Spiritual practice in all traditions are aimed at leading

aspirants to the One True Light, ekam ekadvitiyam. The

Truth which is One second to none. The ways to reaching
such a Truth are many depending on the temperaments
and abilities of the seekers. One of a low mental capacity
but tremendous will power is advised to use the body
through practices of Hatha Yoga and later Kundalini Yoga
to transcend the mundane worlds. For people of an
emotional bent, Bhakti Yoga is prescribed so that the
agony of separateness is removed by their divine union
with their deity. Raja Yoga is usually for people with an
intense mental capacity who can use their mind to silence
itself and thus let the clear light of the soul or ego into
their consciousness in samadhi. Consisting of eight steps,
seven of which are only preparatory to the real Yoga
which begins in Samprajnata or Form based Samadhi,
proceeding to alternating levels of Asamprajnata and
Samprajnata until they reach the Absolute. Tantra uses a
very different set of techniques for enhancing
consciousness and seeks to use occult capabilities of the
human organism. It also seeks to develop powers over
the environment, which Patanjali expressly forbids for the
simple reason that they will waste the aspirants time who
should seek liberation first. No matter which process is
used, the time and effort needed to achieve the
Fundamental Realization is enormous though worth every
second of it. In the words of all enlightened and attained
beings, there is nothing in the three worlds which matches
the glory and bliss of such a realization. All sacrifices,
miseries, sufferings in a life, nay many lives are worth a
second of the taste of enlightenment. It behooves us then
to do everything to make the process easier in whatever
way we can.

Living in the modern age which in occult terms, is the

cycle in which the mind will be developed to its highest
capacity, seekers have a problem which has never been
faced before in the history of the planet. The previous
races which sought and achieved enlightenment were
operating in a mental and emotional realm very different
from today. Patanjalis famous first line in the Yoga Sutras,
Yoga Chitta Vritti Nirodhah was achievable in
comparatively lesser time simply because the Chitta or
the substance of mind was not polluted with so much
garbage like today. Humanity is thinking more today than
ever before, the proof of which we have in the explosion
of research and publication of books, the never ending
chatter of television talk show hosts, the deadening social
media space and its universe of false opinions. What has
happened is that the mental plane has been filled up with
a infinitude of false thought forms or Avidya as Patanjali
would call it. The mental plane is not a personal space as
our body is. Thoughts are always slipping between mental
grounds of individuals. An individual sitting in a room is
not really alone in the mental realm though it seems to him
that he is. We are exposed to so much material vibrations
from the culture today that spiritual seekers are at a loss
to even conceive of the possibility of a spiritual dimension
to life. And here lies the first battle of the aspirant. Setting
aside the fact that modern culture affects the pranamaya
kosha or the etheric body with very coarse vibrations by
its vulgar depiction of sex and greed, the problem today
is also very mental. After one has controlled the physical
urges of lust or money, and cleaned the pranamaya kosha
of its grosser vibrations by sheer will, the aspirant has to
then face its own mind, a mind which will tell him that
spiritual seeking is futile. I have assumed that pure will
has accomplished the cleansing of the first 2 koshas, the
annamaya and pranamaya kosha which in itself is not
guaranteed by any means as a will of such magnitude is
rare today and depends of past samskaras earned in
previous lives. So we start with the very inception. We
have an aspirant who has read some books of saints and
mystics and has got some inner response which makes
him or her believe that the objective, mundane world is
not all. There is a thing-in-itself of Kant which his pure
reason can never hope to know. Reading Kant is a great
exercise to know the limits of reason. But Kant was not a
Yogi and so could not find a solution to the problem he
diagnosed with such brilliance. India has been fortunate
that our seers have not only achieved the Truth but also
written extensively about it. Their words have a shakti of
their own which can bring about a still small voice from
which, a voice which tells in its silent way that the light is
beyond the senses. But every mind is not capable of
sensing this voice. He has to take more indirect means.
When the aspirant sits to meditate, firstly he gets all kinds
of lower urges pulling and pushing him hither and thither.
If he is able to silence them, the next series of troubles
consist of stray thoughts of which the most dominant one
is the futility of spiritual practice itself. This is a dangerous
problem because it can make the aspirant leave the
practice itself. No matter how many accounts of
realization one has read, they are still just stories for the
ignorant aspirant. They are someone elses accounts and
if he has indomitable faith, he can do his practice based
on this faith. Else he is left struggling with his doubts,
doubts which can only be cleared when he does his
practice but the doubts hinder that very practice. So it is a
paradoxical situation. What he needs is a way to silence
this army of false thoughts which tell him that the
mundane reality of separateness is the only truth, just like
the Charvakas used to proclaim in the days of yore. Back
then we had many more philosophical schools which
expounded on the spiritual truths and charvakas were a
minority but today we live in a society of Charvakas. They
dominate the culture and control the mental plane with
their gross vibrations. We need a counter-force in the
mental plane to dismantle these false thought-forms and
get ourselves established in the truth of this very
mundane world, which on examination turns out to be
NOT what it seems. The way by which this is known with
the greatest clarity is the profound system of
Madhyamika.

