Until we can develop awareness, there is no use trying to understand pratyahara. If you are trying to understand and practise pratyahara without awareness, it is like making the effort to put reins on the horse after it has galloped away. You will be chasing the horse; you will not be riding the horse. Awareness has to be there to know the interrelationship between the mind, the sense organs and the sense objects. If you do not have that level of awareness, what are you going to reverse? If you do not have the awareness of the influence of the senses and sense objects on you, your raga, dwesha, your other expectations and desires, what are we expecting to reverse? Therefore, most of the teachers and practitioners get stuck in only observing the thoughts, and they think that is the final stage. It is not the final stage; it is the primary education of pratyahara. That awareness should lead you to recognize, realize and become aware of the interrelationship between senses, sense objects and the mind, and your reaction and response to it.
That awareness is a broad faculty. Attention is focusing of awareness on one small thing. First awareness has to be cultivated and then focus. If you focus with a small awareness, you will not be able to expand your awareness. So, first you expand the awareness. All the practices lead you to the expansion of awareness, even in yoga nidra. Before you move into the states of yoga nidra, you become aware of the outer dimension, the sounds, the environment; you are extending yourself out. That is extension and expansion of awareness. In other practices too, this process has to start.
When you are sitting, expand your awareness; do not only look at me, also recognize other people who are sitting around. Instead of attention, try awareness now. Attention means you are fixed on me. Try awareness. Don’t remain fixed on me; listen to me, but be aware of the surroundings, if you can. You will feel, that due to the prominence of the voice, awareness will always tend to become attention, and listen to what is being said. Listen, but not hundred percent. Listen fifty percent, and spread yourself fifty percent. See if you can do it; it will be challenging, but you can try.
You have to understand that when we say attention, it is limited to the senses. If people pay attention to one thing, they cannot be fully attentive to something else at the same time. The senses work in the same manner. If the senses get attached to one thing, they will lose the perspective or everything else will be clouded. The clarity and perspective will be lost. The input from the sense that is being used will dominate the attention. If you are seeing something, you may not hear what someone else is telling you. One sense is dominant, and that dominant sense is taking your attention. You can be reading a message on the phone. Somebody calls out to you, you do not hear, as the whole attention is fixed on that message. There is no awareness at that point. If there was awareness, you would be aware that somebody has called you. At that moment, there is absence of awareness, and everything is attention.
When you are able to expand your consciousness, you will be able to pay attention to more things, as awareness is the expanded field of attention. Yogis have this faculty. Paramahamsaji had it and Sivanandaji had it. All the yogis of great calibre have displayed and exhibited this nature. At this present moment, awareness is encompassing everything that is recognized by the senses. We are not conscious of it, until we become attentive. Dissipation of attention will lead to fragmented awareness, and eventually to zero awareness.
9 November 2023, Munger Yoga Symposium II, Ganga Darshan, Munger