BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

When a man says ‘I am’ he naturally intends to say that ‘I am this body.’ The moment he says I am this body unknowingly states that I am limited personality. When his journey of life begins he always does and acts in a limited field of his surroundings. The feeling of being limited unknowingly becomes part of his character and he never feels that he has the capacity to get over this illusory limitation and the consequent ignorance. While walking in the dark if a man mistakes a rope for a snake, he gets terribly afraid and runs away from the rope. His suffering is due to cloud of darkness around the rope.

So, in the universe, the man not being cognizant of his capacity cannot pierce through the illusive nature to assimilate the real nature of the self which is blissful, limitless, and absolutely free. But people in general are devoid of this knowledge about their Self and therefore always feel that they live in dearth, although they have all the facilities which a happy man is supposed to possess. Most of the people feel so because they never get satisfied with what they have. It is simply because they want to outshine either their competitors or their near and dear ones. This is their true bondage.

How to cross over this bondage, may be asked by many so called sensible and judicious persons who have realised it well that no amount of material objects or wealth can ever bestow happiness because these are all dead material things and thing that is dead cannot provide Joy or happiness. We, of the Latent Light Culture, truthfully wish to convey to you that without having followed in the foot-steps of the real seeker after truth who have crossed the trammels of bondage no one can realise his own true Self. It is said that without realising your true self you cannot free yourself from the bondage or limitations that are created by you.

You are, whatever you are, is the result of what you have thought in the past. If you want to become, what you want to become, you have to bring about a change in your thoughts, i.e. your Karm. First, you have to develop faith that ‘I can escape the binding effect of our self-imposed limitation.’ You have to understand that it is your freedom of action ill-used in the past that is the cause of your present state of mind or disabilities. It is again freedom of action in the present which should be used to make a breakthrough in piercing through both the wall of limitation and bondage. Freedom ill-used causes bondage, freedom well-used causes freedom.

Now, like a Gyani try to understand that one of the causes of your ill-deeds may be that you unknowingly find fault in others, and never appreciate merits in them. So far may be accommodated but when you find fault in a True Guru, you must become cautious that ego has taken over your mental state, you devotion has shaken. यस्य देवे पराभक्ति: यथा देवे तथा गुरो: –True devotion in the holy Guru is absolutely necessary for every ardent Sadhak.न गुरो: अधिक: कश्चित् त्रिषु लोकेषु विद्यते — In the whole universe there is nothing as auspicious and valuable as devotion to a True Guru. Universe for a devoted Sadhak is his self, the ultimate Noumenon. The external Guru is your Life so long as the internal Guru i.e. your Soul does not bestow his blessings.

Maharshi Patanjali states that a living being can attain bliss only by overcoming the following five afflictions (Kleshas):

Avidya-Asmita-Raag-Dvesha-Abhiniveshah Kleshah

These are: Avidya, Asmita, Raag, Dvesha, and Abhinivesha.

Avidya (Ignorance): Anitya-Ashuchi-Dukh-Anatma Nitya-Shuchi-Sukh-Atma Khyaatih Avidya.

Patanjali thoroughly exposes human ignorance. We perceive transitory (Anitya) things as eternal, failing to realize that our own bodies are temporary. We see impure (Ashuchi) things as pure due to undeveloped intelligence, leading to great affliction (Dukh). Sorrow is omnipresent, yet we mistakenly view it as happiness, preventing us from seeking the true source of joy. Anatma refers to that which is not one’s own. Despite witnessing death daily, we can’t shed this sense of belongingness, let alone for other things. The wise call this Avidya because it blinds and deludes living beings. True knowledge (Vidya) is that which liberates us from the bondage of karma.

Asmita (Egoism): Drik-darshan shaktyoh ekatmata iva Asmita.

When a sense of oneness or belongingness arises with whatever is perceived through the power of seeing (Drik-shakti), and a desire to acquire that visible object is born, one passionately strives to possess it. As ego grows, one becomes arrogant (Ahankari). This is Asmita. Passionately pursuing external objects, they fail to realize that this same power should be used to approach the Soul, the source of true inner happiness through Yoga-Sadhana.

Raag (Attachment): Sukhanushayi Raagah.

The affliction that follows the perception of happiness is Raag. We develop attachment to people or things that bring us joy. If that person or thing disappears, happiness is absent, attachment is hurt, and we become sad. Even things that bring happiness ultimately cause sorrow; therefore, Raag is also a type of affliction.

