What is Knowledge

by Swami Krishnananda

However, this is not the end of the matter. The Reality that we are speaking of, with which you have to set yourselves in tune, is not merely social law – though it is also a very important thing, and you know what will happen if you fight with human society. You do not want to do that, because you will not exist afterwards. But, there is something more than all these things. The yoga system prescribes a rule or a norm by which you have to be in harmony with the reality not only of human society, but also of the world of nature. Can you believe that you can be happy merely by being in tune with human laws but being opponents of natural laws? They will kick you out, and you will not be there. You will cease to be.

Therefore, the yoga exercises or asanas, which are not very complicated from the point of view of Patanjali’s system, imply an attempt on your part to keep your physical and physiological system – your muscles and nerves – in tune with what nature outside will expect from you. Though in the hatha yoga system many types of asanas are prescribed – sirsasana, sarvangasana, and so on – Patanjali does not feel the need for all these complicated exercises. He has a simple recipe: you have to be seated. This is because there is something that you will be expected to do after you are seated.

You may ask what is meant by being seated, and why you should be seated rather than standing or lie down. The standing posture is not possible for a long time, because the very reason for this prescription of maintaining a balance in the system is that you should be able to concentrate your mind on what you consider as the final reality. If you begin to concentrate the mind on reality while in a standing position, you will withdraw your attention from your body and from the effort of standing, and you know what happens if you are not conscious that you are standing; you will collapse. Therefore, a standing posture is not suitable for concentration of the mind in yoga.

Why not lie down? This also is not suitable, because you are likely to relax so much that you may become unconscious and sleep. Yoga is not sleeping, though it is not a consciousness of external objects in a distracting sense. Thus, the yoga prescription strikes a via media. It says do not stand, because it is not proper; and do not lie down, because that also is not good. The via media is sitting.

Even when you are sitting, you may feel aches. Your knees will give pain, and you cannot bend your legs properly; and you will find the greatest ache will be in the spine. You cannot sit erect for a long time. Why should you sit erect? You may ask why you should not crouch, or lean backward as you do in a dentist’s chair. This is also not suitable.

Again, you have to understand the purpose of this seated posture. It is not because somebody is ordering you to do it. It is not because Patanjali says “sit” that you are sitting. There is a science behind this seated posture, and I have already tried to mention what it is. The muscles, the nerves, and everything that your physiological system is made of, is connected to the physical nature outside, and nature maintains a balance. Nature does tolerate any kind of imbalance that is introduced into it. There is a possibility of a certain catastrophe arising in nature – it may be even a cataclysm, or a whirlwind, or a cyclone – if an imbalance of any kind is felt by natural forces, because nature is a balance. The whole universe is an ultimate balance, and if it is necessary on your part to maintain a balance between yourself and the world of nature – and everything that the world is made of, finally – you have first of all to be balanced in the constituents of your body. There cannot be non-alignment of your personality in any sense of the term, because you cannot be in harmony with others or with anything outside you if you are not in harmony with your own self. You cannot be a friend of another if you are an enemy of your own self. When you have sorrow caused by the dismembered quarrelling attitude of your own internal constituents, how can you have a wholesome attitude towards others? “Be good. Do good,” is what Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj used to tell us again and again. You cannot be good to others unless you are good essentially, good in your make-up itself; and doing good is only an external expression of what you are as a good individual.

However, the point is, again, the maintenance of a balance in the inner constituents of your personality as a preparatory step to maintain a balance with the world of nature; and yoga will expect from you much more than these little prescriptions because yoga will end in meditation and samadhi – which is not merely your tentative feeling of attunement with nature, but a total absorption in it, such that nature becomes not merely your friend, but inseparable from your existence. The Yoga System, as propounded by Patanjali, goes into such ecstatic reaches of experience that your inner layers get tuned up with the inner layers of the cosmos in such an intensive manner that you begin to feel that you are not any more a human being, not a man or a woman, not ‘this’ or ‘that’, but a particle of nature, a wave of nature, a vibration of nature, a pressure point of natural energies.

You are not a human being as you are imagining yourself to be. In the ultimate reaches which are called samadhis, you cease to be a human being. You become something which is a part of the cosmic setup of things. You cannot regard a part of nature as a human being. The humanity that you are speaking of is only a social interpretation and understanding of that which is super-social and super-individual. The particles, the atoms, the waves, the energies, the vibrations, are not human. They have nothing human in them. They are impersonal energies like electric energy, which cannot be called a man or a woman, and yet it is more than what you call humanity.

Thus, natural forces are impersonal laws with which you have to attune yourself in what yoga calls samadhis – and as you move higher and higher in yoga, you become more and more superhuman, impersonal, and no more an individual looking at the world as a mass of humanity, as a sea of people. You will see that you are in an ocean of powers, forces, vibrations, and perhaps what people today call the space-time continuum. This is what is awaiting you in the finale of yoga.

