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Pujya Dr. K.C. Varadachari - Volume -1
 

Talks and Lectures on the System of Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga

Transmission in Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga

  

Speech delivered at 3, Sir T. B. Road, Allahabad on 8th April 1968.

I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to speak to you on the great work, which Babuji is carrying on in this world. His present work is to disseminate the practice called Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga, so that not only we who are citizens of India but the whole world may profit by the spiritual work. Ultimately the aim is to have a new type of people who might be called divine, who live the life of God on earth, and make the world a better place and a happier place to live in. For this purpose he has propounded a system of yoga, or Divine connection or union, which would moderate the influences in this universe and normalize our lives.

We are living in extraordinary times and the world is seething with tensions of all sorts which are results of great upheavals in the field of politics, of racial relations, of communal relations, of familial relations and also individual relations. In the fields of industry and in the fields of art you have the same confusion and tension, and there have been many misinterpretations of innovations which are considered to be creations-indeed very perverse many of them-and that is why we are not able to distinguish between the true and the false, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad. And in this great confusion we are trying to create more tensions by emphasizing differences rather than unities. The struggle for unity, again, has not been well conceived. Unless the mind of man changes and his personality is transformed to become harmonious and integrated in the real sense of the term, that is to say integrated from above rather than integrated from below, we are bound to experience more shocks. It is in this context that the Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga demands our earnest and urgent consideration.

The Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga is, in one sense, the ideal towards which all yogas have striven but have missed. We all know that there have been several kinds of yoga, and Raja yoga is also considered to be one of them. We start with Karma yoga, Gnana yoga and Bhakti yoga. And we consider that these are practicable to all of us. However, we know that the sannyasis have a claim for Gnana yoga; Bhakti yoga is intended for people who are uneducated; and Karma yoga for all and sundry. But in ancient times Karma yoga demanded a knowledge of the technique of rituals; Gnana yoga wanted a competence in certain matters; and Bhakti yoga also wanted competence in certain other respects. But thanks to our modern reformulations of ancient yogas, by very well - meaning reformists, we have lost the meaning of Karma yoga, Gnana yoga and Bhakti yoga. Karma yoga is social work. Gnana yoga is Modern Philosophy, and Bhakti yoga is mere bhajan. May be that all this may lead to something good; I do not deny that each one of them has its use in a limited sense. But, by and large, many of us have felt that they have become meaningless as ideals to be pursued and coveted. Therefore, we have been searching for a real yoga, but here again we have met some people who have stated that the Raja yoga propounded and practised by the sannyasis is an exclusive preserve of sannyasis alone, because vairagya is demanded as a condition, giving up of all activities is very necessary. A state of thoughtlessness must be introduced by force and by practice. And all types of disciplines are necessary before you can have union with God. You all know about that other yoga called Hatha yoga. It is a peculiar and arduous training of the physical body, requiring a tremendous amount of patience, and I should say forbearance. We, therefore, found that Hatha yoga, again, is unsuitable for the large mass of mankind.

Now we have Tantrik systems, which have developed several kinds of techniques, occult in some sense, mysterious in another sense, entirely nauseating in a third sense. And revolting also. All this has set intelligent man, the thinking mind, a task of finding out how to connect oneself with God. Much better was it to deny the existence of God himself. But then God cannot be dismissed by merely saying that He does not exist, even if that contention is maintained with the help of proofs drawn from natural history and materialistic sources. We somehow believe that there must be a supreme force, which is operating in every one of us, making us live the life, but unfortunately somehow, for some reason, whatever the reason that man may try to give, the flow of that supreme energy into us, or that supreme consciousness into us, has got arrested, and we feel as if the sap by which we have been fed is almost running dry.

Therefore, we wanted some one to give us the nature and the manner by which that Supreme Being can be first connected with us. We find in the message and the method given by Babuji that not only is it the most simple thing available to us, and ready at hand, it is something that will do the work and the task to which it has been called. Raja yoga, which he has said is really sovereign yoga, is a yoga where we start our yoga with relation with God rather than wait for it at the end of a long and arduous apprenticeship or discipleship, or Tapas. Our tapas begins with the help of God; under the guidance of God; under the guidance of the Supreme power which goes on giving us the force and the power and the ability and the capacity to absorb the Divine element within us. It may appear strange, but it is a fact that the most distant Being, and the highest and the Ultimate Being, has been lodged in the very cave of our hearts, or rather can be lodged there. We are yet suffering from the view that God is some one who is afar and apart from the reality or the world; that logicians non-mystic view that God is far beyond us; man's finite mind cannot grasp it. The Vedic seer was much bigger in this concept than these little logicians of the Nyaya school.

