Chapter 20 - Raja Yoga - The Royal Path
Ramakrishna, one of the great modern sages of India (1833-86) sums up Raja Yoga as follows: "Raja Yoga leads to the realization of the Absolute through concentration and meditation. It has eight steps. The first is Yama, which consists of non-injuring, truthfulness, non-covetousness, chastity, and the non-receiving of gifts. The second is Niyama which includes austerities, forbearance, contentment, faith in the Supreme Being, charity, study and self-surrender to the supreme will. The practice of various physical postures is comprised in Asana, the third step, while Pranayama, the art of breathing, constitutes the fourth. The fifth is Pratyahara and consists of making the mind introspective and one-pointed. Concentration or Dharana is the next. Dhyana or meditation is the seventh, and Samadhi, or the state of super-consciousness the eighth." This is a bare outline, of course.
Raja Yoga is the Royal Path, the path of realization, for which all other Yogas were only a preparation. In a way, it combines the practice of all others.
In Hatha Yoga we have endeavoured to eliminate the obstacles which our body could put in the way to realization; in Karma Yoga we have purified our actions; in Bhakti Yoga we have intensified our emotions and the power of love as levers to attain super-consciousness; in Jnana Yoga we have analysed our mental mechanism and have arrived at the conclusion that none of the instruments of our mind is, in itself, a sure support for real knowledge.
As can be seen in a consideration of the eight steps of Raja Yoga, it is a discipline of the mind through self-analysis and self-control. Above all, as shown in Jnana Yoga, it is the conscious will which must be disciplined. Our thinking and feeling must be strictly controlled. We must begin to learn that the essential things do not happen outside of us, but inside, in the world of our representations. This is, of course, no easy task for a brain used to register impressions coming from the outside world. The brain must now learn that our outer perceptions are only shadows. Paul Brunton reports how an Indian Yogi, questioned by him compared our thinking to an ox-cart in a dark passage under a mountain. Turn the cart around and it will take you back into the light. In a way, it is this turning round of our way of thinking which is Raja Yoga.
In order to accomplish this feat we must first learn to concentrate our thought. The importance of concentration is self-evident even to our Occidental way of thinking. None of the wonders of our technical civilization could have been achieved without the most intensive concentration of mind on the part of some scientist or other. Is it unreasonable to believe that the self-same power of concentration could penetrate also the serets of the world within us?
In Indian philosophy, man is sometimes likened to a king who looks out upon the world from his carriage. The body is the carriage, the senses are the horses, the intellect is represented by the reins, reason by the coachman. The king who takes in the passing scene, passively, only seeing, percieving, he is the Atman, our higher Self.
In Hatha Yoga we have learned how to bring the unconscious activities of our body under the control of the conscious mind. We now must learn to govern our senses. The senses convey to us, in an uninterrupted chain, the impressions of the outside world, keeping our brain busy in absorbing and digesting these sense-impressions. Only in deep sleep does it rest.
But it happens that the senses remain insensible to outside impressions even during the waking state. When we are completely absorbed by an interesting book, for example, we hear and see nothing of what occurs around us. Or perhaps we see and hear, but do not react. It is therefore a question of attention whether we react or not. It should, therefore, be possible to withdraw our attention consciously, voluntarily from certain sense-impressions, or to concentrate attention on one of them to the exclusion of all others. This is the first of Raja Yoga, called Pratyahara.
This is most speedily accomplished in exerting one of the senses to the utmost. We become all ear, for instance. We listen with all our might to our heartbeat. After some practice we shall be able to control our sense of hearing to such an extent that we can withdraw it at will and work tranquilly in the midst of bedlam. Newspapermen who work in the noisy city-room of a big newspaper practise Pratyahara without knowing it! In the same manner, we can educate the nose not to smell, the eyes not to see, yes, even to the extent of commanding the nerve-ends not to transmit a sensation such as pleasure or pain.
Once we have achieved such control we can go a step further and try to control not only the senses, but also our intellect, the Cittam, the thinking process. We generally assume that we do the thinking, while, as a matter of fact, something thinks in us. We do not know how the thoughts come to us. To stop the film which unrolls itself inside us is mightily difficult. This is why Indians compare the intellect to a monkey, always in senseless agitation. This agitation is the welling-up in our consciousness of memories and impressions that have been buried in the great storehouse of the unconscious mind. This is due to the fact that most of the time we live in a completely unconscious manner.
