CLARITY The Mental Body (Manas)
Contents
1. accepting the confusion at face value man places himself in a position of almost unbearable tension Yoga calls this state ignorance and sees it as our CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 121 fundamental affliction the matrix of error from which all other mis perceptions and errors flow From our ignorant identification with our ego and its mortality arises man s creativity and his destructiveness the glory of culture the horror of his history We embark on great and wonderful projects to affirm that the egoic self will not die What are the pyramids of Egypt but an attempt to cheat death They are a marvel of organization engineering geom etry and astronomy but the motivating force behind them was the Pharaohs lust for personal immortality and vanity in believing there was a means for his human kingly ego to cheat the grave A voice within us always whispers that this is a forlorn hope yet still in innumerable ways we endeavor to perpetuate a part of ourselves whose days are numbered or to comfort ourselves in advance for the coming loss What is the attraction of great luxury except this Con sumerism cannot be the gateway to immortality It is an ineffective and temporary balm against mortality To endure the fears of impermanence and to struggle against the inevitable is a tiring business so at the same time we long equally for loss of self for fusion for submergence and transcendence for release from the burden2. boat that must be able to steer both to port and starboard If not the craft would turn in circles Nevertheless when trying to alter embedded behavioral patterns it is preferable to create a positive formulation Let me find out the right way to lift my chest is better than Let me not get it wrong again We see this with children Don t stand there is an order that only serves to tell the child he or she is doing something wrong The unconscious mind relatively more powerful in the young cannot work out from this where is the right place to stand Only the rational con scious mind can do that Come and stand over here is an instruc tion that makes full sense to the child Otherwise he or she will live in dread of doing wrong rather than the hope and expectation of doing right Since ingrained patterns of behavior which yoga calls samskara or subliminal impressions lie as the word subliminal suggests largely in our unconscious it is in our own interests to emphasize the new and positive action and not dwell on the negative past Before we can strike on this new path we must understand how these ingrained habits and patterns of behavior or conditioned reflexes samskara so often con trol us Samskara Freeing Yourself from Habit If consciousness is like a lake there are primary waves or fluctuations of consciousness on the surface of the lake These are easily discernible An example is that i
3. ills Memory is not a platform from which to review the world It is a ladder whose rungs we ascend step by step Memory is absolutely nec essary for the development of intelligence Only when intelligence buddhi consults memory can it get at the information it needs to ini tiate the transformation it seeks While mind reacts to memory intel ligence interrogates memory Intelligence can conduct a thorough interrogation of memory to discern consequences and make connec tions that mind manas shies away from as they are too uncomfort able The Bhagavad Gita says that without memory intelligence cannot prosper and so we cannot reach our soul It is the way we use memory that is crucial and above all which element of consciousness conducts the interview It must be intelligence with its power to extract the truth reflect and act innovatively overriding even the mulish recalci trant ego Memory consulted by intelligence gives completely different an swers to memory consulted by mind As we have seen memory con sulted by mind and ego will always say What I liked give me more of whatever the consequences What I didn t like give me none of what CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 143 ever the consequences Mind and memory reinvoke past experiences of pain and pleasure and equate them to the present situation however inappropriate Whereas intelligence makes creative comparisons mind makes destructive ones destructive
4. me something that can be either or both an interface between T ness and the outer world It is my body The great attention that yoga and other practices too pay to the body derives from its paradox ical position In death we cannot take it with us in life we cannot leave it behind If I cannot take it with me how can it truly be me And why therefore should I trouble myself to look after it when in death it betrays me But if I do not I begin to decay in life and experience a slow prema ture death Yoga calls the body the vehicle of the soul but as the saying goes no one ever washes a rented car Yoga points out that it is in our highest interest to look after this poor conveyance at every level from health to mind to self to soul The conundrum of body is the starting point in yoga from which to unravel the mystery of human existence B K S IYENGAR 118 What is the point of having an individual I shape Could we as with our appendix live without it Why is this evolutionary trait pre sent to a greater or lesser extent in the whole animal kingdom Why most of all in human beings The most natural answer is simply that singularity of body requires singularity of awareness Imagine a car with two independent steering wheels and two drivers It would never stay on the road Self locomo tion necessitates a single I awareness linked through mind senses and body to the environment that provides food air and water Sinc
5. of ego The egoic self is an exhausting traveling com panion forever demanding that his caprices be pandered to that his whims be obeyed though he is never satisfied and his fears be calmed though they never can be The lovely Asmita single awareness in single body is thus trans formed into an insatiable paranoid vainglorious tyrant although this is a phenomenon we normally notice more easily in other people The reason for this sad transformation is ignorance the misper ception whereby a part of us is taken for the whole Much of yoga practice and ethic is concerned with cutting the ego down to size and removing the veil of unknowing that obscures its vision This can be done only with the intervention and assistance of the third constituent of consciousness B K S IYENGAR 122 Intelligence The Source of Discernment This is intelligence buddhi Yoga once again makes an important distinction between intelligence and mind manas The specific quality of mind is cleverness All people are clever compared to other forms of life Yoga states clearly that it is not the fact of being less clever than your neighbor that makes you stupid Stupidity is the absence of intel ligence Stupidity can be behaving in a certain way or not learning from our mistakes We are all stupid sometimes Relatively speaking we are all clever all the time A rocket scientist or professor of linguistics may be more stupid than a peasant in the fie
6. right perception sol dered together in a peerless moment and then another moment and another Eventually we are no longer caught up in the movement of time as a sequence or current sweeping us along but we experience it as a series of discrete and present moments No rising thought wave can escape the sharpness of such vision It is what we call presence of mind Great sportsmen possess it at the level of the body s intelligence They seem to have so much more time to act than other players It is as if the game slows down around them and they can dominate it as they please Asana and pranayama teach us how unsolicited thought throws us B K S IYENGAR 140 off balance Take the standing pose Ardha Chandrasana half moon asana balancing on one leg the other horizontal arm extended up ward We get the balance but the moment the thought arises Oh wonderful I m doing it we wobble or topple Only in stillness of mind can it be successfully maintained Similarly in pranayama we see how breath and consciousness interact A disturbance or irregularity in one creates its counterpart in the other When breath is calmed and attention focused on its inward movement then consciousness is no longer jerked by outer stimuli Similarly if the consciousness is steady and stable the breath moves with rhythm Either way it is receptive and passive no more hungrily seeking distraction or entertainment This frees it to let its attention
7. with I consciousness The benefit is clear single awareness in a single biological entity Is it possible they asked that the singularity of awareness the I ness is not the same thing as my true Self the essence of my being but merely for practical day to day purposes imperson ates it and as it were by force of habit has actually come to believe in that impersonation That is the nub of it Ego has been compared to the filament in a light bulb which because it glows with light proclaims itself to be the light s source electricity In reality the light that shines from I consciousness devolves from another and deeper source one un knowable in daily life but which mankind has always intuitively felt to exist We connect it to our beginnings to an original oneness out of B K S IYENGAR 120 which we have emerged We connect it to our destination to an ulti mate whole to which we shall one day return We connect it to the sky our invisible gateway to infinity What we cannot achieve living as we do in a world of multiplicity diversity difference and separation of getting and spending as the poet says is to perceive that source and ultimate unity within ourselves and in the complexities of everyday living We can perhaps sense its presence and dimly half remember it like the face of a long lost love or timidly apprehend it like the face of the lover we yearn for but have yet to meet The most common word we
