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All spiritual traditions regard our ordinary human condition as somehow flawed or corrupt, as falling short of the unsurpassable perfection or wholeness of Reality. As a process of transformation, Yoga endeavors to re-form or, in the words of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, even “super-form” the spiritual practitioner. The old Adam has to die before the new super-formed being can emerge—the being who is reintegrated with the Whole. Not surprisingly, this transmutation of the human personality is also often couched in terms of self-sacrifice. In gnostic language, the “lower” reality must be surrendered, so that the “higher” or divine Reality can become manifest in our lives. For this to be possible, the spiritual practitioner must somehow locate and emulate that higher Reality. He or she must find the “Heaven” within, whether by experiential communion or mystical union with the Divine or by an act of faith in which a connection with the Divine is simply assumed until this becomes an actual experience. Spiritual discipline (sādhana), then, is a matter of constantly “remembering” the Divine, the transcendental Self, or Buddha nature. There can be no such transformation without catharsis, without shedding all those aspects of one’s being that block our immediate apperception of Reality. Traditions like Yoga and Vedānta can be understood as programs of progressive “detoxification” of the body-mind, which clears the inner eye so that we can see what is always in front of us—the omnipresent Reality, the Divine. So long as our emotional and cognitive system is toxic or impure, that inner eye remains veiled, and all we see is the world of multiplicity devoid of unity. The modern gnostic teacher Mikhaёl Aїvanhov remarked about this: Not so many years ago, when people’s homes were still lit by oil lamps, the glass chimneys had to be cleaned every evening. All combustion produces wastes, and the oil in these lamps deposited a film of soot on the inside of the glass, so that, even if the flame was lit, the lamp gave no light unless the glass was cleaned. The same phenomenon occurs in each one of us, for life is combustion. All our thoughts, feelings and acts, all our manifestations, are the result of combustion. Now it is obvious that in order to produce the flame, the energy which animates us, something has to burn and that burning necessarily entails waste products which then have to be eliminated. Just as the lamp fails to light up the house if its glass is coated with soot . . . similarly, if a man fails to purify himself he will sink deeper and deeper into the cold and dark and end by losing life itself.
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