What The Yogi Teaches

“You cannot live by feelings and emotions; you have to live by your intuition and consciousness.”

—

Yogi Bhajan

I have said before that emotion and feeling is the language of the universe, it is the one element that causes the universe to align quickly to what it is you believe, through feeling.  It is not by mind but through feeling that one grasps the infinite.  When one is able to make peace with their feelings that are misaligned with their higher self,  a natural alignment begins to flow and the All is felt in the moment.  Sadly the Yogi is not entirely correct, and perhaps only a perceptual problem, but words have power for they focus the mind.  Words are things, but how we use them determines our vibrational frequency.  Being careful about words is being careful about what one knows and has experienced as the arbiter of what is meaningful.  I know that this sounds very pedantic and stuffy.  But if you think about words and how we ascribe meaning to them, some interesting things float to the top.

Everything is vibration.  Words have it too, but words are vessels.  I can use the same word and get five different meanings out of the same word, all with very different energies.  Its about intent, you see?  I can say “Oh that’s KILLER!”  and we know that I am saying how great something is.  But a killer is also someone who is pretty off, off enough to go on a rampage, right?  Just as we have associations built into words, associations can also lead you absent a deeper knowing into areas that are not so aware of just what it is that you are talking about.  Sometimes the problem people have with the New Age movement is that some words and their use can be vague.  Or feel vague.  When something is vague, it can have a range of associations.  When you do not understand something fully, you can assume things about something that just isn’t so, and it can lead you more into your own illusions and misunderstandings because of the vacuum of meaning, and instead of clearing things up, it only leads to still more misunderstanding as we seek to insert what we believe or feel into the mix. This happens all the time in religious texts because people are bringing what THEY believe, and this is very much built on the Law of Attraction, you see, as we seek to find those things that match us, even if they in truth do not (we often wind up MAKING them fit).  Very often people will want the given religion to serve where they are instead of being served by the teachings to bring them to a better place.  Meanings get corrupted from their original intent as a result of this, and so you can see just how difficult it is for a religion to serve us (one reason why Krishnamurti sought the pathless path which eschewed ANY religion as a result of this thorny problem existing in human nature which is the tendency to move from truth to some distortion of it which winds up reflecting the person’s own collective distortions about how they feel the world is when in fact its just about their own unresolved feelings and notions that have blinded them from the Source of all being….which is beyond all religion, and beyond all words even!). The teachings of some great person or teacher then gets bent to the uses of the individual, you see. This is as it should be because we will always do this, probably as long as we have these distorted lenses of perception at work within us.  We will always seek to find what is meaningful in the moment, and what we find meaningful is based more on our current awareness in the moment, where we are, and those lenses that we have at work in our perceptions.

One very good example of how this all happens, I think, is the gospel of repentance as it has been accepted by mainstream Christianity.  I wont go deep into this, but it has to do with how texts are translated.  Repentance has to do with changing one’s mind, but it also has wound up meaning a lot of different things, which are about punishment and doing bad deeds (and the problem here is not with the deeds but the feeling and thinking that lead to them…deeds are a symptom of something still deeper).  Even the scholars agree that this is so, but what if the followers missunderstood what Jesus meant when he said “Change your way!”  The word “Way” in Greek has an association with the mind, and its entirely possible that Jesus meant “change your mind” as in change how you see things, how you feel about things.  One disciple once asked Jesus how they should treat their enemies and Jesus replied “like they are not your enemies.”  The way you treat others in this situation involves a real change in how you feel, in how you think and react to others.  It is also, not surprisingly, the path to peace.  Considering that Jesus spoke all of his teachings in Aramaic and the gospels we have now are written in Greek, there is enough of a disconnect with the two languages to provide room for interpretation.  The thing to realize about Aramaic is that it is a highly contextual language.  Remember how I used the word “killer!” earlier?  Aramaic is very much this way.  You have to understand what Jesus was trying to get across or you could misunderstand the entire thrust of the teaching.  This is the problem I have had for years with Christian texts from the get-go.  Something bothered me from a very early age about them, and it wasn’t until fairly recently when I began reading some of the gnostic texts that surfaced in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945 that a light bulb went off in my head.  Here were texts that were banned by the early church for being heretical. They were ordered burned, and their proponents discredited.  In his article, Rev. Dr. Dave Oester, DD., PhD.  states of the history of the competing viewpoints in the early church:

The Gnostic Gospels have been suppressed for centuries, but when Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code hit the best seller list, people starting asking questions about the man called Jesus. Brown’s novel focuses on the conclusion articulated in Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, which is the pseudonym of Henry Soskin.

Their conclusion was that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child. They also concluded that there is a secret society known as Priory of Sion (PS) dating back to the First Crusade and the formation of the Knights Templar as its military and financial front. The Priory of Sion protects the royal claimants of the Merovingian dynasty, because they may be the literal descendants of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene.

