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.
