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Development is to stop being a victim of outer circumstances

Hell and heaven are within you. Both gates are within you. When you are behaving unconsciously, there is the gate of hell; when you become alert and conscious, there is the gate of heaven.
The mind is heaven, the mind is hell, and the mind has the capacity to become either. But people go on thinking everything is somewhere outside. Heaven and hell are not the end of life, they are here and now. Every moment the door opens In a single moment you can move from hell to heaven, from heaven to hell.

Osho: A bird on the wings

The fundamental spirit and purpose of development
is that one proceeds from taking to giving

Steiner: The Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical world. Reality and Illusion p. 68

[…] Climbing to God is like climbing a mountain with many different paths at the bottom that begin to merge when you approach the summit.
[…] And when you get to the top of the mountain, then you must go down again and help others up, according to their capacities and strength. There is no rest in this work: the highest serves most lovingly; the wisest listen best; the one who has seen gives his whole life to help others to see. This is the divine way.

Mother Meera: Answers

The rope, the wings and the ladder

In the Chymical Marriage, the famous alchemic text, three different tools are used in order to move the coffins etc up through the various floors in a tower. The tools are the rope, the wings and the ladder.
This Tower is an allegory of the spine with the chakra system; the tools are accordingly the spiritual paths or ways to work with it.

1. The rope is the yogic and masculine way, using a lot of effort and will power to move the material along the right channel, the solar side, the pingala channel in the spine.

2. The wings are the feminine or tantric way, flowing or flying up along the lunar left channel of the spine, the ida.

3. The ladder is the path of initiation, it is both feminine and masculine - or it is neither feminine nor masculine. It is moving step by step up along the middle path, the main channel in the spine, the sushumna.

Initiation is the harvest from previous merits and spiritual training, even from past lives. We might have a sudden inner or outer experience that changes our whole life; suddenly we find ourselves a step further up the ladder of development. An initiation may be embedded in an accident, in a server disease or in a near death experience. The meeting with a Master can also be an initiation by itself, regardless of this meeting being in a dream, in a meditation or real life.
Significant for an initiation is that it just happens, it is not something our ego can make happening.


 

The goal of Yoga - The goal of Tantra

Yoga and Tantra are paths in spiritual development towards the same ultimate goal.
Both in the yogic and the tantric tradition, the aim is to help the energy to move freely in the right direction.

In spiritual development the goal is to accumulate the energy from the three lower chakras, and to move and transform this potentially enormous amount of energy upwards towards the heart or the 3’eye, as in the Christian and the Buddhistic traditions respectively.
So even if these two main spiritual paths on the surface level seems very different, even in opposition to each other, their ultimate goal, to reach God, or to become enlightened is the same.

 

What is yoga:

Everything can be yoga. Yoga literally means "union", as does the word religion. Work, action, worship are all forms of yoga. Meditation is the highest path of yoga, but very few are able to achieve true meditation.

Babaji in Shdema Goodman: Meeting with Truth

Controlling your mind

The yogic tradition is one of controlling your mind and using will power, where you with the utmost awareness are endeavouring to cut away anything in your life, that wastes the time and life-energy you could have spend on spiritual development.
The life energy, the river of life is all too frequently being side tracked and dispersed in useless activities if you are not disciplining it. When you one-pointedly aim for spiritual unfoldment, you must close and prevent all detours of the energy.
If the energy is prevented from being wasted into all sorts of wrong or irrelevant ways, automatically the energy will move upwards towards higher levels of consciousness.

After many years of uncompromisingly disciplined yogic training, you may have an illumination experience as a result of your ability, in a given moment, to control or block all sideways where the energy could escape.
On the outside, yoga is a masculine path, but in practicing yoga you will gradually get in contact with its inner feminine or tantric side.
A true yogic spiritual practise, with its utmost awareness in everything you are doing, is radically different from repressing unwanted material into the unconscious, because doing that is an unconscious process.


 

Yoga: Inner Renunciation

Renunciation is not negative but positive. It isn’t the giving up of anything but misery. One should not think of renunciation as a path of sacrifice.
Rather it is a divine investment, by which our few cents of self-discipline will yield a million spiritual dollars.
Is it not wisdom to spend the golden coins of our fleeting days to purchase eternity?

Paramahansa Yogananda

Tantra: Continuity

The word “Tantra” might be translated as “continuity”. A more comprehensive translation is “way of life according to the teaching - its origin, its practice and its fruits”
Tantra can be seen as the yes to life, the attitude and practice allowing life to be what it is, the attitude to life which aims at letting WHAT IS in a particular situation, be what is allowed is welcomed, is lived, but with acute awareness.
On the outside Tantra is feminine; in the beginning it is very difficult and diffuse with almost no landmarks, but gradually the path becomes more and more orderly, because the inner man will be reached.
In this sense Tantra is paradoxical. Everything is accepted, but deep within it is disciplined, you must never loose your awareness, the witness is always there.
Dreams are naturally tantric, and in the tantric tradition there is openness for using dreams in the development.

