THE POWER
BEHIND
THE MIND
Marjorie Waterhouse
SHANTI SADAN
LONDON
Published by Shanti Sadan, London.
First edition 1898, second edition 2006.
ISBN-10 085424039X
ISBN-13 978-0-85424-039-5
Copyright © 2006 Shanti Sadan
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Contents
Foreword
I Conscious Living
II The Power Behind the Mind
III Renunciation – The Way to Freedom
IV The Three Paths
V Discovery Through Action
VI The Man of Enlightened Action
VII Action and Beyond
VIII Expansion
IX Conservation of Energy
X Dependence and Independence
XI Grasping the Essentials
XII The Inner Transformation
XIII The Final Teachings
Glossary of Sanskrit Words
FOREWORD
Those who have read Training the Mind through Yoga, the collection of fourteen lectures by Miss M V Waterhouse first published in 1964, will need no introduction to the present book which contains thirteen of her hitherto unpublished talks on Adhyatma Yoga, the Yoga of Self-Knowledge.
Marjorie Waterhouse was one of the earliest and closest pupils of Hari Prasad Shastri, an acknowledged master of Yoga, having joined him soon after he arrived in England from the East in July 1929. After his death in 1956, she became the second Warden of Shanti Sadan, the Centre of Adhyatma Yoga in London, and she held this post for the following seven years.
She brought to her understanding of the philosophy and practice of the spiritual Yoga a practical attitude which was more concerned with smoothing the difficulties of the ordinary man in his attempts to control and enlighten his mind than with the abstruse metaphysical questions posed by the Vedanta philosophy. One of her striking sayings was: ‘We do not yet love the human heart sufficiently.’ But she herself was one of the people least open to this charge. Her sympathy and common sense were enlivened by a delightful sense of humour, which finds expression even on the printed page.
Practical Yoga, as she says, is the process of transforming the mind through meditation, purification and self-control, and involves facing up to, and dealing effectively with, many obstacles which the raw and untutored mind puts up in the way of resistance to change. The transition from individuality to universality is not achieved without effort and without giving up many of the wrong ways of thought which bedevil our ordinary thinking. In this process, the greatest need of the would-be yogi is for sound guidance and clear advice, and this he will get in abundance from the pages of this book.
I
CONSCIOUS LIVING
YOGA is not a religion, nor a system of philosophy, but it is the method by which the goal of a religion or a philosophy may be realised and the spiritual purpose of man may be achieved. That purpose is direct cognition of his true nature, which is divine. Yoga is, of necessity, practical, for it is not an end in itself, but the means to an end, and when that end has been reached, then the task of Yoga has been fulfilled and it can be laid aside, as all training and discipline is laid aside once a learner has become an adept.
There are many authentic, that is, traditional Yogas. Adhyatma Yoga is based on the Advaita or non-dual system of thought, which postulates an all-pervading, unbroken Consciousness—the reality and ground of all phenomena, which, according to the Advaita, consist of name and appearance only. This reality, existence, bliss—all vague, abstract words striving to express the inexpressible—is the supreme spirit and it is established in the centre of man’s being. His sole spiritual vocation is to discover it and to know his identity with it.
The great philosopher, Shri Shankara, is the supreme exponent of this school of thought, and in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which is the principal scripture of India, he defines the word Adhyatma as that which first shows itself as the ego—the innermost self in the body—but which turns out to be identical with the supreme reality—God.
Adhyatma Yoga is based on a three-pronged foundation—if this does not sound too uneasy a position to be maintained. First, it relies on logical and subtly conceived philosophical argument; secondly, on a process of training by which the sleeping capacity in man to know his true nature—to know reality—is awakened; and thirdly—and very important this—on the testimony and instruction which has been left by a great concourse of seers and sages, both male and female, stretching from the earliest times down to the present day, all of whom have reached this peak of existence.
The deep subtlety and logic which clothe the philosophical approach to this Yoga have very seldom been appreciated or acknowledged in the West. Investigators have followed the argument up to a certain point, but after that they relapse into accusations of pantheism, fatalism, escapism and, very often, atheism. But the Teachers of this Yoga have never avoided criticism. In fact they have always held that individual experiment and experience are essential for real understanding, and that unprejudiced investigation should be carried out from the very first. They have left many invaluable works to guide the pupil in his researches. After all, if the contentions of the Advaita are true, they will eventually find confirmation in other fields, in the scientific and psychological fields for instance, and this has already begun to take place.