In addition, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed that the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the dark days of the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was descended from King David and high priest Aaron, thus, all male could have laid claim to both the throne and the office of high priest of Jerusalem.

The Gnostics was the flip side of the orthodox Christians. The winners always rewrite history to match their version of events. The same was true when the orthodox sect dominated the Gnostic sects. Rewriting history was easy; anything that Emperor Constantine opposed the bishops rejected from the Council of Nicene in AD 325.

The Gnostic writings suggested lost knowledge about Jesus that was not included in the formation of what we call the New Testament today. These writings suggested the human side of Jesus and that revelation was not acceptable after Jesus was finally elevated to the level of a God in AD 325.

This Gnostic biblical version presented a totally different side to the teachings of Jesus that included the early Orthodox Church policy of bloodshed, corruption, and the genocide of all other Gospel accounts of Jesus not approved by them. In these nearly 100 gospels, too many accounts showed Jesus was just a man that violated the accepted stance of the Orthodox Church.
The debate erupted in a showdown three centuries later when bishops met at the invitation of Emperor Constantine, who provided them with shelter and food. This was the first Council of Nicene where the bishops were told by the Emperor what teachings were acceptable and which were not.

History notes Emperor Constantine as the man who unified the Christian Church. However, this unification had a price. Emperor Constantine ordered any writings in disagreement with the official view destroyed. Huge bonfires lit the evening sky, as Gnostic scrolls were set aflame, much like the Nazis attempt to eradicate the Jews in Germany. Constantine’s unification process meant death to all that presented anything contrary to the official position of the Orthodox Church.

Prior to the Council of Nicene in AD 325, the structure of the orthodox Christian sect had no formalized doctrines and no physical church buildings. They were competing sects among all of the other Christian groups. They took their name from Emperor Constantine, the Roman Catholic Church, meaning the Roman universal Christians. As a reward for supporting the orthodox view, Emperor Constantine gave them their first church building a year later.
Source:  http://www.ghostweb.com/gnostic.html

Since words themselves are vessels for meaning, being able to discern the meaning is important, but if you are talking about something as mysterious as what Jesus was likely talking about, its easy to miss the point entirely.  This is where FEELING comes in.  When  you can FEEL into the message, the gold will always shine in the sand.  Always.  Something in you entirely mysterious yet attuned to the abiding spirit of the thing will show itself not through hearing words always but through feeling.  But how is this? How do we KNOW what someone is trying to say is what we think it is? Behind the words is the intent.  By using your infinite self, without competing static from the earth-bound individual self, you can navigate through feeling.  The thing though, is you have to be able to overcome all of your biases, all based perfectly well in your feelings about how things are or should be, and are all bound up within FEELINGS which themselves are unresolved and which turn in you, keeping greater awareness from happening.  You are getting static from the individual self and it can keep you from glimpsing the broader realm of experience.

I suspect that Yogi Bhajan meant to not let your unresolved emotions to rule you.  I do not know his teachings, but when I feel it, I sense a certain semantic problem….a quibble on one level, but there is an aspect to this that isn’t quite on the mark and goes to understanding all of this, which is untangling the emotional threads that are karmic from your true nature as an infinite self which also FEELS.
Feeling and emotion are so close to one another.  Emotion IS feeling, the ACT of feeling most often, while feeling does not always involve emotion as we think of it.  Pleasure and bliss are things we do not think of as emotions, but they certainly are feelings.  The connection to the Universal Self, the Infinite Self, is through feeling and tends not to be tied up in emotions that are raw, unresolved, hurt, or otherwise. The feeling of the Infinite Self is itself settled within its own bliss and pleasure.  It is perfect, it is not dual, but unified. The smaller self, the individual self reincarnating here on earth is itself dual.  It is the soap bubble awareness that I have written about before in the Particle/Wave duality that is our experience here. So in a sense, Bhajan is correct.  Don’t let your raw emotions rule you.  However, the channel through which you experience your emotions is the same part of you that glimpses and experiences the Universal Consciousness, the Infinite self!

So how do we keep from being tripped up by our emotions?  That, dear reader, is the subject of another blog entry and I hope that you look into it to find out what I have to say because there isn’t much being discussed on the planet right now about how to deal effectively with karma, which for me are those unresolved emotional issues that have tripped us up perhaps from the Beginning of your entire journey on the planet!  This issue is where Awareness is coupled with Grace in a process of relinquishing what may have been an attachment to something that has done little else but cause you trouble and hurt.  Time to surrender the world of this for something far better….

Just as a historical aside, look for my blog Did Jesus Live In India? which looks at a man who had been crucified and who taught in a very similar way to the historical Jesus who lived in India with a woman whose name was Mary.  In fact, there is a grave stone that shows the nail marks in the feet of this individual that are consistent with how the Romans placed the feet together.