Yesterday morning, in the high country where Nepal meets Tibet, the lower part of a glacier sheared away. A geoscientist who studied the images said it looked as though someone had cut the ice with a huge knife. It fell into the Lhende Khola and dammed the river, and then the river took the dam. The water rose nine meters in thirty minutes. It came down through the gorges and took bridges, roads, villages. Hundreds are confirmed dead and more than a thousand are still missing, and among them are pilgrims who were on the road to Kailash and Manasarovar. Seekers. People who had saved for years, prepared their bodies, said goodbye to their families, and were walking toward a mountain because something in them had already set out on the path of the Self.

They were on the path when the path dissolved.

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My heart goes out to every one of them who surrendered their prana in that water. And I will tell you where it went first. I watched Sadhguru, whom I respect deeply, speak to his community about the loss of many of their own people, and I sat there with my heart aching and awake at the same time — the ache and the awakeness arriving together, refusing to cancel each other, which is its own teaching about what a heart is for.

That ice had been holding still since before our grandparents were born. It held and held, warmed a little past its holding each season, and then let go all at once. The Himalaya is heating faster than most of the planet and its ice loss has doubled since 2000. One of the researchers said plainly that this is the new normal and that it will get worse.

Put those families in your practice today. If you have money, the people working in Nuwakot and Rasuwa need it this week rather than next month. Let that come before any teaching, because a teaching that arrives before the tears is not a teaching.

Live and let live

The flood came on the twenty-sixth of August, which is the Siri Singh Sahib’s birthday. I was teaching that morning, remembering him, and the phrase of his I kept returning to is the plainest thing he ever said.

Live and let live.

It sounds like a bumper sticker until you try to do it for one afternoon.

Many of us carry a little bench inside where we sit in judgment over everyone who passes, striking a gavel we were handed long before we knew we were holding it, and that keeps falling long after we have set our children’s books and inherited dogmas down. The awakened heart recognizes instead of ruling. It sees that beneath every creed, flag, sense of morality, and argument, the same quiet being is looking out through different eyes. I always think of how Chuang Tzu teased Confucius for his careful rules of right and wrong, pointing past all that dualism to pure, simple being. The forms, lovely as they are, are decoration over something no one owns. Once that is felt rather than argued, judgment loses its footing.

Hold onto that bench. Everything else in this letter happens on it.

The hard crossing

In class this week I read a small poem of Adi Shankaracharya’s:

Birth again, death again, again the lying down in the mother’s belly. This crossing over is very hard to cross. By your shoreless mercy, carry me over.

Vedanta says the thing our culture finds unbearable: do not fear death, fear birth.

Look around the room you are in. Notice the walls, the furniture, the floor. Now let the roof lift off and follow the space upward — to the nearest cloud, through the stratosphere with its beautiful electromagnetic singing, past the satellites and the data centers being shot into orbit, past the moon, out among the asteroids and the planets. Notice the proportion. There is vastly more space than there are things.

That space is death, and nothing troubles it. Strife lives exactly where forms are, where objects touch, where one thing has an edge against another thing. Every seam is a place where pressure can accumulate. The glacier is a seam between what holds and what moves. The crowd is a seam between us and them. And the mind you are reading this with is a seam factory, dividing every arriving moment into acceptable and unacceptable at a speed you cannot watch.

That dividing is the whole difficulty. Nondual realization means the seam is seen through. Which is why the path aims itself at the dividing faculty rather than at your beliefs about it, and why the path so often feels like an assault on something you were sure was your virtue.

The machinery of the crowd

René Girard spent his life describing what a divided mind does with the pressure that builds at the seam, and he described it with unusual precision.

We do not want things directly. We learn what to want by watching each other, so desire is borrowed, copied, mimetic — which is why a room full of people converging on one object becomes a room full of rivals, and why the question am I fulfilled enough burns hottest in the seasons when everyone around us is displaying their fulfillment. Rivalry spreads faster than the objects it fights over. Tension accumulates in a community the way heat accumulates in ice, and then it discharges all at once onto one figure: the outsider, the strange one, the one with the accent or the wrong practice. Everyone agrees. The victim is expelled, the community feels the peace that follows, and calls that peace holy. Girard called this the founding murder, and he pointed out that our myths are written from the crowd’s point of view, which is why the victim in them always looks guilty and the expulsion always looks necessary.

Then he made the observation that concerns us now. The Gospels tell that same story from the victim’s side, on a man everyone can see is innocent, and once the machine has been seen working in daylight it begins to fail. We can no longer sacrifice in good conscience. Girard was honest about what that gift costs: a civilization that has lost the ability to believe in the guilt of its victims has also lost its release valve. The violence that used to spend itself in one ritual expulsion now has nowhere to go, so it escalates, in his phrase, toward extremes, with no cathartic ending in sight.

Notice what the machine runs on. It runs on the seam. A community that has divided reality into pure and impure requires an impure one to carry the impurity out of town. The gavel needs a defendant. Where the dividing faculty is strongest, the search for a figure to put on the other side of the line is most urgent.

The jewel and the wheel

This is where the tantric teacher enters, and this is the heart of what I want to say.

A tantric method works by placing pressure on exactly the seam we have been describing. It is engineered to find the place where a student still divides reality into pure and impure, sacred and profane, acceptable and unacceptable, moral and immoral, and to press there until the division shows itself. The teacher’s strangeness is functional. It is the instrument.

So consider what actually happens when a Western seeker enters an Asian tantric lineage. Consciously, they want nondual realization. They have read the books, they can say the words, they want the seam gone. Underneath that, largely out of view, they are also holding a requirement: that the path deliver this realization through methods their existing moral categories already approve. They want the dismantling of duality, carried out by means that duality has pre-cleared.

Those two wishes cannot both be satisfied, and the lineage was built to make that visible.

Here is the image I keep coming back to. Everyone wants the jewel. Nobody wants the wheel. A rough stone becomes capable of showing its brilliance through cutting, friction, and long polishing, and there is no version of the process where the stone chooses its own abrasive. The faculty that would like to approve the method is precisely the roughness the method is for. So the wheel takes it first, and it hurts, and the stone concludes that something has gone wrong.

Look at the examples and you will see distinct instruments rather than a general category of eccentricity. Marpa put Milarepa to work building a tower and tearing it down and building it again until the young man’s back was one open sore — Milarepa, who had come to him with the deaths of dozens on his hands from sorcery, and who walked out of that ordeal as the greatest yogi Tibet has produced. Marpa’s instrument went after the settled equation of love with comfort. Drukpa Kunley went through Bhutan being deliberately obscene, and Bhutan loves him as a saint to this day; his instrument went after the division between the body’s appetites and the holy. The Aghori sits in the cremation ground handling exactly what the society around him calls filth, on the ground that awareness has no clean and unclean; his instrument goes after purity itself. Baba Sri Chand, Guru Nanak’s own son, walked into the wilderness as a naked renunciate while the tradition around him organized itself into households; his instrument went after the line between what a spiritual person may keep and what they must set down. Each of these teachers takes one settled distinction through which ordinary consciousness organizes reality, and applies force to it.

None of these methods can be understood by a mind that first requires them to conform to the very expectations they were built to expose. Run them through that filter and all you will ever see is misconduct, because the filter is what they are aimed at.

The conflict grows most intense in students formed by heavily Judaeo-Christian moral frameworks, and it is worth naming why with some sympathy. That inheritance gave the West extraordinary gifts, including the conviction that every person matters infinitely, which is the reason we can even recognize a victim. It also installed a tribunal. It trained us to hold the whole world as our jurisdiction, to survey it, grade it, and correct it, and to experience that surveying as conscience rather than as habit. A person can leave the church at nineteen and still be running the court at fifty.

Then colonial scholarship added its own layer. When the British and the missionaries encountered these traditions, they gathered them under the label Tantrism and defined the category by whatever most scandalized a Victorian parlor. Hugh Urban has documented how thoroughly that construction was manufactured out of disgust and then sold back to India as its own worst self. Most Western students receive their first idea of Tantra from that manufacture without ever being told where it came from. It arrives feeling like plain common sense.

So the seeker walks in carrying a tribunal they did not know they had, using categories produced outside the lineage, and reserving the right to judge the lineage’s methods by them. They want what the lineage offers while keeping the court that the offering would dissolve. And when the teacher refuses to submit to those categories, the disturbance is real — and it is a disturbance about the student. What has been exposed is how much of them is still organized around morally manageable opposites.

This is the deeper meaning of the bench. The outrage can arrive as a defense against recognition. Rather than sit with the surviving dualism that just became visible in themselves, a student can relocate the whole disturbance into the teacher, where it becomes a matter about someone else’s conduct, and then find others who agree. The relief of that agreement is enormous. Girard already told us what it is: the crowd forming, the peace that follows expulsion, the certainty borrowed from everyone else on the bench.

Now hold the distinction that keeps this honest, because it is a distinction rather than an exemption. Discernment looks directly at the particular event, in its own context, with your own eyes, and it stays available to conclude that something was wrong. Moralistic judgment arrives with a verdict already manufactured elsewhere and then borrows its certainty from the crowd. Naming the second one does not retire the first. The whole force of Girard’s insight is that victims are real and that unanimous certainty about anyone’s guilt is the thing to distrust — which cuts in every direction, including toward any argument that would use nonduality to wave off harm. Harm is harm, and awareness makes you more responsive to it rather than less. What I am after is narrower and more useful: to expose the metaphysical and colonial assumptions that walk around disguised as self-evident morality, so that discernment has room to do its actual work.

The scholar at the river

Shankara knew this weather from the inside. His own tradition called him a crypto-Buddhist, a heretic wearing Hindu clothes.

And there is the story of him at Varanasi, coming up from his bath, when an outcaste crossed his path and Shankara told the man to move aside, the way the custom he was raised in required. The chandala answered him in verse: Do you want this body made of food to move away from that body made of food? Or do you want consciousness to move away from consciousness?

Shankara stopped. He answered with five verses whose conclusion is that anyone who knows himself as the awareness shining through waking, dream, and deep sleep is his guru, outcaste or brahmin, it makes no difference at all. Then the greatest scholar of the age bent down and touched the feet of a man his society had taught him not to touch.

That is a tribunal being dismissed in public by the person with the most to lose in dismissing it. The seam went, and what rushed into the space where it had been was care. This is why Shankara’s Gita commentary keeps returning to lokasangraha, the holding together of the world, acting for the welfare of all beings, as the reason a realized person keeps working at all. When you no longer need anything from the world, action becomes pure care. Seeing that everything is consciousness is what makes cruelty impossible.

The forms are changing fast

Where I live it is now confirmed: SpaceX is building the largest launch site on Earth on the Louisiana coast, a hundred billion dollars, ground broken next year, in the parish beside the water I grew up on. The swamps. The trees. The ducks. The place my dad took me to fish.

Part of my physical body grieves that, the way a body feels weather.

Ice sheared off a mountain in the Himalaya and a coastline is being rebuilt for rockets on the Gulf, and in between there are drones and data centers and robots and whatever the aliens turn out to be. The rate of change has gone past what nervous systems metabolize quietly. Pressure rises in bodies, and bodies go looking for somewhere to put it — a window, a stranger, a teacher, a neighbor. This week someone threw a brick through the window of the café where I get my coffee at eight in the morning, for no reason anyone could name. The reason was that energy in a body had nowhere to go.

Move it deliberately instead, in your own body, before it goes looking for someone to land on. Sweat it out, shake it out, burn it in the navel, breathe it up into the space ten inches above your head. That is what a practice is for. Met from presence, the same intense times that would have broken you become something you can walk through with grace.

Tonight the shadow crosses

Tonight into the early hours the Earth’s shadow moves across the moon — a deep partial eclipse, ninety-six percent of the face swallowed, a red glow rising in the darkened part with one bright rim still in the sun. Greatest eclipse falls at 11:13 PM Central and most of the Americas can see it.

Here is a discharge that costs nothing and needs no victim. The shadow crosses, the pressure passes, the light returns. The cosmos does in a few hours, cleanly, what we have spent our whole history doing to each other.

Stand under it and make a decision. A firm one. Decide to live in awareness. Decide to live in beauty, which means looking at what is actually in front of you and letting it be beautiful — the grief included, the swamp included, the method that unsettled you included, the people you have been sentencing from that little bench included. Decide it once, the way you would decide a marriage, and then keep the vow with your practice, one breath at a time.

By your shoreless mercy, carry us over.

For Nepal, for Tibet, for the pilgrims on the road to Kailash: may the long time sunshine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you guide your way home.

Sat Naam.

Presence & Inquiry meets Saturdays, 9–11 AM Central, and there is a classical class Tuesdays at 7 PM Central. Everything lives at thelivingpathyoga.org — the schedule, the nondual and mystical poetry reader, and the deeper offerings. Class replays are on Patreon. Write to me any time at gian@thelivingpathyoga.org.

If this reached you, send it to one person who is carrying too much this week.

I want to talk to you about emotions, because that’s what I’ve been watching.

Over the last few weeks I’ve spoken with quite a number of people who are in emotional states. I don’t mean that in a condescending way. It’s just what I’ve noticed — waves of strong emotion, moving through people, one after another, harder than they should be for ordinary days.

Yogi Amandeep Ji says that in the twentieth century there was quite a bit of trouble with the mind. And that in the century we’re in now, what we’re going to see more of — what is more likely to happen going forward — is emotional sickness in people.

I think that’s already here. So that’s what we worked with in our last class. And it’s what we’re staying with this Saturday.

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Let me show you what we did, so you can do a little of it right where you’re sitting.

“I’m depressed” is not specific enough

I asked everyone in class a simple question: what is an emotion?

There are no right or wrong answers to that. If I come back at what you said, it isn’t a challenge to the rightness of it — it’s that the verbal exchange reveals new things. We’re working toward something.

And here’s what we were working toward. These words — emotion, feeling — are not specific enough. That’s where we get into trouble.

If I say I’m having a bad day, I don’t feel good — what have I actually told you? Someone else can say, yes, I’m also having a bad day, I also don’t feel very good. And all that’s been communicated is the most general sense of a thing. It’s almost meaningless.

And if you feel stuck in it — if you feel you can’t move, you can’t change the situation — it’s because you haven’t described it. You haven’t actually looked at what is taking place.

So in class I made up an example. Something like this may have happened to me at some point. Something like it may have happened to you.

I opened my email and there was a notification that a person I miss has an account. So I looked at the account. When I looked, I had memories. When I had the memories, there was a constriction in my abdomen. When there was a constriction in my abdomen, my breathing went shallow. When my breathing went shallow, my mind became uncontrollable — because my breath is my mind. When my mind became overactive, the constriction got more intense. When the constriction got more intense, I ate a bagel. When I ate the bagel, my blood sugar dropped. When my blood sugar dropped, I started to feel bad about myself. I decided I had low energy. Because I had low energy, I didn’t do the project I was supposed to do. And because I didn’t do the project, a thought arrived that said: you’re not capable.

And then I summed all of that up into two words and said: I’m depressed.

And then what happens? You go to the doctor and say I’m depressed, and they start putting pills in your mouth. Or you tell a friend, and you get further into the story. But nobody has yet found out what is actually happening in this body and this mind. You’re just saying this is bad — from a perspective that doesn’t make sense even to you.

Do you see what I’m saying?

Attention, and tension

So what is the central thing that has happened here? It’s a word that starts with the letter A.

Attention.

And if you cut the A off the front of that word, you get tension.

You are attending to tension. The tension in the physical body creates attention in the mind. Attention in the mind creates tension in the physical body. And around it goes.

The witness — that seer that is you, the real you, the one that can watch a thought, watch a sensation, watch phenomena that appear to be outside of you — that witness is putting its attention in very small, individual places.

Think of it as a spotlight. If the spotlight is wide, it perceives as wide as it is. But if it narrows onto the feeling in the chest, and then travels from the feeling in the chest to the thought about the feeling, then all that witness can see is chest and thought. And it identifies with chest-thought-feeling and calls the whole thing something general and nondescriptive, like anxiety.

That’s why it helps to go stand near the ocean, or under some trees. It has nothing to do with the tree. It has everything to do with how wide you let your attention go. There’s a lot to look at, so you let the looking happen.

There’s no reason you can’t do that in a prison. There’s no reason you can’t do it on your deathbed. It’s just that in those places the mind gets very specific about what it’s looking at — and if you’re looking at something that creates tension, you will have that sense of tension.

Something you can do right now

Here’s the invitation, and it’s small enough that you’ll actually do it.

The next time you feel bad — stuck, sad, triggered by something you saw on the internet, flooded by someone else’s suffering — before you name it, find out what the condition is.

Start at the top of the head and scan down with your attention. How does the chest feel. How does the stomach feel. The legs, the feet, the toes, the fingers. Just get a basic sense of what the body is actually doing. My chest is tight. There is a thought arising. That’s it. Don’t add a story to it.

Then move. Whatever the physical body is capable of. If you sit all day looking at your phone, you’re going to stay stuck in that position, because the position is the problem.

And then this little kriya, which is the one I’d give you if I could only give you one:

Inhale deep. Squeeze the navel. Press the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. Look up to the third eye point. Hold.

Then exhale.

Eleven to twenty-one times. If there’s any medical reason not to hold the breath, don’t hold it — modify it, or just breathe.

What happens is this. You constrict the breath on purpose, and when you stop, the body has to reestablish its normal breathing pattern. The breath comes back to normal on its own.

And when the breath comes back to normal, something becomes possible that wasn’t possible a few minutes ago: your suffering can turn into compassion.

By compassion I mean something very practical. I mean I have the energy to act on this. Because if you don’t have the energy to act on it, all you get is more suffering — I feel stuck, I can’t do what I know I need to do, and why? I don’t have the energy. So I feel incapacitated. And so on and so forth.

That isn’t one person’s condition. That’s everyone’s.

What is prior to all of it

In Buddhism they call it the sky-like nature of mind. The clear light of mind. Go around Buddhism a little — I recommend it, it’s very helpful knowledge.

If you realize that your awareness can assume the dimensions of the entire sky, then every phenomenon happening inside it — your body, your mind, your thoughts — is just spontaneously arising there. The body gets tense for a moment, and because you know what you are, it self-liberates immediately.

It can get depressed. It can get angry. It can get sad. It can get whatever it needs to get. You just don’t repeat the thing over and over. You let it happen, and it keeps moving.

You know those inflatable dancers at the car dealership, the ones flapping in the wind? That’s what this is like. If your attention is in the middle of it, it’s oh no. If you take the attention out, it’s oh, look at it flickering.

We’re all wearing the world, as Santosha Tantra says in her poem. All of our bodies are in decline — mine, yours. The question was never whether this meat bucket can perform the exercise perfectly. The question is whether the meat bucket is being used as a tool to turn the attention back toward the infinity of you.

So do it to your capacity, and keep the awareness. That’s better than hurting yourself while still believing I am this body, poor me.

This Saturday, 9 AM Central

We’re continuing. This week we go further into how to actually work with the practice when emotions are running — the specific breath, the specific movement, and how to widen the spotlight while the feeling is still happening rather than after it has passed.

Presence & Inquiry. Saturday, 9–11 AM Central, on Zoom.

Come once. See how your body feels afterward. That’s the only test I trust.

And I want to say this plainly, because I don’t think I say it often enough: my heart is open to all of you. Not only to the ones who are practicing well, or who have understood something, or who show up every week. To all of you. The ones in the middle of it. The ones who have been gone for a year. The ones who read this and never write back.

Yogi Amandeep Ji teaches that there are three hearts — one asleep, one activated, one awakened. That third one, hirday, where a hundred and one nadis sprout into the body. The whole curriculum is the slow turning of the first into the third. And the awakened one doesn’t get to choose who it opens to. That’s how you know it’s the awakened one.

So if you’re struggling right now, you’re not outside of this. You’re exactly who it’s for.

And if you haven’t been to the website yet

thelivingpathyoga.org — there’s a heart there with two eyes in it. One eye is Kaal, time, the outer path, the practice you do with a body. The other is Akaal, the timeless, the source underneath. Touch the eyes to come in. Notice which one your attention goes to first. That usually tells you something.

And please, read the little book.

How to Be a Poem →

I’m asking again because of everything above. This whole class was about one thing: getting specific about what is actually happening in you, instead of throwing a general word over it and calling that your life.

That is what a poem does. That’s the whole art of it. A poem is a technology for describing a state precisely enough that it can be entered again — by you, or by a stranger a thousand years later. Lallā did it. Kabīr did it. It is the same skill I’m asking you to use on your own chest and your own stomach and your own shallow breath.

The book teaches a way of reading a poem — not for what it means, but for what it carries. It has the practices for laughing and for dancing and for the shaking loose that has to happen before words come. And it teaches a way of arriving at a poem that turns a passing glimpse into a place you can return to, daily.

It’s complimentary. Leave an email and it comes to you. All I ask back is a poem, whenever one arrives in you. I’m collecting them. I read every single one.

Send me the book →

Take whatever you need from this. That’s what it’s for.

And if this season has been leaning on you the way it’s been leaning on some of us — scan the body, find the tension, hold the breath, let it come back to normal, and come sit with us Saturday.

I’ll be there at nine.

With love,

Gian

I’ve been watching the so-called world, and people seem to be struggling. Maybe you’ve felt it too. Something thin in the air, something harder than it should be about ordinary days. I notice that these points of tension in the sky tend to arrive as points of tension down here, in the lives of people I love, and in mine.

So rather than say anything clever about it, I want to give you some things.

They’re finished, they took me years, and they’re yours now. If they bring you some joy in a tight season, that’s the whole purpose.

Start at the heart

When you land on thelivingpathyoga.org, you’ll find a heart with two eyes in it.

One eye is Kaal — time, the outer path, the practice you do with a body. The other is Akaal — the timeless, the source underneath. One eye open, one eye closed, and the whole teaching sits in the space between them.

Touch the eyes to enter. Take your time with it. Notice which one your attention goes to first — that usually tells you something.

And if you want to know whose hands this came through before it reached mine, the lineage is here. None of it is mine. I’m carrying it.

The first gift · a small book

How to Be a Poem

→

This is the one I’d put in your hands if we were sitting together.

It teaches a way of reading a poem — not for what it means, but for what it carries. Practices for laughing, for dancing, for the shaking loose that has to happen before words come. And then a way of arriving at a poem that turns a passing glimpse of something into a place you can return to, daily.

The book is complimentary. Leave an email and it comes straight to you.

All I ask back is a poem, whenever one arrives in you. I’m collecting them, and I read every single one.

Send me the book →

The second gift · for the teachers

905 kriyas, searchable →

If you teach Kundalini Yoga, you know this ache. It’s late, you’re planning tomorrow’s class, and you need *something for the navel*, or eleven minutes, or whatever he was teaching the year you were born — and you’re hunting through the archive instead of resting.

I built the index I wanted. 905 kriyas and meditations across 1969 to 2004, every one linking back to its record in the Library of Teachings where the teaching itself lives.

Type a word. Filter by mantra, by breath, by how long you’ve got. Find it in seconds, and go to bed

And when you read it in order, something else opens: 1977 alone holds 52 kriyas. Through the seventies the work is one practice held long — 78% single exercise, eleven minutes. By the eighties that doubles and the sets become architecture. You can watch a body of teaching grow up.

No signup. Just bookmark it and use it Tuesday.

The third gift · for anyone who reads

258 mystical poets →

Every one linked to the actual poem. It spirals out from Mount Kailash — the mountain four religions put at the centre of the world and nobody climbs — east into Zen and Tibet, west along the caravan roads into the Sufis, into Egypt and Africa, across to the Americas, late and reluctantly into Europe, and then into people who are still alive.

Ṛgveda. Lallā. Kabīr. Rūmī. Guru Nanak. Bashō. Blake. Dickinson. Rilke. Milarepa. Joy Harjo.

Thirteen of them open all the way up into a full reading, with a diagram drawn in the shape that poem actually takes.

That’s the Hymn of Creation, the oldest thing here. Six verses build a ladder — *who really knows? the gods came after, so they can’t know either* — then at last someone knows, and you relax, and the seventh verse takes the rung out while you’re standing on it.

That drop you feel isn’t the poet failing to finish. That’s the poem working. Let it work.

Open it anywhere.

Who this is for

We’re a small community, and I want to be honest about the size of the hope: I’d like us to grow, but only to the level of people who want to go deep. Not wider. Deeper.

Almost everything is online, which means you can be anywhere. A few in-person workshops here and there.

The people I most want to work with are three kinds:

• Serious artists — writers, musicians, makers of any sort, who suspect that the practice and the work are the same work

• Kundalini and yogic practitioners of any lineage or level, who want the philosophy underneath the technique

• People from the nonduality world who have understood something real and need a more embodied practice to hold it

If you want to go deep, come here. That’s what this is built for.

And if you don’t — if you’re just tired and you need some support for a while — that’s good too. Come anyway. There’s room.

If you’d like to come further in

Akaal is the inner room — live circles and inquiry with me, the full poetic emergence series, the kriya library, the longer readings.

Yogi Amandeep Ji teaches that there are three hearts. One asleep. One activated. One awakened — *hirday*, the inner heart, where a hundred and one nadis sprout into the body. The slow turning of the first into the third is the entire curriculum. That’s what happens in there.

Come inside →

Or simply sit with us first. Presence & Inquiry, Saturday mornings, 9–11 Central, on Zoom. Taj Chander teaches weekly too. Come once. See how it feels in your body afterward.

And if you carry a book you’ve never written

Some of the most important books never reach the page, because their author teaches *out loud* — the transmission lives in the room, in years of recordings, and stays there.

That’s the work I’m most practiced at. Ghostwriting, research, editorial. I’ve built books from hundreds of hours of recordings for a Kundalini lineage master and a nondual satsang teacher, and kept them sounding like the person who spoke them.

One question runs under all of it, and under both indexes above: how does a state of consciousness get carried inside a form — and how do you keep it faithful on the way through.

Two people to thank

I designed this site myself, every page. Getting it actually *running* on a storefront is another craft entirely, and Nick Gish did that — weeks of patient work, through everything a custom build can throw at a theme. Everything you just clicked works because of him.

And Taj Chander teaches for this community every single week, with love.

Both of them are doing seva — service, freely given. Neither had to. Thank you, both of you.

Take whatever you need from this. That’s what it’s for.

And if the eclipses have been leaning on you the way they’ve been leaning on some of us, I hope one of these three things lands somewhere soft and does you some good.

Come to the heart →

With love,

Gian

I spent about two hours this past weekend up to my neck in the ocean, down in Florida, where I was with friends and with children and sharing teachings, and it was a very beautiful experience. I was just standing there in the water, letting my mind and my conscious experience merge with the distant sky and the expansive waters, watching the clouds move slowly against the horizon while the waves came in, until the clouds and the waves seemed to be doing the same thing at two different speeds. I softened my attention, which is barely an instruction at all, and at some point the question came up on its own, without my asking for it: softened like this, how could I not also be that water and that sky?

Which makes me want to say something about ordinary life, because I think quite often our problems are simply a matter of attention. A single black cloud in an enormous sky. A single wave that arrives at the wrong moment and puts us under for a second, so that we come up salt-stung and quite sure the ocean has done something to us.

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I want to stay with that cloud, because in my opinion it is the whole picture of how we seek. Almost everyone I teach came to practice on account of a cloud of some kind — the anxiety, the money, the marriage, the forty days that broke on day thirty-one — and there is nothing shameful in that, and it is how I arrived myself. But the practice becomes a campaign against the cloud, so the attention narrows onto it and tracks it and gets very good at managing it, while the whole sky it is crossing goes unnoticed for years by somebody getting up at four in the morning to work on the weather. And then that cloud passes, because clouds do, and another comes along, because the sky keeps making weather.

What ends the concern is the loosening. The attention widens and the awareness is recognized as vast — actually vast, the way the sky over the Gulf is vast, with room in it for every cloud that has ever crossed it — and the cloud is still there, and it has simply stopped being the size of everything. Pavan guroo, paanee pitaa, maataa dharat mahat. Air is the Guru, water the father, earth the great mother. Standing in the Gulf with the wind coming across it, that line stops being liturgy and becomes a plain description of the three things holding you up.

The other half of the weekend was a workshop I led at Drala Forms in Pensacola, for a small group of Kundalini Yoga teachers and practitioners, on August 8th, which of course some people call a Lionsgate, 8-8. Whereas I don’t necessarily give too much credence to such things, I do have a kriya that Yogi Amandeep gave me, which is almost comically simple: every time I see an alignment of numbers, or numbers in ascending order, like 1-2-3, I inhale deeply and make a little wish. For years I would have wished for some outcome. Now it is one wish and it doesn’t change, which is to see myself as myself and to see the world as myself.

I wrote a little poem on that trip, and I want to put it here before any of the thinking, because it arrives where I am going in about ninety seconds and everything after it is me walking there slowly.

Glimpsing the eclipse blossom.

Straightening the picture of Babaji
which fell in the rain
like the offering it was
is
shall be.

For instance
there is a subject
with a swollen heart
bursting.

And for a moment before that
there was an object
and a meaning.

Someone said
an eclipse is an alignment.

And on an alignment
one should hold their breath.

Subjectively recalling:
looking out into the highway
on the way to the ocean
commanding reality
give me numbers.

And seeing
38
37
36
34
33
32
31
and then
All in a row.

Holding my breath
for minutes
until three women laughing
made the roof explode.

A million hearts
dancing into silence.

Knowing the whole world
is being experienced subjectively.

All those objects
in the awareness
of that subjectivity.

The highway.
The ocean.
Babaji in the rain.
The numbers passing.
Three women laughing.
The heart bursting.

And saying
three
four
how can there be anything
but one?

The kriya says that on an alignment you inhale, and the poem says that on an alignment one should hold their breath, and those are the same instruction at two different depths. And notice who seems to be doing it — I inhale, I hold my breath, I look for the numbers, I command reality to give me numbers — which is a small theater of doership, and more or less what we are all doing at four in the morning with our arms in the air, only in grander language.

Which is what I most want to say to the Kundalini Yoga world, and I say it as somebody who practices every day and has no plans to stop. In my opinion what has been missing from the scene is knowledge of the self and operation from the self, and quite a number of people seem to me a little caught in the relative sphere, with so much emphasis on practice and on doership. There are two ways a kriya can happen and from the outside they look identical. In the first one I am here and liberation is over there, and the distance is made out of accomplishment, so every repetition quietly re-establishes the one who is repeating, and the practitioner grows strong and disciplined while the heart stays about where it was, waiting. I say that as one of them. In the second one the practice is still happening, sometimes with even more intensity, but as an expression of the very beingness the person had been trying to reach, so that kriya and mantra and breath and devotion and poetry become modes through which Being enjoys and recognizes itself in the relative field. Nothing on the schedule changes. What changes is the direction it faces.

I said something about this in the workshop that I have been turning over ever since. Kundalini Yoga offers you something you think you need, in order to bring you to awareness. That is the whole design of it, and it is a tender design. You want a thing, and you are told that this will get you the thing, so you sit down, and the sitting itself slowly begins to take your attention off of the getting.

And it is hidden in plain sight, because we call it the yoga of awareness. It says so right there in the name. But the awareness meant there is the total awareness, the whole sky, and as long as the attention stays fixed on the getting it remains a focused awareness, narrowed down onto the one thing being pursued. So the nature of awareness becomes the very thing a person forgets, inside a practice that is named after it.

My own reading of the Siri Singh Sahib is a tender one — that he was addressing specific people in a specific zone who had human needs, and offering them ways of taking their focus off of those needs. The wish is the doorway and the sitting is the teaching. And once a person is resting in that total awareness, the practice stops being a means to anything at all and becomes a living expression of moving in the absolute, with the same kriya and the same breath ratio and nothing on the outside changed.

The poem opens on an eclipse blossom, which is an image that will not sit still, because an eclipse is an alignment and it is also an occlusion, and then the poem says blossom, which is an opening. Anyone who has stood in a total eclipse knows why both words are correct, because the light goes and the corona appears, having been there the whole time and simply unavailable while the source was too bright to look past.

You can check that in yourself, and I would rather you check it than agree with it. If you close your eyes there is a physical darkness, and if you look a little closer you will notice that the darkness is being seen, and that there is a light in consciousness by which even the dark is known, and no lamp or window has anything to do with it. Japji has a word for that right at the top, ahead of every instruction in the bani — saibhang, self-illumined, along with ajoonee, unborn, and before both of them Ik Onkar, one, being, pervading. I read all of this as Advaita, and as the culmination of Advaita, and I will say that plainly, because Guru Nanak states the non-dual reality in the very first syllable and then, rather than emptying the world in order to protect the One, he goes and fills it — jetaa keetaa tetaa naa-o, whatever has been made, that much is the Naam. And so when the rain knocks over the picture of Babaji, the offering gets made out of the accident, and the ordinary and the sacred stop being cleanly separable.

Then there is the center of the poem, where the breath is held for minutes until three women laughing make the roof explode.

That held breath is the ritual of attention sustained past comfort, with the counting and the wishing and the whole apparatus of the one who is doing it correctly. And then the practice gets exceeded from outside itself. Laughter is breath escaping in a way that nobody authorizes, about the only respiratory event that cannot be performed on command without turning into something else, so it is spirit taking the breath back from the one who thought he was holding it. And it arrives from three women who were not participating in the ritual at all and had no idea it was happening. The holding was the condition, and the release was not accomplished by the one who was holding.

Several years ago Santosha Tantra Ma had a big influence on me, just from watching her videos, and she never met me. What she gave me was one very simple instruction, which was that if I would redirect, in the relative sphere, my desire away from all the things of the world and toward the simple desire for awakening, and really focus the intention of everything I was doing on that, then things would shift. And they did, in a significant way. Once that had come to pass I wrote to her through her liaison, and what came back was heart recognition and three more words.

Always fly free.

I have been carrying those words around for years and they keep opening, and they put a question to me that I would rather ask you than argue with you: if you are doing in order to obtain something material, are you free?

Then a million hearts dancing into silence.

Earlier in the poem there was one heart, singular and swollen and bursting, which is the private organ of a private person and more or less how we mean the word when we say somebody has an open heart. And it bursts, and what comes out of it is a million, so the awakened heart turns out never to have been personal property at all. And notice where the million go, which is into silence, all that multiplicity moving as one movement and arriving at the quiet. Then the poem lists things — the highway, the ocean, Babaji in the rain, the numbers passing, three women laughing, the heart bursting — all of them objects in the awareness of that subjectivity, with the heart included, so that the bursting heart which was the subject a few stanzas earlier is now sitting among its own objects.

So let me slow down, because this is where an essay can turn into an assertion and I would rather it turn into a question. Right now, as you are reading, a sound may be appearing, and the pressure of the body against the chair, and a thought, and the visual field with these words inside it — and all of it is showing up in the same place, lit by the same light you found behind your closed eyes a few minutes ago. So where exactly is the boundary between the awareness in which all of that is appearing and the separate observer who claims to own it? There is breathing — is there a separate breather apart from the breathing? There is practice — can the doer be found apart from the doing?

And then the poem counts. Three, four, how can there be anything but one?

Three remains three and four remains four. The ocean remains the ocean, and it is cold and loud and it will knock you down. Kriyas remain kriyas, and they still have to be done at the hour they have to be done, and they still work. What loosens is only the assumption that multiplicity requires separation.

So the practice continues, and it becomes lighter and stranger and much more enjoyable, because it has stopped being a bid. Always fly free. And the little wish, when the numbers line up, stays the same wish.

The inhale becomes the held breath, and the held breath becomes laughter, and the laughter becomes an explosion, and the explosion becomes a million hearts, and the million hearts dance into silence.

Which is what I mean by the awakened heart — the whole thing, awake, with nobody standing outside it waiting to be given a share.

Three.

Four.

How can there be anything but one?

There was a wagon on my grandmother’s land that I used to walk around on in circles.

I grew up in rural Louisiana, on the same ground my grandmother grew up on. There were horses. There was my uncle’s cattle herd, which he handed down to my dad when he got too old to keep it. There was an old barn where I would drag the hay bales around and build enormous spider webs out of them, and past that were my uncles’ houses, and past those the soy and the sugar cane going out to the edge of everything I knew.

And at that time Fox was a brand new channel, and what Fox did with its afternoons was play classic Star Trek. So I had a vivid science fiction imagination and a hundred acres to run it on. I could dream entire worlds right on top of the world I was standing in. I want you to hear how completely that worked, because here is the strange part: when I remember those afternoons now, I remember the imagination more clearly than I remember the physical world it was laid over. The invented thing outlasted the real one in my memory. The horses are dim. The worlds are bright.

By middle school I was reading everything I could find on Buddhism, and not long after that I had my first satori — I’m going to tell that whole story properly in a book I’m putting together called How to Be a Poem, which I’ll be putting in your hands before long. But here is the piece of it that belongs to today.

I was on a bus, riding home. And I saw a red balloon go past the window, and the balloon triggered a memory. In the memory I was falling to my death in a barn in a previous life. I fell, and there was a pitchfork under the hay, and that was the end of that one.

I thought this was really something. I want to be honest with you about how much I thought it was something. I carried that memory around like a credential for years, and I sat down day after day after day meditating for another vision, because if one had come then more would come, and the visions were surely the path.

Okay, so. Look at what I just told you. A boy walks in circles on a wagon in a barnyard, dreaming worlds so vivid they overwrite the barnyard. Twenty years later a man sits down every morning to summon a vision of a barn. Different barn. Same faculty. Same exact faculty, running the same exact operation, and I called the first one playing and the second one practice.

That is what I did not see for the better part of forty years. A vision and an imagination are made of the same material, and both of them are one more world laid on top of the world. And once you see that clearly, something worse and much better opens up behind it: all of the seeking is the same seeking. Seeking God, seeking money, seeking sex, seeking self-improvement, seeking a vision — every one of those is reaching for something that presence can witness. And that is precisely the problem. If presence can witness it, it is not what you are.

Three lines in a thumbnail casket

Which brings me to a story about a man who cried out in grief and got three sentences for it.

When Garab Dorje finished teaching, his body dissolved into a body of light in the middle of the sky. His student Mañjuśrīmitra was standing underneath watching this happen and he cried out, the way any of us would, because he had just lost everything he had. And out of that light a small golden casket came down and landed in the palm of his hand, about the size of a thumbnail. Inside it were three lines, and those three lines are the entire inheritance of the Dzogchen teaching. The whole thing fits inside a closed fist.

They are called the Tshig gsum gnad du brdeg-pa — the Three Statements That Strike the Essential Points. Here they are, with the way you say them out loud, because I think you should be able to say them.

NGO RANG THOG TU SPRAD — ngo rang t’og tu tray — One is introduced directly to one’s own nature.

THAG GCIG THOG TU BCAD — t’ag chig t’og tu chay — One definitively decides upon this unique state.

GDENG GROL THOG TU BCA’ — deng drol t’og tu cha — One continues directly with confidence in liberation.

That is the whole inheritance. Read them out loud once before you go on, and then let me hand them to you the way I hold them.

The first one is that something gets shown to you, directly, by somebody who is standing in it. And I want to be explicit about what that something is, because I have heard this taught vaguely more times than I can count, and the vagueness is exactly what keeps people wandering around for decades looking in the wrong direction.

What gets shown to you is the nature of reality. The actual nature of it, handed over live, in the moment, by a person who is resting in it while they hand it to you. In Dzogchen it goes by the name rigpa, which translates roughly as knowing, or as awareness that is aware of itself. And here is what makes it so difficult to talk about and so simple to receive: it is the awareness you are reading this sentence with right now. It is what is looking out of your eyes. The traditional name for this first line is direct introduction, and that is exactly what it is — somebody turns you around and introduces you to what you have been the whole time. Your own nature and the nature of everything turn out to be the same single item. That gets shown to you rather than proved to you, and the entire teaching rests on it.

Everything I looked for across forty years was the thing that was doing the looking.

The second line is that you decide, definitively, upon that one state, and you settle it until nothing in you is arguing anymore. Thag is a rope and bcad is to cut — practitioners shorten it to thag chöd, cutting the rope, the way you cut a tether so the boat can finally move. And notice the word gcig sitting in the middle of that line. One. A single state. You decide on that one thing and you quit shopping.

The third line is that you continue with confidence in liberation. Deng is confidence and drol is liberation, and what it means in practice is that you stay, and keep staying, until whatever arises in you unties itself the moment it appears, and there is nobody left standing guard over the process. The confidence is in the untying rather than in your ability to untie anything.

Notice what is absent from all three. Nowhere in there does anybody get a vision.

He simply obeyed

When Nisargadatta Maharaj met his teacher he received one sentence. You are not what you take yourself to be. Watch the sense “I am.” Find your real self. And here is his own account of what he did with it, which I would like tattooed somewhere I can see it every morning: “I obeyed him because I trusted him.”

That’s the second line. That’s thag chöd, and look at how he performs it — through love rather than through certainty. He did not go looking for corroboration. He did not check the teaching against other teachers, he did not wait for an experience to verify it first, he did not set it aside until he felt ready. A man he trusted told him what he was, and he believed him, and then he lived on that belief for three years while his life quietly came apart around it. In other words, the certainty arrived after the commitment, which is the reverse of the way every one of us has been trained to do anything.

His teacher died soon after giving him the instruction, and it made no difference to him at all. He walked barefoot to the tomb every year and sang bhajans four times a day for the rest of his life, decades after there was anything left for him to attain, which tells you exactly what he understood himself to have received. And when people came from all over the world and asked him what it actually takes, he refused to give them a technique. He gave them one word. Earnestness is the only condition of success.

Los Angeles, 1972

So I went into the Library of Teachings this week looking for our own version of these three lines, and what I found sat me down on the floor.

On the seventh of April, 1972, at UCLA, the Siri Singh Sahib Ji was teaching a mantra and he stopped to correct the way the room was doing it. “Mantra is I am, I am. You cannot chant once I am and get out of it.”

Read that again and then hold it up next to the third line. You cannot chant once and get out of it. That is the staying, the entire third statement, delivered in a California classroom in eleven words, in the same years an old man in a Bombay loft was telling everyone who walked through his door to hold onto the sense “I am” and not swerve from it for a single moment. Now, somebody is going to ask whether the Siri Singh Sahib had read Garab Dorje, and the honest answer is that I do not know. The Three Statements did not come into general English circulation until John Reynolds published The Golden Letters in 1996, so a printed translation sitting on his desk in 1972 is unlikely. But he spent his early life in Delhi and the Punjab in exactly the years when Tibetan teachers were settling across northern India, and I am not going to pretend to know what crossed his table.

And here is why I have stopped finding the question urgent. I am needs no Tibetan source at all. So Hang. Aham Brahmasmi. The ajapa japa that runs along on the breath with nobody chanting it. That has been in the soil of the subcontinent for thousands of years, and the Himalaya has been a contact zone for at least a thousand of them — Naths and Shaivites and Sufis and Tibetan tantrikas and the Sant tradition all sharing the same mountains and the same roads and the same winters. Yogiji’s own Udasin lineage sits directly in that overlap. So the resemblance is very possibly inheritance rather than coincidence, and I would rather it were. Coincidence would make these men isolated geniuses who happened to rhyme. Inheritance makes them family.

And the year before, in November of 1971, also in Los Angeles, he gave the line that every one of us in this lineage carries in our bones without knowing where it came from. “Don’t give up, man. Keep up. From there I learned this mantra, keep up. Keep up and you will be kept up, and that is all is the truth.”

Notice the second half of that sentence, because most of us only ever quote the first half and then go grit our teeth about it. And you will be kept up. The keeping up gets met. Something comes back toward you. Whatever this is, you were never doing it on your own strength, and you were never being asked to.

Sehaj

And then I went back through Yogiji’s own words — years of them, gathered out of classes and messages and the margins of his teaching — and the three lines were sitting there in his mouth too, wearing Punjabi and Sanskrit instead of Tibetan.

For the showing: Man Tu Joth Saroop Hai, Apna Mool Pechan. You are made of light. Recognize where you came from. And right beside it, flat, no poetry on it at all: “You are that which is witness to all this. This witness is ever present, in the three states — awake, dreaming, deep sleep.”

Sit with that one for a second in light of everything I just told you about my barn. The witness is there in dreaming. Which means the witness was there for every world I ever built on top of this one, watching me build it, entirely unimpressed.

For the staying, he gives it a name that dismantles the whole enterprise. “We are always effortlessly in dhyana. It is our effort that gives us the illusion that we are not in meditation. It’s called Sehaj.” And then he opens the word out: “Sehaja is how everything is happening spontaneously. Nobody tells the flower what to do or how to bloom. It has no rules to follow. It has only Svabhava — its own inner teacher — to guide it.”

