Our minds will get giddy when we start thinking the possibility of there being something to contemplate without the intervening modes of space and time. In the majority of cases our minds will simply cease being able to meditate and will turn back upon themselves negatively—
either as sleep or as intense rajasic activity. /FANTASY
When we press a thing beyond its limits, it will show its power—even if it is a small thing. Even a mouse can threaten us if we try to catch it.
The mind refuses to come under control when we press it too hard and do not give it any object for thought. We are then not allowing the mind to think an object because the object has been freed from space and time, and
at the same time we will not allow the mind to go to sleep.
What is the mind to do?
Then it is completely confounded. The mind can neither think nor can it sleep—it cannot do anything else. When it normally thinks, it thinks of an object in space and time. When that is not possible, it drops into non-activity like torpidity or sleep. Now we are exerting
a peculiar kind of pressure on the mind by not giving it an object to think because of our dissociating the object from the relations of space and time. At the same time we want to melt in consciousness.
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a small thing like a few words that we speak to a brother is as important as the big matter that we regard as God-realisation or the practice of yoga
these are serious things to reflect and meditate upon. There is nothing that is unimportant. Before God at least,
nothing is unimportant, insignificant or unnecessary. We should not imagine that we
are wiser than God, or that we can distinguish between the important and the
unimportant. There is no such thing as unimportant in this world.(BRAHMANDA!)
Be human first
learn to think rightly.
be human first.
-to be a human being- implies a way of thinking, a
method of conducting oneself in life, an attitude towards life, a particular relationship that we adopt with other people, and our life as a whole. All these imply what we
consider to be human.
be aware of all the subtle shades of difference in conducting oneself in life, be cautious inwardly and outwardly, and be wholly human, and then
to aspire for the divine.
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Discontent
in certain experiences that we undergo in life, we begin to feel that in every one of our experiences, and inour every activity, we seem to be lacking something.
Due to this lack, there is a total dissatisfaction in life.
We are not satisfied with the daily eating of our meals; we feelthat there is something more than merely sustaining ourselves with food. We are not satisfied with mere dressing; we feel there is something more than the clothes. We are not satisfied with our mere office-going or mere factory work;
we begin to feel that there is something more than all this. We are not satisfied with anything. We have an inexplicable feeling within that in everything we do there is something lacking. We may not beable to explain ourselves properly, but our hearts speak a language which ordinarily we cannot explain or understand. In everything that we do, there is a want. Something is left out in everything that we do, on account of which we feel a kind of lacuna.
This is the beginning of the higher life. While this kind of discontent is present in every person, literate or illiterate, itbecomes consciously developed in the literate, the understanding, and the truly educated.
In Sanskrit we have a beautiful term to designate this condition of consciously feeling this peculiar lack or want in one’s life. This term is viveka-literally it means discrimination. The capacity to distinguish between the necessary and the unnecessary, the true and the false, the real and the unreal are all the various translations of this term viveka. We begin to realise intelligently and consciously that in everything that we do there is something left out. We never feel that we are complete in our life.
This condition of conscious apprehension of a want in one’s life arises only in the higher stages of development of the human mind.
There is a kind of tension between the ideal and the real. So, we live a life of tension of various kinds, all of which boil down finally to the ultimate tension or conflict between the ideal and the real-the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’. Something ought to be, but something else is. The ‘ought’ is the ethical and moral value that we have introduced in our life. This is also the philosophical, the metaphysical and the scientific objective in life. Things ought to be this, but they are not. They are something else.
This ideal which remains now as a concept in our minds has taken possession of us so vehemently that our lives have become a misery without its implementation. All of us are unhappy merely because of the simple reason that the ideal has not become the real, and we cannot live that ideal. If it would bepossible to give up the ideal entirely, we would have done it, but we are finding that it is as dear to us as our own hearts or our own breath, and this haunts us day and night.
according to the psychoanalytic technique, the solution was to bring out these ideals so that there may be harmony betweenthe ideal and the real. One satisfies these desires, not materially, but psychologically atleast. What is psychological satisfaction?
These ideals get acted out through dreams. One may become in dream what one wants to become in waking life. Dreams, fantasies, and building castles in the air are some of the ways in which these ideals are expressed. Many a time one tries to substitute for these ideals. “When I cannot get this, I shall get something else, so that I’ll forget this
completely for the time being.” But these ideas and ideals cannot be easily forgotten.
Forgetting a devil is not the same as exorcising it. The devil is there, but we close oureyes and pretend it is not there-that is not a solution. We don’t see it, but it sees us.