Dvesha (Aversion): Dukhanushayi Dveshah.

The affliction that follows the perception of sadness is Dvesha (hatred). It seems that due to ego, humans constantly fall prey to sadness. If one imposes their ego on an inferior egoist, they experience happiness (Raag). If they are dominated by a superior egoist, they experience sadness (Dvesha). In both cases, the person ultimately suffers and remains unhappy while acting under the influence of ‘hatred’.

Abhinivesha (Clinging to life / Fear of death): Sva Rasavaahi Vidushoopi Tatha Aaroodhoabhiniveshah.

Even in a knowledgeable and accomplished Yogi enjoying bliss (Sva Rasavahi), the feeling of being deprived of further benefits obtained through the body, if it is shed, always remains and sometimes arises in the mind. Therefore, it can be a cause of suffering for the Yogi. Ordinary people are always afraid of death. Its popular meaning is: the everlasting thought of death that overshadows both prudent people and fools alike is Abhinivesha (suffering in the form of fear of death). ***

LESSON III— Synopsis: Religious experience as suggesting a greater self —The field of consciousness the “Temple”— “Groups”-Alternations of personalities or groups —Changes of center within the self—Self or mind as a “system” of “Ideas”—Constituting the field—The Indeterminateness of the margin of the field—”Complex” — the “Avyakta” — Religion and Psychology—The Mantra AUMN.

The Rationale of Bhakti Yoga

Says William James in writing on religious mysticism-the cheshta of Bhakti as the Hindus call it: “Religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism; the other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text books on insanity supply. Open any of these and you will find abundant cases in which mystical ideas, Bhakti para, are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism-Asuri Bhakti, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and the same words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic, instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life.

It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or trans-marginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter-seraph and snake abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential; what comes must be sifted and tested and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total content of experience just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods so long as we are not mystics ourselves.

The subliminal, the sub-conscious, the unconscious, etc. of modern para psychology are terms that they have now invented for that greater content of Man, called in Hindu-Yogi Philosophy Brahma. By a man, the Hindus never meant a being whose only consciousness is a little flicker of waking (jagrat) consciousness itself comprising at any moment but an insignificant fraction of his total memory, but a being with a consciousness extending and working over the whole range of his personality (sva) whether instinctively (avasa) or deliberately. That Being does not, like the former, go out of existence every time man goes to sleep, but continues to function on, even in svapna (sleep), turning his attention to vital processes founded at a time of life when he could not speak and before words or other symbols could be used to bring these processes under the purview of the ordinary waking memory. This is the real man, a Being endowed with a stupendous memory and activity and an almost unlimited command over vital processes and even physical processes, a man such as only rare illumined geniuses are ever aware of Being but which we all are though we know it not.”

Jung, the famous European psycho-analyst, calls this greater Being of man, “self,” the nearest equivalent for self in Sanskrit is sva and not Atma which latter is a pronounand he differentiates between the self and the ego, what is at the “threshold of consciousness or what perhaps is the threshold of consciousness itself. “By Ego (Aham),” says Jung, “I understand a complex of representations which constitute the centrum of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a very high degree of continuity and identity. The ego complex is as much a content as it is a condition of consciousness, since a psychic element is conscious to me just in so far as it is related to my ego-complex. But in as much as the Ego is only the centrum of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely a complex among other complexes. Hence I discriminate between the Ego (Aham) and the Self (sva) since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness while the self (sva) is the subject of my totality; hence it includes also the unconscious psyche. In this sense the self (sva) would be an ideal factor which embraces and includes the ego (Aham).”

The expression “field of consciousness”- Kshetra, Temple it has been called in the ancient Hindu works, e. g. the Bhagavad Gita has but recently come into vogue in the occidental psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured the most was the single “Idea,” (in the Sanskrit Bhava) supposed to be a definitely outlined thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and second to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, his field, with any definiteness. As our mental “fields” succeed one another each has its center of interest around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we then see masses of truth together and often get glimpses of relations which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point, as in the famous Arjuna Vishada, grief of Arjuna, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.

Taking then this field of consciousness, you will find that a man’s ideas, aims and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each “aim” which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement and gathers a certain group of ideas (from the subconscious), in subordination to it as its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from the mental field. Our ordinary alternations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is succeeded rapidly by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitely its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon and perhaps to wonder at it, as a “transformation.”