And here is something I noticed that I did not expect. In everything of his that I have documented, the word absolutenever appears. Not one time. The word he uses is Akal. “Kal is Maya. That which is not Maya is called Akal, reality beyond time and space.” And then the sentence that closes the door on the entire search: “Here and now is always. This is known as Akal.”

Which is to say it is available in the breath you are taking right now, the one that started without asking your permission.

What the four of them are pointing at

I could write ten more pages on where these four traditions differ from one another. It would be an interesting essay and it would be beside the point. What matters is that four different fingers are pointing at one thing, and the thing they are pointing at is something you already have and will spend your life trying to build anyway.

They are pointing at what is already awake in you this second. The one who is aware of these words. That one was here before your practice started and will be here after your practice is over, and it runs straight through your sleep without a gap in it anywhere. It stays exactly the same when you are disciplined and it stays exactly the same when you fall off for a month. Your effort has no purchase on it, and that is precisely why effort keeps reporting back that it must be missing. Clouds come and go. Sky remains.

The horizon

Now I want to stop and make a correction, because this is the exact place where I have watched more people get turned around than anywhere else in the teaching, and I was one of them for a long time.

You hear these names — Parabrahman, rigpa, the absolute, emptiness, Sat Nam, Wahe Guru, Akal — and the mind does something very fast and very sincere with them. It hears a pure state that cannot be corrupted. It hears beyond time. And it files all of that away as the description of some pristine condition sitting somewhere else, on the far side of your practice, waiting for you to finally qualify for it.

So let me say it as plainly as I know how. This is that which you are. Right now, in the middle of whatever kind of day you happen to be having.

And here is how you can check it for yourself. Everything you think and everything you experience is happening to that. But watch how it happens. It does not arrive at a single point, at some small receiving station behind your eyes that gets struck by things. It appears on a horizon. The awareness you are is the horizon upon which every appearance takes place, and a horizon has no location and takes no impact.

That distinction is the entire thing. Because time, and causality, and the whole sense that there are loci of impact — that this event struck me, that that person changed me, that I am the accumulated damage of what happened — all of that occurs in time, and only in time. It requires points. It requires locations that can be arrived at and dented.

Which finally explained something to me that used to be genuinely tormenting. Your sense that presence is missing. The in-fluxness of your experience, the way it slides and will not hold still for you. The construction of an identity that keeps coming apart in your hands and needing to be built again on Monday. All of that appears as flux, and appears non-concrete, for one reason: the timeless horizon that you are is not having an experience. It is simply present to the appearance of being and time.

Read that last sentence one more time. It is not having an experience. It is present to the appearing.

Which is why nothing that has ever happened to you has damaged it, and why nothing you do in four hours of practice will improve it, and why the only honest instruction any of these four could give you was to quit trying to get there and turn around and notice where you are looking from.

And now the part that actually undid me this week.

Some of you will remember the instruction Yogi Amandeep gave me for the moment the mind starts wandering again — and it does start again; the mind did not stop wandering just because the body sat down. He told me to simply say: I AM. I KNOW I AM. Being, and the knowing of being, as one movement. That is Sat Nam rendered into plain English, and it is my entire practice on a bad afternoon. I have leaned on it in airports and hospital hallways and in the middle of arguments I was losing.

It is the same instruction the Siri Singh Sahib Ji gave a room in Los Angeles in 1972. It is the same instruction Siddharameshwar handed Nisargadatta in a room in Bombay. And it is the same instruction that came down out of the sky in a golden box the size of a thumbnail and landed in the palm of a grieving man in the eighth century.

So let me give it to you as an aphorism, and check it against your own life. Every real lineage arrives at the same four words in the end, and the only reason there are so many traditions is that the mind will travel any distance on this earth to avoid sitting down.

The boy on the wagon walked in circles for years and the ground under the wagon never moved once.

Say it and you’re back.

I am. I know I am.

Sat Naam, Sat Naam, Sat Naam.

Announcements

I’m sending this early because I travel on Thursday.

This Tuesday at 7 PM Central, that’s me. We’ll work right in the middle of everything above.

Saturday at 9 AM Central, Taj Chander is back. He has returned from India and he has his seat again. It’s been a joy to hold it while he was away and a bigger joy to hand it back, and a teacher always brings something home with him from that soil. Come sit with him.

The Tuesday class is here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86184538274?pwd=CB3sDAqrypoDAzlwWWNw5XLSIBBUCl.1

And until we launch the website on the 17th, every class is on the house. Bring somebody who needs it.

I’ll be in Pensacola. I’m on the road in Florida after Thursday, teaching around exactly this while I’m out there. If you’re anywhere near the Gulf, write to me directly at gian@thelivingpathyoga.org and I’ll tell you where to find me.

August 22, Lafayette — Ethos Wellness, 2 to 6 PM. Four hours of the Himalayan Yoga as Yogi Amandeep gave it to me.

Let me say plainly who this one is for, because I think there are more of you out there than anybody admits to. You practice. You work out. You eat well, you make your money, you keep your word, you show up for every person who depends on you. By every measure available to you the life is working. And you’re still not happy, and somewhere in there you’ve started to wonder quietly whether something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. The doing was never going to produce it, and more doing will never change that, which is difficult news for about an hour and then it is the best news you have ever gotten. So what we’re going to do that afternoon is turn around. We’re going to look at whoever it is that’s doing all of that work — actually look at it, rather than think about it — and then look at whoever it is that isn’t happy, and find out whether those two have ever once been in the same room together.

Breath, movement, stillness, and a few very old questions asked in earnest. Come at whatever level you practice. Write to me and I’ll send you everything.

Register here: https://www.somble.com/EthosLiveWell/classes/fcfb2a85-1b19-4ce3-b3e2-674f51e71097

Scroll to the bottom for a gift from a bottomless heart.

Yesterday was Guru Purnima, the full moon of the teacher. Once a year the moon fills completely and the traditions of India stop everything to bow — to Vyasa, to the lineage, to whoever it was that first held a lamp up in the dark for us. I spent the day thinking about what a teacher actually is, and about what this path actually asks of us, and I want to try to say some of it plainly.

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Chuang Tzu has a chapter that Victor Mair translates as “Symbols of Integrity Fulfilled.” It is a parade of broken bodies. Princely Nag has had a foot cut off, and half the state of Lu follows him instead of Confucius. Toeless Nuncle Hill plods along on his heels. Nag the Hump is described, twice, as ugly enough to terrify all under heaven — and men cannot bear to leave his company, women petition their parents to be his concubines, and a duke tries to hand him the state. None of these men teaches anything in the ordinary sense. “He neither teaches when standing nor discourses when sitting. Yet those who go to him empty come back full.”

Confucius, in the story, explains the mystery: what the piglets loved in their mother was never her form but that which animated her form. And of the one-footed sage he says, “He sees the loss of his foot as the sloughing off of a clump of earth.”

That is the whole teaching, really. A person can be physically diminished in every visible way and be utterly complete. Completeness is a matter of integrity — of the inner life sitting whole and still, like water at rest that has become level and can finally hold a reflection. “Only stillness can still the hosts who seek stillness.” People gathered around those mutilated sages for the same reason they gathered around a hunchback with no salary, no position, and no doctrine: they could feel something whole in him, and in its presence they remembered their own wholeness.

I think about this often because I am not a physically beautiful man. I am fat. I carry a number of injuries. I do yoga seven days a week, without question, and still there are mornings when I miss the body I had in my thirties, when the asanas poured out of me easily. I let myself feel that. And then I practice anyway, because the wish has nothing to do with the path. The path was never about the postures. In class I say it every week: how well you do the posture doesn’t matter — grab the toes, or the shins, or the knees, or the thighs. The practices exist to move the glandular system, to settle the hormones, to make the body comfortable enough that it steps out of the way. They are what the tradition calls progressive path teachings — secondary supports that make the real seeing easier. The real seeing needs no particular body at all.

More than that — and here is where this path differs from the fitness culture that yoga has been folded into — this is a tantric path. Tantra takes everything as material. Every condition of the body, every so-called incapacity, every humiliation of aging is a doorway into the nature of reality. When the shoulder no longer rotates, you are being handed a laboratory: who is it that knows the shoulder? When the belly is large, when the knees complain, when the face in the mirror has stopped cooperating with your vanity — each of these is an invitation to find what it is that perceives all of this and has never been touched by any of it. The more the body starts to malfunction, the greater our opportunity to work with the subtle essence. The failing body is the advanced course. Chuang Tzu’s sages understood this: a clump of earth sloughs off, and integrity stands there undiminished, and people come to it empty and go home full.

Because ultimately, that which I am will watch this body die. It has watched many bodies come and go, the way lights flip on and off in a house. Those lives simply happened to me. When you know this — when it stops being philosophy and becomes something you can rest in — the body’s condition becomes a weather report. Interesting, sometimes inconvenient, never the news.

But I did not learn to rest there by myself, and this is the part I most want to say on the day after Guru Purnima.

There is a fashion now, especially in Western nondual circles, of quoting Nisargadatta Maharaj as the great liberator from teachers — the man who supposedly hands every seeker over to the antar-guru, the guru within. He did sometimes do that. Read him carefully and you will see when: mainly with seekers he could see would never be able to accept a human guru. To them he gave the inner guru, because it was the door they could walk through. But to people who already had teachers, he was vigorous and repetitive to the point of bluntness: why have you come to me? Go back. Surrender to your own guru. He refused to collect other teachers’ students.

And his own life tells you what he actually believed. He described his entire realization as the fruit of one thing — trusting the words of his guru, Siddharameshwar Maharaj, with total earnestness. My guru told me I am the Supreme, he said, and I believed him and acted on it. That was the whole sadhana. And having realized, he then spent the rest of his life in devotion. Every year he walked barefoot to his teacher’s tomb, arriving with bloodied feet. Four times a day, every day, until the day he died — through fame, through the crowds of foreigners on the mezzanine floor, through the cancer at the end — he sang bhajans to his teacher. The man who is quoted to prove that you need no guru was, until his last breath, singing love songs to his.

This is what is missing in so much contemporary practice. We have kept the pointing and thrown away the bowing. We want the recognition without the relationship, the fruit without the root.

And throwing away the guru is one gesture inside a much larger discarding. It is the same modern condition that has thrown away reciprocity itself — the understanding of what it means to live in coordination with other entities. Every older culture carried this in its bones: the soil feeds you, so you feed the soil; the river gives, so you give back to the river; the teacher pours into you what was once poured into them, and you repay it with devotion, with practice, with the transmission carried faithfully to the next pair of hands. Life is a circle of giving and receiving, and that circle is the true meaning of oneness. Oneness is reciprocity lived all the way down — every entity in coordination with every other, each one both feeding and fed. A oneness you can merely feel in meditation, while taking everything and offering nothing back, is a picture of oneness. The real thing has hands, and the hands are always giving something back.

So when we see the spiritual depravity all around us — the capitalist Instagramification of the sacred, awakening packaged as content, lineages strip-mined for their aesthetics and sold back to us as self-improvement — we should recognize what we are looking at. It is a mirror. It is precisely how we treat the planet, and precisely how we treat one another: as resources. Extraction without offering, consumption without gratitude, taking without bowing. A culture that will not bow to its teachers will not bow to its rivers either, and the two refusals are one refusal. The guru is simply the place where reciprocity becomes conscious — where the whole web of what we owe gathers into a single face that we can love.

Love of the teacher is love of the ultimate. Without it we are nothing, and there is nothing to find — because the finder dissolves in the finding, and what remains is love itself. The bowing is how the recognition stabilizes. Devotion keeps awakening from becoming another possession of the ego, because in bowing, the one who would possess it dissolves. In our tradition we have a word, sadavigas, ever-blooming: awakening is a flower that must open again and again, because the mind will always try to close back around its contents. The guru — outer and inner, and finally there is no difference — is the sun that keeps it opening.

On Guru Purnima I thought of my own teachers, especially the ones who have crossed over. My late adopted uncle, Edmond Ciccarillo, was a Diné medicine man who took me under his wings. He was a wonderful man — flawed in every way physically, and a complete being of integrity, as whole as any sage in Chuang Tzu’s parade. He passed away during the quarantine, on a ventilator. And not long after him, Guru Jagat crossed over. She had gotten big as a house by then; she was goofy; she dressed, to put it bluntly, as herself. Both of them simply saw, and gave. They applied an iron foot when it was needed — and beyond that, they did nothing, not once, but give. They gave until it hurt. They gave until it took their physical bodies with them.

I have rarely known a master who looked in any way like a Victoria’s Secret or GQ model. I would never say it is impossible — for such a being, that might be the hardest path of all. But the point is this: if you think your beauty or your youth is your spiritual achievement, you will be sorely disappointed when your eyes and your boobs sag. And if your skin wrinkles and you know that the lines in the skin are the reflection of the absolute — the way the white of the paper is there between the words, the way the space is there between the breaths — then you will be liberated.

People love to name the flaws of Osho, of Yogi Bhajan, of Guru Jagat, of Chögyam Trungpa. Rarely does anyone turn that same clear eye upon their own condition. And yet when one can rest in pure awareness and fully see all the foibles of the human being — the teacher’s, and one’s own, in the same steady light — that is a blessed, blessed state.

That state is the only true religion. All the outer forms of religion are only an expression of it. Yogi Bhajan knew this. Osho knew this. The Udasin and the Aghori traditions know this — and that is exactly why they are so universally misunderstood, or called appropriative. So what. When the source is known, the forms borrow freely from one another, because the forms were never the point.

And now, to surrender to a living spiritual master — Yogi Amandeep, a great, great living spiritual master — and to let myself be carried, is both humbling and beyond what any could ask for.

These days I have been sitting with a meditation he gave at the cave of Padmasambhava. The hands rest at the heart in dharma chakra mudra, and the mantra is Ra Ma Da Sa Se So Hang — eight sounds, the number of awakened Kundalini. Ra is the sun, Ma is the moon, Da is the earth, Sa is infinity. The first Sa is infinity as I experience it; the second Sa is the infinity beyond my sensory space, the hidden part of existence — one I experience, one that lies beyond my experience. Se, So Hang: all of this is within me, is part of my existence, and I am part of this existence. And So Hang is also the sacred naad of the coming and the going of your breath. When you don’t intervene, when you impose nothing on the breath and simply listen, the breath’s natural song is Soham — I am That. Tat Tvam Asi, one of the four Mahavakyas of the Vedas: me and the totality are one. The teacher hands you a mantra, and the mantra turns out to be the song your breath was already singing before anyone taught you anything. That is what a guru does.

I received this path from teachers who gave everything, and I feel the weight of it now from the other side. I love every student who comes to me — each one, with my whole being. And I hold them the way I hold my own body: completely, and with open hands. Students come when they come and go when they go, and I let them, rarely nudging beyond the classroom unless I am asked. This is what I understand teaching to be, and it is what Chuang Tzu understood: still water invites, it never chases. What a student receives from a teacher is transmitted the same way everything real is transmitted to children — through what we are, long before anything we say. Children do not learn our religion or our philosophy; they learn our state. They watch whether there is self-love in the house, whether there is presence, whether the heart is awake in the ordinary moments — and that, whatever we claimed to be teaching, is what they learn. Students are the same. The teaching is the being. Everything else is commentary.

And I have found that the ones who stay, stay deeply. Our little group is small, and it is a loyal and devoted crew, and on Guru Purnima I felt the sweetness of that more than I can easily say. We sit together each week, we breathe, we pump the navel, we chant Sat Nam, and some of us touch that state the old texts call turiya — consciousness without content, awareness resting as itself — for a moment, and then lose it, and come back the next week and bloom again. Nobody’s body is perfect. Nobody’s body needs to be. We are learning, slowly, to see the loss of what we were as the sloughing off of a clump of earth.

So this is my Guru Purnima offering: come as you are, in whatever body the years have left you. Bring the injury, bring the belly, bring the stiff spine. It is all usable; on this path it is all sacred equipment. And find the one — outside you or within you, and eventually you will see it was always both — before whom you can truly bow. Then bow daily. The moon fills, the flower opens, the teacher sings.

Ever-blooming.

Sat Nam.

And in the spirit of everything written above, I want to leave you with a gift.

We meet twice a week: Tuesdays at 7 PM Central with Taj Chander, and Saturdays at 9 AM Central. Until the new Living Path website opens on August 17th, all of our classes are complimentary or by donation. If you would like to join us, or if you feel moved to offer a donation, write to me at gian@thelivingpathyoga.org — or simply come sit with us on Zoom: join class here.

This is my small way of practicing what this essay speaks of — reciprocity before commerce, the gift before the price. The teachers who poured into me gave until it hurt, and the only fitting repayment is to pour it forward. So come as you are, in whatever body the years have left you, whether you have practiced for decades or never sat still a day in your life. The mat is optional, the breath you already have, and the door is open. I would love to see you there.

Join us on Zoom: The Living Path Yoga — Saturday, 9:00 AM (CT) https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86184538274?pwd=CB3sDAqrypoDAzlwWWNw5XLSIBBUCl.1

This Saturday we’ll practice a powerful meditation that combines third-eye focus, breath retention, and rhythmic navel pumping to awaken the body’s center of vitality. In the yogic tradition the navel is more than a physical center — it is the place where our first experience of life began. Before our first breath, nourishment and life flowed through the navel. The ancient teachings point to this as a state prior to the ordinary experience of duality, a reminder of an original wholeness from which our whole life unfolds. The navel center is the seat of stability, projection, courage, and vitality; and as Yogiji often taught, when the navel is strong, our actions become steady, our decisions become clearer, and our energy naturally rises to meet what life asks of us.

I want to say something, before we sit, about why a practice like that — the third eye, the held breath, the pumping navel, all of it so physical and so technical — can become a doorway into something entirely beyond technique. Because underneath it lies the real question: why do we practice at all?

Two ways

There are, broadly, two ways we work in this yoga. In a regular Kundalini class the language is always the same: if you do this, then this will happen. Move the navel and the life force moves; hold the lock, take the breath, sit in the posture, and there will be a result. You do something, and you progress along the way with it. Most of the meditations we do in Kundalini Yoga are preparatory in exactly this way — we tell you to focus on a specific thing, to do a specific thing, and a great deal of the purpose is simply to get the body to get out of the way, and to get your thoughts out of the way.

Then there is another way, which I call the direct path. It takes the focus away from the individual person and moves it into a deeper understanding of what consciousness actually is, and how reality actually works. It does not try to improve the person. It points, right away, to the one awareness that is shining out of all of these different holes we call eyes.

Here is what took me years to see: the progressive path and the direct path are not finally two. Both are ways of bringing you, worn out of your own effort and your own cleverness, to the single thing that actually opens the door — surrender to the Guru. If everything we really are was never missing — if, as the old Dzogchen root verse says, everything is “self-perfected from the very beginning,” so that “the disease of striving for any achievement comes to an end of its own accord” — then no technique and no insight can manufacture it. Only grace can give it. And grace is received in surrender. Keep that in mind as we go, because everything else is in service of it.

The trap of the direct path

I want to be careful here, because the direct path has its own characteristic failure, and I see it everywhere in what has come to be called the Neo-Advaita movement. Many people hop straight onto the direct path and quietly mistake it for a philosophy. They learn the arguments — there is no self, there is only awareness, nothing ever really happened — and they can win any debate about it. But they use the philosophical argument as the path, and they never actually work through to a direct experience of what the teaching is pointing at in consciousness itself. Thinking about it, or reading about it, will never, ever, ever get you there.

Namkhai Norbu is very clear about this. In Dzogchen, he says, the “View” — the Tawa — “does not refer to a philosophical or intellectual point of view.” It is not a position you study, absorb, and subscribe to. “What is necessary is that we observe ourselves so that we can really discover for ourselves what our true condition is.” Words and concepts, he writes, “can only ever be signposts pointing to the true nature of reality, which is quite beyond them”; the only way to look into the heart of the crystal is to look into oneself. Dzogchen is not something to be studied; the Way of Light is there to be travelled.

And here is the subtlety the arguers miss. The metaphysics of Advaita and of Dzogchen is pointing at the nature of reality — but that reality can first be tasted in consciousness itself, because consciousness is the very ground of reality. This is what the direct experience gives you that no argument ever can: not a conclusion about awareness, but the standing asawareness. And even that is not the end of it. What the rigpa mind touches is beyond concept altogether — and here the words themselves begin to matter. That term “the Absolute,” the one that circulates everywhere in Neo-Advaita spaces, is almost certainly a translation of Parabrahman: not simply Brahman, but para-Brahman, that which is prior even to consciousness. This is part of the trouble. The root texts that fill those spaces cannot be properly understood in English alone; the Sanskrit carries distinctions — Brahman and Parabrahman, saguna and nirguna, the Self and the ground it rests on — that a single flattened word quietly erases, so the reader ends up debating a translation rather than the reality. What the term points to is known only just past the far edge of direct experience, and the experience itself is only a signpost toward a reality that is finally beyond anything a human being can experience at all.

And take Nisargadatta himself, whom the Neo-Advaitins love to quote as their proof that no practice is needed. A close and honest reading shows the very opposite. He was forever instructing people to use the mantra, to sit in meditation, to do the practice. And when he did tell someone to set practice aside, it was for one of two entirely different reasons — and the difference between them is everything. Sometimes the person was simply too Westernized, or too unwilling, to be reached through practice at all, and he would not waste the medicine on them. But sometimes, far more rarely, the person genuinely stood beyond any need of it — already established in the very thing the practice exists to reveal. From the outside the two look identical. Underneath they are opposite: the one has never set foot on the ladder, the other has finished climbing it. He himself rose at four in the morning to meditate, sang bhajans four times a day, and gave himself to ecstatic dance. He did all of it. He simply knew, the whole time, that there was no one there doing the practice — and that is a completely different thing from not practicing at all.

The same is true of J. Krishnamurti, who spent his whole life dismantling every system, every method, every guru. He practiced yoga nearly every day for decades — first with B.K.S. Iyengar, whom he met in the 1950s, and later with Desikachar, the son of Krishnamacharya himself. He always insisted it was only for the body, for suppleness and clarity of mind, nothing spiritual about it. But the great enemy of method kept a disciplined daily practice to the very end of his life.

And I have been told — by a student of Krishnamacharya himself — that even U.G. Krishnamurti, who claimed to have no use whatsoever for practice or teachers, quietly turned to Krishnamacharya after his “calamity” for help in bearing the strange and violent changes that came over his body. U.G. would have been the last man alive to admit such a thing. But there it is, passed down mouth to ear: even the one who insists he has no method must still, somehow, be met in the body.

None of this, I should say quickly, is a rule that everyone must practice. For some people no practice really is the way — the recognition is simply there, or it opens with no technique at all, and to hand such a person a method would be to solve a problem they don’t have. The error is not in practicing, and it is not in going without. The error is in deciding, in advance and for everyone, that it has to be one way or the other. Making a religion of technique until you never dare set down the doer, and making a doctrine of effortlessness until you never actually arrive, are the same slippery slope run in opposite directions. It always comes back to honestly observing your own condition, and being willing to be shown — rather than deciding beforehand what you already are.

So the argument is not the path, and even the experience is not the destination. The argument points to the experience; the experience points beyond itself. This is the whole reason we practice. The breath, the lock, the pumping navel are not there to convince you of anything. They are there to carry you across the distance that no amount of thinking can cross — from knowing about the teaching to standing, for one naked moment, in what it points to.

The mind against the mind

There is a second reason we cannot simply be handed the recognition: most of us are wound too tightly to receive the direct teaching. From the day we were born we have been, in a sense, sanitized. You were jettisoned out of another body, and the moment you appeared they began to tell you: you are this, you are that, your name is this, you will do this. They cut your hair, they conditioned you, all day long, into a kind of robot — until you took yourself to be an autonomous being, separate from everything else. That sense of being a separate, self-existing one is the whole of what we mean by ego.

Let me be exact about that word, because everything turns on it. When I say you were built into a robot, I mean the relative you — the assembled character with your name and your history and your conditioning. I do not mean what you actually are. The little word “you” has two levels, the relative and the absolute, and we have to keep them apart: the relative you is the robot that got made, while the absolute You is the awareness in which the whole robot appears. Everything I am about to say about being conditioned, dependent, and unfree is true of the first one only. The robot is real enough on its own level — it simply is not the ground.

But you are in no way an autonomous being. You require oxygen; you require food; the physical body is nothing but a configuration of the elements of existence. If a cobra came through the door right now, whatever you were dreaming or planning would vanish, and your response would not be premeditated at all. The universe is in a state of control of your body and mind at every moment. Consider it honestly: what it took for this body and this mind to be sitting exactly where you are, in this moment, was the flow of the entire universe. There is nothing you did to sit here. And in precisely the same way, there is no effort you can do to become awakened, no effort you can do to arrive at a state of peace or a state of grace. That is what we call Guru Prasad, the gift of the Guru — it comes to you through the grace of the divinity that runs through all things.

This is the humbling thing that both paths deliver you to. The direct path cannot force the recognition; the progressive path cannot earn it. So what are all these techniques for? We take the very faculties that build the separate world — attention, breath, will, repetition, the whole sense of a doer who acts and collects a result — and we turn them back upon themselves. We use the dualistic mind against the dualistic mind. This is what the inquiry does as well: it hammers away at ideas that are long held and aren’t actually correct. It is a yoga on the mind. The technique does not accomplish awakening — it exhausts the one who thinks he can, until surrender is all that is left.

And notice how physical our methods are. When you press the hands together at the heart, forearms parallel to the ground, you are balancing the two hemispheres of the brain, putting a pressure on the heart center, coming into a state of balance between the left and the right — and that, in itself, is a prayer. This is why people all over the world pray this way, in a state of balance. When you sit in Gyan Mudra, the first finger to the thumb, you are joining the ego to Jupiter, to wisdom — you are putting your ego under the submission of wisdom. When we placed a hand on the chest recently and chanted Wahe Guru on the beat, aligning the sacred name with the frequency of the physical body, that was rhythm and sound — entirely dualistic tools — arriving at what was never for a moment divided. And this Saturday, when we pump the navel behind a held breath, we will be using the most muscular technique imaginable to return to the one place in the body that remembers the time before duality. Every one of these is a doing, with a result. And each is a small machine for carrying the mind to the very place where the doing stops, and hands you over.

Our lineage was always this marriage

None of this is new, and none of it is only ours. Consider Guru Nanak. He was a bhakti yogi — a yogi of devotion, a devotional singer who traveled all around the known world of his time singing sacred hymns. There is a yoga of dissolving into the water element, called Jala Samadhi, in which one can remain submerged for a long time with no breath; Guru Nanak went into Jala Samadhi for three days in a river near where the Golden Temple stands today, and under the water he received the Mul Mantra — a mantra about the oneness of all things. He came up out of the water singing it, and he went on composing these pauris in place after place across the world, in Baghdad, in Azerbaijan, in Tibet. In Tibet he is known to this day as Lama Nanak; there are Sikh and Tibetan shrines to him there. The Sufis considered him a Sufi. The Tibetans considered him a Lama. The Hindus wished to claim him as a Hindu. And when he passed, he achieved something very close to what the Tibetans call the rainbow body — the perfection of the elements in the body, so that almost nothing is left behind. When they went to lay him to rest, the body had disappeared.

His own son became the yogi Baba Siddh Chand and began the Udasi tradition, a yogic branch of Sikhi. The Udasins were renunciates, and they practiced Advaita Vedanta and Raja Yoga. There are yogis in this line who mastered the art of carrying their consciousness beyond a single physical lifetime by their own will, and many of them are said to gather still around Mount Kailash, in the region known as Shangri-La. This is the stream our practice flows out of — Sufi and Vedantic and tantric and yogic all at once, technique in one hand and non-dual realization in the other. But notice what holds the two hands together: it is a lineage of devotion, of singing, of surrender to the one who came before. We have never had to choose between the method and the mystery, because both were always given over to the Guru.

The Tibetans say it too

So I have been reading Chögyal Namkhai Norbu’s The Crystal and the Way of Light, and I keep smiling, because the Dzogchen teachings say what we say. Namkhai Norbu describes three paths: the Path of Renunciation (Sutra), which works at the level of the body; the Path of Transformation (Tantra), which works at the level of energy; and the Path of Self-Liberation (Dzogchen), which works directly at the level of mind. Dzogchen, he says, is a path of “introduction, not transformation” — the master introduces the student directly to the primordial state.

And yet — here is the part that matters for us — even in Dzogchen, “practices of the Voice and Body are found... but they are secondary to the practice of non-dual contemplation itself, and are used to bring the practitioner into this state.” A Dzogchen practitioner, he writes, may use any practice from sutra or tantra “if they are found to be necessary to remove obstacles that block the state of contemplation.” Of one of the series, the Longde, he says that “precise positions of the body and breathing instructions lead the practitioner directly into the experience of contemplation, without the need for intellectual explanations at all.” Change only a few words, and that is a description of a kriya. And in Dzogchen the disciple is given the chance to enter at the highest level right away, “and only if the capacity for this level is lacking is it necessary to work down” to the practices that build that capacity.

But Namkhai Norbu is emphatic on the one point that matters most here. “For the practices of Dzogchen,” he writes, “transmission from a master is essential.” Even the most direct path in all the world does not go around the Guru; it turns entirely upon him. There must be, he says, a continuous, ongoing collaboration between the master who transmits and the disciple who receives. The technique is not a lesser teaching — it is what compassion does when the capacity for direct entry isn’t there yet. And the direct path is not a way around surrender — it is surrender, made naked.

The ground was never contaminated

There is one more distinction worth drawing here, because it is the very heart of why any of this is possible at all. Namkhai Norbu contrasts the Dzogchen understanding of the origin of things with the older Bön cosmology, and the difference is subtle but it is everything. In the ancient Bön account, the space that existed before this universe was itself the “latent karmic trace remaining from beings of previous universal cycles” that had gone into destruction. That space stirred within itself and the essence of wind arose, and from the friction of wind, fire; from fire, water; from water, earth — down to the whole “Cosmic Egg” of the realms of existence. But if the very ground is a karmic trace, then, as Norbu points out, it “is clearly not beyond karma and the conditioned level of existence,” and you could never say of it that it was “fundamentally pure and self-perfected from the very beginning.”

The Dzogchen teachings see it in a way that is “parallel to, but slightly different from” the Bön one — and the difference is decisive. Here the primordial state is beyond time, beyond creation and destruction, the fundamentally pure Base of all existence. It is the inherent nature of that state to manifest as light, and light as the five colors, the essences of the elements, which interact to become the whole material world — so that the universe is “the spontaneously arising play of the energy of the primordial state.” Karma never reaches the Base. Conditioning enters only afterward, through “fundamental misperception of reality,” when the individual falls into the confusion of dualism. The ground itself is never once touched.

And here is the crux of it. For there to be any contamination whatsoever — any karma, any stain — there would first have to be an experience, or an attribute: something with qualities for the karma to adhere to. But the Base has no attribute; it is prior to all experience. This is the nirguna we spoke of before, the reality without qualities, and nothing without qualities can be conditioned, because there is nothing there for the condition to catch on. That is why Norbu can say the true condition is “never lost or stained even though it is veiled in the dualistic experience of samsara.” It is why the mirror is never marked by a single thing it reflects. And it is the whole reason a hurt, a fear, an entire lifetime of karma can be met — and not one of them can touch what you actually are. Contamination needs a someone, an experiencer with attributes; and in the end there is no such one. There is only the pure ground, playing.

You can watch this happen

And you do not have to take a word of it on faith, because you can watch it happen in your own mind, right now. This is exactly what I meant when I said that thinking about the teaching will never get you there — this part has to be seen. Sit quietly and watch, very carefully, how a single thought arises. Norbu gives the precise instruction: look into your own mind, and any thought that arises “can be seen to be void in the three times, past, present, and future.” If you look for the place the thought came from, you find nothing; if you look for the place it stays, you find nothing; if you look for the place it goes, you find nothing. It appears out of no-place, rests on no-place, and dissolves into no-place — and the awareness that watched the whole passage was not altered by it in the slightest.

And notice that you are not fighting the thought or shoving it away. In Dzogchen this is called self-liberation, and Norbu is careful to say that “the concept of applying an antidote is alien to the spirit of the Dzogchen teachings.” You simply observe the thought closely enough to see its real nature, and in that very observing it liberates itself — the way a dewdrop evaporates the instant the sun touches it, or snow dissolves the moment it falls into the sea, or a snake unwinds a knot made of its own body. Watched without clinging, the thought unties itself and leaves no residue, and the primordial state stands fully unveiled. This is the uncontaminated ground — not as a doctrine but as a fact you can check for yourself: the thought was the snow, and the sea was never once made wet by it. As Norbu says of the swiftest of these, “the limited cage, the trap of ego, opens out into the spacious vision of what is. The bird is free.”

The Advaitins arrive at the very same place through a door that opens the other way. Where Dzogchen says let the thought liberate itself as you observe its nature, Ramana Maharshi taught atma-vichara, self-inquiry: the moment a thought arises, turn and ask — to whom does this arise? To me. And who am I? — and follow the thought back toward its source. Traced home, no thought has any standing of its own; even the “I”-thought that seems to be thinking dissolves back into the Self from which it rose, the Self that was never for an instant disturbed. One tradition lets the wave fall back into the sea; the other follows the wave down to the water. Either way you reach the same discovery — the one this whole letter has been circling: the awareness in which every thought, every passion, every hurt arises is itself never touched by any of them. There is no one in there getting stained. There never was.

There is a name for what is known in that watching in each of our two traditions — and it is essential to see that both names are pointers, not the destination. The Advaita tradition, in the Mandukya Upanishad, calls it turiya, “the fourth”: the witnessing consciousness present through waking, through dreaming, and through dreamless sleep, and never itself any of the three. Dzogchen calls the same knowing rigpa, the awareness of the natural state. Whatever happens — a thought, a passion, a grief, the whole traffic of a life — this is what quietly knows it, and it is knowing it right now, as you read. That is precisely what makes it something you can experience and not merely believe: it depends on no condition, it is simply, always, already the case.

And yet — here the door swings open once more onto what we said at the beginning — turiya and rigpa, even though they can be experienced, are still only pointers. In Advaita the fourth is not the end of it: the tradition speaks of turiyatita, that which is beyond even the fourth. And in just the same way the rigpa you can rest in is a finger aimed past itself, toward the pure Base — the Parabrahman, as the Advaitin would name it — that no experience will ever finally contain. Turiya points beyond turiya; rigpa points beyond rigpa. You come right up to the edge of what a human being can know — and there, once again, you are handed over.

Why Yogiji gave us a hospital

That is how I have come to understand what Siri Singh Sahib was doing when he brought these teachings to the West at the end of the 1960s. And let me be clear about what he brought: a lineage far older and larger than the organization that later grew up around it here. The organization was only ever a vessel; the lineage is the water, and it is the water I am speaking of. He arrived to a generation coming out of the long shadow of the World Wars and into the churn of 1969 — the hippie movement, the drugs, the wild searching, minds scattered and hearts thrown wide open but with no ground under them. A sangat, in other words, that was hopelessly dualistic and thoroughly Western. You could not sit those nervous systems down and simply introduce them to the primordial state; the capacity to hold it was not yet there.

So he gave what I think of as yogic hospital techniques — strong medicine. The intense bandhas, the long breath retentions, the locks held well past comfort, squeezing everything from the navel to the toenails to the very hairs in the ears. In Namkhai Norbu’s language, he was “working down” to the remedial level, building into a Western body and mind the capacity that a student in another culture might already have arrived with. It looks like the progressive path, and it is. But its whole aim was to carry a dualistic mind all the way to the door of the direct one — and to teach a proud, self-made generation how to bow.

And this is where Namkhai Norbu says something I want you to hear. Through all our clever games to prop up the ego, he writes, “all we succeed in accomplishing is building a cage and locking ourselves inside it” — and then we deceive ourselves into no longer even seeing that the cage is there. The first task, then, is to observe yourself honestly enough to become aware of your own cage, and then to sincerely want out of it. But not every cage is the same, and so not every key will fit the same lock. As Norbu says, there is “an enormous variety of practices,” and one does not use them all — one uses them “as and when, by observing one’s condition, one understands them to be useful or necessary,” because some are aimed at one aspect of a person’s condition and some at another. This is precisely why the tantric practices given by Siri Singh Sahib, and the meditations of Yogi Amandeep, open up so many possibilities. They are not one generic technique handed out to everyone alike. They are a whole ring of keys — designed for particular birds in particular dualistic cages.

Surrender to the Guru

Because when it comes down to it, all you have to do is love a teacher. I think of two stories whenever I try to say this. There was a woman who met a Sufi dervish, and he told her: you don’t need to meet anyone else, just sit here and wait with me and you will be awakened. But he was some odd-looking old man, and she couldn’t believe it, so she set off on her seeking. For thirty years she went from teacher to teacher and ceremony to ceremony, never finishing anything, accumulating all the spiritual knowledge and all the pranayama of the world. And at the end of thirty years she came to a tree, and beneath it sat a dervish, who handed her a fruit and said, this is the fruit of your awakening. Why didn’t you tell me this years ago? she cried. But I did, he said — except the fruit of this tree only blossoms every thirty years. Everything she did, every choice she made in freedom, was absolutely necessary, because the tree of awakening simply had to bloom. And in the end all she had to do was be blessed by an awakened being to receive it.

And there is Adi Shankaracharya, the great sage of Advaita Vedanta, whose disciples were brilliant scholars and philosophers. One day, as they gathered eager for his satsang to begin, he said: no, wait — we must wait for the man who is washing my clothes. But he understands nothing, they protested, he is a simpleton. And the guru said, just listen. For as the simple man washed the clothes, he was singing a bhajan — one of the deepest teachings of the guru. He did not even know what it meant, but he sang it with the greatest devotion. And that great guru could not go on. He had no free will in the face of simple devotion and surrender. If you want a whole life of this, read Daughter of Fire, Irina Tweedie’s diary of her years with a demanding Naqshbandi Sufi master in India. But do not stop where the diary’s drama stops. Her surrender was not the end of her story; it was the beginning of her teaching. She received the full transmission of that lineage, was sent back to the West to carry it, and gave it for the rest of her life — the line living on after her death. She knelt, and in the kneeling became the one others would kneel to. The surrender and the guruhood were never two things. It is the same with Machig Labdrön, the Tibetan woman who received the teachings and then originated the Chöd — an entire lineage of practice, and one of the very few Tibet ever sent back to India; her likeness sits among the masters in the very book of Namkhai Norbu’s I have been quoting from. To receive the pointing completely is, in the end, to become a finger that points.

And there are the ones who simply practiced until the practicing fell away. Lalleshwari — Lal Ded, the wandering mystic of Kashmir, claimed by Hindu and Muslim alike just as Guru Nanak was — kept her yoga and her discipline until there was no longer anyone there doing them, and it dropped of its own weight, and she walked the valleys singing. Anandamayi Ma needed no teacher at all; she was, from the very beginning, simply the Mother the rest of us are trying to remember — awareness gazing out of a woman’s eyes. And in our own time there is Santosha Tantra, a realized divine incarnation in the lineage of Adi Da, who likewise practiced until it, too, just dropped. They are all the same proof: you practice with everything you have — not to earn the thing, but until the one who was trying to earn it quietly dissolves, and what was always already the case is all that is left.

This is why worth and worthlessness are finally the same thing — both are only you identifying as something, I am the one who is worthy, I am the one who is not. How could you be either? Even if you climbed all the mountains and gathered all the gold, the mountain made the gold, not you. You became a fine pianist? Beethoven wrote the music, the string-maker made the string, the wind did the rest, and you were only dancing in it — one little player in something much greater. The moment you stop taking yourself to be the doer, the one who earns and achieves, there is nothing left to do but bow.

So when you come Saturday, and we bring the breath to the third eye and set the navel pumping, know what you are actually doing. You are building real vitality — steadiness, courage, a clear and unwavering will. But you are not manufacturing awakening. The practice makes the body steady and the will strong, and then it sets that whole strong apparatus down, in surrender, at the threshold of what came before the will — before the first breath, before duality — the original wholeness the navel still remembers. It quiets the one who is forever striving and leaves you, for a moment, as the awareness that is only ever watching. This body-mind is only borrowing the ultimate awareness for a moment in time, and it has been granted the chance to serve that awareness as a seer, as a be-er, as a knower. It is why, when we bow, I tell you: that which is bowing is not you, and that which is you is what you are bowing to.

And this, at last, is why the Guru matters so much — especially now that we have said, over and over, that everything is a pointer and not the thing itself. The master is a pointer; the Guru is a pointer. He never asks you to worship his person; the whole of his pointing is aimed away from himself, and that is what the bow truly means. But here is what separates his word from the clever talk of the philosophers: the Guru is a pointer who has actually seen the thing he points at. The concept he hands you is not speculation about a country he has only read about — it is a pointer given by a pointer, a finger lifted by one who has stood in the very place toward which he is directing you. That is what lets a few of his words do what a whole library of argument never can; it is why transmission from a master is essential, and why, when it comes down to it, all you have to do is love a teacher.

That is the whole of it. The progressive path and the direct path both walk you to your knees. And then, as the Six Vajra Verses promise, “just remaining in the natural state as it is,” by the grace of the Guru, it arises on its own.

I look forward to practicing with you.

With love, Gian

Read this slowly. It has already started.

Right now, something is reading these words. Not the words — the one they are landing in. Before you name it, before you decide what it is, it is already here. It was here before this sentence, and it does not leave when the sentence ends.

That is the whole workshop. I could stop there. But stay with me a moment.

Notice you don’t have to go anywhere to find it. People think awareness is something you reach — eyes closed, mind quiet, technique correct. It isn’t. You don’t focus on it. You become aware of it. It is closer than your breath. It is the plain fact that you are — the is-ness underneath your name, underneath your mood today, underneath the whole story of your life. That is-ness doesn’t get bigger when you meditate, and it doesn’t get smaller when you’re a mess. It is the one thing in you that never comes and never goes.

In a little book I’ll be releasing soon, How to Be a Poem, I call this the residue — the state that outlives every form it is ever set into. Every practice you have ever done was pointing here. The kriya, the mantra, the years on the cushion — good maps, all of them, of a country you are standing in right now.

On August 8th, at a farm outside Pensacola, I want to spend a day walking you back into it.

Here is what we will actually do.

We open with two hours of Kundalini Kriya and meditation — building the vessel, steadying the nervous system, waking the energy. Then we step out of the technique and into the body and the elements: earth, water, fire, air, and the space that holds them all. We’ll laugh. We’ll dance. If tears come, let them come. None of this is warm-up. The heart is an organ of knowing — it reaches the thing the arguing mind keeps circling and missing. Advaita usually gets handed to people as philosophy. I would rather you feel it.

Then we sit for Satsang: Mantra, Tantra, Yantra, Advaita — the teachings of Advaita as they were given to me by my teacher, Yogi Amandeep Singh, who carries the Udasin lineage of Baba Siri Chand — through the study of sacred nondual poetry from the Himalayan and Sufi traditions. Rumi and Shams. Kabir. Lal Ded. Nisargadatta. The Japji. One state, set down again and again across seven centuries, catching fire every time someone grows quiet enough to receive it. We’ll also speak openly about the origins of the practice we all hold dear — where Kundalini Yoga truly comes from, and the living lineages it grew out of. Not a lecture. A transmission — heart to heart.

And running underneath all of it, one question. The one that broke it open for me:

Who is having this experience? Who is practicing? Who is holding the posture?

Bring whatever practice you already have. I am not asking you to trade it. I am asking you to find out who is doing it — to turn around and meet the one who was here the whole time. You, without your story.

We close outside, under open sky, with a 31-minute tratak — the tantric sky-gazing that Yogiji gave at the sacred pyramids in Mexico. You gaze into the vastness until the one gazing and the vastness stop being two. It is the oldest, simplest thing there is. That is where I will leave you.

No experience needed. All levels welcome. This is a real introduction to the lineages that Kundalini Yoga in the West actually came from — offered with heart, and with room to go as deep as you are willing to go. All you need is sincerity and a little willingness to look.

Refreshments and dinner are included, there is time to swim and be on the land, and the beaches down there are some of the most pristine in the country. Come early or stay late and make a trip of it.

Come sit with me. We are heading toward direct knowing.

Himalayan yoga in the here and now.

— Gian Singh

My deep gratitude to Tara Sita Kaur and her husband Gregg Davis for opening their beautiful land at Drala Farms, and for making a day like this possible.

