Your Path Into Higher Worlds

YOUR PATH

INTO HIGHER WORLDS

*** THE SPIRITUAL GUIDE FOR MATURE SOULS***

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 by Bożena Podstawska

Written in 1922 by Józef Świtkowski

Original title: Droga w światy nadzmysłowe – raja yoga nowoczesna

Translated by Bożena Podstawska

Edited by William Robinson

Table of Contents

Foreword to the First Polish Edition (1922)

Foreword to the Second Polish Edition (1936)

Chapter 1 – The Goal and Measures

Chapter 2 – Rules

Chapter 3 – Mystery Schools

Chapter 4 – The Path

Chapter 5 – Results

Chapter 6 – Yama (Cleansing)

Chapter 7 – Niyama (Acquisition of Virtues)

Chapter 8 – Asana (Life Attitude)

Chapter 9 – Pranayama (The Rhythm of Life)

Chapter 10 – Pratyahara (Control of Attention)

Chapter 11 – Preparation

Chapter 12 – Dharana (Concentration)

Chapter 13 – Imagination

Chapter 14 – Dhyana (Meditation)

Chapter 15 – Inspiration

Chapter 16 – Samadhi (Yogis’ Trance)

Chapter 17 – Contemplation

Chapter 18 – Samyama (Higher Consciousness)

Chapter 19 – Intuition (Conscience)

Chapter 20 – Enlightenment

Chapter 21 – A Fond Farewell

About the Author

Foreword to the First Polish Edition (1922)

This book is for the few who do not consider higher worlds to be a mere legend – a legend which should be doubted. For the few who do not need any rational reason or experiment to prove the existence of such worlds. Furthermore, this book is for only a small percentage of them. Most people will consider the path described in this book to be too long and tedious; they often think that guidelines found elsewhere will suffice to get an access to para-sensory, higher worlds. If those worlds, so called para-sensory worlds – obtained by mechanical techniques – satisfy them, they have not matured enough to know or they do not desire to find other worlds.

Therefore, this is a book for mature people. In it, I speak to mature readers: I do not explain totally elementary ideas. I assume the readers are already familiar with some basic metaphysical concepts, and they have already studied some of the works quoted in my book. If a reader reads my book carefully, he will realize that – despite its small volume – it contains enough content for many years of self-development. It is not enough to read and understand its words; it is necessary to live by them, to implement them into one’s character, to re-build oneself from the very foundation. This is much more difficult than doing mechanical exercises quoted in other textbooks. The exercises provided in such books may have been simply copied uncritically from other compilations, or have been deliberately written in order to cause harm.

By so saying, I do not attempt to over-estimate the value of my work. It is possible, that it may also prove to be harmful: especially for those who omit the requirement for one’s high moral level. For people without morals – and their purposes – this book may be harmful indeed. However, for my target readers, this will be the path that leads to the higher words they yearn: a path which is undoubtedly difficult and tedious, but which is also certain. In this book, all the advice and instruction are things that I have myself experienced. Some readers may think, at first, that not enough instructions are given; however, when such a reader fully understands the methods, he will be able to create his own exercises. Perhaps, one day, he will put his exercises into a book that is more comprehensive than this one: one which is the first in the Polish language, and therefore, is not free from faults and shortcomings.

Foreword to the Second Polish Edition (1936)

During the 14 years that have passed since the first edition of this book, some of its readers might have reached the level of enlightenment, while others may be still on the preparatory level. Others might have become disappointed, considering the rules set forth in this book to be too demanding for them, and put the book aside. Despite all my efforts to hide my real name, I have received many letters from my readers. They contained either expressions of joy due to finding the right way of living and achieving internal happiness, or they contained requests that I dispel some doubts and make some corrections and rectification in a later edition.

These requests were mainly of two kinds: first, to remove Sanskrit terminology, allegedly confusing, and second, to express my firm opinion about eating meat, about consuming caffeine and alcohol, and about bodily pleasures. Let the fact – that the content of the book has been left nearly unchanged – serve as my answer to these requests. I have only added two short paragraphs to explain more precisely the role of the physical body in the spiritual development.

