Kundalini Yoga

What exactly is yogavastha?

Ending of duality.
Duality that differentiates between you and me, mine and yours, good and bad, happiness and misery.

Assimilating all these into a single state of unity is called yogavastha, which is reached through samadhi.

Yoga is to experience the unlimited.
To exchange our day-to-day, object-by-object, event-by-event, time-bound limited experience with the unlimited experience.
Rather than experiencing piece by piece, experiencing as a whole.

There are three methods in yoga: hatha yoga, ashtanga yoga, and kundalini yoga.

Hatha yoga is trying to achieve yogavastha by forcing the body through asanas, pranayama, and kriyas.
But by its own admission, this is very difficult to achieve, and even when achieved, doesn't last long.

Maharshi Patanjali propounded the ashtanga yoga — yoga with eight organs —
in which he included behavioural changes and changes in attitude and perspective to make the yogavastha more stable.
Asana and pranayama he kept as just two organs in this system.
The others being yama, niyama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.

The third system is to achieve yogavastha by awakening an innate latent power that is present in the body.

In kundalini yoga, yogavastha is achieved through a technique called shat chakra bheda —
or piercing the six centres in the body using a power called kundalini shakti.

Kundalini shakti is normally asleep in the form of a coiled serpent at the base of the spinal column.
This shakti is Devi, it is the power of Devi.
It is a feminine energy.

If you can see up to infinity, if your vision is up to infinity, then you can actually see nothing.
You are able to see because your vision is limited to a certain distance and a certain range of frequencies of light.
Otherwise, there will be so much information going into your eyes that the eyes won't be able to make out anything.
Same with sound and other sensory organs also.

When limitation is imposed on the whole, then parts of it can be sensed with the sensory organs.
The power that imposes the limitation is called maya, or shakti, or Devi.
The whole upon which she imposes limitation is Shiva.

She is called the Mother of the Universe because it is she who imposes limitations on the unlimited, thus giving rise to the world experience.
मीयते अनया इति माया — That by which things become measurable is maya.

When maya is imposed, then objects become measurable — in terms of length, breadth, height, weight, position, and time.
Without maya, if you are seeing a stone as a whole piece,
when maya is imposed, you start seeing it as a conglomeration of a million independent molecules, each having its own independent existence and dynamics.

The position of shakti is at the root of the spinal column — the muladhara.
The position of shiva is at the top — called the sahasrara.

When they are separate like this, then we have worldly experience.
In our ordinary state of awareness, we see a world separate from us — other than us, around us, above and below us — separate from us.
This is the ordinary world experience.

When shakti rises up through the spine and joins Shiva, then we experience unity — or experience the whole.
Everything merges into ourself. Oneself.
When everything becomes a single unity called Brahman,
and the experience that 'I am Brahman' comes —
sarvam khalvidam brahma, aham brahmasmi.

This happens in the body of the sadhaka, for a limited period of time.

Is shakti ever different from shiva? Never.
Because shakti is part of shiva.
They are always together as Ardhanareeswara.

When the male part is active, then there is no universe — it is static.
When the female part is active, it is shakti — it is dynamic.

In that sense, you can say that shakti is the dynamic aspect of shiva,
or shiva is the static aspect of shakti.

Ramaswamy Sastry and Vighnesh Ghanapaathi