Yogi investigates the Psyche
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before May 29, 2017
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Tibeti Yoga stressed what he called the full inner pratyahar practice. Pratyahar is the 5 stage of yoga and some people do not even practice it. Many people sit to meditate who have not spent a few years with just pratyahar. Some meditate and pretend that they know what pratyahar is, as if it is a simple thing to achieve.
In any case Tibeti yogi was piloting me to a terminal pratyahar practice which involves withdrawing the inquiry interest energy of psyche. Actually in the Brahma Sutra, it extols all human beings who could read Sanskrit to stop the external inquiry into the material environment and pursue instead the internal inquiry of what is within the psyche itself (athato brahma jijnasa).
Nature’s convention is that the psyche should be focused into the external environment of the material world for procuring enjoyments. Yesterday I found some insect larvae squirming about on a kitchen counter. These little fellows had just eaten themselves through the walls of a papaya and now they were inquiring about the environment.
Their mission: MASSIVE EXPLOITATION. EAT – CONTROL – the environment outside their bodies.
First their mother laid them as a tiny egg on the skin of the papaya. Then they punctured the helpless fruit which could not defend itself effectively, entered it and ate their way to the hollow inside of it. All the while their bodies were maturing. Then at a certain stage they got this intuitive direction to eat and dig their way out of the fruit. With their exploitive business done, their mission of penetration complete and their successful escape completed, they came out but found themselves on a formica counter which was manufactured by another set of exploiters, the human beings. This was not what they had in mind. They were supposed to be on earth with vegetation under which they could crawl and hide to pass through the pupa stage to adulthood.
Pratyahar? They were not interested in that. A friend of mine questions the yogic idea that among the species of life, the human beings is the highest. He wants to know who said that. Where from is that opinion? What is the proof? But the Brahma Sutras, one of the first Sanskrit texts put out by yogis in India, are still; saying that among the 8.4 million species of life, the human form is the highest. But some will say 8.4, who counted that? The answer is that in the Puranas, it is said that Shiva said that.
In the human form you can consider that your inquiry-interest energy is being invested needlessly and at a loss in the material environment. There is a degree of mastership of the environment as is proven by human scientific achievement, but still it is a loss because a body only lasts for about 115 years for the most. After that the individual’s sure footing in existence becomes very out-of-control and slippery.
So pratyahar is when that interest-energy which we put into the material world, is withdrawn from it and held back in the psyche of the self. Later when one reaches a higher stage, a person like Tibeti Yogi introduces the idea of expressing that interest energy in the psyche itself.
What?
You might think that you know yourself already and you do not need to investigate that.
Really?
Well actually you do not know yourself. You do not know all the parts of the psyche. You are really confused on this and have much misinformation and false assumptions, and for the very reason that you are by nature a consumer like those little squirmy guys who ate their way out of the papaya.
Tibeti Yogi showed me how some of the inquiry-energy in the psyche was being held in reservation for further investigation in the material world. This energy once it was successfully withdrawn from the material world, remained in the head of my subtle body in a sort of silence, like a grenade which was not activated, because the pin was not pulled to release the detonation lever. Some years ago, and right now I cannot even remember the exact date, I did some pratyahar practice and withdrew this energy which used to be poking about and investigating items for exploitation in the material world. Much of what I did to achieve that was explained in the Meditation Pictorial* book in chapter one.
So that energy was in reserve. I forgot all about it, because it was no longer bothering me with investigations into the mundane environment. Tibeti Yogi pointed to it in the head of the psyche, as if to say, “What will you do with that? That is trouble. Get rid of that. Use that up. The thing sits there but it will eventually explode if you do not dissipate it in the right place.
He then pointed to the thighs, legs and feet and said, “Expend it there. Let it investigate that. Use it out there.”
He then used the analogy of a train which was driven into the main depot in a city. The idea of a train system is to have a main depot from which the trains depart on a daily basis. They spread out through the city along well-defined tracks. Each morning they depart. Then they return and are parked in the main depot until the afternoon rush hour. Then they again go out. They seek various parts of the city and investigate those tracks on a daily basis. In the same way the sensual energy goes out of the body through the various senses like the eyes, skin and ear. These energies go out and procure information and then return into the psyche with information which is collected by the appropriate sense organs.
Initially in pratyahar the student pulls back the sensual energy. This is like instructing all train operators to stop all trains dead in their tracks and to reverse the engines so that the trains back up into the main terminal. Then those operators are asked to turn off the engines. The trains will then stay put in the main terminal. No more transit out of the terminal will be observed.
Now in this rather advanced pratyahar, those operators are again asked to start the engines and to drive the trains further into the terminals. This terminal is very large and it has subterranean passages, a whole world is within the terminal itself but this was unknown to the train operators. Now they are instructed to drive the trains within the terminal itself.
There is a mystic world within the psyche, and one should investigate it with as much enthusiasm or more, as one had before when one was involved in creature existence exploiting in the material world.
Dear Beloved 5 years ago
I look forward to investigating my psyche one of these days when I've fulfilled my duty to society.
