Becoming Friends with our Mind
Why is it so much easier to be with a friend - even in challenging times - than with a stranger or even more with a person we dislike? One answer would be that we know our friend, which means that we know his pleasant sides and also the unpleasant ones and we are willing to accept our friend the way s/he is. An unpleasant person we usually reject in thought and action which doesn’t help us getting a more positive relationship wiht them. Knowing someone or something or at least connecting with someone or something is the start of making a connection - and connection is everything in my opinion.
So what is the mind and how we are treating the mind? That the answer doesn’t stay just an abstract theory or a philosophy about the mind, we’ll look at it in relation to our everyday life. The following is ancient yogic discoveries and knowledge as it has been explored for thousands of years.
The mind from the yogic point of view
In yoga there are different ideas about how the mind works and therefore it got divided in :
Manas - the process of reflection
Buddhi - the intellectual process
Citta - Memory
Ahamkara - “the ego-principle”
There are lots of books written about these aspects yet it is still not clear how the mind expresses itself, and we have to make our own experiences. Without aiming to find an exact definition of what the mind is, let’s look at the different aspects of it closely.
Throughout our lives we can see something beautiful, something very subtle in the form of an idea, a wish, a thought expressed on a “gross” level. Our subtle nature - that is the mind - and another nature that is even more subtle than the mind- the consciousness - and our life - the visible world, the world of objects and senses - connects something. There is a flow of connection between them, stretching from consciousness to mind and body. The body is just the vehicle through which the mind expresses itself; that's why it's very important that we don't separate between the thinking nature and the body as an acting tool. It's much more about recognising the flow of ideas that rises from invisible depths and becomes visible. “I would like to make this clear with an example.” (Sw. Niranjan, Bihar School of Yoga)
“What happens in our mind? An idea surfaces from the depth of our being. Out of this idea emerges a wish. Out of the wish we create a plan for action, and in this plan we involve our senses and our physical body. In this way we now have a concept that came from our “I-identity”, our individual nature, because all our concepts come from our “I-identity”, the inner nature of our individuality.
This concept is then later filtered to the lower levels of the mind: to the intellect, to our memory, our part of reflection. From here it is identified as a want or a need and is associated with our aspiration/ambitions, strengths and weaknesses. It thus takes on a totally different form to fill a vacuum that we feel in self-reflection.
What is a wish?
A wish expresses something that is currently missing in our life and that’s why we strive for it. If that is so, how can we find out what we are missing right now? An integral analysis process takes place at the subconscious level: the subtle mind, the ego principle, observes and analyses at the subconscious level the needs or the missing element that we want to achieve later in our life. The concept becomes a desire, the desire becomes a need, the need becomes an action, and the action leads to a result. In this process mind, senses and body work as an integral unit. The moment there is no direction for the mental flow of energy, we cannot direct these mental forces that are manifesting in the body and are therefore confused at a subconscious level. However, we are not aware of this confusion until it enters waking consciousness. There we can then make friends with our mind.
All the efforts we make to correct the inner imbalance take place on the visible level. We try to influence our behaviour by forcing an idea or concept on ourselves. Someone once said that a philosophy arises when we force upon ourselves, a concept or an idea that we identify with, when we try to live by it or incorporate it into our lives. Only this idea is not yet translated into action, it remains a philosophy, and this must inevitably lead to a split between our personal philosophy and our real actions.
How to get out of this split understanding the meaning of inner discipline and the SWAN practice I’ll discuss next time.