8. 39 Cleanliness and contentment are bound together As we shall see they are the first two ethical injunctions of niyama concerning our behavior toward ourselves As yoga practice cleans the system and rests the nerves clarity contentment and serenity establish themselves Con tentment means the thought waves in the lake of consciousness are less turbulent You are starting to bring about Patanjali s statement Yoga is about stilling the turbulence of consciousness Someone who is clouded toxic sluggish discontented blaming others is a prime cause of discontent and restive in mind is never going to catch a secondary wave coming to the surface It will have expressed itself in action before they even notice it It is through the acute awareness and speed of action that we cultivate in asana and pranayama that we can reform ourselves In addition by breathing be fore acting we are able to slow down our responses inhale divinity and surrender ego in our exhalation This momentary pause allows us the time for cognitive reflection corrective reaction and reappraisal It is the momentary pause in the process of cause and effect that allows us to begin the process of freedom The endless process is breath cognitive reflection corrective reac tion reappraisal and action Eventually this process blends together in such a manner that we discover we have pulled ourselves into the pre sent moment no past no future but action and
9. 5 tice or sleep longer in the morning In Latin intelligence means to choose between It does not mean simply to think Have you ever noticed that when we have a problem we say Shh Wait let me think But what we really mean is Shh Wait let me stop thinking We want to see clearly and so we need to freeze frame the incessant flow of pulsating images words and their subliminal as sociations that are erupting from mind Mind produces thought and image all the time like a television with no off switch Thought moves too fast to catch and never of its own accord stops It is an unending analogue wave flowing from our brains out into the ether It cannot re form itself Thought cannot solve the problems caused by thought any more than a faulty engine can mend itself without the objective view and intervention of the mechanic That is the role of intelligence to stop to discern to discriminate to intervene Intelligence performs its task firstly by its ability to freeze frame the flow of thought This is what we call cognition Cognition is the process of knowing and includes both awareness and judgment Cog nition allows us to perceive in the present moment that at the heart of a situation is a choice With the image of thought no longer flick ering we see ourselves objectively in a position where we can ask Do I now do this or do I now do that Time pauses in a moment of awareness and reflection in which sudde
10. ODY MANAS 123 tively When I am being subjective I say I hate my job When I am being objective I say I have the skills to get a better job This first quality makes possible intelligence s second It can choose It can choose to perform an action that is new that is innovative It can ini tiate change It can decide to jump out of the ruts in which we are all stuck and strike out on a path for its own evolution Intelligence does not chat It is the quiet determined clear eyed revolutionary of our consciousness Intelligence is the silent or sleeping partner in con sciousness but when it awakes it is the senior or dominant partner If we glance back at mind manas and I shape ahamkara the two conservative stalwarts of consciousness we will see that logically they are governed by mechanisms that resist change Mind and the senses that inform it seek to repeat pleasure and avoid pain We have seen the rationale behind this but at the same time must admit that it is essentially a holding pattern of behavior rooted in the experience of the past It is in consequence likely to shy away from innovation and thus stifle the possibility of evolution We saw that I shape or ego de fines itself as the totality of the experiences that have accrued to it in the past my childhood my university degree my bank account I Shape or Ego is the running total of all that has happened up until now It is in love with the past Why What does ego fe
11. Sirsasana Chapter 4 CLARITY The Mental Body Manas ou cannot hope to experience inner peace or freedom without un derstanding the workings of your mind and of human conscious ness in general All behavior both constructive and destructive is dependent on our thoughts By understanding how our thinking works we discover nothing less than the very secrets of human psy chology With this right perception and understanding of our minds the door opens to our liberation as we go through the veil of illusion into the bright day of clarity and wisdom The study of mind and con sciousness therefore lies at the heart of yoga Obviously mind and consciousness are involved at every level of our being but because of their subtlety they are considered to reside 107 as far as yoga s blueprint of humanity is concerned in the third and fourth sheaths of being The yogi makes a distinction between the mental body manomaya kosa where the incessant thoughts of human life occur and the intellectual body vijnanamaya kosa where intelli gence and discernment can be found This chapter deals in detail with the mental body and how the thinking brain memory ego and sen sory perception work together for good or for ill in our lives I will in troduce the yogic definition of intelligence making self aware choices through informed discernment and the exercise of will but I will re turn to intelligence and wisdom in the n
12. This is objective It is the consciousness of being conscious that makes us human Trees are conscious too a clump of oaks har moniously spreads its limbs for the benefit of each leaf each indi vidual tree in the group But they are not consciously conscious The consciousness of nature is unconscious The history of humankind can be described as a journey from unconsciousness to conscious consciousness or self awareness If this is correct then it must op erate at the level of the individual and of the species as conscious ness is permeable What is the advantage conferred by the mirror of intelligence Simply that we can see ourselves as if from a distance Suddenly the egoic self becomes an object Normally it is the subject incapable of seeing things except from its own point of view A real mirror permits us to see ourselves as if from outside therefore to notice what we could not otherwise see food stains on our ties for example Thus we can make changes in our appearances if we are disturbed by the images we see In fact consciousness is a double mirror able to reflect the objects of the world or the soul within We can choose to take off and clean our tie We can choose to start asana practice and cleanse our bodies We can choose That is the second aspect of intelligence Based on objective information we can choose to clean our ties or not to clean them We can start asana prac CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 12
13. ar most Its own death Where is that In the future So of course ego is happiest with endless variations on the past It is comfortable rearranging the same old furniture in the same old room and standing back and saying Doesn t it look different Does it Yes Is it No What ego does not want to do is throw away the furniture and leave the room That is the unknown The unknown resuscitates all its panic fears of its own im permanence the fear that one day its impersonation of the true self the unknown soul will be unmasked at which point its existence as it has hitherto known it will terminate Early European travelers in India were often horrified to discover that the goal of religious practice was an end to the illusion of the B K S IYENGAR 124 lasting reality of the egoic self They reacted to this as a sort of living suicide Paradoxically they also respected it Experience of samadhi re veals to us that ego is not the source of Self We transcend ego identi fication After samadhi we return to our ego but use it as a necessary tool for living not a substitute for soul Ego no longer limits us with its pettiness fears or cravings The Sanskrit word for philosophy darsan means vision or sight This is the sight of ourselves an objective vision acting as a mirror to the self This is the reflexive quality of intelligence Plato said that it is not enough to know which is subjective We must know that we know
14. ate but you know that if you pick up a piece of chocolate and eat one piece you won t have to buy the whole choco late shop to satisfy a craving that is still dormant within you You can touch it lightly and say Great that s enough but you re not caught CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 135 So you re acting in freedom That gives you moderation and lightness and you re dealing with the situation as it is You re not a prisoner of past badness or past goodness This has significant karmic implications Everybody wants to have what is called good karma rather than bad so we re trying to make karmic consequences less unpleasant Pleasant effects derive from positive samskara So build these up and you get good consequences This makes life pleasant livable and agreeable for us and for others There is a real social benefit But the yogic goal is freedom so the yogi says I want to be free of conse quence I want to be free of karmic causality Let me act in the present unconditioned even by the good imprints bringing good results I will try to cultivate actions so that they are reaction free He will not be tied either to the past or through self interested motivation to the fu ture He will simply act cleanly in the present If we understand the relationship between samskara and karma of actions and their conse quences we can break the chain of causality The advantage of sus tained and dedicated prac
