Introduction to blog 14 – My Personal Journey in Om Divine Grace Yoga.

Blog fourteen is a summary to date of the previous blogs about my Om Divine Grace Yoga spiritual journey. Blogs one to five contain the introduction, overview and contents of this yogic pathway. Some autobiographical content comes from my previous books, revised to be relevant to spiritual practice and experience. (See English Man, Beggar-Man, Holy-Man & Om Divine Grace Journey, that you can read on this site).

Om Divine Grace Yoga is designed to enable practical use by a practitioner interested in this pathway. Of course anything here can be approached as just reading matter of interest.

Historically, this pathway is approached via a Guru for initiation and guidance. In our modern world this might not be feasible or practical, given the nature of this dark era (Kali Yuga). It may not be possible to get a guru who can assist you in this area.

It is necessary now to offer this spiritual pathway and process as an option for any practitioner, desiring progress. This material will also become a book when all the blogs are complete.

Previous blogs about my spiritual development in India include meeting my Gurus and extensive all India pilgrimage, plus years sitting in a hut outside a small village in the middle of “nowhere”.

My Personal Journey in Om Divine Grace Yoga.

A Summary

What is?

Vedanta: Means literally end of the Vedas, and is a part of the vastness of Hindu philosophy. Vedanta however, on the surface, seems to oppose the Vedic & Hindu religion in a major way and on major points, and separates away from the concept of worshipping many gods or performing rituals. God is one transcendental state, without specifically denying the value and purpose of a personal god. It does critically analyze Vedic sacrifice and worship of the various deities, and even penance of the yogis.

Vedanta seeks to clear away the clutter of ritual, and point to the discovery of the inner soul, the Atma, which is one with the cosmic soul, Brahma. Vedanta is not the pathway of devotion to a Personal God. It is a way of being already perfected souls in oneness with the whole of creation. It may be hard to swallow, that we ourselves are God, as the Atma is the same substance as Brahma. The Vedantic mantra is Tat Twam Asmi – That I Am. Or the mantra, Soham – I am that (Brahma), meditated on with the inhalations and exhalations of breath. I am Brahma, Cosmic Consciousness

Kundalini: Otherwise known as the serpent power, which is considered to be like a coiled snake of energy at the base of the spine. It can be coiled there in a dormant state & when awakened the energy or Shakti arises in a sinuous movement through the centre of the spine to the crown of the head. Along the way are centres of energy called chakras and each one of those chakras has specific and particular attributes.

Shakti: Considered to be the universal energy or Goddess energy – the creation force of the divine being. In this sense the masculine aspect of divine being is seen as a transcendental power which is beyond form and shape & the female aspect is seen as the external creation. When practitioners worship the Shakti or Goddess form they can worship the divine being as the world, the universe, or creation.

Mantra: Is a Sanskrit word. The first part of the word means “constant thinking of” The second part of the word means “that by which one is protected.”

So by the conscience thinking of a certain word one is “protected’, where the word protection has a wider connotation in spiritual terms, as being a means to a degree of perfection (siddhi). The part Man means literally to think and the word Tra means literally to protect or free. The repetition or use of a mantra is considered to be enabling of a range of outcomes, from enlightenment down to the acquisition of wealth and pleasure.

The repetition of a mantra is called Japa. In Hinduism it is said in Scriptures that in this age, the Dark Age, (Kali Yuga), that the repetition of certain mantras is the easiest way to obtain enlightenment. However there may not seem to be much science or evidence associated with such a view.

Chakra: In Sanskrit, chakra translates into “wheel”. These “wheels” can be thought of as vortexes that both receive & radiate energy. There are seven major energy centres or chakras, in the human body. They run from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Emotions, physical health, & mental clarity affect how well each chakra can filter energy. This in turn dictates how pure the energy is that’s emitted from different regions of the body.

Journey summary

I left India after ten continuous years of living there. I had not been home at all in the period & had not contacted my parents or anyone outside India. Until that is I wrote to my parents in London, and as a result received a ticket to fly Bombay to London. I returned home in 1976 having left London in 1965 at the tender age of seventeen. I went on the overland trail as a “Hippy” beatnik, smoked lots of “hashish” and spent a year getting to India. I had no income at all!

(See my book about this period:  English-Man, Beggar-Man, Holy-Man).

