Man a Duality

Man a Duality

Some of the terms used in Yoga are necessarily to be known. For

Yoga takes man for a special purpose and studies him for a

special end and, therefore, only troubles itself about two great

facts regarding man, mind and body. First, he is a unit, a unit

of consciousness. That is a point to be definitely grasped. There

is only one of him in each set of envelopes, and sometimes the

Theosophist has to revise his ideas about man when he begins this

practical line. Theosophy quite usefully and rightly, for the

understanding of the human constitution, divides man into many

parts and pieces. We talk of physical, astral, mental, etc. Or we

talk about Sthula-sarira, Sukshma-sarira, Karana-sarira, and so

on. Sometimes we divide man into Anna-maya-kosa, Prana-maya-kosa,

Mano-maya-kosa, etc. We divide man into so many pieces in order

to study him thoroughly, that we can hardly find the man because

of the pieces. This is, so to say, for the study of human anatomy

and physiology.

But Yoga is practical and psychological. I am not complaining of

the various sub-divisions of other systems. They are necessary

for the purpose of those systems. But Yoga, for its practical

purposes, considers man simply as a dualityÄmind and body, a unit

of consciousness in a set of envelopes. This is not the duality

of the Self and the Not-Self. For in Yoga, "Self" includes

consciousness plus such matter as it cannot distinguish from

itself, and Not-Self is only the matter it can put aside.

Man is not pure Self, pure consciousness, Samvid. That is an

abstraction. In the concrete universe there are always the Self

and His sheaths, however tenuous the latter may be, so that a

unit of consciousness is inseparable from matter, and a Jivatma,

or Monad, is invariably consciousness plus matter.

In order that this may come out clearly, two terms are used in

Yoga as constituting manÄPrana and Pradhana, life-breath and

matter. Prana is not only the life-breath of the body, but the

totality of the life forces of the universe or, in other words,

the life-side of the universe.

"I am Prana," says Indra. Prana here means the totality of the

life-forces. They are taken as consciousness, mind. Pradhana is

the term used for matter. Body, or the opposite of mind, means

for the yogi in practice so much of the appropriated matter of

the outer world as he is able to put away from himself, to

distinguish from his own consciousness.

This division is very significant and useful, if you can catch

clearly hold of the root idea. Of course, looking at the thing

from beginning to end, you will see Prana, the great Life, the

great Self, always present in all, and you will see the

envelopes, the bodies, the sheaths, present at the different

stages, taking different forms; but from the standpoint of yogic

practice, that is called Prana, or Self, with which the man

identifies himself for the time, including every sheath of matter

from which the man is unable to separate himself in

consciousness. That unit, to the yogi, is the Self, so that it is

a changing quantity. As he drops off one sheath after another and

says: " That is not myself," he is coming nearer and nearer to

his highest point, to consciousness in a single film, in a single

atom of matter, a Monad. For all practical purposes of Yoga, the

man, the working, conscious man, is so much of him as he cannot

separate from the matter enclosing him, or with which he is

connected. Only that is body which the man is able to put aside

and say: "This is not I, but mine." We find we have a whole

series of terms in Yoga which may be repeated over and over

again. All the states of mind exist on every plane, says Vyasa,

and this way of dealing with man enables the same significant

words, as we shall see in a moment, to be used over and over

again, with an ever subtler connotation; they all become

relative, and are equally true at each stage of evolution.

Now it is quite clear that, so far as many of us are concerned,

the physical body is the only thing of which we can say: " It is

not myself "; so that, in the practice of Yoga at first, for you,

all the words that would be used in it to describe the states of

consciousness, the states of mind, would deal with the waking

consciousness in the body as the lowest state, and, rising up

from that, all the words would be relative terms, implying a

distinct and recognisable state of the mind in relation to that

which is the lowest. In order to know how you shall begin to

apply to yourselves the various terms used to describe the states

of mind, you must carefully analyse your own consciousness, and

find out how much of it is really consciousness, and how much is

matter so closely appropriated that you cannot separate it from

yourself.