Esoteric Teaching Introductory Seminar

The Vedic Science of Consciousness

by David Bruce Hughes

Part 1-C: Content and Context

Hello, I’m David Hughes; and today I’d like to talk to you about Content and Context. Remember we said that yoga and tantra and other aspects of Eastern spiritual life are completely misunderstood in the West. Why is that? Well, one important reason is that we're taking yoga and other eastern spiritual practices like meditation completely out of their natural context. What context is that? The Vedas.

The Vedas are the Sanskrit literatures of India, and they were recorded, written down about five thousand years ago by Vyäsadeva. However their existence is eternal, and they were passed down by word of mouth from the Supreme Lord Himself to Brahma, the first created being in this universe, and to his disciples and on down to the present day. This is the origin of the Esoteric Teaching, and it is meant to be understood in the context of the Vedas. The Esoteric Teaching, in other words, does not stand alone but it requires Vedic knowledge and Vedic culture in order to make sense. Otherwise if we take it out of context we will certainly distort its meaning, and we will also have to change the practices to fit a different culture, and this is going to change the result. 

I think its clear to everyone that if we change the practices of yoga we're also going to change the result that we get. Just like if you change the formula of a chemical reaction, you're going to change the product, or if you change a mathematical formula then the answer your going to get will be different. This is common sense, but what doesn’t seem to be common sense to many people is that if we change the methods of yoga or change the context of yoga, the result is going to be different. So the result we get from practicing yoga in Western culture, separate from its original context is going to be a very different result that we get by practicing yoga in its original context. 

Let me give you a very simple example This is a picture of a cat, a black cat, on a black rug, at midnight, with all the lights off. Why can't you see that cat? Very simple: the context does not permit you to see any difference between the cat and its background. Now here’s a picture of a cat, the same cat, on a white rug in a bright room at midday. No problem seeing the cat, right? Why? Because the context is different. The context permits you to make a distinction between the content and the context, the foreground and the background. So context is important; without the proper context we will not be able to cognize the different aspects of the Esoteric Teaching that make it work. 

So if we artificially try to understand the Esoteric Teaching out of its normal context, which is the Vedas and Vedic culture, then what we will get is something completely different from the original meaning. This should be obvious to any intelligent person; but because Vedic culture is almost unknown in the West, the disciplines of yoga, tantra and so on that have been introduced in the West have been totally changed. Why? Because when you change the context you change the meaning. That should be clear to everyone. So what is the original context of the Esoteric Teaching  of yoga, tantra, meditation and so on? It is a sacred society. Vedic society is based on the principle of self-realization. It is not like Western society: dog-eat-dog, may the best man win, a society of mundane competition. But it is a society based on spiritual realization, now what does that mean? 

We are now in the material world and we are suffering. Why are we suffering? Because we are not material beings; we are spiritual beings. We are not these bodies; we are pure consciousness, and as beings of pure consciousness we have a need for beauty, love, bliss, eternal existence and pure knowledge, Absolute Truth. And if we don’t get these needs fulfilled we suffer; just as if you would deny us food or drink, to deny the soul  the Absolute Truth and the beauty of perfect love makes us suffer. Therefore in this material world we can never truly fulfill the needs of the soul.

We have taken the spiritual living being and put it into a foreign context, a context where none of our real needs can be met. More than that, we have identified with the body, but the body is not the self. We all have a feeling of eternal existence because are conscious and we are consciousness; therefore the soul can never be happy in the material body, because the material body is always temporary. We change our body from babyhood to childhood, to youth, to middle age, to old age and then we have to die. This is completely unnatural to the spirit soul, therefore we are always feeling some inconvenience in this material world. Things are never perfect here, even if we were to go to the highest planet of this material world. There is still suffering and anxiety there, and these things are foreign to the soul.

Therefore Vedic culture is based on the understanding that we are not these bodies, we are spiritual living beings, we are eternal living entities and our real home is in the spiritual world. Vedic culture provides all the tools for us to go to the spiritual world. It is a culture that is not based on competition, but on cooperation; it is not based on material acquisition, but on spiritual advancement. So the culture derived from the Vedic literatures is a different context, a different social milieu, a completely different environment than the one we're used to in the West. 

So again to bring yoga, meditation, spiritual life out of India, out of Vedic culture (not that India is following Vedic culture nowadays) to bring these arts out of Vedic culture and into Western culture  is going to introduce distortions in them. And in addition if we take the Esoteric Teaching and yoga out of the Vedic context we will distort the meaning of it. So for example many people are claiming to follow the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali, yoga-sutras of Patanjali, but yoga-sutras understood apart from the Vedas will not make sense. Why? Because you're isolating them from their original context.

Just to give an example, here is a Vedic sloka, Sanskrit verse,giving the different practices for the different historical periods or yugas; and as you can see, in the Kali-yuga the recommended practice is chanting mantras, not yoga or meditation or sacrifices or temple worship. Therefore we are following the instructions of the Vedas and in this age of Kali we're chanting mantras, because why? That is the dharma that is the religious process, that is the means of spiritual advancement in the Kali-yuga. 

So by taking the yoga-sutras out of context and missing the fact that these  methods are not really appropriate for the Kali-yuga, people are wasting their time, they are doing so many things, not even following the yoga-sutras properly, and then wondering why they’re not getting the actual results of the yoga-sutras: to attain samadhi. They are not getting the results of following the yoga-sutras because they are not following all the eight limbs of yoga beginning with yama and niyama. If you begin asana before yama-niyama you won't get any result. Why? You're performing the steps in the wrong order; besides in Kali-yuga we don’t have the facilities required for these exercises. You should be in a quiet place in the woods, maybe living in a cave, completely renounced, completely concentrated on meditation. 

Meditation on what? People don’t know because they have taken these arts out of the context of the Vedic literature. That’s why they aren’t getting any result; that’s why people can practice hatha-yoga for thirty or forty years, and maybe they have a nice looking physique but they have not reached samadhi. We were able to reach samadhi in a very short time simply by following the chanting process. 

So you should go on with the chanting process as we recommended in the first video, that simply chant this mantra om namo bhagavate väsudeväya;  and in the next tape we will also show you the proper chanting method. So you can go on chanting this mantra for many hours in the day, if you have the time. Concentrate on this mantra; the more you concentrate on it, the quicker the benefit will come. So please don’t take the teachings out context, don’t change the meaning, but keep hearing form the Esoteric Teaching and you will certainly attain everything that spiritual life has to offer.