Our Brains' Urge for Mystical Experiences

A snapshot into the true forbidden Yoga: The Uu ऊ sadhana

The word “forbidden” makes people think of transgression. Of bodies. Of the things polite society refuses to name. And yes, the left-handed tantric traditions I transmit include practices that involve the body in ways that would unsettle conventional sensibilities. But here is what nobody understands until they actually enter this world: the truly forbidden knowledge was never primarily about nakedness or ritual sexuality. Those elements exist within a vast architecture of practice. What makes these traditions genuinely inaccessible is simpler and more absolute: they cannot be found.

I have spent years searching classical texts, consulting scholars, tracking down obscure lineages. What I discovered is that the core sadhanas I transmit, the visual kriyas that form the foundation of everything else, appear nowhere in the documented record. Not in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Not in the Gheranda Samhita. Not in the Vijnanabhairava Tantra’s 112 dharanas. Not in Bengali Shakta literature. Not in Tibetan Buddhist practices. Not in the Nath tradition that systematized hatha yoga itself. Not in modern yoga research or ethnographic fieldwork. Nowhere.

What the Classical Literature Actually Prescribes

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, composed in the fifteenth century, devotes exactly two verses to trataka. Verse 2.31 instructs practitioners to gaze steadily at a “sūkṣma-lakṣya”—a small mark—until tears flow naturally. That is the entire classical prescription. No mention of candles specifically. No numbers. No arrangements. No geometric patterns. The Gheranda Samhita, composed roughly two centuries later, offers similarly spare instruction: gaze without blinking at a small object until tears arise. Both texts list trataka as one of six shatkarmas, purification techniques preparatory to deeper practice.

The Sanskrit term itself provides insight. Sūkṣma-lakṣya means “minute object” or “small point”—decidedly singular. Classical commentators never elaborated this into multiple objects. When later texts specify what practitioners might gaze upon—a black dot, the moon, the rising sun, a deity image—they consistently describe concentration on one object at a time. The Shiva Samhita mentions “chayasiddhi,” shadow gazing, where one observes one’s shadow by moonlight then the afterimage in the sky. Again: a single visual focus progressing from external to internal.

Academic scholarship confirms this unanimity. James Mallinson, who led the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project at SOAS and is recognized as the world’s leading expert on medieval Hatha Yoga texts, notes that classical sources are intentionally brief, assuming direct guru-to-student transmission would supply the details. Yet even accounting for oral traditions and the texts’ cryptic nature, no commentarial literature, no teacher lineages documented in scholarship, and no ethnographic fieldwork has revealed multi-candle practices with geometric configurations.

The Absence Across Tantric Traditions

Kashmiri Shaivism’s Vijnanabhairava Tantra presents 112 dharana practices, the most comprehensive classical compilation of concentration methods. Only one involves fire directly: visualizing the cosmic fire of time, Kaalagni, rising from the feet to consume the body and universe. This is internal visualization, not external flame gazing. Abhinavagupta’s extensive commentaries emphasize gnosis through internal awareness, reinterpreting even ritual elements as meditative states rather than external procedures. Multiple physical flames arranged geometrically for trataka appear nowhere in this sophisticated philosophical tradition.

Bengali Shakta Tantra, the tradition closest to my own lineage, emphasizes homa—fire offerings—as ritual worship, and practices at cremation grounds where fire transforms the body and liberates consciousness. But these are devotional and transformational contexts, not visual concentration methods. The Brihat Tantrasara outlines elaborate fire offerings with mantras, but practitioners make offerings into a single sacred fire. They do not gaze at geometric flame arrangements. Douglas Renfrew Brooks’ work on Sri Vidya Shakta Tantrism documents yantra visualization, particularly the Sri Chakra, but not flame configurations. When fire appears in Bengali Shakta practices, it serves as transformative ritual element or metaphor for the “burning ground” of the heart, never as multiple external objects for systematic visual training.

The Nath tradition, which systematized hatha yoga through figures like Gorakhnath, developed the most detailed trataka instructions of any lineage. Yet these specify single candle flame at arm’s length, at eye level, in a dark room without drafts. David Gordon White’s extensive research on Nath yogis confirms standard single-flame trataka as part of purification practices. No documentation of multi-flame variations exists.

Tibetan Buddhist traditions use butter lamps ubiquitously—often offered in sets of 108—but these serve devotional and merit-accumulation functions, not concentration objects. When single flames are occasionally used for shamatha meditation, they represent one option among many: breath, Buddha statue, visualized syllable, waterfall. Never geometric patterns. Tummo, the inner fire central to the Six Yogas of Naropa, involves visualizing fire at the navel chakra internally. Practitioners don’t gaze at external flames. Janet Gyatso, Robert Thurman, and Glenn Mullin—who collectively represent the most authoritative Western academic expertise on Tibetan practices—document no multi-flame concentration methods.

The Verdict of Modern Research

A 2024 PRISMA-compliant systematic review in Yoga Mimamsa analyzed all published research on trataka from 2000 to 2024 across PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. All sixteen included studies used single candle flames. Distance specifications standardized at 1 to 1.5 meters, flame at eye level, practice duration building from three to five minutes toward ten to twenty minutes maximum. Not one study employed multiple candles or geometric configurations.