My years in India were spent as a sadhu, a Hindu holy man, a monk, & traveling yogi. I spent several years in several different places in India. I had a first guru that I ran away from after four years never to make contact again. Later after seven years in India I met Swami Muktananda in a place called Genesh Puri, (literally – the town of Ganesh, an Indian God). I stayed ten months in that large ashram, where Swami Muktananda had large numbers of his overseas followers. Americans, British, Australian & others were flocking to become his disciples. I stayed and had my name changed to Ganesh Giri, a sannyasin, (renunciate), name. However, I never took any formal initiation into the holy orders, and indeed was told that I was first and foremost an English man and would always be so. I never considered myself at the time, a full disciple of Swami Muktananda, in the mold of the rest of his Western & Indian flock. I preferred to hang around in the background and take things a bit more cautiously. I left his ashram because I wanted to see my inner guru as well as an outer one. I wanted self-realisation for myself within myself. After all that was what Swami Muktananda taught – that the guru & the Divine was within.

I spent my last three years in India living in the backwoods of Gujarat State, in a hut, thinking about little in particular, and wondering what my role in life was. I had no books or reading material or wrist watch. I just spent days & months mulling over my experiences to date with all the guru’s and yogis I had met in India. I came to the conclusion eventually that I had a different type of life to experience awaiting me in England, and that the time was not yet right to plunge into a lifetime of living in India as a recluse or sannyasin.

I left home alone in 1965. I was seventeen, and had at that time being restless to wander off and explore the world. The flames of rebellion burned within me. Rebellion from society, from parents, from the straitjacket of convention. I was not alone – the 60s were a time of foment, with the new pop culture leading, as espoused by the life, (and music of course), by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was a period delineated through the birth of a youthful revolution that was to overturn the cultural norms of society at that time. The anti-establishment new generation wanted to explore new dimensions of experience, to grow long hair, wear outrageous clothes, and to experience hitherto unexplored depths of the mind with cannabis and LSD.

Influenced by my own generation I ended up on the India trail – the overland trip to Kathmandu and Nepal. I preceded a mass migration by several years, as by the time Westerners were flocking to India to guru is in large numbers, I had been ensconced there for about five years

After ten plus months on the hippy trail I reached India. The culture, like a magnet sucked me in and did not, for a while, spit me out. During my ten years continuous stay in India I met a variety of gurus, yogis, holy men and holy women. I traveled the length of the country & at times my bed was bare concrete and my stomach was empty. Increasingly I was feted, garlanded and dined in splendor by prostrating devotees who revered all holy men, (as I had become). At the end of it all I returned to England, almost following a spur of the moment decision. I ceased overnight to speak & think and dream in Hindi.  Similarly my wraparound cloths became trousers and shirts, and I became a conventional working Englishman.

On return to England I had little to say on the subject of my Hindu monk’s life. It was a role with which I had completely identified during my stay in India, and now I was finished with it and wanted no more of it. I wanted to be the Englishman again and take on that role, but not now as a dropout hippy. I wanted to work, buy a car, drink in pubs, watch the “telly”, and construct a social life for myself that was not in any way religious.

I decided on being a social worker, but found that I was not wanted due to my lack of work experience. It was difficult explaining just how I passed my ten idle years in India. I found it hard once even to get a job cleaning down tables in a café! By chance or circumstances I came to apply for a position as a student psychiatric nurse

No tigers here

When I was a child in London I used to dream about tigers a lot, and think they were wandering outside the block of flats that I lived in. I used to read a lot of books about hunting man eating tigers and leopards and lions. After living in India I came to believe that I’d lived there before, and that all my childhood processes had been regurgitating aspects of a previous life in India. I saw myself as having been a hunter of tigers, who then became a non-violent devotee of tigers. In dreams in India, I saw myself meeting a yogic sage outside a cave and being admonished and turned away from my hunting to become a respectful devotee of the tiger. That dream was about my previous birth: not the current one. I may have been part of the British Raj in India: possibly a collector or some official living upcountry. In India tigers were often a part of my life: certainly spiritually, as the tiger is considered to be the vehicle of the Goddess Durga.  However when I moved away from India I didn’t think then about tigers for quite a few years. My life was not connected like it had been with India and tigers, & my worship of the Goddess. (Now I am very different and the tiger is a core part of my life).

Finding the Tiger

In 1989 I married and over the next 30 plus years I became a family man and remain so to this time of writing. (2020). I extended my career to a satisfactory position as a senior health professional educator within mental health. I studied and received further qualifications and worked within a variety of interesting areas.

Interestingly I find that as I relate now to the personality that I left in India as the Hindu monk, I see that my time of ten years in India was probably about sitting in the same space where I am can sit now. (Without the need for a cave!).

