Yoga Sutras Week 4 - The Dawning of Wisdom

Yoga is self-discovery. It is for those who are interested in what we are when we strip away everything we have accumulated along the way. What we largely think of as ourselves is what we’ve picked up as we travelled through our lives. The yogis were interested in what happens when we strip away everything we’ve accumulated along the way all the way down to our essence. What were you before you added anything to yourself? 

Yoga is not about adding something to yourself to make a better version of you; it is about finding out what you were before you became anything at all - what you will have to fall back into when what you think yourself to be inevitably dissolves at the end of your life. Go and find that. Find the deathless essence of yourself that existed before you even took life. 

Yoga is this falling back from the modifications of the mind - the ideas that one has built up around oneself and falling back into the very heart of one’s own still inner being. Then one’s true nature is revealed in all its splendor. It is splendid, it is self-radiant, and without a cause. 

1:48 Ritambhara Tatra Prajna

From within this stillness of oneself dawns a light of wisdom.

Ritambhara = Filled with truth 

Tatra = Therein

Prajna =  Consciousness

This Sutra refers to a knowing - an understanding without knowledge, born from the Self, that arises when we rest back into the heart of ourselves. It is the dawning of true wisdom, not as a result of information we have learned and accumulated but innate, pure, Self-revelation that is revealed from within. 

When we are not in the confusion of our own thinking and circling in our own dilemmas and problems, we stop trying to figure out Life with an instrument that simply wasn’t designed to comprehend the mystery. Then we fall back into a clarity, a no-mind space and, from there, wisdom dawns. When we are in our Hearts we see clearly, directly, experientially and we connect with Life without filters, rather than seeing from the colouring, confusion and prejudice of our mind. 

Where do we go if we want the answer for ourselves in any given situation? If you want to know where the creative impulse of Life wants to take you in any moment, do you go to your head to try and figure it out or do you have somewhere else to go? From my heart, I recommend you go there.

You can go there when you have a choice to make. You go silent, drop your demands about what you think the answer should be and fall into the nothingness. The answer might appear as a revelation to you in that moment, or it may appear a little further down the line, but because you went to that place and asked, it is guaranteed to come. You cannot go there and ask for an answer and not get one at some point. You may choose to blatantly ignore that answer and go instead with fear or another conditioned response, but you will have a divine choice to make because you asked. 

You have created a special situation for yourself where you can drop out of the modifications of your mind and out of the conditioning that you borrowed from everyone else to go back to the authentic essence of yourself to ask Life itself what is next. You can do it with literally anything once you get easy access to it. It is the ability to drop out of the dilemma of the mind. 

Becoming Choiceless

If you go to the mind for answers, you will have almost endless choices, but it will always be uncertain. Whatever the mind offers you as a path, it will always offer you the opposite and everything in between.

We might go to our minds for the answer and really believe, after a lot of hard thinking, that we are certain, but later down the line we will doubt ourselves as our mind offers us an alternative. This is called living in continuous dilemma. The best the mind can do is dilemma because it is always guessing. It wasn’t designed to give you direct access to the wisdom of Life itself; it was designed to store some information.   

The mind is not bad or inferior. It is only capable of offering you dilemma simply because it functions within duality. It will offer you one choice but it will also offer you the opposite choice. It is a very clever machine in this way. It is doing that based on the previous data that has been inputted. From that data, it will offer you choices and predicted consequences from those choices, so it will always offer you indecision and dilemma. 

Even when you have really thought it through and have reached a place of certainty, behind that certainty, doubt will be lingering alongside. There is no such thing as certainty in the mind because the mind isn’t designed for that function. The mind will offer you endless choices, whereas the stillness will offer you only one because it is not functioning in duality. 

When you drop the question into the clarity of your own being, soon enough, you will get the answer. It is absolutely written. If you legitimately call it into that space, then the answer will become clear in time and it will be singular. You can still put that singular answer into your mind and create doubt but if you leave it in your heart, then no doubt can arise; that is how you know - not because you know, but because it is known. 

