If one wishes to be evil, one can do so instantly. If one wishes to be good, it takes forever.
Endarkenment (there must be better terms in German for these philosophical concepts! Entgutenseiendheit, oder?) is easy and instantaneous, but Enlightenment takes forever. In his LETTERS ON YOGA, Sri Aurobindo talks about the slowness of the evolutionary process from inconscient matter to mind and then Supermental consciousness, but he has also said that he meditated while he was imprisoned by the British for his nationalist activities and in three days he experienced Enlightenment. (Thanks a lot, buddy! That helps a lot!) In Hindu terms, we are to understand by his comment that Aurobindo must have been a yogi in previous lives, so it took minimal time and effort to recover this karmicly achieved state of consciousness. So laboring for Enlightenment with sadhana would seem to go against the grain of human instinctual existence and aspirants must settle in for the long process of several lives.
It takes a long time to build a Stradivarius, but one can smash it in an instant. Paramahansa Yogananda provided his chelas with weekly lessons and scores of techniques, but his yoga seems to provide Enlightenment through the vehicle of the etheric body with its awakening of kundalini. Muktananda’s Shaktipat also seemed to work through this Pranamayakosa, but Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga seems to bypass this step and works to bring down a higher subtle body, the Anatamayakosa, and for this he provides no specific techniques. The Zen Buddhists have commented that each Enlightenment is unique and that there is no standard “one size fits all” for the student, therefore they sit you down in the Zendo, staring at the taitami mats and the wall, and wish you good luck.
And so the hot pot of ignorant karma keeps boiling Trumpily, while the refined souls boil off upwards and onwards into the blue. But some there are who seem to sublime their ascent through cultural tubing in a distillery that produces the Ouiskebaugh–the Water of Life.
– William Irwin Thompson, Jan.29/18