These alternations are the most complete of the ways in which a self may be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous co-existence of two or more different groups of aims of which one practically holds the right of way and instigates activity, while the others are only pious wishes and never practically come to anything. Such fleeting aspirations are mere whimsies (asradha), hypocrisies (mithyachara), and exist on the  remoter outskirts of the mind and the real self (sva) of man, the force behind his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas from more central to the more peripheral, avarana to vikshepa, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness.

What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement alters; things hot and vital to us to-day are cold to-morrow. It is as if seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies. They are in short the centers of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness. Now, there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest and the hot places may shift before one as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have a wavering and divided “self;” or the focus of excitement and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain system, e. g. the Christian doctrine of Atonement: and then if the change be what is called a “religious” one, Christians call it a “conversion,” especially if it be by crises, or sudden; Hindus call it Vairagya, or Vaitrishnya.

Yes, it is ideas that we see spread (vitata) before us, says the Bhagavad Gita, spread before the mentation in this great field of consciousness. It is ideas that govern and move all things; guns, bayonets, kings, ships of war, laws are all but outward symbols. And these ideas are neither to be batoned nor shot, nor bayonetted down; you cannot disperse or kill ideas in this way; they thrive and sprout, aye even under the spilling of blood–as the histories of national movements have shown. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive which mutually check or re-inforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged.

A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration, just as a building is, and yet for, a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration which make the whole fabric fall together, and then the center of gravity sinks to an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the center in the re-arrangements seem now to be locked there and the new structure remains permanent. And it does make a great difference to a man whether one set of ideas or another be the center of his energy; and it makes a great difference as regards any set of ideas which he may possess whether they remain central or peripheral in him. To say that a man is “converted” means in these terms that religious ideas previously peripheral in his consciousness now take a central place and that religious aims form the habitual center of his energy.

It was not until recently that the occidentals made a “discovery” that in certain subjects at least there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field with its usual center and margin but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs; and this “discovery” of a consciousness existing beyond the field of subliminal cast light to the occident on many phenomena of religious biography, till then obscure to them. Further research along the lines of psycho-analysis, led to the definition of this extra-marginal sphere as the “unconscious” of Coue, the “Self” of Jung, the “subjective mind” of Hudson, etc., etc.-all names for what the Hindu long ago called the Avyakta, the form-world beyond the senses.

It was found out that the most important consequence of “having” a strongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one’s ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, for him take the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight and hearing. They have coined a new technical word, complex, to indicate the whole cluster of ideas and emotions which have gathered around some more less suppressed idea or desire, which acts as a core; in the language of the Gita, this is the Avasa which as compulsion neurosis expresses itself in direct ratio as against the “square” of the will repressing it. (Bhagavad Gita XVIII. 69, 60).

To the Hindu-Yog: Avyakta, the unconscious is the storehouse of memory where every impression we receive from the earliest infancy to the last hour of life is recorded with the minutest accuracy. These memories are not inert or quiescent like the marks on the vulcanite records of a gramophone, they are virtually active, each one forming a thread in the texture of our personality. The sum of all these impressions is the man himself, the ego, the form through which the general life is individualized. The outer man is but a mask–the real self dwells behind the veil of the unconscious. The unconscious is also a power house; it is dominated by feeling and feeling is the force that impels our lives; it provides the energy for conscious thought and action and for performance of the vital processes of the body. Finally the unconscious plays the part of supervisor over our physical processes. It never sleeps; during the sleep of the conscious it seems to be made more vigilant than during waking hours.

But what is the function of religion here? What has Bhakti to do with all this psychology? The function of religion is to embody in the most accurate and beautiful symbols the perceptions of the profoundest depths of the self, (Sva) or unconscious, and to present them to us with appropriate ceremony at the moments of the greatest susceptibility for instance: morning, at birth, the change from youth to manhood, marriage, death, — religion can indeed be regarded as the building of a bridge between “conscious” and “unconscious.” And this was illustrated in “Karma Yoga” by the use of the sound “Aumn,” wherein by the conscious repetition of the Aumn the un-conscious was provoked to come into equilibrium with the conscious. AUMN

LESSON IV— Synopsis: Differences of later Hindu thought—Where we should be careful against being confounded by names and “classifications,” e. g. Nirvana and its variant meanings—A simple psychology—Hindu terms collated hereto—The fallacy of the Ego—The self as an otherness, Param Atma.

