Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga: New Darsana : Part-1 :The Darsana

Meta Psychology of Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga

In one sense All process is of this First Mind (manas). As it manifests, its spiritual subtle condition is the inner layer and its gross or material condition is the outer. The inner is the psychic, and the outer the material physical form. There is both parallelity and interaction between the two. Normally parallel, at points of twist or crisis or change there is interaction that brings about the change in both. There also happens in deeper crisis the complete volte face, the psychic becomes awakened and the physical gets subordinated. This condition is the process known as conversion. The individual reveals nearness to the centre, and there is similarity with the Ultimate or identity in some measure. The First Mind thus provides the manifestation of the potential grossness in all subtle being, even as it reveals the subtle, underlying or hidden by the gross. This principle is a general or universal principle - the Mind is the cause of bondage as well as of freedom. The Samkhya darsana stated this in the form that Nature is the cause of man's bondage as well as of his freedom.

The uniformity of the processes of Nature reveals also that what is true of the atom or amsa is equally true of the vast and the whole - as is the minutest so is the largest. The finite repeats the Infinite. The microcosm is the repetition of the macrocosm. If one knows the atom, he can know the Atman or Brahman.

The universality of the operation of the Mind is also clear from its different levels. The levels themselves seem to have been formed by a series of inversions; such that the higher level seems to be the lower inverted. The inversions take place naturally even as could be seen in the wavy character of all rays of light, of energy, and even of flowing water. The general principle of invertendo would help a lot to dissipate the inability to understand the existence of heterogeneity in a world of Oneness.

Secondly, the inversions at the points of inversion reveal a twist or a knot that almost shuts off the flow of the higher into the lower or the inner to the outer, and vice versa. It is this that preserves the several levels from totally disappearing. In fact, there develops always a residual existence, or remainder of the higher, which does not wholly become the lower because it can not. Therefore, it is that there is the so called preeminence of the cause over the effect, the excess of it so to speak, which cannot totally pass over into the effect-condition.

The third principle is when the mind forms, or becomes, or flows into the lower conditions or levels. Not only does it become grosser and twisted, it is also seen to take the form of rings or circles, concentric in character owing to the Central Ksobha being in a state of superfine Central rotation. All motions are not only wavy and vibratory but also circular and concentric. These concentric circles enclosing each other are one unit falling into One great circle of Rings. Sri Ram Chandra states that all organic and other bodies (including the inorganic) are assuming shapes different from one another owing to the pressures and needs of interacting activities though, on inner analysis, they possess all the rings.

According to the Vision there are, around the Centre, infinite point-cells in the plenum of the Ksobha; then there are seven Major Rings; then eleven Rings of Egoism; and finally five Rings of Maya. Expressing this in another way, there is the Centre which is circumscribed and surrounded, in a sense, by the Central Region. The Parabrahmanda comes around it farther from the Centre and the Central Region. The Brahmanda or Cosmic Worlds envelop this and then come the areas of individual bodies, pinda-pradesas. Each is supported by a level of consciousness, and is experienced by any one who is awakened to their existence by transmission of the Transcendental Centre-Force.

Therefore even the tiniest particle enfolds all the levels of consciousness. In one sense it epitomises its entire development or manifestation. The return to the awareness of all these proceeds outwardly by seeing Nature, and in respect of inwardness through intuition or central seeing. (The Samkhya scope of manifestation starts with Nature in its subtlest undifferentiated condition, though it is said to enfold all the three forces or constituents of sattva, rajas and tamas. The first is the vast manifestation called Mahat, which differentiates into many soul-making or individuating points beginning the individual creation. The development of manifestation proceeds from awareness towards activity which tends to lose awareness and ends up in knowing, doing and being known and done. This concept is seen among the Jains who hold that activity deposits matter called pudgala and is capable of infiltrating the consciousness or jiva as centre, and building around it a karma-sarira that limits the movement and freedom of the individual soul or centre (jiva). Modern physics is aware of this twofold character of all matter - it is both a particle and a wave (wavicle). The interconvertibility of these is one of the major discoveries of Modern Physics. In ancient tantra sastra this is the basic conception of the subtlest movement becoming gross or solid matter. It is also seen that matter requires motion, though it is inwardly congealed motion - a motion in terrible bond of repetition, in which consciousness has become thoroughly veiled, waiting to be released by an external force of highest intensity.

Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga thus explains, simply, the actuality of this double process - the consciousness-force gradually descending and becoming matter, and matter gradually ascending and becoming consciousness-force.)