So God can be brought into the heart of man. Not only can He be brought, but He is willing to come in if you can call Him. You can give an opportunity to Him; but your idols of the cave and the idols of the tribe and the idols of so many sorts prevent that God from entering your heart. Our conceptions are like walls raised between Reality and ourselves, and since you cannot break the walls yourself, somebody has to make holes in the wall you have created. And that is the function, which befalls a teacher of Yoga. He has to pierce through your walls of misunderstanding, of obstruction - the sheaths, which you have raised between Reality and yourself. Well, I do not enter into the discussions or the descriptions as to how these walls have ever come between God and us, both from within and from without. The imageries may not help much, but we know that going outward and outward we do not come across Reality, and it is rather difficult to go inward and inward to probe into the depth of Reality.

Well, these have confronted people and produced all sorts of tensions, and when we can go neither inside nor outside, our concern is with our neighbours against whom we make all complaints and spend our whole lifetime in beating each other, and quarrelling with each other. In fact, we are indulging in a very senseless play because we have no other place to go towards. That is why the confusion today is we have not been able to go either upward or inward, or even outward properly. All our knowledge of the world has not opened us up. All the scriptural literatures have not helped us. They somewhere show a dim, far-off glance of an infinite beyond, but of its possibility here and now we have hardly any. That is the reason why this Raja yoga was propounded by Shri Babuji. For him, as I said, the easiest thing is to get the highest consciousness into you. I almost venture to think that that is the bringing of God to his home in the heart of man! And this is done in a simple way taking the old system of trying to bring the ultimate manas, the first thing that is brought out in creation in its nascent form, and introducing it into the heart of the little, blindfolded and severely ensheathed mind of man, and it can do the job well. And when that Supreme Mind, the mind of God - of course God Himself might have no mind, but He uses the mind in his creation, and that mind finds its affinity with the mind within us, of which it is a product-when that Supreme mind is introduced into the heart, this little mind joining with it enjoys a peculiar sense of release of tensions; a kind of unsheathing of the sheaths seems to happen; a penetrating beyond the walls that have been raised by you, so that it can flow out and flow within. So tensions are removed at once. And man has a gaze of the Infinite, which he pursues afterwards with tremendous devotion. The bringing of the Highest consciousness or mind into the heart of every individual is done by a special process which was, at one stage, common knowledge to all the great men, but which has since been forgotten. It had to be brought back. And now it had to be brought back under circumstances which are quite different from those ages; and for this purpose Babuji has devised or invented a method by which it could be introduced with the least amount of sophistication; the least amount of knowledge on your part; or even faith, as he puts it, or any duty or work that you have to do, in the sense of a ritual or rite. It is done simply, by merely sitting before the Master. And the process by which it is done by him is called transmission. Once this transmission takes place, the mind within opens up towards this new frontier. Calmness settles on it. Harmony seems to develop between himself and his members. And afterwards he finds it developing in a larger sphere. Even natural events and oppositions yield to this new force introduced into the heart. This is the power of transmission which Shri Ram Chandraji-Babuji-has perfected, and has been using on all types and grades of people-intellectuals, non-intellectuals, learned men, ignorant men, the rich and the poor, without any difference whatsoever. And the results have been, from my own experience for the last twelve years, uniformly of the same order-the de-tensioning of man.

It is not that you will see God face-to-face as some might say. There are no visions offered; and there is no need for visions in this marga. Experience is not vision. Vision is only one type of experience. Experience is much deeper in the heart; and a peculiar kind of activity of harmonized existence comes. It may not be very sudden. It is not expected to be sudden. It has to become natural, so that your body might become accustomed to this new dynamism and this new movement which has taken place, thanks to this transmission.

This is the unique thing found in this system, and which is not found in any other. If they had, they have forgotten it! And the Raja yogins who have been writing all these books, and translating Patanjali's Yoga Sutras again and again, most learned men, and commented on them also, missed the most important thing namely, that you cannot control your mind with your efforts, you can only control your mind by creating more tensions.