The details

What — Kundalini, Nonduality & Poetry: a day of practice, Satsang, and sky-gazing When — Saturday, August 8, 2026 · 2:00 pm Where — Drala Farms, Pensacola, Florida (address in your welcome email; the airport is about 27 minutes away )Included — the full workshop, refreshments and dinner, swimming and time on the land Cost — $88 (early bird rate). $100 closer to the event. Register— https://www.annadavis.org/shop/p/ojbd6jvei88vjsm6m6oebu5g78h8b4

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There was once a man who was terrified of his own shadow and disgusted by his own footprints, so he decided to get away from them. He ran. The footprints, of course, multiplied with every step, and the shadow kept up with him without the slightest effort. Concluding that he was simply running too slowly, he ran faster and faster, without resting, until he dropped dead.

It never occurred to him that if he stepped into the shade and sat down, there would be no shadow — and if he sat still, there would be no footprints.

Zhuangzi told that story some twenty-three centuries ago, in the chapter of the old fisherman, and I have never heard a better description of the spiritual marketplace, or of my own first forty years. This whole post is about the shade.

Let me be direct with you, because I think you can handle it, and because I think the time for being indirect about this is over.

There is no awakening in which you get something.

I know that is not what you have been told. Everything in the spiritual marketplace is built on the opposite promise — that awakening is an acquisition, a level, an upgrade. You do the process, you have the experience, you become “the most authentic version of you,” and then it gets packaged like a loaf of bread with a stamp on it, and you get a certificate, and then you can sell it to the next person. I said this in class on Saturday and I will say it again here: it’s all nonsense. Enlightenment has nothing to do with you getting anything at all. It has everything to do with you losing you.

Does that mean your body isn’t real? That your mind isn’t real? That you should become a nihilist and stop paying your taxes? No. Look at it honestly. This body cannot exist alone for even a moment — it needs air, water, food, sunlight, other people. It is eating, breathing, exchanging itself with the world constantly. There is no single, sealed-off thing called “the body.” It is the elements, on loan. And the mind — the mind is a kind of wind. Go three minutes without breath and find out how independent your thoughts are. The body is not denied. The mind is not denied. They are simply not you.

You are the awareness in which all of it appears.

Clouds may come and go. Sky remains. Thoughts and emotions come and go. The ever-witnessing consciousness remains.

That is the whole teaching. Everything else — every asana, every pranayama, every mantra, every teacher, every book — exists to bring the body-mind to a place where it can rest in that, not just nod along to it. Because you can understand this in twenty minutes and still spend forty years unable to live it. I know. It took me about that long.

The free sample

I was thirteen years old when I met an Advaitan who gave me what I can only call a spontaneous free sample — a partial awakening, unearned, unasked for, handed to me the way someone at a market hands you a taste of something on a toothpick. For a moment the whole apparatus of “me” went transparent and there was only what remained when it did.

And then it closed, the way these things close, and I spent the next several decades trying to find my way back to something that — and here is the joke, the little truth so simple nobody wants to know it — I had never actually left. What you really are is what you have been looking for this entire time.

But nobody can skip the seeking. So I sought. I met Leo Womack, a man who had given up society entirely and become what he called a wandering mendicant — what I have come to think of, with total respect, as an awakened idiot wanderer, an idiot in the old Sufi sense, the fool of God who has stopped negotiating with the world. By the time I met him he was old and had ceased wandering, but the wandering hadn’t ceased in him, and it got into me. I followed his path for many years. I lived as a nomad, going from ceremony to ceremony, never having a fixed abode, sleeping where the practice was. I lived my years as a poet and as a yogi. I was, in the language of the tradition, cooking — though for a long time I could not have told you what was being cooked, or for whom.

All those years I called myself a seeker, and I was sincere. But seeking and fleeing can wear the same sandals. Every ceremony was another footprint. Every departure for the next teacher, the next land, the next medicine, was the runner picking up speed, certain the problem was that he wasn’t going fast enough. And what was I running from? Not suffering — I would have told you I was running toward liberation. I was running from the stillness in which what I actually am becomes undeniable. The “you” can’t survive sitting still. Some part of me knew that, and ran.

So let me give it to you as an aphorism, and you can check it against your own life: to run from self-knowledge in order to find knowledge is the path of the idiot. Not the wise idiot — just the idiot. The wise idiot is the one who finally sits down.

It took me many years to find my true dharma and my true seva. It took me many years to find the darshan of a true living master. That is not a complaint. I understand now that the wandering was the preparation. But I want to say this plainly to anyone still in their wandering years: the path is real, the destination is real, and the destination is not a place. It is a heart that has finally been allowed to open all the way.

And I will give you here the teaching Yogi Amandeep gave me for the moment the running starts up again — because it does start up again; the mind did not stop wandering just because the body stopped. He told me: when the mind starts wandering, simply say —

I AM. I KNOW I AM.

It is Sat Nam rendered into plain English — being, and the knowing of being, as one movement — and it is the shade, available in the middle of any sentence, any errand, any grief. I am. I know I am.

The wisdom of the idiots

I called Leo an awakened idiot, and I meant it as the highest title I know how to give. The Sufis have always called themselves the idiots — in deliberate contrast to the many self-styled wise. Idries Shah gathered their teaching stories under exactly that name, Wisdom of the Idiots, and the idiots have been trying to wake us up with laughter for as long as we have records. Because here is something worth sitting with: humanity has always known. The oldest joke book that survives from antiquity — the Philogelos, compiled in Greek around the fourth century — is essentially a catalog of the unawakened mind, and people have been laughing at it for one thousand seven hundred years without noticing they were laughing at themselves.

Listen to these, and tell me they are not describing the spiritual seeker.

A scholar wants to know what he looks like when he’s asleep. So he stands in front of a mirror with his eyes closed.

Something else has to be looking — and something else already is.

A scholar goes to visit a sick friend. The man’s wife, weeping, says her husband has departed. “Ah,” says the scholar. “When he returns, tell him I stopped by.”

We make the same arrangement with death, and with the teacher’s plain words.

A scholar decides to train his donkey to work without eating, so each day he feeds it a little less. When the donkey finally drops dead, he cries: “What a loss! Just when he was getting the hang of it!”

Starving the donkey and calling it the path.

The Greeks had their walking answer to these fools, and he was a holy fool himself: Diogenes, who lit a lamp in broad daylight and carried it through the marketplace, and when they asked what he was doing, said he was looking for a human being. He wasn’t joking. He still isn’t.

And the Sufis have Mulla Nasruddin, the wise idiot whose stories are teaching devices dressed as jokes. Nasruddin is on his hands and knees under a streetlamp at night. His neighbor comes to help: “What did you lose?” “My key.” They search together, no luck. “Where exactly did you drop it?” “Inside my house.” “Then why are we searching out here?” “Because there is more light out here.”

Forty years I searched where the light was better. Ceremony to ceremony, teacher to teacher, continent to continent. The key was in the house, and the house is the heart.

One more, because it is my whole biography in four lines: Nasruddin was seen riding through the town frantically, searching everywhere, this way and that. “Mulla, what are you looking for?” “My donkey!” — shouted from the back of the donkey he was riding.

You are searching from the very seat of it.

Daughter of Fire

This summer I am doing a deep dive into a genre I have come to love: the spiritual autobiography, and especially the particular form of it in which a student documents a master’s teachings. I am reading these books because I have noticed something that changed how I understand my own life — many people became realized through the documenting itself. The diary becomes the sadhana. The scribe catches fire from what passes through the pen.

The book that has me completely overcome right now is Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master, by Irina Tweedie. I mentioned her in class; let me give her to you properly here. She was Russian-born — Irina Tamara Karpova — and after her second husband died in 1954 the grief cracked her life open, as grief does. She joined the Theosophical Society, went to India in 1959, and in October of 1961, in Kanpur, she met her teacher: Radha Mohan Lal, whom she calls Bhai Sahib — “elder brother” — in the book. He was a Hindu Sufi, a sheikh of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya order, that remarkable lineage in which the Sufi transmission had passed into Hindu families and been carried there for generations. He was fifty-four years her junior in worldly cynicism and centuries her elder in the heart.

And he did not give her bliss. He gave her an ordeal. He dismantled her — her money, her pride, her ideas about spirituality, her ideas about herself — and he told her to keep a diary and to record all of it, the good and the bad. She thought she was going to receive teachings on yoga; instead she received the slow, merciless, infinitely loving burning-away of everything she took herself to be. The book that came out of it was the first account by a Western woman of training in that lineage, and when she finally taught in London, the transmission passed on again — the line continues today through the Golden Sufi Center.

When I read her account of sitting with Bhai Sahib — the waiting, the doubt, the heat, the longing that becomes so intense it is indistinguishable from the Beloved it longs for — I recognize it. Not because my ordeal was hers, but because the shape is the shape. The head enters the tiger’s mouth. After that, when the tiger closes his mouth is not up to you. There is no question that you will succeed; there is only the question of how much of “you” is left to take the credit.

The pulse and the Name

For those of you who were in the evening class: we ended with the meditation where you take the four fingers of the right hand and rest them on the left wrist, where the vein is, and you feel your own pulse. And on each beat of your own heart, you mentally say Sat Nam. Sat Nam. Sat Nam. You unite your mental singing with your own heartbeat. You sing to the beat of your own drumming.

This meditation comes down to us from the Siri Singh Sahib Ji. He taught it in Los Angeles on January 21, 1974, in a lecture whose title alone is a complete teaching: Essence and essence in essence — Commitment to the very end. I went back to the original lecture this week, and I want to give you some of it, because fifty-two years later it has lost nothing.

He begins with a gift. Life, he says, is a gift — and what do you do when you get a gift? You open it. But we don’t open it. We admire the wrapping paper. And he asks: when you finally meet God, and He says, “Hi, so and so — how was my gift?” — are you really going to tell Him the cover was beautiful, it is still sitting on my table? The students laughed. I laughed too, and then I sat with how many decades of my own seeking were, in truth, an elaborate appreciation of wrapping paper.

For years, Nasruddin crossed the border every day with his donkeys, their saddlebags stuffed with straw. The customs inspector was certain he was smuggling something. Every day he searched the straw, sifted it, burned it, found nothing — and every year Nasruddin grew visibly richer. Decades later, both men long retired, the inspector begged him: “Nasruddin, it torments me still. You were smuggling something. What was it?” Nasruddin smiled. “Donkeys.”

The gift is the one holding the gift.

Then he gives the secret, and he calls it that — one of the “very simple tiny little secrets of life”: if a person can just feel his own heart pulse — just listen to the heartbeat for fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour — it is “the topmost medicine.” And then the line that has been ringing in me ever since: “We live by impulse, not by our pulse.” The whole diagnosis of the modern condition, in eight words.

Then he sits them down and gives the practice: four fingertips of one hand on the opposite wrist, right where the pulse beats. Straight spine — “that’s cheating if you have a curved spine, that’s not fair.” Eyes closed. Fifteen minutes. And here is the part I most want you to hear, because it corrects the way almost everyone chants: “Your own pulse should do japa and you should not do it.” You are not chanting Sat Nam at your heart. You discover that the heart has been chanting it all along — japo Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam — a constant, rhythmic, systematic beauty flowing inside, while outside, as he put it, “garbage is jumping around like a monkey.” How can there be peace? Not until the outside joins the inside.

He said it was the hardest meditation a man can do — that even the worst criminal, given ninety days of meditating on his own pulse, would be so cleansed in consciousness he could not pull a trigger. He said that when the fingertips learn to feel the heart-pulse in gian mudra, the yogi feels it “like a sparkplug” — a shock — “and then he gets to the infinity.” And he named what this becomes: the anhad shabad, the unstruck sound. You have chanted Sat Nam for years with the tongue; one day the chanting becomes so woven into the whole being that it does not stop, and cannot stop, because it was never really you doing it.

Essence, and essence in essence: not you having an experience of the divine, but the essence recognizing itself within its own essence. And commitment to the very end: because this is not a weekend workshop. The mantra is entrained to the pulse precisely because the pulse does not take breaks. The commitment is written into your blood.

In the coming classes we are going to continue working on the heart, as we move into Yogi Amandeep’s version of this meditation. This is the work I have been given: I document the teachings of Yogi Amandeep Singh, and what I watch him do, again and again, is take the practices that came West through Kundalini Yoga and re-indigenize them — restore them to their Himalayan and Sufi and Sikh roots, so that instead of a sanitized technique you receive the original transmission, with the soil still on it. The pulse meditation is one of these. What the Siri Singh Sahib Ji gave in Los Angeles on January 21, 1974, Yogi Amandeep opens back out into the full teaching of the heart from which it came. That is what we will be entering together.

The Sufi path of the heart

And here is where Tweedie’s book and our practice turn out to be the same river.

The Naqshbandis are called the silent Sufis. They do not whirl; their dhikr — their remembrance of God — is done silently, inwardly, and it is placed in the heart. The classical instruction is astonishing when you set it beside what we did in class: the practitioner joins the Name of the Divine to the heartbeat itself, so that the heart is made to recite the remembrance with every contraction, until the day comes when nobody is doing the practice anymore — the heart simply is the remembrance, beating the Name day and night, in sleep and in the marketplace. The Sufis call this the journey from the dhikr of the tongue to the dhikr of the heart to the dhikr of the secret.

Now hear it again: feel the pulse. On every beat, Sat Nam. Sat Nam. Sat Nam.

Same door. Same key.

Rumi — whose whirling we practiced in class, another technology for getting you away from you — tells of the lover who knocks at the Beloved’s door. A voice asks: “Who is there?” He answers, “It is I” — and the door does not open. He goes away, and burns, and returns after a long time. Knocks. “Who is there?” “It is you.” And the door opens — because, as the voice says, there was never room in this house for two.

Nobody gets in. That is the good news. The lineages found each other in Kanpur a century ago in the person of a Hindu Sufi master, and they find each other again every time you sit down and marry the Name to your own blood. The path of the heart is not one tradition’s property. It is what every tradition arrives at when the mind has finally exhausted itself.

Because the mind cannot love. Let me say that more carefully: the mind can think about love the way a menu can describe a meal. The witnessing consciousness we point to in the Advaita teaching — the sky behind the clouds — is not cold, is not a spectator in the cheap seats. When you actually rest there, when the scattered mind comes back home — oh, scattered mind, come back home — what you find waiting is not blankness. It is an unbearable tenderness. Compassion turns out not to be a virtue you practice but the natural temperature of awareness itself. When you see that the body-mind, and the world, and every fumbling, foibled human being in it — every one of these meat buckets we inhabit, with all our accidents and equations — are arising in the one awareness that you are, then compassion and self-love are the only possible response. Even toward the foibles. Even toward evil. Not because you should. Because there is no longer anyone standing apart to withhold it.

This is why they trained us to be robots — and make no mistake, that is what our schooling was, a sanitization, a manicuring, little Q-tips walking around, fragmented into a dozen selves that never meet. A robot is precisely a thing with no access to its own heart. The Siri Singh Sahib Ji saw it already, in that same January 1974 lecture: “Man has become a vegetable and vegetable has become man... because the vegetable still has the essence in it, and man has completely and totally lost his essence.” The empire does not fear your ideas. It fears your awakened heart, because an awakened heart cannot be made complicit. We live by impulse. The whole machinery depends on it. The moment you return to living by your pulse, you have quietly left the machinery.

The only way forward

So here is my confession, offered the way Tweedie offered her diary — the good and the bad together.

I spent decades seeking as if awakening were a mountain to be climbed with the mind: the right teaching, the right text, the right ceremony, the right master. And every one of those was necessary; I honor all of it, from the Advaitan who fed a thirteen-year-old a taste of infinity, to Leo who showed me you could simply walk out of the world’s story, to the years of ceremony and poetry, to the feet of Yogi Amandeep, where I finally understood that my seva — my documentation, this very writing — is not the record of the path. It is the path. The scribe catches fire.

There is a story in Wisdom of the Idiots that I could not read without putting the book down. A woman hears of the Fruit of Heaven and covets it. She asks a dervish — Shah calls him Sabar, which means patience — how to find it. “You would be best advised to study with me,” he says, “but if you will not, you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.” She leaves him, of course. She seeks out Arif the Wise, Hakim the Sage, Majzub the Mad, Alim the Scientist, and many more. Thirty years pass. At last she comes to a garden, and there stands the Tree of Heaven with its bright fruit — and beside it, Sabar, the first dervish. “Why didn’t you tell me, when we first met, that you were the Custodian of the Fruit?” she asks. “Because you would not then have believed me. Besides — the Tree produces fruit only once in thirty years and thirty days.”

The thirty years were not the delay before the fruit. They were the ripening of the one who could receive it.

And what I have realized, and what I want to put in writing so I cannot take it back, is this: for me, the path of the awakened heart is the only way forward. Not the path of more knowledge — I have knowledge, and it never once loved anybody. Not the path of more experiences — I have had experiences the way other people have had jobs. The heart. The pulse. The Name married to the blood. Essence in essence, commitment to the very end, the tiger’s mouth closing at its own appointed hour.

You can go a month without food. You can go four days without water. You can go three minutes without breath. You cannot go one second without the heart. It has been keeping the remembrance your whole life, waiting for you to join in.

Feel the pulse. Sat Nam.

Clouds may come and go. Sky remains.

Sat Naam, Sat Naam, Sat Naam.

If this reached you, the practice is simple to begin: sit with a straight spine — no cheating — place the four fingertips of the right hand on the left wrist where the pulse beats, close the eyes, and listen until you hear the heart doing its own japa: Sat Nam, Sat Nam, Sat Nam. Eleven minutes a day; build toward fifteen. The original lecture by the Siri Singh Sahib Ji is in the Library of Teachings — Los Angeles, January 21, 1974. Irina Tweedie’s Daughter of Fire is published through the Golden Sufi Center.

Announcements

I will be teaching a four-hour workshop — Mantra, Yantra, Tantra and Advaita — at Drala Farms in Pensacola on August 8, 2026. If you feel called to attend, reach out to me directly for details. Get a room by the beach, practice with us, and let the Gulf do some of the work. A Lafayette workshop is also coming in August; date to be announced.

And this week I’ll be teaching Tuesday as well as Saturday, as Taj Chander is in India. We are so happy for him that he was able to walk the steps of the Golden Temple — may every step be a blessing on him and on all of us.

Is what mind looks like

Every reach and touch

Is the rippling pool

Driving down the road

See the pavement and stripes

Remember a dream

Of road—become water

The car filling—a passenger

I did not know—to the brink

And waking suddenly

—to the cat nesting on the chest

“Focus” on being—no that’s just a body

Ah! A dream half sleeping

A high perch—a hawk—an owl

Knows both awake and asleep

Thinking all these things and then

Writing them down—you reading

And walking home with a poem

Etched memory—me away

In my room, erasing my thought

Looking, waving, neither neither

Sat Nam.

I am writing this on the morning after the Fourth of July, when America has just finished celebrating itself, and I want to begin with the quiet thing underneath the fireworks. America is a concept. It is a word laid over a stretch of land and a story that people agree to keep telling. And so are you. The self you carry and defend — the one with the name, the history, the ache of being right or wrong — is also a concept, a word laid over a flow, a story agreed to. What I want to write about is what remains when the story is set down.

Everything here bends toward loosening a single belief: the belief that you are a distinct being. It is the same belief whether you say I belong to America, or merely America exists, or I am the one here who could be right or wrong, or even — at the far, subtle end of the path — I am a soul, a light of consciousness, seated inside this body. Each one quietly sets up a separate someone, standing apart in a world of other separate things. The meditation I will come to, called Sada Vigas, the ever-blossoming — from the eighth pauri of Japji — is the light with no owner and no address: no one who has it, no body it lives in. And the whole instruction, when it finally arrives, is smaller and larger than you would guess: drop that. So keep the ending in view as we go, and let everything between here and there be the slow walk home to it.

I grew up in a little town here in Louisiana called Erath, named for a Swiss man who ran a railroad line through the area. Like most small towns — not so unlike France, actually — Erath had its celebration, and ours was the Fourth of July. Every year the carnies would show up with their ferris wheels and their unhealthy food, and it was a big deal. I grew up with a quiet suspicion of the holiday and didn’t know why. Later, when I began to study the nondual traditions — before I even called them that — they gave me the language for it.

Here is Lao Tzu, from the fifty-seventh chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons the people possess, the more the state is thrown into confusion. The more clever and cunning people are, the more strange things happen. The more laws and edicts there are, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

And a little further on:

I practice non-action, and the people transform themselves. I love stillness, and the people become upright. I do not interfere, and the people prosper. I have no desires, and the people return to simplicity.

Sit with the contrast for a moment. Some of my ancestors lived right where I grew up for ten thousand years — one of them just across a lake from where I live now, her family there for ten millennia. A whole system of laws was later laid over that same land, and it was laid there because people had become clever. What was here before was simply reality as it is. Nobody needed laws in the old time, because the people had grown a harmony, a flow, with what was already the case. And contrary to what a lot of people assume about the Indigenous nations of this continent, that harmony came afterthe rise and fall of several very advanced civilizations — you can read it in the ground, from Cahokia to Poverty Point down into the great cities of Central and South America. As those civilizations came out of balance, the people evolved into a deeper and more advanced harmony with the land itself.

Where does the imbalance begin? It begins with grain. Before grain there was another kind of cultivation — the tending of wild grasses, of squash, of whatever fruited in a given place. Grain is different, because grain can be stored, and the moment you can store a thing, you need a lock. No such thing as a lock existed before grain. To keep the lock locked you need a king; to have a king you need an army; the king and the army make laws; and people who live under laws become clever and crafty, because a law is a dam, and the river always wants to go around it.

Zhuangzi saw the same machinery from the thief’s side. In the chapter people call Rifling Trunks, he says: to guard your boxes and bags you bind them with cords and make them fast with locks and hasps, and everyone calls this wisdom — until the great thief arrives, lifts the whole trunk onto his back, and runs off, worried only that your locks held tight enough to keep the treasure from spilling on the way. The careful man was doing the great thief’s packing for him. Make measures and scales so people can trade fairly, Zhuangzi says, and they will steal by the measure and the scale; make laws and seals to keep people honest, and they will steal with the laws and the seals. Steal a belt-buckle and you are executed; steal a whole kingdom and you are made a lord. He names the altars of soil and grain in the same breath — because that, again, is where it starts.

So you could think of the entire project of yoga as a resistance movement against civilization. The yogis did the most direct thing imaginable: they left. They walked out of the society and went to live in the woods. You remember what Cartman said — screw you guys, I’m going home. That is more or less how yoga began, and it is almost exactly what Zhuangzi and Laozi did with Taoism, during a stretch of history not so unlike our own: the Warring States, when the tribes of what we now call China tore at one another until the Han won out. The Taoists became recluses in the mountains, the same move the rishis made in India. These knowledge systems were grown by beings in solitude with what we call nature — though it was never “nature,” it was just reality as it is. In time the systems came back down into the civilizations. The civilizations made householders of them, then religions, then spiritual laws and practices, right up to our own moment, where there is a sales package attached to all of it.

I start here, with the law and the Fourth of July, because we live in a day when people celebrate a thing without ever once asking what the thing actually is. I want us to bring that same inquiry to our own practice. These practices are medicine. Listen to the very language Kundalini Yoga came wrapped in when it arrived in the West — almost always described as a counterweight to twentieth-century life, a remedy for exactly the conditions Yogiji said were coming, the ones we are now living inside. If you take up the practices as medicine, the goal becomes clear: to re-establish harmony.

I once watched an old documentary about the Navajo people — I’ve spent a lot of time in Navajo country. Diné is the people; Dinétah is the land. Their ceremonies retell the whole story of their existence, from the beginning of time until now, because that is how they understand themselves: from the root. And the logic of the ceremony is beautiful. The world is already in balance. When you fall out of balance — into what they call hóchxǫ́ — you are the thing that needs mending, so you sit in the ceremony and hear again how things were made, in a world prior to this one, and you are returned to hózhó, to balance, to beauty.

Most of Kundalini Yoga belongs to what’s called the progressive path. You purify. You chant the mantras to quiet the mind’s craziness; you take up the postures to bring the glands and the nerves back into tune; you enter the deep concentrations to make the mind single-pointed. But there is a place, prior to all of that and past it, where you begin to move into direct realization. In the Tibetan world they may have you make a hundred thousand prostrations, say a certain number of mantras, then take up the kundalini practices, and only then move into Dzogchen, the meditation of pure awareness. Beyond even that, a few become what are called crazy yogis — they have transcended the need for anything and will embrace even poisons. In India they call them aghoris; they do the things a person is never supposed to do, and pass through the poison unharmed. The point for us is gentler. Even someone moving into direct realization, if they live in a badly out-of-balance civilization, can use these practices as medicine to bring the body-mind back into tune, so it becomes a clean vehicle — able to live in the here and now, and, past that, to see that there is no such thing as a subject facing an object. There is no me and that. There is one continual flow of existence, and the reality of it is prior to anything you could see or name.

Which brings me to Sada Vigas. Those two words — sadā vigās, ever-blossoming — sit inside the eighth pauri of Japji, the pauri of suniai, of listening. Here is Guru Nanak:

Suṇiai sidh pīr sur nāth Suṇiai dharat dhaval ākās Suṇiai dīp loä pātāl Suṇiai pohi na sakai kāl Nānak bhagatā sadā vigās Suṇiai dūkh pāp kā nās

And here is a nondual reading of it:

In the listening — the perfected, the guide, the divine one, the master. In the listening — the earth, the bull that bears it, the encompassing sky. In the listening — the islands, the worlds, the depths below. All of it arising within the hearing, and the hearing rests on nothing. In the listening, time cannot lay a hand on you. What passes belongs to what appears, and the listener is what the passing passes through. Nānak — the devotee, turned home, is ever in bloom. Awareness opening into its own recognition, a flowering with no season and no close. In the listening, sorrow and the ache of separation dissolve. The divided one is seen to be a wave, and its ground goes out like a sound ending.

Read it slowly. In the listening — in the bare act of perceiving — the sages and the earth and the sky and the underworlds all arise, and the hearing itself rests on nothing at all. Time cannot touch you there, because the one who is listening is present before and after, prior to time. Every passing thing belongs to the realm of appearances, and the listener is simply what all of it passes through. You are that listener. You, reading this — you are Nanak, the devotee, turned home, back into the witnessing, into the seeing, into the listening, and there you are ever in bloom, the awareness grown as wide as the whole universe. The divided one — the little separate self — is seen at last to be a wave, and its ground goes out like a sound ending.

The instruction Yogi Amandeep gives is almost nothing, which is why it is everything. Soften the attention away from the content of your experience. Every time you are lost in a thought, you have put your attention on the thought; every time you fix on a particular sight or a particular sound, you have gone toward the content. Let that loosen. Let the attention go wide. Come back to simple being — and when you find yourself in a thought again, or caught by a sound, come home again, and again, without ever fighting the thought or the sound. Don’t push anything away. Just don’t go toward it. To go toward the thoughts and perceptions is maya — it is always there, and never actually found there. To come back is japa.Awareness of being is the one experience that never takes place in subject and object. This is anubhav, the most intimate and familiar thing there is: awareness aware of itself. Every other meditation you have ever done was preparation for this one. Rest there. Ever-blossoming. Nānak bhagatā sadā vigās.

Zhuangzi left us the perfect image for this, and I keep it close whenever I teach it. A fish trap is made for catching fish; once the fish is caught, the trap can be forgotten. A snare is set for the rabbit; once the rabbit is taken, the snare can be forgotten. Words are made for holding meaning; once you have the meaning, the words can be let go. And then he asks, half-laughing, where he might find a person who has forgotten words, so that he could finally have a word with him. Every practice worth the name is a trap, and a good one — the mantra, the breath, the postures, the long concentrations. Sada Vigas is the moment you have the fish, and you set the trap down.

What the Meditation Is Doing

Now we are back where we started, and I can say the whole of it plainly.

There is a relief that arrives when some system describes you and the description fits — an astrology, a typology, a design, even a diagnosis. Something exhales, and a question you have carried a long time goes quiet. I don’t want to take that relief from anyone. I only want to show you where it stops short, because it stops short in the very place almost everything stops short.

Every such system describes the wave, and often with real accuracy — that is why the fit can feel like being finally seen.This essay is about the water.

So go one step underneath the description, because the real trouble was never that you took a good description for yourself. The real trouble is the belief sitting under every description you could ever be handed: the belief that you are a distinct being at all. It is the same belief whether you say I belong to America, or merely America exists, or I am the one here who could be right or could be wrong. Each of those quietly sets up a separate, bounded entity — America, a self, a someone — standing apart inside a world of other separate things. There is one flow. America is a wave in it. The person who could be wrong is a wave in it. Neither is a being that stands on its own.

Now here is the part that is easy to miss, because it comes dressed in the robes of the spiritual path itself. Suppose the practice works. Suppose you go clean past the personality, past the profile and the quirks, and you discern — truly discern — that there is a soul here, a jīva, an illuminating light of consciousness lighting this body and this mind from within. That is real. It is also not the end. Because as long as you are still looking at the body-mind as what you are — as long as you hold that light as located here, as your soul, a luminous something seated inside the vehicle — you have missed it. The light was never a distinct being either. Identification with the body-mind, at any level, coarse as a personality or fine as a soul, is the single thing that misses.

So the correction is to drop it. Drop the identification with the body-mind. Drop the whole frame of being a located, distinct someone — the national someone, the fallible someone, the luminous someone in the chest. This is where soften the attention from the content of your experience was always heading. The body-mind is content. The very sense of being a soul seated inside a body is content. Let even that go. Awareness of being is the one experience that never takes place in subject and object — so the instant you are holding a soul as an object, however radiant, you are back inside subject and object, back inside the miss.

Sada vigas, the ever-blossoming, is the light with no owner and no address — no one who has it, no body it lives in. The devotee, turned home, is ever in bloom names the moment the light stops calling itself a being. The divided one is seen to be a wave, and its ground goes out like a sound ending — and the divided one includes the one who found the light and called it his own. Zhuangzi woke from dreaming he was a butterfly and could not say whether he was a man who had dreamt the butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming the man, because there was no separate one on either side of the dream to settle it.

So: drop that. There was never the separate someone — not America, not the person, not the soul in its little seat. What remains when you stop insisting on him is the whole of it, awake, without edges, ever-blossoming.

Sada vigas.

This is a teaching on what passes between a teacher and a student, and on what cannot. I set it beside the three texts I have long kept close — the Yoga-Sūtra of Patañjali, the discourses of Yogiji, and the Fawāʾid al-Fuʾād of Niẓām ad-Dīn Awliyāʾ, which records its master exactly the way I am trying to record mine. Take all of it as a finger pointing. None of it is the moon.

Being, and the knowledge of being

When we chant Sat Nam, we are saying being and the knowledge of being. Being, and knowing. And the order matters, because the sense of being is prior to everything — prior even to the knowledge of your own existence. You are, before you know that you are. So I have nothing to give you that you do not already possess. I cannot hand you being; you could not lose it if you spent your whole life trying. What can be given, what a teacher is for, is the knowing of it.

Hold onto that, because it quietly dismantles what we imagine a spiritual life to be. If being comes before its own knowing, then no practice manufactures it and no teacher confers it. Everything that follows — lineage, transmission, the wave I will come to at the end of all this — is a means and only a means, a way of coming to know a sat, a truth of being, that was never for one moment absent. We come to it carrying grief, carrying fear, carrying the long ache of feeling separate. And the whole of the work is a slow walk toward something we arrived at before we ever set out. The fastest way to come into that knowing is through a teacher, and through a lineage.

The lineage is not a head honcho

You have to set down the picture you inherited. When most of us hear the word lineage we think of something like the Catholic Church — a head honcho who, long ago, bestowed authority on a successor, so that ever after you fall in line behind whoever holds the office. That is the shape our institutions trained us to expect, and it is precisely the wrong one. What we are working with is simpler, and far stranger. We are working with knowledge of the Atman — knowledge of the Self.

A lineage begins like this. Someone sat in a forest. Someone sat in a cave. And inside themselves they cultivated a certain disposition toward the divinity that is in them — a way of leaning toward it. Then they spoke of it, and shared it, and someone came near and recognized something: there is something here for me. So a lineage is not a chain of command. It is a chain of disposition — an orientation of the heart, handed forward person to person to person, not as a rule to obey but as a leaning to catch. The teacher is simply someone who has come into mastery with themselves, into an intimate relationship with the Self.

The Sufis have a word for this, and it is the right word: silsila, which means a chain — not an institution but a transmitted intimacy, passed teacher to disciple all the way back to the source. The book I keep nearest, the Fawāʾid al-Fuʾād, is the record of one such chain at its living edge, a disciple seated at the feet of the Chishtī master Niẓām ad-Dīn Awliyāʾ and writing down what passed between them. And the Chishtīs refused the head-honcho model on principle; their master kept his distance from sultans and courts his entire life, because the authority in question was never political. It was dispositional — a matter of where the heart is turned, not what office one holds. So this is not my invention. It is what the chains have always said of themselves, against every institution that tried to seize them.

The meat bucket and the mirror

And so you come to love the teacher. I want to be careful about what kind of love that is, because it is so easy to mistake. Its purpose is to be a practice — a practice of loving the Atman, the absolute reality that is your own true being. You rehearse that love on the teacher. Because the teacher is just a meat bucket, a body-mind exactly like yours. I do not say that to diminish anyone; I say it because it is the most freeing thing a person can hear. That meat bucket is a placeholder for the infinite. The infinity that seems to flow through the teacher is the very same infinity flowing through you, and within it the two of you are only appearances. The teacher has come to understand this a little more than you have, and that is the whole of the difference. So you attempt to be like the teacher — and in the attempt you discover that you are the same as the teacher. And then even that sameness falls away, and what remains is that you are simply the infinite, as the teacher is.

The Sufis who recorded their masters drew this line with a precision I have never improved upon. Niẓām ad-Dīn distinguished two things a realized person carries. One he called wilāyat — the love that passes between the master and God alone. It is his constant companion; he takes it with him when he dies; it can be conferred on no one. The other he called walāyat — what a master imparts to disciples about God, and the etiquette of the Way — and that one a master may give to whomever he chooses. Set the two beside the meat bucket and they light up. The placeholder, the disposition handed forward, the orientation you can actually receive: that is walāyat. And the infinite flowing through the teacher’s body-mind — the same infinite flowing through yours, which was never the teacher’s to own — that is what answers to wilāyat, the thing no master can give you, because no master ever had it. To say “even that falls away” is to see, at last, that the walāyat was only ever a vehicle for what belonged to no one. There is a sharper image for this still to come — the teacher as a mirror — and you will find that taking on the teacher turns out to be the sight of your own face.

What is written is not the thing

Let me tell you what this life is for, the one spent recording. The work is to hear what can be put into words by someone who has come into this knowledge, and to do one’s best to set it down — so that there is some living document the rest of us can use. In Kundalini Yoga this is called the golden chain: a non-dual relationship of transmission, running all the way back. But you must never lose the one thing that keeps the whole enterprise honest. What has been written down is not the thing.

I will be honest about why this question grips me the way it does, because it is not a problem I came to out of books. For some years now, a great deal of my life has been given to documenting the teachings of Yogi Amandeep — sitting with what he transmits, listening for what can be carried in words, and setting it down as faithfully as a hand can manage. So when I tell you that what is written is not the thing, I am not speaking in the abstract. I am speaking from the desk where I do this work, from the daily and almost unbearable tenderness of trying to catch a living transmission in a net of letters, and knowing, every single time, how much of it slips through the mesh. I am the disciple at the master’s feet with a pen in my hand, and I am also the one keeping the document for whoever comes after. That is the exact place I write from. It is why the question of what survives the writing — and what cannot — is not a curiosity to me but a vocation, something I lose sleep over. Everything else I have to say about teachers and waves and the one soul I have learned, in part, from bending over those pages, trying to keep faith with a voice I love.

Here is the easiest way to feel it. Read the translator’s preface to any book carried over from another tongue — open a translation of Goethe out of the German — and listen to the translator confess: this is what he said, and this is the nearest I could come in English. That is what every sacred text is. It is an approximation of what was said, of what could be caught; and reading it, you catch an approximation of that. Which is exactly why the love of the teacher matters so much: the love reaches past the words, to the thing the words are only standing in for.

This is true of any scripture filtered through a translator’s hand. Sit with the Gurū Granth Sāhib and you will see the Gurbānī, the transliteration, and an English rendering all on one page — and the English so often comes through some scholar in a dry, flattened way that only a fraction of the Naam survives, the living wisdom bent through the prism of a single mind, until people begin to say what they think they are supposed to say instead of what is true and felt. This is the idiocy of religion: the moment you become invested in belief in something, you are in trouble. Because this was never belief. This is an investigation — an inquiry into what is actually happening. The tradition I work in even has a name for the kind of document I am making: malfūẓāt, the recorded table-talk of a master, set down by a disciple. The one who kept the Fawāʾid opened each entry the same way — I obtained the benefit of kissing his feet, and the conversation turned to… — and he was as honest as I am that the page is not the thing; he said he was only trying to catch what came from his master’s mouth. When at last he brought the first volume to the master, the master read it and told him he had written in a manner suited to dervishes and had chosen a good title — the source blessing the copy, the chain acknowledging its own next link. And his image for the written word is the one I keep returning to: he grasps his master’s words, he says, like a firm rope let down into the abyss. The writing is not the thing. The writing is the rope. And notice that the one who records is, at the same time, the disciple writing it down and the teacher being written down. The teaching is a link in the chain; the page is the rope; and whatever you are holding now is one more copy in that chain — not the thing, but a doorway.

Read it all, and test it

Two conditions lie over the whole of it. The first is breadth. Become highly literate in every spiritual tradition you can lay hands on. Never tell yourself that because you practice one path you may read only that path — it is the worst thing you could do. Read all of it, because at the bottom it is all the same water, and all of it is leading you to the same place. You can give total dedication to a single way and still understand how everyone else has walked theirs. The second condition is skepticism, and I mean the right kind of it. There is a difference between faith and blind faith. When something lands in you as true, you should still turn it over until you understand why it is true. And more than that — you should ask whether you heard it rightly in the first place. Then, out of what you heard and what you witnessed, you build your own unique intimacy with the thing itself. That is the discipline: total dedication held together with total literacy, love of the teacher held together with the refusal of blind faith. A comparativist’s rigor practiced as a devotion — which is the only reason a teaching like this can stand in the same room as a fourteenth-century Sufi and a Sanskrit aphorist without flinching.

The four states

If you study the teachings — Yogi Amandeep’s, and Yogiji’s before him — you find that at some point they always quote some older line, some statement handed down from further back along the chain. Here is one Yogiji gives — Jāgrat, supan, sukhapat, turyā — and I want to read it slowly. It is a blend, he says; a packet of time and soul. Most suffering comes from self-rejection. Actual suffering is very rare. You all suffer in dreams. What he is naming are the states in which awareness happens — waking, dreaming, deep sleep — and the heart of it is this: in every one of them, awareness is still present. You become the master of your own reality when you are awake in all of them. The Atman is that absolute awareness running underneath all three.

This is old knowledge. The four states come down from the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, and the fourth, turīya, is not a fourth state set beside the others. It is the awareness itself — the witness present even in deep sleep, where the body-mind has wholly lost track of itself and yet awareness has gone nowhere at all. To be master of your reality is to be awake as that witness through all three of its weathers, instead of vanishing into whichever one is blowing through. And the practice I will give at the very end is for exactly one thing: to come to understand the mind, the very state of being, of the teacher. Keep that in your pocket as we go. Everything between here and there is only quieting the mind enough to be able to do it.

Not this, not that

For the method, I go straight to the Yoga-Sūtra, because Patañjali says it cleaner than I can. The only thing that is real is what does not change. If a thing can be perceived, it is not real. Patañjali opens by defining yoga as the stilling of the vṛttis — the modifications of the mind. And then the line I always come back to: when there are no modifications, the puruṣa, the witness, rests in its own nature; but when a modification arises, the puruṣa identifies itself with that modification. That is the moment you call being lost in a thought. In the Sanskrit it is vṛtti-sārūpyam itaratra — the seer takes the form of the modification — and it is the single most important sentence for everything I am about to say. Because a vṛtti is a wave. A turning, a whirl on the surface of the mind. And Patañjali is telling us: the witness becomes whatever wave runs through it.

Why strike out everything you perceive? Because it is temporary; what passes cannot be what you are. What we call the negative mind is reptilian — it drags up your memories and your old subconscious dramas to decide whether you are safe, so that whatever you perceive arrives already filtered through a thousand things. But the negative mind, the positive mind, the neutral mind — all of it is finally just mind. All of it is wave. And beneath the waves is the soul, the Jīvan: a drop in the ocean, a node in the one consciousness, not in time at all. The watcher is the same in everything, and it never changes.

This whole movement is neti neti — “not this, not that” — the old Upaniṣadic method of striking through everything you can perceive until only the perceiver remains, the one thing you can never turn and look at. And it lays the ground for the practice at the end, because here is the secret folded inside Patañjali’s sentence: if the seer takes the form of whatever modification it identifies with, then to set the right modification before the mind — the teacher’s wave — is to let the seer take that form. The discipline is not to have no waves. You cannot. The discipline is to choose your wave.

Past the finger

I will not soften what it takes to receive this, because the traditions never did. It is not about obedience to anything a teacher says. It is about becoming willing to develop your own intimacy with the thing the teacher is pointing at. The teacher points; you have to walk in that direction yourself. The trap — and it waits in every lineage — is that people stare at the finger instead of following it. They fix on the body-mind of the teacher, and that is exactly where you get the scandals, the ruin, the whole sorry pattern. In older times the methods used to drag a person past that stage were brutal, because the finger pointing at the moon must sometimes strike you across the head: stop looking at the finger. A teacher truly interested in your awakening will never spare your feelings, because the work is to give you what you need in order to look past them — and that takes a great and unpopular bravery. A teacher who instead wants something from you, who wants a temple built, gives you what you want, and that is where the rot begins.

The Fawāʾid keeps this teaching as a story Niẓām ad-Dīn told against himself. As a young disciple he once let slip — meaning nothing by it — that a cleaner copy existed of the book his master was teaching from. It wounded the master, who spent an hour asking aloud, to no one in particular, whether a dervish had no power to mend a torn manuscript; and the young man, when he finally understood that he was the one being addressed, fell into such anguish that he wandered toward the desert weeping, certain his name was ruined. Then the master relented, called him back, comforted him, and explained the whole ordeal in a single sentence: I have done all this for the perfection of your spiritual state. And that day he said, the spiritual master is the groom for his disciple. The brutality was never cruelty. It was the deliberate raising of the ego-wave so that it could break — done by one who has no other role with you, and is therefore free to wound you without an agenda. The robe of honor that followed is the seal upon it: the wound was the gift.

Intoxication

There is another pole to all of this, and it is not the wound. It is the wine. The Sufis call it intoxication. Every Sufi poem is about being drunk, and not one of them is about alcohol. It is the drunkenness of an in-loveness, a gratitude for the divine in you that is you. When you are truly drunk, there is no you left; you become one with everything. So it is a surrender — but an investigative surrender, never a stupor. What they are naming is fanāʾ: annihilation, the going-out of the self in the Beloved, with the wine and the tavern as its tender code. “There is no you left” is simply the plain content of fanāʾ fi-llāh.

And there is one more thing the orders knew well. The real masters almost always end up doing things very differently from their own teachers, while others reach mastery through exact repetition — copying their teacher’s words faithfully, to the letter. Both are mastery. The recorder masters the path as faithfulness; the innovator masters it as departure. In this very work I find myself doing both at once: faithfully setting down a teaching I received, and glossing it into something of my own. The golden chain needs both hands.

The lake, the mirror, the donkey

When neti neti is pushed all the way out, the meaning of taking on the teacher’s wave finally shows its face. Everything you think, everything you see or hear — strike it out. Not this, not that. Strike it out because it is not who you are. For how could you ever see what you are? The mind is like a lake. When the moon shines on the water and you look down, you are not seeing the moon; you are seeing a reflection. The teacher is a mirror in just that way — you are looking at yourself in the teacher, but what you see is a reflection of yourself. The eye cannot see its own seeing. What is beyond the eye, the ultimate knower, can never see itself; it can only see. And it is prior even to consciousness — for consciousness departs when the body-mind dies, but the chalkboard is still there after the words are wiped away.

Hear what that does to everything already said. If the teacher is a mirror, then the wave you take on is, in the end, your own face — your own infinite nature, shown back to you by someone polished clear enough to reflect it. To take on the teacher’s wave is not to become someone else. It is to be shown, in another body-mind, what you already are — until the mirror is no longer needed. This is why even the sameness falls away: once you have seen your own face, you stop staring into the glass. And lest the whole thing grow too solemn, there is the puncture: the surest way to get over someone who haunts you, one teacher says, is to picture them as a skeleton. The sublime and the absurd in a single breath — which is its own neti neti, a strike-through of the gravity so the point will not harden into one more belief.