15. cally deliberately and wisely in ordinary life and whenever life presents extraordinary challenges and opportunities we will be prepared to handle those too In the next chapter we will continue our exploration of intelligence and how it can lead us to true wisdom B K 8 IYENGAR 146
16. clean so it is yoga s job to clean and calm the thought waves that disturb our awareness What then are the movements and fluctuations of the mind of which Patanjali wrote In the image of the lake they are ripples and waves on its surface and currents and movements in its depths We all recognize how odd thoughts ruffle the surface of our minds Oh I ve forgotten to buy the carrots or My boss doesn t like me We no tice how outside disturbances create inner ones Their mindless chatter is making it impossible for me to concentrate In yogic terms mindless chatter others or our own is a lot of distracting ripples So also do our desires dislikes jealousies doubts and fears erupt to the CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 109 surface out of the mind and consciousness Thoughts arising from memory are considered as a type of wave as is sleep or daydreaming Even ignorance is viewed as a type of movement in consciousness We will look at these later but the point here is that a great many forces are constantly troubling the lake muddying the waters and agitating the surface We can see then that restoring our lakes to a state of limpid crystalline purity and tranquility is a huge undertaking So we should first look carefully at our consciousness see what elements combine to make it up and analyze how they work together The Inner Workings of Consciousness Go into almost any bookshop and you will s
17. criteria of excellence it is straightforward practical and most important applicable now Yoga identifies three constituent parts to our consciousness which it calls citta They are mind which is called manas ego or self with a small s which is called abamkara and intelligence which is called buddhi The mind as I have said is the outer layer of con sciousness Its nature is fickleness unsteadiness and inability to make productive choices It cannot decide between good and bad right or wrong correct or incorrect This is the role of the intelligence which is the inner layer Ahamkara or ego is the innermost layer of con sciousness Literally ahamkara means I shape It presents itself as our personalities and assumes the identity of the true Self It is the part of us that hankers after anything that attracts Whichever layer of consciousness is active expands causing the others to retract Yoga de scribes the relationship between these parts and their relative propor tion to each other and then yoga explains how they react when they encounter the world which of course they do all the time Yoga points out how we generally react to the outside world by forming entrenched patterns of behavior that doom us to relive the same events endlessly though in a superficial variety of forms and combinations Anyone who looks at history or listens to the litany of woe and war on the daily news will bear this out Does manki
18. e each biological entity is subtly or grossly different and recognizes that in itself so it needs to recognize difference in others At the most basic level sexual reproduction demands we differentiate between male and female Wind pollination does not No two grains of sand may be the same but as they do not move about of their own volition forage for food or reproduce the last thing they need is a highly developed ego I have said that our I shape is fluid When we throw ourselves into a great ideal or cause or even go along as fans to support our national sports team at the Olympics we are subsumed in a larger identity for the moment laying aside the burden of the individual self But this col lectivity is both partial and temporary This is still I consciousness It is at best a poor substitute for primal unity Our I ness is an identifier We need to identify with a certain particularity in order to maintain biological and mental integrity All this is to the good so how is it that the words ego and egoistic carry such negative connotations It is because the surface of our I shape is covered with super glue Memories possessions desires experiences attachments achieve ments opinions and prejudices stick to the I like barnacles to the hull of a ship The I shape s contact with the outer world is through mind and senses All the treasure and glory and misery of that contact are passed back to ego which accumulate
19. ebody with good habits of life is an agreeable person able to make his way in life This is a reward from practice cleanliness contentment and from a process of self reform that you can undertake even without yoga Yoga is a support to it obviously yoga is a way to it but that doesn t mean there is no reform of samskara outside of yoga However yoga is a powerful tool for liberating ourselves from unwanted ingrained pat terns Through it we identify acknowledge and progressively change them What is unique to yoga is an ability to take us further to an un conditioned freedom because yoga sees even good habits as a form of conditioning or limitation Yoga never forgets that the end purpose is not just to remove bad samskara We also have to cultivate good deeds to build up good sam skara Of course we first have to weed out the bad But the yogic com pass always returns to the notion of emancipation So what we want is for the bottom of the lake to be flat so that we don t get any sec ondary fluctuations bouncing off the bottom That is freedom But B K S IYENGAR 134 practically speaking you can t go from bad samskara in one jump to freedom You ve got to go from bad samskara to good samskara to freedom It s a logical progression It s doable Theoretically you could go from bad to total redemption and there may be cases where this happens but it would be very rare In practical terms most of us have built up n
20. ee shelf upon shelf of books on self help personal problems and growth psychology and spiritual practices and paths What very few of the books get to grips with is the enduring problem at the core of the human dilemma which is our mind or consciousness not only that is to say the nature of consciousness but above all the way our minds function Imagine a manual for a motor car that discusses endlessly and elo quently its bodywork style color acceleration comfort and safety features but that never actually gets down to how an internal com bustion engine works From such a description no one could ever un derstand maintain or mend their cars Fortunately we can take our cars to the garage where the engines are fully understood and can be repaired But to whom do we take our own individual minds to get fixed We can go to a psychologist for advice but in the end we are eternally obliged to fix our minds ourselves Yoga offers us very useful ways to fix the mental problems that cause most of us so much suffering but first we must understand yoga philosophy s simple description of consciousness I introduce the word philosophy advisedly here and purposely place it in the same sentence as the word simple We have the idea that philosophy which literally B K S IYENGAR 110 means love of wisdom has to be complicated theoretical and prob ably incomprehensible to qualify for its name Yoga philosophy opts for different
21. egative habits You want to turn them into positive habits and then into no habits As progress reaches into the subtle levels of kosa you don t avoid smoking because you are a nonsmoker or because smoking is bad You are not invoking a duality of good versus bad Similarly you do not have to bite off your tongue to avoid giving an angry retort to people who irritate you you re not being self consciously good It simply becomes second nature to be free You might give an angry answer to a rude person you might give a courteous answer to a rude person but ei ther way you act in freedom you act appropriately unconditioned by the past In teaching it is sometimes necessary for me to act the role of anger I have to appear mercilessly merciful in order to save students from themselves The anger response is appropriate But I am not attached to the anger The anger role does not disturb the bottom of the lake and create a pattern As soon as I turn away from the student I put down the anger I am detached and ready to deal with the next student with friendliness or humor or whatever is appropriate to his or her needs I do not get caught up yet I can engage fully in the comedy and tragedy of the human drama Suppose you ve always eaten too much chocolate then you give it up for a long time and free yourself from chocolate Later on if someone offers you some chocolate you can actually say Yes or No to the chocol
22. el rapidly down through the levels of the lake they encounter uncharted banks of sediment that cause secondary waves of thought These in turn stimulate in a way that is beyond our comprehension or control behavior that is both reactive and inappro priate Our reactions are preconditioned and therefore unfree We CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 133 cannot break out of the old pattern of behavior however much we long to In the end we may accept the situation and just say It s the way I am Life always lets me down Things just make me so angry or T have an addictive personality If you don t smoke for one day you actually take away from the smoking sandbank at the bottom of the lake so the sandbank is frac tionally smaller But the second day you don t smoke you still want to smoke because you ve got a one day I don t smoke mound and a twenty four year I do smoke mound Obviously it is through the P continued practice of creating I don t smoke m not disap pointed or I don t get irritable mounds that little by little we re form ourselves We diminish the size of the negative mounds and turn them into positive samskara such as I am a nonsmoker I am good natured or I am equable Then you build up banks of good nature bonhomie openness nonsmoking or whatever you want These form a good character and they make our lives much easier Som