All we think, all we do leaves a trace, not unlike an odour which clings to our being and the sum total of which constitutes our character. What we are, what we would like to be is the consequence of the impressions on which we have dwelled in the past. To the Indian, it is clear that we ourselves have built our character in the course of many previous incarnations, and that it is in our power to remodel it in cultivating henceforth constructive thoughts and habits. But how can we master the unconscious sense-impressions, which in the long run can constitute our character? The answer is that in order to deal with them, we must first learn to recognize them.
For the Indian, the Cittam, the intellect is a vibratory state; it vibrates in accordance with wave-length and frequency of the object it perceives. In a similar way, he also explains the association of ideas. A certain object, let us say a red flower excites a certain vibration; other perceptions arise in the memory, perceptions which once excited the same vibration in the intellect. Thus arises a chain of associations. The idea of Raja Yoga now is to increase the vibratory capacity of the intellect in order to overcome its innate laziness.
We have said that it is the accumulation of unconscious memories and preconceived opinions which constitute our character. We can only change it by changing our thinking habits. We must swim against the stream and that is hard. All we have lived, all we have experienced we must experience once more in reverse; we must make it conscious in order to overcome it. The reader will be struck with the similarity of this method to the methods of psychoanalysis. It goes to show that Hindu wisdom knew about psychology and the unconscious mind thousands of years ago. There is an important difference, however. The psychoanalyst unravels the past experiences of his patient and, having led him through the maze of the accumulated and repressed memories, some of which may have caused mental havoc, lets it go at that and many a time a cure is effected, because the unconscious has been made conscious, the patient has understood what caused the disturbance and may not make the same mistakes again. Raja Yoga follows the same method, but when it has unraveled the past, when it has made conscious what was unconscious, it bids us to return to the centre from which we have started; it bids us to return to God.
We can master the sense-impressions, our memories, conscious and unconscious in two ways. The first method is to make these memories conscious again. This is the method of psychoanalysis, as we have seen. We know how dangerous the unconscious memories can become; they are roots of neuroses and psychoses.
A lovely Indian fable tells of a king to whom his subjects daily brought presents. These were carried to his treasure house. Among the people who thus offered their gifs there was a Yogi who every day presented the king with a beautiful fruit. The king did not estimate this offering any too highly, but accepted it nevertheless and with the other presents accumulated the fruit in his treasury. Now it happened that one day a child was with the king when the Yogi arrived to make his offering, a beautiful apple. The king, smilingly, gave the apple to the child, a little girl, who immediately began to eat it. All of a sudden she gave a cry of surprise: her teeth had struck on something hard. Carefully she took a few more bites and, lo and behold, she uncovered a glittering jewel, a wonderful sapphire. The king was struck with wonder and commanded his treasurer to see what had become of all the other fruit. It had all rotted away. Where it had been stored, there rose a glittering heap of precious jewels. The treasury is our unconscious mind.
But, alas, not all the impressions and memories that lie in that storehouse are jewels, although many of the impressions slumbering there are recognized at their real value only after we have made them conscious again. Into this storehouse we must, above all, bring some order, and then we must see that we do not, in the future, store in it anything without having first carefully examined it. We must learn to live attentively, consciously.
The film of which we have spoken before, the uninterrupted projection of the sense-impressions which constitutes our thinking process, obscures the pure vision of reality. If we were able to stop the ever running film-band for only a very little while, we would see all things in clear outline. We would learn again to think intuitively; we would learn again to think not with the brain, but with the pineal gland, by the ancients called the "eye of God". Here is how Webster defines the pineal gland: "Pineal gland or body; a small organ about the size of a pea, situated in the brain of vertebrates above the third ventricle. It is supposed to be a rudimentary organ of sense, presumably of sight and, as such, to be a vestige of a dorsal median eye found in some fossils and present, in an imperfect form, known as the pineal eye, in some existing animals." A rudimentary organ of sense. ... Descartes, the french philosopher, as recently as the seventeenth century throught it an "organ of the soul", while our so-called "modern" science sees in it merely a hormonal control organ. It is, nevertheless, probable that the phenomena of clairvoyance and telepathy, among others, are a function of this gland.