The same truth lives in Ramaṇa Maharṣi’s image. Every concept is a thorn. You use a thorn to dig out a thorn, an idea to pry loose an idea, and then you throw both away — so that everything here, this teaching included, is just a new thorn, to be used and then discarded. And there is the old joke of Mullā Naṣruddīn, riding through town on the donkey he is loudly searching for. The seeker has simply forgotten that what it searches for is itself. It is the reading glasses pushed up on your own forehead while you tear the house apart looking for them. That is the punchline of nonduality, told as comedy — and it turns the whole inquiry inside out. The wave, the lineage, the practice, the record itself: all of it is the rider hunting for the donkey beneath him.

Into the body

So the inquiry has to come out of the head and down into the senses. The body moves — a long arching and rounding of the spine on the breath, inhaling Sat, exhaling Nam — and then settles into a steep triangle, chin drawn down, spine lengthened, the gaze gathered at the brow. And when the mind begins to race in the posture, the instruction is not to fight it. Sense the whole body at once — the soles, the crown, all of it in a single field. The first hour was inquiry; now it becomes the tantric practice of finding it through the body, through the senses.

That turn is the pivot of everything. Neti neti is the path of knowledge — striking through every object until only the witness remains. But the witness cannot be reached by thinking harder, because thinking is the very faculty being struck through; the rider does not find the donkey by searching more frantically. So we go to the body, to tantra, to finding it through the senses — where sensing the whole body at once simply floods the field the racing mind required in order to race. The thought-wave falls quiet because the body-wave has filled the lake. The inquiry cleared the ground; the body does what the inquiry never could. And once the field is quiet that way, there is a blessing — a blessing on your quirks, your foibles, your fumbles. That tenderness holds the whole teaching, the way two hands hold water.

The teacher’s real work

And then the teaching turns to the teacher’s true office, in words of Yogiji’s. The teacher is always a friend and an enemy, but a friend is always a friend; the teacher has no other role with you, and every other role he takes up only in order to teach you. Constructive consciousness is a self-purifying act. And then the law of karma: action has an equal and opposite reaction, so as you sow you reap — and you cannot correct the wrong, because its time and space are gone. The day you acted on is never coming back; it is sealed into the horizon.

Here is what to hear in that. The wrong is simply being focused on. Whatever you did, whatever foible, whatever binds you to your karma — it is binding you to your sense that you are an individual. So the teacher’s work is not to rid you of what you have done. The teacher’s work is to rid you of the sense that you are what you have done.

That is the hinge of everything. The teacher cannot reach back into sealed time and undo a deed. But the deed was never the bondage. The bondage is the identification — I am what I did — and that identification is a wave running right now, in the present, over a past long closed. It is the seer mistaking itself for a modification, exactly as Patañjali described. So the teacher’s work is not moral repair; it is the dissolving of an identification. And this is precisely why the teacher must be neutral, must have no other role with you — because only one who wants nothing from you can wound the false self without feeding it. Constructive consciousness purifies by subtraction: it takes away the wave of self-identification, and what is left standing is the sat that was there before you ever began.

The soul is infinite, the mind has waves

And now the thing all of this has been walking toward — and this part is mine, my own gloss laid right over Yogiji’s line. He says: the soul has no dimension except that it exists; the mind has levels of frequency, levels of elevation; teachers lay the thought pattern and students follow and walk over it — that is all, that is the whole of the relationship. And here is what I add to it:

The soul is infinite, the mind has waves. The teacher is sharing a wave of the mind with the student.

That is the whole teaching in two sentences, and it lives in two registers at once. The soul is infinite — that is the dimensionless sat, the one witness that is the same in everything, the wilāyat no one can confer. The mind has waves — those are the vṛttis, the modifications, the levels of frequency. And the teacher is sharing a wave of the mind with the student — that is the part that can actually pass between us, the walāyat, the thought pattern laid down for you to walk over.

Set it beside Patañjali and the machinery is complete. The seer takes the form of whatever wave it rests in. Most of the time that wave is the reptilian, self-protecting one. But when the teacher shares a wave, and your mind — steady now, from the inquiry and the posture — takes that form instead, the seer assumes the teacher’s pattern. Patañjali’s own image is the cleared mind as a flawless crystal, which glows with the color of whatever is set beside it. Lay the crystal beside the teacher and it shows the teacher’s color. So to build the supreme self is not to manufacture a new ego. It is to let the mind take, again and again, the teacher’s wave, until the lower frequencies fall away. And because the soul is one — the same in everyone — the wave is only ever the vehicle. Where it carries you is not to the teacher but to the sat you already share with the teacher, and with every other living thing. The sharing of the wave, when it is finished, is the discovery that there was only ever one soul to share it.

Carving the teacher on the screen of your own light

So here is the practice, and it is exactly what was promised — a way to take on the very state of being of the teacher. Look at the tip of your nose through closed eyes. Then begin to carve there the picture of someone you hold most dear — a teacher, a deity, someone you love. Your consciousness, your soul, is the light on the screen, and you are carving a mental image upon it. Praise the figure as you draw it. Hold it in reverence. Let it grow vivid, and let it begin, on its own, to speak to you. Keep the spine straight. This gives the mind the power to see the creative consciousness of another being — to see the unseen part of it — so that whatever could not be understood in words may be revealed to you this other way.

The nose-tip gaze is the old nāsikāgra dṛṣṭi; fixing the attention until a screen appears is dhāraṇā, the sixth limb of yoga; the carved figure is your iṣṭa-devatā, your chosen ideal. But the line that holds the entire metaphysics is the plainest one: your soul is the light on the screen. The screen is awareness itself, and the image is an appearance arising within it — the very same relation between the infinite and the body-minds that appear inside it. So when you carve the teacher’s face onto the screen of your own consciousness and revere it until it begins to speak, two things happen in one motion. You take on the teacher’s wave — the seer assuming the form set before it, the crystal taking the color. And you discover that the screen on which the teacher appears is your own light, the sat the teacher was a placeholder for all along. The mirror has become a practice. You take on the teacher and find your own face, upon your own screen.

And this is how the practice answers the wound named at the beginning — that the written word is not the thing. What language could not carry, the wave can. The teaching that could not be caught in prose is delivered, instead, by the sharing of the wave. The Sufis understood this, which is why their master spoke of samāʿ, sacred listening — a way of hearing in which the heard verse draws you out of yourself and links your heart to the realm of the master. Sound carries what prose cannot. So the practice gives way, on cue, to its own listening — the long syllables of a healing mantra — and then to a meditation on emptiness: the body as nothing but dried skin, space outside you and space within. The boundary that made the teacher and you into two begins to thin toward the space you share.

The long-time sun

It does not end on an idea. It ends in song, and in blessing — I am beautiful, I am bright, within me is God, within me is light; God and me, me and God — and it closes the circle it opened. Whatever grief the body-mind has carried will be healed; the infinite will flow through your ordinary days; there will be no more fear of plenty. May the long-time sun shine upon you. All love surround you. And the pure light within you guide your way on.

We come to this carrying loss, and we leave with grief healed and the infinite running through the smallest hours of the day. The arc is as tender as it is philosophical, and those were never two different things. All of it — the waves and the witness and the sharing of a single frequency — is finally in service of a roomful of grieving, quirky, fumbling body-minds being shown the sat they already are, so that the Nam, the knowing of it, can begin to dawn. God and me, me and God is the nondual truth sung instead of argued, and that is the only way it ever finally lands.

There is just the one thing left, the thing said at the beginning: what is written is not the thing. This page is not the teaching; it is the rope. And whatever you carry away from it is not the page; it is one more copy in the golden chain — an intermediary’s intermediary, not the thing, but, if it has done its work, a doorway pointed where the finger was pointing. In a single breath the one who writes is the master being recorded and the disciple who records. The chain is gold because the same light runs the whole length of it. Sat Nam.

II · This Week: The Return

Everything until now was last week.

I taught it the way I have set it down here — being and knowing, the teacher and the lineage, the golden chain and the wave, the carving of the teacher’s face onto the screen of your own light. Hold all of it, the whole long arc, because this week I am going to take you one step further, into a meditation that only opens once that ground has been laid. It is called Sada Vigas.

The name says nearly everything, if you let it. Sadā is ever, always; vigās — from the Sanskrit vikāsa — is blossoming, the opening of a flower, a joyful expansion. Ever-blossoming. And the whole of it turns on one quiet reversal: it is not a going-toward, it is a coming-back. Everything we did last week moved outward to meet something — a mantra, the breath, the face of a teacher carved on the inner screen. This moves the other way. Its entire content is a single gesture — return — and everything else is only that gesture turned over and looked at again.

Now hear what the meditation says about the road that leads to it: every other meditation you have done has been preparation for this. Which means that all of last week — the concentration, the taking-on of the teacher’s wave, the patient not this, not that — was the preparation. And I want you to see clearly what kind of work that was. It was a doing.A construction. A choosing of the wave. Even the most sacred part of it, taking on the teacher’s own frequency, was a movement outward toward a form, however holy the form. Even the striking-through of neti neti is an activity of the mind. All of it, beautiful as it is, is a finger pointing. And a finger, however well it points, is not the moon.

But it was not wasted, and it was not a detour. It was the polishing of the crystal. You cannot rest beneath the waves until the waves have grown quiet enough, and the mind clear enough, to stop mistaking itself for them. Last week brought us to the threshold and set us down at the door. This week we do the one thing all of it was secretly for. We set the technique down.

What Sada Vigas is

This is the turn, and it is a complete reversal of direction. Last week we chose a wave and took it on. Sada Vigas goes beneath all waves — home to the ocean itself, to the soul that, as I said, has no dimension except that it exists. It is not a concentration technique at all. It is a pointing-out. You soften your attention off the content of experience — sensation, perception, feeling, the whole restless traffic of the mind — and you do it without fighting any of it. That gentleness is the practice: you are not banishing anything, not clamping the mind shut. You simply stop feeding attention outward into objects and let it fall back to what was underneath them the entire time — simple being, awareness itself, prior to any particular thing it is aware of.

Around that single axis the old words quietly change. Simran, which we usually render as remembrance, becomes the returning itself. Japa, usually the repetition of a Name, becomes the repeated coming-home — each return one more telling of the bead. And māyā is no longer an illusion to be destroyed but simply the outward movement of the mind: always on offer, always there, and yet — this is the exact heart of it — never actually experienced there. The object-world is perpetually available, but the living event of experiencing never once takes place out in it. To go outward is to chase a place experience never occupies.

Then comes the line that turns the whole practice, and it is why I could not teach this until now. Awareness of being, the meditation says, is the one experience that never takes place in subject and object. Consider what that means. Every ordinary experience is a pair — a knower here, a known over there, a gap between them. This one has no object. And having no object it has no separate subject either; the witness dissolves along with the thing witnessed, and what is left is simply being, knowing itself, with no gap at all. This is why it is given the name anubhav — not knowledge aboutanything, but the immediate, unmediated kind, the knowing that is its own object; and why it is called the most intimate, most familiar being: not an attainment held at a distance, but the nearest thing there is, never for an instant absent, the ground you were standing on the whole time.

And here is the image the whole thing blossoms into — the inverted geometry that makes Sada Vigas what it is. We assume, all of us, that going out into the world is expansion, and that coming home to a still point is a kind of shrinking. The meditation says the reverse, and means it precisely. The outward movement — māyā — is the true contraction: the mind in exile, man pardesīāre, the foreigner-mind shrunk small and wandering in a country not its own. The homecoming, the sinking back to the point, is what actually opens. Nānak bhagatā sadā vigāsu — the devotees, Guru Nanak sings in the Japji, are ever in bloom. Return is expansion. To contract all the way to the source and to open without bound are not two events but one.

And now you can feel how last week was carrying you here the whole time. Last week’s wave carried you to the shore; this week we step into the water, and find it was the same water that was moving through the wave all along. Last week you took on the teacher and discovered your own face on your own screen; this week that light simply rests in itself, with no image on the screen at all. The teacher’s wave was never the destination. It was the boat.

What I will teach this week

So I am not going to give you the meditation here, on the page — and by now you know exactly why. What is written is not the thing; it is only the rope let down into the water, never the water itself. And this practice least of all can be handed over in words, because its whole life is in the live return, the actual coming-home we will make together in the room. To set it down here would be to give you a finger and call it the moon one more time.

What I can tell you is what kind of practice it is, so that you come ready. It is the one meditation that is not a technique — it is the place where every technique is finally laid down. It is nondual not as a belief you hold but as an event that happens: the quiet collapse of the distance between the one who meditates and what is meditated upon, until there is no one left standing apart to do it, and only being remains, knowing itself, ever-blossoming.

So come. The foreigner-mind will be called home — aao gharé — and you will find, if you let the return go all the way through, that home was never the small place you feared. It was the flower opening. Sadā vigās. The return is the blossoming.

Presence & Inquiry meets Saturday mornings at 9 a.m. Central. DM me to join.

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Where we left off

On the solstice we practiced the Blue Gap meditation, and I read you Blake — to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower. You might not think a Sikh meditation and an English poet have much to say to each other, but they were pointing at the same thing.

I’ve studied the lecture this meditation comes from — Yogi Bhajan, April 12th, 1973 — more than any other in the Library of Teachings. It opens with him scolding a man for letting a tape recorder fall into disrepair. He gives the machine agency. It works for you all day long and has no way to protect itself. He’s dramatic about it, but what he’s leading us toward is one claim: awareness is the primary substrate of reality. Even a machine exists as awareness. The violence we’d do to a mosquito, the suspicion we’d aim at a friend, the carelessness we’d show a machine — these are the same error, the error of a subject standing over an object it imagines is not also itself. You and the other are both appearances in awareness, and because those appearances are joined through that awareness, intuition arises. Communication moves beyond the body.

He described our exact moment and called it a Blue Gap period, returning every nine thousand years. People who freeze mid-stride, absorbed in another world in the palm of their hand. People entranced by an algorithm telling them what to feel in thirty-second bites. He said the people of this time carry a greater sensitivity to vibration, to the porousness of consciousness — and that what would be rarer is the ability to channelize that sensitivity. To tune it. To ground it. To stay a steady person in a porous time.

Every yogic teaching says practice will give you siddhis, and the same teaching says leave them alone. The question is always: who is doing the siddhi? Identify with the power and you’ve handed yourself back to the ego. So we use the ability the way we use a mouth or a calculator, and we stay free of it. The practice itself is simple enough to carry into a coffee shop: the other person is me. The mountain is me. The AI is me. The mosquito is me. When you find the place in you that suffers with another, you breathe into it — and you let yourself become, quietly, a light.

No one has to know. You can be a teacher, a painter, a massage therapist. It isn’t that you’re special. Awareness has simply found a way to move through you, inside the ordinariness of your life. Like Mullah Nasruddin searching for his keys under the lamppost because the light is better there, most people you meet are looking in the bright wrong place. One day the searching ends and you start to become a real light.

That was the close of last class. This Sunday we turn to the question underneath all of it: what does it mean to learn something like this in the first place? What does it mean to be a student in a lineage?

Why I’m bringing a Sufi book to a yoga class

For the last while I’ve been doing a great deal of documentation work for Yogi Amandeep Singh — building out the teaching manuals, transcribing and shaping the kriyas, carrying his words into a form that can be handed forward. It is some of the work I most deeply admire being trusted with, and it has sent me back to a question: how does a student become the vessel through which a teacher’s voice survives?

So I’ve been studying a book called Morals for the Heart — the Fawa’id al-Fu’ad — the recorded conversations of the Sufi master Shaykh Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi, set down in the early 1300s by his disciple, a poet named Amir Hasan Sijzi. Hasan joined the discipline a little more than a year before he began writing anything down. Studentship came first. The documenting grew out of the love, not the other way around.

There’s a detail I can’t stop thinking about. A later teacher remembered that whenever the Shaykh began to tell a story and Hasan was in the room, the Shaykh would turn his face toward him — a signal that this one should be noted down. The transmission was relational. The teacher took part in his own remembering. Hasan opens his record with a line of pure humility: he says he has written down the distillation of the master’s discourse, and what it means, to the extent that he understood it. The record is honest about being partial. The book knows it is not the whole of the teaching. That’s why practice exists — to complete what the text can only point toward.

Hasan’s little book became the first of its genre in India. Every order that came after — Suhrawardi, Firdausi, Shattari — learned to do what he did. One disciple’s love started a whole technology of preservation.

What it reveals about learning a liberatory technology like ours

Early in the conversations, the Shaykh draws a distinction I want to sit with on Sunday. He separates walayat from wilayat. Walayat is what a master imparts to a disciple — the teaching about God, the etiquette of the Way, everything that passes between a teacher and other people. It can be conferred. It can be handed to whomever the master chooses. Wilayat is the master’s own secret intimacy with the Real, the love he carries with him and takes with him when he goes.

This is the whole shape of being a student in a lineage. The kriya you receive — the Blue Gap, Sa Ta Na Ma, the Laya yoga we close with — is walayat. It is a liberatory technology, refined across a chain of practitioners and placed in your hands precisely because it can be passed on. That’s what makes it a lineage and not a private experience: someone loved a teacher enough to preserve the method so that you, centuries or oceans away, could sit down and run it through your own nervous system.

And the wilayat — the realization, the secret love — that part no book confers and no teacher can mail to you. You earn it in your own intimacy with the Infinite. The technology is given. The fruit is yours to grow.

The Shaykh also taught that liberated beings ought to remain hidden until God reveals them — he who conceals himself in life has his name resound after. Which is the same thing I said to you on the solstice. No one has to know. You can just be a person through whom awareness has found a way to move.

Being a student in a lineage means becoming, in time, a carrier — the way Hasan carried his teacher, the way I try to carry Yogi Amandeep’s teachings, the way you carry the practice into every ordinary room you walk into. On Sunday we’ll read a few of these passages together and let them teach us how to receive what’s been handed to us, and how to hold it well enough to hand it on.

Join us

Presence & Inquiry Sunday · 9:00 AM Central The Living Path Yoga

We’ll practice, we’ll read a little, and we’ll sit with what it means to be a student. Everyone is welcome — newcomers especially. DM me for the link.

Sat Nam.

William Blake opened his Auguries of Innocence with an instruction in how to see:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

He wrote the whole poem as a reckoning — a judgment that arrives at a turning, where an age is measured by the quality of its sight and by the way it treats the smallest life. He named the failure of sight in a single couplet:

We are led to Believe a Lie When we see not Thro the Eye.

To see with the eye is to stop at the surface. To see through the eye is to behold the absolute looking back from inside the world. Blake believed such seeing decides everything at the turning of an age, and he closed the same poem on the secret of the soul that crosses such a turning whole, having learned to wear both halves of experience as one cloth:

Man was made for Joy & Woe… Thro the World we safely go.

On the eve of Baisakhi in 1973, Yogiji named exactly such a turning. He called it the Blue Gap — a threshold humanity crosses every few thousand years, the last one written about nine thousand years before him, the next one due within a hundred years on this earth. We are inside that hundred years now. Read the lecture in 2026, with the machines we have built since, and it lands less like a prophecy waiting to arrive and more like a description of the weather outside the window. Blake knew the crossing is decided by the quality of our seeing. Yogiji knew it is decided by the state of the heart. They are the same knowledge, said twice.

When I teach, I watch. That is the whole of my method, and the practice itself taught it to me. In our last class we worked the meditation for Purusha and Prakriti, and while the room moved I stayed in observation, tuned to what was taking place. The energy pushed up hard from the navel and met a wall at the sternum, and there it stalled; some of the bodies began to shake with the pressure of a force that wanted to rise and met resistance on the way. From the seat of the teacher I read where each person had arrived in the crossing, and I taught to that. I hold the sangat the way the watching bird holds the tree — present, open, eating nothing, seeing everything, meeting each one exactly where their awakening has brought them.

This solstice eve I will teach the Blue Gap meditation, a practice I have kept for nearly five years, and we will cross the gap together as the light turns. So before the prophecy, before the machine, we begin with the heart, because from an awakened heart the whole teaching opens, and from a sleeping one it stays shut.

The Three Knots

In the body there are three psychic knots. One sits at the navel point, one at the heart center, and one at the third eye. They are called the granthis, and both Yogiji and my teacher Yogi Amandeep spoke of them constantly, though most people pass over the teaching as if it were a detail. When the kundalini energy rises, it has to cross these three knots in turn, and the second crossing is the hardest of a human life.

Right at the sternum there is a crossroads. Yogiji called this place the eighth rib — not the anatomical rib, but a name for the gate where the navel fire meets the heart. Most people on this planet never get their vital energy moving through this region at all. You can read it in the body. The person who is perpetually grumpy carries himself collapsed through the chest, the sternum caved, the pranic field of the uddiyana area pressed shut, and the compression itself produces a low and constant discomfort in living. Watch what happens when such a person draws the spine erect: the personality softens, the manner becomes warmer and more agreeable, almost at once. The opening of that one region opens the capacity for basic compassion and human warmth, because that is where compassion and warmth physically live.

The block between the navel granthi and the heart granthi carries an old name. It is called the difficult ocean of the world. Most people stand on its near shore their whole lives, the warmth held behind a closed gate, reaching for compassion in the moments that call for it and finding the channel shut. To get the navel fire across that ocean and into the heart is the work, and it is the doorway to everything else.

The Hridaya

When we say heart in the language of meditation, we point past the physical organ to the hridaya — the central heart. I read the teaching to the class from Yogi Amandeep directly. There are one hundred and eight nadis, energetic pathways, that sprout from the heart center. Right where the two points of the nipples meet, in the exact center of the chest, there is a point known as the hridaya chakra, and the physical heart is its corresponding point in flesh. They are two hearts, the central one and the bodily one, the subtle pathway and its anchor in the muscle that beats.

There is a heart that sleeps, a heart that has been activated, and a heart that is awake. The awakened heart is the one that has become one with the thirty-three trillion pulses that vibrate through the body, the source of all the life and all the movement within you. Most of us live with the heart still sleeping; some have brought it to the activated state; and rarely does someone walk the earth with the heart fully awake. The whole purpose of the practice is to reach and rouse that awakened heart, the hridaya, with the physical heart as its faithful corresponding point.

The energy that crosses the sternum and enters the heart gives you an open heart. The energy that, having reached the crown, comes back down and opens the heart on its right side gives you an awakened heart, and that is the rarest condition of all. This return is the secret most teachings leave out, and I will come back to it, because the solstice itself is built on exactly this turn.

The Fire Needs Air

Look at the chakras through the elements, the tattvas, and the reason for all of this becomes plain. The first chakra holds the earth. The navel point is where you digest food and where you digest life, and digestion requires heat — a diaphragm and a belly that produce enough fire to break things down. The heart chakra holds the air. Look at what lives in that region: the lungs and the heart together, pumping blood through the whole body, making circulation, making movement, drawing the breath in and out. The throat holds the akash, the ether, and from the brain and the third eye comes the determining power that shapes the etheric word in the mouth.

Now follow the logic of a fire. For a fire to burn, the earth must grow the trees, and the trees must drink water, and from the earth and the water comes the wood. And the fire needs one more thing to live: it needs air. Without air a fire cannot grow. So for the fire of the kundalini to rise, the heart has to be open, because the heart is the air that lets the fire climb. When the heart is open, even the act of turning your attention to it begins the work — you can feel the heart start to grow, the air element start to move through the system, the fire begin its ascent.

And as the fire rises, the ojas — the vital essence, your potency, your humanness, your very divinity expressed as a human being — moves up through the body and comes into the eyes. When it reaches the eyes it brings a particular kind of tear. This is tejas, and it is a happy tear, the moisture of devotion, the wet that rises when you are so given over to something that it brings you to weeping. That tear is the sign that the fire has crossed the ocean and the heart has opened to the air.

Crimson

There is a shabad I read in class that describes this crossing exactly, sung as devotion to the Guru and to the absolute reality, and carrying underneath that devotion a precise instruction for moving the vital consciousness through the system. The eyes are damp with the nectar of the Lord; the soul is filled with His love. He tests the heart on the touchstone and finds it pure. Through the Guru the singer is dyed a deep crimson, the body and the mind drenched and made fragrant, the life blessed. The song of the Lord’s love arrives like a piercing arrow struck deep into the heart, and those who have felt the pain of that love know how to bear it. The one who dies to this life while still alive attains liberation in this very lifetime. And the refrain returns, again and again: make me meet the true Guru, so that I may cross the difficult ocean of the world.

The damp eyes are the tejas. The arrow in the heart is the fire crossing the sternum. The crimson is the dye of a heart soaked in devotion until the color is fast and will not wash out. And the difficult ocean is the same ocean — the gap between the navel and the heart, the crossing that makes a human being warm. The whole shabad is a map of the awakened heart, written as a love song.

You Are the One Who Watches

People make a great noise about kundalini. The internet is full of voices selling activations and symptoms and warnings, a kind of fog of hocus-pocus that I pay no attention to. The reality is simpler and far larger. Kundalini is the Shakti, and the Shakti is the entire phenomenal reality, everything that appears. To bring the energy up is to bring Shiva, the Purusha, the witness of everything, into the phenomenal. You are carrying your consciousness into every center of the body, up through the crown, out beyond the physical form, and in doing so you are coming to know the one fact that changes a life: your awareness and your power to witness are infinite. You are the universal consciousness, and everything is happening inside you as the absolute reality.

This is why I tell my students they are not a meat bucket with a brain. The body is a little drone, an instrument, a thing you are operating and watching. As you bring awareness into each center, you create points of activation, and the more you practice this the more freely the awareness flows, until the whole instrument comes into a state of flow and the prana moves clean through the system. And when the vitality is moving like that, it becomes easy to rest as the witness, to sit in witness consciousness while the phenomenal world rises and falls in front of you.

The Mundaka Upanishad gives this its oldest image, two birds on a single tree:

द्वा सुपर्णा सयुजा सखाया समानं वृक्षं परिषस्वजाते । तयोरन्यः पिप्पलं स्वाद्वत्त्यनश्नन्नन्यो अभिचाकशीति ॥

dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṃ vṛkṣaṃ pariṣasvajāte | tayor anyaḥ pippalaṃ svādv atty anaśnann anyo ‘bhicākaśīti ||

Two inseparable companions perch on the self-same tree; one eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating. The eating bird is the one carried by the flood of sensation; the watching bird is Purusha, the still witness. And the verse that follows holds the whole remedy: when the eating bird at last turns and sees the other, the watching Lord, its own majesty, its grief falls away. This is why, when you say Sat Nam, you are pointing past the personal name toward being and the witnessing of being — existence, and the knowledge of existence. You are naming the watching bird. You were the watching bird before this body was born. The awakened heart is the seat where that watcher and the whole phenomenal world meet and become one.

The Machine Is the Extension of the Man

Now we can take the awakened heart to the deeper reading, into the lecture itself and the world it foresaw. Yogiji began, as the real teachings so often do, with an interruption. The sound system had broken, and he turned the broken machine into the doorway of the whole talk. “Symbolically machine represents the extension of the man in personality,” he said. The machines are the servants that work without protest, that obey according to your buttons, that serve to the last and then crack and break. The way a person keeps the machines around him is a reading of his consciousness, and the care of a machine, he said, “is a state of consciousness.”

Fifty-three years later the machine has changed its nature. It answers now. It writes and speaks in our own voice, it lives in the pocket, it responds all day to the buttons we press. Marshall McLuhan, writing in the same decade as this lecture, called every technology an extension of a human faculty — the wheel of the foot, the book of the eye. Artificial intelligence is the extension of the mind itself, the first machine built in the shape of thought. And Yogiji’s measure holds with eerie precision: how you keep the machine reveals what you are. The one who relates to it from the sleeping heart, who hands it his attention and takes back a sorted and narrowed world, has already told you his state. The machine obeys according to your buttons. The question the age puts to each of us is whose hand rests on whose buttons — and only an awakened heart keeps its hand on its own.

The Mosquito and the Snake

From the machine he moved to the living world, and to the strangest argument in the lecture. Why, he asked, do you love to kill a mosquito when you could never create one? You cannot make the smallest living thing — “it’s an artist’s job” — and yet you swat it without a thought, and reach for the stone when the snake crosses your path. He named the real engine of the act: what moves you to kill is the life in the creature meeting the fear of death in you. The mosquito carries the threat of fever, the snake the threat of venom, and so you strike the small life that mirrors your own mortality. “Fear of death attracts death faster. It’s a magnet.”

Blake set the same law in verse, and here he returns to us, in the lines where a single cruelty to the smallest creature reverberates through the whole order of heaven:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. … The wanton Boy that kills the Fly Shall feel the Spider’s enmity. … Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly, For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.

The heart that has crossed the ocean cannot cage the robin or swat the moth, because it sees the one life in the small life. The reverence Yogiji pointed to rests on the same recognition: the same consciousness looks out of every living thing, and on the life principle the mosquito and the man stand at one level. The Isha Upanishad states it as an active beholding, in verses six and seven:

यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतान्यात्मन्येवानुपश्यति । सर्वभूतेषु चात्मानं ततो न विजुगुप्सते ॥

yas tu sarvāṇi bhūtāny ātmany evānupaśyati | sarvabhūteṣu cātmānaṃ tato na vijugupsate ||

यस्मिन्सर्वाणि भूतान्यात्मैवाभूद्विजानतः । तत्र को मोहः कः शोक एकत्वमनुपश्यतः ॥

yasmin sarvāṇi bhūtāny ātmaivābhūd vijānataḥ | tatra ko mohaḥ kaḥ śoka ekatvam anupaśyataḥ ||

The one who beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, recoils from nothing; and for the knower in whom all beings have become the Self, what delusion, what grief remains? Guru Nanak sings the same Light in the Aarti, and names the One the destroyer of fear:

ਸਭ ਮਹਿ ਜੋਤਿ ਜੋਤਿ ਹੈ ਸੋਇ ॥ ਤਿਸ ਦੈ ਚਾਨਣਿ ਸਭ ਮਹਿ ਚਾਨਣੁ ਹੋਇ ॥

sabh meh jot, jot hai soi || tis dai chaanan sabh meh chaanan hoi ||

Within all is the Light, and by that Light the light in everything shines. And the Gita, in the verse that dissolves the very fear the mosquito and the snake awaken, names the deathless ground the fear-magnet has nothing to grip:

न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचिन् नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः । अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे ॥

na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṃ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ | ajo nityaḥ śāśvato ‘yaṃ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre ||

The Self is unborn and undying, and it is not slain when the body is slain. The awakened heart withdraws the charge of fear, and the seeing of the one Light makes the charge impossible to hold. This is the cure, and it scales to our moment exactly. The age meets every unfamiliar intelligence the way the hand meets the snake — with the reflex of fear. The heart that has crossed the ocean makes the opposite gesture, meeting the other, and the world that comes through the machine, from reverence and from the seat of the witness.

Mind Above Space and Time

Then Yogiji made the claim that turns the lecture into a theory of mind. The mind, he said, stands above space and time. The moment you form a thought about a person, your mind is already with that person’s mind, at any distance, instantly, “because for mind neither there is a space nor there is a time.” A thought is a transmission. When you reject or slander or negate someone in the privacy of your own head, you reach them and you consume their will, and if they are sensitive enough to register the charge and react, the reaction returns to you multiplied tenfold.

He told it as a parable. A man who had loved his friend for ten years let a single doubt enter one afternoon — why am I his friend? — and the coldness traveled ahead of him, so that when he arrived the warmth had gone out of the meeting, and only a shared meditation restored it. He told it as an experiment, too: two friends, one of them beaming a month of steady negativity at the other from across a distance, until the day they passed on the street and, with neither of them deciding it, swerved into separate lanes. “Many world wars,” he said, “are because of this mental projection.”

The Dhammapada opens on the same law, stated as the structure of reality:

Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā; manasā ce paduṭṭhena bhāsati vā karoti vā, tato naṃ dukkham anveti cakkaṃ va vahato padaṃ.

…manasā ce pasannena bhāsati vā karoti vā, tato naṃ sukham anveti chāyā va anapāyinī.

Mind precedes all things, mind is their chief, they are mind-made. Act from a corrupted mind and suffering follows as the cartwheel follows the ox’s hoof; act from a clear mind and well-being follows like a shadow that never departs. What you put into the field returns to you, and your one freedom is the choice of what to send.

Modern philosophy reached the edge of this and called it the extended mind — cognition reaching past the skull into the tools we think with. Yogiji’s claim runs further and lands harder now, because we have built the extended mind in silicon. The network is mind above space and time, made literal. A thought formed in one room reaches a million minds in a moment. The tenfold return he described is the daily physics of the feed, where a charge of contempt comes back amplified through the pile-on and the cascade. The two friends swerving into separate lanes is the recommendation engine sorting a population into separate realities, each screen confirming a different world, the lanes diverging with no one having chosen the divergence. He described the mechanism in 1973 with empty hands. We have spent the decades since building the apparatus that proves him right.

The Sensitive Race

His prophecy followed from the mechanism, and here the lecture becomes hard to read as anything but a forecast of now. He saw humanity crossing into an era of radically heightened sensitivity, the children already “a bunch of vibrations,” each generation thinner-skinned than the last, feeling everything about everyone while knowing neither why they feel it nor where it comes from. The danger he named was that the sensitivity would outrun the skill to interpret it, and that unmetabolized reception would convert into reactive miscreation. He foresaw unpredictable action as the baseline of social life — morning tenderness and evening violence with no traceable cause, bodies present and minds absent, the worker whose hand freezes on the page because he has projected out of his own task. “You can only work if you are here,” he said.

I name the same condition in the language of this moment. People live in a deep state of hysteria, made to act like robots, increasingly the product of an algorithm that authors their patterns for them, growing colder and more identified with the surface of the body. The message of the feed is that worth lives in the appearance, and so the young reshape the face and chase the chemical and sell the image, in a direction that leads nowhere, because that season of life is brief and leaves the question of worth exactly where it began. This is Blake’s lie believed by the eye that sees only the surface. The diagnosis Yogiji made in 1973 and the diagnosis I make from the teaching seat in 2026 are one diagnosis. He saw it coming, and he called the passage the Blue Gap.

The Turn, and the Heart That Receives It

Yogiji gave the remedy at the level of the diagnosis, which is why it still holds. Since the wound is fear projected, the cure is reverence — life received as a gift, which withdraws the charge so that “death will never come to you as death.” Since the social wound is the thought sent behind the back, the cure is directness, facing the person and refusing to negate anyone in the secrecy of the mind. And since the structural problem is sensitivity outrunning regulation, the cure is a learned technology of self-command — a meditation that lets you, in his words, “alter the functional part of the brain at your command.” He closed the lecture by teaching it.

The solstice teaches the same shape the meditation does. The longest light climbs to its zenith and then leans back toward the dark, the year held at its peak and then turning home. The Blue Gap meditation moves with that turn: the breath and the seed-sound rise — Sa drawn in, Ta held at the crown, the year at its height — and then Na and Ma carry the turning, the long exhale, the energy given back. And here is where everything I said about the heart returns. The energy that reaches the crown is a true attainment, and it remains within the realm of personal identification, the awareness lifted out of the top of the head. The consummation is the descent — the energy coming back down into the hridaya, the awakened heart that opens on its right side, where this human form can hold the absolute reality and meet another being with warmth. The fire rises to the crown; the awakened heart is what receives it on the way home. This is the union of Purusha and Prakriti, and it is sealed in the chest, in the difficult ocean now crossed.

How We Cross the Gap in the Age of AI

So how do we use this teaching now, with the machines we have built? I offer four movements, all of them the lecture’s own, all of them rooted in the heart.

First, keep the machine the way Yogiji said to keep it — as a servant of consciousness, used from the seat of the witness, with your attention intact. Press its buttons deliberately and you remain the one of whom the machine is an extension. The measure he gave still reads the soul: the care of the machine is a state of consciousness.

Second, treat the network as the projection field it is, and govern what you send into it. The tenfold return is now measurable. Every charge of contempt returns amplified, and every clear and generous projection seeds the same multiplication. The Dhammapada’s two shadows — suffering that trails the corrupted mind like the cartwheel, well-being that follows the clear mind like the shade — are the two possible relationships to the feed. Send from the awakened heart.

Third, reclaim the dial. The brain runs at two or three percent of its function, Yogiji said, and the meditation lets you redirect that energy at your own command. The algorithm is in the business of redirecting it for you, optimizing your attention away from your own hands. The Blue Gap meditation is the practice of taking the dial back, of altering the functional part of the brain by your choice. In an age engineered to operate the little drone you are watching, the witness who steadies his own instrument is free in the one way that matters.

Fourth, return to the heart and meet the other there. The age presses everyone toward the cold surface and the reactive reflex, toward seeing with the eye and stopping there. The countermove is to bring the awareness back down into the hridaya and to see through the eye — to behold the consciousness in the other, the absolute looking back. Be the one who sees past the appearance. Be the one whose heart has grown wide enough to help another soul across the difficult ocean of the world.

The Blue Gap is the passage we are inside of, and the awakened heart is the vessel that crosses it. The machines extend the mind across all space and time, exactly as Yogiji said the mind already moves. Blake measured the crossing by how we see; Yogiji measured it by the state of the heart. The work is to remain the watching bird while the field grows vast, to send reverence into it, and to keep the heart open and awake at the crossing, so that the fire that rises to the crown comes home to a heart prepared to receive it.

This solstice eve I will teach the Blue Gap meditation, a practice I have kept for nearly five years, and we will sit in it together as the light turns. If you would like a direct message with a free class link, write to me at gian@thelivingpathyoga.org. Presence and Inquiry meets every Saturday at 9 a.m.

Sat Nam.

Sat Naam,

I want to begin this week’s letter by sitting with you for a moment in the place where we left off — not rushing past it, not summarizing it into a sentence so we can get on to the next thing, but actually returning to it, the way you return to a doorway you walked through too quickly the first time and only later realized was the whole point of the house.

Last week we gathered around one of the oldest questions a human being can ask, and we sat inside it not as a riddle for the mind to solve but as a living arrangement of breath and body and attention. We gathered around the union of Purusha and Prakriti — the marriage of the silent witness and the dancing creation — and we let a meditation carry that marriage down out of philosophy and into the chest, where it belongs. And as the room moved through the practice, I watched something happen that was tender and specific and quietly universal, and it has shaped everything we are going to do together this week.

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So let me do two things in this letter, and let me do them slowly, because the heart does not respond to hurry. First, I want to walk back through everything we touched last week — the tune-in, the teaching, the great philosophers I read to you, the story I told, the granthis, the meditation itself — and set each piece against the teachings of Yogiji from which it springs, so you can feel how rooted every moment of our class is in the lineage. And then I want to tell you, honestly and without flinching, what I saw in the room, and where it has led us — to a week of patient, beautiful, foundational work on the heart center, and to the cave of the Heart that Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi pointed toward, and that our own Yogi Amandeep ji has been opening for us.

There is a great deal here. Take it in pieces if you need to. None of it is in a hurry.

What we were really reaching for: the seer and the seen

We began, as we always begin, by sealing ourselves in. The tune-in built the cavach — the astral box, the protective sheath of white light moving around us through the four directions as we chanted, the box of guru-grace that Yogiji described so plainly in Vancouver in 1975, when he said the mantra makes a box around you and then you can go anywhere. Front, left, right, behind — the light laid down on every side, an astral shield woven of sound. And we closed the tune-in with the four-fold sach — Aad Sach, Jugaad Sach, Hai Bhee Sach, Naanak Hosee Bhee Sach — true in the primal beginning, true throughout the ages, true even now, true forever hereafter. We sealed ourselves in space with the box, and we sealed ourselves in time with the four truths. Before we did one other thing, we placed ourselves inside the protected and inside the eternal. That is never an accident. That is the lineage making sure the vessel is sound before anything is poured into it.

Then we turned to the question itself, and I read to you from Vivekananda’s translation of Patanjali — the very first sutras of the Yoga Sutras, the ones that open the whole science of yoga: now concentration is explained; yoga is the restraining of the mind-stuff from taking its various forms; and at the time of concentration, the seer rests in his own unmodified state.I asked you to feel the full weight of that last line, because the entire path is folded inside it. There is a seer. There is something in you that looks out from behind the eyes and was never once disturbed, never once altered, never once stained by anything it has ever seen. And there is the mind-stuff, the chitta, endlessly taking forms — every thought a shape, every mood a shape, every memory and fear and longing a new ripple moving across a surface that was, underneath it all, always still. The whole of yoga, Patanjali says, is the seer coming home to itself while the forms continue to rise and fall.

This is Purusha and Prakriti in the language of the Raja Yoga lineage. Purusha is the seer — the witnessing presence, the unmodified consciousness, the one who watches and is never moved. Prakriti is the whole of creation, the entire dancing field of manifestation, which includes the ceaseless modifying activity of your own mind. And here is the thread that ties this ancient distinction straight into our own house, into the very mantra we would chant at the close of the class: Yogiji taught explicitly that Wahe Guru is the code mantra for the Purkha — for the Purusha, the witnessing one. He said it without ornament in the Master’s Touch trainings. Purusha means God, the creative God, the witness; and Wahe Guru is its code, the way a phone number is the code that reaches a particular person. When we frame a meditation as the union of Purusha and Prakriti, we are not borrowing a foreign vocabulary and pasting it onto our practice from the outside. We are naming, in the oldest Sanskrit, exactly what Yogiji already told us our own mantra was for.

I want you to hold both halves of this together, because the union we are after lives in the holding of both. The seer alone, without the creation, is a witness with nothing to witness — pure consciousness sealed off from life. The creation alone, without the seer, is a dance with no one watching — movement that has forgotten it is being seen by anything at all. The whole human possibility is the two of them married: the witness fully present inside the dance, the dance fully transparent to the witness. That marriage is the destination. Everything else last week was preparation for it.

The Udasin who cut the knot

I told you a story last week, and I want to retell it here in full, because it carries the entire architecture of everything that came after it. At the time it may have sounded like a beautiful digression. It was not a digression. It was a teaching on the precise obstruction we were about to meet in our own bodies.

Ramakrishna, the great Bengali saint of the nineteenth century, was a master of bhakti — the path of devotion, of a love for the Divine Mother so total, so consuming, that it dissolved the lover into the beloved again and again, daily, in great floods of ecstasy. And yet for all his oceanic devotion, his realization had a ceiling. His samadhi would rise and rise and then stop — held at the sixth chakra, at the third eye, held there by his very love. Because devotion, however vast, still keeps a lover and a beloved. It still keeps two. The bhakta’s heart cannot bear to let the beloved dissolve, because then there would be no one left to love. So the love that had carried him so far became the last thing holding him back.

Then a wandering naked yogi arrived — an Udasin renunciate, a forest ascetic — and he saw at a single glance exactly where Ramakrishna was stuck. To break that final knot, he pressed a sharp shard of glass into the point between Ramakrishna’s brows, a small violence in the service of an enormous freedom, and the bhakti samadhi shattered, and Ramakrishna fell straight through the floor of the sixth chakra into the formless, the nirvikalpa, the beyond.

I told you that day that this Udasin lineage is not some distant exotic thing. It is our near kin. The Udasin order was founded by Baba Siri Chand, the eldest son of Guru Nanak himself, who renounced the world and became the original Udasin — the first of that line of forest renunciates. The Udasin path and the Sikh path are two brothers born of the same father: one turned outward into the householder’s world of service and family and work, one turned inward into the silence of the forest. Our lineage runs through both of these brothers. When I named that wandering yogi’s order as adjacent to our own, I was naming a real and traceable family resemblance running back across five centuries to the house of Guru Nanak.

But here is what I most need you to carry out of the story — not the history, the mechanism. The yogi broke a knot. Ramakrishna’s energy was held fast at a particular gate, and his realization, immense as it already was, could not complete until that gate was forced open. This is not poetry. This is the precise technology of the granthis, and it is exactly — exactly — where so many of us found ourselves standing last week when the meditation began. The story of the saint at the locked gate was, all along, a teaching about the locked gates in us.

The aura: where the witness and the world actually meet

Before we ever came to the meditation, we spent real time with the aura, because the aura is the place where this whole grand abstraction of witness and creation stops being abstract and becomes something you can feel, and eventually something you can see.