The title of the book is Modern Raja Yoga. Therefore, the book tries to show how ancient Indian Raja Yoga now applies to contemporary Western culture. Western culture, to this day, has not created any terminology – in any of its languages – to replace Sanskrit names that describe ancient concepts. That is why these terms cannot be replaced in my book. However, I attempted to write the book in such a way that the reader – without being over-concerned with the technical terminology – should be able to start the self-development that leads to the gate of the path.

The second question asked by my readers – the one about banning the consumption of meat and certain drugs – is a simple misunderstanding. This type of prohibition may be important in textbooks that deal with the culture of the body: with hatha yoga, or with ritualistic magic. In this book, however – a book that deals exclusively with the culture of the soul – such bans would be contradictory to its intent. Giving attention to the care of the physical body – even if done merely in the form of bans or commandments – would only prove that the physical body deserves special care. The truth is that caring about the physical body should take no more time than a reasonable person would devote to tending to his livestock or machines.

I add these two explanations to complement the foreword to the first edition, which otherwise remains unchanged.

Chapter 1 – The Goal and Measures

You have taken this book into your hand. This suggests that some kind of motivation may lay behind that act: something more than sheer curiosity, one that makes you seek a path. A path that you could tread yourself, instead of merely reading about one that others followed and are following ahead of you. Maybe you have been wandering and searching for a long time, maybe you have felt that the broad and frequently treaded road that all people around you utilize is not sufficient for you. It may seem too simple for you, too easy, but most of all: too horizontal. The vast majority of ordinary people follow this road, slowly, comfortably, without much effort but also without many rewards. They do not have to give much, and, in exchange, they do not receive much. But you feel that you would like to sacrifice more in order to receive more. You would like to make the greatest efforts – give everything you have – to accomplish everything that is worthy of such efforts: to accomplish everything you are capable of achieving.

It is good, that this broad and overcrowded road has already become too flat for you. It is good that you want to leave it and are ready to walk on the path which is shorter and steeper but makes your ascent to the top faster. Your aspiration does you credit because it indicates that you have matured enough to enter the path. But, before you decide to enter it, examine yourself carefully and estimate your strength. Evaluate yourself strictly and soberly, ask if you really want to give all yourself, everything – unreservedly. Ask yourself if you will not get so discouraged that you will soon fall down from the path and back onto the comfortable road.

There is no doubt that you will fall from the steep slope repeatedly before you are able to keep firmly on it. The important thing is that – when you fall down – you get quickly to your feet again, despite any wounds or bruises, and that you do not feel sorry for yourself. Without delay, you use all your determination to climb onto the path again. You should make sure that your eagerness to embark on the path is not merely a temporary whim: because you have become disappointed with your everyday life due to some failure.

However, as you have taken this book into your hand and are determined to read it, this may mean that your intentions are honest and stable. Maybe there is nothing in your present life that you find purposeful and worth of effort. Maybe you look on people around you as if they were children whom you have surpassed. You feel that you need to stop playing in a childish way and take on activities of a more serious nature. If their lives always seem to you to be aimless and pointless, you may be ready for the path. If you constantly feel some emptiness – not only in the face of some recent disappointment of yours – but even in times of success and satisfaction: maybe you have truly become ready for the path. Bear in mind, however, that the path described in this book is the shortest and steepest of all: very soon you may find yourself too far away from the broad road to be able to get back down onto it.

There are other paths available as well. They may be longer but they are not as steep and arduous as this one, and – more importantly – they do not turn aside so radically from the common road followed by most of the humankind. If you chose one of them, you would still have constant connection with everything that people call the world, and your return to the common road would be always available. Even though these roads are not so steep and demanding and the pace is not so fast, they also lead upwards. The paths of scientific studies, artistic creativity, or social work – they are all too difficult for idlers but always accessible for you. One of them might be adequate for you: having chosen it, you could put as much effort into it as you wish, and climb as high and as fast as you wish. These roads are relatively comfortable because they do not require such enormous load of work on yourself: you direct your activity mostly outwards, on objects, and it is always easier.

