Skip to Content

Opening – Receptivity – Aspiration – Ascent – Descent

 

Opinion - attitude - motive

  • The concept of an open mind as against a closed mind as a mental attitude, is something that we know of well. It is to discount our personal opinion and to be eager to know from another. Eagerness is the vital energy in the mind.
  • Rational thinking demands an open mind.
  • Yoga demands the opening of all our parts and being eager to receive the Divine Force without any of our usual barricades.
  • Such obstacles in the mind are - understanding expressed as opinion, attitude in the vital, and motive in the physical as well as in the whole Being.
  • Understanding is an organisation of the mental energies around an idea that takes a direction so that future thought and action will have its full benefit of support and sure guidance. For yoga, this is a sure obstacle. To understand is to take the destiny of the being into the hands of the mind which is arrogant or at least stupidly ignorant, as the mind that is the part, cannot handle the Being which is a whole. To make the best of a worst situation, a possible compromise is to let that understanding accept surrender as the final understanding, if we are unable to dissolve the structure of understanding and abolish the mind entirely which is the only destiny for the mind to be open to the force.
  • Another avenue open to us is to resort to the method of surrender to arrive at any understanding. When we strive after an understanding, to surrender that striving is the method of surrender.
  • That way, the mind is open to the force but that is not aspiration. It may be receptive in the absence of resistance but aspiration is to collect all the energies of the mind and to commission it to call down the higher force. It can lead to an ascent and when it reaches its goal, the descent can begin.
  • Mind consenting to any of these efforts begins to expand beyond its limits to the point the head itself feels like expanding. What expands is the consciousness. As it is identified with the physical skill, we feel the skull is expanding.
  • Vital opening is there when the attitude gives way to receive. Vital is energy. As the mind has organised itself into understanding and a faculty of understanding, the intelligence, so the vital's energies for purposes of action have organised into an attitude as an instrument of action. Attitudes coming forward to shed their structure release the energies clogged into them. Now the vital is open, but unorganised. It has shed its possible resistance, not developed into aspiration.
  • Aspiration for the vital is either to organise itself into an attitude of aspiration or to collect all its energies and commission them to call down the higher force.
  • The body in many ways is the whole of the Being, as the vital and physical are, in comparison with it, insubstantial. If we move to the Whole Being which includes all the four parts, the body will occupy about 95%. It may not be wrong to equate the body with the being for the purposes of this argument.
  • Motive is to the body what attitude is to the vital or understanding to the mind. The body has a motive of survival and the motive of the being is to evolve. The motive of survival is a bar. The right motive for the body is the motive of surrender. To shed its present motive is to dissolve its form and to touch the other bodies - a process of universalisation. The being has no business of its own, even if it is to evolve, but its only business can be one of surrender.
  • When the mind, vital, body and Being thus take to surrender, what follows is that they become receptive through this opening and the ascent begins through aspiration culminating in descent.
  • In practice, the motive of the being is a silent aspiration that rises like a flame - agni - which allows the force to flow down all the time.
  • The silent motive of the being is more powerful than any articulated aspiration through mantras.



story | by Dr. Radut