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norms of ethics and conduct, and each person seems to be
standing on his own or her own legs. When there is no
control of any kind, everything is at sixes and sevens, when
we do not know whether or not we are going to live, when
everything is in the form of a social fever and a political
upheaval, the true colour of the individual personality comes
up.
But such occasions are very rare. These are only
academic or theoretical possibilities that we are discussing,
as they do not take place every day. They have occasionally
taken place in the history of nations; but as they are not daily
experiences, they cannot be taken as normalcy in our
behaviour. Normally we always live an artificial life of a
controlled exhibition of our personality, and the major part
of it is kept in reserve for exhibition only under possible and
given circumstances.
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The practice of yoga is an art of bringing out to the
conscious level of experience the entirety of our personality,
so that we may not be artificial individuals at any time. To be
artificial is a very unhappy thing, as we know very well. We
do not like to be what we are not. Yet we are compelled by
circumstances to exhibit an artificial personality. We speak
with people in a very made-up fashion. We have to think
thrice before we utter words, because every word that we
speak may be weighed on a balance, especially if we are a
political unit. And so we are very controlled in our
expression, and do not give up the entirety of our ideas; we
look in all ten directions before we speak a word. All this is
because we have to take note of the consequences that follow
from our actions. We cannot be normal persons in the
present-day world, to mention the situation precisely. No one
is one-hundred-percent normal because society controls us,
political laws control us, our economic conditions control us,
and even our family circumstances have a say in the matter.
We are not absolutely free individuals in society. We are
bound by various factors, and so we are unhappy at the core
of our hearts.
We try to be happy by creating artificial conditions,
which are mostly techniques of forgetting our worries rather
than the solution to our problems. We go to movies, to clubs,
to parties, on picnics; we have a drink, a smoke, strong tea,
etc. All these are methods of forgetting the devil. They are not
solutions to our problems, because these problems cannot be
solved. We know these problems are so deep and
complicated that they cannot be solved at all. So what do we
do? If they cannot be solved and if they weigh heavy on our
heads daily, they may create a complex and we may become
maniacs. To avoid this possibility of going mad, we create
artificial circumstances of forgetting the tense situations in
life.
Hence, we live artificial lives from beginning to end,
forgetting reality altogether, and never giving reality a
chance to get into our lives. Reality is terrible. The world is
not our friendly neighbour; it has its own laws, which we
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cannot abide by, so the best thing is to forget the worries
rather than solve the problems. Most of us adopt this escapist
attitude of forgetting reality. Most of us are escapists. Every
person in the world has some form of escapism in his or her
personality on account of not being able to find an ultimate
solution to problems. The problems are so many; they are
quantitatively large and qualitatively very annoying. Life is
an utter failure in the case of most people in the world. It is
not a success, because reality is different from the makeup of
our psychological constitution. We can be successes in life
only if our inner nature is to be in conformity with the outer
reality.
Yoga practice is a supernormal technique adopted by
ancient adepts and masters, by which we can tune our inner
personality to the reality that is outside. For this we have to
make a thorough study of our personality first, and then
study the nature of the reality that is outside. This is the
study of philosophy. Philosophical investigations and
analyses are the processes by which we study the nature of
reality as well as the nature of our inner personality.
Philosophy includes metaphysics and psychology. It is
metaphysics in the sense that it is a study of the nature of
reality as such, and it is psychology in the sense that it is a
study of our own inner nature. Hence, sadhana, or spiritual
practice, is philosophy and psychology combined. These
combined together make spirituality.
Thus, we have a very difficult subject before us. It is a
study of our own self as a psychological unit on one side, and
study of the vast reality of the world and creation on the
other side. Therefore a sadhaka, or a spiritual seeker, should
have an acute intellect and be a very profound psychologist.
A foolish person cannot be a spiritual person. It is not mere
emotion that is called devotion to God; it is a philosophical
efflorescence of our personality that takes the form of a
spiritual aspiration. The aspiration for God-realisation, or the
ultimate perfection of life, is the growth of our total
personality in conformity with the reality that is outside. The
whole universe grows together with us when we grow
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spiritually. The spiritual aspirant is not an ordinary
individual. The spiritual seeker is a representative of the
whole cosmos evolving towards the Absolute.
It is a wonderful thing to understand, to study, and to
make an investigation of. We become very interesting
individuals. The philosophical mind is a very interesting unit.
Nothing can be more interesting than the study of philosophy
and psychology in its true connotation. The study of
psychology is the study of the total personality of the
individual  conscious, subconscious, unconscious and
spiritual  and at the same time, it is a philosophical study of
the ultimate constitution of things. Philosophy, properly
defined, is the explanation of events by their ultimate causes,
not by their immediate causes.
For example, in medical science we have the study of
disease by its ultimate causes as well as by its immediate
causes. We have a headache. Why do we have a headache?
Perhaps we slept in the open the previous night, in a misty
atmosphere, and today we have a headache. This is the study
of our headache by immediate cause. But the ultimate cause
may not be merely our sleeping outside. Many other factors
have contributed to our headache today. We may have
walked in the hot sun, or we may have had a tense day due to
overwork; we may have even had a small family quarrel
which contributed to today s headache, and so on. We can
multiply causes which jointly contribute to the experience of
the shooting pain or migraine that we have today. We cannot
simply swallow an aspirin and cure our headache, because
many other factors have contributed to it. We may suppress
our headache by taking an aspirin. It may go today, but after
few days it will again come. We have to go on swallowing
pills because we have not found the ultimate cause of our
illness.
Likewise, we cannot attain ultimate freedom or liberation
merely by the study of immediate causes. We have to study
the ultimate causes of things. Every experience, every event
that takes place in the world has a cause behind it, and every
cause has another cause behind it. There is a chain of causes
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and effects, taking us to the ultimate cause of things, the
causeless Cause, which we may theologically term the
Creator of the cosmos, God. The causeless cause is God, the
Unmoved Mover, as we sometimes say.
Likewise, there is a corresponding study subjectively,
studying the nature of mental phenomena. The causes of
mental phenomena have to be studied  not only their
structure, but also their antecedents. This would be the study
of profound psychology. And, as I said, the study of
psychology and the study of philosophy have to go together
simultaneously, parallel to each other, because they are
mutually related sciences.
The study of the spiritual nature of things is thus a
blending together of the philosophical and psychological [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]