23. ere sixteen every time you pick up a cigarette in the day you are also brainwashing yourself In this situa tion I pick up a cigarette sends a little ripple down through con sciousness that adds to the take a cigarette mound That s why cigarettes are more difficult than almost anything else to give up Aside from their physical cravings we create mental cravings because the habit is very repetitive The habit of smoking puts itself into every sit uation The triggers to that situation are so many that many smokers still sometimes want to smoke even years after they have stopped be cause the mound is still there When you have an anger irritability or disappointment mound the conditioned reflex works like this Suppose you re irritable with your parents and your mother comes into the room She might only say Dinner s ready but the irritability reflex is ready to spring up She has said nothing to irritate you but the irritability mound means that any incoming stimulus connected to her sends a wave down B K S IYENGAR 132 through the lake and hits the irritability mound So we get a distorted and secondary wave of bad tempered thought bouncing up from the floor of the lake The accumulated predisposition to bad temper rears up and says Oh it s my mother she s so irritating and even though she only announced dinner you reply Oh alright m coming I m coming There s an irritation in
24. ext chapter It is through this intelligence that we initiate change and free ourselves from ingrained patterns of behavior and steer ourselves incrementally toward illumi nation and freedom However we can hope only to develop intelli gence once we understand why we are so often prompted to act without it Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras chose to make the workings of mind and consciousness both in success and in failure the central theme of yoga philosophy and practice In fact from the yogi s standpoint prac tice and philosophy are inseparable Patanjali s first sutra says Now I m going to present the disciplined code of ethical conduct which is yoga In other words yoga is something you do So what do you do The second sutra tells us Yoga is the process of stilling the move ments and fluctuations of mind that disturb our consciousness Every thing we do in yoga is concerned with achieving this incredibly difficult task If we achieve it Patanjali said the goal and the fruit of yoga will be within our grasp My life s work has been to demonstrate that from one s very first Samasthiti standing still and straight or Tadasana mountain pose in one s very first class one is embarking on this task If one perseveres and refines gaining strength and clarity always penetrating from the initial practice then the techniques of body and breath that yoga of fers will lead us to reach the great goal that Patanjal
25. f you are invited to dinner by dear friends and at the last minute they ring to cancel then you re very disappointed That is a primary wave on the surface of the lake You re disappointed you re unhappy you feel let down and you deal with that on the sur face You have to calm yourself down get over your disappointment CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 131 That is a challenge an external challenge as it were that causes a ripple on the surface The secondary fluctuations or waves are different Those are the ones that rise up from the bottom of the lake The bottom of a lake is covered in sand and so if in life you experience a sufficient number of disappointments the ripple on the surface creates a wave that goes down to the bottom and imperceptibly that ripple creates a little bank in the sand so there is a little mound of disappointment As a result you will find yourself frequently disappointed or sad as this mound at the bottom sends off secondary fluctuations or waves Let us look at another common example If you constantly find yourself being irritable annoyed by something your wife your chil dren your parents or anything at all a sufficient number of irritable reactions will create imperceptibly not in one time only a little mound of irritability at the bottom of the lake of consciousness and that will eventually make you what we call an irritable person an angry person If you have smoked since you w
26. fe During my early travels abroad as a young man invited to spread the knowledge of yoga I was on occasion subjected to demeaning and to me shocking racial discrimination At my small hotel in London I was asked not to eat in the restaurant as it might upset the other guests and at the airports in America I encountered the ugly face of institutional ized racism Although I have strong feelings about racism and equality those incidents in no way altered my behavior or my warmth toward the people of England or the U S A The wound on my youthful self left only a healthy scar no lingering resentment no decision to avoid B K S IYENGAR 142 such situations again by staying away And in time laws and attitudes in those countries have changed so that others are no longer dehu manized by such arrogance and prejudice This principle applies to yoga s treatment of all addictions too What we don t feed will wither Desires even if only expressed at a mental level continue to nourish negative imprints By turning our minds inward which automatically happens in asana and pranayama and teaching us the art of constructive action in the present moment yoga leads consciousness away from desires and toward the inner undisturbable core Here it creates a new avenue by which reflexively to perceive observe and recognize the heart antarlaksa In this way the meditative mind created by yoga is a powerful therapeutic tool for removing human
27. fication with self with me with my singularity and difference from you my apartness my feeling CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 117 in some way of being at the center of everything and that all that is not me partakes of a degree of otherness This otherness is not fixed nor is our I shape Indeed one aspect of the self which the Sanskrit ahamkara conveys is the constantly changing ever shrinking and expanding shape of the self The great night sky may make us feel small and lonely but a beautiful sunrise can cause us to feel intimately part of a greater whole cared for by a benevolent universe On other occasions the sight of the stars and blackness might bring us to the edge of grasping infinity itself the source of all our hopes and terrors So the relationship between self and nonself is fluid Neither is a fixed quantity Sometimes we are close and intimate with other people at other times these same people might seem like our enemies Yet every time we say the word I we feel something hard and monolithic in side us like a great stone idol Whatever the shape of our I however defenseless and perme able we allow ourselves to become a separation between self and other continues to exist in normal consciousness Even in the rapture of na ture s beauty we know that we are not the glowing sunset There is ad miration not fusion Early yoga philosophers identified a grey area between what is me and not
28. give to this is soul If the I attaches itself to consciousness it becomes ego ahamkara If the I can be erased awareness of soul infuses the consciousness This is not the true realization of the soul The soul is a separate entity and should not be confused with any form of I consciousness Nevertheless when ego is quiescent consciousness senses the reality of the soul and the light of soul expresses itself through the translucent consciousness To an extent we all sense the presence of soul in our origin and our end Looking at the world around us we are torn between feelings that soul cannot be in this and yet if soul exists at all it must be in this also We guess it to be unlimited by our notions of space and time Its existence is not defined by or confined to the span of our years between the cradle and the grave Those brief years are the province of the I shape of consciousness which is born grows flourishes withers and dies in the body that bears it It is democratic if in us then equally in others It is not personal if anything it is we who belong to it If we mistake this separate necessary but temporary I awareness for our true and abiding identity if we confuse it with soul we are in a cleft stick What we all most desire is to live and to be a part of life By choosing to identify with a part of ourselves that MUST die we condemn ourselves to death By embracing a false identity
29. gravitate toward the most profound level of consciousness in the depths of the lake Normally this level ap pears as our unconscious as no light of awareness penetrates it But if the lake is clear no rising wave can catch us by surprise There is no mystery here It is about training self education If we learn reflection and correction in equipoise where any movement or alteration is de tectable and its source revealed then we have acquired the sensitivity that brings self knowledge the threshold of wisdom We know when we are reacting to an external challenge in a straightforward manner or when the hidden sandbanks of previous conditioning are trying to influence and warp our response We can now identify thought as a de liberative useful and necessary process a great gift and talent apart from thought as meaningless disturbance mindless chatter a radio we cannot switch off and also from thought as a subtle form of interfer ence from the past a self sabotaging mechanism lodged in our uncon scious memory We have looked at the process of turning negative habits into pos itive ones as a prelude to the larger freedom of unalloyed moment to moment perception and wisdom but one might legitimately ask this question What happens if a negative sandbank has been created in unconscious memory by a single past event such as a traumatic acci CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 141 dent ten years ago the spontaneous recall of whic
