The Search for Enlightenment

Traditionally, the goal of spiritual practice has been to attain enlightenment, but is that what today's seekers are really after?

By Colleen Morton Busch

Photograph: Don Hong-Hai courtesy Photos Gallery, Berkeley, CA www.photosgallery.net ruphotos@earthlink.com 510-594-1613

Anna Ashby wears a headset and looks warmly into the camera to include the thousands of Siddha yogis watching around the world as she guides us into the aisles of the cavernous Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. Ashby, a yoga teacher in the Hatha Yoga Department of the Siddha Yoga organization, then leads us in 20 minutes of breath-centered stretches—doing her small part to prepare us for the journey to spiritual awakening.

As we return to our seats for meditation, Ashby reminds us to connect to the ground through our sitting bones as best we can in the uncomfortable red-velvet chairs. By the time the 10-hour intensive is drawing to a close—after Ashby's brief hatha yoga sessions, meditations, talks, and more than two straight hours of ecstatic chanting with Siddha Yoga's spiritual leader, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda—many attendees have drifted into the aisles again. They raise their arms and open them wide to their teacher, inviting a direct transmission of bliss, love, and higher consciousness.

I have never been in the presence of a person believed to be enlightened, as Gurumayi is. I don't know what I expect exactly, but something like a priest—restrained, paternal, and heavy with the weight of knowledge and spiritual duty. But Gurumayi seems to me light, not heavy, in her being. She sits in the center of the stage and sings her heart out. She is warm, funny, joyful, radiant. She is also remarkably at ease and generous with her love.

Siddha yogis believe that Gurumayi, as a guru in the Siddha Yoga lineage, has the ability to awaken her followers to their own inherent potential for enlightenment, a transmission called shaktipat. Ashby herself has had direct experience of the "guru's grace": When she was 20 years old, she got shaktipat from a Siddha Yoga intensive led by Gurumayi, and she has been living in the ashram ever since.

Before the intensive, I was counseled that I would receive shaktipat. I am not drawn to study with one teacher or to follow one way, but I am struck by the heart-opening experience of harmony and connection fostered by Gurumayi's disarming presence and the ecstatic group chanting. I feel a swelling of the heart, a breaking down of borders that will last well into the evening, and a rising awareness of the possibility for transformation. And this is what Siddha Yoga promises—not that you are instantly enlightened, but that shaktipat can awaken you to the path. It can open the door, but how far you go after entering will depend on your choices, on how intently you practice and study and serve the teachings.

Siddha yogis are committed to yoga as a path to radical transformation—to the awakening or enlightenment that is traditionally considered the "goal" of yoga and meditation practice. However, if polls are true indicators, the greater yoga world is not so aligned with tradition: Only 16 percent of 1,555 yoga practitioners who took a survey on the YogaJournal.com Web site indicated that the goal of their yoga practice was to pursue the path to enlightenment, when the other choices were to stay fit and toned (30 percent), to reduce stress (21 percent), to remedy a health problem (18 percent), and to engage in spiritual practice (15 percent).

YJ's poll seems to reveal that the goals of today's yoga practitioners are exceedingly practical, even unspiritual. As yoga enters the mainstream, what we think of as "higher" intentions for practice may be losing ground to the more immediate, graspable goals of firmer abs and lower blood pressure. Of course, there is a positive side to having modest, focused aims: Clear, practical goals can provide the essential foundation of sound body and mind. (Gurumayi quotes her guru, Muktananda: "First the stomach, then God"—first, meet people s basic needs, then you can offer spiritual teaching.) And when we have goals that are not overly idealistic, we may be less likely to cling to what we want or become deluded about our achievements.

Photograph: Don Hong-Hai courtesy Photos Gallery, Berkeley, CA www.photosgallery.net ruphotos@earthlink.com 510-594-1613

Many devoted hatha yogis—whose primary focus is the physical practice of yoga—attempt to fully integrate yoga philosophy into their lives, but for how many is the pursuit of enlightenment a living, breathing mission? As yoga is translated into a culture of mostly lay practitioners, we have to ask ourselves: Are modern yogis missing the full potential of this practice? Or are we making genuine efforts to define enlightenment in a way that works in a modern context and makes sense to the Western mind?

The poll results may also reflect a deep confusion about what enlightenment is—after all, sages and scholars have been debating the definition for millennia. Depending on whom you talk to, enlightenment is a sudden, permanent awakening to the absolute unity of all beings or a gradual,back-and-forth process of liberation from the tyranny of the mind. Or both. It is freedom from feelings or the freedom to feel fully without identifying with those feelings. It is unconditional bliss and love, or it is a state devoid of feelings as we know them. It is a shattering of the sense of a separate self, a transcendent experience of unity, a radical freedom available only to the few who are ready to give up everything and surrender the ego to pure awareness.

Buddhists and yogis tend to agree that in a sense we are already enlightened; we are already there. "Enlightenment is really just a deep, basic trust in yourself and your life," says Zen priest Ed Brown. The work that awaits us is stripping away the layers of delusion that we have accumulated through our karma, so that our natural state of peace and wholeness can be revealed. "Enlightenment is not a new state that is in any way obtained or achieved," says Richard Miller, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and founder of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, "but rather, it entails the uncovering of our original nature that has always been, and always is, present." Or as Robert Svoboda, the first Westerner to graduate from a college of Ayurveda in India, says, "The enlightenment process is much more about getting rid of stuff than grabbing hold of it."

To understand how the concept of enlightenment is framed by today's Western ambassadors of the yoga tradition, YJ interviewed five prominent teachers whose practices in yoga and meditation collectively total 125 years and span many traditions. When we asked them whether we must aim for enlightenment to practice authentically, the conversations often turned to intention—a word that comfortably carries the weight of hopes yet doesn't sink under our expectations. The teachers agreed, and their own stories reflect, that our intentions often start with ourselves—we want to soften our stiffness, dampen our anger, quell our fear—but widen and deepen organically in the alchemy of practice. And this is a good thing.

When asked how they hold the goal of enlightenment in their own spiritual practices, not surprisingly, they each had unique ways of relating to liberation. But whether they view awakening as rarefied, permanent, and sacrosanct or hard-won, human, and imperfect, they all spoke of enlightenment as coming home to our deepest truths and aspirations—a gift a teacher gives or one that emerges from the depths of solitary practice. And like most precious gifts, it remains a mystery until we receive it, until our hearts open and do not close.

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