The Essential Yoga Sutra Page 3

  At this point, the second step of the Path of Seeing, we must try to remember what we saw: that things are empty. This is the first time that the Master refers to emptiness.

  Emptiness doesn't mean blackness, or that nothing exists, and certainly not that things like good and bad actions don't matter. It only means that what we thought was there isn't there—no more than a man on a movie screen. That is, if I look around and try to find anything that is not coming from seeds in my mind, I'll come up empty-handed: a simple absence, like colorless light.

  Our minds in the Great Mistake mistake words—that is, the perfect little mental pictures that the seeds make—for actual objects. This in itself is thinking “conceptually” here. It's not that we want to stop thinking altogether!

  So now we know that ultimate reality and emptiness and clear light and just that simple missing feeling when we find out there's no real man on the movie screen are all the same thing. The day after we see this directly, we are on the fourth path: the Path of Habituation.

  It's called this because we are getting used to what we saw, using that indescribable experience to complete the work of removing negative seeds from our mind forever.

  At this point we still have these seeds, even when we meditate, but we never again fall into those meditation traps that are just moving between subtle pleasant experiences: shifting mental gears lower and lower, beyond even examining the notes of the music, but with none of the content of meditation that can free us of the Great Mistake.

  This content of our meditation, the object we use this powerful tool to focus upon, must be that one most meaningful and subtle object of all: the fact that the man on the screen simply isn't a man— all the “signs” of a man to him, real arms and legs and the like, disappear too when we touch the screen.

  As we travel along the Path of Habituation, we eliminate within ourselves, forever, all negative thoughts like anger, jealousy, or wanting things ignorantly. The last negative thought that we overcome is even the most subtle form of examining or seeing things the wrong way.

  Once all negativity is gone, we progress through the final steps to total purity. This period is devoted to gaining the ability to see everything in the universe—whether past, present, or future—at the same time: a useful trick for helping others.

  Our wisdom is not only vast, but also awakened.

  Even very advanced people can only see ultimate reality during deep meditation, and at that time cannot experience things of normal reality. When we reach total purity though we blissfully see everything in both realities, even with our ears and fingers and other senses. It's difficult for us to imagine.

  This is the fifth path, the final goal, the Path of No More Learning. We are beyond all fear, and we're not afraid to announce it to the world. We have reached our goal through the careful process of learning from a Master and considering well what he says; now we experience it directly.

  Now we have new seeds that cut off all our old, negative seeds— both those that caused the Great Mistake and those that limited us from knowing all things.

  One vast group of the new seeds creates a paradise around us, where we dwell forever with everything, and everyone, we ever hoped for. We enter this heaven whenever in our lives we reach this much goodness within ourselves, and we enter it wherever we are, without leaving or coming.

  Another vast group of seeds acts spontaneously, without any conscious thought on our part, to send us out to billions of suffering beings. We appear at their side, in whatever way they need—as a pet dog, as a spiritual guide, as a lover, as an enemy to test their virtues.

  We do all this without stirring from a perfectly still and pure state of being. We are perfect knowledge, which by merely being plants the seeds that make itself continue, eternally.

  The second cornerstone upon which the house of yoga is built is the Way. In the first chapter we use deep meditation to travel through the five paths; in the second chapter we start some very practical yoga methods to attain this meditation, and the wisdom that rides it. The two chapters together reflect yoga as a union of inner, mental methods and outer, physical methods or activities.

  It's important to be clear about where we want our yoga to take us. What goal do we have in mind? The first important goal is nirvana. This is not some stupefied numbness, but refers rather to permanently stopping all our negative thoughts. Imagine yourself as a person who is simply not capable of getting angry, ever again.

  After reaching this nirvana, we work further to become a holy being—something like an angel really—who sees all things and helps all people.

  In fact, the Sanskrit word for “the Way” here is sadhana, which means “to reach” angels through our steady, daily practice. We reach them first by contacting them. We reach them secondly by becoming them.

  The best way to get out of trouble is to figure out how we got there in the first place. If water is pouring all over the floor, you can either mop all day or simply turn off the tap.

  There are four important principles that—when we grasp them totally—help stop all our pain. These are called the Four Higher Truths. Here we begin the first: the truth of where our pain comes from. The Master takes us step-by-step through the entire process of how we cause ourselves trouble.

  At the very bottom of everything lies the fertile field of ignorance—what we've been calling the Great Mistake, or how the mind turns things around the wrong way. Only by stopping this ignorance can we stop all our other unhappiness, anger, and the rest.

  Oh, we can try to get more sleep, or take a vacation, do a little yoga or light meditation to calm our harried minds. This doesn't stop thoughts like anger, it just suppresses or interrupts them for a while. Their root, the ignorance, is always still there. And as long as it is, the calm will wear off at the first big traffic jam.