30. h may continue to trouble the present as latent hidden impressions resurface There is no countervailing positive sandbank we can build up and so we would seem to be imprisoned by an unchangeable past incident lodged in memory We are not Everything I have said about strengthening the nervous system and stabilizing the mind holds good In addition there is the old nostrum time heals It does but only if we allow it to In Western psychology one recites and reflects repeatedly on one s prob lems This rumination reinforces and exacerbates the problem While revelation can help one to see the samskara rumination only continues to reinforce it We all know that a scab that we constantly pick will not heal In the same way we have to let old wounds in memory heal over This does not mean repressing them It means that what is not fed will wither A sandbank that we do not add to will gradually erode The right practice of yoga speeds this process by enabling one to identify the impulses rising from the old imprint and by severing the mecha nism that feeds it Acting on subliminal impulses reinforces them and so the ability to intercept the rising wave is itself a progressive means of relief As the rising impulse is stopped before causing a disturbance in our consciousness we stop it from making a ripple on the surface that will in addition return to reinforce the sandbank at the bottom I can offer at least a small example from my own li
31. hearing and taste but mind is pow erless without its storehouse of past imprints Therefore when a child is asked to pick up red he refers to the imprint of red in the cloth of consciousness There is a perfectly sensible historical reason for this Mind all minds whether brilliant or dull are equipped with a simple and in stinctual survival tool that is Repeat pleasure and avoid pain This enables us to avoid putting our hands in the fire twice or continually trying to quench our thirst with sea water The converse of nasty im plying danger is that nice or pleasurable implies the opposite which is a survival advantage You can see this most strongly in sexual re production If the sexual act were unpleasant it would hardly favor the propagation of either our individual genes or the species in general If we look at the case of wild animals we can see this mechanism working within the context of their lives almost entirely to their ben efit Think of a brown bear during the autumn salmon run pleasurably guzzling fish after fish He will need the excess fat to get him through B K S IYENGAR 114 the coming hibernation and his gluttony far from being among the seven deadly sins is an indispensable virtue But is the context of our lives alienated from nature as we increasingly are similar to that of the wild bear Substitute human for bear and junk food for salmon Is gluttony likely to prove a winning techni
32. hings we think will make us happy but in learning to like doing the things we have to do anyway Try this when you re waiting for a late train or doing the washing up If you want to learn how to repair a car you first need to learn the parts Similarly we must now discuss the three components of con sciousness and look in detail at the user s manual that yoga offers for the human condition Yoga philosophy identifies three main constituents of conscious ness considering them to be an evolution of nature We all admire the myriad complexities of nature s long evolution opposable thumbs the eye of the fish or eagle the metamorphosis of the frog a bird s wing the bat s radar or at a more subtle level our own linguistic and grammatical abilities hard wired into the brain cells of every healthy human Yoga asks us to look at the unfolding complexities of con sciousness on the evolutionary path that are even more subtle such as mind I shape and intelligence and to question what they are and how they work Our mind processes our thoughts and lived expe riences The I shape allows us to establish a distinction between our selves and others whether our mother or the person on the bus next B K S IYENGAR 112 to us This is perhaps closest to the Western psychological notion of the ego Beyond this I shape or ego and the mental activity of mind we also have intelligence by which we discern and make decisions Co
33. i has set However B K 8 IYENGAR 108 a conceptual understanding of what we are trying to do is vital as long as we do not imagine that it is a substitute for practice It is an aid to practice An architectural plan is not the same thing as the building it self but it is certainly an important element in bringing about its real ization Yoga has precise definitions of mind and consciousness and the English words we use do not always correspond well to the Sanskrit I will explain them as I go along but suffice to say that normal English usage often uses mind and consciousness synonymously In the preci sion of the Sanskrit mind is described as an aspect or part of con sciousness The mind forms the outer layer of consciousness citta in the same way as the skeletal and muscular body is the outer sheath that contains the inner body of vital organs and circulatory and respiratory systems Consciousness means our capacity to be aware both exter nally as well as internally which we call self awareness One good image for consciousness is a lake The pure waters of a lake reflect the beauty around it external and one can also see right through the clear water to the bottom internal Similarly a pure mind can reflect the beauty in the world around it and when the mind is still the beauty of the Self or soul is seen reflected in it But we all know what stagnation and pollution do to a lake As one has to keep the water of a lake
34. in the sense that they fix us in a rut an imprisoning pattern Memory is useful if it helps to prepare you for the future to know whether or not you are moving forward Use it to develop Memory is useless if it brings about a repetition of the past Repetition means to live in memory If repetition is taking place then memory retards the path of evolution Do not live in memory Memory is only the means to know whether we are fully aware and evolving Never think of yes terday Only go back if you feel that you are doing something wrong Use yesterday s experience as a springboard Living in the past or longing to repeat previous experience will only stagnate intelligence But what of the memory of the body Does that also like its con scious counterpart in mind have the capacity to enslave us or set us free It does and here again the awakening of intelligence is critical Consciousness is potentially in every cell of our body but most of us are comatose The nervous system reaches everywhere Where nerves are mind must be Where mind is so is memory Any repetitive skillful action depends on that memory The potter s memory is in his hands When we drive a familiar winding road we know instinctively how to take the bends We do not think consciously at all In a new stranger s house we can never find the light switches In our own our hand goes to them automatically Scents and tastes recall scenes of childhood to us without the
35. intervention of mind The cellular memory also provokes negatives I don t want to do that It s too much trouble I don t like him He looks like my boss Again it is practice that brings the light of intelligence to our cells and roots out negativity I said in chapter 2 that stretching brings the con duits of the nervous system from the center to the periphery strength B K S IYENGAR 144 ening and relaxing them Through these conduits adi there is a spread of awareness Awareness is consciousness Intelligence is a part of consciousness and so its light is reaching every cell in areas that pre viously were dull and unknown to us We hear a lot about illumination of the Soul This is illumination of the body Our cells die by the mil lion every minute but at least if we bring life to them they live before they die When intelligence shines into the cells then instinct is joined by the higher faculty of intuition Instinct is memory and mind func tioning for good or ill with reference only to the past life preserving and life destroying jumbled together When intelligence is awakened in the cells then instinct is transformed into intuition and the past loses its deterministic grip on us as our inner intelligence tells us what the future requires Memory at the cellular level is at the service of intelligence in the form of intuition At the conscious level it serves initially as a reference library for intellige
36. is not immediate enough to act as a deterrent or the reward does not come fast enough to act as a spur we tend to feel and act like children We seek immediate gratifi cation Take the case of disease Until recently the greatest danger to health came from such diseases as cholera and typhoid They operate CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 115 within a small time scale Drink contaminated water on Monday sick on Tuesday dead on Wednesday Once the link between water and these diseases was established we quickly learned through intelligence to purify the water supply Rapid connections are relatively easy to identify and rectify If you hit your thumb with a hammer no one is going to convince you the pain comes from anywhere else Next time you ll be more careful But what of the diseases that plague us now Are they not degen erative and operative over a very long period And are not both their avoidance and their cure highly problematic We nearly all recognize that there is some connection between the way we live and such illnesses as cancer heart disease and arthritis yet since the process of decline is so gradual and the deadly payoff so long deferred we find it terribly difficult to make the necessary reforms in our habits of life even if at one level we are actually longing for them Take the case of AIDS I have treated many AIDS patients in my medical class right from the beginning of the epidemic and so I know the di