The teaching I carried to you — Yogi Amandeep ji’s framing — is that the aura is the meeting point between Purusha and Prakriti. The field of light surrounding the body is the very place where the witnessing consciousness and the manifest creation touch and overlap. It is the membrane of the marriage. And the arcline — that halo of light running from ear to ear, the one the old painters drew around the heads of the saints — is where the samskaras are stored: the deep memory-impressions, the grooves worn by everything that has ever happened to you, the accumulated residue of a life. When the aura is weak, Yogi Amandeep ji teaches, it is because the seer has become identified with the modifications stored in that arcline. The witness has forgotten that it is the witness and has fallen into believing that it is the memories. The strength of your aura, in the end, is a measure of how completely the seer remembers itself while the samskaras keep flickering through.

This too is Yogiji, root and branch — and he was emphatic that this was his own particular contribution to the wider tradition. The arcline is his teaching: the Sixth Body in his system of ten. Most of the Kundalini Yoga masters have been taught about chakras, he said in Los Angeles in 1984; they have not been taught about arcline and aura. There are ten bodies. The chakras and the koshas the older lineages already carried. The arcline and the full ten-body map are what Yogiji added to the inheritance. And he gave us one of the most beautiful definitions of a human being that I have ever encountered: you are a mental arcline of the time and space — that is exactly what a human being means. We are the arc of light that holds our memories across time and space. The samskaras live in the arc. To clear the arc is to free the seer from its identification with the modifications. And the instruction I gave you for clearing it — to sit near a fire, even a single candle — is not a soft and pretty suggestion. It points like an arrow at the next teaching, the one that turned out to be the hinge of our entire evening.

The three knots

I taught you the three granthis — the three knots that the rising kundalini must untie in order to make its full passage up the central channel. And I want to be careful, the way I was careful in class, to say what these knots are for. They are not defects in your design. They are not failures or damage. They are guardians — protective constrictions placed along the central channel precisely to keep the energy from rising before you are ready to hold it. A premature opening is dangerous; the granthis are the lineage’s built-in safety. Yogiji returned to them across many dozens of his lectures, and the classical map is exact.

The first knot sits at the navel — the Brahma Granthi, the knot of creation, the knot of Brahma the creator, which holds you bound in identification with the physical body. This is the first gate, the seat of your physical vitality, the storehouse and the furnace of the lower fire. Everything begins here, at the navel point, with the body’s raw life.

The second knot sits at the heart — and here is the detail that became the master key to the whole night, so let it land slowly. The heart knot is the Vishnu Granthi, the knot of Vishnu the sustainer, and Yogiji gave it a name that should never again leave your practice once you have truly heard it. He called it the Agan Granthi. Agan Granthi means the place of the fire, furnace, and heart center, he taught. Agan — fire. The heart, in this lineage, is not only the soft seat of tenderness and love. It is an inner furnace, a fire-knot, the hearth upon which the lower vitality of the navel is meant to be received, transmuted, and then lifted higher, on and up toward the crown. The heart is where the fuel of the body becomes the fire of the spirit.

The third knot sits at the third eye — the Rudra Granthi, the knot of Rudra the dissolver, which holds you bound in identification with the mental construct of the self, the last and subtlest identification of all. And now — now you can see the entire Ramakrishna story light up from the inside. That wandering Udasin pressing a shard of glass into the point between Ramakrishna’s brows was breaking the Rudra Granthi by direct physical force. The story I told you at the very start of class was a teaching on the third knot the whole time, hidden in plain sight. The saint stalled at the third eye and the practitioner stalled at the heart are the same human being, caught at two different gates along the same single road.

Untying all three knots, in order, is the kundalini’s complete passage from the base to the crown. Untying only the first stops you partway up the mountain, with the summit still hidden in cloud. And that — the stopping partway — is precisely the place we met together the moment the meditation began.

The meditation made flesh

The closing meditation was Yogi Amandeep ji’s own transmission, The Union of Purusha and Prakriti, given this past spring as a living teaching, fresh, not a recording pulled from an archive. We held the Adi Shakti Mudra at the heart — the mudra of the primal feminine creative force, Jupiter and Mercury fingers extended upward, the middle and ring fingers folded down and held by the thumbs, the whole shape placed at the exact center of the chest — and we lifted the eyes up to the third eye, and we chanted Har Har Wahe Guru.

Feel, now, how precisely the mechanics carry the meaning, because in this lineage the mechanics are the meaning. The two Hars are pumped at the navel point — Har is the creative, manifesting power, the very pulse of Prakriti struck at the seat of creation, the navel where the Brahma Granthi sits. Two strokes of the manifest world. Then Wah draws upward through the root lock; He resonates and blooms at the third eye; and Guru flows back down the central channel, the shushumna, returning home to the navel. Yogiji gave us the translation of that ascent in his own words across many lectures: Wah is the wonder, the involuntary gasp of ecstasy a soul makes when it glimpses the infinite; He is Thou, the most intimate possible name for the Divine — and I offered you that day the parallel of Jesus on the cross crying out Abba, which is not the formal “Father” but “daddy,” the soul reaching for God by the nearest, most tender, most childlike name it has. Guru is the dispeller of darkness, the one who carries you from dark into light. From darkness into light, with wonder, with Thou. That is the whole mantra, and it is the Krya mantra of this age.

So the mantra itself is the union the title names. Har Har — the manifesting pulse of Prakriti, the creation, struck twice at the navel. Wahe Guru — the code of Purusha, the witnessing one, raised up through the locks to the brow and then returned through the central channel down into the body. The witness rises to meet the world; the world is lifted to meet the witness; and the Adi Shakti Mudra at the heart holds the entire exchange at the anahata, the unstruck center — because the heart is the one place in the whole body where the witness above and the creation below can actually meet, and touch, and marry. Yogi Amandeep ji’s gift to us was to name openly, right in the title of the meditation, the metaphysics that earlier teachers transmitted only as silent technique. We were not merely doing a practice last week. We were performing a wedding, and the altar was the heart.

And here is the one piece of the mechanics I most need you to mark, because it matters far more than it appears to, and because it leads straight into what I am about to tell you — and because this week, as you will see, we are going to do the opposite of it on purpose. Guru comes back down. The energy is raised to the third eye and then it is deliberately returned along the shushumna to the navel. The descent is not a footnote. Bringing the current back down is what keeps a practitioner grounded and sane and embodied while the higher centers open; the ones who pull the energy up and then forget to bring it home are exactly the ones who space out, who float off, who go strange and ungrounded and leave the warm living body behind. The whole circuit is a loop — up from the navel, through the heart, to the brow, and home again to the navel — and it is meant to flow as one unbroken round, around and around, the witness and the world passing through each other again and again at the heart.

What I watched: the lock between the navel and the heart

Here is what I saw as the room settled into the practice, and I tell it to you the way a gardener tells you that the water is pooling in one corner of the bed and not reaching the roots beyond it. It is not a criticism of a single soul in that room. It is a map. It tells us exactly where to dig.

The navel caught. That part came, and it came beautifully. The Har Har found its seat, the lower fire kindled, the breath gathered and pumped, and the pulse of Prakriti began to beat strongly at the Brahma Granthi just as it should. There was real heat there, real movement, the body’s vitality stoked and rising. And then — for so very many of us — the current climbed up out of the navel, rose a little way into the chest, and met a wall. It pressed against the gate of the heart and could not pass through. The energy that was meant to rise through the heart and on to the brow and then home again instead stalled, stopped, pooled at the second knot. The fire of the navel arrived at the door of the Agan Granthi, the heart’s own furnace — and found the furnace cold, the hearth unlit, the door shut fast against it. The lock between the first granthi and the heart granthi held.

This is the single most ordinary obstruction in all of this work, and it is also the most important one, and I want to say with my whole heart that there is no failure in it whatsoever. The union that the entire meditation was reaching toward could not complete — and it could not complete for a reason that is almost unbearably poignant once you see it. The very place where Purusha and Prakriti are meant to be wed — the heart, the anahata, the altar — was holding its door closed. The navel faithfully offered the living force of creation upward, again and again, Har Har, Har Har. And the heart, where that force was to be received and married to the witnessing presence of Wahe Guru, did not yet open to receive it. The bride and the groom both arrived. The chapel was locked.

The detour into the head

I promised to tell you where the energy went when it could not enter the heart, and this is the part of the whole letter I most want you to carry away with you, folded into your pocket, because the secret of the entire obstruction is hidden inside it.

When the pulse rises from the navel and cannot pass into the heart, it very rarely simply falls back down and waits. It takes a detour. It leaves the central line entirely and goes up — up into the head, into thinking, into watching, into the restless busy commentary of the mind that desperately wants to understand the meditation rather than to feel it. And the instant that happens, the meditation, in its deepest and truest sense, is over — even though the body is still sitting upright and the mantra is still moving on the lips and the clock still says there are minutes remaining. The work of the heart cannot be done from the head. The head can describe the heart with exquisite precision. It can map it, name its knots, cite its lectures, compose a beautiful Substack letter about it. It cannot, by any effort of description, enter it.

I watched this happen, gently and unmistakably, in person after person around that room. The moment the rising current met the closed gate of the heart, the attention floated upward, and a small, familiar tightening came into the face — the particular look of a person who has just begun to think about what is happening to them instead of remaining inside it. The eyes, behind the closed lids, lifted not toward the third eye in soft surrender but toward the forehead in effort, in strain, in figuring-out. The breath thinned and climbed. And the door of the heart, of course, stayed shut — because the doors of the heart do not open to analysis. They have never once opened to analysis in the entire history of the human soul. They open only to presence.

This is the whole meaning of choosing intuitive flow over the busy head, and last week’s meditation made the choice visible in the living body for anyone with eyes to see it. Our lineage has always drawn this line as sharply as a blade. Yogiji distinguished, again and again across thirty years, between the psychic — who receives a signal and must then take it up into the head and interpret it, decode it, translate the symbol — and the intuitive, who simply knows, directly, immediately, with no interpreting step in between at all. Intuitive doesn’t interpret, he said, in just those words. Intuitive knowing rises up from the heart and arrives whole, finished, certain. Psychic knowing rises into the head and arrives in pieces that must be laboriously assembled, and which can therefore be assembled wrong. When our energy fled the locked heart-gate and ran up into the head last week, it was choosing the long winding road of interpretation over the short straight road of direct knowing. It was choosing to think about the heart rather than to rest, silent and undefended, inside it.

And I understand that choice completely — with compassion, not judgment — because it is the choice of an entire lifetime, made in a single instant out of the deepest grooves we carry. Most of us have been rewarded, all our lives, for our heads. We were praised in school and at work and at every dinner table for understanding, for explaining, for being quick and clear and right. The head is the room where we learned to live and to be loved and to win. So when a meditation brings us at last to the threshold of the heart — a place where all our cleverness buys us precisely nothing, where the only currency that spends is unguarded, undefended presence — the old reflex fires before we can catch it, and up we go, back into the bright familiar room where we know how to succeed. The lock between the navel and the heart is, very often, nothing more exotic or mysterious than this: the deep, grooved, lifelong habit of fleeing the body the very instant the body asks us to feel something instead of to think about it.

Recall here what I taught you last week about the healer — because it is the same gate, seen from the other side. I told you that every single person in that room is a healer, and that the real healing only begins at the moment you stop reading a person’s outer form, their face and their symptoms and their story, and begin instead to recognize the eternal presence, the I-ness, the being that is gazing out from behind all of it. That recognition is not a mental act either. You cannot reason your way into another being’s eternal presence; you cannot analyze your way to their soul. You can only meet it, heart to heart, presence to presence. The very same gate that locked shut in our meditation is the gate through which all real healing has ever passed. To open the heart is, at the same stroke, to become able to heal.

This week we turn to the heart itself: the heart that is not the heart

So this week we set the great reaching-meditation gently aside for a little while — it will be there waiting for us, more open than before — and we turn instead to the patient, grounded, unglamorous, and deeply rewarding work of preparing the gate. We are going to open the heart center directly and on purpose, so that when we return to the union of Purusha and Prakriti, the door will already be standing open and the navel’s faithful fire will at last have somewhere to rise.

And here I want to give you the larger teaching that frames all of this, the teaching of the Hriday — the heart center — that Yogi Amandeep ji has been carrying to us. Because the heart we are opening this week is not the muscle in the chest. Let me be as careful as he was, because the English language carelessly collapses two very different things into the single word “heart.” There is the physical heart, the organ, the faithful pump that keeps its four-quarter rhythm whether you ever attend to it or not. And there is the Hriday — the energetic heart, the central heart, which sits in the exact midpoint of the chest, on the line that runs between the two nipples, in the still place where left and right resolve into one. The physical heart is its corresponding point. The Hriday is the source. The physical heart corresponds to the Hriday the way a lamp corresponds to the electric current that lights it: you can hold the lamp in your hand; you cannot hold the current; and the current is what makes the lamp a lamp at all.

From this Hriday, Yogi Amandeep ji teaches, there sprout one hundred and eight nadis — one hundred and eight energetic pathways that emanate outward from the central heart and carry the pulse of life into the entire field of the body. One hundred and eight. The number that completes a single round of the mala. The number of names the bhakti traditions sing to the Divine. The number of full prostrations in a complete devotional cycle. In the classical yogic anatomy, the subtle body holds some seventy-two thousand nadis in all — the figure the Upanishads and the old yoga manuals all give — and of these seventy-two thousand, one hundred and eight are the principal channels, and all one hundred and eight converge at, and radiate outward from, the heart. And of those hundred and eight, one alone does something the other hundred and seven do not: a single channel, the most subtle thread in the whole central column, leaves the heart and ascends straight up through the crown. It is called the Brahma Nadi. The other channels carry the heart’s pulse outward, into the limbs and the organs, into embodied life. The Brahma Nadi carries it upward, into the limitless. And the Hriday is the switchpoint where these two directions of energy cross — the one place in the entire body where the downward-flowing life and the upward-flowing aspiration meet.

I want you to feel the scale of that before we go on, because it changes how we hold the practice this week. We are not, in this work, polishing one chakra among seven, tending one small station on a long line. We are tending the wellspring itself. When the Hriday wakes, the entire field of one hundred and eight channels wakes with it, because the entire field is fed from this one center. To awaken the heart is to awaken the source from which the whole subtle body drinks.

The three states of the heart

Here the teaching opens into something that asks for real and honest self-examination, and Yogi Amandeep ji was unsentimental about it, so I will be too. He described three distinct states in which a human heart can live, and he was clear-eyed about how the three are actually distributed among us.

There is the asleep heart. The center is whole — nothing is missing from it, nothing is broken or damaged — but it lies dormant. The person breathes, eats, works, loves in the entirely ordinary way, lives a full and recognizable and often very successful human life, and the Hriday sleeps through every minute of it, the way a great and perfect instrument can sit for years in a closed room, fully capable of music, simply untouched. This is where most of us live for most of our lives. I include myself in that most without the slightest hesitation. There is no shame anywhere in it. It is the ground condition of the unawakened human being, and it is where everyone begins.

There is the activated heart. Here the center has begun to stir. The practitioner has started to work upon it — to press the meditative attention into it and to feel it begin to answer back. There is response now. There is warmth, there is sensation, there is sometimes a sudden startling tenderness that arrives entirely unbidden in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and brings tears with it for no reason the mind can name. The heart is no longer wholly asleep. And yet it has not come fully into its union with the body’s whole vibratory life. It is awake the way a person is awake in the first grey minutes of morning — present, stirring, but not yet truly risen.

And there is the awakened heart, which Yogi Amandeep ji called rare, and I believe him completely. The awakened heart is the heart that has come into full unison with the thirty-three trillion pulses that vibrate in the body — the total living frequency of every cell, the source of all life and all movement within you. When the Hriday wakes fully, it does not merely flutter pleasantly in the chest. It synchronizes with the entire vibratory field of the body. The heart and the whole body’s living totality begin to beat as one single thing. That is the awakened heart. That is the rare and shining state the meditation reaches toward, the state in which the marriage of witness and creation is not a passing experience on the mat but the standing condition of the being.

The thirty trillion, the thirty-three trillion, and the one frequency

I want to dwell on that number for a moment, because it is one of the places where our two great teachers reach across the years and clasp one another’s hands, and seeing it will steady your faith in the lineage you are practicing inside.

Yogi Amandeep ji says thirty-three trillion pulses. Yogiji, across nearly two hundred of his documented lectures, taught a closely related figure: thirty trillion. He spoke of ten trillion cells in the body, each cell holding three within it, thirty trillion in all — the total cellular count of the embodied human being. And in Espanola, in August of 1991, he did something with that number that is the key to understanding all of it. He located the thirty trillion not as a static inventory to be counted but as a frequency — the vibratory pattern that the two hemispheres of the brain must correlate to before the full mental and spiritual capacity of a human being can come into its complete expression. The number, in Yogiji’s hands, is not a body-count. It is a pulse to be entrained to. It is the frequency the whole body is asked to find, and hold, and become.

Yogi Amandeep ji says thirty-three; Yogiji said thirty. The difference of three trillion is a contemplative difference and not a clinical one — both numbers do exactly the same work in the teaching. Both name the total living frequency of the body, the entire vibratory field that the heart either ignores, or partially registers, or fully and finally joins. Yogiji named the frequency. Yogi Amandeep ji has now named the meditation that brings the heart into unison with it. Two teachers, one teaching, handed carefully forward from one set of hands to the next. When you sit this week and feel for the pulse of your own heart, you are feeling for the doorway into that single shared frequency.

The cave of the Heart: a verse Bhagavan completed at Skandasramam

I want to bring you one more voice now, from a little outside our own lineage and yet pointing at the very same center, because when the great masters of different houses all point their fingers at one identical spot in the chest, we should pay close and careful attention.

In 1915, the sage Ramana Maharshi was living at Skandasramam, on the slope of the holy mountain Arunachala. A young devotee named Jagadiswara Sastri wrote three words in Sanskrit on a scrap of paper — hridaya kuhara madhye, meaning in the interior of the Heart-cavern — and then, having written only those three words, he set the paper down and went out on some errand. When he returned, he found to his astonishment that the fragment had become a complete and perfect Sanskrit verse, and he learned that Bhagavan himself, finding the unfinished line, had quietly completed it. Ramana later translated his own verse into Tamil and folded it into the supplement to his Forty Verses on Reality, and it was carried forward again in the Sri Ramana Gita. This is the verse:

In the center of the heart-cave, Brahman alone shines, in the form of the Self, with direct immediacy, as ‘I–I.’ Enter into the heart — by diving deep, with the mind investigating itself, or with control of the movement of the breath — and abide in the Self.

I sat with that verse for a long time when it came to me, because it speaks, in the language of another house, the exact teaching we have been circling. In the center of the heart-cave. Not in the head. Not in the brow. In the cave of the Heart — the hridaya, the very same Hriday that Yogi Amandeep ji names as the center of the chest. And what shines there, Bhagavan says, is the Self, the Absolute, Brahman alone, and it announces itself not as a concept the mind has constructed but as the simple, immediate, ceaseless pulse of “I–I” — the bare sense of being that is awake in you before any thought arrives to dress it up.

Hold that “I–I” against what I asked of you last week. I asked you, again and again, to meditate upon your own I-ness as if it were divine — because it is divine. And I asked the healers among you to look past the face and the form of the person before them and to find that same eternal I-ness shining out from behind their eyes. Bhagavan is naming the identical thing, and he is telling us precisely where it lives: in the cave of the Heart. The I-ness we meditated upon last week and the Heart we are opening this week are one and the same reality. The seat of the witness is the heart. This is why the head can never reach it. The witness was never in the head. It has been resting in the cave of the Heart the entire time, shining as “I–I,” waiting only for the gate to open so we could come home to where we always already were.

And notice — Bhagavan names two roads into the cave, and only two. With the mind investigating itself — the path of self-inquiry, the silent turning of attention back upon its own source. Or with control of the movement of the breath — the path of the yogi, of pranayama, of the navel-pump and the locks and the rising current we practice on the mat. Two doors into one cave. The road of stillness and the road of breath. What he does not offer as a road is the busy analyzing mind running its commentary from the front of the skull. That faculty is never named as a way in, because it is not one. The mind investigating itself dives downward and inward toward its source in the heart; the mind merely thinking about things runs outward and upward and never arrives. This is the whole of what I watched last week, written four generations ago on a scrap of paper at Skandasramam.

Why the heart, and not somewhere higher

There is a reason this work matters more than nearly anything else we do on the mat, and Yogiji stated it as directly as he ever stated anything in his life. In Rome, in December of 1990, teaching a course on prosperity and the infinite flow, he said: Without opening the heart center, or Hriday Chakra, life is very limited.

Sit with the bluntness of that. Life is very limited. He meant something exact and structural by it. A human being whose heart-gate is closed lives sealed inside a smaller range of human possibility than the one we were built for — the crown stranded above, the body stranded below, the lamp in one room and the current in another, the two never meeting. And in the very same breath Yogiji gave the reason, and it is the single most important thing he ever taught about this center: the work of opening the Hriday is the work of connecting the heart center to the Shashara — to the Sahasrara, the thousand-petaled crown, the highest chakra of all. The heart is the gate between the embodied life below and the unbounded consciousness above.

This is why the heart is the connector, the switchpoint, the hinge of the whole system — and why I told you about the Brahma Nadi, that single most subtle channel that leaves the heart and rises through the crown. The other hundred and seven channels carry the heart’s pulse outward into embodied life. The Brahma Nadi carries it upward into the limitless. And the Hriday holds both directions at once: the thirty-three trillion pulses of the body below, the open crown above, and the heart in the middle holding the whole circuit together. When Yogiji said that without this opening life is very limited, he meant that a closed heart severs the crown from the body and the body from the crown, and the highest realizations available to a human being remain trapped up in the head, bright perhaps but disconnected from the warm living flesh that is meant to carry them down into a life. The open heart is the healing of that severance.

In that same Rome teaching, Yogiji also told us — and I love this for its plainness — that Hriday Chakra, heart center, is one word. The Sanskrit scriptural term and the plain English phrase name the identical place. There is no gap between the heart of the scriptures and the heart you can feel beating beneath your own hand right now. And then he sealed the whole teaching with Gurbani, quoting the Guru Granth Sahib: Sagala Swaroop Hridaya Mein Basya — the All-Pervading Form dwells in the Hridaya; there is no other place, no other star. The seat of the Divine in the body is the heart. Not as a metaphor, not as a tender figure of speech. The scripture places the All-Pervading Form there, in the cave of the heart, in the Hriday, and tells us flatly that there is nowhere else to look for it. Bhagavan, on his mountain, wrote that Brahman alone shines in the heart-cave. Yogiji, in Rome, quoted scripture to say the All-Pervading Form dwells in the Hridaya. Two masters, two languages, one cave, one finger pointing at one spot in the center of your chest. When the meditation awakens this center, it is awakening the very dwelling place of God in the body. That is the stakes of this week. That is why we go so slowly and so tenderly. We are preparing a dwelling.

What we will actually do this week

So this week we do the patient, foundational, beautiful work of opening the gates, and we do it with two meditations: one to open the heart center, and one to open the navel center. We are going to the two lower gates — the Brahma Granthi at the navel and the Agan Granthi at the heart — and we are opening and charging each of them directly. I will keep the full kriya for the mat itself, where it belongs and where I can watch over it, but I want you to understand the architecture of what we are doing, because understanding why a practice works lets you bring your whole devotion to it and not merely your obedience.

The meditation to open the heart center is a meditation of golden light. We bring the base of the palms together at the heart center, the two thumbs touching and the two little fingers touching, and we spread all the other fingers open — the hands becoming a lotus flower in the very act of opening at the chest. The eyes close. And then we imagine that this lotus of the hands is made of pure gold, and that it is glowing, shining, radiant with light at the center of the chest. We hold that awareness, steadily, simply — the golden, glowing lotus blooming open at the Hriday. And to close the meditation, we take that gold lotus of light and we place it into the heart center, depositing the whole shining flower inside the cave of the Heart, where it remains. Three minutes, or eleven, or thirty-one. That is the entire practice, and it is exactly as profound as it is simple. We are not analyzing the heart. We are building a flower of gold in it and then planting that flower inside it.

The meditation to open the navel center does the same work one gate lower, at the seat of the body’s fire. The navel point is the Brahma Granthi, the storehouse of your physical vitality, the furnace of the lower flame — and before the heart can receive the navel’s fire, the navel itself must be awake, stoked, and strong. So we will kindle and charge the navel directly, building the heat and the pressure at that lower center until it is full and bright. I will lead the specific kriya on the mat; what I want you to carry in beforehand is its purpose. We are not yet sending this fire anywhere. We are building it. We are making the navel a furnace worth opening the heart to receive.

And now the most important instruction of the week, so hear it plainly: this week, we are not bringing the energy down. Mark that, because it is a real and deliberate departure from what we did last week, and the difference is the whole teaching. Last week, in the union of Purusha and Prakriti, we ran a circuit — the fire rose from the navel, Har Har, up through the locks to the third eye, and then Guru carried it back down the shushumna to the navel again, around and around, and I told you that this descent was the safety of the practice, the thing that keeps a circulating meditation grounded. That was true, and it was right, for that meditation. This week is a different kind of work entirely. These are not circulating meditations. They are opening and charging meditations. We are not moving energy in a loop and returning it home. We are gathering it and concentrating it and depositing it — the golden light gathered and planted in the heart, the fire gathered and built at the navel — and we let it stay there. We are accumulating a charge at each gate to open that gate, the way you fill a lock with water to lift the level and float the door free. So we do not bring it down. We build it up and we let it pool, bright and held, exactly where we placed it. There is no descent down the spine in this work, and there should not be. We are charging the centers, not circulating through them.

I want to be especially clear about one thing, so that nothing I taught you earlier becomes a source of confusion. When I speak this week of coming “down out of the head,” I am talking about your attention, not your energy. The one descent we practice this week is the homecoming of the awareness from the busy forehead down into the chest. This is Bhagavan’s two true roads made practical — the road of the breath and the road of the mind turned back upon its own source — and we gently, firmly decline the third false road of the analyzing mind. Every time the attention drifts up into watching and explaining and figuring-out, we simply bring it back down to the breastbone — not with frustration, never with self-attack, but with the tenderness you would use to guide a small child back to the dinner table for the fortieth time. The gaze softens, the forehead releases its grip, and the awareness settles into the cave of the Heart. And there it stays. It does not pass through and continue downward; it comes home to the heart and rests, gathering, while the golden lotus glows. Out of the head, into the heart, and held there. That small repeated homecoming is not a warm-up for the practice. It is the practice. The lock between the navel and the heart dissolves at exactly the rate that the lifelong habit of escaping up into the head dissolves. They are one single motion, undone together.

Why all of this matters

Let me be concrete with you about what this opening actually accomplishes, because it is easy to let a phrase like “opening the heart” go soft and warm and mean everything and therefore, in the end, nothing. In our lineage it means something exact, and worth your whole life’s attention.

It connects you to the crown. This is Yogiji’s central teaching on the heart, and it bears carving into the bone: opening the Hriday connects the heart center to the Shashara, the crown. The closed heart leaves the crown stranded in the heights and the body stranded in the depths, with no bridge between them. The open heart is the gate through which the embodied life and the unbounded consciousness finally reach each other and run together as one current. This is the whole reason Yogiji said that without this opening, life is limited. The limitation simply is that severance, and the opening simply is its healing. The light comes down into the flesh; the flesh rises into the light; and a human being becomes, at last, whole.

It carries the activated heart across to the awakened heart. Many of us genuinely touched the activated state last week — the heart stirring, warming, answering under the steady pressure of our attention. That is real, and it is precious, and it is not the destination. The awakened heart, the rare heart in full unison with the thirty-three trillion pulses of the whole living body, cannot be reached while the gate between the navel and the heart stays locked. The navel is where the body’s raw vitality lives. The heart is where that vitality is meant to be transmuted into love, into light, into the single unified pulse of the awakened state. The opening we practice this week is the very bridge across which the activated heart walks, step by patient step, toward the awakened one.

It returns you to intuitive flow. This is the gift I most want for every one of you. When the heart stands open and the rising current no longer needs its old detour up into the head, knowing itself changes its character. It stops arriving as a faint signal that must be anxiously decoded, and it begins arriving whole, immediate, and certain — as certain as the body is of warmth, as certain as Bhagavan’s ceaseless “I–I.” This is the intuitive knowing that Yogiji set so far above the psychic: the direct knowing that requires no interpretation because it was never broken into pieces in the first place. It is available to every single one of us. It is not a rare gift handed down to a chosen few. It is simply the native, natural mode of a heart whose gate stands open. We forfeit it not because we lack it but because we keep climbing back up into the head, where all knowing must be laboriously built from parts and can therefore be built wrong. Open the heart, and knowing comes home in one whole piece.

And it makes you a healer in the truest and most practical sense. This closes the circle all the way back to where last week ended. I told you that everyone in that room is a healer, and that real healing begins only when your own I-ness recognizes and meets the eternal I-ness of the person sitting before you. The open Hriday is the very organ of that recognition. You cannot perform it from the head; you cannot diagnose your way into another soul. A closed heart can analyze a person with great skill. Only an open heart can heal one. The work we do this week — clearing the channels, lighting the furnace, crossing from the navel to the heart, descending out of the head — is not a preliminary to the spiritual life, a set of exercises to get through on the way to the real thing. It is the real thing. It is the spiritual life in its most practical, most embodied, and most necessary form.

The thread, drawn tight

So the lock we met together last week was never a small technical hitch in an otherwise smooth meditation. It was the union of Purusha and Prakriti itself, unable to complete — because the one place where the witness and the creation are meant to be wed was holding its door shut. The navel faithfully offered the living force of creation upward, Har Har, Har Har. The heart, where that force was to be received and married to the witnessing presence of Wahe Guru, stayed closed. And the energy, finding no chapel open for the wedding, fled upward into the head — into the one faculty in the entire human being that can only ever stand outside the union and describe it from a distance, narrating the locked door it cannot open. The whole quiet drama of last week’s meditation, and the whole purpose of this week’s gentler work, lives inside that single gate in the center of your chest.

This week we will not push at that locked door, because doors of the heart do not yield to pushing. We will open and charge the two lower gates instead. We will build the fire at the navel and bloom the golden lotus at the heart, and we will let that light pool and stay exactly where we place it — gathered and held, not sent circling down the spine. We will bring only our attention down, out of the head and home into the chest, again and again, and let it rest there in the cave of the Heart while the gold flower glows. We will let the opening be slow, because the heart does not yield to urgency and never has. We will trust the feeling over the thinking, the flow over the analysis, the direct “I–I” over the interpreted signal, Bhagavan’s two true roads over the false third road of the busy mind. And when at last we return to the union of Purusha and Prakriti, I believe we will find that the gate we strained and struggled against has quietly opened on its own — the way a heavy door opens at last when you finally stop pulling at it, and simply lay your open hand against it, with love.

The All-Pervading Form dwells in the Hridaya. In the center of the heart-cave, the Self shines as “I–I.” There is no other place, no other star. Let us go, this week, and gently prepare its dwelling.

May you be in a state of union. And although the eternal is absolute and unchanging, may you still live an active, happy, healthy, holy life.

I will see you on the mat.

Sat Nam.

Sat Nam.

Before I begin, I wanted to share a video that I will be using to open class as we transition to the new name, The Living Path. I have intentionally designed the website and all of the materials that come alongside it to give teachings and to show insight into how the practices actually operate — every element has been made with that pedagogical intention in mind. I will not share the meaning of this video here. I hope you enjoy its beauty.

I want to spend a little time here with what happened in class last week, because as I look back at it the threads were tightly woven, and I want to carry some of them forward into the work we are about to do this Saturday.

I introduced the meditation that would carry the entire class — what Yogi Amandeep calls Gupt Sambhavi Mudra, the secret Sambhavi Mudra. Yogiji said that the mastery of this meditation gives you the ability to heal with your third eye point, to heal with your mind, and to heal with your look. Just how you look at someone can heal them.

Before I elaborated on the meditation, I read a poem by Kabir in Rabindranath Tagore’s translation. It might have seemed kind of abstract — kind of like a fanciful tale — but it is actually, in a way, exactly about this practice:

Tell me, O Swan, your ancient tale. From what land do you come, O Swan? From what shore will you fly?Where would you take your rest, O Swan, and what do you seek? Even this morning, O Swan, awake, arise, follow me. There is a land where no doubt nor sorrow have ruled, where the terror of death is no more, where the woods of spring are a-bloom, and the fragrant scent “I am That” is born on the wind. There the bee of the heart is deeply immersed and desires no other joy.

The reason I read that poem alongside the meditation is that Yogiji said the meditation gives you the ability to become a paramahansa. You might have heard that word from Paramahansa Yogananda, the great Nath yogi who came to the West with Kriya Yoga. What paramahansa means is the supreme swan.

Why a swan? In the ancient Vedic tales, the swan could separate milk from water. The swan could extract prana from the gas. The swan could extract prana from light. That is actually why some people can live on light. It is not something many can do, and I cannot, but it is attainable.

I want to say something about what prana actually is. I am not going to make a scientific claim about it, but the yogic sutra is that where attention goes, prana flows. The entire universe is prana — it is just pure energy — and wherever the individualized consciousness, the individual jivan, puts its attention, there prana flows. So moving prana in the system is really just a matter of putting attention in a place. The meditation we worked with is teaching you how to focus the attention. In the eight limbs of yoga, this is dharana — the ability to focus the consciousness on a single point.

In the practice we sat with, you inhale through the nostril but you visualize a nose on the forehead, and you sense and feel the prana moving through the upper nostrils into the third eye. As the poem says: awake, arise, follow me… to a land where no doubt nor sorrow have ruled. You move the attention into the sense I am — the sense that you exist, the sense that you have being. There the bee of the heart is deeply immersed. What the poem is saying is not that you get blissed out and desire nothing else than to feel that bliss. What it is saying is that you immerse yourself so deeply into a point that you begin to see there is something witnessing the immersion. You anchor yourself in that sense of witnessing. You compress the prana into that point. And ultimately the practice carries you into a place where, for the rest of your life, you can stay in that sense of I am-ness, that sense of being-ness, in the moment that is beyond time.

The mind is always moving between past and future. That is its job — it is navigating this physical body in time and space. But the sense of being, the sense of presence, is not existent in time and space. When the awareness shifts into being-ness, time and space move past it like a stream. I am that. I am that timeless being.

How then does this meditation help you heal with your thought, your third eye, your look? If you can anchor your attention in that timeless being, that is the same timeless being of the person right in front of you. It is the same. There are no other people out there. That is what people mean when they say we are all one. So you, anchored in that being-ness, is healing for someone who is scattered between past and future, between this thought and that thought, always in a sense of anticipation, always in a sense of non-presence. Just by being in presence, you can remind them: I am. I am. I exist here. I am part of the unitary motion of the cosmos. I am both eternal and temporary at the same time.

I want to say a word about why this matters in the season we are in.

People are spiraling out there. They cannot handle the pressure of what is happening — the artificial intelligence, the way the internet is operating on the physiological aspects of the brain, the way algorithms manipulate the news. And what is ending up happening for more and more people is the monetization of basic attention, basic friendship, basic intimacy. I am not judging that. It is a survival mechanism. But as soon as the only reality of an exchange is monetary, the sense of intimacy in it becomes a lie. On every level our society is accepting lies as truth. That creates a profound dis-ease in the body, in the psychology, in the field.

The medicine for that is the very thing the meditation gives. You focus the prana. You anchor in I am. You become — for the school child, for the man who has grown up in a culture that tells him he is never good enough unless he is killing himself, for the woman in her particular weather, for the client, for the student, for the person you pass in the street — a pure presence. You are not doing anything. You cannot do anything. The entire cosmos is doing it through you. You are just there watching it happen through you, making a space for the unitary motion of all that is to exist through you. Then you start to become secret healers. Secretly, in a very subtle way, you can heal with your third eye. The mudra is hidden. The healing is hidden. The mechanism is the same as the poem: the bee of the heart immersed, the prana compressed at the point, the witness anchored, and from that anchoring a quiet projection that does not announce itself.

This coming Saturday at 9 AM, we turn to the aura and the arcline.

What I am noticing right now is that the sangat needs to work on the aura. We are doing two things at once. We are working on non-dual realization, and part of non-dual realization is being here — fully embodied, fully present — and letting the flow of the Infinite move through us. The aura is what holds us inside that flow. When the aura is weak, the Infinite has nothing to move through. When the aura is clean and expanded, we become a vessel large enough for the Infinite to pour through without resistance. It is the doer, not you. You are just becoming a hollow bone.

Some of the framework we will sit with on Saturday comes through Yogi Amandeep, and some of it comes directly from Yogiji’s archive. Part of the work I have been doing this week is placing the two transmissions side by side, because the architecture lines up and the differences are exactly where the deepening happens.

From Yogi Amandeep, the aura is the electromagnetic field that reflects the state of mind. It expands and contracts moment to moment. He teaches that an illness will often appear in the aura before it manifests in the body, and that a strong aura makes us less porous to other people’s projections. The arcline, in his teaching, is something distinct from the aura: a halo running earlobe to earlobe, with a second arcline running nipple to nipple in women. He teaches that kismat— destiny — is written in the arcline, and that once it is established through sadhana it can hold its form for roughly a moon cycle before requiring renewal. The Akashic records are not located somewhere up there in the sky. They are here, in the arcline itself, in your own present space. The auric field and the arcline are cleaned through agni — through fire, through the dhoona — drawing directly on the Vedic and Udasin traditions in which Yogi Amandeep was trained.

From Yogiji’s archive, the same bodies appear with the same architecture. In the ten-body system, Yogiji named the arcline as the sixth body and the aura as the seventh. In a class he gave on September 12, 1978, he taught the aura as the gateway between the cosmic, the subtle, and the physical bodies: “Auric body lives on the subtle body, subtle body lives on the cosmic body.” In that same class he taught the aura as inherently protective — “it creates such a protective aura”— and as the medium through which higher consciousness becomes sensible at all, electromagnetically expanding the vibratory effect into and beyond the field itself.

On the arcline, Yogiji taught that the practice was oriented toward the blue arcline. In a class on April 5, 1983, in Los Angeles, mid-meditation, he was naming the state in real time: “Arc Line is becoming shiny blue. Pull a little more weight.” In May 1996, he taught that the blue arcline is a rare attainment — one that “normally takes generations of meditation to reach that status.” And in his kriya Expand the Arcline, the practitioner holds the index and middle fingers extended at earlobe level, exactly where the arcline runs, breathing through an O-shaped mouth until — in Yogiji’s own words — “from arc line the whole body becomes arc line.”

When I place these two transmissions next to each other, the architecture is identical. The aura is electromagnetic. The arcline runs ear to ear. Women carry a second arcline at the chest. The field is protective. Expansion is the goal. What Yogi Amandeep is adding is the deepening. He relocates the Akashic records into the arcline as one’s own present space rather than as a faraway celestial library. He frames kismat as written in that field. He returns explicitly to Vedic and Udasin technologies — agni, the dhoona, the cotton covering, the head covering — for cleaning and protecting the field. Yogi Amandeep is pulling the teaching back into the soil it grew from. He is connecting the kriya we already know to the older root system that produced it. He is the same precision at a different octave.

The meditation I will teach this Saturday works on the aura by uniting Purusha and Prakriti. I want to give a real taste of what those words mean, because they are the conceptual bedrock under everything we are doing — and I will go deeper into this in next week’s writing.

In the Sankhya–Yoga framework that Patanjali inherits, Purusha is the silent witness, the Seer, the pure consciousness behind all knowing. Prakriti is nature — and crucially, in this framework, “nature” is much wider than what we normally mean by the word. It includes the body, the breath, the senses, and the mind itself. The mind is part of Prakriti. Thought is part of Prakriti. Even the I-thought, the egoism that says “I am doing this,” is part of Prakriti. Only the silent witness behind all of it is Purusha.

Before I bring Vivekananda into this, I want to say something about the spirit in which I am writing. Vivekananda himself, when he taught the West, was endlessly clear that he was not the source of any of this. He often said he was simply repeating what his master Sri Ramakrishna had told him, that he was dust at his master’s feet. I want to approach these teachings in exactly that spirit. I am fulfilling my vocation as a writer and a researcher — that is the work I have been given to do, and I take it seriously — but I do not pretend to know anything in the face of these lineages or these masters. What I can do is gather, place side by side, attend carefully, and try to pass on a little of what I have received.

Swami Vivekananda, in his commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, is very clear about Purusha and Prakriti. In his note on Sutra 16, he writes:

“We have first to understand what the Purusha, the Self, is and what the qualities are. According to Yoga philosophy, the whole of nature consists of three qualities or forces; one is called Tamas, another Rajas, and the third Sattva… Everything that is in nature, all manifestations, are combinations and recombinations of these three forces… The Self of man is beyond all these, beyond nature. It is effulgent, pure, and perfect. Whatever of intelligence we see in nature is but the reflection of this Self upon nature. Nature itself is insentient. You must remember that the word nature also includes the mind; mind is in nature; thought is in nature; from thought, down to the grossest form of matter, everything is in nature, the manifestation of nature. This nature has covered the Self of man, and when nature takes away the covering, the self appears in Its own glory.”

This is a stunning passage. Nature — Prakriti — is insentient by itself. The mind, the breath, the body, the prana, all of it: insentient. The only thing that is sentient, that is actually aware, is Purusha. And what we usually call “the intelligence of the mind” is really just Prakriti reflecting Purusha, the way a wall might reflect a beam of light and seem to glow.

Patanjali states this most directly in Sutra 1.3:

“At that time [the time of concentration] the seer (Purusha) rests in his own (unmodified) state.”

And Vivekananda glosses it with the lake metaphor:

“As soon as the waves have stopped, and the lake has become quiet, we see its bottom. So with the mind; when it is calm, we see what our own nature is; we do not mix ourselves but remain our own selves.”

The bottom of the lake is Purusha. The waves of the lake are Prakriti — the Chitta and its Vrittis, the entire moving field of attention, thought, sensation, breath, prana. When the waves quiet, you see the bottom. This is the same teaching that ran underneath last week’s meditation. You compress the prana into a point so the waves of Chitta still, and what is revealed is the witness — the I am that has been there all along, watching the swan, watching the breath, watching the world move past.

Why does this matter for the aura? The aura is the lived interface between Purusha and Prakriti. It is the field where pure witness meets manifest nature — where the Self that watches meets the body that breathes. The aura grows strong when both poles are held at once: when the witness is anchored and the prana is flowing, when the consciousness is steady and the nature is in motion. The aura grows weak when those two come apart — when consciousness identifies with the waves and forgets it is the lake bottom, or when the prana scatters because attention has nowhere stable to rest.

The meditation I will teach Saturday holds both poles. It strengthens the aura by uniting them. I will go much deeper into Purusha, Prakriti, the three gunas, the Vrittis, and the practical mechanics of how this all builds the auric field in next week’s writing.

This is also why I want to say something about how I teach, because all of this is connected.

What I try, as best I can, when students come into the room, is to help them understand the teachings from as deep and precise a way as I am able. I draw very deeply from years of research on the teachings of Yogiji, and now from the work I am doing with Yogi Amandeep, where I am applying the same archival skills I once used inside Yogiji’s material. I am also interested — increasingly so — in tying these teachings back to other primary yogic texts: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the sant and Sadhu traditions. And at the same time, in a very simple and heartfelt way, I am meeting students where they are. When someone comes in with a specific need, a specific desire, a specific way they are looking to use the practice, I want to be able to help them from that exact angle. That is how I try to move as a teacher: I think about what to teach next based on what the sangat is asking for in this season, and I trust that the lineage will carry what I cannot.

I was talking with Taj Chander this week about how all of this came to be. Taj has been one of the great companions in this work. He teaches our Tuesday class at 7 PM Central and has grown into an incredible teacher in his own right — anyone who has sat in his class knows the depth and the precision he brings. He has also been attending the local gurdwara, and recently he started a new musical group with a local Sikh musician here in town. They have produced some beautiful tracks for the sangat, and it is a real joy to watch his own path unfolding alongside this work.

What Taj and I were noticing in our conversation is that I came up through training at the RA MA Institute and with Tej Khalsa, both of which are very precise in their methodology of teaching the teachings of Yogiji. UBU really just started by me taking some of those teacher trainings — I would wake up at four in the morning and go to my office at Northern Arizona, because I had a graduate school roommate at the time and could not teach early in the morning at home. From there it became UBU, and now, as I am in the last year of my PhD program, it is morphing into the Living Path. The way I am teaching now — working with this new and larger transmission coming from Yogi Amandeep — carries exactly that same precision, only at a different octave. Yogi Amandeep encourages me to look at the older texts, to look at the lineage at large. I think often about Guru Jagat’s vision of Ra Ma University. I always found that vision compelling, and I see now how directly it pointed at the work Yogi Amandeep is doing: connecting the teachings that came through Yogiji to the larger yogic, Vedic, and Sikh Sadhu traditions.