The psychology we have adopted in this treatise does not go pat with the psychology of the later Hindu thought, as given first in the Isvara Krishnan Sankhya literature, and later adopted by the schools of thought of the Renaissance, now available for us in a condensed form in the “Sarva Darsana Sangraha.” The character of what we called the “complex” as ever active and the lines of its activity along the Indriyas (as understood by Sankhya and later Hindu psychology) have to be touched upon and students told exactly where we are; and at the outset of this lesson we may state that we have thrown overboard the Sankhya classification, entirely preferring to abide by the ancient Gita forms of thought-expression. The craze for classification that obsesses the dull minds of the learned has been particularly pernicious in the East (as among the Roman mystics).

In order to divide states of thought into 84 classes which is —to their fatuity–an object in itself, they do not hesitate to invent names for quite imaginary states of the mind and to put down the same state of the mind several times. We have, for instance, in the earliest of Sankhya literature the terms Indriyas as meaning the senses and sense organs, Manas, Budhi, Chitta, Antaskarana (Manas as the sum-total of these last four), Sankalpa, Vikalpa, Atma, Antaratma, Paramatma, Bhootatma, Pratyagatma, Jina, Maya, Isvara, Brahma, Brahmam or (ParaBrahma)– Linga, Mahat, Akshara, etc. etc. etc. And they in this craze for classification utterly ignore the Upanishad (the authoritative) statement that Budhi, Manas, Linga, Mahat, Akshara, are all Paryaya words, words that mean several aspects of one and the same thing, the same at different moments of occurrence.

This is what we have to remember always, that man is a unified of states, made up of several billion states, each of them fully endowed with self-government, self-determination, self-expression, each state being made up of billions of Lives, of billions of Souls, of billions of Gods. If we remember this datum, we can understand that to the original thinkers, Krishna, Budha and the like, whoever they may have been , dug out of their mind a sufficient number of jewels each for us all to possess and enjoy; and these wretched intellectuals who edited their works, who commented on their works, who redacted their teachings in their Karikas, have added bits of glass, plenty of straw, and enough dirt to make up a garland.

Very probably these psychologists of more recent date (i. e. about 3000 years ago) were actually using language and technology current in their time. That is clear to students of comparative religion, just as it is part of accepted teaching among the real Yogins of India and the Further East, for they alone can understand why these terms convey different ideas, apparently different in meaning but actually the very same, the very, very same thing.

Take the word Nirvana which occurs in the Upanishads (Vedic) literature, in Puranic literature, in Yogic literature, in Budhist literature. Each one of the schools that abides by these literatures gives different meanings, different translations of this very simple word but when you analyze these translations you find that they all come down, at the rock bottom to mean the very same thing–though insists very strenuously that it is quite another thing than what the other says. To the Budhist Nirvana means that kind of “death” or passing that leaves nothing behind. It is mistranslated as annihilation. But what is It that passes away? Not the soul, for to the Budhists there is no abiding entity like the soul. The Budhists believe only in passing states of consciousness, each occurring, being born (Nitya Jatam) and dying, or passing away (Nitya mritam) as representing what others understand by the term “soul.”

On death of the body, this recurrence of states of consciousness suddenly ceases to be. But does “it” get into Nirvana? Rather can we say that Nirvana has ensued? No, says the Budhist. The Thought of the last moment of “life,” the last state of consciousness, if of the world and its pains, has force enough to get up another aggregation of skandhas (forms) and become “re-incarnated” therein and continue this continual round of occurrence and passing away till by belief in and surrender to the Budha, by belief in and subservience to the Dharma (Law), there ensues Nirvana the state where the last thought is not of the world. Reduced to our English forms of expression it is all bewildering.

But the Upanishad says almost the very same thing. Nirvana is release, says the Upanishad. Release from what? Who was bound? Who bound it? What was the bond? And how was the release? Analyzed in the utmost we have statements somewhat like this: The soul, a portion of immortal God (Paramatma) was bound, got bound up, or is found to be bound whether apparently or really, in the Human body. Release of the soul from the body, then, should be death, is it not? That is what the more ancient Sankhyas (mentioned in the Shanti Parva Book XII of the great epic Mahabharata) said. Wilful, conscious, induced death is Moksha (the Hindu prefers this term for Nirvana) according to the Jains even to-day. But, the Hindus say that every kind of “death” is not Nirvana, and that it is not necessary to die to get into Nirvana. One can be a Jivanmukta, freed while in the body, and in active worldly life; Videhanmukti, freed irrespective of his embodiment or environment.