Finding the Tiger. The tiger is my soul animal – similar to a favorite animal but not quite! The tiger represents me as being a complete whole person. Powerful in that I have my spiritual plane again, but also powerful in that I am a complete human being. I am human with my experience of the depths of despair and depression whilst at the same time have become able to deal with and cope with this part of my life. This adds to my power. I have experienced a common place reality for many. That is the human life which can be, “weak, disabled and dysfunctional”. I am happy about this because I don’t see it as bad, as within these times I   also been a functional health professional at a senior level, a family man, and “healthy human”. All this alongside the choice of continuing my practice of spiritual awareness. This is about finding the Tiger: the tiger memories that drove me when I was a child to go to India, and to head off to end up as a monk. This metaphor for life has driven me now to look at the issue of spirituality and religion, and also life’s psychological dysfunctions in depth.

Religions talk about redemption and being lifted up. This however occurs when there is surrender, and when there is choice to know one’s True Self, accompanied by a willingness to act to make this so.

As I write now in my 70’s I can look at my wrinkles, I can experience more tiredness and wonder about all I have done or rather not done. However the Divine Grace has remained, and I can understand myself as beyond all of this. Certainly I can understand my identity as the “lord of the qualities of nature who lives as the mountain man”. (Ganesh Giri). Added to that is not Swami, but Paramahansa.  (“Great Swan”).

(Just as the swan floats on water so the Paramhansa floats on the cycle of life & death, (Samsara), without getting “wet”. Samsara is a Sanskrit word literally meaning “continuous flow”, which is the repeating cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth or reincarnation, as seen in Hinduism, Buddhism, Bön and Jainism.

What’s our Purpose?

Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose?

What goes on outside, but taken in through our eyes, thoughts, and are senses?

Thought sees “happenings” as something to hold on to and maintain.

More often we see what we want, but we don’t get it.

Why do we do what we do?

Why should it work?

However if that’s what works what’s wrong with that? Then all is well also!

It seems that life has a lot of things that we want, or positions we want to attain.

By this time we should not be saying there is anything to fix nor anything to make different!

Perhaps having a purpose is not all it’s made out to be.

Certainly sometimes it seems there is no purpose at all, to anything.

But other times the sun is shining and all is well.

Another time a person may have a deep faith

Fundamentalist faith can be akin to burying one’s head in the sand.

The other prospect is that we get or use what we like and want, and then become addicted to substances or behaviors, which then of course lose their power to pleasure. So perhaps it will be better for all of us, if we just stay out of off the roads! Living out caves and just pass the time. That way we stay out of trouble!

Presumably there is some underlying understanding that answers must come from within us, in order for us to hold the expectation that some form of salvation occurs this way. Indeed all the teachers in the spiritual sphere will undoubtedly mention as some component of their teaching that the Divine is within.

My gurus say that the guru is also actually within. So some say when you find the Buddha tell him to go away, as you don’t then need the guru in human form. In other words you’re done, finished you’ve got it, and you’ve got what it needs.

Except this is just the beginning!

Step back & look at the real human needs before jumping into space! (Divine space that is).

In the spiritual world or in the mental health world, there are other things we can do: activities to partake in. At one level there are talking therapies. We can try to heal through counselling or psychoanalytical methods, or with practical efforts, such as using sensory modulation techniques to alleviate anxiety. Physical relaxation methods: practice controlling the breath, listening to soothing music, or practicing some mindfulness type exercise.

If we go further still, then there are other things we may do. It seems necessary in life to bring in mechanical means to alleviate suffering. An illustration of this is taking medication for physical or mental health problems. We “forcefully” try to resolve the issue. This quite often is reasonably successful, otherwise people would not bother going to doctors or psychiatrists.

We also go into the realm of prayer, using liturgical hymns, or using mantras. Or, on a more physical level, some devotional worship, as for instance performed in temples. We are almost trying to force God to come to the party.

We want to make it happen. Some of it we can touch, talk to, or directly experience through senses, but of course it eventually disappears or vanishes, or changes. Then you need to expose yourself to the Divine Grace through your spiritual practice again and again, until there is no more “again”.

And then what life is, still goes on. There is still the mortgage, to pay the pets to feed. Then what is just left is the suffering of the moment, the being in the body here now, which is not really a comfortable place by any measure. The tummy rumbles, the nose itches, it’s too hot or too cold, and we are always subject to hunger and thirst, with a need for sleep in a place of safety. Life is pretty dangerous, and it can be extremely dangerous. A matter of just survival for so many billions of people.

So this daily moment to moment practice is what gives us the moment to moment relief, (from our suffering), and this is where we can thrive instead of survive. By this time we will have formed a connection with our Deity, with our spiritual pathway, and understand the place of our particular religious beliefs in the whole picture.