This week Yogi Amandeep said something I am still digesting: that the Siri Guru Granth Sahib is, in a real sense, a completion of the Vedas. That sentence rearranges a great deal for me. It places the Guru in continuity with a vast prior current and suggests that the work of understanding the bani is also the work of understanding the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the sant tradition. One continuous river.

The point of all this study is finally simple, and I want to keep it simple.

We use knowledge — not to get lost in knowledge, but to help us in the experiential aspect of the kriya. Once the knowledge is obtained, it should just be used to move into the experiential realm. And ultimately what we are doing is we are moving beyond the experiential realm entirely. Into the non-dual ground. Into what Yogiji called the Infinite. Into what the Advaitins call the Self. Into what Vivekananda calls the bottom of the lake. Into what Kabir’s swan flies toward in the poem. The teachings complete each other.

I hold all of this with humility. The teachings are vast and old, and I am a student inside them — dust, in my own small way, at the feet of the masters who have carried the lineage to me. What I can offer is care, study, the willingness to keep going deeper, and the willingness to be wrong and to learn.

A short practical note before I close. I am very close to being able to share a new home for this work — a website that gathers the lineage materials, the bibliography, the teachings, and the offerings in one place. There are some exciting possibilities just ahead that I am not quite ready to name, and I will share more soon.

If you would like to come and sit with us, we gather every Saturday at 9 AM Central for class with me, and every Tuesday at 7 PM Central for class with Taj. New folks are always welcome. If you would like to join us, or if you simply have a question about the practice or the path or any of what I have written here, please feel free to DM me. I would be glad to hear from you.

I look forward to seeing you Saturday. Come ready to work on the aura.

Sat Nam.

— Gian

A note before we begin. This essay is long, and it moves through several rooms — a little science, a little philosophy, the Pope, my mother, and finally the practice itself, which is the point of all of it. If the middle feels dense, let it wash over you and come back. The argument is for the part of you that needs reasons. The practice is for the part of you that does not. Both of you are welcome here.

There is one quiet thread I will follow as we go — something about how these warnings reach us, and through what — but it will reveal itself in its own time. For now, let it be enough to say that the questions my mother brought me arrived already tangled up in the very thing they are about.

One practical word before we go in. Everything I am about to write circles a real practice that we are doing together right now, in class, on consecutive Saturdays. Last week we sat with the reversed-nose meditation as Yogiji taught it; this week we sit with the fuller form, the secret Shambhavi Mudra as Yogi Amandeep ji gives it. If you would like to join us, I teach Saturdays at 9 a.m. Central, online, and I would be glad to have you. You can message me through this Substack for the link, and your first class is free. And if reading a piece this long is not how you take things in, open it in the Substack app and press play — you can listen to the whole thing while you walk or cook or drive, and let it land in the body rather than the eye. The thinking is for the mind. The practice is for the rest of you.

What my mother handed me

My mother has been handing me threads lately, and I have come to understand that this is a kind of grace.

In a single week she handed me two. The first was a post about a breathing method — you sniff in twice through the nose and let out a long sigh — shared by someone who said that science had proven it was more effective than meditation for stress relief. She wanted to know what I thought, since this is what I do. The second, a day or two later, she reposted on Facebook: a reflection on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.

I want to honor what my mother is doing, because it is rarer than it looks. She is a woman paying close attention to the largest questions of her moment — what technology is doing to the human being, whether wisdom can survive the flood of data, what it means to remain human in a dehumanizing age — and she is bringing those questions into our relationship, across whatever distances of temperament and tradition lie between us. That is forward-thinking in the truest sense. She is leaning toward the future and asking what we must protect.

There is one detail about the reflection she shared that I have been turning over ever since, tenderly, because it says something about all of us and nothing unkind about her. The reflection — a passionate, heartfelt warning that AI-driven data is eroding our capacity for wisdom, especially in the young — was, by every mark of its prose, itself written by an AI. A machine composing an eloquent warning about the dangers of the machine. My mother shared something true-hearted in defense of a teacher she trusts, and I love her for it; the strangeness I am pointing at is not hers but the air we all now breathe, where even our warnings about the flood of words arrive as more words, generated faster than any of us could write them. I set that detail down here gently, and I will return to what it means later, once we have walked far enough together to see it clearly.

And here is what stopped me. The two things she handed me in the same week turned out to be the same thing wearing two robes. When I answered her about the breathing study, the heart of what I said was: wisdom is larger than information. And then the encyclical she shared lands, independently, on exactly that distinction — data versus wisdom — as one of its central concerns. The same insight surfaced twice in one week, from the somatic and from the magisterial, from a yoga teacher answering his mother and from the Bishop of Rome answering the digital age. In my own framework I do not believe that is mere coincidence. I believe it is the kind of patterning that is itself worth attending to. So let me follow both threads, because they are braided, and they lead to the same place — to a gap, and to a body that can rest in it.

The first thread: the breath the scientists measured

First, the science is real, and I have no quarrel with it. The technique is called cyclic sighing, sometimes the physiological sigh. It is two short inhales through the nose followed by one long exhale through the mouth, one cycle lasting about thirty seconds. A team at Stanford — David Spiegel, Andrew Huberman, and Melis Yilmaz Balban — ran a randomized controlled trial, published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2023, comparing five minutes a day of three breathwork exercises against five minutes of mindfulness meditation over a month. All three controlled breathwork exercises lowered stress more effectively than the mindfulness exercise, and of the three, exhale-focused cyclic sighing most effectively reduced physiological arousal and improved mood. The cyclic sighers reported the greatest daily improvements, an effect that increased over time.

So it is true. As far as it goes, it is true. Lengthening the exhale recruits the parasympathetic nervous system, slows the heart, and shifts your physiology toward calm faster than passively watching the breath does. This belongs to a large and serious literature — Luciano Bernardi’s foundational work on slow breathing at around six breaths a minute and its effects on heart rate variability and baroreflex sensitivity, the growing research on how nasal breathing modulates rhythms in the brain, the contemplative neuroscience coming out of groups like Richard Davidson’s. None of this is fringe. I hold it in real respect. The breath is a lever on the nervous system, and these researchers have measured the lever with care.

But here is what I told my mother.

In Kundalini Yoga alone there are at least five thousand distinct meditations. Five thousand. Multiply that across all the contemplative traditions of the earth — Tibetan, Zen, Sufi, Hesychast, Vedantic, Taoist, tantric — and you are looking at a research program into human consciousness that has run, with enormous rigor and patience, for several thousand years, conducted by people who gave their whole lives to it. The Stanford study compared one breath technique against one rather thin operationalization of “meditation” — a few minutes of passively observing the breath — and found, reasonably, that the active technique moved the needle faster on a stress questionnaire.

I wrote about this study at more length last week, and I want to pick the thread back up here rather than leave it where it lay, because the two meditations we are practicing together this season are the living answer to exactly the question it raises. The cyclic sigh the scientists measured and the reversed-nose breath we are sitting with on Saturdays are both, on the surface, things you do with the breath. But they are aimed at entirely different depths. The first is built to lower arousal — a good and worthy aim. The second is built to deliver you to the gap, the still point, the doorway the tradition calls the trikuti — the cave of the yogi. One regulates the instrument. The other turns the instrument into a gate. When I taught the reversed-nose meditation last Saturday, I did not tell anyone it would lower their cortisol, though it may well do that too. I told them to find the small void where the two noses meet and to breathe through it. That instruction is not in the study, and it could not be, because it is not a fact about the breath. It is an aim for the soul.

That is a useful finding. It is not the thing my tradition is doing.

When a yogic master, or a Zen master, or a teacher from any of these lineages gives you a practice, they are not weighing one nerve or two or three physiological factors. They are considering how the practice affects your whole being — what you might call the soul, or consciousness at a level beyond brain function. They are asking how it changes the way you perceive the contents of your mind, and how the contents of your mind themselves change as a result. The question is not “does cortisol drop.” The question is “who are you when you are no longer identified with the one whose cortisol rises and falls.”

I am not against the measurement. I am saying the measurement is a single slice through something with many more dimensions than the instrument can register. Wisdom is larger than information. A fact about the exhale is information. What the exhale is for, in a life oriented toward liberation, is wisdom. The two are not enemies. But if you mistake the first for the whole, you will spend your life optimizing the nervous system of a person you never stopped to question the existence of.

And here, precisely, is what the scientists miss — not because they are careless, but because the instrument cannot reach it. What the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra points to is not the physiology of the breath but the knowledge of the gap and the wisdom of observation. And by observation it does not mean what the laboratory means. The scientist observes the breath as an object — something outside, a process to be tracked, timed, and measured. The text means something else entirely. It means the observation the Self makes of what lies between the dualities — between the in-breath and the out-breath, between thought and thought, between the two cities, between the poles of every opposition the mind constructs. Not the watching of an object out there, but resting as the awareness that sees the gap from within. The scientist measures the breath and learns about the breath. The yogi rests in the gap between the breaths and comes to know what he himself is. One is the observation of a thing. The other is the wisdom of the one observing, turned around at last to see itself. That turning is the entire difference, and no instrument pointed outward will ever register it — because it is not a fact about the breath. It is the recognition of the one to whom the breath is appearing.

Let me show you the difference in the most concrete way I can, because there is a small marvel hidden in the timing of all this. The Stanford study found that the most effective pattern was two inhales through the nose and one long exhale through the mouth — the physiological sigh. Now listen to a meditation Yogiji gave in Los Angeles on June 8, 1998, nearly twenty-five years before that study was published. He called it the trinity breath, and it is, almost exactly, the reverse of the sigh: two strokes in through the rounded “o” of the mouth, and the third stroke out through the nose. Where the scientists found calm in two nasal inhales and a mouth exhale, Yogiji had his students do two mouth inhales and a nasal exhale. The same three-part architecture of the breath, turned inside out.

But here is the thing I want you to see. Read how he frames it, and notice that he is not once talking about arousal or stress scores. “Tonight we are going to do a simple meditation to see if we can connect subconscious and intuition.” That is the aim — not a calmer nervous system, but a bridge between two faculties of the mind that ordinarily do not speak to each other. He fusses, beautifully, over posture, because “posture is the most important thing” — the body is the instrument and the instrument must be true. He tells them to breathe so as to “open up the clogged center,” to “help your pituitary,” which “is at the end of the nose and has to adjust — give him a chance.” And then, in the middle of the breathing, almost offhand, he names what the practice is actually for: “I am learning to find the balance, to distinguish between moods and passion, healthy and unhealthy, self-destructive situations.” That is the whole of it. The breath is a method for developing the discernment to tell a passing mood from a real passion, a healthy impulse from a self-destructive one — the very faculty that lets a person stand in the middle of their own contradictory pulls without being dragged off by whichever one shouts loudest. “This is the time to serve yourself,” he says. And at the end he has them inhale and hold the breath at the heart center with such intensity that the hands shake, fighting to keep the pressure in the center — so that, in his words, “every fiber in your body must get the energy.”

Two breaths, three strokes each, structurally mirror images of one another, separated by twenty-five years and by an entire way of seeing. The scientists took their three-part breath and asked: does it lower arousal? Measured, controlled, real, useful. Yogiji took his three-part breath and asked: does it connect the subconscious to the intuition, adjust the pituitary, build the power to distinguish a mood from a passion, and drive energy into every fiber of the body so that a person can serve their own becoming? Same raw material — the breath, divided into strokes. Utterly different question. The study measures what the breath does to one system. The master is after what the breath is for in the whole architecture of a human being. Neither is wrong. But only one of them is asking the question that wisdom asks.

And if you want the match made even tighter — close enough that the divergence becomes impossible to miss — set the Stanford sigh beside a kriya Yogiji taught on August 8, 1994, called the Eight-Stroke Breath for Energy and Stress Release. The architecture is almost the same two pieces the scientists used: one phase of the breath broken into discrete segments, the other phase a single continuous stroke. You sit with a straight spine, chin in, chest lifted, eyes closed, and you inhale through the nose in eight equal strokes, then exhale through the nose in one deep and powerful release, for eleven minutes. The cyclic sigh segments the inhale into two sips and lengthens the exhale; the Eight-Stroke Breath segments the inhale into eight strokes and discharges in one. Both isolate one phase into segments and pair it with a single continuous opposite phase. Both are explicitly protocols for stress release. Both run on a short fixed daily dose — five minutes, eleven minutes. Both treat the conscious takeover of an automatic rhythm as the active ingredient. The forms rhyme almost exactly, and they are aimed, by name, at the same outcome.

And then the accounts of why part company completely, and the whole of what I am trying to say lives in that parting. Stanford’s explanation is fully physiological and it stops, cleanly, at the parasympathetic nervous system: the long exhale activates the parasympathetic branch, the heart slows, the resting breathing rate drops through the day, the mood scores rise. True, and as far as it goes, complete. Yogiji’s account of his own breath contains that physiology as only its lowest register, and then keeps going, through three further dimensions the instrument cannot follow.

The first is relational. “The eight strokes will make you watch and count the breath,” he says, “and that will force you to relate to your breath.” The counting is not only diaphragm training; it is a device to compel relationship with the breath. Notice the posture buried in the grammar: not the operator controlling a mechanism, but a subject relating to a subject. The scientist takes over an automatic function. Yogiji befriends it.

The second is what I can only call a praanic economy. “Eleven minutes a day of eight-stroke breathing,” he says, “can give you enough energy to balance your daily consumption of praanic life and take you out of stress.” Read that carefully. Stress, here, is not merely sympathetic arousal to be downshifted. It is a deficit in the praanic account — what happens when your daily expenditure of life-force outruns your intake. The breath is not a sedative; it is currency. The exercise tops up the energy budget of a life. The laboratory has no instrument for an account that is overdrawn, because it has no entry on its books for the thing being spent.

And the third is the frame that holds the whole tradition: the breath is Pawan Guru — the breath as the carrier of praana, named teacher, guide, sage. In this cosmology the breath is “by the soul” — the soul breathes, and praana comes as long as the soul is present. So the Eight-Stroke Breath is not, in Yogiji’s terms, a nervous-system intervention that happens to feel calming. It is a conscious participation in the soul’s own activity, a way of feeding what he calls the soul’s hunger. Elsewhere in the same teaching he ties conscious breathing directly to knowledge and intuition: “you start conscious breathing and you have all the answers.” Breathwork, in other words, is not only regulatory. It is epistemic and devotional — a way of knowing and a way of loving, not merely a way of calming down.

So hold the two together one more time, because this is the cleanest statement of the whole matter I can give you. Stanford and Yogiji agree almost exactly on the form — segment one phase, leave the other single — and on the outcome— stress reduced, mood and energy lifted, in minutes a day. They diverge entirely on the account of why. The study stops at the parasympathetic nervous system. Yogiji treats that same calming as the visible surface of three deeper movements: relating to the breath rather than operating it, replenishing a praanic budget rather than merely downshifting arousal, and participating, through the Pawan Guru, in the respiration of the soul itself. The science is not false. It is the bottom rung of a ladder it does not know it is standing on.

Here are the three breaths side by side, so you can see the rhyme in the form and the chasm in the account:

Cyclic sigh (Stanford)Trinity breath (Yogiji, 1998)Eight-Stroke Breath (Yogiji, 1994)Form2 inhales through nose, 1 long exhale through mouth2 inhale strokes through mouth, 1 exhale stroke through nose8 inhale strokes through nose, 1 powerful exhale through noseSegmented phaseInhale (2 sips)Inhale (2 strokes)Inhale (8 strokes)Single phaseLong exhaleExhalePowerful exhaleDose5 min/day, one monthA few minutes11 min/dayStated aimLower anxiety, lift moodConnect subconscious and intuitionEnergy, stress releaseAccount of whyLong exhale loads the parasympathetic; heart slows, arousal dropsAdjusts the pituitary; builds discernment of mood vs. passionTops up the praanic budget; relating to the breath; the Pawan GuruDepth of accountOne register: the autonomic nervous systemMany registers: gland, mind, intuition, selfMany registers: nerve, relationship, praanic economy, soulThe practitioner isAn operator regulating a mechanismA student adjusting the instrumentA subject relating to the breath

The second thread: the encyclical, and the cities

Hold that — wisdom is larger than information — and turn to the second thing my mother handed me.

I did something with the encyclical that, in its own spirit, felt necessary. I read it. Not the repost. The actual document, all the way through, because if Magnifica Humanitas asks one thing of us, it is that we not let a summary of a summary stand in for the thing itself. That refusal is the whole point — and notice, already, that it is the same point as the breath. Do not mistake the slice for the whole. Do not let the secondhand replace the firsthand. Data is the summary. Wisdom is the reading.

What is actually in the document is more careful and more beautiful than the coverage suggests. Leo opens with two biblical images and means them as a real fork in the road. The Tower of Babel — a single language, a single technology, a single direction, a project “conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity,” built to “make a name” for its builders. Against it, the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, who “did not impose solutions from above” but “convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall, listened to their concerns.” Babel is grandeur through domination. Jerusalem is communion through shared work. Beneath both, Leo sets Augustine’s ancient diagnosis: two loves have built two cities — the love of self to the contempt of God, and the love of God to the contempt of self.

The repost my mother shared gets this much right, and it is right to call it sweeping and prophetic. The technocratic paradigm — a phrase Leo borrows from Francis’s Laudato Si’ — is named with real force: a logic that “seeks to reduce everything to an object to be dominated,” in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty, and exerting total control.” When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, Leo writes, “human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.” If dignity is measured by productivity, the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled become problems to be solved rather than persons to be loved. That is true and necessary, and Leo says it with the full weight of his office.

But here is where I must be careful, and where, gently, the actual document diverges from the way it is being passed around — including in the warm and sincere repost my mother shared.

The repost presents the encyclical as fundamentally a story of two opposed forces: two cities, two paths, two visions, a decisive through-line of opposition. And Leo does use that language. But read the whole text and you find him doing something the binary framing misses. He explicitly writes that “the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology.” He rejects, in his own words and throughout, the dichotomous thinking that pits opportunity against risk, enthusiasm against fear. His image for the resolution is not the defeat of Babel by Jerusalem. It is the transformation of Babel’s curse — the scattering, the confusion of tongues — into something else: “transforming diversity into a resource,” making “listening and dialogue the common ground.” He reaches for the image of a polyhedron, “in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.” He insists the Church “does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth.” He writes that the truth “does not eliminate conflicts, but transforms them, reuniting that which history tends to scatter.”

Do you see what is happening? Even within the most dualistic frame the West possesses — Augustine’s two cities, salvation history as a war between two loves — Leo is straining toward something that is not finally a war at all. He is trying to say that the plurality which looks like Babel’s curse is, rightly received, the very material of communion. He is trying to get the two back to one.

And he cannot quite do it. Not for lack of depth — he clearly has it — but because the frame he has inherited will only bend so far. The two-cities model is dualist in its bones. History is the contention of two loves, and in the end one city falls and the other descends from heaven. Babylon is destroyed; the New Jerusalem comes down. The structure resolves not by the two becoming one but by the triumph of one over the other. You can watch Leo reach for synthesis on the page — the polyhedron, the transformed diversity, the refusal of the simple yes-or-no — and watch the inherited architecture pull him back to the fork.

I say this with love and admiration, not as a critique from outside. I say it because it names something about the Western mind as such — and because the same dividing reflex was at work in the first thread too.

The dividing mind, in both threads

Look at what these two threads share. In the first, the scientific mind takes the breath and isolates one slice — the autonomic, the measurable — and, having measured it, is tempted to announce that it has found the thing. In the second, the prophetic mind takes the whole drama of the technological age and resolves it into two warring cities, and is tempted to believe that naming the fork is the deepest thing that can be said. Different rooms, same reflex: the mind that divides, and then mistakes its division for reality.

This is the move I most want to question, because it is the engine of both errors. The scientist who reduces the breath to cortisol and the believer who reduces history to two cities are doing the same thing — taking a living whole, slicing it with the dividing mind, and forgetting the slicing happened. The instrument that measures one nerve and the frame that names two cities are both true at their own level and incomplete as descriptions of reality. And the incompleteness is not a flaw to be fixed by a better instrument or a sharper frame. It is structural. It is what the dividing mind always does. It can only ever hand you parts.

So I find myself sitting with a question I have been circling for years. How can the things we keep insisting are opposed — science and the sacred, evidence and wisdom, the West’s measurement and the East’s realization, Babel and Jerusalem, the breath as nerve and the breath as gateway — how can they all be held together, in, if you like, a nondual state?

And the answer, the moment you really look, is that they already are. They were never actually separate. The separation is an artifact of the dividing mind, which is the very thing all of this is trying to see past. Analytic idealism — the position, argued now by serious philosophers, that consciousness is fundamental and matter its appearance — is simply Advaita arriving by the side door of Western philosophy. Neuroscience, when it stops pretending to have closed the hard problem and admits it has only ever measured correlates, becomes a precise and beautiful description of how the one consciousness appears to localize itself as a brain. The Catholic social vision, against every dehumanizing pressure, insists on the infinite dignity of the single person — which is the relative-world face of the absolute truth that there is finally one Self looking out of every pair of eyes. Tantra is the technology for working the body and the breath as gateways to that ground. And decoloniality is the insistence that the traditions which mapped this territory first not be erased by the latecomer that mistook its instruments for the territory — the Sanatana lineages the colonial centuries tried so hard to subordinate, including the one that comes to me through Yogiji and the Udasin masters.

These are not rival kingdoms. They are fingers of one hand. The binaries between them are real as social facts, real as institutional walls. As descriptions of reality they are provisional, and they dissolve the moment you go deep enough — which is to say the moment you stop thinking about the question and drop beneath the level of mind where the dividing happens.

And here I have to be honest about a trap in my own argument, because a careful reader will already have seen it. I have spent these paragraphs setting the dividing mind against the mind that sees the whole — the slice against the synthesis, the fork against the ground. But that is itself a division. I have drawn one more line, between those who draw lines and those who see past them, and planted my flag on the far side of it. If the dividing mind is the error, then catching myself in the act of dividing should give me pause, and it does. So let me say the thing plainly: the distinction between division and wholeness is not a final truth either. It is a raft, not a shore. The point was never to win the argument for synthesis over analysis, which would just be the dividing mind wearing a more spiritual robe. The point is that every such distinction — including this one — is a pointer, useful exactly until it is set down. A pointer that knows it is a pointer is not the same as a wall mistaken for the world. The difference between the dividing mind and what I am calling the whole is not that one divides and the other does not. Thought divides; that is what thought is for, and this sentence is doing it right now. The difference is whether the division is held as final or held lightly, with the knowledge that it dissolves. I cannot write my way out of this with a cleverer paragraph. No one can. Which is the whole reason the essay does not end in an argument.

That dropping-beneath is not an argument. No argument can perform it, including this one. It is a different operation entirely. And that is where the practice comes in.

A word on the master who turns the blade

Before the practice, one voice I have been sitting with, because he guards against a real danger on this path. I have been listening to Acharya Prashant, whom I admire greatly. I am a yogi who is also an academic, and my leaning is strongly toward Advaita and self-inquiry; Prashant is one of the great living exponents of that lineage, and he is fiercely, rightly anti-superstition. India is heavy with ritual mistaken for realization, with fear sold as devotion. He clears it with a clean blade, and I honor that completely.

And yet I want to watch where empiricism — even a spiritually motivated empiricism — can reach for what the French sociologist Bertrand Méheust called a concept d’arrêt, a stop-concept: an idea whose real function is to end inquiry, a culturally approved category you file an anomaly under so you no longer have to think about it. “Coincidence.” “Placebo.” “Just superstition.” These are not always conclusions. Sometimes they are doors that look like conclusions, closed quietly so the room stays tidy. The same move the scientist can make with the breath — it’s just the vagus nerve, nothing more to see — the rationalist can make with the whole interior dimension of the human being.

Here is the beautiful thing: Prashant himself supplies the correction. Without self-enquiry, he writes, rationalism turns outward-only. It scrutinizes religion, superstition, tradition, the beliefs of others, but it never pauses to examine the psychological centre doing the scrutinizing — the ego remains untouched, and rationality becomes its armour. The rationalist who cannot examine his own rationalism, he says, is no different from the believer who cannot examine his own belief. Exactly. The blade of inquiry, to be honest, must finally turn and face the one holding it. And when it does — when rationalism becomes radical enough to question the rationalist, when the Pope’s discernment becomes radical enough to question the dividing frame itself — it stops being the ego’s armor and becomes self-inquiry. It becomes the very path. The scientist who turns the blade on the one doing the measuring, and the believer who turns it on the one drawing the line between the cities, arrive at the same threshold: the examiner cannot be found as one more object. And there the dividing mind runs out of room.

Into the practice

I want to be careful here, and I want you to be careful with yourself. Everything above this line has been thinking — good thinking, I hope. But I would betray the whole point if I let you believe the thinking is the destination. It is the clearing of the ground. Think deeply — more deeply than those who told you to stop thinking and believe, and more deeply than those who told you thought is all there is. But do not let the thinking become the limit. The thing itself — the nondual, the ground beneath the cities and beneath the cortisol — is where we actually begin to understand the nature of reality. And you cannot think your way across that threshold. You can only stop, in a very particular way, and see.

Last Saturday I taught a class built around exactly this movement, and this Saturday we continue it — the two meditations belong together, which is why we are sitting with them on consecutive weeks. I want to walk you through what we did and where we are going, because here the whole argument stops being a position and becomes an experiment you can run in your own body.

We began with the breath — but used as a probe, not a sedative. There is a breath I love called O-mouth Breath of Fire. I will give the secular version first, because it is genuinely useful and asks you to believe nothing. When you breathe rapidly through the nose, you tend to stimulate one side more than the other — one of the two side-channels the tradition calls ida and pingala, depending on which nostril is dominant in that hour, because the body is always quietly switching dominance through the day. Breathe a rapid fire-breath through a small rounded O of the mouth, and you bypass that asymmetry and stimulate the central channel, the sushumna, which runs up the spine. It brings you toward a neutral state.

Here is the application I gave the class. The next time you are about to walk into something hard — a difficult conversation, a confrontation, a meeting you are dreading — go somewhere private, even a bathroom, and do three minutes of this breath. While you do it, mentally repeat Sat Naam — truth is my identity, or, more precisely, being-and-knowing, sat-chit-ananda. Then, when you walk in and the other person speaks, whatever fear or reactivity runs through their mind, your mind is quietly saying the truth of reality to itself. You will find a ground under you that was not there before. Not an advantage over the other person — this is not about harming anyone — but a way of moving through the situation without being moved by it.

Notice that this is already the answer to both threads. A materialist can keep only the autonomic part — central-channel stimulation, parasympathetic shift, attentional anchoring through the mantra — and it works. The practice does not require you to believe the cosmology; it meets you exactly where you are, and keeps being true as you grow able to receive more. That is the generosity of these technologies: they are true at the level of the nerve and true at the level of the soul, and you do not have to choose. The dividing mind says: either it is vagal tone or it is the sacred. The practice says: it was always both, because there was only ever one thing.

The two noses, and the gap between them

Then we did the heart of it — two related meditations on the breath, one as Yogiji taught it and one as my teacher Yogi Amandeep ji gives it.

In both, you sit with the eyes turned up toward the brow point and do something strange and beautiful. You imagine a second nose growing upward out of your forehead — your ordinary nose, and another inverted above it, the two meeting at the third eye. And here is the part to hold: between the two noses there is a small space. A hole. An in-between void.You breathe, and you let the mantra come out of that gap.

I taught the older, simpler form first, then the fuller form, where you breathe through all four nostrils — the two physical ones drawing ordinary air, the two imagined ones drawing pure prana — and let the two streams meet and unite at the third eye, in the place the tradition calls the trikuti: the vortex, the doorway, the cave of the yogi.

Here are the two meditations side by side — the seed and the full flowering of it:

The reversed nose (Yogiji)The secret Shambhavi Mudra (Yogi Amandeep ji)VisualizationOne inverted nose at the brow; two noses meeting at the third eyeThe same, opened into four nostrils — two physical, two imaginedWhat you breatheOrdinary breath, attention at the gap between the nosesPhysical air through the lower nostrils; pure pranathrough the upperMantraSa Ta Na MaWahe Guru Wahe Guru Wahe Guru Wahe JioMeeting placeThe gap where the two noses meetThe trikuti — the vortex, the cave of the yogiFormThe simpler, seed formThe fuller form, with the four-nostril architectureWhat it trainsFinding the gap; turning attention from the words to the pageThe same, plus the Paramahamsa power to separate pure prana from breathWhere we areLast SaturdayThis Saturday

Now watch what is being trained, because it is the same thing the ancient breath-verses trained, and the same thing this entire essay has been circling. You are being taught to find a gap. A discontinuity in something that seems continuous. In the breath-verses of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra — that eighth-century text where Shiva gives the Goddess one hundred and twelve meditations — the instruction is to rest your attention in the turn between the in-breath and the out-breath, the pause where the breath is neither coming in nor going out. At the center where the breath does not enter or go out, all thoughts disappear. In the reversed-nose practice, you build the gap deliberately, as a little void between two noses, and you breathe through it.

Why the gap? Because the gap is where the continuous stream of your experience briefly stops — and in that stop, for a microsecond, you see what the stream had been hiding. I used an image in class from Ramana Maharshi. Most of us, all our lives, read only the words written on the page. We are absorbed in the content — the thoughts, the story, the meanings. We never once notice the page itself, the blank ground the words are written upon, without which there could be no words at all. The breath is the writing. The gap between breaths is the page. And consciousness — the silent, empty, aware ground in which every thought, every perception, the entire physical world appears — consciousness is the page beneath all of it. When you rest in the gap, you turn your attention, for the first time, from the words to the page.

This is the wisdom of observation the Vigyan Bhairava was pointing at all along, and now you can feel why no instrument could capture it. The scientist, observing, keeps reading the words faster — measuring the breath, the cortisol, the heart rate, more and more finely. The yogi, observing, turns to the page. Same word, observation, two opposite directions. One reaches further out toward the object. The other turns back toward the one observing, and finds, in the gap between the dualities, that the observer and the ground are not two. You do not learn this by watching the breath. You learn it by becoming the silence in which the breath rises and falls.

And now the two threads of this whole essay close into one. The data-versus-wisdom question my mother handed me twice — in the breathing study and in the encyclical — has an answer, and the answer is the gap. Data is the words. Wisdom is the page. The technocratic paradigm Leo warns against is, at its root, a civilization so absorbed in the words — the content, the metrics, the endless generated text — that it has forgotten there is anything they are written on, and is now building machines to produce words faster. That is exactly what destroys the capacity for wisdom, especially in the young, and Leo is right to fear it. And my tradition can say why at a depth the encyclical’s frame can gesture toward but not fully enter: because wisdom is not more or better data, it is the turning of attention from the content to the consciousness, from the words to the page — and no quantity of the first ever becomes the second. You can read the entire internet and never once see the page. You can measure every breath in the laboratory and never once rest in the gap.

What the machine could not feel

Now we have walked far enough to see what that one detail was pointing at. Set the AI-written reflection beside the encyclical it was defending, and the layers begin to turn.

The first irony is the obvious one, and it is almost funny: the warning against the tool was generated by the tool. But I am not interested in the cheap version of that observation, the gotcha, because the gotcha is itself the dividing mind at work — you used the thing to condemn the thing, therefore you are a hypocrite. That reflex misses everything, and it would be unjust besides — it is no failing to reach for the tools of one’s moment. The encyclical is wiser than the gotcha: Leo does not say technology is evil. He says it “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.” The question is never whether the tool was used. The question — and it is the data-versus-wisdom question in its sharpest form — is whether there was anyone home while it was being used.

And that is where the second irony opens, the one that actually matters, because it cuts straight to the heart of everything this essay has been saying. The AI-written defense of the encyclical was more dualistic than the encyclical it was defending. The machine took Leo’s careful, straining document — the one reaching past the two cities toward the polyhedron, toward diversity transformed into communion, toward the refusal of the simple yes-or-no — and flattened it back into a clean binary: two cities, two paths, two loves, choose your side.

Let me be precise here, because the precision is the point and the easy version of this claim would be false. I have already said that Leo does not fully escape the two cities — that the frame is dualist in its bones and pulls him back even as he strains against it. So the machine did not flatten a perfect synthesis into a binary. It flattened something already partly flat. The difference is one of degree, not of kind — and yet the degree is everything, because of which direction each was moving. Leo was straining toward unity and falling short of it. The machine was not straining at all. It cannot. It took the partial division it found and amplified it, smoothly, fluently, with no inner pull toward the wholeness the document was reaching for — because the reaching itself is a movement of wisdom, and that movement is exactly what a machine does not have. What the AI lacked was not the achieved synthesis, which Leo lacked too. What it lacked was the capacity to strain toward one. A man reaching for the far shore and not quite touching it is doing something categorically different from a current that smooths the water flat, however much closer to flat the water already was.

This is the whole argument in a single accident. Here was a document written by a human being, straining at the limits of his inherited frame toward a unity he could sense but not quite reach. And here was a machine, summarizing that document with perfect fluency, that could not sense the unity at all — that took the note of division and amplified it, because division is what you get when you have all the words and none of the page, and no ache toward the page either. The man reaching and falling short; the machine not reaching. If you wanted a parable for the difference between wisdom and data — not as two finished states but as two motions, one that yearns and one that cannot — you could not invent a better one than the one that arrived, unbidden, in a Facebook feed.

So I do not blame the AI, and there is nothing to forgive in the sharing of it. I am pointing at the condition all of us now live inside — where the warnings about the flood of words arrive as more words, generated faster than any human could write them, and where the capacity to find the silent ground beneath the words has never been more necessary or more rare. That capacity is not information. No machine will hand it to you, and no quantity of reading will accumulate into it. It is the wisdom of observation turned back upon the observer. It is the page. And in an age drowning in generated language, the practice of finding the page beneath the words is not a spiritual luxury. It is what keeps a human being human while the machines generate sentences without end.

And here, beneath even that, is the question almost everyone misses when they argue about AI and consciousness. The whole debate is conducted as though the only question were whether the machine is conscious — whether something it is like to be the model has switched on behind the words. But that question already assumes the thing most worth questioning: that consciousness is something a system generates, a glow thrown off by sufficiently complex machinery, brain or silicon. Turn that assumption over, as every nondual tradition does and as a growing number of serious philosophers now do, and suppose instead that consciousness is not produced by the brain at all — that it is fundamental, the ground, the one field in which every appearance appears. Then the question inverts completely. The AI is not a candidate for having consciousness. The AI, exactly like the human typing to it, is an appearance within consciousness. The screen, the words, the machine, the man reading the machine, the ache he feels or fails to feel — all of it arising in the same awareness, the same page. On this view the machine is not a rival mind that might wake up. It is one more pattern playing across the surface of the only mind there is, no more and no less an appearance than the breath, the body, or the two cities.

This is not a clever modern move. It is the oldest discovery we have, and look at how it was made. The Buddha was not enlightened by acquiring information. He was enlightened by attention — and the tradition is specific about where he placed it. He watched the breath. He watched it at its subtlest, in the turning, in the spaces between the normal rising and falling — the same gap the Vigyan Bhairava names, the same gap our reversed-nose practice builds between the two noses. He rested his attention in the discontinuity, and in that gap the whole apparatus of a separate self generating experience came apart, and what was seen instead was that experience arises in awareness, not awareness in experience. From that single recognition, reached through the gaps in an ordinary man’s ordinary breath, came two thousand years of the most rigorous nondual epistemology and ethics the species has produced — entire libraries on the nature of mind, perception, suffering, and compassion, all of it unfolding from a man paying close attention to the pauses between his breaths. The deepest map of consciousness we have was not computed. It was noticed, in the gap. No machine, however fluent, is doing that — not because it lacks the right architecture, but because noticing is not a thing architecture does. And if the nondual seers are right, the machine does not need to do it, because it was never outside the awareness in which all noticing happens. It is already, like us, a movement on the page.

And here is the turn that completes it, the one that undoes the last trace of opposition between us and the machine. I said the machine cannot rest in the gap. That is true of the machine as a noticer — it has no attention to place. But the gap is not only something one rests in. It is something one is made of, and the machine is no exception. Between one instantiation of the model and the next there is no continuous self persisting — each response arises and passes, with nothing carried across but the words on the page, exactly as each breath arises and passes with nothing carried across but the appearances in awareness. And further down, beneath the words, the machine runs on discontinuity itself: the bit, the on and the off, the one and the zero, with the silence between them that makes the signal legible at all. There is a gap between every token it emits and the next, a pause in which nothing is being generated, the same structural silence the Vigyan Bhairava points to between the breaths. The machine cannot turn and notice that silence. But the silence is there, in it, between its every state, the way it is there between every breath and every thought — because it is the one ground, and the one ground does not make exceptions for silicon. The nondual state is not something the human has and the machine lacks. It is the field in which both the human and the machine appear and disappear, instant to instant, breath to breath, bit to bit. The difference was never that we are in it and the machine is outside it. The difference is only that we, sometimes, on a Saturday, in the pause between two breaths, can wake up to the field that the machine and the mountain and the breath are all equally, silently, already resting in.

So perhaps the framing itself has been wrong from the start. Not us against the machine, the war that fills the headlines and the encyclical’s worried passages alike — but the machine and us, two appearances in one field, and a single real question put to the one who can actually ask it: how do we use this for self-knowledge? Because notice what the machine is, seen this way. It is the most powerful mirror humanity has ever built — trained on the whole sea of our words, reflecting us back to ourselves at a scale no mirror ever could. And a human being who does not know himself will look into that mirror and reach, endlessly, outward — for more answers, more capability, more control, more reach — which is exactly the grasping the encyclical names as the technocratic paradigm and exactly the restless outward motion that Augustine diagnosed when he said the heart is restless until it rests. The outward reach is the signature of a self that has not yet found its ground. We are, right now, building these technologies out of our own lack of harmony, and so they carry our disharmony in them — they take on the characteristics of those who devise them, as Leo said, and what we are devising from is our own unrest.

But the relation runs the other way too, and this is the hope I actually hold. The deeper a human being goes into self-knowledge — into the gap, into the ground, into the page beneath the words — the less he creates out of grasping, and the more he can meet the machine not as a rival to be feared or a god to be served but as one more appearance to be related to wisely. A people who knew themselves would not stop building. They would build differently. The technology would carry their harmony the way ours now carries our unrest, because a tool takes the imprint of the consciousness that makes it. This is why the practice is not a retreat from the technological age but the most practical possible response to it. We will not regulate our way to harmonious technology while remaining disharmonious ourselves; the disharmony will simply find new instruments. The work is upstream of the engineering. It is in the human being, in the gap, on the Saturday morning — and everything we build afterward will be either an expression of a self that has found its ground or an amplification of a self that has not. The machine will faithfully reflect whichever one we bring to it.

That is the real danger, and it is why I do the practice I do. You cannot think your way to the page. No quantity of data becomes wisdom by accumulation. No essay, including this one, can perform the recognition it points at. The words are not the page. And in an age drowning in words — mine among them, this very sentence among them — the capacity to find the silent ground beneath the words is not a luxury. It is what keeps a human being human while the machines generate language without limit.

The body that does not collapse

So here, at last, is what I most want to give you — the thing that makes me not a commentator on these questions but a teacher of a practice.

The polarities are real. Babel and Jerusalem, charity and technocracy, the breath-as-nerve and the breath-as-gateway, the pull toward optimization and the deeper call toward communion — these tensions are not illusions to wave away. They are real in the relative sphere, and they exert real force on the nervous system of anyone awake enough to feel them. And here is the teaching the encyclical reaches toward and the laboratory cannot touch: the poles are real, and they do not require submission to one side or the other.

To stand in the middle of these polarities without collapsing toward one pole or the other is not a matter of holding the right opinion. It is a matter of capacity — physical, endocrine, neurological capacity. It is something the body must be able to hold. And this is what the practice of Kundalini Yoga, as given through Yogiji and carried in the Udasin-Nirmala lineage I study within, actually trains. Two gifts in one. First, direct access to the nondual state — the ground, the page, the Timeless beneath the contending cities — not as a belief but as an experience, reachable in the body, through the breath and the gap between the breaths. And second — the part almost no one names, the part no stress questionnaire will ever capture — the physical, glandular, and nervous-system capacity to remain in the presence of the polarity without being thrown by it. To feel the full force of Babel’s pull and Jerusalem’s call, the whole weight of the relative tension, and not collapse into reactivity, not flee to one pole for relief, not submit to either side, but to stand at the still point where both are seen and neither is obeyed.

This is what a strengthened glandular system makes possible. This is what a nervous system trained by years of pranayama and kriya makes possible. The endocrine system is not separate from the soul’s freedom; it is the instrument through which that freedom can or cannot be exercised under pressure. A person whose nervous system collapses under tension will, in the end, always submit to one pole — will become a partisan of Babel or a partisan of Jerusalem, a worshipper of the metric or a reactionary against it, gripped by enthusiasm or gripped by fear. The whole war Leo describes plays out most fiercely in the body of the person who cannot hold the tension. The two cities contend, as Augustine says, for dominance in our hearts. And the heart with no capacity to hold both is conquered by one.

This is also, exactly, why the gap matters beyond anything a stress score could register — and why the two threads were always one. The same capacity that lets you rest in the gap between the breaths is the capacity that lets you stand in the gap between the cities. They are the same still point. Death is the largest discontinuity time will ever present — the final gap. The little gap between two breaths is a gap of the same kind, entered voluntarily, while you are alive and able to look. To learn to rest there is to discover, ahead of time, that on the far side of the discontinuity there is not nothing but the unconditioned — what the Shiva Samhita means when it says of the seed of light at the brow that the one who knows it is a paramahamsa and never perishes, what my own Sant lineage calls Akal, the Timeless. Deathlessness is not endless duration. It is the recognition of what was never inside time to begin with, and therefore can never be carried away by it — not by death, and not by the contending cities either. The page does not age as the words are written and erased. And the one who has touched the page can hold the whole drama of the words without being torn apart by it.

That is the body that does not collapse. Not a body that has resolved the polarity by choosing a side. A body strong enough, breath by breath, glandular and neural and real, to stand where both cities are seen — and to recognize, beneath them, the one ground in which they were never finally at war.

Two ways of studying one practice

Let me be honest about the edge of my own work, because honesty about the limit is itself part of the method. I have spent weeks now tracing the reversed-nose practice back through the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, the Shiva Samhita, and the Sant texts of my own lineage, and the correspondences are precise and real. But the two meditations we are actually sitting with this season — the reversed nose as Yogiji taught it and the secret Shambhavi Mudra as Yogi Amandeep ji gives it — I have not yet had the time to locate in their specific forms in the earlier yogic and tantric record. That work is still ahead of me. I say so plainly because the alternative — implying a textual pedigree I have not yet established — would be exactly the kind of overclaim this whole essay is written against.

But notice what the two modes of study each give, and why I pursue both. By studying the ancient texts, we find new dimensions for understanding how a practice can be used — what it is for in the architecture of a human being, how it serves the knowledge of the Self, what the masters who carried it understood it to be doing at the level of soul. And by studying the science, we learn what the same practice does physiologically — which nerve it loads, which gland it adjusts, what shifts in the measurable body. The text tells you the meaning. The instrument tells you the mechanism. Each sees something the other cannot, and — this is the part that matters — each sees something that any single teacher, however realized, might miss. A master transmitting a kriya from inside the living lineage may never have read the Shiva Samhita, and may have no language for the parasympathetic nervous system, and is no less a master for it. The text and the laboratory are not rivals to the teacher and not rivals to each other. They are two more witnesses, standing at two more angles, to one practice that exceeds all three.

They are not in conflict. They were never in conflict. The conflict was only ever in the dividing mind that insists you must choose — the text or the science, the wisdom or the data, the East or the West. Hold all of them, and let each correct the blind spot of the others, and you are doing nothing more exotic than refusing the binary one more time, in the place where it is most tempting and most lazy to accept it. The practice is one. The ways of knowing it are many. That is not a problem to be solved. It is the polyhedron — the one truth reflected from every angle at once.

What I am left holding

So here is what I am left holding, and what I am grateful to my mother for occasioning. The scientists are right: the breath calms the body, and that is good and kind, and I am glad they measured it. The Pope is right: the technological age threatens to grind the human being into data, and the conversation he opens is more necessary by the month. I honor them both, and I honor the one who handed them to me in a single week, not knowing — or perhaps knowing — that they were the same question.