But the philosophical aspect of this Yoga is only one of its riches. Its second asset is the training it guards and offers to those who are ready for it. Control and equanimity of the mind is the principal technique taught by this discipline, for this is the necessary condition preceding the awakening of the higher intuition which can recognise the Truth instantaneously and directly. Intuition has a very bad name in this part of the world today. Hitler is supposed to have used it and so too have many other now discredited people. But in fact all they developed was a subtle method of getting their own way, based on reasoning and their acquisitive faculties. The power of intuition and inspiration, on the other hand, acts instantaneously and inevitably and from its own centre, and it manifests unchanged by preferences and prejudices of the mind. In fact, it only awakens and operates after the mind has ceased to act as a guiding, influencing force.
Words such as these are notions that need a good deal of explanation, but the subject here is confined to the preliminary training, the preparation for Yoga, so I must put myself in the place of an enquirer and speak for him. What is the first thing such a one would want to know? He will surely ask why there is any necessity for training at all, or for restriction—for the word ‘control’ hints at it—if divinity and omniscience are the birthright of man, his natural state.
The answer to this is that, not only are we living most unnatural lives, but only a fraction of our powers are brought into play in the process. Those powers which are in evidence and are the property of the mind, such as the power of perception, reasoning, memory and so on, are usually in a state of instability and continuous activity. It is stated again and again in the Yoga classics and in the traditional instructions passed from Guru to pupil, that the universal and inexhaustible Power lies dormant behind this busy state of the mind and, when called forth, it can destroy fear and make a man a god and completely satisfied. But this Power will not be brought into operation until a sustained atmosphere of quiet and security and also a state of complete harmlessness have been established in the mind; then alone will this imperishable Truth reveal itself.
It is surely worth undergoing the discipline if only to test the truth of such a claim. But most people have already passed through some kind of training in their lives and do not enter another too easily. They know that it will demand patience, courage and enthusiasm, and also impose temporary restrictions upon them. During training every reaction seems to be out of proportion. Even conscious living, which simply means living with a sense of direction, does not appear to be a stable thing at all. It becomes self-conscious living, and the mind which you are trying to bring into focus perhaps for the first time, reveals itself as a whirlpool of instincts and resistances. But this is only natural, for when you decide to become the master of anything—to control it—you must be willing to experience its strengths and weaknesses, vicariously so to say, while you are bringing it into focus, and you will receive many surprises in the process.
Most of those born before World War II have at some time or other miserably gyrated round a room in the arms of a dancing mistress while she counted: ‘One, two, three—reverse’. At that time dancing meant to us great misery, embarrassment and ceaseless vigilance and counting. But later it became for some at any rate a living and creative art, an interpretation of musical themes. Dancing is a specialised art practised by few only, but every man who is born into the world comes into it with latent powers awaiting development. Moreover, unless they are awakened and brought into focus, he will die half a man, ignorant of the greatness which lies within him and yet subconsciously aware of some deficiency of experience which was his right. We shall never know whether the claims made by those who would teach us about our inner nature are based on fact or fiction unless we patiently investigate, enquire and risk the hardships of a training.
Let us suppose that the investigator says: ‘Granted that this supramental power does exist, how am I to know that it exists in me in anything but a rudimentary form? In other words, how am I to know that it exists universally, as is claimed, and not in isolated beings only?’ The answer to this is that it may be inferred from the testimony of those who have already awakened this power in themselves. They affirm that in this state they become directly aware of the interpenetration by Consciousness, not of their own being alone, but of the whole phenomenal field also, just as the ether is interpenetrated by solar rays. And furthermore, no matter how high and into what abstract regions their awareness rises, they feel centred, that is, at home, and in their natural state. Like Peter and John, who were present at the transfiguration of the Lord Jesus, they feel instinctively: ‘It is good for us to be here.’
Only personal experiment and experience can establish the truth of such a statement, for the means through which this knowledge is achieved is extremely personal. It is attained through the practice of meditation and contemplation.
Meditation and contemplation! Now at last the investigator thinks he is on firm ground, for he feels that at least he knows his capacities in this direction and he is convinced that meditation will always remain a closed book to him. He assures you that he could never keep his mind on a meditation for two minutes; he is quite sure of that. And yet this very man is capable of sitting with unseeing eyes in a bus, meditating in his mind on the rearrangement of his house and furniture so that the new television set may be adequately housed. This meditation may go on for ten minutes or longer, during which time he is utterly oblivious to sights, sounds and physical contacts. What is this but meditation? It may not be a very high meditation on an abstract theme, but it is sustained. Why, the man is a born meditator!
A woman will tell you that she can’t visualise anything, that she must have it before her eyes before she can call it to mind. ‘When I was a child I couldn’t visualise the map of England, I could never put in the capes and bays on the east coast. I know I could never practise contemplation.’ Yet she can go into a brown study and sketch in her mind the features of someone she loves, and do it with joy and accuracy, or she can equally easily scratch in the defects of one she does not love, in pitiless detail. She is surely a contemplative in the making, though still unaware of her powers.
