Everyday Yogi Read online

  EVERYDAY YOGI

  H.S. SHIVAPRAKASH

  To the Guru, who comes in many forms

  Aneka janma samprapta karmendhana vidahine,

  Atmajnanagni danena tasmai shri gurave namah.

  He who burns with the fire of self-awareness the charcoal

  of karma accumulated through many lives,

  Before that Guru, I bow down.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  1.The Eye of the Storm

  2.Three Paths, Three Yogis

  3.The Need for Atheism

  4.Only Facts, No Fiction

  5.The Seed of the Mantra

  6.Those Who Strum the Inner Strings

  7.In Search of the Heart

  8.A Personal Jesus

  By Way of Not Concluding

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  This book is not my autobiography. As my life has been a series of painful crises, I have not tried to write an autobiography; I do not want to burden my dear readers with my tale of woe. I have always tried to conceal the details of my life in my considerable body of poetry and drama, though the agony I have experienced makes up the emotional content of my works. Further, I have always considered creative writing as an escape from, not an elaboration of, my life story.

  The book you are about to read is an account of the experiences I’ve had in the course of my encounters with the spiritual realm. Some of these real-life experiences seemed to me to be fictional, so I decided to write about them. Part of my purpose was also to write about some spiritual adepts I have known in my life. These were people who were immensely interesting as human beings and had fascinating stories to tell.

  When Batteesa Raga, the Kannada version of this book, appeared in 2000, it became extremely popular. It topped the best-seller list in Karnataka for almost a year. Though it shocked a majority of the readers of my drama and poetry as it challenged their image of me as a rationalist and progressive intellectual, the book won me thousands of readers from other walks of life. I started getting countless letters of appreciation and questions from my new readers. Many of them wanted to meet me to get advice on their personal and spiritual problems. Though I tried to help them in whatever way I could, I did not want to arrogate to myself the role of a guru.

  The phenomenal popularity of the Kannada version of this book has convinced me that it may have some meaning for readers in other languages. It is this thought that has led to the translation of the book into English. I hope my English readers will be able to find answers as it has happened in the case of my Kannada readers. However, I want to caution the readers of this English version about what not to expect from the book.

  My book is not a consistent or detailed exposition of the life and acts of the masters. Nor is it about one single guru. Fortunate are the people who find everything in one guru, but one master–disciple theory does not work for everybody. Sri Ramakrishna and Ram Surat Kumar had more than one guru. So did Acharya Abhinavagupta. Some great gurus like Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi) did not even need a human guru. I have had several gurus in my life. Maybe I needed to go to diverse masters because I am so dull and could not learn properly from one guru!

  Despite the fact that I talk about several masters, there is a hidden unity behind diverse gurus and paths, and this is the theme of my book.

  My book is different for yet another reason. There are several well-known books by disciples of Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. Robert Svoboda’s three volumed Aghora is another remarkable work. Though I have also had experiences with some well-known yogis like Amma, Ram Surat Kumar, Nirmal Guruji and Baba Virsa Singh, the guru figures that dominate these pages are neither well known nor supported by a huge following. They have all chosen to live obscure lives committed to their own respective missions and to communicate with a small group of people destined to meet them. Further, this book is not just about them; it is also about my experiences with them.

  My Sufi guru made a distinction between gurus of this world and cosmic gurus. Gurus of this world are useful in that they attract a huge following and make spirituality popular. However, cosmic gurus are of another kind. They prefer to work for the evolution of all, far away from public view, and their lives are lacking in external drama.

  In this book, I talk about both gurus and yogis. Let me explain the difference between the two. A yogi is one who has attained the integration of the self. He has been able to balance, within himself, the opposites: the solar and lunar breaths; knowledge and emotion; purusha and prakriti; Shiva and Shakti. A guru need not be a yogi, while a yogi can also be a guru. A guru is one who opens a disciple’s inner eye through energy transmission. He transmits wisdom mainly through non-discursive communication. A teacher, on the other hand, merely gives knowledge.

  The integration of the self can happen through various means such as hatha yoga, bhakti yoga, vamachara and even kavya. Everything in a yogi’s life is ordered around a centre, which is pure awareness. Visually, one can see this integration of the yogic mind as a mandala or yantra, while a non-yogic mind can be represented by a jumble of lines.

  Whether you are a complete non-believer or a passionate believer, you are sure to find some interesting material in this book. A Marxist friend of mine who was very critical of the content said, ‘But it takes a lot of guts to write stuff like this. I wouldn’t dare. I don’t know why I keep on recommending it to everybody in spite of my conscious disapproval.’ If you are a believer following a particular path, you may get some useful hints here, but please keep an open mind. One of the most illiterate reviews of the Kannada text attacked it for not being spiritual enough. ‘How can a spiritual seeker experience negative states like depression or suicidal urges? Isn’t spirituality meant to improve health and peace of mind?’ This reviewer had made up his mind about what spirituality was, but I have not, and am still trying to understand.

