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From Yoga and the Quest for Self by Stephen Cope.

We’ve forgotten we’re simply the fantastic play of consiousness and energy, of shiva and shakti.  We’ve become ensnared in a gross misidentification. We have become exclusively identified with our physical bodies, with our possessions, with our thoughts, with our personalities. We think we’re our ideas, our careers, our families, our countries. We live our lives in utter ignorance of the vastness of our real nature, estranged from our true selves. This is the source of our suffering.

In yogic philosophy, the source of this alienation from the true self is not sin or wrongdoing of any kind. It’s simply ignorance-avidya. As they awaken to themselves, the fundamental problem is not guilt, it’s delusion. The Upanishadic sages described this ignorance as a “viel of illusion” that obscures the truth and confuses the mind so that it cannot discriminate between reality and appearance.

In the yogic view, suffering has its origins in a process called extroversion (unmesha). The soul gradually becomes completely identified with the material plane of existence, even though this “gross material plane – the physical body and the personality – is only the most outward and visible aspect of her true home. This is a disasterous misidentification because, in addition to the body, mind and personality, yoga teaches that the true home of the soul is also beyond time and space, in the eternal now of consciousness. When we live disconnected from these vast roots of the Self, we suffer.

Self is capitalized here because it refers to the divine, awake, free self. Given the yogic view of our predicament, it’s not suprising that we so often feel estranged, that we feel unreal, that we feel disconnected from our center. That is precisely our condition.

Yoga psychology gets very specific about the exact nature of the conditioning that keeps us ensnared in delusion about our true nature. The classical scriptures identify five “afflictions” or kleshas – five conditioned beliefs and behaviors that keep us bound to “gross apparent reality.” They are:

1. Avidya: Ignorance

2. Asmitta: “I-ness”

3. Raga: Attraction

4. Dvesha: Aversion

5. Abhinivesha: Clinging to the life and fear of death.

Passages from Yoga and the Quest for The True Self by Stephen Cope. It’s going to take me a while to finish this one.

In yogic view, shakti is the energy essence of the phenomenal world, the purely active force in the manifestation of the universe. Shakti is seen as the divine Mother, the essence of the feminine principle, because she brings the world into being. She is also energy, the primordial power that is always at play, creating, preserving, destroying, the world of form. There is no object or event that doesn’t disclose the presence of her power. But the body of a yoga adept is a particularly open channel for the play of pure energy.

The thing is though, that you can’t really understand the action of Shakti in the world without understanding Shiva, Shakti’s consort. Shiva is the masculine principle in creation. He is the pure witness consciousness, the archetypal seer. He is the formless brahman, pure spirit, transcendent, without any attributes. You might think of Shiva as the still point, the absolute subject, the One. And Shakti is the dance. It’s like T.S. Eliot said “Without the still point, there would be no dance.” In the yogic view, the entire universe moves between these two poles – shiva and shakti. Pure consciousness and pure power. Pure being and pure becoming. The still point and the dance. Always arcing toward one another.

Here’s the really cool thing, In hatha yoga-the practice of postures and yogic breathing-the whole drama of the universe gets acted out right within this very earthly body. In this drama all the condensed powers of shakti lie coiled at the base of the spine. This is what we know as kundalini, the essence of divine goddess energy. The kundalini shakti rises up to meet her consort shiva, pure witness consciousness, who resides in an energy center at the energy center at the crown of the head, the so-called crown chakra. The union of shiva and shakti, which is the goal of hatha yoga, is accomplished when shakti moves up through the central energy column in the area of the spine-called the shushumna-and arrives at the crown. On its trip to meet shiva, this highly condensed energy of kundalini shakti awakens all the latent energy centers in the body, and as this happens, the body moves spontaneously into hundreds of postures. The dance that results is the interplay of energy and consciousness, or what yogis call lila-the divine play.