Mark Whitwell | Avatar, Jivamukti, Acharya

In ancient Vedic culture there was always a cultural cooperation between the avatar, the jivamukti and the acharya.

The avatar is the divine person who for the sake of all beings has entered into all conditions, all circumstances and is there so all circumstance of your life can be felt as the divine. In other words all there is IS the divine: reality only and all circumstances are seen in and as the divine. The avatar is born in the state of union.

The jivamukti (liberated person) is the one who comes into the natural state spontaneously during their life. For no apparent reason life throws out the social patterning and contractions from the jivamukti’s body/mind and they are now living free from illusion.

And the acharya is one who has had victory over the presumptions of limit and the dark karmas that they were born into. The acharya is a person who has released the patterned roles of society that otherwise reduce the relationship to a tangled web of reaction and dissociation from Reality. They know what it is to suffer and to transcend that suffering. They are required to give the tools of participation in the Given Reality so that the avatar and the jivamukti can function as their mere presence to all, for all.

In Vedic culture, the grace of the avatar and the jivamukti was always received in the context Yoga accurately given to individual needs. The transmission of the Heart that these figures give to all requires a practical response. It has always been there in the culture since ancient times.

If you were a student of a jivamukti or an avatar like Muktananda or Sai Baba or a devotee of Christ, for example, then you need a Yoga practice. You need to step into the full picture of Vedic participation. It was Krishnamacharya’s firm view that there must be Yoga in order to to actualize the beautiful ideas in Vedic tradition and the beautiful realizations that come from meetings with such jivamukti’s and avatars. Without Yoga, then inspiration can make your life worse due to the stark difference between your encounters and the usual life droning on.

The avatar, the jivamukti and the acharya are working together for the same social realization: that intimate connection to life is the most fundamental condition of life that is we are all connected to the nurturing force of Reality and nobody can be separate. You are a flower blooming in your own garden.

Yoga is given so that people can be relieved of the imposition of the socialized mind that is assuming separation, especially from the male-female collaboration. Asana is necessary to get to the place of direct enjoyment of Reality and it does a very fast work for everybody to clear the mind and allow the whole body to feel into what life actually is. There is no linear process here. When you apply the principles that Krishnamacharya brought forth from the wisdom traditions, that is, Yoga adapted perfectly to individual needs, then your Yoga is direct intimacy with life itself.

The relationship between these three functions forms the basis of wisdom culture and guru tradition in all times and all geographies as well as specifically the vast ancient culture of Veda. It is a framework within which to understand the profound work that Yoga teachers do even if they are not socially recognised.

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007)

U.G. Krishnamurti was very much the Jivamukti power, some would even say the avataric power, behind the delivery of Yoga into the ordinary human life. U.G. was the power that corrected Krishnamacharya’s Brahmin tendency to be be involved in Yoga as spiritual seeking for a future result. He clarified for all time that Yoga is each individual’s direct intimacy with Reality itself.

When it comes to Yoga however, U.G. Krishnamurti can be confusing to people because he was so against the idea of doing yoga, or any spiritual discipline, as a struggle to get to some future state known as ‘enlightenment.’ U.G. had a very special siddhi, a gift, which was the ability to destroy the psychology in people that was fueling a stressful search for an alternative possibility. And of course, this is how yoga is taught everywhere. There are many youtube videos and books in which U.G. is blasting yoga.

But U.G. upheld actual Yoga with a real ferociousness. It was not his function to teach Yoga but he certainly told me to teach. He would say, “Get out there!” How much money have you made?” Not for its own sake but as a measure of success in communicating this to the world.

U.G. also utterly supported it in his friends who were around him at the time. He was very encouraging when one of his friends began to practice. He would say, “Yoga is making love with life — literally.”

Krishnamacharya’s life was dedicated to communicating to the world that an actual Yoga practice is realize the non-dual state, otherwise the delusion of two is the fixation of the mind and you cannot end that fixation through a lovely idea of non-dualism. Rather, there has to be a Yoga, the union of opposites in your own embodiment. U.G was not opposed to this idea but to the imposition of Yoga as a struggle for a future result.

About Mark Whitwell:-

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.