  As most of us do, I have switched many roles in my life, consciously or unconsciously. I have been a poet, playwright, director, student, teacher, activist, editor, translator, wanderer, healer, tarot card reader and numerologist. I have spent years learning wrestling and the martial arts. However, the role of the seeker has been the most important one for me, and that journey is the focus of this book. I share with you my spiritual explorations from early childhood till my mid-forties. I have had many more experiences since, but these are very different from the encounters I talk about now. Maybe I will write about them some other time.

  I thank my dear student Devapriya and her husband, Saurav, for pushing me into translating this book. It was Saurav who suggested the title of the English translation, which is more in keeping with the theme than the Kannada title.

  A big thank you to V.K. Karthika at HarperCollins India for agreeing to publish this book even before the translation was ready. I am particularly grateful to my editor, Rukmini Chawla Kumar, who lavished great care on the text and always asked the right questions. The book is so much better for her interventions.

  Last but not least, let me thank my Kannada readers for their overwhelming response but for which I would not have thought of translating the book at all.

  Berlin, H.S. Shivaprakash

  February 2014

  Introduction

  The material in this book covers the first four decades of my life, though most of the experiences narrated here occurred while I was in my thirties.

  I’d like to tell you briefly about my family background. Born in Shivagange in 1902, my father, B. Shivamurty Shastry, was a well-known Sanskrit scholar. He was also an editor, and an author of many books on the culture, epigraphy and literature of Karnataka. His specialization was in the area of Virashaiva philos
ophy. In the early part of his life, he had been a schoolteacher and an expositor of the sacred stories, the Shivakatha, of the Shaivite saints.

  During the course of his career, he received many accolades, for instance, the Padma Shri from the Government of India, the Panditaratnam from the Maharajah of Mysore and an honorary doctorate from Karnataka University, Dharwar. He was also the president of the Kannada Sahitya Parishad for three consecutive terms. During the last thirty-five years of his life, he earned his livelihood by running a printing press along with publishing and printing a monthly journal called Sharana Sahitya, which focused on literature, culture and religion. He passed away in 1976 at the age of seventy-three.

  My mother, Mudduveerammal, was my father’s second wife. Born in Peraiyur near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, she worked as a Tamil teacher in a primary school till she got married. An avid reader of books in Tamil and Kannada, she was a treasure house of information on the Shaivite saints. She also knew many Tamilian songs and stories. She passed away from cancer in 1973, aged thirty-nine.

  I grew up in Bangalore. After getting an honours degree in English literature, I got a job in 1976 as an English lecturer in the Department of Collegiate Education, which looks after the postings and administration of all government-run colleges in Karnataka. My first posting was in Tumkur. In 1982, I was transferred to Bangalore and then moved to Delhi in 1997 to take up the job of editing Sahitya Akademi’s literary journal, Indian Literature.

  I got married in 1976. Things began to go wrong almost immediately. After the most trying married life, I filed for divorce in 1989. It did not come easily though, and it was only in 2009 that I managed to get my divorce.

  Throughout my life, I have taken a deep interest in diverse philosophies, but the thread running through them is my spiritual quest. In my college years, I was drawn to Marxism and socialism. Raymond Williams and Noam Chomsky’s school of social anarchism shaped most of my ideas on society and politics. During my Marxist days, I was also drawn to Theravada Buddhism. Simultaneously, I was attracted to the philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Later, I developed a deep interest in yoga, tantra and Sufism. I will talk about all this in the book.

  My quest for new philosophies ended when I found, quite by accident, a Kashmir Shaivism text called Spandakarika. When I began to read it, I felt this was the book that explained accurately all my experiences on the path of sadhana. Though many books on this school of philosophy are now available, I would recommend that interested readers read Kashmir Shaivism by Swami Lakshmanjoo, which remains the best introduction to this fascinating philosophy.

  For those who do not have the time to read it, I summarize here the tenets of this school. Kashmir Shaivism recognizes Paramashiva (also known as Bhairava or Parasamvit) as the First Principle. This is Universal Consciousness, free and dynamic. As an expression of its unlimited freedom, it goes through several stages of self-division and self-veiling, continuously moving between the One and the Many without sacrificing its self-awareness. The One constitutes the unity underlying the diversity whereas the Many makes up the beauty and variety of experience.

  The expansion of the One into the world of sensory experience is called unmesha. Its opposite, contraction, nimesha, is the movement of the phenomenal world towards the centre. Since all experience consists of vibrations of consciousness, spandas, experience can be likened to the opening and closing of a flower. The power that expands is Paramashiva, the Cosmic Self or light, prakasha, and the process of expansion is called Shakti or self-awareness, vimarsha.

  This rejects the theory of the world as an illusion because that would compromise the eternity of the Cosmic Self, which is always united with its own power in all stages of expansion and contraction. The self-division and the resultant self-veiling of Paramashiva is an expression of his joy and freedom.

  Paramashiva performs five functions (creation, protection, destruction, disappearance and grace) with his infinite powers of ichchha (will), jnana (knowledge) and kriya shakti (action). Through his lila, he shrinks into ‘anu’ (individual) and continues to perform functions, but his powers are now contracted and limited. This is how all beings, living and non-living, participate in these five functions.

  We human beings participate in creation when we make something; in protection when we take care of something; in destruction when we destroy something; in disappearance when we hide from others or disguise ourselves; and in grace when we do acts of love and kindness.

