Sahaja: An Introduction to Sahaja Yoga

By Christopher Greaves

Who are we? Who are we really? What is our purpose here? And how can we make this a better world?
Sahaja Yoga answers these questions. It answers them not only intellectually, in the form of an idea, and not only as a felt response, in the form of a mood of the heart, but also as an actual living happening. Practical, simple, and free, it transforms us from within and thereby brings about the evolution that we seek.


Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the founder of this Yoga, advised the author of Sahaja that he should write a substantial account of her discovery. This book, whose aim is to offer a rounded understanding of and thorough grounding in Sahaja Yoga, is the result.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477222652

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© 2012 by Christopher Greaves. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/04/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2266-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2265-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

1: At A Party

2: The Key

3: The Roses

4: On Colley Hill

5: The Questioners

6: Books

7: Resolve

8: The Marketplace

9: The Pearl

10: The Teachers

11: Confusion

12: Sahaja

13: The Spirit

14: Kundalini

15: The Mother

16: The Way

17: The Hands

18: An Experiment

19: Awakening

20: Meditation

21: Realisation

22: Vibratory Awareness

23: Collective Consciousness

24: Enlightenment

25: Verification

26: The Comforter

27: The Actualisation

28: The Structure

29: Innocence

30: The Left Side

31: The Right Side

32: The Central Path

33: Dharma

34: The Water Of Life

35: The Chakras

36: The Arrival

37: Blackbushe

38: The Work

39: The Firebird

40: The Whirling Castle

41: The Tower

42: The Scavenger

43: The Wild Man

44: Lightheartedness

45: Marriage

46: Basmati

47: The Bridge

48: Crocodiles

49: Miles Davis

50: In Cheltenham

51: The Adventure

52: The Return From Exeter

53: Love

54: Compassion

55: In Pune

56: In The Vineyard

57: Kapilavastu

58: The Enchanted Knights

59: Darkness

60: The Postcard

61: Trespassers

62: Social Science

63: Mercy

64: Sophia

65: Anti-Sophia

66: Ectopia

67: The Fishers

68: The Culture Of The Spirit

69: Art, Love And Truth

70: Michelangelo

71: Leonardo

72: The Family

73: Respect

74: A Talisman

75: The Bonfire

76: Introspection

77: The Blank Page

78: Diffidence

79: Twins

80: Misericordia

81: Maya

82: Her Endeavour

83: The First Brother

84: The Second Brother

85: The Globe

86: The Playing Field

87: The Bureaucrats

88: The Third Brother

89: The Guru

90: Collectivity

91: Revolution

92: The Fragrance

93: The Kingdom

94: The New Age

95: Judgement

96: Shri Kalki

97: Shri Mahamaya

98: Closeness

99: Gifts

100: Mother And Child

101: The Cloverleaf

102: The White Castle

103: Wisdom

104: Prayer

105: Practice

106: Praise

107: Before Completion

108: In Conclusion

List Of Sections And Chapters, And Notes

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1: AT A PARTY

I went to a party the other night. The time passed pleasantly enough while we ate the food provided and made the sort of bland, inconsequential conversation that you make at such events. Then the atmosphere changed.

Somebody raised a contentious, political issue connected with foreign affairs.

Our host—a professor of politics—delivered his verdict. Then I said my bit.

There was a pause.

‘Well, you’ve certainly changed your tune,’ the professor exclaimed with a hint of displeasure. And then he referred to—and, to my surprise, even managed to quote—one of the typically rabblerousing statements I had liked to make back in our student days.

‘In some ways, yes, perhaps I have changed,’ I agreed. ‘But I don’t think I’ve changed that much—not in the way you mean. In fact, my real concerns have always been the same.’

Before I could explain how and why that was so, however, some other people joined us, the conversation took a different turn and, as so frequently happens, the opportunity passed. In any case, the background din of middle-of-the-road rock music and the let’s-keep-it-uncontroversial chitchat of the well-to-do guests were scarcely conducive to the theme I had in mind.

But if I’d had the chance to finish what I’d wished to say, I would have said something like this . . .

2: THE KEY

My theme is transformation: both of ourselves and of the world.

I want to speak of a way of achieving that transformation—a way that is practical, spiritual, real. And not only do I want to do it, but now that thirty years have come and gone since I first came across this approach, I feel that I ought to do this, that it’s high time I did it.

Nevertheless, I hesitate.

For one thing, what are my qualifications? To myself, I am still a beginner, a shallow personality compared with people less deficient in a range of qualities, an altogether awkward case. Haven’t others gone further, gone deeper?

Of course they have.