By the ordinary textbook method of Raja yoga, without transmission, you can only create tensions, and as Sri Krishna said, it requires quite a large amount of abhyasa, vyavasaya-cultivation and culturing, or ploughing shall I say, before you can bring the mind under check. But checking the mind is not our goal. It is only the means. And Yogascitta Vritti Nirodhaha doesn't at all give the full definition. The real thing is, if you connect yourself with God then everything will follow from it.

So, first let me be connected with God, with that Ultimate force, which is called by Babuji Pranahuti or transmission. The offering of the very breath of Brahman into you. It is manas that has become prana, as the Upanishad puts it, and it is by that you are all living. But the prana with which you are all living has become so enfeebled, so much so that you would like to give up this type of prana even. How to give new life to you? You have to get it from the source again. And he is certainly a god who can bring that source back into my heart! To re-enliven one, make one feel a new man with a new life, and a new possibility for mankind - that is the reason why this pranahuti principle of transmission is very important. If you have all the other things with you and not this they are like dead things with you. Instruments which have no meaning, methods which have no value; but if you have this all of them get built up, and you find everything makes for your harmonization and integration. This prana-ahuti-many of us think that this pranahuti is merely the offering of argya into the fire, the ghee into the fire. And in our eating we always feed the five pranas with some food and call it pranahuti. But what is it that you are offering into this fire of the heart, which has fire of a greater life and an immortal one? I believe God himself offers his very breath into us, that is, His mind which is resting in peace which is unfathomable, and which cannot be broken by any amount of confusion. That is what is fed into us. You may call it the sacrifice of the Purusha in the language of the ancient Veda. The Supreme consciousness is offered into you. And this we call the supreme thought, the supreme mind; and when that is introduced our Yoga starts. The others are preliminaries, and as Master has, I think, written somewhere, the real initiation comes long afterwards when the connection between you and the Ultimate is established.

I have suggested, in a way, that the very touch of the Master's life force into one is the beginning of a yoga that will not terminate till the final, complete yoga is had. We start with yoga, we culminate in identity, in union. Such a Sayujya is beyond any description. But we start with it. We grow more and more with it. All the sadhanas become natural to us. The so-called yama and niyama are naturally established in our system because they are basic elements and characters of the Ultimate consciousness which has come to dwell within us; which has come to operate on our very urge. Our organism is not something repellant, something karmically determined by blindness and darkness and ignorance. An omniscient, omnipotent force, such as the prana of the Divine, the supreme mind, the supreme thought, when it enters into our whole being, every one of the several parts of our body and mind get new force, new direction. They become truthful. They yearn for the infinite Brahman. They neither steal nor rob, nor cause injury. Their cleanliness is natural to them. Their devotion to Reality is perfect. And God almost dwells in them, because they have surrendered willingly, freely, to be moulded by the Divine light and the Divine force. But even that is not something which you are asked to do. It does it quietly, naturally. And may be it appears fantastic, it appears almost that I am speaking something in exaggerated language, but I may confess to this that slowly, imperceptibly, many of our abhyasis have changed for the better. And to them there is no effort to speak the truth; there is no effort to practice brahmacharya, or an effort even to love God; or effort for devotion. Knowledge comes naturally. Action comes naturally. We are established in the yoga of gnana and karma and bhakti in a natural way. And all the controls over the several portions of one's body also, I believe, if wanted, come naturally to us.

The Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga then takes us naturally to this point of a normal evolution of the human being to the most high spiritual stature by developing his moral virtues. Indeed Shri Ram Chandraji has prescribed, in his Ten Commandments, the practices which might be helpful for bringing about and preserving the force and effort which the Divine makes after the pranahuti has been given, or during the period during which it is regularly being given. These commandments are rather instructions, which he would like one to practice as a way of co-operation with him so that one's higher evolution may be made easy and swift. But even these instructions sometimes appear conventional to me, because one naturally becomes resigned to the will of the Master, and one does everything as if effortlessly. Occasions for one's choice of events as to how one has to do, and how not to do certain things become infrequent. Occasions for going wrong normally do not occur. It seems, as it were, that the Master is looking on all the time. And, therefore, you feel the omnipervasive presence of the Master with you. The Divine consciousness and Presence will be vouchsafed to you whether you are asleep or awake. It is a phenomenon, which I have experienced again and again. That is why I speak with a little amount of pride that it has been possible for me to experience these things which I felt were beyond my reach.