There must be something which is lacking or is very weak in spiritual meditations, which is alive and strong in the self-imposed meditations of these two people. There must be something which makes the one a theoretical exercise and the other almost a hidden vice. What is this mysterious quality? It is identification. Identification is the root from which spring devotion, worship and love.
My Teacher, Dr Shastri, used to say that love and worship must be learnt and practised like any other art, and that this was a vital part of the spiritual training. It is true that the mind is secretly selective and retentive, but it is also true that it can be coloured by images imposed upon it. Therefore the pupil is taught to train his mind consciously by placing before it those concepts which will expand and make it lighter. This is one of the laws behind the repetition of the mantram or of the seed word such as OM. Descriptions of the lives of the great saints or of an Incarnation of God, or even a conception of an abstract truth, if dwelt upon in mental relaxation, can arouse the imagination and awaken this sense of identification, and then the quality of life will be changed for ever.
Once in ancient times, a certain king of Delhi, King Jalaluddin, caught a parrot. It was a sweet speaking parrot but it had only one theme: the beauty and perfections of its mistress, the Rajput princess, Princess Padmini. It had strayed away from her palace in the great Fort of Chitor and had lost its way, never to find it again. Day after day the king listened half consciously to this paeon of praise from the parrot, until slowly his imagination was fired and he became obsessed with the desire to possess her. He raised an army and marched against the great Fort of Chitor, the stronghold of the Rajputs, and demanded that they should hand over the princess to him. But these warriors refused to surrender her, for they were a high souled people and they knew that this life has no value whatsoever if it cannot protect truth and virtue. So the siege began, and in one day alone the Rajputs lost twenty thousand warriors, and four young princes were anointed kings one after another on the battlements, only to lose their lives in the fighting. At last a breach was made in the great walls and King Jalaluddin rode into the Fort at the head of the forces. He found that all the defenders had perished, and the women, with the Princess Padmini at their head, had joined them and jumped into the flames.
The whole situation sprang from the transformation of the heart of a great king as a result of listening to the reiterated laments of a parrot. The seeker after liberation also hears the description of spiritual beauty uttered again and again by the Teachers. He reads their inspired words. And if he listens and reads with open eyes and ears, without defences or prejudices, the desire for the hidden treasure can awaken in his heart. This is why the Teachers recommend shravana and manana, listening and reflecting, as the first steps to be taken on the spiritual journey.
But after interest has been aroused in this way, it must be fanned into something more urgent and intense. It must pass from enquiry to identification. The inner and outer discipline—the inner practice of meditation and the outer practice of a dedicated life and consciously directed action—are taught at this stage, because through them the flame of identification may be kindled and Truth pass from hearsay to reality. The point at which a pupil ceases to admire with his mind, crying out: ‘How beautiful, how wonderful’ and begins to whisper in his heart: ‘I must possess this thing’, is a turning point in his inner career, as it was in the worldly life of King Jalaluddin.
How do the Teachers pass on the secrets of the outer training—the discipline of conscious living and action—to their pupils? Traditionally the Adhyatma Yogis are participators in life and workers among men. They live lives of controlled and specialised action, which bear a resemblance to the life of a pilgrim, or a mountaineer, if you prefer it. The only reason why the mountaineer is where he is—often in a perilous position on a narrow ledge—is in order that he may carry out his project, namely to reach the summit and help his fellow climbers to reach it too. Every happening, his health, the general conditions, his food, his moods, are judged by him simply and solely on whether they help or hinder his design. He harbours his strength in order to go further, he restricts his food in order to become harder, and he expends his energy like a miser pays out gold. Of course these remarks apply to the climber and not to the one who has arrived. He can expend his energy as he likes and do what he likes, for he is beyond injunctions and prohibitions.
A pupil who has taken the decision to attempt the spiritual climb will also have to work according to a plan. He too will have to judge his instruments, that is, his mind and body, in just the same way that the mountaineer does, namely, in relation to whether they help or hinder him in gaining his end. It is the mind on which the training is concentrated in this Yoga, and the pupil is constantly warned that it can be his best friend or his most dangerous enemy. This may seem strange to us, for in the West the mind is associated with the thinking principle. But in the East the word antahkarana—mind—covers the entire composite inner instrument: the will, the ego, the faculty of perception and conception, the thinking principle, the discriminative faculty, in fact all that makes man a man, empirically speaking. In these last words lies the crux of the whole matter. The mind, if allowed free rein, will not only make man, man, but it will also keep man, man. He has identified himself with its activities for so long that he thinks he is the mind.
