Tyranny of the mind YS 1.5
YS 1.5 - The five thought patterns are troubling or not.
We like to think we are free-thinkers, but we are not.
In a world dominated by the head we exist in a world of thought. As children we were made to sit at desks and had the knowledge of our society inculcated within the fertile soil of our tender minds. We are born, they say, creative geniuses but as the institutional curricular incursions take hold and our thought patterns harden into their mandated set ways, we often ossify into being just another brick in the wall.
As we journey through life we think we are running the show. But our thoughts are not our own. They are our parent’s thoughts, our teacher’s thoughts, our government’s thoughts. We are the petri dish on which grows the mould of our culture.
‘Good and bad’, ‘right and wrong’, ‘should and shouldn’t’, forever we judge ourselves, everything and everyone around us from the basis of our unconscious conditioning. We imagine our myopic theorising and analysis to succinctly make known reality. We believe in our thoughts. They are our creed, our religion, that we will stand by and defend to the hilt. We become cheerleaders, not of free-thought, but for the idea sets that we have assimilated as our self-identity.
Yoga is not, as is often thought, mind control. Mind control is the stuff of secret government programmes that have sought since time immemorial to shepherd slavish populaces (sometimes peacefully and sometimes proddingly) along the pathways of societal planning.
Yoga is, rather, freedom from the mind’s control, the release of the grip of our ‘knowing’, eventually of every belief and idea that we have ever held sacred, taken for granted and held on to as existential safety rafts in this inexplicable sea of existence.
We don’t want this yoga! We don’t want to do away with all these ideas that (apparently) make us who we are. This is not what we are interested in. We are interested instead in continuity, maintaining the past’s momentum not only in our journey through this world but also into the next!
We imagine we are happy in our belief bubbles but, as Patanjali suggests, we are troubled; troubled because our thoughts and ideas create castles in the sky, troubled because our knowing separates us from the intimacy of reality, troubled because deep down we know that we don’t know who the hell we are and just what the hell we are doing here! Yet we are not willing or brave enough to admit this to ourselves or others and so we drift languidly, holding onto second hand assumptions, living the unexamined life, busy making other plans.
Yes, our ideas, our knowing, like sleep, can give us a sense of safety, security, comfort. But yoga, at least in the philosophy, is not about being comfortable or having like-minded friends. Rather it is an invitation to stand in the aloneness (kaivalya) of one’s Self whether in good company or not. This does not mean we drop the external world but, instead, we drop the unexamined, unconscious internal world of thought through which we view existence like some kind of metaverse headset.
Patanjali, like all the mystics throughout time, beckons us beyond – beyond belief, beyond knowing, beyond ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be, out beyond those ideas of right and wrong doing. He invites us instead to the intimate and awesome experience of this magnificent and miraculous mystery unfolding each and every moment before our eyes and all of our senses as this new, ever-fresh, aliveness here and now.
This does not, however, mean that we become anti-thought fascists. Even within the most sublime space of samadhi thoughts will (eventually) arise and emerge. Thinking is indeed wonderful! A blessed evolutionary tool that has given us no end of advancement as individuals and as a species.
Thinking, it has been said, though, is a good servant but a terrible master and it becomes our master when we take it too seriously, when we believe that the version of reality that it tells us is true is The Truth. It becomes our master when we allow it to veil behind reason the very human motivations that govern our actions, it becomes our master when we use it to lie to ourselves and others.
To be a free-thinker, to be a yogi, is to become free of thought as master, to cease to be a slave of societal conditioning, to stand alone, free, amidst the tyranny of the opinions of the crowd, neither agreeing nor disagreeing but instead watching, listening, alert and present... and it is from here, as Krishna counsels Arjuna, that the yogi acts, actionless in action.
