"Hinduism does not suggest that everyone drop his or her work and go live in the forest. In this period, only male Brahmans were invited, for one thing. But more fundamentally, no one is supposed to proceed toward enlightenment until he or she wants to. The idea is that people will want to on their own because, eventually, nothing else will satisfy. First of all, the desire for physical pleasure, once indulged, does not really bring happiness. To refuse one's desire may be more repression than transcendence, but many who do indulge get bored. When this happens, people often move on to seek achievement. As a goal, achievement is a step up from hedonism, because it is communally directed — to be successful is to be valued and lauded by at least some part of the community — but the project is still rather ego-oriented. Still, Hinduism suggests that we indulge this desire so long as it satisfies. Once we grow weary of physical pleasures and tired by accolades and honors, Hinduism recommends that the next stage of life is to leave all this behind and seek internal happiness and, eventually, release.
To obtain that happiness, four major techniques, four yogas, were devised. One of the most fascinating aspects of the yogas is that they reflect the belief that people come in great varieties, and thus need various paths, yet are all capable of reaching the same truth. The jnana yoga is the path through knowledge. For people who live through the intellect, the best path to truth is to think about the real nature of one's self, to learn that a more real self lies somehow behind the noisy surface-self, and to spend time coming to know this deeply. There are thinking exercises to help achieve this .... This suggests a conviction that there is something behind the personality ... Hindu philosophy suggests that if we want to know reality better, we need to practice seeing outside ourselves, perhaps starting by thinking of ourselves in the third person, from a birds-eye view ... This jnana yoga is supposed to be the shortest path to truth, but also the steepest. It's best for people whose minds tend in that direction anyway.
Then there is bhakti yoga, the yoga for those more invested in emotion than thought. Bhakti yoga is about love. Becoming one with everything might be seen as a journey in two directions: forgetting the self and embracing the whole. The bhakti concentrates on the embracing. It is a common Hindu idea that those on the bhakti path do not want to become one with all truth and reality, because then there would be nothing outside themselves to love! In the words of a Hindu classic: they want to taste sugar, they don't want to be sugar. Bhakti explicitly advises the novice to choose a god image to worship. The novice chooses this god image based on what kind of love he or she wants to express in worship..."
This is possibly the most direct path to understanding why I worship "She who destroys," but not necessarily a complete or accurate one. This path, known in Shaktism as Dakshinamargis, otherwise known as the right-hand path, is not my only or even primary path. As many can likely guess, there is a strong element of jnana yoga here as well. This comes, both from temperament, and from being steeped in the religious and philosophical traditions of China, a strange melange of multiple influences, not the least of which was the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. For better or worse, this strain of Buddhism stressed the teachings of the prajnaparamitra sutras, the wisdom sutras, almost to the exclusion of any others, a lopsided approach which effectively reduced the Buddha's eightfold path to one of enlightenment through knowledge. This trend reaches its epitomy in Zen Buddhism, in which the only way to approach enlightenment is to experience it first hand, to know it in the immediate here and now, mostly by engaging in practices designed to provoke such knowing. Thus, my Taoism and my Hinduism are greatly informed by intellectualism. For all his faults, perhaps Schneibster said it best: I'm complicated.
"...The third, karma yoga, is the path to truth through work — through staying in the world — and karma yoga can be performed through either of the first two yogas: jnana or bhakti, knowledge or devoted love. The secret of getting to enlightenment while working is to do the work for its own sake, with no thought of its results or benefit. One can work for the sake of the work and thereby move one's attention away from the planning, greedy, false self or one can work for the sake of a god image, offering up one's labor in adoration, and therefore move one's attention away from the planning, greedy, false self. Either way, it takes years of intense concentration, but one eventually learns to let go, and see other people, and the world, in a stunningly new way....
...The final yoga is the "royal road to reintegration," raja (royal) yoga, and it is understood as the most empirical of the four. Practitioners of raja yoga essentially experiment on themselves, trying to induce the state that will help them to come to truth, to see reality. Solitude and subsistence living were common approaches toward enlightenment; this was more. Raja is a varied, curious, and intense approach to finding altered states and shaking free the true self The basic rules are to abstain from lying, injury, stealing, sensuality, and greed, and to aim for cleanliness, contentment, self-control, studiousness, and contemplation — but that is just to get the most common difficulties of life out of the way. From here, one can begin the training of postures, fasting, and controlled breathing that have helped others in their quests. Some of these techniques are purposefully excruciating. Raja is an aggressive approach to pulling the mind out of its ordinary, repetitive somersaults of thought. Buddhism was to borrow a great deal from this yoga, although with a dramatic new twist."
— Doubt: A History, Jennifer M. Hecht
(Note: Despite being a devotee for many years, I am a novice in my practices and my knowledge of Hinduism overall. I don't vouch for the accuracy or validity of Ms. Hecht's interpretation, because, frankly, I don't know enough.)