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Sounds like the guy who was asked to go out of the married life, to become a Tathaagataa, one who went (agataa) out of (tatha) (pronunciation tut-ha) family life to become a monk-beggar (bhikshu).
When Buddha returned to his home town, many of the males suddenly got this idea that they should leave the householder life. Some who were on the verge of getting married, which meant in those days, to have their parents select their brides, began to have doubts about everything. Buddha was not like Deepak and Tolle who give the positive side of life. Buddha gave the negative pessimistic view explaining that it all pans out in misery anyway.
So one old chap who had served the householder life decided to shit-can the whole thing and go with Buddha in the forest to meditate from then onwards. So he told his son to just come along with him but the boy said that there was work to be done and that when the work was done in the years to come, he would leave the householder life. So the old man told him something like this, “Who are you telling about the work getting done. I have been working all my life and the work never finished, so why do you think that for you the work will be done. It will never be done. It never got finished for my father nor for his father and it won’t get finished for you either.”
Duty is ongoing in the material world. Maintenance of this and maintenance of that will continue. In the simpler less-sophisticated societies one sees this more clearly, like when I was using a child’s body in Guyana in the 1960s. I used to notice how an old man would have a job and he would dutifully come home to his family every afternoon, some of these old geezers did not drink and carry on like my father. Some of them went to church and stuck with the straight and narrow, being ideal householders. Their wives and children looked up to them and loved them, because they provided everything as much as they could accord their means of livelihood.
And then sometimes suddenly there would be a message that Mr. Jones or Mr. Edwards was dead. So people would run about to inquire how he died. Somebody would say,
"But he greeted me this morning and he looked healthy.”
Somebody else would say,
“I heard that he had blood pressure but it was under control.”
Somebody else would say,
“I wonder if his wife will get his pension.”
So like that the man kept up with duties until his body dropped dead. Duties will continue. There will never be a time when they will be finished. The first illusion is to think that later on you will be able to cultivate spiritual life. Material nature will remember you as the person who failed to incorporate it into your daily life and so later, when you think you can do it, it will spoil your situation in such a way that you cannot put your finger on it.
I remember another example which is closer to home than those men who dropped dead. It was my mother. She worked for the Americans in Guyana at their bauxite mining concerns during the 1960s. From that she got a connection and migrated to New York City. Later on she used to say that she could not wait to reach Social Security age, when she would retire and collect a monthly check. At the time the retirement age was about 61 or 63 years of age. Believe it not, she literally dropped dead just before she reached that age.
So Babaji has asked and I think I explained this in his commentaries in the Kriya Yoga Bhagavad Gita, that all the yogis should try to enter the householder life even though it is risky and is facilitating to expanded materialistic attitude. His idea is that from youth, one should learn the kriya yoga system from a reliable guru and then one should get married, discharge the obligation to the ancestors by giving them bodies, but all the while keeping up the kriya practice. Then later when the children reach maturity, one should accelerate the practice.
If however one does not keep the practice going during the married life, then the momentum of no-practice will continue after the children reach maturity and one will then be disinclined from practice. This is due to a law of nature, which states that a cultivated attitude will persist even if one decides something to the contrary. A good example of a person who used yoga during his householder life is Arjuna but Arjuna had a problem which was he did not understand initially how yoga could be applied to married life. So in the Gita, Krishna cited how he (Krishna) instructed previous yogi-kings in many many lives before, in the way of how to inculcate yoga into cultural development. This is called Karma Yoga. Krishna was so specific that it was such a difficult thing to do that he said he is the one who has to teach it.
Imagine if you meet someone who says that he is God, he and no one else and he is not talking about some mergence energy or anything like that. And then he tells you that he will teach you this secret information and method who no one else understands. So that is the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. If you study it you will not find anything there which says that you can just live out your duties and then do yoga after. In fact Krishna told Arjuna this:
The yogi is superior to other types of ascetics; he is also considered to be superior to the masters of philosophical theory, and the yogi is better than the ritual performers. Hence, be a yogi, Arjuna. (Bhagavad Gita English 6.46)
A word of advice:
Married life and community-service life should be closely monitored. One has to budget one’s energy just as one would budget money. We see that in modern times, money has become so important that whole countries are controlled by Central Banks, which affect everything everybody does. Not a single human being is independent of these Central Banks. So looking at this we can get some idea of how closely we should monitor and regulate our energy distribution to family and country. If we fail to do so, then our plan to rein it in later, will prove to be a failure.
The most important thing in life is not money, it is self-energy. This is usually known under the titles of emotions and thinking-energy. Both of these energies should be tightly budgeted so that the family and community expenditures do not use up all of the energies. Some of the self-energy should be put aside for spiritual practice, all the way through the married life, not just at the imagined end of it.
There is no end to social life. My father begot a child when he was about 60 years of age which is where I am now. He could not stop the indulgence impetus because he did not budget it along the way. If you do not have the strength to turn off the valve during the early married years, then it funny that you are feeling you will develop the power to do so later on. In any case, we can only wish you the best of luck!