However, if you still feel that they will be too easy – if you truly want to work on yourself – you have many paths to choose from. There is a choice of paths between the two extremes, very distinct from each other: the path of Hatha Yoga at one end, and that of saints at the other. They are also paths, but they are not easy at all. Yet, if you choose one of them, you can still expect something for yourself. You may say: I give everything I am, all that I am worth, and I expect to receive as much as I am worth in exchange.

On the other hand, if you choose the path described in this book, you will not be able to say so. If you choose it, you can expect nothing: no benefits, no rewards, nothing but the feeling that you have done everything you are capable of, that you have not wasted anything, that you have not neglected anything.

That is why it is absolutely essential that you are aware of the aim you are going to pursue. It is not enough to tell yourself: I am not satisfied with the life that everybody around me leads. I must find something more fulfilling for myself. Consider how you define something more fulfilling. If you want more satisfaction for yourself, you will not find it on this path; in that case – you should turn towards hatha yoga. If you want to fulfill your curiosity of extra-sensory worlds, you will discover them on the path: but only after you have stopped craving to know them. If you want to obtain magical powers and extraordinary abilities, you will also get them: when it has become absolutely impossible that you might use them for personal advantage.

As you can see, the path does not offer much. But if you still wish to pursue it despite this fact, or especially because it does not offer any personal advantages, it means that you have truly grown up to it. You have grown to it, because you have already outgrown an erroneous belief that there is any other good other than the common good.

Your aim must be absolutely unselfish. You must want nothing for yourself, nothing for your own pleasure or personal benefit. Your only desire, your only aspiration must be always the common good: not only the good of all people, regardless their nationality, race, religion, culture and moral level, but also the good of the entire universe, that is the good of all creatures living in it: animals, plants, higher beings, and all the creation. Do not think that you are too small and weak to be of any use for angels or plants; when you are on the path, your forces will grow to a superhuman, inconceivable strength. This is because you will be approaching God, and thus, you will participate in God’s omniscience and omnipotence.

God wants nothing for himself. Therefore, if you are going to follow God’s path, you have to get rid of all your egoism, you have to forget about yourself. Are you ready to eliminate your ego permanently? Are you always ready to say: Not mine, but Thy will be done? If you can do this, and if you are truly determined to renounce every single thought of yourself, all your egoistic traits; then you are truly ready for the path. Enter it boldly: do it right now, today. If you hesitate or delay, it means that you have not grown to it yet.

Soon, you will realize how much this path gives you, how much invaluable treasure you can find on it; this is because you do not desire nor seek it. First of all, you will find infinite peace, it will be sweet and tranquil: God’s peace. You will find health of the soul and even of the physical body: health so flowering and sound that it could never have been achieved by living in the most advantageous conditions elsewhere. You will find unlimited knowledge: not the knowledge that can be found in books and learned by using your memory and brain, but the direct knowledge acquired by seeing and comprehending. You will also find that which people call clairvoyance, even though they do not believe in it: you will be able to see inside the Earth and far distant lands, look into human souls and angels’ spirits, and talk both to the so-called dead and the alive, no matter how far they are from you. Finally, you will find all those magical powers and incredible abilities which have given some people either the reputation of a saint or the notoriety of a wizard; you will have all of them, without exception, for your unlimited disposal.

You will find all these on the path: you will find them gradually, more and more with each step, without any effort or attempts by you. You will find yourself surrounded by wealth, power, respect, fame but – at that time – all of them will have become worthless for you. They will all seem to you to be yet other, more heavy burdens: ones that bring new and more extensive duties. But you will manage to fulfil all of those duties because you will not desire anything for yourself.

Until now, you might have been searching for this path, without the clarity of what you were seeking. You have had the premonition that somewhere, beyond all what you knew and experienced in life, there must be something more, something else, something higher: something more real. Things that other people perceive as real and valid, have lost their value of realism and truth for you. You have been looking for something beyond it because ordinary, everyday desires and aspirations of humankind have become insufficient for you.

