BIG WORLD OF CONSCIOUSNESS

-excerpt from lecture by HG Swami BV Tripurari

“…So by approaching the world, nature in a different way rather than as takers but as lovers, they(yogis) got insight and they talk about the way the world evolves. There’s Prakriti, there’s nature, and it’s a stuff and it has three modes of operating in – Sattva, Rajas, Tamas. It means a mode of clarity, purity a mode of energising, doing and collecting and then a mode of inertia. A mode of not doing anything, kind of going backwards.

We can see what they are talking about in our own psyche. Which is a subtle dimension of our material reality and in our physical body, which is a more gross dimension of our material reality. And different people’s psyches and physiologies are constituted differently of these influences. It manifests in what you want to wear, in what you want to eat, what kind of places you like to gather, what kind of music you listen to, what kind of people, and so forth.

And of course the yoga seek to bring us to a sattvic mode of living, which brings clarity, which helps to distinguish between, to discriminate in a very fine way, between matter and consciousness and separate the Self out from that which it’s not and pursue it; the experiencer from the experience and so forth.

So in the beginning, if you will, it goes something like this: these modes of nature, Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, they are in a state of equilibrium, resting, and poetically it is described, the glance of Vishnu. Vishnu glances, that’s called Shambu, Siva. Siva means auspicious, it means consciousness, it is projected onto this primordial matter in a state of equilibrium, and it’s agitated and that’s like, there’s an explosion, a big bang kind of idea. And the whole thing is set in motion, the world.

And this consciousness that we’re constituted of we are agitating that matter that is unconscious, inanimate. We’re the life but we’ve been projected into and we have started it moving, animated it so to speak, and upon animating it well it takes a shape so that shape kind of the reflection of our selves. In other words, like looking in the mirror, all of sudden matter takes a shape and we notice it and we start to identify with it.

So from the agitation of the primordial, it’s in a primordial state Prakriti, then it becomes agitated and it becomes Mahat. Mahat means Buddhi also. It means like knowing. And so the matter takes on an appearance of knowing and being, and being alive and we identify with it. Is the next phase. That identification is called Ahankar. Ahankar means ego, Identity. We’ve identified with that. And then that identification with the stuff that looks like you build something and then you are like “Wow”. You’ve got identified with it. You’ve gone there. You’ve entered into it. You might lose sight of your Self even. Let’s you create a movie and then you really lose yourself in the part. Something like that. People have died in movies. Actually had heart attacks while portraying someone who had a heart attack. It’s possible to really get absorbed.

So this is the condition. We get absorbed in matter and then we identify with it. And then our identification, this Ahankar, this ego interacts with Satva, Rajas, and Tamas in different proportions and that interaction with Sattva then manas, mind is formed. And in interaction with Rajas then the senses are born, or evolve. Senses for perceiving and for acting. Atmendria, Karmendria. It means like sense of sight by which you perceive. Taste, smell, touch, hearing and then organs of action by which we accomplish things, legs, hands, procreative organs so on and so forth. Speech. So these manifest by ahankar, ego, in relation to Rajas. And then the more gross elements that are the objects of sight, like color- the objects of taste, like water- the objects like earth from which the flowers come and so forth. Solidity, earth. Liquidity, water. Plasma, heat, fire. Earth, water, fire. Air, which is also like movement. And time-space, that’s kinda like quantum Akash, Ether. One comes out of the other and it is an evolution.

The self, the consciousness that is moving that. Identifying with matter, matter starts to form around it in a particular way and as it gets senses, then sense objects have to manifest and so the world. Whole world of matter descends down like this from the primordial state of matter to the development of the elements like earth, water, fire. And then the Self goes down to the bottom and starts going up through different forms of life in accordance with Karma. We arrive at the human form of life we get to talk about all these things, think about all these things.

We also learn from this that there is the macrocosm and there is a microcosm of our particular body. So in that we have sense objects that we contact. We have sense through which we contact them. We have a mind. We have intelligence. And then there’s us. And that’s different than all those things. That’s what animates those things. That’s what gets lost in the identification that causes all that to form around us. That’s a huge tangle. You can imagine. It’s a huge tangle. Bad enough that happens, then we start to act. It’s like quicksand, the more you move the more you go down. That’s like the idea of Karma. The more we move in that direction the more we kind of lose sight of ourselves. The more we try to reach out and acquire and solve the problem. The problem is misidentification. The more we move within the context of misidentification, we will not grow in terms of self-identification. Until unless we like bottom out and think there has to be something more. There is negative impetus that makes us look beyond somewhere else, in another direction. We take a radical approach maybe there are people with elephant heads. Who knows? I’ve got to do something...