Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

dependencies on dogmas, beliefs, gurus, churches, and temples? Can you loosen the bondage of your own fixed ideas? This freedom, beyond fear and acceptance, lies across the void of your own failings and ignorance, and lights your own unique path, a path that can never be walked by another. Can you be free from images and spiritually adolescent cosmic fantasy, living in the potent presence of the mysterious and the miraculous, the sacred in all things, seeing the play and constant movement of life and death that is awakening? Can you live beyond images and personifications of the infinite in the freedom, joy, and aliveness of the unknown? These questions have no answers—they are the light on the path.
    Meditation and spirituality can be simple and natural, or made into complex forms of mental contortion and inner battle that supposedly take years of effort to master. What is one to do instead? Be quiet, sit, and breathe in a place of beauty or with the simplicity of a candle flame.Sit under the stars with a quiet mind and no goal. Be attentive to all things in life. Honor yourself. Laugh at yourself. Listen to the voice of your own body. Carry joy and light on your path. Listen to the wise, but always question. Truth and love are simple and ever present.
    We need not seek initiations and intermediaries. We need only the awakening that allows us to see. Awakening comes uninvited from a flower, a person, a word of love, a crisis, or the wind on the water. This awakening may not even require a big experience, or a mysterious inner light. Inner visionary experiences can be overwhelmingly beautiful, but they are no more so than the outer visions we see each day in the universe. We have just become used to, numb to, the miracles in which we are living.
    Meditation and spirituality come into being in the twinkling of an eye in any moment that allows us to pierce the veil of the ordinary, the repetitive, the dull. We need only the sensitivity of understanding and awareness—insight that reveals that we are already immersed in the miraculous, the holy, the sacred. It is the earth, the trees, the wind. It is the rivers, the stars, and the cosmos—and each person. It is the miracle of life, of consciousness itself; it is the immeasurable. The beauty of nature, the body, the hand, the eye, and the existence of love are all facets of this miraculous jewel. The self is not a tiny spark in all these things—it is all of these things. It is the All, and the universe is its face. We are at once the infinite and the infinitesimal, the eternal and ephemeral. We stand on the shoulders of the past seeing farther than ever before. We are the self-reflecting part viewing the whole, the observer and the observed, time-bound and timeless, our lives the prayer. Tat Twam Asi,
you are that!

Ganga in Fatehpur Sikri, India. 1971.

About the Author —
A Short Biography
    Ganga White is a lifelong adventurer, explorer, and student of yoga. His odyssey began when he was eleven years old and saw the word “yogi” chalked on a school sidewalk. It being the late fifties, no doubt it was some baseball fan’s favorite-player graffiti, but for Ganga, it seemed something foreign and the strangeness in it needed deciphering. He asked a kid on the playground, “What’s a yogi?” and was told that yogis were “these guys in the Himalayas who could wave their hands and make a flower appear.” In that instant he resolved to go there someday.
    This vignette illustrates the offbeat leanings of Ganga’s mind and the strength of his curiosity, even from an early age. The image of a yogi making flowers appear never left him. Always fascinated by nature, science, and electronics, he earned his amateur radio operator’s license at age fourteen and spoke with people around the world on ham radio. He raced hot rods and earned his California State University tuitionby fixing TVs and managing an electronics store. In 1966 he and a friend read
Black Like Me
and Errol Flynn’s autobiography and decided to drop out and explore life, the civil rights movement, and the turbulent sixties. They traveled the country hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, eventually landing back on Sunset Strip in the heyday of the counterculture and participating in and conducting visionquests using the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
.
    Ganga began his study in 1966 of yoga and comparative religion with the scholar Dr. Framroze Bode, a Zoroastrian high priest and Doctor of Religion in