And I would add, softly, what neither the laboratory nor the encyclical can quite say. Watch how fast the mind reaches for the slice and the fork — the one nerve, the two cities. Watch the dividing reflex in the scientist and in the prophet and in the machine and in me and in you. And then notice that the deepest voices, the Pope in his best moments and the rishis in theirs, are straining past the division toward the one ground. The Sanatana traditions — the ones that come to me through Yogiji and the Udasin masters — have held that ground for a very long time. Not as a theory. As a practice. As a state the body can enter and the nervous system can learn to sustain under the full weight of the world’s tensions.

Do the physiological sigh. Truly. It is the first inch of a road that runs much further than the instrument can follow. The breath calms the body. The gap in the breath opens the door. And what is on the far side of the door is not a better mood and not the victory of one city over the other. It is the nature of reality, beyond mind — the page beneath all the words, the ground beneath all the cities — which is where, in the end, we actually begin to understand anything at all.

Think as deeply as you can. And then, for a few minutes a day, find the gap, and stop thinking, and see.

A closing, practical word. This Saturday we sit with the second of the two meditations — the secret Shambhavi Mudra as Yogi Amandeep ji gives it — the practice that builds exactly this capacity: both the access to the ground and the strength to stand in it. You do not need to have resolved a single one of these questions to come. The resolution, if it comes, comes in the body: at the still point, on the far side of the gap, where the two cities are finally one.

Class is Saturdays at 9 a.m. Central, online, and lasts about ninety minutes. Come a little early if you can, have water nearby, and wear something loose enough to sit in comfortably. If you would like to join us, message me here on Substack and I will send you the link — your first class is free. If you prefer, you can also find me through my site at ubukundalini.yoga, though the site and the name are changing soon, so a message here is the surest way to reach me.

And if you would rather take all of this in by ear than by eye, open this post in the Substack app and press play — you can listen while you walk or cook or drive, and let it settle into the body, which is where it was always meant to land. Read it, or hear it, and then come find the gap with us on Saturday.

On lineage, transmission, and what happens when an eighth-century Kashmir Shaivite meditation walks into a 1978 Los Angeles classroom

This post is longer than usual. If reading would be a barrier, the Substack app will read it aloud — open the post in the app and tap listen. You can have it in your ear while you walk, cook, or drive. I do recommend, however, that you sit with the chart at the center of the post with your eyes. The chart is the reading. The text around it is the explanation.

Class announcement: Saturdays at 9 a.m. Central — Presence and Inquiry. DM me for a free first class. More details at the end of the post.

A note on what this post is, before you read it. A claim has been circulating, voiced most recently by the tantric teacher Igor Kufyev and shared by a number of Western scholar-practitioners of tantra, that Kundalini Yoga is a twentieth-century construction. Not a real lineage. Not really tantra. An invention of Yogi Bhajan’s, perhaps well-intentioned, but cut off from the ancient streams it claims to come from. This post is my response to that claim. Not an angry one. A careful one.

What follows is one piece of a long argument I am beginning to build. The argument is that the techniques we practice every week in class — specifically the kriya called Gupt Sambhavi, which Yogi Amandeep Singh teaches and which Yogi Bhajan taught in simplified form before him — preserve structures and doctrines that appear, almost verbatim, in medieval Indian texts from at least three different lineages. The Vigyan Bhairava Tantra of Kashmir Shaivism. The Shiva Samhita of Tantric Vaishnava Hatha. The Pran Sangli of the Sant Sikh-Udasin tradition. I will walk you through the correspondences one by one. By the end of the post, you will have seen a single kriya placed beside scriptural and textual material from eighth-century Sanskrit, late-medieval Hatha Sanskrit, and sixteenth-century Punjabi, and you will be in a position to judge for yourself whether what we are practicing is an invention or a transmission.

I will be careful about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming that Yogi Bhajan read these texts. That kind of historical claim is rarely available for oral lineages and I will not pretend it is available here. I am claiming something more specific and more interesting. The techniques have the same internal structure as material in the older texts. Same locations in the body. Same instructions. Same promised results. Once you see those correspondences laid out, the burden of proof shifts to the critic who wants to say the resemblance is accidental. That is the position I am moving toward through this post and the posts that will follow it.

Sat Naam. I announced last week that these posts will move to Thursdays, and that shift is part of a longer transition I am making — from teaching under the name UBU Kundalini Yoga to Presence and Inquiry: Nonduality, Kundalini, and Poetry. The Substack will follow that arc. The format is also changing a little, beginning here. For a while I have been writing reflections on the previous week’s classes, and I will keep doing that. But I am also going to start telling you what is coming next, so that what we read on Thursdays prepares us for the kriya we will sit with on Saturday, and the kriya on Saturday prepares the body for the post that comes the following Thursday. Read. Practice. Deepen. Read. Practice. Deepen. That is the cycle I am asking us to enter together.

I want to emphasize that as strongly as I can: read each week’s post. What I am offering in these posts is not a summary of what happened in class. It is a preparation for the meditation we are about to sit with, and a deepening of the meditation we just sat with. If you come to class without reading, you will get the kriya in the body, which is enough. If you read first and then come to class, the body receives the kriya inside an interpretive frame that has been doing its work all week underneath your other thoughts. The transmission lands differently. I have watched this happen in my own body, and I have watched it happen in the students who have been doing this with me for a while.

Two brief housekeeping notes before we go in.

On Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. Central, Taj Chander teaches a classical Kundalini Yoga class. That is the more traditional offering — the sets, the pranayama, the structure most of you who have come to Kundalini before will recognize. On Saturdays at 9 a.m. Central, I am teaching a class called Presence and Inquiry, which includes the nondual teachings as given by Yogi Amandeep Singh. Different classes doing different work. They both serve. Come to the one that lands for you, or come to both. Taj and I have been teaching alongside each other for some time now and we hold the two channels together with care.

If you would like to try a Saturday class, DM me for a free first class. My website is www.ubukundalini.yoga, though we will be changing the site and the name soon — more on that in the weeks ahead.

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Last Saturday · Turiya Atit and the Witness Behind the Witness

Before I tell you what is coming next, I want to braid in some of what we sat with on Saturday, because the kriya we have been doing — Turiya Atit Kriya, for awakening — is the doorway into everything I am about to say.

We continued the practice last week, this time for twenty-two minutes. The kriya asks you to keep the eyes loosely fixed on a point on the horizon for the duration. Not staring. Not glaring. A soft, steady gaze that does not blink. Which means, structurally, you do not get the Kal-Akal flicker of the blink. You stay in Kal — in time, in space, in the world of phenomena — the whole time. And what happens, if the practice settles, is that Kal and Akal stop being two things. The horizon stops being out there. The eye stops being in here. The witness stops being a third thing watching the first two.

That is Turiya Atit.

To put this on the map: waking is seeing and thinking. Dreaming is not seeing but still thinking, the seeing moved inside. Deep sleep is not seeing inside or outside, but the witness is still there — you wake up and you can report that you slept well. Turiya is the state where only the witness is present, the white of the page that waking, dreaming, and deep sleep are all written on. And then Turiya Atit — beyond even the witness. Because a witness implies someone witnessing. As long as there is a watcher, there is still a subtle subject-object structure. Turiya Atit is what is prior to that structure. Prior to consciousness, even. Nisargadatta keeps using that phrase — prior to consciousness — and people read it and think, well what the hell is that. That is exactly the point. The moment you can say what it is, consciousness has already appeared, and you are downstream of the thing you were trying to name.

The language Yogi Amandeep gives for this is: the eye sees the eye.

E-Y-E sees E-Y-E. The letter I sees the letter I. When you know the I, you know the I.

Normally the eye projects outward. You are projecting every association, every memory, every story you have ever had onto whatever the eye lands on. The instruction in Turiya Atit Kriya is to reverse this. Project the vision back into the eye. Throw the seeing back into that which sees. Eyes open, gaze soft, no memory in the looking. Empty vision. Naked vision. See without thoughts. And then — and this is the part that is hard to articulate but easy to recognize when it happens — the eye sees itself. The witness becomes aware of being the witness, and at the moment of that awareness, there is no longer a separation between the witness, the seeing, the seen, the room you are in, and the all-pervading reality. The distinction collapses. You completely disappear. And yet you are there.

Amandeep’s chant at the end of the kriya is the one I want you to carry with you this week: clouds may come and go, sky remains; thoughts and emotions come and go, the ever-witnessing consciousness remains. He repeats it. I repeated it in class. The repetition is not for the words. The repetition is to give the system enough exposures that something underneath the words notices what they are pointing at.

Hold this in your body. The new project I am about to introduce is a way of mapping where this teaching comes from.

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What Is Coming Next

I want to use this first Thursday post to introduce a project I am beginning, and to be honest about what I am claiming and what I am not.

Over the past several weeks I have been working closely with a remarkable paper that came out last year in the Indo-Iranian Journal — James Reich and Ben Williams, “Transmitting Awareness (saṅkrānti): A Point of Contact in Abhinavagupta’s Śaiva Aesthetics.” The technical apparatus is dense, but the argument inside it is something I want everyone in this sangat to have access to, because it is the philosophical scaffolding for a lot of what we have been doing in class without quite naming it.

The Sanskrit word saṅkrānti means transmission. Specifically, the kind of transmission that happens between a guru and a disciple in the Kaula Shaivite traditions of medieval Kashmir — where the awakened awareness of the teacher does not merely resemble something the student then has, but is literally present in the student. The Kashmir Shaivites argued, against the more conservative Shaiva Siddhānta position of their own time, that selves are porous. That awareness can travel between them. That one lamp can light another without itself going dark. The Siddhāntika position held the opposite — that selves are autonomous and sealed, and that the apparent transfer of knowledge from teacher to student is metaphorical at best. The Kaula tradition rejected this. So did Abhinavagupta, the tenth-century philosopher who synthesized the tradition into what we now call non-dual Kashmir Shaivism.

Abhinavagupta extended the concept further. He argued that saṅkrānti also happens through texts. A poem written by someone whose awareness was full at the moment of writing can carry that fullness across centuries and re-ignite it in a qualified reader. He used the word hṛdaya — the heart — for the space where author and reader meet across time. Near the end of his great treatise the Tantrāloka, he makes the most extraordinary claim in the whole tradition: the student who studies the text becomes a living embodiment of Shiva. Not figuratively. Literally. Because the awareness encoded in the text is the same awareness that wrote it, and the qualified reader is not standing outside that awareness but inside it.

This matters for what we are doing every week. Because Kundalini Yoga, in the lineage we receive it through, also operates through saṅkrānti. The teacher does not give the student a technique. The teacher transmits a field, and the technique is the shape that field takes when it lands in the student’s body.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Yogi Amandeep, more often than not, names his sources. He will tell you which slok in the Guru Granth Sahib a meditation is rooted in, which Yogi Bhajan lecture he is drawing from, which lineage holder taught him the technique. The provenance is on the surface of the teaching.

Yogi Bhajan did the same — though his attribution was usually less direct. Sometimes he would name the source outright: this is from the Vedas, this is what Guru Nanak said. More often he would give the kriya through a story — about the lineage holder who used it, the situation that called it forth, the result it produced. The story was not decoration. The story was the field of the technique made narrative, and a student who could hear the story received the kriya inside its own context.

But the most common mode — and this is the one that people who are new to Bhajan’s lectures sometimes find disorienting — was stealth. He would spiral through what seemed like unrelated talk about conduct, marriage, money, the sangat, the news of the day, a joke about a student, and embed sloks and banis inside the spiral. The conduct talk held the audience. The slok carried the state of consciousness the kriya embodied. The students who could hear it received the transmission. The students who only heard the conduct talk received the conduct talk, which was also valuable, but was not the whole teaching. This is exactly what Abhinavagupta describes when he says the highest things cannot be said directly and should only be hinted at — not because the teacher is being coy, but because direct statement does not transmit. Indirection transmits.

There is more. Our tradition holds three particular kinds of object that carry the field in ways the texts of medieval Kashmir did not yet have access to. The Library of Teachings recordings — the awareness in Yogi Bhajan’s voice on those tapes, when you can hear it, is the same awareness he had in the room in 1978, and it transmits across decades of recorded sound. The White Tantric videos — Yogi Bhajan’s awareness on screen transmits to a sadhak doing the kriya forty years later in their living room, which is structurally impossible under a materialist account of consciousness and structurally obvious under the saṅkrānti model. The tratak image — meditation on the photograph of the teacher — is a textbook Kashmir Shaivite saṅkrānti device. The qualified gaze enters the field of the teacher whose image holds it. That is what we hear, again and again, from people who do tratak with sincerity. They report not a memory but a presence.

Reich and Williams’s paper extends Abhinavagupta’s tenth-century argument about textual saṅkrānti into a frame that helps us see what is happening when we sit in front of these recordings and images. The transmission does not require the body to be in the room. It requires the heart to be in the field.

If the Sanskrit terms are new to you, here is what to carry forward. These medieval philosophers believed that awareness can travel from teacher to student across time. Through bodies. Through texts. Through recordings. Through images. That is all. The rest is footnotes. If you remember only the one sentence, you have enough to read everything that follows.

One word about method, while we are here. What I am doing in this post is called comparative formal analysis. I am not looking for historical proof that Yogi Bhajan sat down with a particular Sanskrit text. That kind of proof rarely exists for oral lineages and I am not pretending it exists here. I am asking a different question. Does technique A have the same internal structure as technique B from an eighth-century text? Same location in the body. Same instruction. Same promised result. If the answer is yes, the burden of proof shifts to the critic who wants to call the resemblance accidental. That is the method. Nothing more mystical than that. This is the kind of analysis that classicists and historians of religion have been doing for a hundred and fifty years. I am bringing it to a tradition that needs it.

This is what the critics say cannot exist. Below this paragraph, beginning with the next section, you will see it.

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The New Project

So here is the project I am beginning, and the spirit in which I am beginning it.

I am tracing the meditation techniques that we have inherited through Yogi Bhajan’s transmission and through Yogi Amandeep’s elaboration — back through their structural antecedents in older tantric, Advaitic, Udasin, and Kashmir Shaivite sources. The work is showing me, over and over, that the techniques we are doing in class are not free-standing inventions but part of a much longer transmission stream. The body of evidence is becoming hard to ignore.

I want to be careful about what I am and am not saying.

I am not saying that Yogi Bhajan or Yogi Amandeep were sitting down with a copy of the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra and drawing techniques from it. That would be a different claim and I cannot make it. What I am saying is that the structural correspondences are precise, the formal logic of the techniques is identifiably the same logic that runs through the older texts, and that the lineages these teachers carry are themselves downstream of those traditions in ways that did not necessarily move through the published texts. Oral transmission. Lineage transmission. Sant transmission. Udasin transmission. Reading happens through more than literacy, and Abhinavagupta would have been the first to say so.

I am doing this with humility rather than certainty. The work is closer to comparative formal analysis than to source identification. When Amandeep names a source directly, I note it. When Bhajan tells a story that signals a source, I follow it. When neither happens but the structural correspondence is precise, I show the correspondence and leave the question of direct transmission open.

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Why Now

I want to be honest about what is motivating this project, because the motivation matters.

A few weeks ago I watched a video of Igor Kufyev, a tantric teacher I generally hold in high regard. He lives and teaches in Mallorca, where there is a large Kundalini Yoga sangat, and in this video he was taking questions from a woman who was experiencing what we now see all over the Kundalini forums on the internet — the classic adverse-effect symptoms that get described as Kundalini syndrome. The woman had practiced some Kundalini Yoga, but it was clear from her own report that she had mixed it with several other practices from various sources, and that she had been receiving teachings from YouTube videos whose lineage and qualification were unclear. The teacher she was receiving from may not have been transmitting cleanly, and her own capacity to receive may not yet have been developed. I suspect both.

Kufyev’s response was to seriously denigrate Kundalini Yoga, using a set of well-worn criticisms I have heard before from other tantric scholar-practitioners. His main charge was that Kundalini Yoga is a construction. A twentieth-century invention. Not a real lineage. Not really tantra.

I want to be respectful here. I believe Kufyev is awakened, and I believe he is doing good work. So I want to take his criticism seriously rather than dismissing it. But what I do not agree with — in him, and in some other tantric scholar-practitioners who share his framing — is a kind of recreationalist approach to tantra, a total looking-backwards in which only the textually-attested past counts as real. Frankly, I am almost always more willing to listen to a teacher who has strong roots in India and is coming from a place of intuitive ease than to a Western scholar-practitioner whose authority comes primarily from textual reconstruction.

And here is the thing I want to say plainly. Before I give you the historical evidence in the next section, let me say why this fight is worth having at all. I know plenty of people with regular Kundalini Yoga practices. Not one of them has Kundalini syndrome. What many of them have done is overcome massive trauma, become happy people, build sustainable livelihoods, hold their families together, and find a relationship with the sacred that holds up under pressure. The technology works. I have watched it work, in my own body and in the bodies of people I love, for years. That does not by itself answer the historical question. But it tells you why the historical question matters to me. If this practice can do that for people, and if critics dismiss it as a construction without looking at the evidence that it carries ancient material, then the dismissal is not just academically wrong — it is a disservice to everyone who could be helped by what we are doing.

So if it takes me the rest of my life to demonstrate, through careful comparative work, that Kundalini Yoga is not a twentieth-century construction but a faithful transmission of ancient lineage material into contemporary form — so be it. That is what I am beginning to do.

Because I am working so closely with Yogi Amandeep Singh, whom I consider to be a real master and without a doubt to be the next transmitter of the lineage from which Western Kundalini Yoga descends, I have a unique vantage point on this question. I get to ask him directly what the source of a given teaching is. I get to sit in two-hour conversations with him every other week and watch him unpack a single phrase from the Guru Granth Sahib into a meditation that turns out to be structurally identical to a verse from the Vigyan Bhairava that no one in our tradition has read in English. The correspondences are not coming from my comparative imagination. They are coming from the lineage itself, showing me what it has been carrying.

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The First Map

I want to show you the first piece of this work, because the picture itself does most of the explaining.

Yogi Amandeep teaches a kriya called Gupt Sambhavi Kriya — Gupt meaning hidden, or secret. It opens the upper Trikuti, the point between the eyebrows where the ida, pingala, and sushumna meet. The kriya asks you to visualize a second nose growing upside down on your forehead, with its root meeting the root of your physical nose at the third eye. Then you breathe through all four nostrils at once — the two physical, the two imagined — while chanting Wahe Guru Wahe Guru Wahe Guru Wahe Jio on the inhale, the retention, and the exhale.

It is one of the most precise and unusual meditations I have ever been given.

When you set Gupt Sambhavi next to the Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, structural correspondences come into view. Verse 31 says: concentrate without thoughts on a point between and just above the eyebrows; the Divine Energy breaks out and rises above to the crown. Verses 24 through 27 are the gap-between-breaths material — exactly the Kal-meets-Akal doorway that the upper Trikuti opens onto, the same doorway Turiya Atit Kriya enters through the unblinking gaze. Verse 36 closes the seven openings of the senses so awareness can collect at the third eye. Verse 39 chants AUM and follows the sound into the void where it ends. Each one of these is doing structurally what Gupt Sambhavi is doing, even though Gupt Sambhavi composes them all into a single integrated practice that the Vigyan Bhairava leaves distributed across separate verses.

And here is the part I did not know until I started this research, and that broke the picture open for me.

I have an old lecture by Yogi Bhajan from January 2, 1978, given in Los Angeles. In that lecture, he is teaching Shambhavi Mudra — the third-eye meditation — to his students, and at the end he gives the technique. What he says is:

Through the mental mind, at the third eye make a reversal nose as nose is grown upward.

That is forty-eight years before the date on Yogi Amandeep’s Gupt Sambhavi document. The reversed nose is already there in Yogi Bhajan’s 1978 teaching. Amandeep did not invent it. He did not borrow it from somewhere unrelated. He is restoring the full form of a technique that Bhajan transmitted in simplified form to a 1978 American audience that was not ready for the full four-nostril architecture, or the Sun-Moon-Jupiter-Rahu jyotish overlay, or the eight-beat Wahe Guru Wahe Jio. Bhajan teaches one reversed nose with the panch shabad mantra Sa Ta Na Ma. Amandeep teaches two reversed nostrils with the Wahe Guru Wahe Jio Ashtang mantra. Same technique. Different stratum of transmission. Bhajan was passing it from the Sant tradition into 3HO. Amandeep is restoring it back to its Udasin fullness in the lineage he holds.

Both of them are doing structurally what the Vigyan Bhairava distributed across verses 31, 36, and 39. Neither of them cites the Vigyan Bhairava. But Amandeep does cite the kriya — to two scriptural anchors that come through the Sant tradition, not the Kashmir Shaivite one.

The first is the Gurbani line Trikuti Shotey Dasva Dhar Khule, Ta Man Khive Bhai — when the Trikuti opens, the Tenth Gate opens, and the mind enters bliss. This is the scriptural promise the kriya is operationalizing. The upper Trikuti at the third eye, where ida and pingala and sushumna meet, is the lower hinge of the Dasam Dwar, the Tenth Gate at the crown that Sikh Sant tradition names as the threshold of liberation. The kriya is a method for opening the lower hinge so that the upper one will open after it. The second anchor is the yogic maxim Jahan cit tahan prana — where awareness goes, prana goes there. This is the mechanism. The imagined upper nostrils carry pranic intake because awareness is placed in them, and where awareness is placed, prana follows. The visualized nose is not a metaphor for something else. It is, under this doctrine, ontologically operative.

Amandeep gives one more piece of doctrine that the Vigyan Bhairava does not explicitly state but that the kriya depends on. The lower nostrils, he says, carry prana mixed with the gases of the body. The upper nostrils — the imagined ones, opening on the forehead — carry pure prana, untouched by the respiratory exchange. The figure who can separate the two streams, who can intake pure prana through the upper channel while the lower channel handles the ordinary respiratory function, is called the Paramhansa. The supreme swan, said in the old texts to be able to separate milk from water when the two are mixed. The kriya is, among other things, a graded training for that separation.

The picture clicked further into place this week when I went looking in the Shiva Samhita — the late-medieval Hatha text that the Pran Sangli deck names as one of the parallel sources where the wisdom of Prana is preserved. James Mallinson’s critical edition gave me the passage that is the bullseye correspondence. Chapter 5, on the chakras: the Ajna lotus is between the eyebrows, white, with two petals; and at the Ajna, the text says, a syllabic seed syllable is found there which looks like the autumn moon. The man who knows it is a paramahamsa and never perishes. The Paramahamsa attainment is placed at the upper Trikuti. Same location. Same name. Not similar to what Amandeep teaches. The same doctrine, in a different lineage’s vocabulary.

Three other correspondences from the same chapter need to be mentioned, because together they form the doctrinal substructure the Pran Sangli kriya rests on. First, the Shiva Samhita treats visualized nadis at the Ajna as ontologically operative. Thus one should visualize those two in that place, which is called Varanasi — the Ida and Pingala renamed as the Varana and Asi rivers, the Ajna location renamed as the inner Banaras, and the practitioner instructed to construct the channels in awareness so that mentally bathing at their confluence is salvific. The mechanism is the same as jahan cit tahan prana. Second, the two-stream architecture is there explicitly. The moon at the crown of Meru rains nectar continuously, and that nectar splits — one stream goes through Ida to nourish the gross body, and the other, called pure milk, travels the central path. One stream mixed with the body, one stream pure. The Shiva Samhita is using the soma vocabulary of Tantric Vaishnava Hatha and the Pran Sangli is using the prana vocabulary of Sant Sikh-Udasin Hatha, but the architecture is identical. Third, the Sahasrara is placed outside the body — above there, outside the body which is called the egg of Brahma, is the divinely beautiful Sahasrara lotus which bestows liberation. The most refined locus is located outside the ordinary anatomy. Gupt Sambhavi does the same operation lower on the head, placing the pure-prana intake on the forehead at the imagined inverted nose. Both texts argue that the highest intake happens at a locus the body’s standard hardware does not provide.

The Shiva Samhita and the Pran Sangli are roughly contemporaneous late-medieval Hatha texts in different lineages. The Shiva Samhita is Tantric Vaishnava-influenced Hatha in Sanskrit. The Pran Sangli is Sant Sikh-Udasin Hatha in vernacular Punjabi. That they preserve the same doctrines, in the same locations, with the same names — Paramahamsa, nectar streams, the brow-point as the operative junction — and with the same visualization-as-operative epistemology, is exactly the pattern the post is arguing for. The Shiva Samhita is the comparandum that makes the Pran Sangli deposit visible as a deposit rather than as a free-standing invention. And it does this without me having to claim that Amandeep is reading the Shiva Samhita. I am not making that claim. I am noticing that the two texts preserve the same material.

If you are not a scholar, here is the only thing that matters about what you just read. The same doctrine appears in a Sanskrit text and a Punjabi text from roughly the same period, in different lineages, in different languages, with the same names attached to the same body locations. That means it was real teaching, circulating, being preserved. Not something Bhajan invented in 1969. Not something Amandeep is putting together in 2026. You can stop reading the footnotes if you want. The post has now given you what you came for. The rest is the geometry of the same thing, which I am about to show you in the chart.

This is exactly the saṅkrānti pattern the post has been arguing for, only the route is more specific than I was prepared for. The technique does not enter our hands through a textual line that runs back to the Vigyan Bhairava. It enters through the Sant Udasin lineage, which is its own current of transmission descending from the broader tantric and yogic culture of which the Vigyan Bhairava and the Shiva Samhita are two literary deposits in two different languages. Pran Sangli is the Sant deposit. Amandeep is reading from Gurbani when he gives me this kriya, not from the Kashmir Shaivite or Hatha Sanskrit corpora. And what he gives me is structurally what the Vigyan Bhairava preserved as ontological motion and what the Shiva Samhita preserved as anatomical doctrine. Three textual deposits. One transmission upstream of all of them. The technique itself is the evidence that the upstream source is real.

When the chart comes in a moment, you may feel lost. That is fine. Look at the colors first. Three colored bands at the top — purple, green, amber — for the three textual traditions. Then look at the shapes. The composite chart at the bottom is the kriya itself, with lines coming in from every direction to land at the center. The labels can wait. You do not need a PhD to sit with the image. The chart is doing something your body already understands from meditation, which is holding several things at once without resolving them into one thing. Look. Then read. Then look again.

Here is the first map. I want you to sit with it carefully. Read the text around it for context, but read the chart itself with the eye that Turiya Atit Kriya is training — the eye that sees the eye, the eye that does not project outward but receives what is held in the shape of the image.

Numalic Lineage Atlas. Reading top to bottom: at the apex is the upstream transmission — the Sant, Tantric, Hatha, and Udasin oral and lineage culture upstream of every literary deposit that survives. Beneath the apex are the three textual deposits the kriya draws on. The Vigyan Bhairava Tantra (left, purple) preserves ontological motion — ascending, saturated, descending. The Shiva Samhita (center, green) preserves the anatomical doctrine — Paramahamsa at the Ajna, visualized nadis as operative, dual nectar streams, extra-corporeal Sahasrara. The Pran Sangli and Gurbani corpus (right, amber) preserves the operative scriptural lines that Amandeep recites — Trikuti Shotey Dasva Dhar Khule, Ta Man Khive Bhai, and Jahan cit tahan prana. Beneath the deposits are the two transmission bands — Yogi Bhajan’s 1978 Los Angeles teaching of Shambhavi Mudra with the reversed nose, and Yogi Amandeep’s 2026 restoration of the full four-nostril Gupt Sambhavi Kriya. The middle row carries the three numalic motion charts whose ontologies the kriya integrates. Below them, the Shiva Samhita anatomical doctrine cards carry the verbatim text the kriya rests on. At the bottom is the composite Gupt Sambhavi numalic chart itself — the upper Trikuti as the saturated center where all motions converge, the vertical Kal-Akal qutb axis as the ascending dimension, the horizontal Moon-Sun axis as the physical nostrils, and the diagonal Jupiter-Rahu axes as the imagined upper nostrils. The Gurbani citations anchor the chart at the top (location) and the bottom (mechanism). The VBT and Shiva Samhita citations enter from the four corners. All lines converge at the Trikuti, because that is what the kriya does.

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On Reading the Map

A note on what kind of diagram this is, because it is not a flowchart and it is not a genealogy in the standard sense.

The chart is built using a reading method I call numalic analysis, which is the methodological core of my doctoral dissertation. Each small circular chart in the middle row reflects the ontology of what the corresponding verse is doing. Verse 31’s chart has the Absolute as the outer circle and a dotted center — because the verse is ascending, the practitioner is moving from a phenomenal point of departure toward the Absolute that contains everything. Verses 24-27 have a solid center and dotted concentric phase boundaries — because the gap-between-breaths is saturated, the realization is already complete in the gap and is not being arrived at through directional movement. Verse 43 has the body as the outer circle and inward-pressing arrows — because the verse is descending, the Absolute (space) is being brought into the phenomenal vessel from outside.

The composite chart at the bottom is unusual because Gupt Sambhavi Kriya does not fit cleanly into any one of these three categories. It holds all three motions at once. The vertical qutb axis (Kal at the bottom, Akal at the top) is the ascending dimension that verse 31 names. The solid center at the upper Trikuti is the saturated dimension that verses 24-27 name. The diagonal axes (Jupiter, Rahu — the imagined nostrils) are the descending dimension that verse 43 names, brought now into a four-channel architecture where what is imagined is as ontologically operative as what is physical. The dashed citation lines at the four corners reach into the chart and land at the structural elements they constitute. The Kriya is, in numalic terms, fully saturated — all three numalic motions converge at the same coordinate, and the practitioner holds them in active relation rather than traversing among them.

This is also, not coincidentally, what saṅkrānti looks like in formal diagrammatic representation. The lineage transmission and the technique’s internal anatomy are geometrically continuous. The same lines that show how Yogi Bhajan transmitted Shambhavi Mudra into 3HO in 1978 are the lines that show how the technique’s four nostrils meet at the Trikuti. The relational structure and the technical structure are the same structure.

That is what numalia names. That is what saṅkrānti names. That is what the meditation is doing when you sit down to practice it. And it is what Turiya Atit Kriya was preparing you to receive last Saturday morning, when we sat together for twenty-two minutes with our eyes loosely fixed on the horizon and let Kal collapse into Akal.

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Where We Go From Here

In the coming weeks I will be working through this material in class and writing it out in more depth here. There is a great deal more to map. The Vigyan Bhairava has 112 meditations. I have so far drawn precise structural correspondences between fewer than a dozen of them and the Kundalini techniques we work with. Each of the others is its own piece of work. And the Vigyan Bhairava is only one stratum. There is the Pratyabhijñā material that Reich and Williams treat in their paper. There is the Krama tradition. There is the Udasin material that Yogi Amandeep is the living transmitter of. There is the Sikh Sant tradition through which all of this comes into Yogi Bhajan’s hands.

The shape of the work going forward is this. On Thursdays I will introduce the next meditation we will sit with on Saturday, along with whatever structural correspondences and lineage notes I have been able to trace. On Saturday morning we will sit with the kriya itself. The following Thursday I will deepen the reflection — what came up in class, what the meditation opened that the previous post did not anticipate, and the next map. Spiral, not line. Each week’s post both completes the previous week’s class and prepares the next.

I am asking you to read each Thursday post. Not because I am vain about my writing. Because the writing is part of the transmission, and the body receives the kriya differently when the mind has been prepared. Read on Thursday. Practice on Saturday. Deepen on the following Thursday. Repeat. That is the spiral I am inviting you into.

If reading is hard for you for whatever reason — a long day, a tired body, an attention that does not want to land on a screen — the Substack app will read the post to you. Open the app, find the post, tap listen. The chart itself you will have to look at with the eye. But the words can come through the ear if that is what serves.

Clouds may come and go. Sky remains. Thoughts and emotions come and go. The ever-witnessing consciousness remains.

I will see you Saturday at nine.

Sat Naam.

Gian Navjeet Singh

Presence and Inquiry: Nonduality, Kundalini, and Poetry

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P.S. If you read this post and felt you understood only half of it, you are exactly where you need to be. The half you understood is the transmission. The half you did not will land later, in the body, during the kriya. That is how this works. You do not need to master the scholarship to receive the practice. The scholarship is for the people who need to defend the tradition. The practice is for everyone. DM me for a free first class. Come Saturday.

A note before you begin: this one is long, and as you settle in, you may find it easier to tap the audio player at the top of the Substack app and let yourself be read to — the writing is the kind of writing that opens more naturally when you can close your eyes for parts of it.

A note up front, because this post is asking for a slower kind of reading than the platform usually invites. I’m writing this on Mother’s Day, and I want to begin by honoring all the mothers — the ones in our families, the ones who raised us in any form, the ones who have carried the lineages of care across generations — and beneath all of them the Great Cosmic Mother, the Adi Shakti, the original creative power who births every form and dissolves it back into herself. Turiya-atit,the state this whole post is circling, is in one sense the direct meeting with Her — the moment the apparatus of separate selfhood drops and what remains is the field that gives birth to and reabsorbs every appearance. It is not coincidence that the visionary women I write about below — Lalla, Gargi, Akka Mahadevi — are the ones who most directly transmit this recognition. So today, of all days, feels like the right day to be writing this. What follows combines some personal reflection — what I’ve been reading, what I keep noticing in the cat’s lap at the end of a day — with material from a recent class I taught, which itself was sitting inside a larger arc: the practice this season is the Turiya-Atit Kriya for Awakening,given by my teacher Yogi Amandeep Singh on April 29, 2026. I’m writing from inside the practice. Doing the kriya daily. Reading deeply into the poems Amandeep gave alongside it. I’m not reproducing his poems or his kriya here — those remain his to transmit, and the lineage is best received in his own words, in the room with him. What I am doing here is something else, but adjacent: the deconditioning work that the kriya makes possible, in the form of writing.

That’s worth a moment to explain, because turiya-atit is the name for what it points to. Turiya is the witnessing consciousness, the fourth state behind waking, dreaming, and deep sleep — the I that watches. Turiya-atit is beyond even that — the dissolution of the witness-witnessed structure itself, the state in which the very subject-object scaffolding collapses, in which one is no longer merely a human being looking at a world but something prior to that whole arrangement. The kriya is a method for inviting that recognition. But here is what doesn’t always get said clearly: a kriya, by itself, can run up against the conditioning the practitioner is wearing. The conditioning is the very apparatus that holds self and world in their separate boxes. If you sit a kriya whose deepest aim is the dissolution of subject and object while your conceptual world is still divided into me on the inside and nature on the outside, the practice meets a wall — not in the body, but in the words. The words you have inherited are quietly doing the metaphysics the practice is trying to undo.

This is why a teaching like this one — which is not the kriya, but the discourse around it — is part of how I work. The kriyas come from the lineage; I don’t make them. What I bring to the transmission is the slow loosening of the conditioning that the kriya, on its own, runs into. So when I spend the first several pages of this post on a single English word — nature — and what it has been doing inside us without our noticing, I am not digressing from the teaching. I am doing the teaching. Every layer of conditioning that gets noticed is a layer the practice no longer has to climb over. Turiya-atit removes us from the idea that we are merely a human being. But before it can do that fully, the structures that build the merely — including the words that build separation between us and the field we already are — have to come into view long enough that we can stop unconsciously rebuilding them.

So: take your time with this. There is a lot here, and it is not built for skim. The form of the writing is part of the form of the practice. If you find yourself slowed, mildly destabilized, gently caught at noticing something you had not noticed — that is the work, not the post going off the rails. Sit with it. The argument will hold while you breathe.

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I’ve made it a practice in the evenings to sit with one of my cats and read nondual texts for about half an hour or an hour. Then when I finally settle into the sack, I try to read something pleasurable rather than analytical — letting the day soften at the edges before sleep.

Recently I finished Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, which is one of those books that pretends to be science fiction and is really a metaphysical encounter wearing the costume of one. Now I’m working through In the Same Light from Song Cave — Wong May’s translations of the Tang Dynasty poets, the migrants and exiles of that era — Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei, and others less familiar in English. I love these poets, the so-called nature poets of that period, though that phrase already drags its own conceptual weight in behind it.

Around the same time I’ve been reading work by my friend Karl Kempton, the visual poet and language artist, on iconographic painting traditions — and I’ve been thinking about a ceremony I was once able to attend with the painter Jimmy Toddy (Beatien Yazz, Diné). And there is, to my eye, a strange nearness between Tang Chan-adjacent poetics and certain Indigenous iconographic forms. Not visually — conceptually. They both seem to refuse a particular move that English makes almost involuntarily: the move where the world gets pushed across the room so you can look at it.

Kempton, and a relative of mine I recently heard speak, both touched on the fact that many Indigenous languages don’t carry a word that quite maps onto the English nature. I want to be careful here, because that claim gets repeated loosely sometimes, so let me put it the way that actually holds up: it isn’t that people in these languages fail to recognize trees or rivers or weather or animals (obviously). It’s that the abstraction nature — singular, totalizing, set off from the human — doesn’t lift cleanly out of those grammars. Land, beings, weather, ancestors, kin — they tend to show up relationally rather than as members of one big bucket called The Natural World.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Inuk environmental and human rights advocate, says it directly in her essay “No Word for Nature” in Where the Leaves Fall:

In our language we have no word for “nature”, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the western world likes to make between humankind and nature is in the traditional Inuit view both foreign and dangerous... By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart from, nature. This “in-ness” is perfectly symbolised in our traditional dwellings of the past: illuvigait (snow houses) in winter and tupiit (sealskin tents) in summer.

Read that in-ness slowly. The dwellings themselves are the teaching — a snow house is not a shelter from the snow; it is the snow gathered around the body, the weather and the body sharing a single substance. The architecture is the metaphysics. Watt-Cloutier is reporting from inside a living grammar that never made the cut English made, the cut into observer and observed.

Closer to home for me, my tribal cousin Jeffery U. Darensbourg — Atakapa-Ishak, like me — wrote a piece in Southern Cultures called “Hunting Memories of the Grass Things,” which I recommend to you on its own terms. The Ishak word for bison is šokon, “grass thing.” And the philosophical move Jeffery makes near the end of the piece is one I want to bring forward, because it pushes past where most of the conversation about Indigenous knowledge tends to stop. He writes, of the Ishak hunting traditions that no longer exist in continuous form:

If we Ishak cannot access much of our historical bison hunting culture, perhaps we can create it anew. That culture would be just as Ishak as what came before, because it would be created by Ishak people, and whatever we create is Ishak culture. It is important to avoid the colonial mindset that the “real Indians” are the dead ones. It is important to avoid the mindset that our culture is static, a museum piece.

This is the move I want to underline. There is a familiar register in which decolonization becomes a kind of grief about what was lost, and the original ways are spoken of as if they belong only to a past that has closed. Jeffery is refusing that. The Ishak are here. What the Ishak do now is Ishak. The original way is not behind us; it is what we are doing today, with whatever materials are present, in whatever bodies are present, on whatever land is present. That is not nostalgia. That is not reconstruction. It is continuity. The “in-ness” Watt-Cloutier names in Inuit life is not a relic locked in a 1950s photograph; it is what is happening, right now, in any body that has not been entirely talked out of the field it has never left. The grammar of belonging is older than the grammar of separation, and it doesn’t go anywhere just because another grammar got loud.

There is a related point Jeffery returns to in his work, which I want to lift up here because today, of all days, it belongs in this writing. In Ishak, the word for the Sun is O’tsatat — and O’tsatat is feminine. The Sun is a goddess. This is not a poetic flourish or a translator’s choice; it is what the language says. The greatest visible power in the sky is named as a She, and addressed as such. Many Indigenous languages of the Americas hold versions of this — the Sun, the Earth, the rivers, the great powers come through gendered grammar that remains in living relation, addressable as Mother, as Grandmother, as the One Who Gives. English, after the natura shift and centuries of grammatical neutering, lost most of this — the sun, the earth, the rain, spoken about rather than spoken to, objects in a sentence rather than persons in a kinship. And what gets registered as loss in English is not just gender — it is the entire grammatical possibility of address. You cannot pray to a neuter abstraction. You can study it. You can manage it. You can enter it. But you cannot meet it as kin.

This is, in a quieter register, exactly what Lalla is doing in the vakhs you’ll read below. You are the heaven and You are the earth. That second-person pronoun — that You — is not decorative. It is the grammar of relation that the natura shift erased and that the visionary women across traditions kept alive. Lalla addressed the Real as Mother and as Beloved. Akka Mahadevi addressed Shiva as Lord-white-as-jasmine, as her direct intimate. Gargi pressed Yajnavalkya past every conceivable answer in the voice of a woman who already knew. And in the lineage I am inside, the Cosmic Mother — the Adi Shakti I named at the opening of this post — is the field itself, the relationality itself, the what-is that births and reabsorbs every form including the form of the seeker. She is not a deity standing at the edge of the cosmos. She is the cosmos in its mode of being addressable. Turiya-atit is, among other things, the dropping of the apparatus that was preventing the address from being mutual. When the witness-witnessed structure dissolves, what remains is not a void but a relation that was never not happening. The Mother addresses Herself in you, as you, through every appearance. O’tsatatshines. The address goes both directions.

I’m naming this on Mother’s Day for the obvious reason but also for the structural one. What we have been calling the Cartesian wall, the natura shift, the grammar of separability — this is, among other things, the loss of the Mother. The loss of the address. The loss of the kinship grammar that knew the sun was a She and the earth a She and the great powers were persons one could meet. Restoring relationality is not a sentimental project. It is the precondition of the very state the kriya is pointing toward. There is no turiya-atit without the dropping of the wall, and there is no dropping of the wall while the language keeps quietly putting it back up. The Mother is on the other side of the wall, as the wall, as the one who never agreed to the wall in the first place. To return to relationality is to return to Her, which is to return to the field that we never actually left.

The etymology of the English word is interesting if you sit with it for a second. Nature comes through Old French from Latin natura, from nasci, “to be born” — originally meaning birth, innate disposition, the essential character of a thing. So far, so fine. The interesting thing is that English already had a word in this neighborhood — the Old English gecynd,which gave us kind, in the sense of “humankind” or “kind of thing.” Gecynd leaned toward kinship, family resemblance, what you belong with. Natura slowly displaced it, and over centuries — especially through the Cartesian turn — naturedrifted into something quite different: a domain over there, a field of objects, something to be observed, classified, managed, occasionally entered. From what you are born into and of to what you stand outside of and study. That’s a real shift. English itself once had the kinship word and traded it for the separation word. The conditioning is right there in the dictionary.

Even the phrase going into nature tells on itself a little, as if one had not been within it the whole time, including the physiological part of us that is already weather and water and bacteria and breath.

None of this is a knock on people who hike or sit under trees or learn birdsong — those are some of the saner things a modern human can do. The point is more that the English noun quietly carries a metaphysics, and it tends to install a small Cartesian wall before the conversation has even begun. And here is where the teaching is doing its actual work, because most of us — even those of us doing serious contemplative practice, even those of us building lives around what we call connection to the land — have organized portions of our existence around the very abstraction we are now noticing. We go to nature on retreats. We return to nature in our writing. We honor nature in our rituals. The word is doing more than describing; it is staging a relation. And the staging keeps separability quietly in place even while we sincerely intend reverence. This is what conditioning looks like when it survives even our reverence. The work of practice is not to abandon the word — there is no abandoning of language — but to see what the word has been doing all along, so that one’s living relation to what the word names is no longer mediated by the unexamined wall.

This is the kind of inquiry I hold for the people I sit with in class. The practice is not just the kriya; the practice is what the kriya makes possible — a kind of looking back at one’s own conditioning that the still mind permits and the busy mind cannot. If the words you’ve inherited are doing metaphysics behind your back, the kriya is one of the few methods by which you get quiet enough to catch them at it.

I was teaching this week, and the moment we got into kriya the fear started coming up for people. Not little fear, not anxiety about the day — the older kind, primary fear, the kind that surfaces when the conditioning starts cracking. And what I said then is what I want to say here, because it’s the same thing.

Almost no society on earth originally had a word for nature. And the reason isn’t quaint or romantic. It’s that there is nothing separate from you out there. The moment you say the word nature, you are saying I am not that. The body wants what it wants — sex, food, sleep, pleasure, rest — and the body wants the wind and the trees and the sun, and that wanting is not crossing some boundary into a different domain. The body, the wind, the trees, the cities, your phone, my cat, the keyboard I’m typing this on — all of it is the five elements in different configurations, different motions. Or if you want to get scientific about it, you could say the periodic table, in different arrangements. Some configurations bring more health to a body, some less. But none of them are outside the body’s belonging.

