SreeNarayanaGuru

[gopu]

CHAPTER IX.

The title here refers to the most publicized and misunderstood of all topics in Indian spirituality, namely, Yoga.
Yoga means union of two aspects of the same Self, as if happening within consciousness itself. And further, this union has to be conceived under two distinct heads as happening between the horizontally dual aspects, and as taking place between the lower and higher selves vertically. This delicate distinction has not been brought out by Patanjali in his Yoga-Sutras. The four different definitions of Yoga found in the Bhagavad Gita too, although elaborate in their own way, leave out this delicate matter where the union is both Samyoga (contiguous association) and Sambandha (continuous association) at once, of the tendencies within the Self. The very first verse makes this clear in its striking definition. The joy of being thus unitively absorbed in the Absolute is here seen to be more accentuated than in the case of Bhakti, which is in this respect a more passive or negative state, although both belong to the positive side of contemplation as a whole.

[gopu]

CHAPTER X.

To complete the contemplative cycle, the supreme value of release or emancipation is here the subject-matter. We find in the world many persons who claim spirituality: how are they to be classified and graded according to inner principles proper to the subject of contemplation?
Almost like a book on grammar, the Guru here excels in analysis and divides and even numbers the possible varieties of mystical and contemplative experience into various grades and sub-grades. It will be noticed that, in the higher grades, all matters of doing good in a philanthropic sense drop off, although in less perfect stages they exist, as it were, on sufferance. Piety and works have to part company somewhere, and when one is totally absorbed in unity with Brahman, the Absolute, no question of a second value outside the self can even arise. Self-realisation in the fullest sense, when a man forgets himself in the Absolute completely, is the last mark of punctuation to which this garland takes us. It catches up thereby with the very first chapter where the world is given primacy as against the Self that is given primacy in this last of all chapters. The garland thus retains its link with the beginning of the subject, and a full cycle of contemplative topics has thus been covered in a graded inner order, always under the same normative reference to the Absolute.