On the principle that it is always easier to deal in a detached way with other people’s troubles than with your own, the first item of training is to disentangle and disidentify yourself from your mind, to look on it as if it were your pupil, and then to direct it from a distance. In order to achieve this disidentification, you must affirm again and again, until it becomes a sort of mantram to you, that you are not the body, that you are not the mind, but that you are superior to them—that you are the supreme spirit. Having reiterated this for some time, you change the affirmation to: ‘The mind is my instrument. I, the supreme Power, can and will control it.’ Having spent some time on this, and only you will know how long it should be, you start the next practice, which is carrying out what you have affirmed— the controlling of this instrument.
It is inevitable that these practices will appear baby-easy at first, but it is also inevitable that most people will find them quite enough to employ them for some time. To control the mind you must learn to start it, steer it and stop it, as if it were a car. The aim of this trio of practices—starting, steering and stopping—is to bring the mind into focus as an object, and then to teach it to obey your orders. If you do not become at any rate partially successful in these preliminary practices, your later experiences in meditation and conscious living will somewhat resemble surfbathing or being on the witching waves at a fair.
You can do the exercises given at any time. In fact, it is almost better to do them in the day, during your working life, than when shut up by yourself in your room. For instance, as you are sitting in the train, going to work and reading the daily paper, give your mind the order: ‘Stop!’, and instantaneously cease reading, and not only cease reading, but make your mind cease to think of what it has been reading. Hold it in suspension for a minute and then start it again on an entirely different theme.
It doesn’t matter at this stage whether the subject you now present it with is secular or spiritual. The purpose of the practice is to teach your mind obedience. Say you decide to think for five minutes about your summer holiday, or about your coming work during the day, or about the meaning of a sentence you read earlier in a spiritual classic—it is all one. Let the mind carry out the order and then stop it again when the time limit has been reached. In this way you are practising starting, steering and stopping the mind.
These practices must seem almost inane and certainly very restricting, but they will not have to be used for long. After a certain time, varying with each pupil, the mind will have learnt to obey a percentage, at any rate, of your orders, or alternatively, you will be aware of its disobedience. In either case you will have brought your mind into focus. These practices should never be persisted in for very long at a time. The mind must be given frequent rests. The control will become automatic in due course, as the dancing steps became automatic after the agony of the first lesson was over.
This control lays the foundation on which meditation and consciously directed action are based. Control is imperative, for a mind which is capable of sustained concentration only when it is interested, and which refuses to apply itself to anything which is foreign and distasteful to it, will be of no use to you when you get to the higher reaches of Yoga.
Practise moderation: that is, get to know how long you can stand these exercises before you get tired of them and dismiss them as no good. Great things very often start in small ways, and if you persevere with these suggestions, you will have cause to be thankful all your yogic life.
II
THE POWER BEHIND THE MIND
ONLY an illumined man can have direct knowledge of spirit or Consciousness—the Power behind the mind. In a manner of speaking, any power which goes against the instinctive nature of the mind may be said to be a higher power of that mind. In this sense, concentration can certainly be said to be a higher power, for it is infinitely superior in quality to the diffused unselective activity which is the natural characteristic of the untrained mind. To speak more correctly, however, the mind does not possess any higher powers in its own right, for just as the peak of a high mountain is the first to flush with the light of the rising sun but is not a light itself, so the highest peak of the mind, the apex, the function known in Sanskrit as buddhi, or the faculty of direct spiritual perception and pure intuition, is the first to catch the light of the rising sun of Consciousness, but it sheds no light of itself.
The destiny of the mind is not to be enriched and loaded with powers but to be unloaded and absorbed into the great Power which stands behind and within it: the power of Consciousness. It is true that the mind is subject to transformation, but when the state of transcendence is reached, it is no longer active. Wonderful things may be performed through it, but not by it.
Just as a safe containing great treasure only opens to what is known as a ‘special combination’, so that highest function of the mind known as buddhi, which hides the treasure, does not yield it up until a special combination has been applied. A thirst for release, devotion and continuity of purpose form that combination, and, since God is not mocked, it never works on a pseudo application. We shall only have access to that part of the mind-safe where the less valuable treasures are lodged, until we learn to use the full combination.
Many achieve worldly success through concentration born of will directed to a special empirical end, but the higher Power cannot be so used by man, nor is it the property of his mind. That Power uses his mind and his whole organism for its own higher and cosmic purposes, but it will not become operative until the mind has become its instrument and has been laid down empty before it. This is the object of all spiritual discipline and austerity: the laying down of one form of activity and the taking up of another and a higher.