In Indian tradition, the pineal gland is a most important organ. The highest states of consciousness depend on it - intuition, beatitude and Godlikeness. All of the Yoga exercises, in the last analysis, have the purpose of eliminating the predominance of the brain and of self-consciousness and of attaining the cosmic consciousness through a reactivation of the pineal gland.
But what are the practical steps which lead to such control? In order to control, to dominate the unrolling of the film of consciousness the first step is to become aware of the fact of the "unrolling". We can only control what has become conscious. As a first aid to this process of making conscious the thinking and feeling of our organism, the Yoga student learns to re-examine and re-evaluate the events of the day, every night before going to sleep. He begins with the very last impression and unrolls one after the other back to the beginning. Thus: "I have extinguished the light ... before that I went to bed ... before that I cleaned my teeth ... before that I undressed ... before that I wound my watch ..." and so through the events of the day. This is not as easy as it sounds. It is more than probable that you will go to sleep long before you have come to the end of your examination, but at least part of the "Samskara", the sense-impressions, have been made conscious and will not come to disturb your sleep in anxiety dreams.
This exercise has been likened to the practice of scales by a pianist. We thereby learn to dominate the impressions, instead of being dominated by them. We begin to be master in our own house. During this exercise we remember at will, and only through memory, through our past do we know who and what we are. He who remembers, knows himself through his former ations, judges himself in these actions and, looking back, realizes why certain things had to happen to him and not to another, what he could learn thereby, what new possibilities open up before him. Memory is multiplication of the one who remembers; he owns not only the present, but also the past; he has mastered a part of time.
It is thought that if we can extend our memory over the day, the week, the month, the year, and the years back to our childhood to the thresholdd of birth, we can step across the threshold to remember the events of our former lives. Our human reason may not be able to comprehend this, but who could doubt that a personality of the spiritual purity of a Buddha did not lie when he affirmed that in this way he had become conscious of four of his former incarnations?
One thing is certain: In trying to recall to memory the events of a single day in all its detail, we realize what tremendous power of concentration would be needed in order to recall the events of a whole life, not to speak of former lives. But to seize clearly and sharply in consciousness only the events of the previous day will immeasurably refine and sharpen our powers of memory and consciousness. We gradually learn to understand the causalities, the why of the events in our life. We begin to realize that we are the makers of our destiny.
Meditation on the events of the past day also helps to awaken our unconscious memory and offers an answer to questions which we have been asking ourselves, to problems which have been torturing us; it is a sort of self-analysis.
As long as we have not learned to make conscious all of our sense impressions, or consciously to direct them, they will constantly reappear on the surface of the mind, like bubbles on a swamp, at the very moment we seek to quiet our intellect in meditation. We, therefore, must find yet another method to subjugate them. Buddha, whose teachings are a sort of combination Karma Yoga, Raja Yoga, recommends that we discipline the chaotic flux of impressions, that we categorically reject all undesirable ones the second they present themselves at the door of consciousness. This is not to be confused with repression. Repression is only a partly conscious act; we repress an idea through cowardice, through conventionality etc. ... When we consciously reject an idea, in the sense of Buddha's recommendation, we do so by a conscious moral decision. To "reject" is to be understood as to "replace". We replace the undesirable idea by a desirable one. The higher idea has a higher frequency, higher vibrations; in cultivating the higher idea, we gain power over the lower one. Buddha puts it in these words: "The same, O monks, as a mason with a fine wedge drives out, pushes out, beats out a bigger wedge, so a monk when he seizes upon an idea in connection with which base and unworthy considerations obtrude themselves, images of lust, of hate, of illusion, he shall replace them by other, worthy images." The student thus constantly keeps his unconscious mind under control and lifts the sense-impressions into the light of consciousness. This extension of the consciousness is the first phase of Raja Yoga.
"With a clear conscience let us arm ourselves, clearly conscious in coming and going, clearly conscious in mounting and descending, clearly conscious in eating and in drinking, in chewing and in tasting, clearly conscious in eliminating, clearly conscious in standing and in walking, in sleeping and in waking, in speaking and in keeping silent, thus, O my monks, you should practise well."