So substitution is, therefore, not a good psychological method for clearing these avenues of the mind. Suppression is also not a goodmethod. Suppressionand repression are the causes of our illness and destruction. Substitution, again, is obviously not a solution.
The desires will have to be vaporised completely, like the camphor that burns up without leaving any residue, orlike the mist that melts before the rising sun. These ideals should sublimate themselves into either the reality that is in front of us, or disappear into nothingness. There is no other way left to deal with these cherished ideals.
We do not have the wisdom to know the difference-that is our difficulty. We do not know what can be changed and
what cannot be changed. We mistake the ‘cannot’ for the ‘can’. We try the impossible and then suffer-the sufferers are those who try the impossible. If it is possible, we can change it, but if we cannot change it and yet we want to, then we suffer in society. These are the simple forms of mental tension which philosophy studies in its superficial levels, and which has to lead to psychoanalytic techniques, especially today in the West.
mostly people
float on the surface of the mind. They cannotgo deep into their minds, because their minds are merely extrovert. They think only outwardly, and cannot move the mind inward. The mind cannot think of itself. This isthe difficulty with the mind. It can only think of others.
The mind has become a subject of the judgement of other persons and
things. It has never been able to subject itselfto that self-same analysis to which it wants to subject other people and things in the world. The mind is not honest and dispassionate in its habits-it wants to judge others but not itself. Because it sees itself as the judge, why should it judge itself? The judge judges only the defendants, but not himself.
When we employ wrong techniques in life-wrong in the sense that there was no proper relation to the facts of life-then we get rebuffed and receive a kick from nature. If our ways of living are unconnected with the
realities of life, one may say that life becomes a failure, and one becomes a grieved person, cursing nature. But nature is not going to listen to our curses. We can go on cursing and belabouring, but what does it care? We do not know nature, and therefore we do not understand it.
There is something deeper than the sociological and the outer reality,
through all of which we have to attune ourselves systematically, stage by stage. When we
attune ourselves and harmonise ourselves through all the levels of reality, we are one
with nature, one with truth, and ultimately one with God. This is yoga.
Some of these conflicts are
called defence mechanisms, or we may say certain contrivances which the mind makes
use of in releasing itself. Some of these are the attempts of the mind to utilise other
persons and the objects of the world as instruments in bringing about a release of
conflict. When there is no peace within us, we just try to forget the fact that we have no
peace within, and we try to drown ourselves incertain outer phenomena. We just engage
ourselves in hectic activity and forget the boredom of life.
people carrying their radios with themwherever they go. Whether
they are in the bathroom, or at the lunch table, or in the meditation room, it makes no
difference-the cell-phone must be there. They go to the market to purchase something, and
the cell-phone is hanging on their shoulders. Theytry to drown themselves in the sound of
this instrument, because they have no peace within. They want to manufacture some
peace artificially with instruments that theyhave created, because there is no peace
inside. “If I have not got something, I will import it from outside. I will drown myself in
a loud sound so that I may not hear any other sounds. I do not want to hear the sound of
my own mind, because it is very inconvenient.So let me hear the sound of the cell-phone,
tuned very high; or let me just move about from place to place.” These people never sit
in any place; they become a permanent tourist throughout their lives so that they have
no time to think of their problems, because to think of problems is another problem.
“Better not to think about them-let them die out,” these people imagine to themselves.
While the forgetting of
these problems by engaging oneself in something quite different is one of the methods of
the mind, there are other ways which it adopts, such as associating ourselves with larger
groups of people or busying ourselves with some work of the family. We become a social
worker, or at least think that we are one, though we might not be in a position to do any
good to society or think of larger things such as world problems, world peace and world
brotherhood. We have no peace within us, and we want to bring peace to the world. We
become a sort of important person due to talking about world peace, world brotherhood,
international harmony and many other thingsof the same kind. While there is no
intrinsic importance in us, we have an artificial importance in the eyes of the people to
whom we are talking about these big things. We talk only of the world-nothing smaller
than that-and this is one of the ways of the extension of the difficulty of the mind into
outer conditions of life. The mind imagines that by going on expanding its field of
activities it will be able to be free from the conflicts that are within.
We do not eat with peace, we do not speak with peace, and we do
not sleep with peace. When we eat our meals we are not at peace, because we are
thinking of something else. When we go to bed, we do not think of our having gone to
bed; we think of something else-about yesterday or tomorrow. We should think of
these examples for a few minutes and judge for ourselves whether this is correct or not.
