There are layers after layers or degrees of reality—subjectively as well as objectively. Such as if one draws a large triangle on a canvas or a blackboard, there is a base to the triangle. Just above the base of the triangle, a few inches above it, suppose a straight line is drawn parallel to the base, touching both the sides of the triangle. A few inches above the second line, a third line is drawn, parallel to the second, and on and on line after line is drawn until one would reach to the apex of the triangle. One will find that each line is parallel to the base, and each line which rises above is nearer to the apex than the lines at the bottom. One will also notice the peculiar interesting feature of these parallel lines—the lines seem to be connected to the triangle on each side, and that the lines tend to rise higher and higher to eventually fill the apex itself. When one reaches the apex, one will find that no additional line can be drawn; it is a point where no motion of any kind is possible.

This is an example to understand the relationship between adhyatma and adhibhuta in relation to the adhidaiva, and how the many gods can be the one God ultimately. All these lines can finally absorb themselves in the one point which is the apex of the triangle. The many gods of religion, whether of the East or the West, are only the names that we give to the consciousness that is necessary for the existence of any degree of reality—objective or subjective. If we accept that there are degrees of reality, we have to accept there is a consciousness implying every degree of reality. That consciousness is adhidaiva, and that is the god of any particular degree.

Therefore, one may have a god for any stage of the manifestation of reality, whether externally or internally. We have gods outside in the heavens and gods inside within us. The heavens are nothing but the regions that we contemplate as identical with the positions of the different degrees of objective reality. These positions have to be somewhere, and that somewhere is heaven, the higher regions, one of the other worlds, and so on. Subjectively, too, the very same gods are superintending and presiding over these regions. In the Vedanta and yoga psychologies we are told that gods preside not only over the cosmos outside, but also over our own sense-organs, our minds, etc. Previously I said that we have many gods, and there is no place where a god is not present; and every god has some name which we have given in our own languages. The god may be named in Greek or Latin, or in Sanskrit or Tamil—it makes no difference. According to our own language or dialect we give some name to this god whom we adore, but the god does exist—he is not a myth. If degrees of reality exist, gods must exist.

Religion has a value in practical life. We have to ascend from the gross vritti to the higher vritti by an assimilation of the vritti into a higher state of consciousness which is immanent in it. These are the stages of yoga which we will study. All the many stages of yoga and steps of yoga are nothing but the ways of the absorption of the lower vritti into the higher, by means of a consciousness immanent in the vritti or what one might call the god of the vritti. Religion and philosophy are not separate—there is no contradiction between the two. It is all dry philosophy that says that there is no God, no gods, no religion, no temple, etc. Everything is necessary. Why not churches? Why not temples? If we can have a kitchen and a lavatory, then why not a church or a temple?

There are all varieties of the egoism of man which assert things suddenly, without understanding. Humility is the prerequisite in the search for Truth. No egoistic man can know Truth. We should be very humble and assume the Socratic method of knowing nothing rather than asserting an egoistic point of view. Knowledge does not come where ego is present. We cannot really understand the mysteries of the universe so easily, and it is fatuous to assume too much wisdom in the very beginning. We have to go slowly, stage by stage, with open eyes and firm steps.

The adhidaiva is this presiding consciousness over a particular degree of reality, both objectively and subjectively. The adhidaiva is the connecting conscious link between the subject and the object in any level of manifestation of reality. It may be physical, it may be psychological, it may be vital, or it may be intellectual. There are said to be seven worlds—one above the other. Theosophists are very fond of talking about the many worlds above. They do exist, if degrees of reality do exist. The worlds exist, the gods exist, religions exist, and devotion to the gods therefore is one of the ways of realisation of Truth.

Bhakti and jnana are ultimately one, as it is usually said. Though many think that bhakti and jnana are different, they are not. They are only two ways of looking at the same thing. We may have love for the presiding deity of a degree of reality—which is devotion—but when we meet the last point of the triangle I described, the devotion merges in ultimate Being itself, and bhakti becomes jnana. Love and the lover become one. There is no contradiction between devotion to God, the religious observance of bhakti, and the philosophical contemplation of knowledge. They are one and the same, and all are co-related.

