All you see during concentration and meditation are expressions and manifestations of your samskaras, the archetypes. Then you understand that each and every experience is imperishable, everything you cognize is registered in you. You register these impressions through the ears, eyes, the nose, taste and touch. These things are registered in your subconscious mind just as whatever I am saying is registered in the tape recorder. Right from the day you incarnated inside your mother’s womb up to this day, everything and every experience is registered by you in your subconscious mind.
Nothing is going unregistered, please remember that. Even in the night when you are unconsciously sleeping, the process of registration is going on. Even when you are unconscious under morphine, ether or chloroform the registration is going on because the subconscious mind is constantly active. The subconscious mind in yoga is known as the subtle body or the astral body. Even a child who doesn’t understand anything has a completely natural astral body. Therefore, from the moment when you incarnated in your mother’s womb, right up to the point where you go to the grave, the constant process of registration of every experience is going on whether you know it or not.
These impressions sometimes become too much for an individual, especially for people who have a suppressed personality. Very suppressed personalities are known as introverted personalities and many people in the world today belong to this category, particularly in the western countries. In the eastern countries there are lots of chances for communication and expression, of vomiting out what is in the mind without any verbal etiquette, but our modern society, I will not say western society, our modern society, is a suppressed society. We cannot even communicate with our family members openly and unassumingly. Therefore, everything is piled up within us.
When you practise meditation or kriya yoga or some sort of raja yoga practices, then during meditation you have so many experiences. Sometimes you hear a sound in your ears, sometimes you see a lot of light, a lotus, a cross, or you see your guru, Christ, a temple or a church. Sometimes you see a monster also or dirty animals. Sometimes you see beautiful gardens, sometimes death and violence, sometimes you hear celestial music. Then you have the feeling of heat or cold or have shocks in the body. Then you think like Christ or God, you feel like repenting for all you have done in the past. This is called an outlet. This is called manifestation of karma. This is called working out of the archetypes and this is called expression.
Now there is another important thing that you have to note. Whatever you experience in life has a symbol in the subconscious mind. If you experience pain, pleasure, comedy or tragedy, the same picture is not in the subconscious mind, it is immediately converted into a symbol, just as a sound in the transmitter centre is transformed into radio waves and then transmitted through the radio field, then again reconverted into the sound that comes in your transistor. Throughout your life you have created millions of symbols in your subconscious mind, but nobody understands which symbol is for which particular karma.
There is another important thing: the karmas are endless. Every moment of your life you are going through experiences, even if you do not work, still you are creating karmas. Even if you live alone you are creating karmas because the whole of life is nothing but a manifestation of karma.
How to get out of this hypertension? We have found during our world tours that most people suffer from hypertension in the modern world. In the developing countries you have less cases of hypertension. In the developed countries you have a lot of hypertension. The more the country is developed, the more cases you have of hypertension. Another aspect that has come to our notice is that the people who have less material problems have more hypertension, therefore hypertension is not necessarily due to material worries. When you don’t have to think about money for living, when you don’t have to worry about retirement or mental treatment, why should you have tensions? However, we have found that among these people there are many more people suffering from hypertension.
From this, one point is very clear. It is important that a person must have material problems to get rid of hypertension, because material problems keep a man within a certain space. We have studied the statistics of people suffering from coronary thrombosis. Why should the people who have succeeded in life, in business, in politics, have coronary thrombosis? Now here come the emotions into the picture. A man who succeeds has one type of emotion. The person who fails has a quite different type of emotion. These emotions immediately affect the glands and hormones and the metabolism.
Successful people become very dull, they become great show-offs, they become careless and contented. They think they can do anything with their success; they can fly to America this very afternoon and come back tomorrow morning, because they have a fat bank balance. This particular process of thinking immediately affects the critical organic process; they have diabetes, blood pressure, coronary thrombosis. If you have difficulties, then sometimes you have cold and cough, sometimes fever, diarrhoea or dysentery, sometimes headache or pain in the body, but not blood pressure or hypertension, because the problems are being worked out then and there.
In the practice of yoga, there is one particular aspect that is emphasized every time: simple living and high thinking. No matter who you are, you may be rich or poor, you may be a big factory owner or a labourer in the streets, you will have to simplify the whole process of living. Simple living is one of the most important ingredients in yoga. Complicated living contributes to hypertension. Complicated living creates a lot of distress in the emotional personality. However, in order to live a simple life, you should have a simple mind as well.
7 April 1981, First National Greek Festival, Hotel Nepheli, Thessaloniki, Greece