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It is in the yogic consciousness that we begin to observe these twofold processes operating in many ways. The lower mind has to be quietened or restrained from flowing out and canalised to flow into the higher mind. The luminous, upward movement to the higher levels of mind, from pinda to Brahmanda, is discerned as rising from the heart. The heart is the physiological centre of flow of blood to all organs. Its contents, or constituents determine the health or ill-health of men. Men suffer from all sorts of pressure, or lack of it, at the heart and are in mortal agony. He who would cure the man must cure his heart. The heart is the place of the cittavrtti (mind-modifications) or the lower mind, even as the stomach is the seat of the lower mind along with the genital organs or the muladharasvadhisthana, which is said to be the seat of Kundalini. The heart is to be regulated or subdued and calmed, and this can be done either by suppressing all thoughts by force of practice and restraints as prescribed by some of the schools of self-control, or by concentration, or by introducing the higher consciousness of the Master into the heart - a sort of injection to restore the inner peace and balance. It is, in other words, the specific work of psychic therapy or treatment done by the competent Guru. In one sense it can be experienced even as physical process in transmission, and is not mere imagination - a kind of thought of a lower level leading to a hallucination. The transformation of the affective, or emotional, or feeling state is the first step of this experience of transmission of the supramental or superfine consciousness into the heart. The flow of this force all through the body later reveals the lightness and also immateriality of the body felt during meditations under this transmissional guidance. (Sri Ram Chandra writes:- "The heart is the field for the working of the mind and when samskaras descend for Bhoga, the process of bhoga starts at the heart appearing in the form of network. I did visualise it in clear form. The forehead is the place of citta. They are not identical. The vibrations start from citta-lake and come down to the point A of the heart. They are, therefrom, diverted towards the lower region of the heart as marked (L) in "Efficacy of Raja Yoga" and also towards the region of Atma (the 2nd point opposite to the heart). Generally the force of the vibrations is stronger in the left than in the right part (Atma region); the teacher in Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga makes the vibrations in the Atma region stronger than in the left side of the heart.")

It is through this process that one also resolves the dualism between motion and matter or even mind and matter. Further, it is with the help of this consciousness-force, which is also called "Thought", that one removes the material or dark obstructions or dross within the system, either by throwing out or by burning the dross with the 'heat' produced by this transmission. The force is further brought into action by means of concentrated or willed thought. All these reveal the fact that Thought, as power of consciousness, is of the very nature of manifest Reality. The higher thought is used to subdue, determine and guide the lower ones; and the highest thought is used to dissolve the products of thought which are what we know in the gross condition of the organs and matter.

Pranayama, as breath-control, hardly helps the calming of the heart. The real prana is not the solid breath but transcendental force of the Centre. Mere regulations of breath through the nostrils Pingala and Ida do not lead anywhere towards purification - removal or throwing out of karma-matter in the system.

The ancients used to say that the sense-organs are out-turned (parancikhani) and are made for adaptation to the environment or, in Samkhya language, for experiencing the outer world. It was also taken for granted that this leads to misery through desire for these objects. So it was suggested that one should develop internal vision (Pratyak-jnana or drsti). The sense must be in-turned. How this is to be done is a big problem. We have, of course, teachers of Yoga who have somehow contrived to suggest ways and means of doing this. In abhyasa, this is done by suggesting their merger in the thought that is higher. They then develop a new way of seeing without the senses. It may be suggested that this is very much like the dreams which are caused by inner stimulation; and obviously the dreams we see, or hear, or feel, are not external objects at all. But according to Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga the Superfine Thought introduced into the heart as prana (life-breath, prima vital) makes this inwardness immediately possible. Of course objects then would reveal new dimensions. Further, we almost enter into a new world where thought-name-thing are interconvertible, co-present, and this is a very great gain to universal consciousness.

In meta-psychology we are not interested in the structure of the organs, and their knowing, feeling and willing, but in the transmutation or transformation of outer experience that binds and limits, into inner experience that illumines and liberates man from his bondage to all that he knows, feels and wills. By Thought we go beyond thought.

Thought takes a leap back into its indescribable Source and merges into it, even as it leaps out of it and emerges into the worlds and individuals.

The basic concept of Sri Ramchandra Rajayoga's psychology, or meta-psychology, is the manas. From earliest Vedic times manas was an accepted concept of prakrti, and all evolution was potential in its being. It was thus the matrix of creative evolution. Sri Ram Chandra has, in an article on Manas, clearly presented its value and nature. He has, in another context, also stated that while other types of Yoga, including Samkhya, have held that manas must be brought to a stand-still or even abolished, and one should arrive at the state of amanska (non-mind), the proper and free utilisation of it by making it flow unmodified and untwisted in our life is to be advocated. Similarly he considers the ego (ahankara) as important help, and not an impediment to righteous and natural living. The ego has become a bar to higher naturalness only in so far as it has been made to cling to one form of manas, or one formation or ring of it. As different from Sri Aurobindo, who has made the arresting aphorism "Ego was the helper, ego is the bar", Sri Ram Chandra states that ego too is essentially necessary for life and continues to be valuable for spiritual being in embodied existence, if only we could make it again the real instrument and organ of the Pure Being or Nature. It is an eternal entity and is invaluable. All that has happened is that it is linked up with an ego-sense - a twist or vivarta of the real ego, which is transcendental reality in the Centre.

Therefore, manas, ahamkara, buddhi and citta are several phases of the original Nature.