Contemporary institutions teaching traditional practices—Bihar School of Yoga in the Satyananda lineage, Sivananda centers worldwide, the International Nath Order—all maintain single-flame protocols. The most comprehensive modern text on concentration practices, Dharana Darshan by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, describes “advanced stages” of trataka as progression from external to internal visualization of the same single object, not multiplication of external objects.

Even accounting for the historical pattern Mark Singleton documented in Yoga Body—how modern postural yoga evolved through syncretism with Western physical culture, creating practices that differ substantially from classical sources—multi-candle trataka hasn’t appeared in the documented record of modern yoga innovations either. The absence is total.

The Uu ऊ Sadhana: Structure Without Revelation

What I transmit operates according to entirely different principles. The Uu ऊ sadhana—one of dozens of visual practices in my lineage—unfolds over fourteen days. It requires only a corner of an empty room, candles, and ordinary objects. But within these modest parameters, something emerges that has no parallel in the accessible historical or contemporary record.

The practice involves multiple candles arranged in geometric configurations that shift daily. Objects placed at measured distances between flames. Specific patterns where some candles burn while others remain unlit. The progression is not arbitrary. Each day introduces new spatial relationships between fire and form, building systematically toward perceptual capacities that single-point concentration cannot develop.

Classical trataka trains the gaze to hold steady on one point. The Uu ऊ sadhana trains something else: the capacity to hold multiple points simultaneously, to make flames disappear from visual awareness while remaining physically present, to fuse object and light into composite perceptions that bypass conceptual processing. The practice teaches your visual system to operate according to geometries it never consciously learned.

The phenomenology is distinctive. Practitioners report that boundaries between “what you are looking at” and “what is looking” grow porous over the fourteen days. Objects known intimately for an entire lifetime reveal themselves as participants in visual processes the rational mind cannot narrate. Fire and form begin speaking to each other in a language that predates human symbolic capacity.

The Neurological Context

The human brain evolved in firelight. For two million years our ancestors gathered in darkness around flickering flames, their visual systems bathing in patterns that preceded language, that preceded even the conceptual architecture we now call thought. Something in our neural substrate remembers this. The modern neuroscientific literature calls it absorption, or flow states, or default mode network suppression. These clinical euphemisms obscure what our species has always known: we are wired for altered states of consciousness. We hunger for them.

When we don’t feed this hunger through legitimate means, we feed it through screens and substances and the thin gruel of entertainment that numbs without satisfying. The ancient Tantrikas understood that this neurological doorway doesn’t require belief. It requires method. Systematic, progressive, precise method that works with the visual system’s evolved capacities rather than against them.

The Uu ऊ sadhana exploits these capacities in ways that single-flame trataka cannot. Multiple flames create interference patterns in visual processing. Objects at measured distances engage depth perception and peripheral awareness simultaneously. The daily progression allows the nervous system to integrate each new configuration before the next complexity is introduced. By the fourteenth day, practitioners have developed perceptual skills that did not exist when they began.

What It Does and Does Not Claim to Do

Does the Uu ऊ sadhana heal trauma? Honestly, we don’t know. Probably not in any way a clinician would recognize or validate. Does it fix relationship patterns or dissolve neuroses? Almost certainly not directly. These are not the questions the practice was designed to answer, and forcing it into the therapeutic container betrays a modern desperation to justify the mystical in utilitarian terms.

What the sadhana does, what it has always done, is open a fissure into something else. Call it the magical realms if that language doesn’t embarrass you. Call it a perceptual ontology that preceded the Cartesian prison we now inhabit. Call it the hologram of what you actually are when you stop performing the role of a contemporary human. The practice doesn’t care what you call it. It simply opens, and you either walk through or you don’t.

The method I transmit is closer to what Karl Heinz Stockhausen achieved in his atonal compositions than to what happens in a yoga studio: a systematic dissolution of the familiar until perception itself reorganizes around different axes entirely. Not therapy. Not self-improvement. Not weekend spirituality offering pleasant aesthetics and calling it transformation. Something stranger. Something older. Something that the documented traditions either never possessed or guarded so closely that no trace remains in any accessible record.

The Meaning of Forbidden

This is what forbidden actually means. Not transgressive, though transgression has its place within the complete architecture of practice. Not shocking, though shock can serve as a doorway. The truly forbidden is the genuinely unavailable: practices so specific, so lineage-bound, so absent from the global record that you cannot find them no matter how hard you search. You cannot learn them from books because they appear in no books. You cannot learn them from yoga teacher trainings because no yoga teacher training transmits them. You can only receive them from someone who holds them, in transmission that no text can replace.

The classical tradition provides an answer that practitioners across centuries have found sufficient: one flame, one point, tears, afterimage. Elegant simplicity. Every yoga school on earth teaches some version of this. But simplicity is not the only path. Some lineages preserved something more elaborate, more demanding, more strange. Geometric arrangements of fire and form that teach your nervous system something it once knew and has long forgotten.

Whether that knowing heals anything is beside the point. The point is the knowing itself. The point is access to dimensions of experience that modern life has foreclosed. The point is remembering what you are beneath the performance of who you have been taught to be.

That is the true forbidden yoga. Not merely bodies breaking taboos, though that exists too within the complete system. Not merely rituals designed to shock, though shock has its uses. The genuinely forbidden is what cannot be accessed through any channel the contemporary world provides. It can only be transmitted. It can only be received. And then it must be practiced, in a corner of an empty room, with candles and objects and two weeks of your undivided attention, until the fissure opens and you discover what waits on the other side.