WHAT IS THE "KAILASA PARAMPARAI"

The Kailasa Paramparai is a millennia-old guru lineage of the Nandinatha Sampradaya. In this century it was embodied by Sage Yogaswami, who ordained Satguru Swami Subramuniswamy in Sri Lanka in 1949 to carry on the venerable tradition.

The authenticity of Hindu teachings is perpetuated by lineages, parampara, passed from gurus to their successors through ordination.

The Kailasa Parampara extends back to, and far beyond, Maharishi Nandinatha and his eight disciples--Sanatkumara, Sanakar, Sanadanar, Sananthanar, Sivayogamuni, Patanjali, Vyagrapada and Tirumular. This succession of siddha yoga adepts flourishes today in many streams, most notably in the Saiva Siddhanta of South India. Our subject in this article is the branch of the parampara in the line of Rishi Tirumular (ca 200 bce), of which the first known satguru in recent history was the Rishi from the Himalayas (ca 1770-1840). From him the power was passed to Siddha Kadaitswami of Bangalore (1804-1891), then to Satguru Chellappaswami (1840-1915), then to Sage Yogaswami (1872-1964) of Sri Lanka, and finally to Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (1927- 2002).

The Tirumantiram states, "Thus expounding, I bore His word down Kailasa's unchanging path--the word of Him, the eternal, the truth effulgent, the limitless great, Nandinatha, the joyous one, He of the blissful dance that all impurity dispels."

The Pernicious, Persistent Ego

Anava is one's personal ego, his identity and place in the world and position on the planet. If his motives are proper and the position is earned on account of good deeds, it is not anava. But if, when praised, he takes credit for himself, it is anava. Anava is the tricky substance of the mind. It is behind every door, it's peeking in every window. It is the first thing to come at birth and the last thing to go at death. To break the chain of anava, the yoking to the Infinite beyond comprehension in any state of mind must be complete and final.

And yet, while a physical body is still maintained, the anava elf is still lurking in the shadows, saying "praise is better than blame, name must come into fame, and shame is to be avoided at all cost." This is the anava routine. It keeps people held down on the planet in the instinctive-intellectual mind of remorse and forgiveness and suffering the adjustments to circumstance that occur beyond their power of understanding.

A big gun that shoots the bullet of the depth of knowledge of karma, the second bullet, of the deep understanding of the perfect universal energies, and the third bullet, of the dharmic way of a balanced life, kills the anava and brings that purusha onto the charya marga, onto the path of the Gods, the hospital of the soul at that point. The final conquering of the tenacious anava is the final mahasamadhi, when all three worlds sing, "Mukti has been attained," the final goal of life that we on this planet know, merger with Siva.

Because ignorance is all-pervasive, equally distributed throughout the world, one must leave the world and get a wise dome, wisdom, a wise head. He must transmute the energies from the solar plexus--nothing must affect him there--to his third eye, see into the past, see into the future, and with that seeing understand the present.

If we were to admit that there are really seven margas, we would find that charya, kriya, yoga and jnana are progressive states of fullness, and the anava marga, by comparison, is a static state of emptiness. This feeling of emptiness is a motivative, driving force of desire toward the attainment of the feeling of fullness. The feeling of fullness is the awakening of the higher chakras, of course.

And the constant feeling of completeness is, of course, the permanent awakening of the sahasrara chakra. The feeling of emptiness distinguishes the anava marga from the other four margas, and this is why it is not included in Saiva Siddhanta, but is not excluded either, because the anava mala is mentioned here and there and everywhere within the scriptures. For the sake of understanding individual ego in its struggles to be whole, we have delineated it as a path leading into charya, kriya, yoga and jnana.

The path of the anava teaches us what to do and what not to do. It creates the karmas to be lived through and faced in many lives to come. And when dharma is finally accepted and understood and the religious patterns of life are encompassed in one's own personal daily experience, then and only then do we see the end of this path in view. So, the anava marga is definitely not a never-ending maze or a no-man's land.

Though a state of ignorance, it is still a state of experiential learning. All is leading, in evolution of the soul, to Sanatana Dharma. Everything preceding charya is anava marga. People try to fill their emptiness with things. They work so hard for their money, thinking, "Oh, when I can buy this object for my home, I will feel fulfilled."

They buy it with their hard-earned money. A day or two later, after ownership has taken effect, the initial fulfillment of ownership wanes, and unfulfillment, which has always been there, takes over, with the accompanying desire for the next fulfillment, object, or in the case of the intellectual, the next idea, group of ideas or new sphere of knowledge.

There is no fulfillment in the instinctive-intellectual mind. This is the way it is. This is the way it has always been, and always will be, too.

MAHAPRALAYA - COSMIC DISSOLUTION

Monistic theists hold that at mahapralaya, cosmic dissolution, all creation is withdrawn into Siva, and He alone exists.