For another, there is the grandeur of the subject. The latter is such that whosoever sets out to describe it should do so, I feel, not only with an intellectual clarity and a measure of the gravity of truth but also with a certain poetry. At least, so momentous does this subject seem to me that, were I using my very last breath, I would still wish to speak as best I could of it. Yet I’m fully aware that in a time of irony and faithlessness like this it really doesn’t do to talk of ‘last breaths’—or, indeed, of ‘gravity’ or ‘truth’.

Nor does it do to mention poetry, when the standard form of discourse available to those who would like to be taken seriously while explaining something new is a dry, prosaic, scientistic one from which the poetics of philosophia have long since been expelled.

All of which makes it hard to speak sincerely, in a human style, a balanced, integrated style, a style that befits the subject’s dignity, while at the same time being entertaining—for the way of which I’m talking here is above all a playful, lighthearted, sahaja one.

How much easier it is, in fact, to criticise, to undercut, to carp or resort to mockery, to lament or advert to the problems around and within us, to preach uncertainty and questioning—how much simpler it is to do these things than it is to propose a solution. How grown up it appears: to cast doubt. And by contrast how simplistic: to shed light.

And what of that chatter of people around us? What of that background of TV or hiphop or traffic, of ubiquitous popular culture, of the white noise and grey noise of commonplace, daily life? Given that context, how can one speak of sublime, eternal things?

In short, all manner of objections come to mind with the result that it seems simpler not to start.

Yet from somewhere there comes the question, as though the muse herself were speaking—as though the shakti herself were demanding—’For what are you waiting? For what are you waiting? If ever I’ve shown you compassion, now show that compassion to others by describing your seeking and what it is that you’ve found.’

And she adds: ‘Just like Dante before you, you must point out the way to the gates of bliss. But while the key of which he spoke was just the concept of a key and nothing more, in describing this way, you will be offering that key itself!’

So, that is my aim. It is to offer that key—which, I should say, is not my key as such—but I know where it is, I know what it is, I have seen something of what it does. And to those who wish to take that key and turn it in the lock and fling apart the gates of joy, I dedicate the following.

3: THE ROSES

For a long time, as long as I can remember, I used to wonder what this life was for. And what was I? What was my meaning? What was this world in which we found ourselves?

In short, I was a seeker.

Whether this was because my childhood was an unusually solitary one—without any brothers or sisters to play with, with no mother alive and no father at home—and as a result I began to ask the kind of questions which, had things been otherwise, I might not have considered till later; or whether it was because I was innately predisposed to ask such questions, I cannot say. But I know that I asked them. For example, I remember standing in my grandfather’s rose garden and thinking—not intellectually, of course, but in a child’s way—the beauty of these roses must mean something, but what? To what end do they point; from what source do they come? All around me, the unspoiled country of the Sussex Weald seemed to whisper or breathe an answer . . . but whatever it was, I could not interpret it.

At other times I would think about God, wondering what he was and where he was—and if he was.

I remember one instance of this so distinctly that, if I call it to mind, I might be standing there now on our little back lawn, at Mogador, aged four or five, between the sandpit and the ruined vinery, gazing up and up intently at a blue and cloudless sky.

What am I doing? I am looking for God. But at first I see nothing, of course: neither magical, cloud-built palace nor mysterious heavenly Father.

Then something occurs to me. To a boy in a garden in Surrey, God might look rather small, I suppose, for his house must be high, high up and far away. So, that speck over there . . . if it is a speck . . . could that be him?

Yes, it might be him.

And thinking this, I go indoors.

All the same, I could not quite convince myself that I had witnessed God, and even had I done so I would still have been outside his kingdom, looking up at it, when what matters is to be within it, delighting in it.

What matters is not just to see the Absolute, or to feel it from a distance, or to sense it intellectually—but to be one with it.

4: ON COLLEY HILL

As I grew older, however, I began to puzzle less about the whys and wherefores of existence and more about the state of it. Wherever I looked, I could not help but see the ugliness, the poverty and inhumanity with which our world was scarred, and I longed for a new state of things, a very different dispensation. I began to seek what is sometimes called the New Jerusalem. I wished for an Earthly Paradise.

And from time to time I seemed to see the outline of that paradise; I felt its truth and immanence. I felt it when I played with the children next door. I sensed it when I lay awake at night, picturing heaven in all its brightness and security, imagining its mood which would sometimes seem so vivid that I might have been remembering it. I felt it when I stood on Colley Hill, a short walk away, beside the public drinking fountain there—its shelter designed like a temple: twelve-pillared and domed, the ceiling depicting the sun, the moon and zodiac in blue and gold mosaic—and gazed across the Pilgrim’s Way and great green Weald, with its farms and woods and villages, to the far-away Downs beyond: I sensed it undeniably, that collective and peaceable world: it was there, it existed, was implicit in what I beheld, yet had still to be brought into being—had still to be realised.