At “death” one is freed from the physical body but there remains round this one an environment of Karmasraya, the past “done” by him–the “past” that has not been “spent” by reaction-action and reaction being equal and opposite on all planes, mental, physical or spiritual. This Karmasraya impelled by the force of the last “thought” of the past “life” has power enough to get up another aggregation and be re-incarnated in another body. But Hindu, do you not say that the soul (atma) was one with God, or could be one with God, or as near one with God as possible? Yes, replies the Hindu. The soul is one with God, says one set of the Hindus–did it but realize it, it is freed. That it has to realize it, that it did not do it, and what will become of the soul when it realizes its sameness with God are the paradoxes of this school of Thought (Shankara); paradoxes which have led to volumes of very ingenious explanations, and very special pleading.

The soul by deep devotion to God becomes one with God, says another sect of the Hindu. Those who have read Ouspensky’s “Tertium Organum” can understand this position better. It is a dilation of the teaching in the Vedic Brevity (Mahavakya) Tat Tvam Asi–Thou who are not that, becomest that. This is somewhat an expression of Bhakti Yoga, the fallacy here being in taking it that Thou becomest That–in taking it that the Dewdrop becomes one with the ocean. Why not the ocean pouring with the dewdrop? This is Nirvana, the Nirvana of the Budhist differently rendered.

So with other terms. We have as far as possible avoided the Sankhya technology, as it is very confusing, and as the Sankhya teachers have made of these terms Purusha, Prakriti, etc. entities. As all thinkers can realize, one must avoid so far as possible introducing new entities especially into books intended for the earnest student practitioner, especially for the Bhakti Yogi. But none the less we shall, to avoid all misunderstanding, state what these terms actually meant, with reference to the simple psychology we adopted.

We shall give a simple diagram. The circle represents the “sphere” in the Three-Dimensional world of what we call the Body-Mind (Kshetra), both the “physical body” and the fields of consciousness, for they are in truth but one. The body-mind is Loka the world of which the self (Body-Mind again) Paramatma or God is Emperor-King (Raja means both “mind” and king). The Kshetra is made up of billions of Points (souls, lives, Devas, Bhootas) as they are variously called-each point being a circle or Form–each being itself a field of consciousness again. The totality of these souls, the totality of these fields of consciousness is called self (according to Jung)–sva in Hindu literature. In, anywhere, within the totality appears a “threshold of consciousness,” a ‘Form” or circle before the “I,” the centrum of the fields comprised, for the moment, within that threshold.

This is the Aham, the “I,” that which after all is but a fraction of the whole “I” (Integrity or Akshara). The Threshold of Consciousness is the Inner circle–and it appears before the “I” either by “contact” (sparsa), or sense-function as it has been miscalled, or quite, naturally by “sankalpa.” That is to say even when the senses are not active, the Threshold continues to “form” and reform. Its circle may be delimited (maya) by the “I” which here is called the Mind (manas); it may be formed by the “I” or it may occur independently of the “I” as an Avashah Karma, thought function irrespective of the Ego (I).

Life and mentation, are continual formations of these “groups” of Points (Lives, gods, forms, according as you like to call them–formations and dissolutions of these forms, occurring every moment–histories of uttered Thought). In one sense, it is taken that there is interaction between the “I” and its field, the threshold of consciousness; between the Kshetra and the Kshetrajna, of each moment for these are not again entities, mind you. And it is taken again that in the interaction the “I” (Mata) knows, that is to say delimits (meeyatai) its field (meyam). This is the Manas functioning (Sankalpa), imagining that it is acting.

This is our difference from Sankhya and other schools of thought; that we do not admit of any Ego nor of any “action”–we state, following the Gita, that the Act is the resultant of five factors (XVIII 13 to 16) and never of one. In our view the Mind, Manas is Brahma, Svayambhu, which utters (Briruhati) to itself (Brimhayati) and becomes “Great,” i. e. takes up several points of view in its “complex.” Budhi is Nischaya, the “Ego” again that is a composite of its group of Points, shifting its position decisively with reference to its prior position–what one would call judgment the equivalent for “action.” Where it, I mean the Ego, flits about, it is called chitta; where it, not flitting about, turns within its own circle and makes of an area in that circle its threshold of consciousness, the state is called Antaskarana.

We shall say that in this diagram the whole of the Big Circle, the totality of the self, presents itself as an otherness (Para) which we find in our experience, or rather which is for want of a better term called God ***