Pluralistic theists hold that world and souls persist in seed form and will later reemerge.

Pluralistic Siddhantins contend that after mahapralaya--the withdrawal of time, form and space into Siva--souls and world are so close to Siva that, for all practical purposes, He alone exists.

Actually, they say, both world and souls continue to exist, not as things, but as "potentialities." As if in a deep sleep, souls, now in a bodiless state, rest. Individual karmas lie dormant to germinate later when creation again issues forth and nonliberated souls are re-embodied to continue their spiritual journey.

Monistic Siddhantins believe that souls persist through the lesser pralayas of the cosmic cycle, but hold that only Siva exists following mahapralaya. There is no "other," no separate souls, no separate world.

The universe and all souls are absorbed in Siva. Pasha--anava, karma and maya--is annihilated. In the intensity of pre-dissolution, when time itself is accelerated, all souls attain complete maturation, losing separateness through fulfilled merger with Siva. Yea, jiva becomes Siva. The Vedas boldly decree, "By His divine power He holds dominion over all the worlds. At the periods of creation and dissolution of the universe, He alone exists."

What Makes a House a Home?

What is it that makes a house a home? A home is a place of companionship with people in it who love each other, who are harmonious and closer inside with one another than they are outside with associates in the workplace or with classmates at school. A home is a place that's so magnetic that it's difficult to leave. In a home there is love, kindness, sharing and appreciation, and the inhabitants help one another. It's a place of selflessness and togetherness, where everybody has time for everybody else. In a home, the guests are treated like

Deities or devas coming to the temple. That is the spirit of hospitality in the Hindu framework. It is the same spirit of sublime energy flowing to the guest that also flows within the household. And a righteous household that worships every morning together as one family is like a temple. That's a home, and everything else is just a house or a hotel lobby.

If you were to look at a harmonious home with your astral vision, you would see the three primary colors--pale pink, pale blue, pale yellow--and white, all intermingling in a big pranic force field. Moving over to another house, you might see a congestion of various colors, with dark and light shades and strange astral forms, and you would know that house was not much different from a hotel lobby.

But if they live together, if they sleep together, if they talk together, if they eat together, they are a family, even if they are destitute. Such a family is at home wherever they are.

The truly homeless are some of the rich people who build multi-million-dollar houses and are too busy to really live in them.

The truly homeless are those who have turned their home into a hotel lobby. The husband works. The wife works. The children are delinquent. There's no companionship. They don't talk together every day.

They don't eat together every day. They rarely see each other. The truly homeless people are those with babysitters, caretakers, gardeners and maids, but who don't spend quality time with the family in their house. Babysitters often abuse their children.

Parents are unaware, too busy making money outside the home that they don't live in. This is another way of looking at the rich and the homeless. Who is to be pitied? Control of the computer and the Internet is also important to make a house into a home. If the computer is on all the time, the house turns into an office, even if everyone is at home.

Many homes these days are just offices. Human communication has stopped. The computer eats up the time that one should be giving to others within the home. Using the computer moderately gives us time for gentleness, play and communication, not with a screen, but with a human being. And that is the vibration needed in a home.

Fear, Anger and Opportunism

Those who want to hold a position and those who don't want to hold a position combined, those who have no time to perform sadhana, who avoid their yearly pilgrimage, whose family cannot gather in the shrine room, who do not read scripture daily and attend a temple infrequently, if at all, they are doing extremely well on the anava marga, in my estimation. Their artha and kama are coming along just fine. Dharma is ignored, and mukti just may not happen. Many people on the anava marga perform yoga, japa, disciplines of this kind, and gain great adulation, as well as business contacts, through it.

But nothing is gained other than a few minutes of quiet and aloneness. These are the opportunists, the people who make the world go 'round as we see it today. Swamis are most precious to those on the anava marga, giving blessings, amplifying their desires; adulation is sincere but not real.

The swami is taken into their family as a personal figurehead of it, like a status symbol. They do not enter the swami's ashram to do sadhana and become a part of his life. And if the swami rebels, preaches dharma and holds back blessings, he is generally abused. "Love you, use you and abuse you" is the methodology of those on the anava marga.

All swamis, gurus and priests know this only too well. The anava margi looks at God from a distance. He does not want to get too close and does not want to drift too far away, lives between lower consciousness and higher consciousness, between the manipura, svadhishthana and muladhara and the lower three, atala, vitala and sutala, which represent fear, anger and jealousy. He does not get into confused thinking.

That is super lower consciousness, in the realm of the talatala chakra. He is guided by reason. That is why he can come into the other margas. Therefore, God is at a distance. He sees himself pluralistically, separate from God, coexistent with God. Those who fear God anger easily. They fear their elders. They fear their government. They fear impending disaster, and they fear disease.

