Sahaja

(Revision as of 15:17, 21 Oct 2004)

The Sanskrit term Sahaja means natural joy, amoral, elevating all worldly things to a divine status, to dissolve natural senses into divine expression.

In The Pathless Path to Immortality, Shri Gurudev Mahendranath wrote:

"Man is born with an instinct for naturalness. He has never forgotten the days of his primordial perfection, except insomuch as the memory became buried under the artificial superstructure of civilization and its artificial concepts. Sahaja means natural. It not only implies natural on physical and spiritual levels, but on the mystic level of the miraculous. It means that easy or natural of living without planning, designing, contriving, seeking, wanting, striving or intention. What is to come must come of itself.

"It is the seed which falls in the ground, becomes seedling, sapling, and then a vast shady tree of wisdom and teachings. The tree grows according to Sahaja, natural and spontaneous in complete conformity with the Natural Law of the Universe. Nobody tells it what to do or how to grow. It has no swadharma or rules, duties and obligations incurred by birth. It has only svabhava - its own inborn self or essence to guide it. Sahaja is that nature which, when established in oneself, bring the state of absolute freedom and peace.

"It is when you are in your natural state, in the harmony of the Cosmos. It is the balanced reality between the pairs of opposites. As the Guru of the Bhagavad Gita says, 'The person who has conquered the baser self, and has reached to the level of self-mastery: he is at peace, whether it be hot or cold, pleasure or pain, honoured or dishonoured.' Thus Sahaja expresses one who has reverted to his natural state, free from conditioning. It typifies that outlook which belongs to the natural, spontaneous and uninhibited man, free from innate or inherited defects.

"In all the Golden Dharmas, Sahaja flourishes. In Taoism, it was the highest virtue (Teh). In the earlier Zen records, it is the main plank of training along which the disciples had to walk. The masters demanded answers which were Sahaja, and not the product of intellectual thinking or reason. The truth only came spontaneously.

"Sahaja in Chinese became tzu-jan, or Self-so-ness. Taoism openly lamented the loss of the peculiar naturalness and unselfconsciousness of the child."

Sahaja is one of the four keywords of the Natha Tradition, the other three being Svecchachara, Sama, and Samarasa.

References

Mahendranath, Shri Gurudev. Ecstasy, Equipoise, and Eternity (http://www.mahendranath.org/twiyoga1.mhtml). Retrieved Oct. 20, 2004.
Mahendranath, Shri Gurudev. The Pathless Path to Immortality (http://www.mahendranath.org/pathlesspath.mhtml). Retrieved Oct. 20, 2004.

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