Natha yoga has its roots in Advaita Vedanta.
‘A’ means ‘not’ and ‘dvaita’ means ‘two’. So Advaita means ‘not two’.
This means that there is only ONE ‘thing’, and the yogi’s called this one ‘thing’ BRAHMA.
I have written about this extensively in Ramblings of an old Yoghini part One.
I quote:
“Advaita Vedanta teaches that in the Universe there is only One thing, and nothing else. This One thing they called Brahma (see also the ‘Brahma Sutra). Everything that exists, from the smallest ant to the farthest galaxy, is Brahma. All manifestations that exist are manifestations of Brahma. This again is in contrast with religions, where ‘god’ is outside ‘creation’.
As such everything is a part of Brahma, or rather, IS Brahma. . Each human being is a manifestation of Brahma, and as such is called ‘jivan’, or ‘atman’ (Adam in the Bible). There is a famous story of a student of Advaita who asks his teacher about Brahma, at which the teacher gives an explanation with the words: Tat Tvam Asi: You are That.
The jivan, that part of Brahma that needs/wants to experience being a human being, is born with a human body. Personally I think that all animals have a jivan; for me my old horse Cisco, who died 8 years ago, was an old Zen monk in a horse body, who taught me many things.
For us the human body is the means with which the eternal jivan can interact with the particular matrix in which he/she is born. An eternal spirit doing a human experience (another famous Vedanta saying: “Nothing is born, nothing dies”. (See also the teaching of Nisargadatta Maharaj, after Shankaracharya one of the most famous teachers of Advaita Vedanta).
As such the body that he/she creates during life is his/her vehicle, his/her means of experiencing this matrix.
This matrix is a collective creation of all the jivans together. Not only that, but each jivan brings his or her own particular talent to this show.
Now let us come to the present world situation.
Many people have complained about the fact that part of the population of this matrix has decided to take part in an experiment, which the other part of the population thinks is horrible.
And so we look at the ‘wrong’ part and feel ‘angry’, because they ‘don’t get it’.
This is a boomerang.
Anger, disappointment, everything that belongs in the sphere of low vibration, will automatically boomerang back to us.
Attention, the same thing goes for the high vibrational emotions.
We are players in this show, in different roles.
Now my personal belief is that when the baby or jivan is born, it may have somewhere memories of another lifetime, but does not have yet the tools to express them. But it comes nevertheless complete. Its core is complete.
In a world where we are all feeling lost, we do not know anymore who we are, rocked by so many emotions, the jivan has trouble keeping his/her sense of who he/she is, we are confused, depressed, lost.
I have a personal ‘trick’.
I think that the eternal jivan is at the height of its BEING in the age between 5 and 15 . It is not yet corrupted, has not yet taken a certain road, can still express itself in all its innocence, still has the MEMORY OF WHO HE OR SHE IS. I think the jivan is what it is, and never changes throughout all the incarnations. There is a core inside which is the ME, the eternal ME, will always be ME, the jivan. It may change on the surface, but not in its essence.
So I have been mediating, with the help of old photographs, on the time that I was in that age group.
What I found was not a yoghini.
I have spent 65 years doing and teaching yoga, but what I found in the photographs, and in my memories, and in the love that I felt in my heart, and in the core of my jivan, was a wild little cow girl.
My first ride on a horse when I was four years old, telling everybody within the range of my 4year old voice that ‘riding a horse was very very nice’. The last ride when I was twenty. From then on it was yoga.
Me and my B.F. both twelve years old, were the main characters of Carl Mays books of the Indian Chief Winnetou and his white friend Old Shatterhand, galloping wildly through the tropical bushes in the mountains, going to the race course and screaming at the top of our voices to our favourite horse, called d’Artagnan, who of course won thanks to our screaming (hahah).
It was horses and horses and horses, and when Nellie, my favourite mare died, I was by her side at twelve years old, keeping her head on my lap, both of us crying and crying.
Then if we were not riding horses, we were riding our wild bucking broncos, our bicycles, racing through the crowded streets, trying to avoid all the street vendors and cars.
I even bought a bridle. Never used it. Without a horse a bridle is useless, but it was my flag, my declaration..
Back to modern times.
When I feel in the dumpiest of dumps, and want to crawl underneath the sheets and never get out again because of what is happening in the world and the loss of friends and family, I think of Winnetou, of the wild rides, of all the horses that I have loved. I am again that wild little cowgirl, getting into all kind of crazy scrapes, always the leader of mischief, dragging my more timid friends into all kinds of wild adventures, always coming out triumphant, and I end up laughing.
There was a book written in a mixture of Javanese and Dutch called :’ Charlie alone against the whole world ’ .
I fancy myself sitting on my wild stallion, rearing up against the whole world, me and my horse, laughing, laughing at the innocence and purity of a twelve year old girl.
And I take my head out from underneath the sheets.
Moral of the story. Forget about what the world is doing. Nobody, but nobody, can hurt your immortal jivan. Look for him, and cherish him. Don’t poison him with the energy of other people.
Poison is a boomerang. It will come back to the person who threw it.
Go back in your memory, to your childhood, and find that real YOU, the core of your jivan. Brush off the dust, clean him up and make him shine again. Love him, cherish him, he is all that you REALLY have. Everything else you have in life is just borrowed, and is left behind when the jivan goes ‘home’.
TAT VAM ASI