Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

of being saved by gurus or perfect paths, we must go through our fears. The demons of fear guard the gateways to freedom. When we let go of the weight of enlightenment, as a permanent state of supreme wisdom and all-knowingness—which may be nothing more than an abstraction or concept—we are closer to the possibility of seeing the insight, light, and delight in each moment in the world outside us, and in the infinite worlds within us.

The Mystery: Death and Time
    Death is the greatest mystery and the ultimate unknown. As we have seen, death embraced is a great teacher, a potent meditation, and life is the greatest guru. Living and dying, beginning and ending, are intertwined. Death is part of life’s teaching. Yoga, religion, and spirituality concern, at the core, our relationship with death. I use the word
relationship
, instead of
knowledge
or
understanding
, because death has its own life; it is the essence of change and mystery. We cannot completely know death. As we grow older and experience the deaths of loved ones, this relationship with death can bring insight, love, maturity, compassion, and appreciation for our own mortality. Having beliefs in philosophies and hopes about the meaning of death does not inform and enlighten living in the same way that having a relationship with death does—seeing death, change, beginning and ending, in the movement of living.
    Seeing the presence of death in life gives life its preciousness. Over millennia philosophers, yogis, and sages have discussed and inquired into the possible limits of understanding death. In mystical experiences, altered states, and meditation, it is possible to experience entire lifetimes, even eternity, in very short spans of time. Many have reported back from these experiences and described feeling they lived vast periods of time in short moments. This points to the elasticity and relativity of mind states and mental time. The concept of the relativity of time appears occasionally in ancient texts such as
The Yoga Vasistha
. 7 A story is told there of the god Vishnu walking and enjoying the beauty of the earth with his student, Narada, who is a wise and advanced student. Narada is in such joy walking with his teacher and wants to understand why people suffer in illusion. He asks Vishnu to please explain the power that time, delusion, and illusion hold over people. Vishnu says it is much too complicated for such a beautiful day and he sits down on a log on a mountain ridge. Their canteens are empty so he asks Narada to please find them some water.
    Narada leaves and has to hike a long way before he finds a river. As he is filling the canteens, he sees on the other bank a beautiful young maiden bathing naked in the river. He is entranced by her full breasts, long hair, and shapely legs as he watches her bathe. After she dresses he crosses the river and introduces himself. They are both quite taken with each other and Narada decides to stay awhile. After some days they fall completely in love, and he asks her father for her hand in marriage. They are wed, and have two beautiful children. One day a huge storm arrives, bringing incessant rains. The river swells and starts to wash away the village, with his wife and sons. Narada, in great fear and panic, desperately tries to rescue his family from the rising torrents, but they drown in front of his eyes. He struggles to the banks of the river, barely saving himself, and sits on the shore wailing. Sobbing in overwhelming grief, he feels a tap on his shoulder. It is Vishnu, who says, “Narada, where have you been? It has been two hours since Iasked you to fetch us some water!” Narada comes to his senses, looks around, and sees there is no village, no flood. He realizes he has dreamed or experienced a lifetime in a few minutes. Vishnu winks at him with a look that reminds Narada he had asked to see the power of mind and illusion. This story is sometimes used to denigrate sexuality, relationships, and attachments, purporting them to be dream, illusion, and a lower level of reality. But the story also has the subtler message repeated in this old text that time is fluid, mental states are relative, and time can expand and compress in near-death experience, altered states, dream, and reveries. In a flash, time collapses from years to minutes for Narada, and he realizes the pliability of mental time and mental suffering. He sees how in the twinkling of an eye everything can change when life taps us on