So, Patanjali tells you to be seated in a very equanimous position, in which you will be so equanimously posed that you will not even know that you have a body. Sit in a very calm posture for a few minutes without feeling any ache or pain in the body. Sit for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes; you will not know that you have a body at all. You feel a sense of buoyancy of spirit. The intense feeling that you are the body arises on account of your non-alignment with the objective world, and even at the stage of yoga asana, at least from the point of view of the system of Patanjali, begin this meditation. Even the yoga asana itself is a meditation, because it requires a great power of concentration of mind to be seated in such an equilibrated position.

The inner constituents of your personality, to which I was referring again and again, are also to be understood properly. What is meant by the inner constituents? As I mentioned, the physical body is ultimately constituted of the five elements – earth, water, fire, air, ether. The bones, flesh, nerves, marrow, blood, and whatever is in your physical body, is nothing but the result of the permutation and combination of earth, water, fire, air and ether. But there is something else; there are energies. The prana, which takes the form of breathing, is also an essential. And the breathing process, which is the expression of the energy we call the prana, is the generator which pumps strength into our body, due to which we are able to move, walk, lift our hands, and perform the physical and physiological functions. If the prana does not pump energy, we cannot even move; there will be no life in the body. The body has no vitality of its own. It cannot move, just as a brick cannot move or a cart cannot move unless it is pulled. This dynamo that pumps energy into the physical body and makes it move, as railway carriages are made to move by their engine, is the prana sakti within us – the energy, vitality, force, vibration, or whatever we may call it.

You must know what is inside your body before you can go further. This physical body is made up of the five elements. Then there is the prana which performs various functions, and it assumes various names on account of the performance of these functions. Prana, apana, vyana, udana and samana are certain Sanskrit terms used to describe the functions of the prana. We are not very much concerned with these functional differentiations now. Suffice it to say that there is a vibrating force within us which is vitality, energy, prana, which expresses itself as the breathing process through the nostrils. But you have also a mind which thinks. You are not merely the physical body, the physiological system and the prana. You know that when you are fast asleep, the body is there, and the prana also is there. You are breathing, no doubt, but the mind does not think, so you do not know that you are existing. Hence, whatever you know is an act of the mental faculty. The mind is a general term we use to describe everything that is called ‘psychic function’.

In the Sanskrit language there are special names for these operations of the psyche. In western psychological parlance, the word ‘mind’ generally includes everything that is called the psyche. In a general way, we call everything that is psychical as ‘mind’ or ‘mental’. Well, that is all right for all practical purposes, but in the system of Indian psychological analysis, what is called ‘mind’ in the English language may be regarded as that particular faculty which indeterminately thinks. ‘Indeterminate thinking’ means just being conscious that there is something, without actually knowing what it is. This is general perception. When you just look at something, you know that something is there. This especially happens when you are just getting up from your bed and not fully awake. You wipe your eyes, and then begin to see what is around. There is something, and you know that there is something. This knowledge that there is something around you is an indeterminate cognition of the mind, called manas in Sanskrit. Then you become awake more acutely, and get up from the bed and begin to see things and people standing in front of you. It is not just ‘something’. This is determinate understanding, where the intellect begins to operate.

The mind is manas, the intellect is buddhi. The manas, mind, performs the function of indeterminate thinking, and the intellect decides and determines that it is such and such a thing. And there is a will, sometimes called volition – buddhi sakti in Sanskrit. The power of the understanding is the will force – the volition, so-called. When you merely think that there is something, it is manas, or mind, knowing that there is something; when the understanding or the intellect operates, you decide that it is something. Then the will says, “Oh! It is a snake!” Now you understand it is not merely ‘something’. It is decided by the intellect that it is a snake. Then the will orders an action – ‘Quit this place’; and the prana is ordered – ‘Take action’; and the prana urges the leg – ‘Run!’; and you know what you do when you perceive a snake in front of you. Or, if you see something very pleasurable – “My dear friend has come! Oh, my dear, you have come after a long time!” – you embrace. This is the action of the will as a consequence of a determinate understanding of the intellect, superior to the general thinking process of the manas or the mind.

So, as I mentioned, apart from the body and the prana, you have the mental process of thinking, the understanding process of the intellect, and volitional activity of the will. There is a fourth something which is called ‘ego’. This is a very difficult thing to understand, and in Sanskrit it is normally translated as ahankara. Thus, the psychic function includes manas, buddhi, chitta, ahankara – wherein we have to include the buddhi sakti, or the volitional process. Manas is indeterminate thinking, intellect is determinate thinking, will is buddhi sakti, which is the power of action. Then there are the principles of ego, and there is chitta, which is a Sanskrit word which cannot easily be translated into English. Some people regard chitta as the subconscious – the principle by which you have a memory of things. For the time being, you may just be satisfied that chitta means memory or the faculty of remembrance, and that is something directly connected with the subconscious. You have to know what this subconscious is. Sometimes we are even told there is something called the unconscious. And there is the ego.

These things have to be very properly understood in order that you may know what you are expected to do in yoga practice as a step towards the freedom of your psychophysical personality and the freedom which you hope to attain in the sense people generally call Liberation, or the attainment of Eternal Life.