Yogis who cannot rise early

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 5 years before Jul 09, 2017

MiBeloved 5 years ago

Michael wrote:

Just to get up in the morning is a hassle and a balking from the body and mind. I was doing this practice since around 1972 when I learnt bhastrika pranayama from Yogi Bhajan and still today so many years after, it is an uphill climb pretty much every morning. But while I am fighting with the devil of sleep, most other people are slumbering away in the arms of the devil which is their darling, their nightly lover, more dear to them than their sex partners even.

Dean's question:

Can you elaborate more on this regarding sleeping in the arms of the devil? Is that balking coming from the condition energy of the mind and body which is linked in with the collective energy from the other souls?  And does the will or presence of mind to fight that negative energy emanate from the core self?  Because I too this morning had a struggle to rise from my bed to do pranayama exercises.

MiBeloved’s Response:

As you suggested the balking, lazy mood comes from the conditioned energy. In the Bhagavad Gita, this is listed as the third energy out of three types of energy in material nature (prakriti). This is the tamah guna energy. It causes inertia. This is Krishna’s description of it:

aprakāśo'pravṛttiśca

pramādo moha eva ca

tamasyetāni jāyante

vivṛddhe kurunandana (14.13)

aprakāśo = aprakāśaḥ — lack of clarity; 'pravṛttiśca = apravṛttiśca = apravṛttiḥ — lack of energy + ca — and; pramādo = pramādaḥ — inattentiveness; mohā — confusion; eva — indeed; ca — and; tamasă — in depression; etāni — these; jāyante — they emerge; vivṛddhe — in the dominance; kurunandana — O dear son of the Kurus

Lack of clarity, lack of energy, inattentiveness and confusion emerge when depression is predominant, O dear son of the Kurus. (Bhagavad Gita 14.13)

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Don’t knock it because it has those negative effects. How would you take rest unless your consciousness is taken over by a mood of inertia? We do use these negative aspects. It is important to understand that. Then you may go about regulating how much of that energy invades your psyche and how much of it is native to your consciousness.

As you indicated it is also a collective mass force. In fact our individual intellects come from a cosmic pool of intellects. We are just awarded one of these each. The same thing goes for our sense of identity expressions. My intellect is like one ray of the sun and the collective mass intellect is like the sun itself. In fact when one sees it in the astral regions, it seems to be a blinding mass of energy which one cannot look at easily even when using the supervision of the third eye.

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Unfortunately initially the presence of mind to fight this inertia does not come from the core-self. Believe it or not it comes initially from the same material nature which produced the lethargy in the first place. Later on after one advances sufficiently, an impetus which is similar comes from the core self.

Material nature is a contrary force which means it has opposing energies in itself. It is so sad when people talk about harmony in material nature. I sometimes wonder what they are talking about, because nature, according to Krishna has three phases and each of these phases tries to defeat another. So within it there is always this conflict going on except when it enters the state of quiescence (Sanskrit – pralaya). Then it stops this internal argument but as soon as it begins its operations again, the quarrelling for dominance of one of the three modes begins.

In the beginning of practice, it is like there is no core self because the student is confused and cannot sort what is what. But still there develops disgust about material nature which comes from that nature itself. Sometimes even a corrupt politician gets tired of cheating people and turns on himself.

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This relates to pranayama practice where one has to fight to remove the apana energy. This is a serious fight. Those who think that they can do this by giving mental commands for the energy to leave the psyche are deluding themselves.

The energy won’t bother with their little will power because the sluggish force has what it has under control and it won’t yield an inch of territory to a puny student yogi.