Once a famous doctor had come to meet me from South India. He had heard about the innumerable experiences of the sadhaks at Dhyan Ashram and wanted to experience them.My first question to him was if he had a guru, to which he answered in affirmative. When I asked him about his spiritual experiences, he had none.
Having no experiences even after nearly 20 years of sadhana and yet following the same path seemed a little strange to me. Normally the experience of the subtler dimensions, and gods and goddesses happens within a year. The answer to my doubt laid in the statement which he made, “Yoga and bhoga go hand-in-hand”.
He was looking for bhoga and he wanted to put on the garb of yoga; the same would have applied to the gentleman who he called his guru, a mutual symbiosis.
He did not understand the concept of yoga and bhoga, and the concept seemed alien to his guru as well.
If I go into the mechanics of yoga, I would say that the pleasures of the body or bhoga require 7 to 8 per cent of normal brain-functioning and in any normal person 7 to 8 per cent of the brain functions, because you don’t need anything else.
Your desire is bhoga, your five senses do not need more than this, you live in a false world, day-dream and call it yoga and dhyan. The people who teach day-dreaming meditations, desire your wealth and you are fooled. To get into yoga and experience the higher dimensions, it is imperative that you shut off the normal brain functions, for only then the higher centres will get activated and you will experience what is beyond.
Patanjali was very clear on this—yoga chitta vritti nirodh.
He never says bhoga is a stage of yoga. People who have no idea of what is beyond, normally teach day-dreaming meditation and feed your ego for their personal pecuniary gains. Yoga and bhoga are two different things and exist in different dimensions. Yoga is for rising above bhoga. As you advance in yoga, the bhoga, which is grosser, will leave you. And experiences of higher pleasure or ananda follow. These experiences could be interaction with gods and goddesses, or an elevated consciousness with which you can manifest your thoughts and other experiences of the subtler world, as experienced routinely by sadhaks at Dhyan Ashram. A normal person does not understand this and has no patience to wait for this experience of bliss. He gets stuck in the cycle of experiencing bhoga and keeps going lower and lower.
The difference between physical pleasure (bhoga) and spiritual bliss (yoga) becomes clear from an episode from the life of Adi Shankaracharya. On being asked the difference between the two, he entered the body of a king to experience sexual pleasure. On reentering his body, he shared that the physical pleasure is limited and has a peak but spiritual bliss has no peak. It goes on increasing. To experience this bliss, give yoga (not bhoga) priority in life and see what follows.
The writer is the spiritual head of Dhyan Ashram. Email: dhyan@dhyanfoundation.com