so that the best of wombs may call us.
It is said of the bardo that we must never be distracted or let ourselves drift into ideas and mental projections of any kind, so as not to wander anywhere and anyhow.
Reading all this, and in the light of my own experience, I can say that at every moment of life we should try to remain continuously conscious and drive away at all costs all the moods that only pollute our existence and which, already in this life, weaken us and set us adrift, all of this to prepare us for this passage.
Yoga teaches us to enter the light!
Denis
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