Purushottama is a combined word of purusha (person) and uttama (utmost). [The common consonants shared by Sanskrit and English words are not coincidence: they originate from the same Indo-European prime language. In Sanskrit "a" and "u" are euphonically merged into "o"; that's why "aum" is pronounced "om".] As the verbatim translation "utmost person" may indicate, purushottama is someone who has accomplished the best possible state which may be reached by a human being. This state is nothing less than the divine state because anything less than that still has a potential to be further developed. This may sound esoteric for some and even blasphemous for others, but at the very summit of all performances, something humanly possible inevitably meets something humanly impossible. On the apex of human evolution, there is an interface between the supernatural and the natural. In this interface, supernatural becomes natural for those who have there their inner residence. Those who can easily fall into the state of samadhi or trance through meditation or other spiritual practices know exactly what I mean. In India, this culture of human divinization through self-realization is deep-rooted in tradition. No wonder that India had produced, before the Western cultural invasion, many saints for whom the miracles done by Jesus were no great feat at all.
Putting this rather unrealistic or hardly reachable state of thing or being aside, we can start with the realistic and the progressively attainable. The human existence, unlike animal life, has multiple aspects. I would like to place them along a scale of seven levels: physical, lower emotional (anger, fear, jealousy, envy, arrogance, greed, lust, attachment, etc.), lower-mental (memory, reasoning, comprehension, analysis, comparison, calculation, planning, etc.), lower-spiritual (phenomenal philosophy and religion), higher emotional (unconditional love and righteousness), higher-mental (discernment, insight, intuition, creation, invention, etc.), and higher-spiritual (noumenal philosophy and spirituality), with the vital force (prana in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese, ki in Korean and Japanese; unfortunately, there are no equivalents in Western languages) flowing through all these levels. We can penetrate into higher levels as the prana is growing in force (quantity) and refinement (quality). People have their own different electromagnetic frequencies depending on their prana level. A purushottama has the highest humanly possible level of prana able to penetrate into the inner realm of sanctum sanctorum (Holy of Holies). The way of purushotta is anything but the world of competitions and records, in which performances and accomplishments take place in the realm of lower four levels: physical, lower emotional, lower-mental, and lower spiritual. The transcendence to the higher three levels begins only after we are well-equipped with three well-harmonized, positively-charged pranic forces: volitional, cognitive, and behavioural. If these three forces of "I want," "I can," and "I do" work simultaneously in a spontaneously equilibrated manner, there is no barrier to the road to human perfection.
This was a necessary bit of my personal theory to introduce the idea of purushottama which came to my mind this morning while reading an email from an old friend of mine, a Frenchman living in Frankfurt whom I nicknamed my private professor. In short, he is a man of wit and character. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge in the fields of his interest: music, photography, architecture and literature. On the hobby side, he has the world record of cycling in the "Tour de France Randonneur" yet to be challenged both by professionals and amateurs. Once a high-flying banker in Frankfurt, he became "redundant" in his mid-fifties. Since then, he has been spending his time on private researches, photo-shooting journeys, archiving documents and photos, writing in forums, helping his friends like me whenever they ask his help, etc. There are many unknown men and women like him everywhere in the world who are, consciously or unconsciously, living at the higher three levels of existence and endeavouring towards the summit of humanly possible and/or impossible. There are some peculiar marks such people have in common: detachment from material things (incidentally, this friend of mine wrote in his email: "l'argent est l'idole des âmes perdues"); anti-material value system (placing inner values higher than outer values); honest modesty (neither self-glorification nor self-deprecation); indifference to fame or shame (wanna test? flatter or insult them ;-); objectivity (same yardstick for themselves and others). Not all of them really reach the summit of purushottama in this life, but they are on their way (purusha marga) and their souls leave their bodies in a higher state of evolution. The whole human race keeps becoming richer and more evolved by the efforts towards human perfection of those walking on the purusha marga.
Putting this rather unrealistic or hardly reachable state of thing or being aside, we can start with the realistic and the progressively attainable. The human existence, unlike animal life, has multiple aspects. I would like to place them along a scale of seven levels: physical, lower emotional (anger, fear, jealousy, envy, arrogance, greed, lust, attachment, etc.), lower-mental (memory, reasoning, comprehension, analysis, comparison, calculation, planning, etc.), lower-spiritual (phenomenal philosophy and religion), higher emotional (unconditional love and righteousness), higher-mental (discernment, insight, intuition, creation, invention, etc.), and higher-spiritual (noumenal philosophy and spirituality), with the vital force (prana in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese, ki in Korean and Japanese; unfortunately, there are no equivalents in Western languages) flowing through all these levels. We can penetrate into higher levels as the prana is growing in force (quantity) and refinement (quality). People have their own different electromagnetic frequencies depending on their prana level. A purushottama has the highest humanly possible level of prana able to penetrate into the inner realm of sanctum sanctorum (Holy of Holies). The way of purushotta is anything but the world of competitions and records, in which performances and accomplishments take place in the realm of lower four levels: physical, lower emotional, lower-mental, and lower spiritual. The transcendence to the higher three levels begins only after we are well-equipped with three well-harmonized, positively-charged pranic forces: volitional, cognitive, and behavioural. If these three forces of "I want," "I can," and "I do" work simultaneously in a spontaneously equilibrated manner, there is no barrier to the road to human perfection.
This was a necessary bit of my personal theory to introduce the idea of purushottama which came to my mind this morning while reading an email from an old friend of mine, a Frenchman living in Frankfurt whom I nicknamed my private professor. In short, he is a man of wit and character. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge in the fields of his interest: music, photography, architecture and literature. On the hobby side, he has the world record of cycling in the "Tour de France Randonneur" yet to be challenged both by professionals and amateurs. Once a high-flying banker in Frankfurt, he became "redundant" in his mid-fifties. Since then, he has been spending his time on private researches, photo-shooting journeys, archiving documents and photos, writing in forums, helping his friends like me whenever they ask his help, etc. There are many unknown men and women like him everywhere in the world who are, consciously or unconsciously, living at the higher three levels of existence and endeavouring towards the summit of humanly possible and/or impossible. There are some peculiar marks such people have in common: detachment from material things (incidentally, this friend of mine wrote in his email: "l'argent est l'idole des âmes perdues"); anti-material value system (placing inner values higher than outer values); honest modesty (neither self-glorification nor self-deprecation); indifference to fame or shame (wanna test? flatter or insult them ;-); objectivity (same yardstick for themselves and others). Not all of them really reach the summit of purushottama in this life, but they are on their way (purusha marga) and their souls leave their bodies in a higher state of evolution. The whole human race keeps becoming richer and more evolved by the efforts towards human perfection of those walking on the purusha marga.
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