  If aliens came to our world from another planet, an enlightened planet, they would be shocked and saddened by how we live. Because we are completely wrong about everything we think is good.

  Instead of trying to figure out where things really come from, instead of trying to find out why good things end, we simply and blindly work our lives away, to get things that we all know cannot and will not last. Houses, cars, positions, friends, families, death.

  We spend billions of dollars on soaps and creams and cosmetics and clothes to drape over something that is already beginning to rot.

  Our attempts to seek pleasure or rest are often only painful, and the few pleasures we do manage to obtain always end in pain.

  These are ignorance, yes, but again at the bottom of them all is root ignorance: the fact that every single thing we ever see is not what we think it is. Things are not themselves—they are ourselves.

  All living creatures, even ants, make this mistake about things. Ignorance at this first stage is a seed that lies within us, before we are even born.

  So we enter life with the seed of ignorance within us. And then in the very womb the seed flowers into a personal experience of this misunderstanding, which is here called “selfness.”

  This wrong idea of “me” is awakened by our very first sensations in life: the warmth and pressure within our mother. Poisoned by ignorance, the mind immediately splits life into “warmth” and “me feeling the warmth.”

  It's very important to say here that there is a “me” that is perfectly fine—one that does exist, and that experiences other things. So what's the difference between this me and the one that causes all the trouble?

  When we do experience an object like warmth, we tend to think of it as something out there, on its own, by itself. We tend to think that how it got out there in the first place was from something outside of ourselves: it comes from a fire, it comes from my mother's body.

  But in fact the warmth, and me too for that matter, is being produced by those seeds within my own mind. We can see this from the fact that cozy warm for one person is stifling hot to another.

  “Grasping” here means ignorance as it m
isunderstands an object in the moment. We enter a pastry shop and see a single maple-coated donut left on the tray.

  Temporarily blinded by our feelings for maple-coated donuts, even those of us who to some extent understand the Great Mistake begin to grasp, despite ourselves. Grasping doesn't mean grabbing the donut, or even wanting it a lot. It just means looking at it the wrong way: It's out there, on the tray. It's there because someone baked it. I will get it because I have money. None of which is true.

  Now it's not wrong to like donuts. Spiritually advanced people en-joy things like donuts a lot more than we can. The very ability to like and dislike is what gets us enlightened: I like peace, I don't like pain, I dislike seeing people suffer.

  Heaven itself is bliss, not some place where yogis sit around trying not to enjoy anything. But there's a difference between smart liking and stupid liking. How do we tell them apart?

  Here's a test. An elderly lady behind you says to her husband, “Maple's my favorite!” Do you like the donut enough to leave it for her?

  Back to the bad man on the movie screen. He's hurting a puppy. It's something I don't like.

  The seed of ignorance triggers misunderstanding me and things, which triggers immediate blindness, which allows my mind to pose the following moral quandary:

  Do I run up to the screen and hit the bad man? Or do I run up to the screen and try to talk him out of his violence peacefully?

  Get it. It's not that one of these methods, as they stand, would work better than the other. My crazy mind has lured me into choosing between two false opposites. The point is that neither approach will work, because neither approach could ever work. That man's not the man!

  If we don't like what we're seeing—and in fact it is something unpleasant—we obviously have to go up to the booth where the movie projector is and change something there. It's an infinitely more subtle approach, but we don't really have any choice. If we want to stop pain, we have to stop the seeds.

  And this is done in the mind, in deep meditation, beginning with the seeds that cause the Great Mistake.

  So here I am at the last maple-coated donut. I see it as something I get from a store and some money, not from my own seeds. I want it in a way that's mistaken about how to get it.

  And so rather than taking care to plant seeds for a donut (by leaving this one for the lady behind me), I force the issue. I take the last donut, and thereby do a “karma.”

  Our mind is like an extraordinarily sensitive video camera that records every act, word, and thought we ever undertake, every second of our entire life. The image of each action or karma is stored in the mind as a seed. When the time comes, the seed ripens and creates everything around us and inside us.

  This storehouse of seeds decides what we see now and also what we see where we can't see yet: after we die. Don't be naïve and believe that thoughts stop just because the body stops. If you don't get a call from someone, it doesn't mean they're dead. Maybe their phone is just broken.

  We all have lots of old bad seeds. Knowledge can stop them from ever growing.

  Take a moment of total honesty and ask yourself where the pain in your life is coming from. There are basically three choices.

  The first is the Big Bang Theory. All things, including your irritating boss, have been caused by an event that conveniently has no cause itself. Your life, and all its tragedies, is simply a huge coincidence, as random particles from a very old explosion bump into each other, creating the face of every person you've ever met.

  Or else there is a higher and infinitely compassionate intelligence that has created everything, and created it in such a way that we always lose everything to the agonies of old age, cancer, war, death.

