Expanded Consciousness Allows Us
To Take a Rest from External Perceptions
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Like an old dog who comes back to be near his master
The Yoga Sutras say:
“Yoga is the suppression of the transformations of the thinking principle”. [1]
This cannot be done from the outside or from the periphery of one’s consciousness. Attempts to control the whole mind from its external layers are at best neurotic. Effectiveness is attained when the ability to stop one’s mind – or move it at will – is exerted from the very center of the thinking principle.
And this depends on the purity of the heart.
A “pure” heart is that level of human consciousness that is free from personal desire.
When the soul has “seen enough” of a lower scenario of life, it transfers its focus to a higher level. Yoga happens as one’s consciousness feels at home in the absence of lower-self desire and fear, and aspires to nothing except Goodness in itself.
It does not emerge as a goal being achieved by someone’s personality. It takes place as the cure of all suffering and as that kind of stability that contains the best of every movement.
It is felt like the feeling of the old dog who comes back to be near his master: everything is OK for the mind that is next to its teacher or spiritual soul. It is not necessary then to think, in order to understand all things.
In the life of a spiritual pilgrim, the lower self will sometimes gravely realize that “there has been a stoppage, and a vast wordless, soundless insight occurred together with an absence of chronological time”.
It is not up to the personality to produce a transition to higher states of mind. However, it can humbly pave the way for it to occur, in the present lifetime or in some future incarnation.
Sooner or later, right effort produces right insight.
NOTE:
[1] Sutra 2 of Section One, in “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”. One of the best editions available has translation, Introduction, Appendix, and Notes by Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi. Click here to see the book in one of our associated websites. It was published by Tookárám Tátyá for the Bombay Theosophical Publication Fund, 1890, 107 pages.
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The above article incorporates the note entitled “Commentary on a Sutra”, which was published – with no indication as to the name of the author – in the December 2016 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”.
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