This consciousness seems to be in the form of awareness rather than as it is philosophically or metaphysically understood by eastern and western philosophers. This awareness in man is not manifest in animals. It is through this awareness that you know that you are, I know that I am and through which I am aware I am speaking and you are aware that you are listening. This awareness is completely dormant in animals, therefore, they do not know that they move and live. Sometimes animals even do great deeds, but they do not know what they are doing. Self-awareness and the ability to develop the state of witnessing is completely absent in them, but it is developed in man.
In our case, this awareness is associated with sensual knowledge, intellectual knowledge, mental knowledge. The awareness is functioning through the lower mediums and therefore, as it is said in Vedanta, this awareness is associated with the senses, the mind, the prana. Is it possible that this awareness could be made free and independent from these lower, limited and finite instruments as far as its functions are concerned? Is it possible that my awareness could function without any medium? Is it possible that I could know without the mind, that I could see without eyes, that I could hear without ears? Is it possible that all kinds of knowledge, every form of knowledge could develop within me without depending on these material instruments?
Yoga is trying to develop this awareness and it has been proved possible from time to time by those people who have developed this supra-sensual knowledge, this transcendental knowledge within themselves. There have been people in every period of history who have been able to know things without any medium at all. So, therefore, let us learn something about what is within us, through which you know you are, and I know I am, through which you are aware of the awareness and through which you are aware of the functions of yoga in relation to your personality.
Is this awareness an expression of your brain which is expressing itself through the senses, or is awareness completely distinct from brainwaves? Is the brain the origin of consciousness, of awareness or is the brain independent of awareness? Eastern philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, says the brain is not the basis for awareness and awareness is not the action of the brain. The awareness, ‘I am, you are, everything is existing’, this knowledge of everything, the understanding of everything is not an offspring of the brain. The brain is not the house of consciousness so that when a man dies, the consciousness does not leave the brain. This is the eastern philosophy. Western philosophy has been developing through the medium of science. So this consciousness or awareness is something in man which is the nucleus, the centre or the hub of his personality.
If you see a spider’s web and a spider in it, you can understand that this spider is the cause of the whole web. The web is the manifestation of the functions, the abilities and the qualities of the spider. In the same manner, somewhere or everywhere within us there is something which is the nucleus of our personality. Some say it is atman, this is translated to English as self. Some call it pure being. In Vedanta it is called satchidananda, which means existence, knowledge and bliss. It is nameless. Although we cannot indicate the existence of this consciousness, some name must be given to it in order to make people understand this concept.
This awareness which is in man is also in animals and minerals. It is in every vegetable and in every visible and invisible object, but this awareness is sleeping, it is dormant. In Vedanta and in yoga, the sleeping consciousness is known as purusha, which means the sleeping consciousness in the city. This body is the city of the nine gates and the awareness is sleeping within.
Consciousness has started functioning in man. When the consciousness wakes up a little, there is a slight movement which tends towards expressing itself through the very limited means of the hands, eyes, ears, mouth. These are the finite mediums through which the awareness is functioning in the form of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, feeling, thinking, acting, etc. This potential is in every sphere, visible and invisible, and all that is taking place is because of the power of consciousness. We, as human beings, have become aware of this consciousness, but when we become aware of it in the spiritual sense, this awareness becomes what we call God.
The concept of God begins, when one starts to feel the awareness of God within. In ancient times man asked, ‘What is the awareness in me?’ The people who were interested in inner awareness are not the ones who were afraid of thunderbolts, the crying clouds, the terrible rains, great floods, the rising sun and the setting moon, and they created their concept of God around these phenomena. These people began to ask, ‘What is this in me? How do I know that I am? How do I know that it is? What is this awareness which continues in spite of my death every night? I die every night but again the next morning I am aware that I am the same person?’
So they began to explore into the possibility of the fact of continuity and ultimately came to the conclusion that this awareness through which ‘I know I am’ is only a partial expression of that supreme consciousness in man. They began to experiment in order to find the finite scope, but they found that consciousness is infinite, so they stopped the investigation. Then they asked, ‘Where does it spring from?’ So this started a process of involution or going in, and this process actually and practically started through the process of yoga.