The degrees of reality are the explanations for the existence of the many divinities or gods of religion, and these divinities are connected with us. They are not far away in the heavens, millions of miles away. They are transcendent and immanent both. They are transcendent in the sense that they imply both the subject and the object. They are immanent in the sense that they are present in us also. The presiding deity is the connecting link between the subject and the object. This connecting link is transcendent because it is not limited to the subject, and it is immanent because it lives in the subject as well. God is both transcendent and immanent—not only a god but also the ultimate God are of the same nature. Here we have an interrelated cosmos before us, not merely an objective world. The cosmos is an interrelated system of subject, object and its presiding consciousness.

We are not in an isolated world and we are not unbefriended persons—we have friends everywhere. We cannot be in a place where we have no friends. Everywhere there are friends; the world is flooded with friends. This should give us confidence and joy. In one of the great scriptures, the Yoga Vasishtha, it is said, “Gods shall protect persons who abolish the ego.” Why should not the gods come to help? The gods are everywhere. There are divinities flooding the whole cosmos.

Light emanates from every quarter of creation. There is no spot in space where consciousness is not present, where God is not present. Such is this wonderful, beautiful and magnificent world in which we are. Now we have come to the conclusion that we are in an interrelated creation. It is not merely a far-off adhibhuta, or an isolated adhyatma, or a distant adhidaiva, but a mutually related, co-related system is this universe. A rise from one level to another would imply a threefold rise. Yoga is not subjective or objective—it is universal. Some people think yoga is a selfish practice, only performed by some individual in a room. No; yoga cannot be practised in a room—that is impossible. For the yogin, there is no room. If yoga means an ascent from the lower to the higher, there is no such thing as an isolated, independent or personalised yoga. Such a thing does not exist.

We should not think that yogins are selfish people. There are some uninitiated and uninformed people in the world who think that yoga is a selfish practice of private individuals who are not concerned with the world outside. Yogins have tremendous concern, more concern than others, and they are concerned with more things than even the wisest man in the world. The yogin is more altruistic than anyone in the world, because his concern is for the whole of creation and not merely one country. The so-called patriot may criticise the yogin, thinking that he is a selfish man. However, the patriot limits his love only to his own country, while the apparently unconcerned yogin is concerned with the larger structure of the cosmos; otherwise he would not be a yogin.

Let us remember, there is no such thing as a private yoga of an individual—such a thing is a myth. All yoga is one. All life is yoga; the whole life is yoga. There is no such thing as your yoga and my yoga, Eastern yoga or Western yoga—it does not exist. Yoga is one, because any step that a practitioner takes is a universal step. It is not an individual step which is no real step at all, because one remains in the same position. When we take one step, we drag all the three together with us—the adhidaiva, adhibhuta and adhyatma. Either we have taken this threefold universal step, or we have taken no step at all. There is no such thing as an individual step of a private body. This is the answer to those uninformed wiseacres of the world who think yoga is a selfish practice of some persons in a corner of the world. It is not so.

The practice of yoga is a majestic mosaic of values which opens up our eyes to the structure of the whole cosmos and makes us concerned with everything in the world. This is the advantage, and also a disadvantage in the practice of yoga. Its advantage is that the whole world is backing us up in yoga. It is a kind of disadvantage at the same time, because we cannot ignore anything in this world in the practice of yoga. We cannot close our eyes to something and then be a yogin. We have to be completely awake to every kind of reality and every degree of manifestation of reality.

We cannot say ‘this is mine’ and ‘this is not mine’ in the true practice of yoga. We cannot say ‘this is necessary’ and ‘this is unnecessary’. We will find that there is nothing unnecessary. Everything will become necessary one day or another—even a mouse can save a lion as in the story of Aesop where a small mouse saved a captured lion. Even a mouse could save a lion, though in the beginning the lion laughed at the thought of a mouse being able to help him. Even the most insignificant things in the world may become important one day. We should not look down on any person or thing in the world as insignificant or as something unconnected with us. We may be lions, but a mouse may have to come to our aid one day. The whole world therefore is the concern of the yogin, and the whole world is the object of study of the yogin.

