Spiritual teaching involves passing a communication or message from a higher source to a lower recipient. By definition, the spiritual Master Teacher is more highly developed, and the student is less developed in consciousness. To help the student progress, the teacher must communicate the message of the Esoteric Teaching to the student. Let’s examine this process of communication.
Communication involves taking an idea or concept in one person’s mind, encoding it into some language or other system of representation, and writing it down or speaking it to another person. The recipient hears or reads the message, decodes the language and ideally, is left with an idea or concept identical to the intent of the speaker or originator of the message.
Of course, we all have experienced that the process of communication rarely goes so smoothly. Any error in a message can render it useless, or even dangerous. If a long mathematical formula or calculation has even one small error in the beginning, the result will be completely erroneous.
Similarly, the Vedic spiritual process is precise and scientific. Any error in understanding the process or its application will deviate the result from the original intention. To attain the result, the teacher’s communication of the message of the Teaching must result in an exact duplicate in the student’s mind. If the student begins working with a corrupted copy of the Teaching, the result will be useless.
Here is how the process of realizing the Esoteric Teaching is supposed to work. The process of spiritual realization has four stages: duplication, understanding, contemplation and realization. First let’s look at the process of duplication.
After accepting that the pursuit of the Absolute Truth is the purpose of human life, the sincere Candidate approaches a Master Teacher—an authorized source of this Teaching—and receives precise knowledge of the Absolute Truth. The student can also refer to the literature of the Esoteric Teaching to verify that the teacher is presenting it accurately and to reinforce the information in his own mind. This is called duplication.
Then by a long process of practice, experimentation, observation and inner debate, the student can verify and unify the dynamic elements of this transcendental knowledge, and figure out why it is the way it is. The student must ask himself, “How can it be that this Teaching is correct?” and work out the inner logic of the Teaching for himself. This is called understanding.
Next, the student admires the beauty of his personal copy of the Absolute Truth. When the disciple meditates upon the essence of his perfected understanding; this is called contemplation. Prolonged contemplation of the Absolute Truth leads automatically to the fourth stage of actual Enlightenment or realization.
Realization of the Absolute Truth is of three types or in three distinct stages: Brahman, Paramatma and Bhagavan. Each stage has its own well-defined array of yogic techniques performed in the context of the standard Vedic transcendental ontology of the Esoteric Teaching. These techniques gradually develop into the various spiritual perfections by applying the four basic functions of the intelligence—duplication, understanding, contemplation and realization—to the transcendental subject matter. The proper use of intelligence is thus the first and the last word in the process of searching for the Absolute Truth.
To use these methods of approaching the Absolute Truth effectively, one must first mentally record or duplicate the background philosophy of the Teaching. That is, one must read or hear about this philosophy from one who understands it properly, both in theory and in practice. One should hear so nicely that one can repeat and explain the philosophy perfectly, almost like a tape recorder. As far as possible, one must make an exact mental copy of the philosophy of the Teaching.
This is the standard of duplication. Unless we duplicate the information about the Supreme Absolute Truth, how can we think about it properly? If we start thinking with an imperfect copy of the information, even if we reason perfectly we may reach a spurious, deviant conclusions. If one performs ten pages of mathematical calculations perfectly, but makes a mistake in the procedure, the result will be incorrect. So to be successful in our reasoning about the Esoteric Teaching, we must start with a perfect duplicate of the original Teaching, then mature our understanding through understanding, contemplation and realization.
The Esoteric Teaching maintains accurate duplication in the transmission from teacher to student by using an error-correction protocol. We have experience with error-correction protocols. Anyone who has connected to the Internet with a modem has used an error-correction communications protocol without even knowing it.
Also, in ordinary Western materialistic education, a great deal of information is transmitted from the teacher to the student. How can the teacher be sure that the student has received an accurate copy of the information? By questions, quizzes, tests and reports. If the student gets a high grade on the test, it indicates that the information has been transmitted accurately. If the student fails the test or has trouble answering the teacher’s questions in class, this indicates that a problem with duplication of the information needs to be resolved. Thus the real purpose behind tests and quizzes in Western academics is error correction of duplication.
