Traditions of the East and West

All religions have their own particular form of yoga. Christians have always practiced adoration, prayer, love and veneration of the Creator. In India this is known as Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, adoration and spiritual love. This particular form of yoga suits certain temperaments but not others. Some people have gifts and qualities that call for other modes of expression. The ways that lead to the Creator are innumerable.

The goal of all spiritual discipline is for the disciple to finally recognize that he or she is God himself; that is the meaning of the Jnana Yoga saying: ‘I am He’.

In Greece it is referred to as ambrosia, in India soma, and alchemists call it the elixir of eternal life. All cultures make mention of the existence of a beverage of immortality and explain how to prepare it. In reality this beverage exists in nature, but not just anywhere of course. It is found only in the most subtle and purest regions and only at specific moments, such as sunrise. Sunrise is the best time of the day to drink this ambrosia, which the sun distributes everywhere in the universe and the particles of which are collected by all living creatures, rocks, plants, animals, and human beings. Light is the true beverage of immortality and you can catch this light in the morning at sunrise and use it to nourish your subtle bodies.

The initiates of India have summed up the work of man’s identification with the Deity by the formula ‘I am He’. This means that only He, the Lord, exists; I, myself, do not exist, or I only exist as his reflection or shadow. Until human beings know their true reality, they identify with their physical body, with their thoughts and feelings, not knowing that these are not the true reality. It is this ignorance that keeps them in weakness and illness. God alone exists, and we are a projection of him. So, when we say, ‘I am He’, we link ourselves to him, we draw closer to him until the day we become like him. For thousands of years, history has handed down the testimony of those beings that have succeeded in identifying with the Lord, and they have received light, they have received true powers, they have tasted ecstasy.

‘My Father and I are one.’ Jesus was able to make such a claim because he had done a tremendous amount of work on himself, and we too must endeavour to do this work, following his example. God lives within us, and his kingdom also exists within us. Those who know they are inseparable from the Creator see more and more clearly how to resolve their problems and act for the good wherever they go. Whereas those who feel that God is outside them are abandoned to their own resources, which are very limited.
We find this work of identification with the Divinity in the Hindu practice of Jnana yoga, the yoga of self-knowledge. The yogi learns to meditate on the formula: ‘I am He’ – ‘He’ referring to the divine Principle – and pronounces it until it becomes flesh and blood in him. At this point his limited, personal self no longer exists: only ‘He’, the Lord, exists in him, and from that moment on he is able to perform miracles.

In many Indian temples, you see the lingam, the symbol of Shiva, represented – a raised stem on a horizontal base. Those who give commentaries on the symbol often stop at the raised stem, which represents the phallus, the generative organ, the masculine principle. In fact, you should also take into account the horizontal base, which represents the feminine principle. The masculine principle is the spirit, working on the feminine principle, matter. The whole of creation is simply the result of these two principles working together. And so they should not be thought of as separate in spiritual practice either. In India you still come across men and women with a red dot painted between their eyebrows. That is where the ajna chakra, the centre of clairvoyance, of spiritual vision, is situated. But if you concentrate on this chakra, which is receptive, feminine, you should also concentrate on the sahasrara chakra, situated at the top of the skull, which is emissive, masculine. When the two principles are brought together, they become a living lingam.

Consciously or unconsciously, all men and women are looking for their twin soul. What they do not know is that, in reality, their twin soul is not a different entity from them but the other pole of their being, living on high with God in perfection and fulfilment. In all the ancient initiations, disciples were taught how to find this other pole of their being – their higher self.
In India, Jnani yoga provides methods that enable the yogi to achieve union with their higher self, since through this union they become one with God. In Greece, we find the same idea expressed in the phrase carved into the pediment of the temple of Delphi: ‘Know yourself’. But we should not forget the rest of the sentence: ‘… and you will know the universe and the gods.’ True knowledge is the result of the fusion of the two principles, the masculine and the feminine…

Each person possesses both the masculine and feminine principles within them, and you cannot limit men to only the masculine principle or women to only the feminine principle. In the Chinese Taoist philosophy, this idea is represented by the yin/yang symbol: the black part, yin, representing the feminine principle, contains a white dot, and the white part, yang, representing the masculine principle, contains a black dot, to express how the masculine always contains a feminine part and the feminine a masculine part. Men and women are not abstract principles but living combinations of masculine and feminine in unequal proportions.