  In Indian mythology, the image of Nataraja is symbolic of five functions: damaru in the upper right hand for creation; torch in the upper left hand for destruction; the left hand that points downwards for protection; the right foot lifted off the ground for disappearance; and the right hand that indicates varada, the attitude of blessing or grace.

  While the Cosmic Self does all this without losing its totality and freedom we, the essence of Paramashiva, fragment into individual souls because this act of self-division expresses the creative and playful nature of Paramashiva. However, the difficulty arises when we lose our connection with the Source and cling to our separateness as a result of maya and various kinds of malas, impurities. In this philosophy, maya is not illusion but the principle of contraction and self-delimitation following our forgetting of our Shiva nature. This is the negative aspect of maya (adhomaya). When the positive aspect of maya (urdhwamaya) becomes active, we reconnect with the Cosmic Self, not intellectually but experientially, through awareness.

  The process that enables us to achieve this is sadhana. Sadhana can be of different kinds depending on one’s present state of evolution. Therefore, it can range from rituals to the most esoteric meditative practices. Though the guru is necessary on the spiritual path, there need not always be just one guru or even a human guru, as the ultimate Guru is Paramashiva, the light of one’s own consciousness.

  The uniqueness of this philosophy lies in two aspects: first, recognizing the dynamic nature of consciousness; and second, considering freedom not as a withdrawal from active life but a greater involvement flowing from the awareness of the self as Paramashiva, the source of unlimited joy and freedom.

  This philosophy is not contradictory to other schools of philosophical thought, which can be perceived as limited versions of the overarching truth contained in Kashmir Shaivism. This truth is anuttara yoga, the yoga beyond which there is nothing. According to it, everything is one, not at the level of details but at the level of essence, ekarastava.

  The experience of self-realization based on these principals is most exquisitely expressed in the following poetic texts, available in English:

  1) Dakshinamurthi Strotram ascribed to Shankaracharya

  2) Shivastotravali by Utpalacharya

  3) Amritanubhav by Sant Jnaneshwar

  4) Poems of Akka Mahadevi and Lalleshwari

  ONE

  The Eye of the Storm

  I felt the first stirrings of a spiritual life as a child, when I discovered that I had a great fascination—and an equally great disgust—for God.

  My father was one of the reasons I wanted to rebel against God. Though a great religious scholar, he was very short-tempered and womanized shamelessly. I was furious with God for allowing my father to torment my kind-hearted and docile mother, her frail body helpless before my father’s beatings. However, in spite of everything, my mother was in the habit of worshipping Shiva with great devotion. When my father was raging and ranting, my mother would quietly sit down for Shiva worship and sing the devotional compositions of Tamil saints, which were highly soothing in an atmosphere of tension.

  My intellect rejected the Divine because all my mother’s devotion came to naught, and her anguish continued. Yet, my heart was drawn to devotion for it offered a space one could crawl into in order to recuperate before returning to everyday challenges. No matter how great the challenge, I felt it was possible to overcome it through devotion. In one sense, my mother was my first guru.

  Despite the conflict within
me, there were a handful of people around who awakened and nurtured my interest in spirituality. They planted tiny seeds of faith in me, though not always consciously.

  In my childhood, I had the occasion to meet several monks who frequented our house. They did not seem particularly evolved to me, and I found it difficult to respect them. I felt that their saffron clothes were more a costume they wore than an expression of sincere devotion. When the ritual of padapuja, the washing of the guru’s feet, was carried out for them in our Virashaiva house, I was required to drink the water after the ritual. I found this demeaning, and I hated the fact that these saffron-clad mortals enjoyed this kind of treatment.

  The one monk I revered was Sri Mrityunjaya Swami from Dharwad. Whenever my father went to see him, he would send back for me a crisp five-rupee note along with his blessings. Though five rupees meant a lot in those days, this money was sacred to me as it came from a monk who exuded a rare kind of tranquility. After reading Nanna Rasayatre, the autobiography of the great Hindustani maestro, Mallikarjun Mansoor, as an adult, I discovered that it was Sri Mrityunjaya Swami who had played a decisive role in Mansoor’s life.

  Everything a yogi does has a symbolic meaning. What was the secret of the five-rupee note? Retrospectively, I understand. It was the five-syllable mantra that opened new avenues in my spiritual life because it was with this mantra that Swami Satyananda Saraswati had initiated me years later as an adult. I shall talk about this initiation in a subsequent chapter. My ultimate guru, my mahaguru, Shivalinga Swami, also gave me an experience where the five syllables of the mantra became the five elements of the cosmos.

  I do not remember when my heart started gravitating towards the guru tatwa, the guru principle, but somehow, it seemed natural that this would happen. The guru principle is central to Virashaiva spirituality. Belonging to a Virashaiva family, I constantly heard stories of how gurus transformed the lives of their disciples. The story of how Allama Prabhu, a yogi poet whom I adore, was transformed into an incomparable yogi after his contact with his guru, Animisha, was particularly compelling. So was the story of the sea change that Sri Ramakrishna brought about in Swami Vivekananda, which I had read about in my school books.