The question was, how?

This was increasingly what concerned me. As a result, I found myself becoming more and more dissatisfied with what were normally assumed to be the aims of life, for these had nothing to do with our meaning, or with God and his kingdom, or the transmutation of everyday life. Instead, we were being directed to mundane or to frivolous ends: to strictly material ends, or, in a complementary way, to hedonistic ends. Yet I felt that there had to be something more, that there had to be something far beyond whatever I had known to date, and it was my duty to find it.

It was our human vocation to find it.

For if life was a puzzle—and what was it, if not a puzzle?—then surely it had to be solved. Or if, as some maintained, it was a play, our task was therefore to perceive it as a play and, moreover, to enjoy it as a play. Or if it was a journey, like that of King Odysseus to Ithaca, then it had to be completed. Somehow, we had to reach our destination.

5: THE QUESTIONERS

That’s what I felt. And when I left school and went up to university, I expected to find that these questions of meaning would be upon everyone’s lips, would be everyone’s first concern.

Yet not a bit of it. For most of my peers and elders, this great affair of seeking seemed to be at best of minor relevance, at worst, a waste of time. Indeed, those who upheld or dictated the mores appeared to think that seeking was something quixotic or abnormal—was a symptom of adolescence, or of a ‘failure to adjust’, or was merely a fad or fashion—or else was some strange, subcultural phenomenon which had nothing to do with them, or with the real direction of society, or with reality.

With a word or a smile, a note of worldly wisdom or a hint of gentle mockery, saying: ‘Yes, it’s fun to wonder why we’re here and to ponder the meaning of life—but of course there can’t be any answer,’ or, alternatively, ‘It’s a matter for saints—the rest of us can’t hope to know;’ or, on the question of the transformation of the world: ‘Human nature can’t be changed,’ or else, invoking a version of science: ‘The universe is just an accident, and God a creation of Man,’ they gave me to understand that, insofar as I were seeking, I was guilty of that most heinous social sin of modern times: naivety.

It seemed that in a disenchanted, desacralised world, there was simply no room, no allowance, for seeking. Therefore, most seekers could only express their desire in some marginal way: in the churches or temples of senescent religions, in the rootless, parasitical lifestyle of hippies, in sects and cults, through the tarot, the occult, or in drugs. At which the ruling powers could say with some justification: ‘Look, how outdated, deluded, stoned, scruffy, or simply plain creepy these seekers are.’

And even if they didn’t say these things as such, they were nevertheless voiced within me, since I had grown up in this modern Western culture where the one thing that is really taboo is the thought that there might be something beyond this culture—such as God, truth, faith, an economy based upon love, a culture expressing compassion.

6: BOOKS

How often I would walk the Cathedral Banks in Durham, mulling over these things—though not to much effect. Meanwhile, being of an intellectual cast of mind, I looked to books for illumination. I read the Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada, Lao Tzu, Martin Buber, and Marx—and altogether paid a great deal more attention to this business of seeking than to the work I was supposed to be doing. But if, in Blake’s phrase, the ‘Whole Creation Groans to be deliver’d,’ and if those groans oppress you in the morning when you wake and again at the fall of night, if in the whining of sirens or the sighing of falling leaves or that ambient noise of banality which, at all hours of the day, is played out in the media, you cannot help but hear them, then to give yourself body and soul to some mundane, material task seems scarcely possible.

That’s how it struck me, at least.

After graduation, I moved to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. There, the thinkers who most impressed me were Lefebvre and Debord, with their insistence that if there were to be a revolution, it was everyday life itself that had to be transformed. In other words, it is the quality of actual lived experience that matters, not the installation of some new abstract system. And then I came to Bristol, where I studied Gurdjieff, Rumi, Jung and, with the most application, the Book of Changes or I Ching in Richard Wilhelm’s version.

But interesting though all these varied texts were, I couldn’t help but agree in the end with Kabir that: ‘Reading book after book, the whole world died and no-one became enlightened.’

7: RESOLVE

I sometimes think that you could liken the soul’s arrival in the world of adulthood to that of Gulliver, shipwrecked on the coast of Lilliput. By the time he comes round, he finds he’s been tied up securely by a thousand tiny ropes. While each attachment is, in itself, insignificant, all the attachments together serve to incapacitate him completely. To add insult to injury, a tiny man comes along and tells him that in thinking he’s a soul, come from somewhere else in quest of truth, he’s under a delusion.

‘So you’re saying I’m just like you?’ says the soul.

‘Not just like us, no. You are deluded, after all. But in time you can become like us,’ says the tiny man.

‘What, you’ve got some sort of shrinking device, have you?’ says the soul.

But the tiny man has already gone away, smiling darkly.