God is just one item on the long list of things that they fear. They are not on the path of spiritual unfoldment. Their higher chakras are dreaming benignly, waiting for the consciousness to explore them. Only when someone begins to love God is he on the path of spiritual unfoldment. Only then is he a seeker. Only then does his budding love begin to focus on religious icons. Only then is he able to nurture his love into becoming a bhaktar and at the same time a religious person, a giving person. This is the charya path. We come onto the charya marga from the anava marga.

We come to Lord Ganesha's feet from the anava marga. He is now the guide. The personal ego has lost its hold. The anava marga, and the glue that holds it together, is ignorance of the basic tenets of Hinduism. There is no way one can be on this marga if he truly accepts the existence of God pervading all form, sustaining all form and rearranging all form.

There is no way this marga could be pursued by one understanding karma, seeing his manifest acts replayed back to him through the lives of others, his secret diabolical thoughts attacking him through the lips of others. The anava marga does not include this knowledge.

The dharma of a perfect universe and an orderly life, the consciousness of "the world is my family, all animals are my pets" is an abhorrent idea to someone on the anava marga, especially if he is casted by birth in this life.

The anava margi abhors the idea of reincarnation. To pay the bill of one's indiscretions in another life is not what anava is all about. There is a forgetfulness here. When you renounce your childhood, you forget that you ever were a child. You forget the moods, the emotions, the joys and the fears and all that was important at that time.

TWO VIEWS ON CREATION

What Are the Two Views on Creation?

Monistic theists believe that Siva creates the cosmos as an emanation of Himself. He is His creation. Pluralistic theists hold that Siva molds eternally existing matter to fashion the cosmos and is thus not His creation.

Pluralistic Siddhantins hold that God, souls and world--Pati, pashu and pasha--are three eternally coexistent realities. By creation, this school understands that Siva fashions existing matter, maya, into various forms. In other words, God, like a potter, is the efficient cause of the cosmos. But He is not the material cause, the "clay" from which the cosmos is formed.

Pluralists hold that any reason for the creation of pasha--anava, karma and maya--whether it be a divine desire, a demonstration of glory or merely a playful sport, makes the Creator less than perfect. Therefore, pasha could never have been created.

Monistic Siddhantins totally reject the potter analogy. They teach that God is simultaneously the efficient, instrumental and material cause. Siva is constantly emanating creation from Himself. His act of manifestation may be likened to heat issuing from a fire, a mountain from the earth or waves from the ocean. The heat is the fire, the mountain is the earth, the waves are not different from the ocean.

The Vedas proclaim, "In That all this unites; from That all issues forth. He, omnipresent, is the warp and woof of all created things."

Commitment To Harmony

Traditionally, every Hindu family should have a family kulaguru, a preceptor who knows the flow of karma within all the family connections and the birth dharma of the family itself. To be without a kulaguru is likened to a child being without its parents. One of the greatest disruptive forces in a marriage is the amateur psychiatrist or psychologist practicing on his or her spouse. This tactic for solving problems is totally unacceptable.

Such efforts, however well-intended, to straighten out a spouse through subconscious analysis are antagonizing, disruptive and hurtful emotionally and mentally. All these psychiatric games are based on the principle, "Something is wrong with you, and I'm going to straighten it out. Come to me. I have all the solutions."

Saivism is different. It is based on the principle that you are perfect. The only problem is that you don't know it. Let's talk ourselves into our own perfection through reading scripture, praying, doing Sivathondu together, doing japa together, to lift our consciousness into the perfection that is always there.

If your spouse is trying to hurt you, protect yourself in the Sanatana Dharma as your first line of defense. Recognizing that this is your karma, fulfill your dharma fully, be it stri dharma or purusha dharma, the best you understand it.

The Vedas assure us that truth always wins over evil (Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.6). It is the wife's duty to uplift the husband, the husband's duty to uplift the wife. A husband bent on hurting his wife could not outlast--his hurtfulness could not survive--the wife's chanting "Aum, Aum, Aum" all day long and placing spiritual vibrations into his food. In this way, good overcomes evil, ahimsa overcomes himsa, dharma overcomes adharma.

This is why we are born on this planet, to evolve through such challenges. We are here for no other reason. But should the husband ever become physically violent, the wife should take the children and run to safety. She should stay in a safe place until he has undergone counseling, made amends to her and to the congregation, asked the family guru to prescribe a penance and fully performed that penance.

When families who are trying to meditate and unfold spiritually go through times of internal or external violence they should not practice raja yoga or other forms of meditation. This will only aggravate and worsen the situation. Yoga practices are not for them. What they should do is Sivathondu, or karma yoga, bhakti yoga and simple japa yoga. That is all.

