Page 200 - Wisdom Unfurled

Introduction
Stages on the path of Realisation
The Master unfolds in this Chapter a panoramic vista of the stages the aspirant comes across during his progress on the Path of Realization. The Master endowed with an extraordinary degree of spiritual sensitivity has been able to identify the multifarious spiritual conditions encountered and gone through by Him till He reached the Ultimate condition possible to a human being.
As He puts it elsewhere one should possess the capacity to move up and down through the various planes of spiritual consciousness, secure mergence in a particular knot or sub-centre before putting down the experience had in that place in terms of the thought content, feelings and attitude one forms towards the self, Master, God and existence in general through the perspective gained from the experience at that place. In the case of the Master He started writing about the various conditions after He secured the subtlest and the most sublime heights in spirituality endowing the account with the authority of direct intuitional insight. The Master has always stressed the superiority of experiential knowledge and that too as obtained through yogic intuitional insight and He has stated elsewhere that His views and conclusions as to the nature of Reality are based upon His own direct anubhava whatever Sankara or Ramanuja might say. He says again characteristically that the yogi does not infer fire from smoke but sees things directly.
The Master has presented His system of Rajayoga in several ways. In His first work, ‘Commentary on Ten Commandments of Sahajmarg’, he presented it from the point of practical methods to be adopted to achieve the desired goal namely, moderation in daily life. This work constitutes the ethics of the system. In His book, ‘Efficacy of Rajayoga in the light of Sahaj Marg’ He has revealed the possibilities of human consciousness for evolving from the absolutely self-centered one to the purely Divine oriented through various levels called by Him as Heart region, Mind region and Central region. It is in this work He has presented to the world His inventions of points ‘A’ and ‘B’ located in the chest region of the human frame and counseled meditation on these points for the evolution of consciousness. In His book, ‘ Towards Infinity’ He has delineated the various levels of consciousness lying twisted due to the very nature of evolution (involution) itself and identified mainly 13 knots and many more minor ones for general assessment of spiritual growth of an individual (Imperience beckons p141).