“Guruji, what is pratyahara?,” I asked my teacher. He came closer to me, turned my head to face a wall in his practice room and asked, “Look at that wall, what do you see?” “A wall?,” I asked timidly. “If you see a wall that means you have to practice pratyahara, then afterwards you will see God, not a wall.”
Yoga is a tantric practice in which the practitioner practices seeing all of life as alive, as the living manifestation of God. What is realized in the yogic state of samadhi is the Oneness of being. A realized yogi does not see a world populated with others—living beings or inanimate objects—separate from themselves. A realized yogi sees the Self/God in all of life. It is the illusionary appearances of others that must be overcome in order to break though the false separation between self and other, or between self and nature, or between self and God. Practically speaking, what that might mean is that you start by putting a face on the other, you relate to others that you encounter as persons, you even relate to the Earth as a person, to animals, trees, plants, even streams, rivers and oceans or rain and wind as persons. You don’t see the living world as made up of inanimate objects or unfeeling, faceless animals, plants, minerals or elemental forces, but as individuals, much like yourself. When you perceive the world as alive in this way, it is easier to interact with and relate to your environment; you don’t feel so alone or as if others or the world were coming at you and you were only a passive victim. Pratyahara is the practice of purifying your perception—not believing in only what you see with your physical eyes, but looking deeper. When you can really relate to others as persons more like you than not, that provides a way, an access point, to get underneath or through the illusion of separateness.
You know how it feels when you fall in love with someone and at first, they seem like a separate person, and you seem like a separate person, but then you become enthralled with the similarities rather than the differences between the two of you, which draws you even closer, and the separateness that seemed to separate you from them dissolves. You may even feel like the same person. It may dissolve for perhaps only a moment, but in that moment, you know that it’s possible. They say that everyone experiences the true Cosmic reality many times in their life. You don’t have to be an enlightened being or a saint to have this experience of the Oneness of being: it happens at the moment of sexual orgasm and at the time of death. And it also happens every night when you go to sleep, into deep sleep, where you lose your identification with your ego/personality, with your body and mind, and you no longer experience your own self as separate, you let it go. For most people the merger experiences of orgasm, death and deep sleep are involuntary, beyond their conscious control.
A yogi wants the deep sleep experience while they are awake, a conscious experience of continuous ecstasy, like a perpetual orgasm; well, we could use the metaphor of the orgasm, but we could also use the metaphor of death. Many tantric practitioners meditate on death, and others on sex and others on sleep. The word tantra means to stretch across: tan=stretch + tra=cross over. The tantric yogi stretches their perception of self and other so far that their perception magically encompasses all of existence, including of course the Divine. To the realized yogi there is nothing outside of, or separate from God.
The word sex means separation. Etymologically, the word sex is derived from the Latin roots seco and secare, which mean “to divide, cut or separate.” Actually the experience of orgasm is a resolve of sex or separation, where the person loses themself and feels the heightened experience of oneness, if for only a moment. At the time of death a person separates from their body and merges with the oceanic experience—no longer identifying themself as a separate being confined in a body of flesh and blood, but instead as one with the universe of potential. The experience of samadhi is akin to orgasm, death and sleep, as it is a resolving of all forms of separation into the reality of Oneness. Yoga means “to yoke, to connect, to dissolve disconnection.” Yoga is the antithesis of sex, because sex means separation—to divide or separate—and yoga means union—to yoke or bring together. The state of Yoga is the state of Love, unconditional. To see yourself in others—to see so deeply into others that otherness disappears and only the Self—only God, only Love—remains is the yogic magical quest. Through the practice of pratyahara—looking deeply within—one refines their ability to go past the outer differences apparent in other beings and things in order to perceive what unites all beings and things—the universal solvent, the Divine force of eternal love, which is actually the essence of one’s own self.