At any rate, the older I grew, the more I found myself absorbed by all the usual romantic, ambitious, domestic and carnal wants and needs and whims which so distract and subsume our attention. As far as my seeking went, it was hard to formulate the question, let alone find the answer. And to whom was there to turn for guidance? My teachers? They were, alas, of no more use to me than Holden Caulfield’s were to him. Therapists? But I wanted truth, not therapy. Intellectuals? Philosophers? But I longed for the blissful awareness of bliss, not just their ‘science of despair’. My parents? But I had no parents, and in any case the older generation had no gnosis to impart.

And what of those who had seemed to be companions in this quest? One after another, they were dropping away: were losing heart or interest, were committing themselves to the so-called ‘real world’, or were accepting the role of the part-time, never-satisfied seeker—and so forth.

Yet whatever the doubts I had about my seeking and however much I neglected it, it wouldn’t go away. Indeed, I would say that it can’t go away, not really, since it is built within us.

We haven’t put it there. We haven’t invented our seeking or had it introjected, nor does it have its basis in our feelings or rationality. We haven’t decided to seek—not exactly. Yes, it may be stimulated by some emotional need or shock, or else by a process of thinking, but such thoughts, needs and shocks do not in themselves create our seeking. Equally, we can accept it or deny it, and if we accept it, we can then do this or that with it. We will articulate it in different ways—in Christian terms, or Buddhist terms, or agnostic or atheist terms, in political terms, in romantic or rational terms, and so on and so forth—according to our character, our culture, our education or the ideas of our peers. But in itself our truth-seeking is given. At root, it is a priori. You could say that it comes from our situation—for where is the person who, finding himself in this finite, impermanent world in which his very life appears to bloom and fade between one nothingness and another, has not hankered for that which endures, is eternal, is infinite, is absolute? Though I would rather suggest that this seeking is rooted inside us: that it’s there, engraved within our soul. It is there, within the structure of our being. It is there, in our Unconscious.

Thus, there is something in our inmost nature which obliges us to seek, which adjures us, which behoves us, which requires us to seek the truth and all that ‘the truth’ comprehends: enlightenment and meaningfulness, fellowship, joy, and pure love.

And what if there is nothing to be sought?

So long as we are seekers, we cannot yet answer that question. We cannot yet know whether truth exists or not. But we may guess that it does, for our seeking itself would seem to presuppose the fact that there is something to be found.

8: THE MARKETPLACE

Such, at least, was my hypothesis. But whenever I tried to satisfy this seeking, all I found was incoherence.

It was as though I were in a marketplace in which the priests of every religion, the supporters of every political party or movement or group, the purveyors of every aid to self-awareness, the gurus and mystics, the magicians, the shamans, the witches, clairvoyants and healers, the analysts and therapists of every school, the hypnotists, masseurs and acupuncturists, and the ‘spiritual workers’ with crystals, aromas, or colours, or mantras, or music, or dancing, or drama, or dreams, or sexuality, etc., were all crying their wares, saying: ‘This way is true, but not that,’ or: ‘That way is true, but not this,’ or: ‘All ways are true, and it’s only a matter of choosing the way that suits your personality,’ or: ‘The only truth is that there is no truth,’ and variations on that theme.

And so on.

Yet how could one make sense of this? And how could a new world be built by what in effect were warring factions? How can truth contradict itself?

9: THE PEARL

And even if truth were in that marketplace, how was one to know it to be true? Since one was only a seeker, not yet possessed of the knowledge one sought—by what means, or from what point of view, could one judge all those methods on offer?

It was all very well for seekers to say of some method, ‘Well, I feel it to be true,’ or ‘I think that it’s true,’ or else: ‘My intuition tells me that it’s true,’ or even: ‘Experience assures me it is true.’ Yet when the history of seeking was so full of false hopes and misdirections, strange cults and mass possessions, dark simulations of religion, and collective dreams of paradise which metamorphosed at the drop of a hat into Stalinist nightmares, how could they really be so sure? What was their perspective on the matter and what were their criteria?

Christ likened the seeker to a merchant in search of fine pearls. But in spite of the fact that there were what were labelled and packaged as ‘pearls’ on display in that marketplace—and although there were among them what, in a certain light, resembled one’s idea of pearls—how could one tell the artificial from the real?

When one had not yet acquired a pearl, when one hadn’t yet mastered the subject, how could one tell a real pearl from a fake?

10: THE TEACHERS

For that matter, what of the teachers in that marketplace? What of the gurus—including those who said: ‘You do not need a teacher,’ or ‘The Unconscious is the teacher’? Where, amongst those priests and swamis and rishis and sufis, white witches and dream guides and trainers, those psychotherapists and counsellors, those encounter group leaders and yogis, those gnostics and masters and adepts, those lamas with their