Reports serve a similar purpose, but indicate that the student has understood the subject well enough to think independently. This level of understanding is a more advanced stage than simple duplication of the subject material. Especially at the University level, education is designed to produce an understanding of the subject enabling the student not only to think independently without distortion of the subject, but also to perform research and make a unique individual contribution to the field.
If this is true in mundane education, how much more so in spiritual life? What is at stake is not merely one’s material career, but one’s eternal spiritual destiny. Therefore, the Vedic lineages of the Esoteric Teaching use a sophisticated error-correction protocol to ensure that the teaching is passed down accurately from teacher to student. This system has proved accurate over many thousands of years. Let’s see how this works by comparing the accuracy of a message transmission with and without using an error-correction protocol.
The game of telephone is a well-known party pastime, wherein a short message is whispered around a circle. The joke of the game is that the final version of the message is nothing like the original. This is because no error-correction protocol is used to certify each copy of the message.
Now imagine the same game, but each time the message is whispered to the next person in the circle, they must whisper it back until it is certain that their copy is correct. While this might make the game a lot less fun, it would certainly result in improved fidelity in the transmission of the message around the circle.
This exercise demonstrates that an error-correction protocol is required for accurate transmission and duplication, even of a short message. The Esoteric Teaching is a very complex and subtle message, requiring many volumes of Vedic Sanskrit codes for its complete expression. Certainly, without some form of error correction, there is no possibility of this great message being transmitted without error.
The Esoteric Teaching uses two types of error-correction protocols: literary and instructional. The literary error-correction protocol uses a specific message header called a mula-mantra to signify the beginning of a mantra, or transcendental message. The mantra itself is encoded in the form of Sanskrit sacred poetry. Each line of poetry is written in a meter having a specific number of long and short syllables. The sum of the long and short syllables must equal a predefined value for that meter. After hearing the mantra the student must be able to copy or repeat it perfectly. This prevents duplication errors in copying or transmitting the mantra, even in situations where modern publishing technology is unavailable and the message must be copied by hand.
The instructional error-correction protocol relies on another feature of Sanskrit sacred poetry, which in this mode has at least seven distinct levels of esoteric encryption. The teacher can assess the student’s level of realization by asking for an analysis of the meaning of the mantra. The student’s response will indicate how deeply he has been able to realize the esoteric meaning of the mantra, which can only be decrypted by personal experience of self-realization. The teacher then awards the student a degree of initiation appropriate to the level of self-realization he has actually attained. This is the principle of an authentic esoteric school. Of course, this also means that the level of understanding of the student is limited by that of the teacher. This is all the more reason to search for a fully self-realized Master Teacher.
In the school of the Esoteric Teaching, the student is able to verify that what the teacher says is identical to the written message in the Vedic literature. The teacher examines the student to make certain that he has duplicated the Teaching properly before awarding initiation or authorizing him to teach others. We use all these error-correction methods in the community of the Esoteric Teaching.
Western Tantra and Yoga schools claim that their teachings are based on the ancient Vedic tradition. Then why are their teachings and practices—and especially their results—different from the ancient traditions they claim to represent? Western Tantra and Yoga schools use no error-correction protocol. Since they are just commercial businesses, not esoteric schools, anyone can attend their classes simply by paying for them; there are no prerequisites or other entry requirements. The teachers are not initiates of any authorized Vedic lineage. They do not check the understanding of their students according to the esoteric principles, and the students do not get initiation or the approval of their teachers before passing on the teaching. Often, students mix the ideas of several teachers when they begin to teach their own classes.
Therefore, Western Tantra and Yoga schools are not faithful to the original Vedic version of their disciplines. So how can they deliver the powerful results of actual Yoga and Tantra? The answer is simple: they can’t and they don’t.
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