If a disharmonious situation comes up between husband and wife, they must resolve it before they go to bed, even if they must stay up all night into the light of day. Sleep puts the problem to rest over a period of two or three nights, and it will eventually fade into the memory patterns of forgetfulness over a longer period of time. Having sex does not solve the problem. It puts the problem into seed, into the memory patterns of current forgetfulness, and these will definitely materialize at another time. Sex and sleep are not solutions to marital disputes. One is immediate postponement and the other is a slower postponement. To resolve a conflict between husband and wife, lest it affect the lives of the children by being postponed into forgetfulness, it must be done before sleep. There is no other way. This is the way husbands and wives catalyze their spiritual unfoldment on the path and develop themselves. Another reason sex is not a solution to disharmony is that babies that are conceived in a union that is supposed to settle a squabble are more often than not invoked from the Narakaloka. Such children might harass the family for the rest of their lives.

Unconditional Surrender

What do we mean by internalizing worship? In external worship we are trying to see God and communicate with God with our two eyes and our physical nerve system. We enjoy His darshan and feel His shakti.

In deep meditation, the external worship is deliberately internalized, and we are trying to see God with our third eye and feel God's all-pervasiveness through our psychic nerve system. Externalizing bhakti is really much easier than internalizing it. But once the externalized bhakti is perfected, it will be easy and natural to internalize bhakti right along. When this is accomplished, the most rigorous hurdles and time-consuming practices of yoga, which often lead the person onto anava marga, will have been side-stepped.

To internalize worship, after the puja is over, sit before the Deity and draw into yourself all the pranas you feel around your body. Then draw those energies up the spine into the head. This is done with the mind and with the breath. It is very easy to do. It is especially easy when one is at the end of a major karmic cycle. The bhakti of uncompromising surrender, prapatti, to the God during a temple puja awakens the amrita. The amrita is the sweet essence from the sahasrara chakra. It is the binding yoke to the Divine. Bind yourself in the lotus posture after temple worship and simply internalize all the feeling that you had for the God during the worship. That's all there is to it. The yogi yoked within enjoys the amrita that flows from the cranium throughout his body. Devotees who want to awaken the higher chakras and sustain that awakening on the safe path will throw themselves into becoming uncompromising bhaktars. Then all the Gods of all three worlds will open their hearts and shower their blessings upon them.

Go on a pilgrimage once a year, read scriptures daily, perform puja daily, go to the temple at least once a week, if not more often--fulfill these disciplines, known as the pancha nitya karmas. This is the basic Saiva Siddhanta sadhana. But on another level, one will not be able to fulfill the pancha nitya karmas if he or she is not fulfilling the yamas and the niyamas, for these are the character-builders. We must possess a good character to be successful in bhakti yoga.

Therefore, begin at the beginning. Right thought produces right speech, which produces right action. Right thought is produced through the knowledge of dharma, karma, samsara and the all-pervasiveness of God. This knowledge correctly understood disallows the devotee from having wrong thoughts. He simply has right thought, and of course, right speech and action follow naturally.

Saiva Siddhanta extols the guru and says that when the student is ready, one will appear. The guru will always restate the dharma to a devotee who is having problems with bhakti yoga practices. He will always direct the mind to the beginning teachings, for it would be obvious that the student does not understand one or more of them. If the devotee is not following the pancha nitya karmas or the yamas and niyamas, it is obvious that purified knowledge of these four areas--dharma, karma, samsara and Sivaness--needs to be strengthened.

Individual practices to advance spiritual unfoldment include prostrating before God, Gods and guru, full body, face down, arms and hands outstretched, and in that act, total giving up, giving up, giving up, giving up. In Sanskrit it is called pranipata, "falling down in obeisance."

What are these devoted ones giving up? By this act they are giving the lower energies to the higher energies. It is a merger, a blending. When one is performing this traditional devotional act, awakening true prapatti, it is easy to see the lower energies from the base of the spine, the muladhara chakra, rising, rising, rising up the spine through all six chakras above it and out through the top of the head.

It is transmuting, changing the form of, the base energies which breed conflict and resistance, "mine and yours" and "you and me," division, insecurity and separateness, into the spiritual energies of "us and we," amalgamation, security, togetherness. Once the giving up of the lower is total--body and face on the ground, hands outstretched before the image of God, Gods or guru--those energies are surrendered into the higher chakras within the devotee, and it is a blissful moment, into the consciousness of "us and ours," "we and oneness," and inseparable love, thus claiming their individuality, not as a separate thing, but as a shared oneness with all.

Thereafter, these devoted ones, having been transformed, are able to uplift others, to harmonize forces around them that they work with day after day after day, year after year after year. This total surrender, prapatti, is the meaning of Siddhanta. This is the true meaning of Vedanta.

The combination of both, and the pure practice of prapatti, as just described, brings out from within the deeper meanings of Vedanta, the Vedic philosophy, without having to depend on the path of words, lectures and debates.