Transformative Awareness

The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there. – Hua Hu Ching

True yoga can actually be defined as the mastery of awareness.  Through the various practices of yoga we are developing our capacity to expand awareness, to move from the limits of ego-infatuation to an expanded state of selfless presence.  It is a progression from bodily awareness to mental awareness to formless awareness.  Many people think of yoga as a merely physical practice of asanas, but this is just a start.  Asana is actually a way of transcending physical awareness.  Through asana practice we can learn to relax the body so completely that we can forget about it.

The same with pranayama: through pranayama we bring our subtle energy into balance and harmony so that both mental and physical restlessness is alleviated.  We are then ready to enter into a state of inner awareness wherein the subconscious filters of our experience become apparent.  The Sanskrit term for these filters is samskara.  Samskaras are the latent impressions within our minds which condition how we experience ourselves and our world.  As we become aware of and release these samskaras we achieve greater freedom and self-transformation.

Samskaras are both personal and collective.  Our personal conditioning is a result of the unique experiences of this and previous incarnations.  All of our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, others, our reality are the result of previous impressions.  Psychotherapy is generally aimed at helping people to resolve negative samskaras from an earlier age.  Trauma is a powerfully charged samskara which can completely take over our awareness and leave us stuck reliving a past event.  Collective samskaras belong to us as a race.  They are passed down culturally and are generally harder to separate from.  When we begin to become aware of them however, we can begin to understand that we are not who we have been taught to believe we are.

The process of yoga meditation is a process of dehypnotizing ourselves and awakening to a deeper reality.  We move from gross, to subtle and then into causal realms of being.  The causal realm is found in the state of deep sleep.  It is nondual, non-spatial and atemporal.  In the earlier stages of meditation we are learning to separate the witness from the objects of experience – gross-physical and subtle-mental.  In the deeper stages we find there is no separateness of anything.  There is no observer and nothing to be observed.  This is liberation – freedom from the idea that there is anything to be liberated from! 

The idea however is not to remain in some state of suspended animation.  We can bring this awareness into our daily activities through the practice of karma yoga, or nonattached action, selfless action.  In this way the enlightened ones work tirelessly for the liberation of all beings, helping us to awaken from the illusion of suffering.