The experience of the awareness, of the subjective and of the objective in Yoga and in oriental meditation
Who takes part in
a simple lesson of Hatha-Yoga, or common Yoga, considered more
properly physical, is often invited by the professor to close
the eyes also during the maintaining of positions.
This allows them to be in the present through a process of
experience different from the usual one, starting to reside,
concretely, their inner universe.
And so, sometimes unconsciously, the students receive the real
first initiation, by reviving a new life, a life founded on a
bigger awareness.
For this reason, Yoga, in any case, not even in Hatha-Yoga
itself, has to be considered as a normal form of exterior
exercise. Even more for other kinds of Yoga, especially for the
meditation, where the “inner” approach is even more evident.
It would seem a very easy thing to close the eyes, but it is not
so because, with closed eyes, the student put to use his state
of attention on a field that he doesn’t know.
His usual experience, and consequently everything that is in his
mind until that moment, comes from the senses experience and
this new condition would disorient him if the professor with his
presence and his words wouldn’t be a reference point to him.
The Master, in fact, normally, continues by inviting the student
to the consciousness raising of his body’s position, but keeping
his attention, in a sense, in the periphery, so that the
practice would not be, at the beginning, too shocking, because
of the lack of knowledge.
Only when a certain maturity will allow the student to face
himself deeply, it will be suggested to him to put the awareness
on the respiratory act, to the experience of the “I am” or
“sense of the self” (the Sanskrit aham), the principle of
characterization and, consequently, also of the subjective.
The subjective, for the Yoga culture, comes from the centripetal
and cohesion principle that in Samkhya Darsana, one of the
orthodox six points of view of Hinduism, is called Ahamkara.
Ahamakara is the state in which the matter or Prakrti is when,
activated by the impulse of evolution, proceeds from the neutral
state of Mahat (that is energetic mass) to the one of, as we
read in the Yoga encyclopedia, unitary mass, a-perceptive, still
devoid of personal experience, but already with the obscure
conscience of being an Ego.
From a practical-evolutionary point of view, everyone can guess
that it deals with the principle that will allow, afterward,
everything to be what it is, that is a microcosm with its name
and its shape.
Ahamkara represents, being a fundament of separation, a real
obstacle that we have in meditation, it obstacles the experience
of unity, because the real self, caught in this condition,
cannot be aware of its autonomy because of the ignorance, for
which the self changes body, senses and mind for the real self.
And this lack of discrimination between self and non-self,
causes every affliction, because of the aspect of instability
characteristic of the non-self. The freedom originates with the
support of the discrimination. And this is immediately evident
to the serious researcher.
He will test different stages during which he will feel his
physical existence as a sheath or a dress, in which he will fell
wrapped, and in the worst moments this sensation will go with a
sense of oppression.
The less prepared person who meditaes, instead, will be caught
by his microcosm, especially into the mental, fascinated as a
child at the fun fair, by the big variety of situations present
inside him and there he will be able to loose himself for a long
time, even forgetting the experience-purpose he was following.
We said that it’s the lack of discrimination between self and
non-self that misleads, confusing the subjective view for the
reality.
This is because of the Avidya, Sanskrit word that means
ignorance.
Who walk the path of Yoga has to go toward a strong mental
purification before to see in him an objective discriminative
capacity.
by Amadio Bianchi