37. lds or a worker in a factory He may well be much cleverer but that does not necessarily make him more intelligent Let me give you an example Scientifically advanced nations invent many complex and terrible weapons To do this they must be clever Then they sell these weapons indiscriminately around the world and the arms end up in the hands of their enemies Is this clever or stupid If stupid did their stupidity consist of a sudden loss of cleverness or of an absence of intelligence Mind is certainly highly inventive But is that the same as being innovative To innovate is to introduce the new to engage in a process of change To invent is to produce a different variation of the old This is a subtle and important distinction for we often mix the two up For example if someone al ways makes me angry I may express my anger in a thousand different ways inventing new words or actions to do so The day I choose not to respond with anger something new has taken place This is innova tion There is change Yoga tries to help us to truly innovate to develop the intelligence that allows us to create a new relationship to our ego and our world This new relationship is dependent on perceiving the world objectively and truthfully and on making choices discerning what is best Intelligence has two overriding characteristics First it is reflexive it can stand outside the self and perceive objectively not just subjec CLARITY THE MENTAL B
38. n sciousness is composed of these three and is yet greater than the sum of its parts Let s look more closely at each of them in turn Mind The Human Computer Mind manas in the yogic understanding is both physical and subtle It covers the entire body beginning from the brain and nervous systems of the spinal cortex linking outward to the five senses sight smell touch hearing and taste from which it gets most of its information and then to the five organs of action hands feet tongue and genital and excretory organs which it controls and through which it acts That is why mind is said to be the eleventh sense Mind is both per ceptive and active The mind is a computer and information storer and sifter analogous to the central processing unit CPU of the computer on your desk The mind faces out to the external world and deals with the daily affairs of My knee hurts I smell my dinner cooking gt That looks like an interesting film or I ve forgotten to do my homework Mind contains the apparatus that makes us outstanding at music poor at math handy in the tool room or gifted at drawing These qualities are distributed unevenly between people and though all faculties can be improved upon no amount of practice will turn an average musician into a Yehudi Menuhin There is a physical reality to these talents seated in the brain and senses that can be damaged in a physical way by accidents s
39. nce to be consulted judiciously and with scholarly detachment When intelligence consults spontaneously with memory at each moment then conscious intuition arises and the word we give to conscious intuition is wisdom There is another subtle way in which memory influences our lives without our realizing it The imprints of memory at an unconscious level act as a filter to perception Intelligence strives to see things as they are but mind and memory tend to interpret these in relation to the past The effect of this is imperceptibly to construct sandbanks of prejudice We are all aware how prejudice acts retrospectively you see something and place a distorted value judgment on it But prejudice also projects itself into the future by which I mean that it influences us to see and therefore to experience only those things that will confirm what we already think That is why I say it acts as a filter eliminating anything that will challenge our entrenched beliefs If you think that all foreigners are untrustworthy then it is certain you will meet lots of CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 145 them who are as you will never notice any others Yoga calls this mis perception and it is a lot more dangerous and difficult to eradicate than the simple misperception of misreading the number of your bus because you have forgotten your glasses The yogic analysis of the workings of consciousness supported by practice enables us to live philosophi
40. nd never learn anything we ask in exasperation The historical change from killing with stone clubs to swords to guns to nuclear weapons is clearly no change at all and it s certainly not evolution The constant is killing and the choice of means is merely a result of technological inventiveness or cleverness at its most self defeating The word cleverness implies a technical facility and dexterity that grows exponentially whereas intelligence suggests clarity of vision like pure lake waters that reflect without distortion CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 111 There is nevertheless a chance that we can break free from the im prisoning past and individually train ourselves to control this reactive mechanism in such a way that the old patterns are not repeated new things truly can happen and real changes can in fact take place This dawning clarity is in essence the path of yoga The evolutionary process I have just described can be summed up individually as Getting more of what I genuinely desire and less of what I don t The trick is to recognize which is which and then act on it The paradox arises in that to train ourselves to achieve this we have to start by doing a fair bit of what we don t want to do and rather less of what we think we do Yoga calls this tapas which I ve translated as sustained courageous practice The French philosopher Descartes said happiness does not consist in acquiring the t
41. nly our destiny is ours to command Do I eat a second scoop of ice cream or do I stop now The choice may be hard but at least it is simple We find ourselves at a parting of the ways that however trivial in itself is somehow mo mentous to us Imagine you wake up early one morning and ask yourself Shall I get up and do a bit of yogasana practice for once or shall I turn over and sleep for another hour In a way we desire both but recognize that this is impossible There is a choice a fork in the road before us Both paths have their attractions but obviously one is easier than the other Our cognitive intelligence has brought us to a clear perception B K S IYENGAR 126 of choice but at the moment of decision we are still stuck Is the harder path getting out of bed really an option Thanks to the second aspect of intelligence yes it is This is the property of will or volition This will is sometimes called conation which is why we say in yoga that intelligence is both conative and cognitive Will is what gets our feet out of bed and translates our awareness of choice into action Will is what converts the harder op tion from hypothesis into reality I have often described Hatha Yoga as the Yoga of Will Now you are out of bed The battle is won but not the war Would it not be nice now to make a coffee and read the morning paper for an hour Getting up was an achievement a step in the right direc
42. of all our hearts It is the only desire that leads us toward unity and not separation It makes possible our aspirations to love and be loved and on its farthest shore touches that union with infinity that is the ground and the goal of yoga If infinity seems a long way off let us not forget that when by an act of effortful intelligence we remove our feet from the warm bed to the cold floor we have taken our first step By now we have made a quick tour of mind ego and intelligence which together form consciousness There is much more to be said and more with this model as a guide which you can discover for yourself Consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts and I will talk about this later I have mentioned some of the defects inherent in mind and small self I consciousness but not yet those of intelligence Our first job is to awaken and vitalize intelligence before we look at what can go wrong Patanjali called it sattva suddhi purity or cleansing of the intelligence Now I want to describe how mind and the senses that inform it ego and intelligence collaborate or not in a trivial everyday situation We have the model in our mind s eye of consciousness as a circle di vided into three intercommunicating segments This is static which the world certainly is not so we shall launch a challenge to consciousness in the form of an external sense object This will be a very large tub of vanilla ice cream You have a
43. oul is always outside the game of life a Seer not a player and so when the ego based human consciousness loses its identity in the Soul it can no CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 137 longer be ensnared in pains and pleasures The ego is then understood to be no more than an actor s mask for the true Self Few people have ever reached this level of detachment Humanity lives for the most part in grey actions with mixed results but nurtures an ethical resolve gradually to shift from grey to white What impedes this self reforming process is that we have little awareness let alone control of the waves of thought that arise in the depths of the uncon scious Few of us possess the clarity and dexterity to catch the currents that arise from ingrained habits and conditioned reflexes Yet if we un derstood the complex role of memory we are more likely to use it skill fully and act with greater awareness and freedom Memory Liberation or Bondage When Pavlov rang his bell for the dogs at mealtimes the dogs salivated because the bell hit a bell equals mealtime mechanism in them asso ciating with and triggering memory The bell triggered the time to eat response and salivation occurred instantly The dogs didn t say Wait a minute this is a secondary wave This is only a bell It is very difficult for us to pick up the secondary wave rising from the uncon scious toward the surface We are caught up in the action