Thus, too, the final emancipation of the ego (moksa) happens when nature or manas merges in the Centre which is below it, or substands it, and supports it. It is then that the ego merges in the Centre rather than in the manas. A significant possibility of moksa, here within the many rings of manas, is when the laya or mergence or oneness is attained with the Centre itself in its closest proximity with prakrti and nature. The solution of this problem lies only through an attainment of the condition of the primary, or primal, manas in its transcendent aspect, which alone can reveal the mystery of svarupa-laya in Brahman from which there is no return to the condition even of prakrti or manas involvement.

The concept of dhi is at the back of the idea of Dhyana (Dhi-yana) which takes one beyond the lower levels of aspiration and enjoyment. It is sometimes identified with manas, or as a modification of manas. But it appears that this is the direct spiritual force of the Centre, a little different from the manas itself, since it is the inward-going force rather than the externally moving force. This makes for subtlety rather than grossness of presentation. It is centrifugal rather than centripetal. This force was used in dhyana or buddhi-yoga or utterance of the Vedic Gayatri - dhiyo yo nah prachodayat - which is called upon to ignite the inner ego of the individual that has turned upon its past outward movement stricken by misery, frustration, and deceit in enjoyment.

The modern psychologists recognize the mind to have the functions of cognition, affection and volition, but do not pay as much importance to the ego or personality which colours the three processes and is basic to all reactional and actional systems. Further, though they recognize the three-fold states of the human individual such as waking, dreaming and sleeping, their analysis of these is anything but complete or sound. These three conditions, as well as the three modes of consciousness, are, at their very base, dependent on the ego. The ego-awareness is identified by some with embodied existence, whereas there is every likelihood that it is something more than that - that is to say, the ego seems to have more bodies than one, such as the causal and astral, and the ego consciousness or awareness includes the awareness proceeding from the deepest or innermost body to the outermost visible body. This is well known in Indian psychological and eschatological thought.

The ego is the plurality nucleus fulgurated from the Centre, and lasts as long as the Centre is in this poise of stir (ksobh). The ego-made bodies are indeed many as the ego activities seem to take on many - as many as eleven poises, or conditions, or modifications. Each one of these may be said to form a ring or body. In the Nivrtti or Yoga, the lower bodies are slowly integrated or merged in the higher, till all are absorbed in the last form of the ego. This ego-awareness, and awareness of its eleven rings, however does not arise normally until the five material or apparently non-ego bodies are dropped. In Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga it is possible on psychically crossing these outermost five rings.

Firstly, we are aware of the physical bodies; then we become aware of the eleven ego-bodies (astral bodies); and then alone do we become aware of the spiritual nature which again is without ego in the embodied form, but is spiritual Being in essence as well as existence.

The interesting part of the formation of these bodies, and the changes from subtle to gross or vice versa, lies in the discovery of the concept of knots or brackets which make for the changes. Just as in the transformations of solids into liquids and liquids into gases there are critical points which make for the transformation of one kind of energy into another kind, the brackets or knots (granthis) or cakras (wheels) make for the formation of the one cell into many kinds of cells. Thus the human body has several kinds of organisations or systems such as the supra-cortical, cortical, nervous cells, the blood corpuscles, and hormones, bone and muscle cells, all of which have developed from one original or primary cell - which, perhaps, is itself a product of two or three kinds of force or potentialities.

The psychological development of the human being as a spiritual person is, therefore, conditioned by the understanding of the higher principle of energy which has to enter into the very scheme of existence in its lowest and grossest form, and make for the harmonised working of the several levels of Being, understood as the physical, and the spiritual. Functioning in unison, inner transformation makes for the flow of spiritual energy all through the system, maintaining their being and activity rather than abolishing or annihilating them. The brackets and rings or cakras and knots (granthis) have to be firstly cleaned and then inter-connected in terms of the deepest and innermost energy of the Spirit (prana). The understanding of the nature of man becomes possible only through this inner activity of prana which gives rise to intuitive awareness of the Highest or central spirit and its nature.

The atomistic method of understanding human psychology is useful more for physiology than for real psychology. The breaking-up of the organism into different systems, each autonomous, is very much akin to the concept of a whole as composed of parts. It is true that this concept has been invaluable, and actually operative, in the field of mechanics and matter; but the moment one becomes aware that even the smallest particle of matter is an organism, and is dynamic in nature, it becomes necessary to deal with the whole of the material realm in terms of the organic conception. This biological view of reality reveals the important principle of translation or transformation of energy both in the ascent and the descent, and how their integration is also achieved by a third force. It is this concept of the organic that leads further to the evolution or subtle development of the mental and the supramental order of consciousness or energy which is such as to make for awareness, imagination, intuition, and the desire and the seeking to go beyond the body itself. True religious cognition develops only when desire for existence beyond the body occurs - desire for the growth beyond the conditions and limitations of the material and vital bodies. Sometimes the desire is known to be the activity of the mind, but even this is transcended when one becomes aware of the cosmic desires or universal truths.

Such being the case, the psychology that limits itself to human activity or reactivity, and the imagination which is riveted to practical purposes of survival and continuance in the human body, are very limited ones, if not truncated ones. The spiritual, psychic endeavour transcends these boundaries and seeks to know man, or the ego, as a universal or super-universal reality, amenable to direct intuition of the Ultimate Reality.