Edited from Jes Bertelsen

Yoga and its shadow

Looking at the yogic tradition it is clear that it has its shadow sides. Most sincere Christians have a normal investment in their spiritual development, and a normal amount of courage and will power at hand, and the way they cope with the immense energy structures dormant in the three lower chakras, is a mixture of burning it out, and repression. This has been the case both in the Catholic and the Protestant church. The western sense of guilt and sin, connected to the hara centre and sexuality, the repressive structures regarding feelings and emotions, are examples of repression; the ruthlessly greedy materialism and exaggerated focus on sexuality are the opposite swing of the pendulum, the result of the repression.
The Christian mystics, the nuns and monks that practised the yogic way to God (Unio Mystica), reached their goal, but many others sit with the double standards, greed, bigotry, hostility and arrogance that are earmarks of repression. These shadows can be seen as a compensation for the starvation (but not transformation) of these raw forces for centuries, even millenniums. This is probably what is acted out in the West right now.

Edited from Jes Bertelsen

The Yogic path: About repression

Aren’t your teachings about controlling the emotions dangerous? a student asked. Many psychologists claim that suppression leads to mental and even to physical illness.
The Master replied: Suppression is harmful - holding the thought that you want something but doing nothing constructive to get it. Self-control is beneficial - patiently replacing wrong thoughts by right ones, changing reprehensible actions to helpful ones.
Those who dwell on evil hurt themselves. Men who fill their minds with wisdom and their lives with constructive activity spare themselves ignoble suffering.

From: Sayings of Paramahansa Yogananda

Tantra and its shadow

The tantric approach is not free from its shadow sides either.
The shadow or flip side in the individual is a “why bother” weakness, cowardice and maybe a too idealised attitude to tough aspects of life, as perceived from the lower chakras.

This may lead to statements like:

Everything is as it should be

Whatever happens is all right
Whatever happens is meant to be
The universe will provide

This is true only on very elevated levels of consciousness, in a normal state of consciousness it mirrors denial and ungroundedness.

The shadows from both East and West, from the tantric and yogic traditions in their one sided aspects are now surfacing.

Edited from Jes Bertelsen

Osho Tantra: Seriousness is always goal oriented

Seriousness is always goal oriented. And when you begin to live in order to obtain something, life will be meaningless to you if you do not achieve it. Unless you become something that is flowing like a river, you will never learn to know the divine, for that is not a thing, but an event.

Osho

All detours are accepted, because they are only detours because our attitude is that they are detours.
The tantric approach is that the loss of energy is bigger if the individual decides in a yogic way, not to loose energy; when you are making a lot of fuss about a detour, you give it energy. Putting up restrictions, barriers, taboo’s etc., means that you make the enemy bigger, you spend a lot of energy.
In yoga you will have to be a mighty warrior, day and night.
According to Tantra, the detours will loose their attraction or temptation when you are allowing the energy to flow in whatever direction it wants to go; the detours will no longer act as magnets, you do not build up polarities with its inevitable swinging to and from between hunger and satisfaction.

Yoga

Saints are sinners who never gave up

"Saints are sinners who never gave up. No matter what your difficulties, if you do not give up, you are making progress in your struggle against the stream. To struggle is to win the favour of God.

Paramahansa Yogananda

The medieval Christian mystics are examples of individuals that succeeded in reaching God through yogic discipline (Terese de Avila, Hildegard of Bingen Frans of Assisi etc.). The monks and nuns who practiced wholehearted the path of mystical and devotional Asceticism.

These mystics suffered terrible agony, seeing the desires in their root chakra to own all things in the world. They counteracted this desire by promising to own nothing, and by obedience to the leader of the monastery. They have met the devil himself as luminous, perverted sexual symbols and they have had to fight against the total sum of lust embedded in the hara centre.
And they have confronted the deeply hidden material in their solar plexus as experiences of descending to the lower astral realms, hell, with accurate experiences and evaluations of their desires and these realms.
They have practised an honest and true path in Christianity, the yogic path of starving out or burning out the dross.

Edited from Jes Bertelsen

Sexuality in yoga and tantra

A main issue in both yoga and tantra is sexuality, because the Divine can only be reached in a “in and up” energy-movement, and sexuality is one of the main “down and out” energy movements.
Thus from the perspective of a dedicated spiritual development, sex is the main energy looser, and thus the main obstacle on the spiritual path.
In yoga the idea is not to involve yourself in any sexual or erotic situation at all, you disconnect yourself from the temptation.

One way is to live in celibacy in a monastery or in an ashram with like minded people. In yoga you will work to obtain a clearer insight into your sexual impulses in order not to project them, but to transform them upwards, long before they have been allowed to live themselves out in the physical reality.
In tantra, you do not bother about controlling the sexuality through celibacy. That will only create even bigger problems or more preoccupation with sex, than if you had a normal sexual life. Tantra is open for sexuality and allows it to flow through the person in its extrovert aspect, which means allowing the energy to flow outwards and downwards, rather than inwards and upwards. The genuine tantric tradition, however, is not just accepting sex in its normal way; the goal is to preserve the awareness, to stay in the energy. In a normal and well functioning sexual life you are not especially aware in the sexual situation. So in this very tantric situation comes the yogic control - the idea is either to go the whole way through, including orgasm, and offer the orgasm to God, or not to fall into orgasm at all, but with full awareness stay turned on, stay, stay.
In this way, if there is enough love, the energy will gradually transform into higher states of consciousness.

Edited from Jes Bertelsen