Sahaja, natural or spontaneously arising, names a state that several strands of this tradition, particularly within Kashmir Shaivism, later Vedanta, and certain tantric lineages, treat as the actual endpoint of all the practice this series has surveyed: not a rare, exalted achievement requiring extraordinary effort to reach and extraordinary effort to sustain, but a condition of natural, unforced ease that was, on this account, present all along, obscured rather than absent, and simply uncovered once the effortful maintenance of a false, limited self-sense finally relaxes.
This is a distinctive and in some ways counterintuitive claim to end a long path of discipline on. Nearly everything this series has described, the six disciplines of shatsampatti, the three-stage method of shravana, manana, and nididhyasana, sustained practice aimed at loosening deep vasanas, is effortful, deliberate, and demanding. Sahaja describes what is said to be found on the other side of all that effort: a state that itself requires no further effort to maintain, because what had actually required continuous effort, all along, was not the natural state but the elaborate, exhausting maintenance of the false, bounded identity that had been covering it.
The apparent paradox, that a state reached only through years of demanding practice turns out to be effortless once reached, resolves once the object of the effort is correctly identified. The practice was never building or constructing the natural state from nothing; on this account it cannot be built, being already and always the case. The practice was dismantling the accumulated samskaras and habitual superimpositions that had been obscuring it, and dismantling, unlike building, eventually reaches a genuine end point at which there is simply nothing further left to do.
Two hundred parts into this account, from the earliest hymn wondering whether even the source of creation knows its own origin, through cosmology, myth, and ritual, into the long inward turn of self-inquiry, everything this series has traced converges here, at a state the tradition insists was never actually reached because it was never actually left. What that convergence means for the metaphor this entire account has been built around, a river descending from its source, is the subject of the final piece.
Part 99 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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