The Epistemology of Yoga

by Swami Krishnananda

There is a fourfold level of our being, says the Mandukya Upanishad. This declaration was made years and years before the first psychologist was born. Modern psychology classifies our personality into what is called the conscious and the preconscious—or, sometimes, the subconscious and the unconscious. The Mandukya Upanishad tells us that there is a super-conscious condition—which should not be regarded as a condition, but as the True Being of ours—which billows up into the personality that we are, passing through a thick cloud of darkness which is called the unconscious, and conditioning our present conscious activities. There is a depth within us which is all light, brilliance and perfection. But, when it becomes the conscious personality that we are now, it has to pass through a cloud—the cloud of unknowing, as mystics sometimes call it.

When the great perfection that we are at the root of our being passes through this distracted thick cloud of unknowing, we can imagine what sort of consciousness we are able to operate with in our waking life. It is a totally distorted consciousness. It is not even like the rays of the sun trying to peek through the thick clouds. It is something worse than that, because this cloud which covers the unconscious totally miscalculates, misinterprets, misconstrues and wrongly projects the direction of this rootedness of our being in our conscious level, so that we are now behaving in a way totally contrary to what we really are at our base. We are our own enemies, in a literal sense.

How is this possible? How could it have happened? The loss of self and the gaining of the world has been referred to in a pithy passage by Jesus Christ in his great statement: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his own soul?” This is not merely a gospel; this is exactly the condition in which we are today. We have the whole world with us. All the dollars and the pounds are under our control. Yes, this is very grand indeed. It may be that the whole earth is our property. We have gained the whole world, but we have lost ourselves.

This immersion of what we really are in what we are not is what is called the affairs of the world. The whole panorama of the drama of existence in this world—the whole history of mankind—is the story of the antics which human nature plays by running out of itself and becoming what it is not. Only a very careful, investigative mind will be able to understand what it means to get involved in what one is not; a lay mind will not know the implications of it. This is called death. Though physically we are not dead, psychologically we are corpses; and, literally, it is so. We are living a life of psychological death and spiritual annihilation while physically we are alive. Thus, death masquerades as life.

Those who have read the pronouncements of great thinkers made under the pressure of a lofty desperation of life due to their insight into the nature of things will be able to appreciate the meaning of what I am trying to place before you. The joys of life are the projections of human ignorance. As Patanjali, a great sage in India, told us, to the truly discerning individual, all the pleasures of life are forms of utter pain and sorrow. We are mistaking sorrow for delight. This is what Buddha said in the East and Schopenhauer said in the West. They all say the same thing, but these things will not enter our brains because in a very, very specialised sense, we are abnormal individuals. Though we may not be maniacs in the sense of patients intended for a mental hospital, in a highly metaphysical sense we are all abnormal. Pitva mohamayim pramadamadiram unmatte bhutam jagat: Having drunk the liquor of delusion, the whole world has gone mad. This is what Bhartrihari, a great genius not only of poetry but of philosophy, declared centuries back.

It is sometimes said that philosophy begins with the discovery of the sorrows of life. Dissatisfaction with the surface view of things is regarded as the mother of philosophy. If we are satisfied with the world, there is nothing for us to learn. [Addressed to the students.] Every one of you has a dissatisfaction—else, you would not have taken the trouble of purchasing a ticket and coming here to this jungle where you will see practically nothing which is satisfying or delighting to you.

We are seated here, therefore, to conduct a sort of self-analysis—which is a very intriguing term—because there is a need for self-analysis in medical parlance, in statesmanship and political governance, and in every walk of life. Even in conducting a good business, we may have to know what real self-analysis means.