Whenever we act, we think of something else other than that.
when we are expected to do something or meet someone,
we may be anticipating something else. Now we are here, but we may be subconsciously
thinking of what is going to take place after an hour. The future is there already touching
us, so that we are never wholly living in the present. We are living always in an artificial
future which has not yet become a reality to us. We are living in an imaginary world of
fantasies, imaginations, reveries and ideals that may be realised or not.
Sometimes we belong to a community, and we begin to associate ourselves with it. We
talk about it again and again, and we cannotextricate ourselves from the idea that we
ourselves are a part of that community. “I am a Hindu, a Maharasthrian; I am this, I am
that.” These are the communal selves . Then we have the family selves. We have got
family names which are called surnames, and to each person a surname is attached. It is
a family heritage. We have so many associations. Then come the personal associations of
“I am a judge, a teacher, a businessman, a professor.” These are also selves we have
created, but they are false selves. Socially also we have created these false selves. As if
the inner problems were not sufficient, we have created additional problems by adding
all these from outside. Inwardly there are also many layers; I shall touch upon these
inner layers a little later on. Layers and layers of self are covering the true self. Like
layers of clouds can make the sun dark, layers of the false self have made our true selves
a mass of darkness, confusion, and therefore unhappiness.
our pet desires, ambitions and cravings, sometimes acquired by heredity and sometimes they are newly created by our own wrong thinking and imaginations of the future. What a mess we have created in our minds. It should be very
clear why we are unhappy in this world. Wehave a cloud of confusion covering the light of our minds, and we cannot see through this cloud properly. We try to see the world through this cloud of conflicts, but because we see unclearly through this mist of conflict, we see a world of conflict in front ofus. The whole world is chaos. We begin to
see that the world is not all right, because we see the world through this screen of darkness that holds sway over our own minds. This screen has become dark through many layers of conflict getting layered, one over the other for years and years together.
Yoga philosophy and psychology tells us that we have been doing so for ages. We have passed through several births; we should not imagine that this is our first birth. We have been living through many bodily incarnations. Through the process of evolution we have come to this present level of the state of mankind. The layers of wrong thinking and unfulfilled desires are all there with us, which we have carried through the different incarnations of the mind.
Yoga began to contemplate the mysteries behind the phenomenon of unhappiness persisting in spite of one’s having everythingin life. We may be the king of the whole world, yet it is doubtful if we are going tobe happy; we will havemany problems. What is above this world? Why not conquer that? Maybe we have ambitions. Desires cannot
be overcome even if we were the kings of this world. Death will come to us when it is time to leave this world. These are important difficulties of a person, even if he is the emperor of the whole world. How long are we going to be the emperor? It may be for a few hours. We may be asked to quit this world to a place of which we have absolutely no
knowledge. Do we know when we will have to leave this world? Do we know where we go after leaving the world? No! What a pity, we do not know when to leave this place, and we do not know where we are going. Can there be a worse suffering than this? Yet, we seem to be cosily imagining that everything isokay. In a state of intense ignorance, we may be in a state of bliss. This is also a kind of bliss, as not to know anything is also bliss. That seems to be our final resort.
There seems to be a fundamental conflict between man and nature. The conflict between man and society is small when compared to this conflict between man and nature. There Iis a larger conflict of the irreconcilabilitybetween man and nature, because we do not know what this huge cosmos is. Inasmuch as we have not been able to answer this question of the relationship between us and this cosmos, we have not been able also to answer this question of our relation with human society. What wecall human society is only a small fraction of the vastuniverse before us. Just as a finger is a part of a person’s larger body, this so-called society which is apparently troubling us so much is only a part-a very small part, insignificant perhaps-ofthis vast and magnificent creation. It is creation that is posing a problem, not this small human society. The problem of society is a part of the problem ofthe world as a whole.
The adhyatmaand the adhibhuta,
the subject and the object, man and nature, havebeen in this sort of relationship-not
really related, but only apparently connected. So we have not been able to know what to
do with this world. Nature has always been lying outside us. It has never become a part
of us; it has never become ours. We have never been able to control or master nature
fully, because it was always something different from us, and not ours. Ever since
creation, this has been the situation. We have never been able to possess a thing
properly. If we could possess itreally, why should it leave us after some time? We lose
things, as we say. Why should we lose a thing that is really ours? The reason is that it is
not ours. We have been thinking that it was ours, but it asserts its real nature of not
being ours when it leaves us. “I am not yours, my dear friend. Don’t think I am not
going.” Things may leave us; it may be a person, it may be our own relationships, our
own possessions-whatever it is-all that we possess may leave us.