It is not simply one branch of learning with which he is concerned—unlike our modern students who are concerned only with more particular things in schools and universities. We might ask these students, “What are you studying?” “Oh, this and that,” they may answer. But in the field of yoga we are not just studying this or that—we are studying everything. The student of yoga is a student of everything, not merely one branch or a few branches of learning. We ought to study the whole of creation, and study it not merely as an object outside us, but as something vitally connected with us. We should not think of adhibhuta as distant, because it is as connected with us as the adhyatma.

In doing this practice, we will find that we are citizens of a wider world than the world that is before our eyes. We cannot belong to any nation or country, truly speaking. We cannot belong to any person or to any thing, and nothing can belong to us. The truth is that nothing belongs to us. How can anything belong to us in this mysterious structure of the cosmos? People who say “this is mine” and “this is not mine” naturally come to grief, because they go contrary to the truth of things. Whoever cries “mine and not mine” has to suffer, because this is a cry against Truth. Truth shall triumph, so we should not cling to this notion of “I and mine”. These notions are not going to help. They are only a vilification of reality and a cry against the very idea of creation itself.

We might have heard the word ‘vairagya’. Vairagya will automatically come to us through the practice of yoga—we have no need to struggle to practise vairagya. Why should dispassion not come when we have this awakening? How could we get attached to anything, when the world is made in the way that it is? We can understand how simple it is to be unattached to the world. Why do we imagine that it is so difficult to practise detachment? “Oh, I’m so involved in this.” How can we be involved? It is impossible to be involved in a structure of this kind.

Hence, detachment becomes a spontaneous way of living. We cannot but be detached in a world of this nature. In this way, yoga becomes a natural condition of our lives. It is not an effort that we have to exert. We have to be yogins, and we cannot be but that. This is a wondrous vista that gets revealed before us through an analysis of the nature of creation and the beautiful relation between the adhyatma, adhibhuta and adhidaiva, the degrees of reality and their interrelationship.

I mentioned that we have to rise from the lower to the higher, and that this is yoga. The vrittis of the mind are in different degrees of reality, and every vritti is connected with a particular object; and as there are degrees of these objects, there are also degrees of the vrittis. We have been told that there are seven stages of knowledge and seven stages of the practice of yoga also. These stages are nothing but the rise of the related consciousness from one condition of vritti to another condition. But what are these layers that we have to transcend, and how does consciousness manifest itself? In what form does it reveal itself—in a particular degree of reality, or in a form of the vritti?

This is what we could call the ‘evolution of consciousness’, and about which people like the philosopher Henri Bergson have written a lot. Bergson’s wonderful book Creative Evolution, for which he won the Nobel Prize, is worth reading. This creative evolution of Bergson, or for the matter of fact, any biological evolution, is nothing but the study of consciousness as it appears to evolve through the different degrees of reality. I mentioned that consciousness cannot really evolve, because it does not change and is not involved in a process. It appears to evolve as it gets extricated from the clutches of the different degrees of vrittis of the mind, just as light appears to get brighter as the mirror becomes more and more polished. A dusty mirror reflects less light; this does not mean that the light is less, because the light is actually the same. But as the mirror is polished more and more, the light appears to be brighter and brighter. One cannot say there is an evolution of light—the evolution is only in the mirror.

The ‘evolution of consciousness’ is therefore a misnomer. Consciousness cannot evolve, but it appears to evolve when it is studied in relation to that which does evolve. Yoga is a conscious attempt at bringing about this evolution from the base of the triangle to the apex of the triangle where multiplicity merges into unity. The study of these stages of consciousness is the psychology of yoga. This psychology is very interesting, and without a careful study of this psychology of the nature of consciousness that appears to evolve from the lower to the higher, we cannot know what yoga practice actually is. This requires the use of chit, which I shall take up another time.