Nagarjuna, the author of the Madhyamikakarika, the

founding text of the Mahayana or Northern Buddhism
school, appeared in the 2nd century AD, with a set of
esoteric texts, hidden from the world in the possession of
a class of astral beings called the Nagas. These texts
expounded a set of teachings which could not be given
earlier due to the lack of comprehension, exhibited by the
humans. The time was ripe for Nagarjuna to bring out
these complex treatises in the world. The prime thesis of
Nagarjuna is that of the emptiness of existence. The true
interpretation of emptiness will take us into the rarified
realms of scholarly discourses but in essence, its about
the lack of any essential reality of the external world. It
starts with any object of the world we see everyday, like a
pen, a pot or a bus moving through a street and asks if
the pen is really resting on the table, asks if the bus is
truly moving on the road or if the man in front of us is truly
coming at us. Now at first glance, such questions seem
laughable to the commoner. Of course, all these things
are true by our standards. But ours is not a true
standard. Madhyamika seeks to dismantle all conceptions
of the world we have. We think we are watching the grand
spectacle of the universe with its relentless motion of
billions of individual human beings, living, enjoying,
laughing crying, moving, sleeping and dying every
second. We are enchanted by the play of so many units
of life playing out their lives and this play makes us happy
and sad. Nagarjuna is telling us that we have no clue
about anything of this world we think is real. By real we all
mean to think that these units or objects are existing by
themselves. A beautiful woman is really there, waiting for
us to approach her. The great palace is really there,
existing all by itself for a rich man to buy it and enjoy his
stay. People are truly being born and dying. We are really
watching a grand show in which we can only watch and
helplessly react with either glee or anguish. This is the
idea which ordinary non-thinking people have of this
world. And this ingrained sense of the world being out
there, with us being a tiny unit with little or no powers
waiting for death, makes us want to grab as much of the
world as we can, or compromise and die with regrets.
Nagarjuna is telling that that we can say nothing
whatsoever about this very world. We cant say that the
pen is resting, nor that the bus is moving, or that the man
is running, or that the water is flowing. We cant ASSERT
anything of this external world. We cannot because if we
examine what we really mean by all these properties, of
sitting, running, resting, coming, going, we will find that
they really mean nothing. We really dont understand the
truth of such terms. Just by examining our own concepts
and categories by which we comprehend reality, we will
find that we have been wrong all along. The great
example of this comes from an analysis of the seed and
tree problem. We usually say that the tree has come from
a seed, and that the seed dies so that the tree is formed.
But Chandrakirti in his famous Madhyamikavatara spends
a hundred pages, unpacking this very simple assumption
we make of saying that the tree is formed from the seed.
At the end of it, we are left stunned by the revelation that
we cannot assert anything about how the seed became
the tree, about how the seed died or how the tree
appeared from it. We should become silent about the
world and not speak a word. Nagarjunas work is basically
dismantling a hundred other such assumptions. If one is
able to get into the heart of these abstruse and
demanding logical exercises, one comes out on the other
side with a freedom of a kind which defies explanation. In
essence, the cessation of thought about the external
world means the cessation of craving and the attainment
of the Chitta Vritti Nirodhah which Patanjali had
discussed. Madhyamika can be said to be the mental
process of the cessation which Raja Yoga achieves by the
eight-fold way. They are both intended to take you past
the vrittis or fluctuations of the mind in all its aspects,
mundane, memory and sub-conscious.

The great relevance of the Madhyamika today is that ours

is a primarily mental race, being the fifth sub race of the
fifth root race of the aryans. The Fifth sub-race of any
round is the cycle where the fifth principle of manas or
mind is developed to its highest capability. Thus we dont
have the luxury of innocently following instructions of a
teacher. We are no more innocent. We need to know in
the mental realm and not just feel drawn emotionally to a
teaching. Thus the imperative of the intellectual approach
with Madhyamika expounds at its highest. It silences
once and for all, all those gnawing doubts which the lower
mind, used to only external objects, presents before us to
hinder our efforts. Once this certainty is achieved, all
yogic practices will flow with smoothness since the great
barrier of mentally created thought forms has been
removed. The higher intuition will flood our minds and the
powerful vibrations of our higher self will pull us upward.
The great Tantric scripture, Durga Saptashati which
manifests the very Adi Shakti before us, is in reality an
invocation of the force of Illusion herself. One of her
names is MahaMaya. Maya is the name for the three
worlds of illusion which we are submerged in. We invoke
the great Goddess to remove her veils from us so we can
seek the Truth. Madhyamika can be considered the path
of Jnana Shakti to remove these veils. By fighting the
lower mind with the power of the higher intellect, we
remove the mental aspect of the veil. The rest of the veils
consist of the energy aspect and the perceptive aspect
which tantra can give us. Once the intellectual veil has
been removed, the energy veil can be removed much
more easily as we can then invoke powers of the intuitive
mind which in the hierarchy of reality is of a much higher
order than the energy body and thus can control it easily.
The lower mind with its doubts and entangled ideas
cannot prevent our lower urges from controlling us and
leading us astray. Thus it is said in Tibet that the right view
of emptiness is the first milestone after which, one can
safety take to Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism.

Esoteric philosophy teaches us that the mental, astral and

physical planes are the three worlds of illusion, after
crossing which, we are able to see the first glimpses of
the Truth. Madhyamika seeks to break the hold of the
mental plane on us, which is the plane of false ideas. An
idea by itself is a distortion of the truth from the ultimate
perspective since it is a much refined form. The world of
formlessness or Arupa Loka has to be entered before one
is given the keys to the universe. Mankind has still not
reached a level of evolution where it considers ideas to be
falsity at an ultimate level. Which is why Madhyamika can
be a dangerous ground for people who think ideas are
the ultimate reality. But such people need it the most.
Nagarjunas dialectics lift us to our true self, the Ego or the
Thinker residing in our Karana Sharira which is above the
planes of illusion. Our lower self is the result of this
Thinkers thought. And for this thinker, who is beyond
thought, surely thoughts are a falsity. Thus madhyamika is
an exercise in thinking from the consciousness of our
Higher Self. This is an intense yoga in its own right and
exceedingly recommended to mentally polarized yogis
who can accelerate their yogic attainments with these
powerful analytical meditations.