It is a different way to live and requires some experimenting with in order to find out how it works. No one can do that for us; we have to go in ourselves and find out. 

One key to mastering it is to invest in the pause. We all know the pause. The mind has already made up its mind in pretty much every situation we are in. It has already processed the data and decided within itself what is going on. It works compulsively at this all the time as a programme. In order to come out of this, we have to create an interruption in the programme; this is the pause.

It is also the exact thing that we equate with a wise person. A wise person pauses because they are connecting to the wisdom. In order to do this, they have to disconnect from their conditioned response by pausing. They use the pause to inwardly reference and connect to the divine so that their response may come from there. They feel the response in the pause. 

With practice, this wisdom connection and Self-referencing becomes a mechanism within itself and it can be done without any interference from the mind but there are times when it is tough because there is a lot of noise coming from the mental and emotional fields. The way it works is that we get our answer from the field of wisdom only when we have reached a point where we are not putting the question into the Heart with conditions or presumptions. 

If I'm putting the question into the Heart, but I am still attached to a particular outcome that I would like to happen, then I am still influencing the response from the Heart. In this case, you won’t get the response, or you will get one that is clouded by your influence because you haven’t surrendered your thinking enough in order to get the clarity. 

For example, you have a choice to make and you drop it into the Heart and if you can be clean from any outcome, then you will be able to feel in your energy whether that is the right course to take or not. 

There is already something in us that absolutely already knows exactly where it all needs to go. But we have our own ideas, and it is those ideas that we are surrendering in order to be guided from the beyond. Some of those ideas will be tough to surrender, do not underestimate this work but at least we understand the process. 

Choice becomes an interesting thing to explore from this understanding. I could say that there is only one choice I can legitimately make and that is to either go to my head or to drop into my heart.

When I think I am making choices in my head, I am only offered a programmed choice. The options are presented due to past conditioning that has been written due to circumstances external to myself. I’m not actually making a choice, it is just my conditioning coming up with a certain outcome based on past information. When I go to my Heart, I definitely don’t have a choice because it is already chosen. 

So there is only one choice, head or Heart. The one in the head isn’t really choosing, it is just programming and the one in the Heart is already chosen. It is possible that after some time we even start to doubt that first choice but for now it is better to stick with the first choice. As long as we still think we are doing something, then that first choice is the one of us.

To go to the head or the Heart?

Fear or Love?

Knowledge or wisdom? 

Confusion or singularity? 

These are the choices of the yogi and that is the dawning of a spiritual life. Not only have we found the stillness, but we start to live in accordance with the guidance of that stillness. We start to move from the Heart, daring to listen, even when it is inconvenient. Sometimes it won’t make any sense to the mind, but will you have the audacity to follow it? It is the courage to not have a clue where the choice is taking you and not care because you know where it came from and that is the only important thing.  

This is the Shakti - the rising of a new possibility inside of us where we start to surprise even ourselves. No one ever surprises themselves from their thinking, but Life is full of surprises. In fact, Life is nothing but a surprise once we have come out of the mechanism in the head that presupposes everything. When we’re there with it the whole thing is fresh and new rather than on repeat.

The light of inner wisdom is right there inside of you, go listen to yourSelf. 

We’re not scholars; we aren’t looking at these Sutras without an experiential backing. We know how to fall back from our mental dance and surrender ourselves into a deeper feeling inside of ourselves. This means that wisdom is available to you - the voice of God in its own self-revelation to you, is always going on. 

The conversation is always happening and there are many ways it can reveal itself but only if we are in the conversation. Only if we are in the place of listening rather than assuming and demanding that it is a certain way will wisdom arise. 

 We are not talking about an if and when situation - we all have access. The more we access it, the more it opens. The more we show our faith in it, the more reliable it becomes. The more interest we show in it, the more interest it shows in us. It is an incredible reciprocal relationship.

In every moment, we have a choice as to whether we wish to seek our answers from the outdated accumulated data of our intellect or whether we go into the heart and stillness of ourselves and seek our answers from there. That is faith - to look somewhere else for what you're seeking rather than the mind.