Do you know why they are insufficient? Because within you, there exists something more than in your brothers. The Divine Spark has already awakened within you. The same spark does exist in your brothers but they know nothing about it. It is too early for them to feel it within themselves. But you have been sensing it, maybe unknowingly at first, but you feel it, without doubt. In your soul – in the core of your existence, something new, so far unknown – has started living: like an unborn baby developing in the womb of a young mother. The Devine Spark now exists in you, because you are mature enough to be conscious that it is a part of you. In other people, it is still dormant, but in you, it has already awakened. That is why you long for something unknown, something real and authentic which cannot be found in the mundane world.

Now, you can feel clearly and undoubtedly that there is something more in you than your bodies – these visible and incorporeal layers. You realize that when you pass the gate of death, you will take those layers off, one after another: first your physical body, then the etheric and astral ones and finally, your mental body. But who will take them off you? It will be you, the real you. You are already able to intuit that these bodies are not you, that for you they are rather like layers of clothing. You live inside them but they are not you. What will remain of you when they have been taken off? That which remains is you, your Divine Spark, your higher self. What is immortal, authentic and true in you – that will remain and survive beyond death and all demises.

You are becoming aware of the immortal particle within you: this is why, what may seem sufficient for your fellow brothers, has become unsatisfactory for you. You have started seeking something more because there is something more within you. You have already learned how to hear the voice of your conscience: it speaks silently within you. From now on, you will be able to hear it; at first, not all the time, but often. This is the voice that told you that you are not your outer layers; it gave you a constant sensation of dissatisfaction with yourself and with the world. Sometimes, you may still ignore it but you will never be able to deaden or repress it in yourself completely; now, when the higher self – the Divine Spark – is alive in you.

So now, you can see your goal more clearly. Instead of the mortal and trifling, you would like the eternal and divine to be the master within you. You do not want to be a slave of your bodies anymore, not even the more subtle ones, like the astral or mental bodies. You want to learn how to rule them, how to change them into useful tools that are always obedient to your higher self. In some way, you feel that you will not learn how to rule them anywhere in the ordinary world; therefore, you wander and seek.

Until now, your bodies have ruled over you, they were doing whatever they wanted with you and you obeyed them without any resistance. Before now, you simply did not realize that it was possible to disobey them nor how that was possible. But now, your higher self is awakening in you and claiming its rights. Before now, it was animal instincts that ruled over you, but now God in you is to lead your way. If you start a battle against yourself – that is, one against your bodies – you will not be able to reach your goal. Your goal is not division or conflict, but unification. Your lower nature should become compatible with your higher self; they should harmonize and unite. The aspirations of these two parts of yourself cannot be inconsistent anymore; they are to be attuned and harmonized. Your lower self must unite with the higher one. Such unity is called yoga in Sanskrit; if you prefer more modern term, you might call it synthesis.

Therefore, your goal is yoga. Do not hesitate to use this term only because it was coined and used by ancient Indians. Since their times, humankind has made much progress in development but still not as much as to make Yoga obsolete. You must have noticed this yourself: how very few people around you have already united with their higher self. Of course, Yoga seen as an idea or a goal, should not be mistaken for the methods leading to this goal: that is, for the systems of Yoga. From the very start, the goal has not changed: but systems and methods change as mankind develops. Today, the ancient Indian Raja Yoga would not only be fruitless, it might even mean development goes backwards. At the time of ancient Indians, a unity of higher and lower self was not possible in a wakeful state: at that time man was not advanced enough to be able to maintain his awareness while reaching into the higher planes. Achieving Yoga – the unification – back then was only possible when in the state of Samadhi; the state that we could call a trance or magnetic sleep. On the other hand, nowadays, the goal is not to experience Yoga only in short moments of an unconscious trance but in full wakefulness, with full awareness. Today, this is possible because we have made sufficient progress in development. Therefore, do not be surprised or annoyed by the term yoga or other Sanskrit words being used in this book: we do not have alternate names for them.

You should understand that today, if you want to have Yoga as your path – as your method – it must differ from ancient Indian Yoga. There are many abilities that ancient Indians had to develop by means of methodological exercises; you do not have to work on them because they are already developed in you. But you have to work on other techniques, those which were completely unknown to ancient Indians. Even their raja yogis were not matured