44. que for survival Not if we all die of clogged arteries at age forty At the level of the individual the system that governs the bird bear bat or human brain no longer works so clearly to our advantage as at earlier stages of evolution or in more natural modes of life In other words something programmed in our own brain which worked very well in the far distant past is no longer bringing us the benefits it once did A possible reason for this is contained in the phrase the context of our lives Animals are constrained by short ter mism Their actions bear fruit for good or ill within short time spans A gazelle who decided to experiment with junk food would soon end up as a lion s lunch In the case of man the delay between action and consequence or cause and effect has gotten longer and longer No animal has ever planted a field with grain in spring waited six months for the harvest and then stored and consumed it over the following year This is a long span of time When we tell a child to study hard to pass his exams we know the consequences might radically alter the quality of his life till his dying day seventy years later But what the child is feeling is I hate math I want to watch TV instead We are back to nice and nasty and the innate propensity of mind This is the problem with long termism a problem yoga identified more than two thousand years ago When life s rap on the knuckles
45. rrived home late and tired from work On the way you stopped off for a pizza and so are no longer particularly hungry Once in the kitchen as if by magic you find yourself opening the freezer door Inside sits a tub of vanilla ice cream The following sequence of events takes place 1 Your eyes sense organs light on the ice cream read the label vanilla and carry the information back to mind for decoding and B K 8 IYENGAR 128 identification A link is established a external object b sense organ c mind 2 Mind as it always does relays this information to the egoic self The links of the chain are now a b c d ego 3 Quick as a flash ego and mind go into a huddle and memory which is contained in mind is brought into play A question is auto matically put to memory Does the act of eating vanilla ice cream re sult in pleasure or pain 4 Without hesitation memory replies Pleasure 5 Ego says OK give it to me And mind coordinates the hand organ of action movements necessary to take the tub off the shelf open it and find a spoon The rest is history Let us now go back to stage 4 and see if any other outcome might have been possible and if so how 5a Mind and ego are vaguely aware of a sort of static buzz in the background of consciousness as if someone were trying to get their at tention This makes them uneasy so they turn round away from the open fridge and see in
46. s a flat bottomed lake in order to act solely in response to the stimulus that comes from outside and that is on the surface How do we catch secondary waves coming up from the floor of consciousness Let us say you are driving a car and a small absent mindedness or selfishness on the part of another driver releases a wave of anger in you Before you know it you are honking your horn cursing and driving aggressively yourself Does it do any good Do you feel better for letting your serenity be so easily shattered Does blaming the other driver restore your peace of mind No If you want to intercept the secondary waves rising you need speed and clarity of perception an acute self awareness If your lake is muddy and impure if there are lots of toxins in your system clouding your vision clarity of vision is impossible If your liver is sluggish with toxins your brain will be impaired because the liver is not filtering the blood Your nervous system will be slow to react to danger but dis proportionate in the degree of stress it registers To gain health you have to know the unconscious mind which expresses itself within the nervous system If the nerves are disturbed you feel the weakness of the mind As long as the nerves are strong stable and elastic the mind is stable When mind is stable the sediment held in suspension that clouds it sinks to the bottom and the consciousness becomes limpid CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 1
47. s them and declares This totality is me My success my wife my car my job my woes my CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 119 wants my my my And the pure single identity succumbs to the dis ease of elephantiasis in which our self becomes grossly enlarged coars ened and thickened In India there is a lovely name for girls Asmita It means I ness Aham means I Asmi means am This I am ness is asmita Aham means I and akara means shape When I identify myself with my pos sessions and attributes it is abamkara From this derives me my mine When I identify myself with I that is asmita I ness It re flects the beauty of the gift of singularity and uniqueness that all who live possess It also however means pride You can see the connection overweening pride is the symptom of the diseased self Our bodies can fall sick likewise our minds So also the self The answer to our earlier question as to why mankind is so prone to this engorgement of the ego lies probably in our extraordinary mental capacities for speech and memory Communication and memory permit the ego to feed inces santly off the experiences relayed to it by mind Naturally it puts on weight and falls sick A long time ago yogis examined this unsatisfactory state of affairs They saw how the bias in mind of repeat pleasure avoid pain for all its survival usefulness could lead to trouble Where was the problem
48. sease and its gradual devastation well If death supervened the day following our contracting the virus there would be no AIDS epi demic Everyone would shun risky or dangerous behavior But be cause the onset of sickness is five ten fifteen years away the pull of immediate gratification proves too strong for many people to resist We find it very hard to change our patterns of behavior however self destructive because of the very nature of the way mind senses or gans of action and the external environment work together These behavioral ruts seem impossible to jolt ourselves out of but as we shall presently see through the understanding of consciousness offered by yoga and the self mastery gained through its practice a sus tained progressive reform and change are achievable To state that the hereditary bias of mind and senses works often in our disfavor is in no way to condemn this miraculous apparatus that we possess We must simply come to realize how fast how powerful B K S IYENGAR 116 and how tricky it is impulsive as a wild stallion The information it gives us Fire burns or Rice is good to eat has proved essential to our survival and still is Lao Tzu the Chinese philosopher said Know yourself Know what is good Know when to stop Yoga is concerned to help us reach these goals Atomic energy is solar fire re produced on earth Adequate warmth is desirable But when we look at the stampede
49. t ice cream when I m tired after a long hard day It s a great comfort to me I owe it to myself It s who I am 11a Intelligence who is also annoyed about the trousers though in its case it is more about the stupid waste of money speaks up for the last time For once I m going to put my foot down Will Pm fed up with the rut you two are in always the same day in day out and then whining about the consequences or dreaming about how good things used to be or will be again one day Nothing s going to change unless we do Challenge Mind please tell hand to move away from the ice cream and shut the freezer door Which it does 12a And next day they all felt better for the way things had turned out In fact ego was very smug and had quite persuaded itself that leaving the ice cream had been its idea all along If we can train ourselves to compress all the steps from 1a to 12a in this little story into a second and then we use them dozens of times a day in every situation then we will have a disciplined mind a pliant i e not rigid ego an acute vibrant intelligence and as a result a smoothly functioning integrated consciousness You may have noticed that the example of getting out of bed to practice yogasana concerned B K S IYENGAR 130 embracing a positive whereas the matter of the ice cream involved avoiding a negative In either case intelligence operates in the same manner It is like a rudder on a
50. telligence jumping up and down May I ask memory a question it asks 6a Mind and self shuffle their feet sensing trouble but finally reply We d rather you didn t but if you insist we cannot deny you a chance 7a Thank you says intelligence Memory please tell me what happens when you eat ice cream night after night What are the con sequences 8a Memory has a truthful nature though on occasion it can make mistakes Memory replies You put on a lot of weight can t fit into your new trousers have sinusitis and your arthritis flares up Left to itself memory from past acquired taste will make the mistake of saying Go ahead eat enjoy It is the intervention of intelligence CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 129 that poses the more complex question Do we live to eat or eat to live 9a Intelligence continues to hold the floor Let me summarize our predicament it says We all enjoy eating ice cream even in ex cess We all hate the secondary consequences of this you especially ego being so vain about your figure It seems to me we have a choice to eat it or not to eat it That must be clear to us all Cog nition choice 10a Poor mind is utterly confused as in spite of its name it does not really have a mind of its own It will run in any direction like a dog after a ball Normally it lets ego give the orders and ego is now very upset I always ea