Many of the experiences recorded in some of the Upanishads get a confirmation, and you find that the system, which our Master has propounded, is sublime, simple, and very easy to practice by everybody. This is the normal method. The extra-normal or artificial methods are where you are asked to practice these things, and even if you practice them for twenty years and thirty years, yet we have got many people who will tell you that they have had falls, disillusionment, and so on. And I know of so many men, who have come away from some other system feeling, at the very first touch of this system, that they have been made perfect and pure.

So you see that the Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga, this unique system of simplicity, dependent upon an acceptance and trust as my Master would put it, that the Divine force which he gives as the breath of your breath and the life of your life, and the eye of your eye and the ear of your ear, and the mind of your mind, can work a transformation of your entire personality, structured as it is and fed as it is on the normal experiences of the world. Such a change is unbelievable. I concede that it is very difficult to believe that such a thing could happen. But if you can believe certain unbelievable things which are not even credible, and which you cannot verify, I am not asking too much when I request you to give this a chance to see whether it can transform you.

The method is merely to sit before the Master and get or ask for his pranahuti-transmission, and see whether it will not bring a state of peace and calm. A state of self-recollectedness where the thoughts do not fly about meaninglessly. And where you can tolerate the whole worlds' thoughts for they do not interfere with the calmness and placidity of your inner being; and where you gradually enter deeper and deeper into the levels of consciousness which have been told by the Upanishads. And the promise given by the Yoga Sutras that you enter into a samprajnata samadhi where you are in a non-sensory, non-mental state of thought which is called Prajna in the Upanishads, and taken bodily by the Yoga Sutras - Samprajnata. And when you go to the 'turiya' state, still higher, you come to a state when you transcend the prajna-asamprajnata samadhi. And when that state occurs you almost enter into what is called the sahaja-avastha-that is normal to, and natural to, a person who has got to the highest possibility of release from the prakritic soul. Then he has gone beyond the prakriti, and the trigunas of the prajna, and he enters into that asamprajnata samadhi--non-mental, non-sensory, non-prakritic state, which is natural to the Self-that is the Purusha. And all this is done with the help of the Divine force which has come down from above. In this system, then, the Master, starting with this transmission, takes you gradually, tenderly and yet very cautiously, step by step, beyond the circle of maya, beyond the circles of ego, beyond the circles of splendour to the very Central Being, which is the natural state which ought to be attained, and which can be attained by this process alone.

There is no stress on faith. There is only an emphasis on a continuous process of development, evolution, transformation, and finally, perhaps, even a transcendence. That supreme transcendent state which is called the Central state is something which is, for the first time, rendered possible whilst yet within this body by the techniques and methods devised or invented by Shri Ram Chandraji, our Babuji. That is a very good thing, that with such small beginnings the greatest thing can be achieved. For we are working with the greatest and most sovereign principle in creation-the Divine mind which has been brought down, thanks to the efforts of Babuji, in such a way that it can be given or administered into almost everybody, whatever the status of his evolution in any other system or in any walk of life. We are expected to train ourselves as householders, not as renouncers. Why should we renounce, just to get this? And if it comes why should we renounce it? The only renunciation is the renunciation of the will to live in the idols, which you have created and worshipped. All that is demanded of you, if anything at all, is a willingness to open yourselves for this great experiment in the divinisation of man. It has been tested again and again in the past, and it is in that sense most suited to our modern age; to our modern temperament; to the complexities that have come down to us in such measure as were undreamt of in the past. It has given us a way, and a meaning to our lives. And I only pray that this benefit which he has given to some of us and which he is yearning to give to all people will be fruitful and successful. It is something which I feel to be a blessing that has come to us because the transformation of man, the harmonization of man, the birth of an integrated individual, and their continuous birth in our country and elsewhere alone can bring about a transformation in the world crisis and tensions; and man would be fulfilling the goal which he has set within himself of becoming a wise man, but one who yet lives humbly and in holiness, in God, for God, by God. I do not know if there is anything greater to the living in God, for God, by God. Some have emphasized they can live in God; many of them have stated they live for God; but who lives by God? And with the very force which God has given to us? And this third thing is most important. We mean to live our lives with the force, with the breath, with the vision, with the audition, and with the conscience which He gives us as men determined to achieve perfection in this world and in yonder worlds. Fear we have none. There can be no fear in this system. God is not feared but loved; and love, as he puts it, is the pranahuti for him - a self-offering of himself into the fire of your hearts.

May you all profit by this great transmission of my Master.