The Yoga of Non-separation

from the Spring 2007 issue

An extract from The Yoga of Non-separation

The essential Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita is the Yoga of non-separation because it abolishes the sense of separation between God and man. If the supreme power which rules the universe were really cut off from the inner being of man, there would be no road to salvation or liberation. Thankfully this is not the true situation. For hidden within and behind the individuality is that ‘divine thread running through all beings’. It is by recognising that subtle thread of divinity within himself that man can make his approach to the true wisdom of non-duality, of non-separation. His ultimate realization will reveal the state beyond individuality and personality. It is a recognition, as one mystic has said, that: ‘One Power Supreme is the only one Soul of each and all, and that am I.’

Why is the divine Self apparently hidden from man, even though it is the ultimate principle of his own being, his fundamental essence? The Self is never really hidden and is always more than known to us, since we are ever identified with it. We are It. Hence we cannot know it objectively, any more than fire can be said to heat itself or the eye see itself. ‘You cannot know the Knower of knowing’, says the Upanishad. What is necessary is to realize the Self as self-evident and self-illumined without the interference of the thinking processes. While there is mental activity and the insistence that knowledge belongs to the mind, the omniscience of the true Self is veiled and the quest for self-knowledge is confused. But once we have grasped that the thought-producing mind can never reveal, display or conceive its own source, then man, tranquillizing the mental process, withdrawing his sense of identity from the mind and affirming his true identity, will realize that he is that Self. Yoga prepares man for this realization.