  Or else we get exactly what we give to others: a sort of perfect cosmic justice, as unforgiving as gravity. Let go of the coffee cup, it falls and breaks. Hurt someone else, you get hurt back.

  All this, by the way, is not to say that there are no divine beings hovering around us constantly, guiding us toward perfect happiness. There are. But it cannot come unless we take care of others.

  You meet somebody new, somebody exciting, and the feeling is mutual. In six months you can't stand each other.

  Why do things fall apart? It's not your fault, or theirs. It's a problem with the way life itself is designed. It's that seed thing again.

  Meeting a new friend is, like everything else, the result of a seed ripening within our own mind. Every minute that we spend with our new friend, this seed is wearing out, simply by producing our friend.

  As the seed wears out, the relationship changes. When the seed sputters to an end, so does the friendship. When we understand how seeds work, we stop misunderstanding friends. They are not friends out there, who themselves have a smile or a touch that we enjoy. Everything is coming from the seeds.

  Everything comes from the seeds, and seeds die by being born. Truly, then, every part of our lives—even the good things—must one day cause us pain. This is the second higher truth: the truth of pain.

  If everything we ever experience is a result of how we treat others, then why do good people suffer? And why do people who cheat get rich?

  It's crucial to realize that mental seeds act just like physical seeds. No one puts a corn seed into the ground and then stands there, expecting corn to pop up in a day or two.

  Mental seeds are planted in the mind simply by our being aware that we are doing, or saying, or thinking something toward someone else. Seeds enter the storehouse and wait to be called up, like airplanes standing in line to take off.

  Certain seeds, like priority flights, get to move ahead of the others in line; for example, if we have said something out of terrible anger, or done a kind deed with an intense understanding of how seeds themselves work.

  In any case, it takes some time for the ripening process. It's very good to keep this in mind, since the time lag is deceiving and we can get discouraged. In actuality, anything good we ever do always comes back good. As does bad. When it seems differently, that's just an older seed taking off in between.

  Here begins the third higher truth: the truth of the path to the end of pain. Let's take a glance at the way the universe itself is organized, and look for clues on how to stop the Great Mistake, the cause of all pain.

  Everything we see around us is either at work or at rest. Things that work, or do something, change thereby. A few things, like the empty space or place that things stand in, never change.

  We ourselves are ever-changing, a combination of physical elements like chemicals and conscious components such as our mind and powers of sense.

  It's important to grasp that our perceptions of all things, whether they themselves are constant or in flux, are coming from the seeds in our minds. Then we can relate to the universe wisely. We can either blindly consume what our past seeds provide us, or embrace the bold endeavor of planting new seeds for a perfect world of freedom.

  Another, very useful way of dividing up the universe is into the two realities. The first is called “deceptive reality”: everything in our normal life, like donuts that look like you get them by paying.

  Things in this lower reality seem different from each other, in and of themselves. A salad is not a donut. I am not you. We are innately and by definition different.

  The second, higher reality we call “ultimate reality.” On this level, a salad and a donut are not different. This is not some vague sentiment that everything is one; it's not, and we can't get anywhere with that. Rather, all things are one thing in that they come from our seeds. Now if we know this, we can build a new world, without pain.

  Earlier on we caught our mind imposing a perfect little picture of a pot onto the mere signs of a pot out there on the stove: silver color, round shape. But even the silver is a picture imposed on two patches of silver, left and right.

  When we understand thus how deceptive reality works, it leads us to see pure, ultimate reality; but we can't stay there without the right seeds.

&nb
sp; Only a person who has seen ultimate reality directly, on the Path of Seeing, truly understands the two realities. The experience is called “indescribable,” only because the seer cannot convey it to another person in words that can make that person see it, on the spot. But of course a seer devotes the rest of his life to helping others see ultimate reality too.

  And this is because the simple act of seeing, if only for a number of minutes, destroys certain negative emotions immediately— and all others not long afterward, bringing the freedom that all of us so desperately need.

  In the hours after you first see, you pass through a series of extraordinary visions. One of these is seeing directly into the future, to the day when you will become a being of light who helps all other living creatures. And so all doubts about your future, for example, vanish forever.

  These two are very personal experiences that can never be fully conveyed to those who have not seen. However much the seer may want to share them, however much he may say or write, he cannot remove every last doubt of those who have yet to shatter the Great Mistake.

  Again, the reason that negative emotions must always continue in a person who has not seen is the way she feels that the things around them are separate from her, in the sense of not coming from them.

  At the root of this misunderstanding lies the seed of ignorance, which we carried with us into this life. We said that seeing stops some negative thoughts immediately, and all others in time, inexorably, just because you saw.

  The last negative thought to go is the Great Mistake, and all of its seeds. This is how seeing sends us toward the final goal, of absolute purity.