Once a very famous doctor had come to meet me from South India. He had heard about the innumerable experiences of the sadhaks at Dhyan Ashram and wanted to experience them for self. My first question to him was if he had a Guru, to which he answered in affirmative. When I asked him about his spiritual experiences, he had had none. Having no experiences even after nearly 20 years of sadhna and yet following the same path…seemed a little strange to me. Normally the experience of the subtler dimensions and gods and goddesses happens within a year. The answer to my doubt lay in the statement which he made, “yog and bhog go hand in hand”, he was looking for bhog and he wanted to put on the garb of Yoga, same would have applied to the gentleman who he called his Guru, a mutual symbiosis. He did not understand the concept of yog and bhog, and the concept seemed alien to his Guru as well…Maybe to the Guru the concept was not alien but the desire to have well-to-do shishyas took over the duty of a Guru; a pitfall which has been discussed in detail in the Yogsutras.
If I go into the mechanics of yog, I would say that the pleasures of the body or bhog require 7- 8 % of normal brain functioning and in any normal person its 7 to 8% of the brain which functions, because you don’t need anything else. Your desire is bhog, your five senses do not need more than this, you live in a false world, day-dream and call it yog and dhyan. The people who teach day-dreaming meditations, desire your wealth and you are fooled. Internationally Yoga is taken as an exercise of the physical body twisting and turning into funny postures.
I would blame not the international community but the people who go to teach them as Gurus, for they are catering to the demand of low developed brains having efficiency of 7-8 percent only, for such people it would be difficult to understand how you can slim down by sitting in dhyan without jogging, so they would not buy the courses offered in the market – the Guru would make no money nor get any fame.
To get into yog and experience the higher dimensions, it is imperative that you shut off the normal brain functions, for only then the higher centres will get activated and only then you will experience what is beyond. Once you experience what is beyond, you also experience the power of higher forces – Demonic and Divine. But to reach at that level you need the sanidhya of a Guru who you follow…and not vice versa.
Patanjali was very clear on this – Yogah chitta vritti nirodh. He never said bhog is a stage of yog. People who have no idea of what is beyond, normally teach day-dreaming meditation and feed your ego for their personal pecuniary gains.
Yog and bhog are two different things and exist in different dimensions. Yog is for rising above bhog. As you advance in yog, the bhogs, which are grosser, leave you. And experiences of higher pleasure or ananda (bliss) follow. These experiences could be interaction with gods and goddesses, or an elevated consciousness with which you can manifest your thoughts and other experiences of the subtler world, as experienced routinely by sadhaks at Dhyan Ashram. A normal person does not understand this and has no patience to wait for this experience of bliss. He gets stuck in the cycle of experiencing bhogs and keeps going lower and lower.
The difference between physical pleasure (bhog) and spiritual bliss (yog) becomes clear from an episode from the life of Adi Shankaracharya. On being asked the difference between the two, Adi Shankaracharya entered the body of a King to experience sexual pleasure. On reentering his body, he shared that the physical pleasure is limited and has a peak but spiritual bliss has no peak. It goes on increasing. To experience this bliss, give yog (not bhog) priority in life and see what follows.
