Christian Yoga

Part Seven

by Tony Crisp

	Enter your search terms
	Web This Site Submit search form

The Human Spirit

Through Christian Yoga you gradually come to recognise that your Spirit is the central fact of your being. Through the awareness of this you arrive at a greater personal peace, and harmonise with your innate nature, without having to join any sect or give yourself to a rigid set of beliefs. You may also meet and converse with the master - your eternal self - and receive the teachings at first hand.

Achieving this means that you have transcended your own previous state of awareness. When you transcend your own needs, your own biological, social, sexual needs, and reach across what may be a huge gap that separates you from another being, you change something in yourself. From the most ancient of times some men and women have done this to extraordinary degrees. Society has built physical and sociological structures that have evolved into what we can see and live within today -- for instance we live within this body today that is a physiological structure gradually developed over millions of years -- but, behind that is another structure formed by extraordinary men and women. Like our body, like our language, like the social rules and attitudes we live within, this other structure is built out of thousands of lives and endeavours. As with language it is the accumulation of an unimaginable synthesis of human feeling, action and thought. We have this heritage of extraordinary human action. It is the spirit we open to when we accept baptism. It is the gift we are offered by proxy at christening. It is represented by the blood of Christ.

The mystery of you

This is so important it needs to be made very plain, otherwise you proceed along this path of Christian Yoga in a fog of misunderstanding. Most of us now recognise that the body we inherit from our parents is the result of the physical and mental characteristics of countless forebears. Your physical body, and who you are as a person, have not arisen from a vacuum. The details of this are becoming more and more understood as thousands of researchers dig deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the genetic code. But our science has been sadly lacking in helping us to understand what is meant by the human soul, and the human spirit, and unless we have some grasp of these we remain vulnerable in our journey towards a fuller spiritual life.

Just as the human body emerges from immense past action and experience, so do the intangible aspects of your own personal awareness and mind. As already mentioned in previous paragraphs, without your relationship with parents, family and the people around you, you would never have developed the ability to speak and think. The language you inherit, like the body you inherit, is the result of enormous human experience, thought, struggle and sometimes bitter hardship. That immense gift comes to you through your relationship with those around you. But there is another gift that arises with barely any awareness of its impression upon you. This is the gift of behaviour, or more precisely, behavioural responses. From the moment you are born, perhaps even prior to that, you are learning, or there are pressed upon you, responses to what you are experiencing. The culture you are born into is a huge ready-made set of behavioural responses. For instance, an Australian aborigine would easily respond to a huge living grub/caterpillar by eating it. This would be a very difficult behavioural response for most Northern Europeans or Americans.

Without knowing it, without thinking of it or being aware of it, when we make decisions or choose directions, or simply decide what to eat, we are drawing upon our own massive behavioural pool. That may appear to be basic psychological insight, and you may wonder what it has to do with the human spirit. Perhaps you will have a clearer view of this if you consider just for a few moments a little of human history. Remember the immense bloodshed, the torture, the constant conflicts between different nations and religions, the struggle of countless individuals to survive, to care for their children and those they loved. As was said earlier, your behavioural responses do not emerge from a vacuum. They emerge out of history. What you do today has its roots in what took place yesterday – even in the long past - as it says in the Bible – unto the third and fourth generation. And those roots are passionately feeding upon those past struggles, the past triumph, the times of transcending evil and war. If you do not understand this, then you do not understand the human soul. You do not understand yourself, and the passions and pains you are moved by. For the human soul is that great pool of inherited human experience and responses, only part of which you recognise and call your own – yourself. In fact your soul is the part of that grand inheritance that you recognise and are aware of.

Bathing in the ocean of Life

Beyond that lies the human spirit. To arrive at a glimpse of this is a little more difficult than understanding the human soul. The problem is that we live our lives virtually unconscious of what moves us, and the subtlety of our own motivations. Perhaps we can have some understanding of this if we have travelled widely. Many of the things we do in our daily life are, as said, done completely unconsciously. If we have the good fortune to live for a while in a totally different culture, sometimes we are made aware of things about ourselves we never previously noticed. (For instance in Thailand it is very bad manners to sit at a level above the head of the family you are visiting.) So, perhaps you might be able to accept that there are things you do, the whole broad sweep of your life, maybe arising out of subtle things within you that you are presently not aware of.

All of us, in fact, are living deeply immersed in the influence of the spirit. The directions, the difficulties, the triumphs we achieve, arise out of our spirit. This spirit that guides us and we are immersed in unconsciously, is the essence, the distillation, of all life experience. This essence, this distillation, when we meet it is experience as a great ocean of consciousness that we merge into, losing a sense of boundary, of ego. Or sometimes it is felt as a dropping away of your boundaries and a realisation with wonder and love that in reality you are this ocean of life. (See The Morning of Awareness).

With a little self-observation it becomes fairly obvious what part language and behavioural responses have in your life. With training you can become more fully aware of how and from where these arise in you. The impress of the spirit is subtler, but likewise with self-observation it can be experienced. Meeting the spirit is a profound experience. It is this meeting that is the aim of Christian Yoga. It may be a very personal meeting with Christ, or it may be an opening to the vastness of the spirit in a less personal way. Whatever it is, you will know your life is more that your body, more than the smallness of your personal experience in this one life.

Strangely enough we experience the spirit all the time. Each day when we sleep we drop into this egoless ocean more fully. We experience this as unconsciousness - sleep. But people have learned to enter this deep level of sleep while maintaining awareness. What they find is an experience of total connection with all. Their personal ego slips into the ocean of Life like a drop of rain falling into the sea. Of course the drop doesn't disappear. It still exists, but all the ocean is added to it.

But to grasp what it is before you meet it is akin to a person born blind trying to grasp what light and colour are. We understand things because we experience them. Of course we are constantly experiencing the spirit, but we are so immersed in it we fail to 'see' it until the coverings fall away. It is what remains when physical sensations, thoughts and emotions drop away. It is naked awareness - consciousness without the clothing of thoughts or imagery, or sound or smell. Sometimes one arrives at it while practising relaxation, meditation or prayer. Deep relaxation can uncover it occasionally because your personal awareness drops away things until, occasionally, it is as if you fall into sleep with a spark of awareness. Then, in that place, you lose any sense of your body, and all thoughts melt away. All that is left is an ocean of living awareness, that you know in some way has always existed through all time. You experience a sense of being in the timeless and universal essence of life.

Christian Yoga Part Eight