Becoming An Adept
Whatever your faith or beliefs, there are some words of wisdom that transcend them all.
“1. Adeptship is attainable by the purification of the body in all respects. Purification of the material body can be effected by things generated along with it by Nature; that of the electric body by patience in all circumstances; and that of the magnetic body (chitta, spiritualized Atom, Heart) by regulation of the breath, which is called mantra, the purifier of the mind.
2. The eight bondages or snares are:
Hatred
Shame
Fear
Grief
Condemnation
Race Prejudice
Pride of Family
Smugness
Removal of the eight bondages leads to magnanimity of the Heart.
3. When this love becomes developed in man it makes him able to understand the real position of his own Self as well as of others surrounding him.
4. When this love, the heavenly gift of Nature, appears in the heart, it removes all causes of excitation from the system and cools it down to a perfectly normal state; and, invigorating the vital powers, expels all foreign matters- the germs of diseases-by natural ways (perspiration and so forth). It thereby makes man perfectly healthy in body and mind, and enables him to understand properly the guidance of Nature.
5. Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.
6. The world illusion, maya, is individually called avidya, literally, “not-knowledge,” ignorance, delusion. Maya or avidya can never be destroyed through intellectual conviction or analysis, but solely through attaining the interior state of nirbikalpa Samadhi.
7. Firmness of moral courage when attained removes all the obstacles in the way of salvation. These obstacles are of eight sorts, viz., hatred, shame, fear, grief, condemnation, race distinction, pride of pedigree, and a narrow sense of respectability, which are the meannesses of the human heart.
8. The Holy Sound Pranava Sabda appears spontaneously through the culture of Sraddha the energetic tendency of heart’s natural love, Veerya the moral courage, Smiriti the true conception and Samadhi the true concentration.
9. It has been clearly demonstrated in the foregoing pages that “Love is God,” not merely as the noblest sentiment of a poet but as an aphorism containing an eternal truth.”
–Sri Yukteswar (a.k.a. Swami Sriyukteswar Giri, a.k.a. Sriyuktesvara, a.k.a. Priyanath Karar, Bengali Educator, Yogi and Guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, 1855-1936)