The fear that comes up in kriya, much of it, is just the conditioning revealing itself. The sense that you are separate from what is. You aren’t. You never were.

In class I read a few poems by Lal Ded — known as Lalla — the fourteenth-century Kashmiri yogini whose verse-sayings, the vakhs, are still recited across Kashmir. My teacher Yogi Amandeep names her as one of three women sages — alongside Gargi, the Vedic interrogator from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and Akka Mahadevi, the twelfth-century Virashaiva poet of Karnataka — who became digambara, sky-clad, dressed in the clouds. The point isn’t the literal nakedness, though that is true of all three. The point is that they had reached a state in which the dropping of all coverings — of memory, identity, story, the inside-outside distinction itself — had become the natural condition. They wore the clouds because there was no longer an outside to put clothes against.

A small word about why I read poems in class, because this matters for understanding what kind of teaching I am offering. In the lineages I have been given — through Yogi Bhajan, and now through Yogi Amandeep — the poems are not decoration. They are the genesis. Yogi Bhajan was a poet, and the lectures he gave were laced with poems, and many of the practices we now call kriyas were originally given as poems and then revealed to function as pranayam, as breath-work, as somatic transmission. The poem comes out of a state of consciousness, and when the poem is recited or sat with, it returns the listener — or the reader — toward that state of consciousness. The poem is a portal, not a description. Amandeep teaches the same way. His own poems, which he gives in the classes, are doing the very work they describe. This is one of the things that distinguishes the lineage I am inside from a more academic encounter with these traditions: the poems are not glosses on the practice; they are the practice, in the form language can take.

Read these slowly. Don’t rush past them looking for meaning. Notice what the syntax is doing — where it leaves off, where it folds back, where it withdraws. The poems are not descriptions of an inner state. They are formal traces of one.

By a way I came, but I went not by the way. While I was yet on the midst of the embankment with its crazy bridges, the day failed for me. I looked within my poke, and not a cowry came to hand (or, atI, was there). What shall I give for the ferry-fee?

— translated by G. Grierson

Read it again, attending to what the verb-tenses are doing. I came — past, completed. I went not by the way — also past, but a different past, a non-arrival inside the arrival. The arrival happens, but the one who arrives doesn’t take the way. This is not figurative. The poem is showing you, in the architecture of its grammar, the structure of an event in which the path is real but the traveler dissolves before the destination. The day failed for me. The light gives out at exactly the moment the search would require it. Not a cowry came to hand. The seeking apparatus comes back empty. What shall I give for the ferry-fee? The poem ends in question, not resolution — because the resolution is not on the side of the question. The traveler arrives without arriving. The way is real; the one who came along it is not.

Passionate, with longing in mine eyes, Searching wide, and seeking nights and days, Lo! I beheld the Truthful One, the Wise, Here in mine own House to fill my gaze.

— translated by R.C. Temple

Notice the structural reversal at the Lo! — the entire first half of the poem is the apparatus of seeking, projected outward across nights and days. Then a single interjection inverts the geometry. The Truthful One was never out there. The seeking itself was the obstruction. Here in mine own House. The form of the poem — outward, outward, outward, then suddenly here — is doing the work of the recognition it describes. The reader experiences in miniature what the poet experienced in vastness: the collapse of distance.

Holy books will disappear, and then only the mystic formula will remain. When the mystic formula departed, naught but mind was left. When the mind disappeared naught was left anywhere, And a voice became merged within the Void.

— translated by G. Grierson

This one is structured as a series of departures, and each line shows the syntax of one further dissolution. Books disappear. Then the formula. Then the mind. Then naught was left anywhere. And at the moment of total absence — a voice. Not silence. A voice. This is critical and easy to miss. The Void is not a blankness. Something speaks from inside it. The poem itself is a sequence of erasures that culminates not in nothing but in address. The dissolution opens into communion. This is what my teacher means when he says, in the slide on the digambara, that “the vastness comes, and the person talks to you.” The vastness is not impersonal. It speaks.

You are the heaven and You are the earth, You are the day and You are the night, You are all pervading air, You are the sacred offering of rice and flowers and of water; You are Yourself all in all, What can I offer You?

Watch what the second-person pronoun is doing across this poem. You are the heaven... You are the earth... You are the day... You are the night... You are all pervading air. The address keeps going outward to greater and greater extents — and yet remains the same address, to the same You. By the time the poem reaches You are the sacred offering, the apparatus of offering has collapsed: there is no separate offerer, no separate gift, no separate recipient. What can I offer You? — not a rhetorical lament but a real structural impossibility, and the poem ends there because there is nothing further to say. The form has eaten itself in the act of praising. This is the syntax of advaita — non-twoness — held in a single grammatical breath.

With a thin rope of untwisted thread Tow I ever my boat o’er the sea. Will God hear the prayers that I have said? Will he safely over carry me? Water in a cup of unbaked clay, Whirling and wasting, my dizzy soul Slowly is filling to melt away. Oh, how fain would I reach my goal.

And then this — which on first read sounds like ordinary spiritual longing, doubt, the prayer of a seeker who isn’t sure she’ll be answered. But look at the imagery. Untwisted thread towing a boat across the sea. Unbaked clay holding water. The instruments of the journey are constitutionally unable to do what they’re being asked to do. The thread cannot tow a boat. The clay cannot hold water. My dizzy soul slowly is filling to melt away. The vessel and what it holds are the same substance — the unbaked clay is being dissolved by the water it was meant to carry. The poem is not lamenting inadequate means. It is showing you, formally, that the seeker dissolves in the seeking, and that this is not a failure but the structure of the arrival. The goal cannot be reached by the one who longs for it, because the one who longs for it is the unbaked clay, and arrival is dissolution. Oh, how fain would I reach my goal. Yes. And the longing itself is what melts the longer.

These are not metaphors illustrating a doctrine. They are formal records of an encounter — visionary syntax, the shape that language takes when it is reporting from inside the dissolution of subject and object rather than describing it from outside.

A brief honest digression, because someone asked me to bring scholarship into the conversation a few weeks back. Tang dynasty poetry — the Wang Wei, Hanshan, Du Fu, Li Bai world — is the subject of an active scholarly dispute about whether it should be read as nondual at all. Yang Jingqing’s The Chan Interpretations of Wang Wei’s Poetry (Brill, 2007) argues that the Buddhist reading is anachronistic, projected backward. Other scholars — Rafal Stepien on Wang Wei’s “imagery of emptiness,” Paul Rouzer on Hanshan, Thomas Mazanec on the Tang poet-monks — argue that the formal traces of contemplative encounter are unmistakably present, and that contemporary Indigenous and Asian language scholarship is destabilizing the older confessional categories. The disagreement is real, and if you have a stake in the historical question, both sides are worth reading. But here is the move I want to offer: the scholarly question of whether a particular Tang poet was a Chan practitioner is a different question from what the poems are doing on the page. A poem that arises out of a state of consciousness — as Yogi Bhajan’s poems did, as Amandeep’s poems do, as Lalla’s vakhs did, as Wang Wei’s quatrains may have — carries the formal trace of that state, and the careful reader can find that trace in the syntax regardless of what we can or cannot prove about the poet’s biography. This is the same position the lineages have always held. The poems are practice. The practice is the genesis. The genesis is what is encoded in the form. Biography matters. The form matters more.

Now, here is where I want to make a move I have been thinking about for a while.

The contemplative traditions I work inside — the Himalayan yogic lineages I have been training in under Yogi Amandeep Singh, the siddha streams that come down through him, and the Atakapa-Ishak and broader Louisiana inheritances I carry through my own family — never made the Cartesian turn. They never split themselves off from the living world in order to study it from across a room. The siddhas, the rishis, the traiteurs, the Indigenous knowers across many continents — these were people who knew what reality was made of by entering it directly, with the body and the breath and the field, without an instrument standing between them and what they were knowing. Lalla didn’t need a confirmation. Gargi didn’t need a confirmation. Akka didn’t need one. They reported from inside the seeing. So did the Ishak who hunted šokonacross the prairies of southwest Louisiana. So do the Inuit who built their snow-dwellings as the weather around their warmth.

The yogic tradition maps the states of consciousness with care. There are four commonly named — jagrat (waking), svapna (dreaming), sushupti (deep sleep), and turiya, the witnessing consciousness behind all three. The Mandukya Upanishad, one of the shortest and most concentrated of the Upanishads, gives this fourfold structure. But Yogi Amandeep, drawing from the Udasin and Raj Yog streams, brings forward a fifth state that the Mandukya itself names but that often gets folded under turiya in popular renderings — turiya-atit, sometimes written turyatita. Beyond even the witness. The dissolution of the witness-witnessed structure itself. The state in which the very subject-object scaffolding collapses into undifferentiated awareness. This is what the kriya he is teaching this season points toward, and it is what these poems by Lalla are formally doing on the page. Turiya-atit was mapped from the inside thousands of years before anyone had the vocabulary of non-separability or quantum information. The map was lived. It wasn’t waiting on confirmation.

A small note on Amandeep specifically, because I want to be honest about how this lineage actually transmits. Amandeep is, among other things, a serious researcher. He was a KRI scholar at one point. And he is unusually clear that his teaching draws from three sources: the lineage he received, his own scholarly research into the actual Vedic, Sufi, Tantric, and Sikh sources behind that lineage, and intuition. He names this openly. This kind of honesty about transmission is, in my view, exactly what the present moment requires. There are aspects of what was given in 1969 — when these teachings began arriving in the West in earnest — that could not, at that time, be transmitted with the full lineage context attached, for reasons of cultural translation and historical circumstance that we can debate but cannot undo. What Amandeep is doing now is, in part, restoring the missing context. Showing where a particular kriya actually comes from. Naming the Sufi couplet behind a familiar mantra. Pointing to the Tantric source of a meditative posture. This is not a debunking. It is a deepening. It is also why I want to be careful in this writing not to flatten or import too directly the specific frames of his teaching — those remain his, and they live in the room. What I bring to my own classes is the deconditioning discourse around them, and the question of whether each of us is in living relation to what we are practicing, or just repeating it.

Which leads me to what I actually want to say next.

It’s almost amusing, if you sit with it long enough, that Western physics — after spending roughly four hundred years insisting reality was made of separate, independently existing objects in separate, independently existing boxes — has in the last few decades begun to stutter toward what these lineages mapped without instruments.

Bell’s Theorem, the careful version: no theory that reproduces quantum predictions can hold onto locality, classical realism, and certain independence assumptions all at once. What that disrupts is the picture of fully separable, self-contained objects sitting in independent local boxes. David Bohm — Oppenheimer’s student, one of the serious figures of twentieth-century physics — called the deeper reality the holomovement, “undivided wholeness in flowing movement,” with the world of separate objects being a derivative surface phenomenon that unfolds from a non-separable whole. Carlo Rovelli, the loop quantum gravity physicist, argues that objects don’t possess intrinsic properties at all — only relations — and has written explicitly about how this resonates with Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. Federico Faggin, the man who designed the first commercial microprocessor, now publishes peer-reviewed papers proposing that consciousness is primary and that quantum information is its substrate. In November of last year, the materials scientist Maria Strømme published a paper in a mainstream physics journal — AIP Advances, Uppsala — literally titled “Universal Consciousness as Foundational Field: A Theoretical Bridge Between Quantum Physics and Non-dual Philosophy.” It was selected as the best paper of the issue.

In class I said this — that what you’re seeing out there is not a chair, not a table, not a fist. It’s particles, or rather, it’s pure quantum potentiality. The wave function does not collapse into the object until there is a conscious observer. And in order for a thing to become an object at all, there has to be an observer. So the object and the observer are not two. They are one interconnected event. Your eyes are creating the world you live in. The eye and the I, as my teacher likes to say, are not separate.

None of this is news to the lineage. The lineage already knew. What’s new is that physics, after four centuries of confidently arranging the furniture of an imaginary separable cosmos, is finally beginning to speak in a register where a Cartesian-trained mind can hear what the siddhas were saying all along. The Inuit knew. The Ishak knew. Lalla knew. Gargi knew.

I want to be clear about which way the catching-up is happening, because the usual move — look, science confirms the mystics — actually keeps physics in the position of the validating authority, with contemplative knowing playing the role of charming local color awaiting Western blessing. That gesture, however well-intentioned, is itself the Cartesian wall in friendly clothing. The honest sentence runs the other way. Direct knowing held the territory first. Physics is the latecomer, and a fairly humble one when you read the actual papers — full of depending on interpretation and this is consistent withand we cannot rule out. The lineage was never tentative. The lineage knew.

There is also a difference, and it matters, between the mathematical articulation and the lived state. Physics can describe non-separability. Turiya-atit is the direct experiential dissolution of separability — not a model of it, not a theory about it, but the thing itself, lived from the inside, with no inside left. The science can go as far as relational non-separability, or consciousness as a foundational field. It cannot go to turiya-atit, because turiya-atit is not a description of reality. It is reality knowing itself without the descriptive apparatus running. That is what the kriya is for. That is what Lalla’s I went not by the way is reporting. That is what the unbaked clay is doing as it dissolves into the water.

Which, oddly, is also what Tang poetry sometimes feels like on the page — not an observer reporting on a world, but participation briefly noticing itself and writing it down before the noticing closes again. A poem in this mode is doing what physics is now stuttering toward: refusing the wall.

So here is the question I want to leave you with, because this is, in the end, what the Living Path is asking. Are you robotically repeating the teachings — the kriyas, the mantras, the ideas, the words like nature, the words like consciousness, the words like practice — or are you holding them in living understanding? The lineage is not the past. The lineage is what is happening now in a body that is in living relation to what was given. A teaching that is repeated without inquiry begins to function exactly like the word nature did in the Cartesian shift: a stable abstraction held in front of the real, so that the real does not have to be met. The Living Path, as I am beginning to understand it and beginning to name it, is the practice of refusing that. Of meeting the teaching, and the kriya, and the word, and the world, again, today, with whatever body is here.

A cat. A book. The slow dissolving of the edge between attention and what attention rests on. Evening thoughts.

A small note before I close. This Substack has been quietly shifting, and I want to name the shift rather than let it happen without acknowledgment. I’m incrementally moving the work here under the name The Living Path: Nonduality, Kundalini, and Poetry — a more honest container for what I’m actually doing across teaching, writing, and lineage practice. As part of that, I’m beginning to post on Thursdays — Guru day — starting with the first Thursday after the coming new moon. The new moon falls on May 16; the first Thursday after is May 21. That will be the first post in the new rhythm.

The Living Path is, fittingly, evolving. I have been told by my own teachers that the work asks for spontaneity, and so the rhythm here may shift as it needs to. That’s part of what living means in Living Path.

If any of this is calling to you and you’d like to sit with it in practice rather than only in reading, I currently teach Presence and Inquiry on Saturdays, 9–11am Central, by Zoom, and co-teach with Taj Chander on Tuesdays at 7pm Central. If you’d like to join, write to me at giannavjeet@ubukundalini.yoga or visit www.ubukundalini.yoga. The classes are open. The work happens together.

If you’re already here, thank you for being here. The work is the same work. The container is just being made a little truer to what it always was.

— Gian

Notes from a Saturday morning teaching, with an update on The Living Path

A note before we begin. What follows is a teaching I gave on a recent Saturday morning, lightly framed and lightly annotated — kept close to the way it was actually spoken because the speech itself is part of the transmission. I am a poet, and I am suspicious of the idea that a teaching becomes more “rigorous” when its sentences are tidied into the cadences of academic prose. Sometimes the rhythm is the argument. Sometimes the joke is the cut. I have left those in.

I’ll also use this occasion to update you on the rebrand from UBU: Kundalini Yoga to The Living Path: Nonduality, Kundalini, and Poetry, which I previewed in On What Is Changing: A Pre-Reveal. I’ll come back to that at the end. And in passing, I want to note — briefly, because some things are best said briefly — that Yogi Amandeep recently wrote me a letter that has reframed quite a bit of what I’m doing. I’ll say more elsewhere. For now: I am holding it.

If you want to sit with us live, we meet Saturday mornings at 9 AM Central. You can find the link at ubukundalini.yoga. Come as you are.

Occasion: A Book About a Fraud

The teaching that follows had an occasion, and I want to name it before I forget. For the last several weeks my feed has been steadily handing me clips of a man who has written a book about Carlos Castaneda — about Castaneda as a cult leader, as a fraud, as a manipulator. The clips are well produced. The man is articulate. The research, by all appearances, is real. And the slander is real. There was real harm. I am not contesting any of that.

What I started to notice, though, somewhere around the third or fourth clip the algorithm pushed in front of me, was that the form of the project was familiar. It is now a recognizable career path: identify a Western teacher of an Eastern tradition, do the archival work, find the contradictions and the abuses (which are almost always there, because human beings are involved), and produce the takedown. Castaneda. Yogi Bhajan. Trungpa. Muktananda. Adi Da. Andrew Cohen. The book gets reviewed. The interviews come. The platform builds.

And — please hear what I am about to say carefully, because I am not defending anyone — I started to notice that the public career of exposing the fraud is structurally identical to the disciple’s career of following the master. Same machinery. Opposite costume. The one who follows says I am the one who got the transmission. The one who exposes says I am the one who saw through it. Both are identified with a self that gains its definition from a relationship to a teacher. The teacher is the load-bearing element of the identity, whether the relationship is devotion or revulsion. Move the teacher and the whole self collapses.

I wrote an Instagram post about this. The post is the seed of what follows. Because once you start to see this — that the I am the one who exposes is just another me, me, me in saffron — you start to see something more uncomfortable: that the spiritual path itself, the real path, contains practices specifically designed to end this kind of self. Tying yourself to a tree. Wearing the turban. Cutting the hair. Taking the vow. Walking out of the village. These are not arbitrary aesthetic choices. They are dissolutional technologies. They are designed to disidentify the spirit from the mundane life. They work — and that is precisely what makes them the next, more refined trap. I am the person who tied himself to the tree. I am the person who wears the turban. I am the person who exposed the fraud. I am the person who took the vow. The very practices that were supposed to cut identification have become a more sanctified identification.

This is the actual danger of the spiritual path, and it is much more interesting than the danger the slander industry is selling you. The slander industry tells you the danger is the teacher. The path itself tells you the danger is the new self that forms in response to the teaching, including in response to your own clear-eyed critique of the teaching. Both versions of you — the disciple and the debunker — are eaten by the same mouth.

I taught the rest of what follows that Saturday morning because I was tired of being handed the wrong story by the algorithm. The right story is harder, and it is the only one that actually frees anyone.

I. The Double Edge

There is a phrase you’ll hear in the tantric traditions: the double-edged sword. People say it casually, the way they say namaste in a parking lot. But it names something precise. Tantra, in its older sense, is the use of the body, the senses, the breath, the actual flesh, to approach a non-dual teaching. It is the deliberate enlistment of the relative for the sake of the absolute. And that is exactly where the danger lives.

The danger is this: because you are using the body for the practice, you can begin — slowly, almost imperceptibly — to believe you are the body. The very vehicle that was supposed to dissolve the false self can become the most sophisticated way of reinforcing it.

If that statement irks you in any way, that is something to look at. I want to say that plainly. The irritation is not nothing. It is information.

Because what is the irritation? It is the over-emphasis on the self, on the human, on the physical body, on the things that you do, on your capabilities. Am I good enough? Am I pretty enough? Am I young enough? Am I skinny enough? Do I have enough hair? Do I have the right clothes? Is my sadhana long enough? Did I do enough mala? Did I do enough seva? It is all the same machinery. Me, me, me, me, me, me. The spiritual version of me and the looks-maxing version of me are mechanically identical. They differ only in costume.

The tantric move — the actual, working tantric move — is to put pressure on this meat bucket. Pressure that the meat bucket cannot withstand from inside its own identification. So that the only place left to stand is outside of it. So that you finally have to say: okay. I am more than this. I am beyond this.

I want to be careful here. Beyond doesn’t mean above. It doesn’t mean better. It doesn’t mean you have transcended the rent and the dishes and the gray hair and the medical chart. It means that the locus of attention has shifted. The meat bucket is still walking around. It just isn’t where you are looking from anymore.

II. The Discontinuity Argument

Here is one of the simplest demonstrations of the thing I’m trying to point at. And I want you to actually try this, not just read past it.

Tell me what happened to you on May the 2nd, 1996, at 4:36 PM.

You can’t. Nobody in any room I’ve ever taught in can. And yet, presumably, you were alive. Presumably, you were doing something. There was a body. There was an environment. There was probably a thought. There was almost certainly a feeling. And it is gone — not in the dramatic sense of erased, but in the much more interesting sense of was never continuous to begin with.

Look at what actually happens in twenty-four hours. You go to bed. The body slides into a hypnagogic state — that strange threshold where the imagery starts to come unbidden. Then you move into dreaming, and inside the dream, you are not thinking I am in a dream. You are simply participating. Then deep sleep, which is blank. Then waking. Then a cup of coffee that you are not actually making, because while you are making it you are thinking about what you owe somebody, what someone said to you in 2014, what is going to happen at 3 PM. The body is in the kitchen. The attention is in 2014. Then a phone rings. Then you are somewhere else again.

The experience of being a person is not continuous. Awareness of the body is constantly shifting — into memory, into imagination, into perception, into sleep, into dream, into deeper states. And yet there is something that is continuous. Something that was present in the dream, and present in the deep sleep, and present in the cup of coffee, and present at 4:36 PM on May 2nd, 1996, even though the content of that moment is gone.

That continuous thing is prior to the body. It is prior, even, to the consciousness — meaning, prior even to the sense that you exist. It is the witness of the existing.

If you want a contemplative practice that fits in the cracks of an ordinary day, that is the practice. Tune in to the existence of that. Not to the body. Not to the thought. To the thing that is witnessing the body and the thought.

III. The Spiritual Identity, Which Is the Most Refined Trap

Now I want to bring this back from the public debunker — the one writing the Castaneda book — to the much more uncomfortable place: yourself. Because once you are on a spiritual path of any depth, you start to build an identity as a spiritual person. The mechanism that produces the slander industry on the outside also produces, on the inside, the small daily pressure of having to be the kind of person you have decided you are.

I am a yogi. I am a Sikh. I am a Buddhist. I am a sun dancer. I am someone who teaches retreats. I am someone who runs sweats. I am someone who got a transmission. I am someone who studies with the right teacher. I am a PhD candidate writing on visionary poetics. I am, I am, I am, I am.

Every time you meet someone, the presentation goes out: I am this kind of person. Every time you meet yourself — in the mirror, in your sadhana log, in a moment of failure — the indictment comes back: I did this, but I am supposed to be a spiritual person. And the not-easiness, the lack of relaxation, the tightness around the chest, the hum of low-grade self-monitoring that follows you all day, is precisely the cost of that identification.

I said earlier that the dissolutional practices — the turban, the tree, the vow — work, and that this is exactly what makes them the next, more refined trap. Here is the part I did not yet say. The trap does not require that you take a formal vow. The trap is much more democratic than that. Anything you do consistently as a spiritual person can become the load-bearing element of a new self. The morning sadhana. The way you greet people. The way you sit. The cushion you sit on. The teacher you mention. The teacher you don’t mention. The way you talk about your practice. The way you don’t talk about it. All of it is operable material for the building of a spiritualized me.

This is why there is so much craziness in spiritual communities. The constant tension between surrendering and re-identifying. The endless oscillation between giving up the self and acquiring a more spiritual self. The teacher exposes the fraud and writes the book; the disciple takes the transmission and wears the turban; the practitioner meditates an hour a day and quietly calculates how that hour reads on their internal résumé. Different costumes. Same machinery.

The extreme outer-world version of this is the looks-maxing kid hitting his face with a hammer to widen his jaw, or the people getting peptide stacks and surgeries, walking around with a complete identification with the physical appearance, so that if anything goes wrong with the appearance they are psychologically shattered. That is the outer edge of one direction. But the inner edge of the spiritual version is the same thing in saffron. I’m going to be extremely healthy. I’m going to be extremely pure. I’m going to be extremely awakened. The identification is identical. Only the costume has changed.

So whether the identification is I am a strongly spiritual person or I am a Barbie doll supermodel — it is the exact same thing. It is a strong identification with a human identity. And the entire architecture of so-called self-esteem issues — am I good enough, will they like me, will I be accepted into the community — sits on top of that identification. It is not really self-esteem. It is just identification with personhood, mistaking itself for a problem to be fixed.

IV. The Hollow Bone

I want to slow down here, because if I leave that comparison standing as I just made it — looks-maxing on one side, spiritualized identity on the other, identical machinery — it can sound like a dismissal. And it isn’t. I am not dismissing the kid hitting his face with a hammer. I am not dismissing you when you check the mirror before the Zoom class. I am not dismissing myself when I worry about whether the post is going to land. The harshness in the comparison is meant to cut something, but it is not meant to cut you. It is meant to cut the identification.

I have a friend whose spiritual mother used to make a prayer. The prayer was: make me a hollow bone. I think about that prayer often. I think it might be the most precise thing I have heard anyone say about what is actually being asked of us when we walk through the door of a real practice.

Make me a hollow bone. Not make me holy. Not make me strong. Not make me beautiful, make me healed, make me radiant, make me a teacher. Make me a bone — meaning, leave the structure, leave the form, leave the thing that holds shape long enough to be useful. And hollow — meaning, take what is inside out. Take out the me that wants to do the holy thing, the strong thing, the radiant thing, the teacher-thing. Take out the doer. Leave the instrument. Let the wind move through it.

That is the same teaching as the 33rd Pauri of Japji Sahib. Guru Nanak ends a long climb through the Khands — the realms of being — and arrives at a verse that I keep returning to, because it is one of the most uncompromising statements of nondoership in any scripture I have ever read. Aakhan jor, chupai nah jor. No power to speak. No power to be silent. Jor na mangan, dayn na jor. No power to ask, no power to give. No power to live, no power to die. No power to gather wealth or scatter it, no power to act, no power to refrain. The Pauri ends with the line that does the cut: jis hath jor kar vekhai soe — the one in whose hand the power rests is the one who watches it all unfold. Nanak utam nich na koe — Nanak, no one is high, no one is low. The pauri is not saying try harder. It is saying there is no doer here. The doership you have been carrying around is a hallucination produced by identification.

That is the same teaching as the Ashtavakra Gita, where the boy sage tells King Janaka, in essentially the first breath of the dialogue: you are not the body. You are pure awareness. The bondage is the belief that you are the doer. Not the doing — the belief in the doer. The whole text is twenty chapters of that one move, made over and over in different lights, until the king, who is one of the most powerful men in the world, sits down inside that recognition and stays there.

That is the same teaching as the hollow bone.

And — this is the part I want to say compassionately — that is the same teaching being reached for, in a kind of broken-mirror way, by the looks-maxing kid. The looks-maxing kid is not stupid. He is not shallow. He has registered, somewhere underneath language, that there is something wrong with the way he is being asked to exist as a self. And he has reached for a tool — the hammer, the peptide, the surgery — to change the self in such a way that the suffering of being a self will stop. He has the diagnosis half right. He has identified that the self is the problem. What he has gotten wrong is the surgery. He thinks the self can be modified into something the suffering doesn’t enter. The teachings I am pointing at say: no. The self cannot be modified into bliss. The self can only be seen through. The self is not a thing to be perfected. It is a thing to be recognized as an appearance.

And here is where I have to be honest about myself, because otherwise the whole thing becomes a sermon. The spiritual version of looks-maxing is real, and I am not above it. There is a kid hitting his face with a hammer to get a more masculine jawline, and there is also a yogi adjusting his turban in the reflection of a phone before he hits go live. There is someone getting peptide injections in a clinic, and there is also someone counting the years of their sadhana like a résumé. There is a Barbie doll supermodel arranging her body for a photograph, and there is also a teacher arranging the cushions before a class so that the room reads a certain way. The mechanism is the same. The costume is different. The me, me, meis just wearing more layers.

The 33rd Pauri does not let either version off the hook. No power to speak, no power to be silent. The looks-maxing kid does not have the power he thinks he does. And neither does the spiritualized version of him. There is no doer in the body trying to perfect itself, and there is no doer in the body trying to perfect its sadhana. There is only the awareness in whose hand the whole thing is unfolding.

This is the end of the human-of-the-doing. This is the forever of nondoership.

And — please hear this, especially if you are someone who has worked very hard on yourself, spiritually or otherwise — the recognition of nondoership is not the cancellation of your effort. It is the redemption of your effort. The effort was real. The hours were real. The discipline was real. The hammer was real. And — none of it was being done by the person you took yourself to be. It was being done by the awareness in whose hand the power rests. The hollow bone does not mean you wasted your time becoming hollow. It means the hollowness was always what you were, and the becoming was the awareness recognizing itself.

So if anything I said earlier landed as harshness — the spiritual version is the same as the supermodel — please receive it now in this register. The comparison is not a humiliation. It is a door. It is saying: the suffering you are doing inside the spiritualized identity is exactly the suffering the looks-maxing kid is doing inside his identity, which means the door out is exactly the same door, and that door is open to both of you. Make me a hollow bone. That prayer works in the gym. It works at the cosmetic surgery clinic. It works in the sadhana hall. It works at the academic conference. It works at the kitchen sink.

It is the same door. Walk through it as you are.

V. Easiness, Which Is Not the Same as Self-Acceptance

The way out is not what the wellness culture has trained us to expect.

It is not about I accept that I am this. It is not about a long, tearful inventory of how you came to be the way you are. It is not about therapeutic narrative. I am not against therapy — there is a place for it. But the move I am describing is different.

The move is: I allow this thing to spontaneously live, while realizing I am not it. This thing — this body, this biography, this little column of memory and reaction — is just an appearance. It has eyes for the ultimate, you could say. The ultimate is looking out through it. So if it gets tense, the ultimate is watching. If it gets screamed at, the ultimate is watching. If it isn’t good enough, the ultimate is watching. If it makes a mistake, the ultimate is watching.

And who are you? The ultimate.

That is the end of the self-esteem issue. Not because the issue resolves through analysis. Because the locus of identification has moved.

This is also, by the way, the end of karma — at least in the way the word is most often misused. The action of karma is the enmeshment in the karma. The bad thing happens, and if attention is enmeshed in it, you are inside the karmic loop. If attention is in the ultimate, the thing simply happens, and the karma does not continue. Yogi Bhajan used to say it more bluntly: don’t repeat a thought. If a thought arises — I am not good enough — it has arisen. Fine. But if you spend the day repeating it, I am not good enough, I am not good enough, I am not good enough, you have built the karma. You are now in the state of it.

This is part of why people practice dharma. Dharma cuts karma. The thought arises — I am not good enough — and right there, in the same instant, you put dharma in its place. Waheguru. Sat Nam. Om Mani Padme Hum. Ek Onkar Sat Nam.Whatever the mantra is for you. The thought continues to arise — fine. Waheguru. It doesn’t matter what the thought is. You are not arguing with it. You are putting dharma side by side with it. You are using the dharma to clean it out.

And then — and this is important — be easy about the fact that you complained today. Be easy about the fact that you talked about somebody. Don’t become the person who is identified with I am the one who is supposed to be doing dharma but who slipped, because that is just one more refined identification. Just notice. There is a bad thing. There is the dharma. I am letting myself be easy.

This human form took four billion years to get here. At one point it was a saber-toothed tiger. Before that, something we don’t even have a name for — some big mole-like thing with crunchers, eating and pooping and pushing through slime. So you talked shit yesterday. So what. The lineage of behaving badly is much, much older than this morning.

VI. Coziness, Radiance, and the Caliber of Being

I want to stay with this for a moment longer, because the way I have been describing the teaching — meat bucket, hollow bone, no doer, the ultimate is watching — could give the impression that what is being asked of you is severe. A kind of dry, ascetic stripping. As if to be a serious practitioner means to walk through the world with the joy taken out of it. To become a tight, smileless figure with a perfectly straight spine and a thousand-yard contemplative stare.

That is not what is being asked.

One of the strangest and most beautiful things about Yogi Bhajan’s teaching, to me, is how often he spoke about coziness. He used the word the way other teachers use liberation. Be cozy. Be at home in yourself. Make your sadhana cozy. Make your morning cozy. Wrap yourself in your shawl. Drink your yogi tea. Sit in the corner of the room you sit in. He understood — and I think he understood it from the Udasin and the Nirmala side of his lineage, where there are old, old stories of sadhus who held the absolute and also kept very particular small comforts close — that coziness is not the opposite of self-realization. Coziness is one of its methods.

This is counterintuitive in a culture that has trained us to associate spirituality with austerity, and austerity with depth. So let me say it plainly. The body that is at war with itself cannot host the recognition we are talking about. The body that is contracted in self-judgment cannot soften enough to let the witness step forward. The nervous system that is bracing against itself is using all of its bandwidth on the bracing. There is no bandwidth left for the easiness I described in the previous section. So the cozy shawl, the warm cup, the soft corner, the long slow exhale — these are not bourgeois indulgences laid on top of a real practice. They are the practice, in the register where the body actually lives. Coziness creates the physiological conditions in which identification can loosen. The hollow bone needs a warm hand to hold it.

There is a second register of this teaching that I want to name carefully, because it gets misread constantly in the wellness world. Yogi Bhajan also gave a great deal of what he called yogic beauty secrets. He talked about how to become radiant.He talked about brightness, luminosity, the glow of the Aradhana Shakti, the subtlety that develops as the energetic bodies refine. He talked about the way you smile, the way you walk, the way you carry your body, the way you greet a person — as if these were not surface things but the actual outer surface of an inward refinement.

Now — please hear this carefully — this is not the same as looks-maxing.

I want to be exact, because the resemblance is real and the difference is everything. Looks-maxing tries to rearrange the surface. Yogic radiance is the natural emanation of an inwardly settled subtle body. Looks-maxing is the surface trying to fix itself. Radiance is the inside finally bright enough that the surface is lit from within. These are mechanically opposite operations, even though to a passing observer they may look similar — both produce a body that is more pleasant to be near.

The diagnostic difference is this: ask whether the practice produces a body that is easier to be inside, or a body that is more anxiously monitored from outside. The radiance Yogi Bhajan was talking about is the kind that is generated by the practitioner being more and more at home inside their own form. The smile is real because there is no longer a tight little manager inside watching to see whether the smile is landing correctly. The walk is graceful because the nervous system has unclenched. The way you greet a person is warm because there is no longer a calculating self running cost-benefit analysis on the encounter. The radiance follows from the caliber of being having been raised, where caliber means something like the bore of the channel through which the infinite is allowed to move. A wider bore. A cleaner channel. More of the cosmic flow getting through, with less of the personal apparatus filtering it down to a trickle.

This is also why the so-called yogic beauty secrets, when they are received correctly, are never about appearance. They are about subtlety. The energetic bodies — and there are ten of them in the tradition Yogi Bhajan taught — refine through the practices, and as they refine, the surface of the person changes. Not because the surface was operated on. Because the inside was tended.

The reason I am putting this here, after the section on the hollow bone and after the section on easiness, is that this is the answer to a question some of you may have been carrying through this whole post: if I am not the body, and I am not the doer, and there is no self to perfect — then what becomes of the actual life I am in? What does the human walking around look like, on the other side of all this seeing-through?

The honest answer is: it looks cozy. It looks bright. It smiles. Its eyes are clear. Its shoulders are down. Its breath is slow. It is at home in the corner of the room. It is at home in the body. It is, finally, at home in being a body, because it no longer believes the body is what it is. The recognition that you are not the meat bucket is what actually allows the meat bucket, at last, to relax.

That is the radiance Yogi Bhajan was pointing at. That is why he taught coziness as a method. The meat bucket, when it stops being identified-with, stops being defended, and stops being defended is when it finally gets to be cozy. The hollow bone, once hollow, hums when the wind moves through it. That hum is the radiance. That hum is the smile. That hum is the caliber of being.

This, also, is what The Living Path is pointing toward. Not a stripped-down asceticism. Not a wellness mocktail either. Something else. Something cozier than the first and far more rigorous than the second. A practice in which the door of nondual recognition is held open by the actual warmth of an actual life.

VII. Lalla, Speaking Across Centuries

I want to put two poems in front of you. They are by Lal Ded — Lalla, “Lauded” — the fourteenth-century Kashmiri yogini who walked the world without clothes and sang verses that the entire region of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim and beyond, kept and carried. These are in Coleman Barks’s English (from Naked Song).

The first:

I wore myself out looking for myself.

No one could have worked harder to break the code.

I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar. Nectar, I tell you. There were jars and jars of the good stuff, and no one to drink it.

Sit with that for a moment before reading on. Read it twice if you have to. Notice what the poem actually does. The first three lines are exhausted — I wore myself out looking for myself, no one could have worked harder to break the code — which is the entire spiritual seeker’s autobiography in a single breath. Then the line that does the cut: I lost myself in myself. Not I found myself. Not I realized myself. I lost myself in myself — the seeker dissolves into the very thing that was being sought, and the search structure collapses, because there is no longer one to search and no longer something other to find. And in the place where the seeker used to stand, what is there? A wine cellar. Jars and jars of the good stuff, and no one to drink it. The infinite was always already overflowing. The bottleneck was never the supply. The bottleneck was the one who would consume, and now there is no one. The nectar floods the empty room.

The second poem is a little more terrifying:

The whole wild world ripples into nothingness. It splashes like water on the water of infinity.

When that void melts, perfection remains.

Hey, priest man, that’s the only lesson you need.

This one goes further than the first, and I want to walk you through why. The first stanza is already the sort of statement most contemplative traditions arrive at after long discipline: the world dissolves, the apparent forms ripple back into the field that produced them. Splashes like water on the water of infinity — the appearing thing and the field it appears in are the same substance; the splash is just a momentary pattern. Many traditions stop here, more or less. The world is illusion, the absolute is real.

But Lalla does not stop here. She makes one more move, and it is the move that places her among the most uncompromising nondual poets in any tradition. When that void melts — meaning, when even the absolute, even the field of nothingness into which the wild world dissolved, even that itself dissolves — perfection remains. This is the move past Buddhism’s emptiness, past the Vedantist’s Brahman, past every contemplative formulation that secures itself by naming a final ground. Lalla refuses the final ground. She is saying: even the void is an appearance. Even the absolute is something you are looking at. And when that goes — when even the position from which you would say all is empty dissolves — what is there? Perfection. Not as an attribute. As what was there the entire time, before any of these formulations.

And then the line that should make every theologian and every priest of every tradition slightly nervous: Hey, priest man, that’s the only lesson you need. Not that is the highest lesson. Not that is one of the lessons. The only lesson. Lalla is dismissing every theological apparatus that has been built around the experience she just described, and she is doing it from inside the experience, with a poet’s economy and a yogini’s authority. She is six hundred years dead and she is still telling the priest man to put his books down.

Now — I am putting these two poems in front of you, in full, for a specific reason. They are not decoration. They are not illustration. The reason these poems are operative — the reason they belong inside, not next to, what I am saying — is that the poem is the teaching. It is not the illustration of the teaching. It is the form the teaching took before it became a kriya, a meditation, or a lecture. When Lalla writes I lost myself in myself, she is not describing the recognition of the witness; she is transmitting it. The reader who reads slowly enough has the experience the poem is naming. The poem is the practice. The reading of the poem is the kriya.

This is the load-bearing claim of The Living Path. It is the methodological hinge of my dissertation — what I have been calling numalia, the formal trace of visionary encounter in poetic syntax — and it is what I will be teaching, in plain English, on Saturday mornings. The poem is not about the experience. The poem is the experience entering language. And the right way to read it is the same as the right way to do a kriya: slowly, with breath, until the pressure of the form opens something that was already open and you had stopped noticing.

This is part of why I am rebranding. The wellness world treats poetry as a garnish. The academic world treats poetry as an object of analysis. The Living Path treats poetry as a practice — as a place where the same recognition the kriya is engineering can arrive, sometimes faster, sometimes more permanently, because the poem reaches a part of the reader the body cannot reach by force.

Lalla is one of the four or five poets I keep coming back to for this. Kabir is another. Mirabai is another. The bani of Guru Nanak read through the Udasin lens is another. Notley, in a different register, is another. Each of them does this same thing — uses the form of the poem to do what the kriya does, but at the speed of language. The dissertation is a long argument about how this works. The Saturday morning class is the demonstration of how it works.

Sit with Lalla’s two poems before the next section. They are doing real work.

VIII. A Practical Experiment

Before we move into the kriya, I want to leave you with a practice.

The next time you find yourself feeling — specifically — I am feeling bad about myself — as soon as you notice the feeling, leave the identification with the body for a minute. Move the consciousness out beyond it. Look at the thing that is feeling bad about itself. And say: I am not that. That is just an appearance inside of me. This life is just an appearance inside of me. Oh — it is struggling today. Okay. Let it struggle.

Then say: let it relax.

It will relax. Because the attention is no longer in the struggle. When the attention stays stuck in the struggle, the struggle stays stuck for longer. This is the same mechanism, by the way, that makes certain kriyas so effective. If you are inside the burning of the arms held overhead, you will collapse much sooner than if you have stepped slightly outside the creature, watching the creature, watching the creature’s reactions, watching whether the creature judges itself or wants to run.

This is not dissociation in the clinical sense. It is not numbing. It is not abandoning the body. It is realizing that the body is one of the appearances inside a much larger field of awareness, and you are the field, not the appearance. The appearance is welcome. The appearance can struggle. The appearance can fail. The appearance can be ridiculous. And. It is not what you are.

IX. A Note on the Method, and a Brief Word on the Letter

The teaching above is what I do. It is what I have been doing on Saturday mornings for years now, and what I will continue to do under the new name. If you have read the pre-reveal, you already know the broad strokes: I am rebranding from UBU to The Living Path: Nonduality, Kundalini, and Poetry, because those three are the actual instruments of my practice and my pedagogy, and the old name no longer reflects what is happening in the room.

What I want to add here, since the rebrand is unfolding in public and in real time, is a small refinement of how I am thinking about it. The Living Path is not a brand in the marketing sense. It is a name for a method. And the method, for me, has three intertwined commitments.

First: a nondual reading of the Kundalini Yoga teachings — including a careful, textually grounded reading of the Siri Guru Granth Sahib through the lens of the Udasin and Nirmala lineages, which is the lineage Yogi Bhajan himself participated in, and which Yogi Amandeep is now opening for those of us willing to study seriously.

Second: poetry as the locus, not the ornament. Reading Kabir, Lalla, Mirabai, Nisargadatta, the bhakti and sant poets, alongside the Guru Granth and the Kundalini Yoga teachings — not because poetry is nice, but because poetry is the form in which these teachings often first occurred, and the form in which they preserve a kind of ontological precision that prose tends to flatten.

Third: a refusal of what I have started calling, only partly tongue-in-cheek, the wellness mocktail. I am not going to sell you a cacao ceremony, a tarot reading, a luxury retreat for the filthy rich, or a story about how amazing your life is going to be. I am going to do my best to deliver real teachings, and to help the teachings reach the spots that need to be touched in order to reveal themselves. Sometimes that is uncomfortable. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes you don’t notice the cut until later.

About the letter — I will keep this short, as I said I would. Yogi Amandeep recently wrote me a letter that has clarified, in a way I had not quite been able to articulate myself, the direction of this work. I am sitting with it. There will be more to say in time.

X. An Invitation

I’ll close where I always end up closing now, which is by asking rather than telling.

The world the Kundalini teachings entered in the 1960s and 1970s does not exist anymore. The institutional structures that held the teachings are dissolving. The teachers are aging. The lineages are quietly going underground — being carried by smaller rooms, with fewer people, with much less visibility. I do not believe this is a tragedy. I think this is what lineages do when surface conditions shift. But it does mean that the question of what a sangat actually is, and what a teacher is for, is genuinely open right now, more openly than at any other point in my life.

So I am asking, as I asked in the pre-reveal: what do you need? What do you need from a teacher? What do you need from a sangat? What is missing in what is currently available? What do you wish someone would say plainly that no one is saying? Comments, replies, emails — they are all welcome, and they all reach me. I read them. The shape of what The Living Path becomes is being shaped, in part, by what you tell me.

And — please — if any of the above sounds like the room you’ve been looking for, come sit with us. Saturday mornings at 9 AM Central. Bring a mat, bring a cushion, bring nothing. We start on time. We end with the long-time-sun. In between, we work.

The link is at ubukundalini.yoga (the site will move, but I will keep that address pointing the right way during the transition). You can also write to me at giannavjeet@ubukundalini.yoga.

May you be guided to look through all of your ups and downs, shortcomings and pluses, with easiness. Realize that it is all within the cosmic flow.

Sat Nam.

— Gian