The Cause of Bondage
Divine Life
Society Publication: Chapter 55: The Study and
Practice of Yoga by Swami Krishnananda
What is the bondage from which
we wish to be free? What is actually meant by this thraldom of samsara? How has it come about? Why
is it that we are full of sorrow and we have no peace? This is mentioned in a
single sutra, avidyā
kṣetram uttareṣāṁ prasupta tanu vicchinna udārāṇām (II.4), which states
that the series of processes by which the individual soul has got into bondage
consists of nothing but pains and pains, one after another, in various degrees
of involvement.
Ignorance of the true nature
of things is the origin of bondage. ‘Avidya’, ‘ajnana’,
‘nescience’, etc. are the terms used to designate this condition. What actually
exists is not known; this is called avidya. We
cannot, by any amount of effort of the mind, understand what is actually there
in front of us; and whatever we are seeing with our eyes or think in our mind
is not the true state of affairs. This is called avidya.
We may logically argue, deduce, induce, but all this is like the definitions
given by the blind men who touched different parts of the elephant. On account
of a partial grasp of truth, there is a partial attitude to life; and
everything follows from that, one after the other.
Every successive link in the chain
of bondage is dependent in one way or the other on the previous link.
The inability to perceive the
true state of affairs, the absence of an understanding of the correct
relationship among things, creates a false sense of values. Avidya is not merely absence of
knowledge –but the presence of a terrific foe in front of us, which has a
positivity of its own. It exists in a peculiar way which eludes the grasp of
understanding.
So a negative type of positivity
is created, we may say, called the individuality, which asserts itself as a
reality even though it is based on a non-substantiality. The individuality of
ours is insubstantial, like vapour. It has no concrete element within it. It
can be peeled off like an onion, and we will find nothing inside it, but yet it
looks like a hard granite adamantine being on account of the affirmation of
consciousness. The reality that is apparently visible in the individuality is
borrowed from that which is really there. The support comes from that which
really exists, which is True Being, and this support is summoned for the
purpose of substantiating something which is utterly false and wholly
untenable. This untenable position is called self-assertion, affirmation, egoism,
asmita, ahamkara,
etc. All this has happened on account of not knowing correctly the
interrelationship of things. There is a dependence of every factor on every
other factor so that individuality can have no ultimate value in the scheme of
things.
The asmita tattva
that is mentioned as the effect of avidya is a
centralisation of consciousness, a focusing of it at a particular point in
space and time, and a hardening of it into an adamantine substance which gets
encrusted more and more by repeated experience of sense contact which confirms
the false belief that the isolated existence of the individual is a reality. We
get confirmation every day that our individuality is real due to the pleasure
that we receive by sense contact.
Piles and piles of notions of this false individuality, asmita, get grouped together, and there is an impregnable fortress created in the form of what we are as individuals. That which is real has become unreal, and that which is unreal has become real. The thing that has really evolved as an effect becomes the cause, as it were; and that which is the cause looks as if it is the effect. The cosmic substance out of which the individuals have evolved has become the object of perception of the individuals, and the latter have usurped the position of the cause of cognition, experience, etc. notwithstanding the fact that they are evolutes. They have come further than the original substance which is cosmic.
Conclusively, we may say that
everything that we think is a wrong thought. There is nothing like correct
thinking as far as the reality of the individual is concerned. When the very
basis is wrong, how can anything that proceeds from it be correct? This is the
history of the production of asmita out of avidya.
In one place Swami Sivanandaji
Maharaj has mentioned in a humorous way that the mind is something which is
really nothing, but does everything. This is the world – it is really not
there, but it is terrible. The character of the real is injected into the
apparent formation of the unreal, and then the unreal looks like a reality. We
transfer ourselves to the objects in our perceptions, and then it is the
reality of the background of our being which is the cause for our belief in the
reality of objects.
No individual can be complete.
Everything is a part. Therefore, everything is restless; it has to be restless.
But this restlessness, pain and anguish felt by each partial experience of
individuality tries to get fulfilment by finding its counterpart in sensory
experience. We may say our likes and
dislikes are conditioned by our prarabdha karma. That is why everyone does
not like everything – my likes are different from your likes, etc. The reason
is that we as individuals are constituted of certain forces which do not relate
themselves directly with every factor in the universe, because the prarabdha is a peculiar sample that
is taken out of the entire resources behind us, called sanchita karma.
This peculiar effect that
further follows from asmita, or
individuality, in the form of the pulls and repulsions, raga and dvesha, adds a further confirmation
to our belief that the world is real, the body is real, individuality is real –
that all our phenomenal experiences are real.
Patanjali gives a series of
descriptions for the freeing of one’s consciousness from such involvements by
graduated techniques and practice. A sudden directing of the mind to meditation
is not possible because the layers are hard enough that they cannot be pierced
through at once. Also, the layers of bondage, which have manifested themselves
in a series, are not placed one above the other in a linear fashion. They are
intricately involved – one getting into the fibre of the other, as it were –
and we cannot peel one layer out without causing pain to the other layer that
is underneath. Because of the vital involvement of consciousness in every
layer, there is a little bit of suffering involved in the peeling out of the
layer, just as we feel pain when we peel the skin. We know that skin is not our
real nature, but yet we feel pain when it is peeled off because we have become
one with the skin, one with the bone and marrow, the flesh – one with
everything. Likewise, every layer of bondage has become part of the self, so
that the removal of the bondage is not desirable. It looks pleasurable for the
soul.
Bondage itself has become a
source of joy, so that we can say that the very vision of there being something
beyond in the form of freedom has left one’s vision. If a person is a captive
in a jail for fifty or sixty years, he may take that as the natural way of
living. He has been in the jail for sixty years; he has been used to that way
of living, and he cannot think of any value or reality other than that. In a
similar manner, there is an accustoming of consciousness to a life of bondage,
and the conditions, limitations and restrictions have been regarded as a type
of freedom by itself. Even the limitation that has been imposed upon us, we mistake
for freedom, and the pain that follows is regarded as joy.
The pleasures of sense are not
really pleasures. This is the point that is mentioned in one of the following sutras. They are pains which are
misread as pleasures.
It is difficult to know why we
feel happiness, why there is pleasure at all in sense contact, unless we know
the depth of perception itself. Why is it that we are seeing objects? What is
it that compels us or drives us towards objects? Where is the need for us to
come in contact with things? Why it is that we wrongly mistake pain for
pleasure, and how is it that we can get fooled by the senses in creating a
notion of falsehood?
It is the inability to grasp
these things that has created an impression that bodily experiences and
phenomenal processes are independent by themselves – a reality taken by them.
This is the essence of bondage; and how difficult it is to get out of it is
clear on the very surface.
Excerpts from:
Chapter 55: The Study and
Practice of Yoga by Swami Krishnananda
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