What happens in yoga? In yoga, you try to withdraw your consciousness so that the field of knowledge becomes narrower in the realm of the visible world of external knowledge. You stop seeing, hearing, being, you completely disassociate the awareness from objects. When two people are standing opposite each other, the awareness is associated through the medium of the eyes. If one closes his eyes there is a disassociation, but that is not enough to break the awareness because one still remembers the other person. Thus this awareness is associated with the presence of the other person through the mind, rather than the eyes. In yoga, one must withdraw the mind so that someone can be in front of you and even though you have seen him a hundred times, your awareness is completely free from your impressions of the other person.
When you listen to someone speak, your awareness is associated with the flow of words and the sounds. If you plug your ears, your consciousness or your awareness, which is functioning through the medium of your senses, is disconnected. You do not hear anymore, but you have the experience or impression in your mind of all those words which you have heard. If you withdraw your consciousness from the mind, all the words you have heard in the past and all the knowledge you have gathered through your ears is also completely disassociated from the body’s awareness.
This is how the process of purification works. Please note the word ‘purification’ because it is usually associated with an ethical and moral background, but it should not be understood in that way. Purification of consciousness is the process by which you free your consciousness from the incoming impressions, the accumulated impressions as well as from the possibility of impressions that the consciousness might gather in the future.
When you close your ears, your mind becomes free from external sounds. When you close your eyes, your mind becomes free from visual perceptions. If you withdraw your mind, your mind becomes free from thoughts, but what happens to the experience of the past? There are thousands of experiences that are called samskaras in yoga. These are impressions of the past which lie in the subliminal body of man and decide the mode awareness functions. Awareness functions in the form of passion, greed, memory, pain, pleasure, ignorance, understanding and misunderstanding, because these are impressions.
You have to scrape off those impressions in the process of involution. First, you withdraw the senses, you cut off the connections, then awareness becomes sense-free awareness. When your consciousness becomes free from sense associations, it is known as withdrawal or pratyahara. Pratyahara is the first stage in which your awareness is disassociated from the sense experiences. Yoga does not begin with asanas or with ethics or morality, it begins when all the sense perceptions are withdrawn. This state of pratyahara is where the lower scheme of yoga begins.
The second process is the control of the mind. The mind remembers through chitta, memory. It remembers in the form of visions, thoughts, impressions, worries, anxieties. It is easy to withdraw yourself and your awareness from the senses, but it is more difficult in the case of the mind. The mind is very powerful and it is through the mind that you are working on the whole scheme.
In order to consolidate the multiphase tendencies of the mind, there is a beautiful method that is known as dharana. Dharana means fixing the mind on an object after the senses have been withdrawn. The object could be gross, semi-gross, or abstract, but the mind must have an object or a centre on which to fix itself and gradually consolidate all its faculties. Thus, the field of the mind is made very narrow. This particular art of yoga is known as the process of negation. This is the process of involution. The personality is withdrawn; it becomes a point. When you have completely withdrawn the associations and your consciousness or awareness to a point, it functions as your object, as a triangle, a cross, a flower, a circle, a sound or point.
Then you start developing it, you start expanding it. You were contracting your consciousness from a circle to a point, which is again to be developed into the form of a circle. The difference is that the first circle was the objective circle, the finite circle, whereas the second one is an infinite circle. This is the process of expansion of consciousness where the sense experiences are completely absent. Therefore, in the practice of yoga, meditation does not only mean that you close your eyes and see something.
I think people do not know how to meditate and that is the whole problem. Many people feel that to sit down and close the eyes is meditation. As a matter of fact, the word meditation is not the right word. It is not meditation; it is complete awareness. When you practise either meditation or awareness, you must start with those practices which withdraw your awareness. You then fix your mind on some object so that your mind becomes a point and your awareness also becomes a point. Then you try to expand this point to the maximum possible extent, and that is when the experience of meditation takes place. It is here that yoga and Vedanta meet each other.
1970, UK