TRANSCEND YOUR FEELINGS
Sri Swami Atmaswarupananda
Although there are an infinite number of Yogas, they say that they can all be reduced to either a Yoga of the head or a Yoga of the heart. Either they depend primarily upon our thinking or on our feelings. But the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that man is thinking, feeling and will, and that it is actually the will that is closer to who we really are—because it is the will that determines how we act.
For most of humanity it is not the will, it is, rather, the absence of it, or its misuse, that determines what we are. And we are governed not by our human faculty of rationality, but primarily by our feelings. Most of us are defined by our determination to feel good and our avoidance of that which we consider to be painful. Even our attraction to the Guru is often because we feel good in his presence, or we are anticipating that he can somehow get rid of our confusion and our pain, so that we will feel better.
The real purpose of the Yogas of the intellect are to give us a different understanding. We are meant to understand that the goal of life is not to be constantly bound and caught up by our feelings, be they pleasant or unpleasant. Rather, in Lord Krishna’s words, it is to be the same whether sattva, rajas or tamas is present, to be the same whether it is gold or a clump of dirt that is before us. In other words, the goal is to transcend our feelings rather than to change them.
Even if we know the Gita by heart, even if we have meditated on it, even if we teach it, most of us are still caught up by our feelings. We want to wake up in the morning feeling good, and if we haven’t, we want to do something to get us out of our depressed feeling. But that, in fact, is not the goal of our spiritual life. Rather, no matter what feeling is there, we are meant to recognise that there is something else that is always present within us that is exactly the same whether we feel good or we do not feel good.
The purpose of all our spiritual practices is to help us to recognise that place that is always present within where we are indifferent as to how we feel. Occasionally some teaching, some experience, some surprise will put us in that aliveness where we are indifferent as to whether sattva, rajas or tamas is present. But the scriptures want us to understand that that is a goal and to make effort to be there—to practise it.
When we repeat God’s Name, if we understand it correctly, it is putting us in touch with that ungraspable place within where we are the witness of our feelings rather than being caught up with them. We can also do it by discrimination, by awareness. We are aware whether there are pleasant feelings in the mind or unpleasant feelings in the mind, and we can, so to speak, be aware of our awareness that is indifferent as to what is present in the mind.
This is Yoga—rising above the three gunas and the pairs of opposites. Be gunatita Lord Krishna told Arjuna. Let us not wait for His grace in order to be gunatita, but let us use our will and make being gunatita our yoga and our daily practice.
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