The study of man is regarded as the highest of the sciences of life because, as I mentioned at the very outset, all the wide world that we see in front of us is a fabric or a web that we have cast around ourselves, and we are moving in an atmosphere created by our own selves, calling it the world of experience. The world of joys and sorrows is not the physical world of mountains and rivers. The mountains were there, and the sun and the moon were shining even before we were born into this world. They do not cause us any trouble. There is another kind of world in which we are living, which is invisible to the eyes —and the invisible man is the dangerous man. The visible man is perfectly all right. He is a geographical individual. We do not differ much among ourselves anatomically and physiologically, but each one is a world by himself or herself; that is the invisible definition of what we are.

We are engaged in a very serious theme, of which even the world may be afraid; and it is not for nothing that adepts on the path of yoga have warned us that when we probe into these mysteries, the sleeping dogs of life will wake up and will start barking at us, and then it is that we will find ourselves in hot water. The forces of nature get awakened when we begin to investigate into them—like the roots of a disease which are dug up and brought to the surface—especially by systems which study man as a whole and not as a part.

In the beginning, when we move in the direction of these studies, it may appear to be frightening because all discipline is unpleasant in the beginning. The word ‘discipline’ is frightening; nobody likes it, because we have a feeling that discipline is a force exerted upon us by that which is not pleasant to us. We cannot be happy with the presence of others. We love ourselves more than we love anything else, though from another point of view we are totally involved only in other people. We are broken individuals, not wholes as we appear—broken because on one side we cannot honestly love anything except our own selves and, on the other side, we seem to be conscious only of other people and other things and are thus totally involved in the affairs of what we are not, as I have mentioned already.

This is a double game that we are playing. Due to the split of our personalities we are, therefore, half ourselves and half somebody else. This is perhaps the reason why the novelist had a good theme to write on—what he called the personalities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both are present within us. We are only half in ourselves; the other half has gone to the other world. Sometimes a major part of us goes to the other world and very little is left in our own selves. Then it is that we become delinquents, atrocious individuals, criminals and tyrants whose only intention is to destroy rather than to construct. It depends upon the extent to which we are psychologically alienated.

The percentage of this alienation differs from individual to individual, but whatever be the percentage of this alienation, it is there in everyone. And the purpose of yoga is to bring a right-about turn of these alienating forces in us, to turn them towards their centre which we are, so that we become whole beings. Yoga is, therefore, a science of health in a very, very real sense of the term.

Health does not mean merely a perfect working of the physiological organs, because we know very well that human nature is not merely flesh and bones or the anatomical system. The health of the individual is not the health of muscles, bones and nerves; it is the total integration. This theme will take us into deep waters because the art of the integration of the self—which is yoga precisely—is, at the same time, the necessity to take into consideration all the things in which our personality is involved. The whole world, itself, becomes an object of study when we begin to study ourselves. Such complicated persons we are. We are not individuals seated in a room here; we are little switch-bolts of activities that are taking place in the whole of creation. This is why we are indefinitely striving for the infinite possession of inscrutable perfection in our life. Though we look like small boys and girls here, almost like nothings in the eyes of the public, such a mystery is before us; and we have to clean our minds of all the cobwebs of involvements and entanglements, for the time being at least, and keep ourselves thoroughly de-conditioned.

Do not have prejudiced ideas and conditioned ideologies. Do not come with the idea that you already know certain things and therefore there is very little to learn. Let there be a clean approach to the studies that you are about to undertake, as if you are born just now, like small babies, into this new world, and you have completely brushed aside your past lives. Otherwise, the old memories will come and harass you again and again, and they will be impediments to an impartial study of your own selves.

You should not enter into discussion of this theme with prejudice in your minds. You should not take for granted certain conclusions in regard to what you are going to study. It should be totally dispassionate. Hence, great leisure is essential. Your whole being has to be dedicated to this study, without tentacles connecting you with problems which are extraneous to the task on hand.

So, let your whole being be here. You know very well, success in any adventurous project in life is proportional to the percentage of the wholeness of your being involved in it. If you are wholly engaged in some task, there is a greater chance of your succeeding in the fulfilment of the task than when you are partially involved in it. Your interest in it should be whole, and then there is certainly a bright future for every one of you. God bless you!