51. that it pro vokes both like salivation at a physical and sensorial level or the level of doing something salivating is an action We re caught up in the consequence before we can interrupt it For example sex or violence in films acts like this on us Even if we dislike or disapprove of them at a conscious level they create sec ondary waves from unconscious sexual or aggression sandbanks that muddy the waters of consciousness Only someone who is completely free of causality is beyond the dangers of pollution The advertising business is largely based on the trick of triggering a response in the cus tomer s unconscious mind Our consciousness increasingly becomes what we feed it B K S IYENGAR 138 It s very difficult to be aware of these secondary waves rising We always think that we are reacting in a certain situation to the primary stimulus the ruffle on the surface of consciousness but in fact far more than we can ever realize we are reacting to the predisposition that is in the samskara at the bottom of the lake Consumers buy prod ucts without knowing what it is that has unconsciously motivated them to do so We think we re acting in freedom we convince ourselves that we are but in reality we are manipulated or influenced by these waves The word influence comes from the Latin to flow in which shows that their language understood thought as a current or wave The yogi wants to see and act directly so he need
52. the present then we are coming closer to the yogic ideal of what is called an action without taint or without color Ac tions are either black which means they are entirely rooted in selfish motivations and lead to painful consequences or white disinterested and good or like most actions grey in that they stem from mixed mo tives and therefore bring mixed results That s the normal way of the world The yogic action is an action that is absolutely unfettered by past habit and without desire for personal reward in the future It is the right thing in this present moment just because it is right and is colorless or taint free Its great benefit is that you can act in the world without creating reaction The benefit of that for a yogi in relation to freedom is that he is trying to free himself from the karmic wheel of becoming The yogi wants to get off the merry go round of cause and effect He knows that pleasure leads to pain and pain to pleasure in an endless cycle It is an exhilarating ride and the goal for most people is to eliminate the pain and experience only pleasure The yogi knows this is impossible and takes the radical solution of transcending the endless chain of causality He does not cease to engage in life on the contrary but he can act without being tainted That is why we say his actions are without taint or color and it is only possible when the ego that rides on the merry go round ceases to impersonate the Soul The S
53. the response that isn t warranted This often happens between husband and wife The same predisposition oc curs whether you are talking about a smoking habit or about accumu lated disappointment Somebody who has encountered a great deal of disappointment who has got that mound in any situation is likely to feel predisposed to disappointment When something happens they don t say Oh this could be good or Let s see how this turns out They say Oh dear I don t know this is going to go wrong That s the disappointment wave sending off a secondary reflex thought of un justified negativity As these things are built up over time they can be removed only over time It s not because you give up smoking for a day or you guard your tongue and don t snap at your wife for a day or you say Yes PI look on the bright side of life that you remove the mound at the bottom of the lake that has been built up over probably many years or even your whole life By now it s a big mound sending out powerful waves that are nevertheless difficult to detect The practice of yoga is about reducing the size of the subliminal mounds and setting us free from these and other fluctuations or waves in our consciousness Everybody aspires to be free No one wants to be manipulated by unseen forces but effectively the banks of samskara in the dark depths of the unconscious do just that As stimuli from the conscious surface trav
54. tice over time tapas is that it creates lasting results What we do over time removes what we have created over time We cannot leap to freedom in one bound or one immersion in a holy river This is a dream an illusion Resurfacing ego will always grab us back The immersion is a beginning and a declaration of good intent We wash away our stains and heal our wounds and frailties over many minutes in many hours in many years of sustained mindful application Nevertheless even beginners can move rapidly from debit to credit and the quality of life can change significantly for the better Presence of mind self control and creative direction em brace us and we gain the strength to persevere in the face of remaining adversities Whether one agrees with the technicalities of karmic causality or not everyone desires progressively to raise the threshold of their intel ligence and to reap the benefits This is a sort of karmic moving stair B K S IYENGAR 136 case an impulse toward moving up and fear of the consequences of moving down We must be careful however that the idea of progress does not project us into a future that never comes The point we are seeking to reach is where we can act directly in the present Direct action stems from direct perception the ability to see reality in the present as it is without prejudice and act accord ingly This is what it truly means to live in the present moment If we perceive and act in
55. tion but was it enough Another moment of cognition of choice of the ex ercise of will Soon you are doing yoga practice at 6 30 a m This is new a first an initiation an innovation This is history being made your personal history thanks to the mirror and scissors of intelligence see choose act Afterward you will probably measure the benefit of the practice in terms of physical well being as you set off for work a certain vitality and some satis faction at your own activity and self discipline What you have also ex ercised along with the components of body is that too often dormant component of consciousness intelligence itself And tomorrow when the alarm clock rings it is all to do again Or perhaps not quite all If a well toned body works better each day surely the same is true for a well honed intelligence For our bodies the fruit of our sustained intelligent effort will be in its widest sense health But at another level what we are really gaining and this is the cause of our satisfaction is self control This is a point of huge significance Logically with health and self control we are increasingly able to direct our lives We feel happy when we are directing our own lives because we are experiencing a growing freedom We are exploring the possibilities of life on earth CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 127 through the release and realization of our own potential Freedom is the innermost desire
56. toward the proliferation of nuclear weapons we must wonder if we have any idea when to stop A bowl of rice is good A full belly is desirable But should it be full twenty four hours a day Do we really want More is better to be the epitaph of the human race In our individual lives we struggle most with two sorts of action The first is Do something nice now and at some unspecified time in the future a nasty will emerge Repeat it often enough and a nasty will appear with a compound interest we could well do without You might call this From first hangover to cirrhosis The second is Do something now that it would be easier not to do e g math homework instead of TV or get up an hour earlier for some yogasana practice and reap the benefit a bit later Repeat it often enough and harvest the com pound interest as the future unrolls The longer the delay between the primary action inaction and its secondary effect the more tempted we are to prevaricate lie to ourselves refuse to jump our fences and take the downhill path So honesty is a key issue for without it Know yourself is an impossibility Thus we deny what is good and never learn when to stop Let us now put to one side our mind brain gatherer and storer of information and experience and explorer of the world and examine the second element of consciousness I Shape The Shape of the Small Self This is our individual awareness and identi
57. uch as blows to the head illness or gen eral deterioration of health through aging or unhealthy living What mind is and does dies with us Through mind we engage with experi ence perceive and interpret the world Senses perceive and mind con ceives According to their health and vitality we enjoy the gift of life to a greater or lesser degree CLARITY THE MENTAL BODY MANAS 113 Mind is above all clever clever as they say as a barrel of monkeys Like monkeys jumping restlessly from one branch to another so too the mind flickers from object to object and thought to thought It is personal active outward looking and perishable While the mind is good at sifting and sorting it is not good at making choices Memory without which we cannot function is an aspect of mind The imprints of experiences and sensations are stored by memory within the fabric of consciousness This permits mind to propose se lections such as I like the blue mauve orange and pink shirts but remember that blue suits me best What we call consumer choice is not a choice but a selection It offers only an illusion of freedom The choice to consume has already been made Mind alone cannot factor in questions like Can I afford the shirt or Do I need yet another one Mind can select which one to buy but cannot of itself answer the binary problem Do I buy a new shirt or don t I Mind senses understands sight smell touch
Download Pdf Manuals
Related Search