True Spiritual Living

by Swami Krishnananda

The mind, when it is conscious of an object or deals with a particular object, takes out from its resources only those aspects and features of its structure which are necessary for the fulfilment of a chosen purpose at that given moment of time. What is my present purpose? I will take out only that much as is necessary for this particular purpose, just as we may have a large godown [warehouse] with lots of things in it and we will not take out everything every day from that godown. We will take out only half a kilo of pulse or one kilo of rice, etc., because that is what is needed for the day. There may be many other things in the godown, but we are not worried about that because there is no purpose in looking into those things, the purpose being something else.

Likewise, the mind, in being conscious of an object and dealing with that object, lays emphasis only on the specific character of the particular purpose or aim in view at that given moment of time, and everything else is shoved into limbo. It is not bothered about other things that are there, because they are not necessary. And this is what we are doing every day – or rather ever hour, every moment of time. Our whole personality will not come outside, because it should not come outside for its own welfare. The mind knows this very well.

This is the main illness of man. A peculiar reservoir of maladjustments is inside, and that is covered over with a camouflage of apparent adjustment and harmony outside. So, while we are deep-seatedly disharmonious with everything, we openly and overtly appear to be harmonious with all things. Therefore, there seems to be a sort of satisfaction and a success in outward life, while there is an inward dissatisfaction and disharmony inside. And life being very short, we may die in this very condition, with a tremendous potentiality for disharmony within us, and without having achieved anything substantial in life.

This latency for disharmony that is within us pursues us even after death. This is the cause of rebirth. We are reborn into embodiment in successive lives because we carry with us, in spite of shedding the physical body, the potentiality of which we are made – the psychological stuff which we really are. And rebirth, the transmigratory process, cannot be put an end to as long as the deep-rooted, the deep-seated potentialities are not brought to the conscious level and made a part of our conscious nature.

So, yoga psychology works to some extent, though not entirely, along the lines of modern psychoanalysis. Whatever is inside should be brought out; otherwise, we cannot be free from tension. But no one would like to bring out everything that is inside, for various reasons, and therefore no one can be psychologically healthy in a perfect manner. Then, what is the solution? Like psychoanalysis, yoga prescribes various methods of sublimating these deeper impulses, not by repressing or suppressing them, or even substituting something else for them, but by sublimating them by a very slow growing process. This done, what happens is that the stuff out of which we are made – the personality of ours that we are speaking of – gets decentralised, as it were, into its components, and gets adjusted with the pattern of facts outside in the world. That is what we mean by harmony with nature.

The affirmation of the ego is the centralising principle within us, on account of which particles of matter are brought into a particular form or shape by a centripetal action and hardened into an instrument of action, that instrument being called this body. Like the nucleus of an atom – the proton or the neutron, or whatever we may call it – which, by its central electric action pulls the electrons around it towards itself and compels them to move around itself in a particular pattern so that the pattern of these electrons moving around it looks like an atom, so also, this proton called the ego within us, this centralising principle, draws sustenance from the constituents of nature outside, pulls particles of matter from the five elements towards itself, arranges them in a particular pattern into what is called this body; and this process will continue endlessly as long as this centralising principle, the ego, continues to exist. So, the purpose of yoga is to break this fortress of ego – asmita, as it is called in Sanskrit.

The ego is a very subtle principle which is the ruling power of what we call the psychological process within us. It is the king, the emperor, the chief directive force. Asmita – which we translate as the ego – is not merely the vanity or the vainglorious attitude that we put forth in public life. That is only a cruder form of it. The asmita or ego, in the sense of yoga psychology, is a subtle feeling of ‘I’-ness, or ‘I am’-ness, as we may call it. The very sensation or feeling ‘I am’ is called the ego. That ‘I am an officer’, ‘I am an emperor’, ‘I am a king’, ‘I am Julius Caesar’ – this is a cruder form of it. But yoga is concerned with even the subtlest aspect of it – the mere feeling ‘I am’. This ‘I am’-ness, the sense of individual ‘be’-ness, is called ego. That is asmita in yoga psychology. Asmi in Sanskrit means ‘I am’, and asmita means ‘I am’-ness. How subtle it is!

This is the cause, ultimately, of isolating us from all creation outside, making it falsely appear that we are disconnected from things outside and that all the problems and difficulties are in the outside world and not in us. This asmita is the cause of the problems. Ahankara vasad apat ahankarat duradhayah, says the Yoga Vasishtha. The great sage speaks to Rama: “All your apat – all your calamity or catastrophe in this life is due to this asmita, this feeling of ‘I am’.” Because ‘I am’, it follows that others also are. Well, now the trouble has started; you have set the fire ablaze. If ‘you’ are, ‘others’ also must be, and therefore the need arises to establish a connection with others. This is society, this is samsara. Because ‘you’ are, it follows that ‘others’ must be. And if ‘others’ are, it also follows that you have a connection with them in some way. You cannot understand this connection with others because the connection is internal rather than external, and the internal connection cannot be known because the asmita, the ego, works only through the senses, which can act only externally. So all our idea of relationship or connection is external, spatio-temporal, causally related, and nothing of the internal relations is known to us. But relations are really internal, and the external relationship is only a temporary shape or form taken by this internal set of relations. To solve the problems of life, therefore, we have to deal with the internal relations, and not merely the outer aspects of these.

Thus, coming to the point with which we started, the need for control of the mind, or chittavrtti nirodhah, arises because of our entire personality being involved with everything in the world, and because of this ego principle within us being the seed form of all the future projected activities, including all thought processes, etc. Whatever we think and feel, whatever we propose to do in the form of our daily activities, whatever our aspirations are, whatever we were in the past and shall be in the future and are in the present – everything is in this ego in a miniature form. Therefore, the old saying once again comes to our memory: “Know Thyself”. When we know ourselves, we have known everything, because the entire past, present and future is hidden inside us. Even the unimaginable past and the remotest future possibilities are all potentially present in ourselves. So, to know one’s own self is, in other words, to become omniscient, to know one’s own self is know the whole creation, and to know one’s own real difficulties is to know everyone’s difficulties.

Thus comes about the need for controlling the mind. As we have already observed, this psychological process of controlling ourselves, harmonising ourselves through the yoga techniques, is not merely a so-called internal activity of ours because, though for the purpose of expressing ourselves, for the sake of convenience in language we may talk of yoga as an internal process, it is really a cosmic process. It is so because this so-called internality of ours, this apparent individuality of ours, is really connected with all things everywhere. Therefore, to touch anything anywhere is to touch everything.

The world ‘outside’ and we ‘within’ are only ways of expression. There is neither a ‘within’ nor a ‘without’. And so, while we speak of the subject in relation to an object ‘outside’, we are speaking in the language of the ego; otherwise, there is no subject and there is no object in the language of our own usual day-to-day customs, manners etc. To think a thought is to think an object simultaneously, and to think an object is to at once imply all the relations of this object with everything anywhere. So, we can imagine the importance of a thought; it immediately stirs up powers and forces which are everywhere in the world. Therefore, while rightly directed thoughts can bring about immediate miraculous success, wrongly directly thoughts can bring about a reverse consequence. They can create a hell or a heaven at once, with the power of our thinking. This capacity, this potentiality, this power, this latency hidden within an individual, is discovered by the psychology of yoga; and this has to be unfolded, brought to the surface of consciousness, and made a reality of day-to-day experience.