The practice of visual representations of a high nature creates a favourable vibrations, favourable states of consciousness. The same is true, according to Indian tradition, of the repetition of certain sentences and words. The Indian believes that in thse words and phrases lies the experience of many thousands of years, of innumerable former incarnations of millions of men, creating again and again the atmosphere and the vibrations which they had when first used. It is not absolutely necessary to understand the meaning of the word or phrase; its sound alone will create the favourable frequency of vibration. The best known of these sacred syllables is OM, or AUM, the meditation on which is said to lead to salvation. Its perfection is due to the fact that it comprises all the consonants and vowels, all other words from alpha to omega. The sounding of the final M is considered the most important. In the same way the Yogi meditates on the phrase: "Om mani padme hum", ("O jewel in the lotus blossom") as a Christian would meditate on the phrase: "God is love." or "the peace that passes all understanding". The sounding of the phrase is accompanied by meditation on its meaning. Since this murmur meditation may easily lead to a sort of trance which has nothing in common with real liberation, it must be used with great care and discretion. The Yoga aphorisms of Patanjali recommended in its stead a systematic practice of concentration, then of meditation, finally leading to a contemplation. In this way, consciousness is not lulled to sleep.
Thus after we have learned to discipline our senses, we have learned to control the sequence of our representations, trying to analyse our unconscious mind, rendering it conscious as far as possible.
After this stage, we have consciously created a representation and held it in our mind, excluding all other representations. This is what is called concentration.
When we now endeavour to state everything we know about the object held in our mind, when we oblige our thinking to turn around this object and to look at it from all sides, and when finally we go with our mind to the very centre of this object (med-itari, going to the middle), we call it meditation.
But still we are here and the object is there. Our mind is still in movement and says: "Here am I and what is there is not I." Should we succeed in extending our I to the object, ie. not only to represent and comprehend the object, but also to feel it, then we get into contemplation. Then I and the object have become one.
And finally, should we succeed in overcoming our ego, in dropping the object with which we have become one, in dropping, therefore, ourselves, then we have freed ourselves of the world of representation and are in the Absolute. This is not hypnosis, since we are doing it in full consciousness. This condition is known as Samadhi. Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, Samadhi, - this, in brief, is the path of Raja Yoga.
In trying this mental exercise, it is advantageous to select an object which attracts us, which has our fullest sympathy, something beautiful, for instance. It is evident that if our emotions help us in concentrating on the chosen object, that concentration will be made much easier and much deeper. Indians choose with predelicition the flower of the lotus. Apart from being beautiful, the lotus flower also has symbolic significance for an Indian, which makes it all the more attractive to him. A Western student might choose the rose instead.
There is no doubt that consciously or unconsciously all the great creative artists have used concentration and meditation in the elaboration of their works. Without it, artistic and creative activity, in general, is unthinkable. As to contemplation, St John of the Cross describes it as follows: "The soul is steeped in deep forgetfulness; it knows not where it was or what it has done and it seems to it that no time at all has passed. And so it is really in this forgetfulness many hours may go by; when the soul awakens, it seems that only a minute has passed."
With our intellect alone we are only able to grasp the world, to understand the world in a one-sided sort of way. In conscious contemplation the fullness of life and the wisdom of the ages are near; in it we transcend the limits of our appearance. When we have reached this condition which we might call the intuitive state, for moments first, then for longer and longer periods and finally at will, then we have reached the sources of being. And at this stage, the effort is made by us is helped by a force, an attraction from within, grace. "Knock and it shall be opened."
Development from then on is rapid, since the notion of time does not exist any more. In contemplation, the body is fully relaxed, every muscle, even the face, and the contemplative smiles the smile we see on the faces of the departed, the really living, released from the tensions of their egotistical self. In this state prayers are heard and answered. It is also the state in which we can most efficiently make suggestions for our welfare. Now we feel what we think and think what we feel. In contemplation, the consciousness of the body wanes, the consciousness of the Self grows and gathers itself in a centre.
From contemplation to Samadhi, ecstasy, is only a small step. When even questions cease, when soul and body are fully relaxed, the last stage is reached. Here God knocks at our door. The state of blessedness cannot be described with words.
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