Ancient Ayurvedic Secrets: Charika Samhita Part 5

Do we need a specialized knowledge to know about our health … imbalances and how to heal them? Or is there a way where we can know this directly.  As conscious beings, can we not know our status directly, without depending on any source. And therefore heal ourselves? Let’s explore.

Transcript

Consciousness - The Subject Of Life 

When a person comes to a doctor for help, to a specialist, an orthopedic, an endocrinologist, he may not be able to help that patient every time because the symptoms do not come under his area of specialization. In many diseases, three or four different specialists will see the patient.

What about the doctor who never gets the chance to look at the patient completely on his own as more than just a set of symptoms, as a conscious being in pain who is calling out to be healed? What about this doctor’s own evolution? Where does the specialist find that space to explore his own consciousness and where is his chance to evolve in this divided space in which he functions all his life? Is he doing something else which can take care of this soul need? If not, how much of help can he be to another when he himself might need to heal?

Specialization is about expertise and command. It’s an objective method of getting information, processing it, developing analytical skill. Somewhere “you the person” can get lost in becoming the specialist. What you feel when you spend some time with the patient, that is simply not there by ‘feel’ we don’t mean emotion, we mean, like how you feel hunger, how you feel your sense of just being to “feel your way” when faced with a new patient, a new scenario. Analyzing the symptoms can be done by AI with the help of tests and scans but to feel and connect to the patient not knowing what his body, mind and soul need, what touch can heal his heart? There is a little unpredictability with every human being. A pet’s reactions might reveal  quite a lot about his owner’s pain point, to be available to and absorb all the material that a patient brings; even social and psychological and in that space where you don’t know everything, finding your way without the stress a specialist might feel of having to have all the answers. This “not knowing” and exploring in the dark is probably the easiest way to shut the thinking process because here you have to feel your way to the solution. You have to respond and that makes “you the healer” alive that faculty of feeling to know every moment “how am I feeling right now” to be conscious, why would you want to miss out on this simply because you are a specialist?

Modern science has been struggling for a while now with the question “what is consciousness” and where and how consciousness operates. After quantum physics happened, scientists began to see mind and matter as two faces of reality. Some recognise a “mind like quality” (*1) in the physical world when we go down to levels smaller than the atom, many subtler and subtler levels of the mind seem to operate not only in humans and animals but out there in Nature as well.

It has been found (*2) that people who survive near death experiences, where the thinking brain is in coma, who are practically dead, they have complex experiences. Their experiences are richer than what even normal people have. This shows  consciousness does not arise in the parts of the brain that generate thoughts which is  the cerebral cortex.

Some scientists say, (*3) consciousness is experienced as ‘feeling’ and it happens in the brain stem which connects the brain to the spinal cord. Specifically the reticular activating system of the brain stem. It is the area which houses our survival drives. It makes us feel hunger, cold. It is being said that here is where we feel our sense of ‘being’ as well, the feeling of I am, the knowledge of “I exist”, that “I feeling” and this theory says, consciousness is found not on a particular organ but in a function. In the function of homeostasis, the internal balance of the body’s physiology. It is in trying to remain in a state of balance that we manifest consciousness. Our thinking brain has no role to play in this, that is why there are cases like a woman who is born with no cerebral cortex knows that she exists and experiences feelings, expresses them freely and can show empathy. This approach says, my moment to moment feeling of being is the space where I am alive as me, as the human being. That’s the space where I am not like a robot which can be replaced by AI.

The ancients saw this a little differently. They called consciousness ‘chaitanya’. The words ‘chit’ and ‘chaitanya’ share the same root and in Yoga when we say “yogah chitta vritti nirodhaha”, we “to stop the modifications of the mind”, it’s about removing all that modifies or obscures consciousness. The Yoga Sutra also says that  on meditating on the heart, we can feel the power of the chitta, confirming that its by “feeling our way”, we can allow the full potency of consciousness to shine through; except that that it is not the brain stem but the heart hriday which reflects our consciousness and the moment it’s all about memory, thought, analysis, dealing in information which today even a bot con do. It is just a material process, like a chemical reaction, the ancients called it ‘jada’ meaning inert lacking in consciousness.

There was a time when a doctor’s memory was very important because we didn’t have IT. Any technician’s memory was very important in that age but even then where  doctors  were like demi-gods, it was not just the doctor’s knowledge, it was his touch, one felt that sitting with him for a few minutes will heal you. Yes, his being mattered how he evolved as a human being, the doctor’s dreams, his vulnerabilities, his joys and sorrows, all mattered. This was the subjective side where the doctor felt “my patient is like me” even in the era of computers, you would still want to consult with such a doctor. Being objective was part of his training but there was equal emphasis on empathy on subjectivity, on passion for his subject.

Passion has many faces. It means you can let things affect you. You can be vulnerable , you can allow yourself to get hurt because it is very likely to happen in life. Why pull down the blinds and stay all day in a closed room and miss out on the glorious sky simply because that bee might come in and disturb you? Can you let the bee come, take that risk of a few seconds and you have 24 hours to enjoy that great view down the valley and the stars at night. Keeping all our windows open all the time might look a little obsessive but that’s how a squirrel is, a deer is, vulnerable. It will not shy away from danger and miss out on its way of life. It will not also act like there is no danger from the cat. It has to be watchful, alert. It’s the space of vulnerability where there is a joy of being and yet it’s an alert state. It’s just Nature, in that space can we also feel another’s problem being vulnerable means you are out in the open, naked not only can others see you for who you are, it also lets gives you a different sight. You see through everything around you because with nothing to hide, your eyes too need to wear no blinds. It’s a space where you can’t really judge another. It tempers that passion into compassion. ‘com’ means ‘with’, compassion is to feel what the other feels to know it as my own feeling. It’s probably from this space of vulnerability that the question arose “oh why is there suffering” because you can feel another’s pain as your own. It’s from here someone might have noticed that everything in Nature is in a flux and then asked, “is there something that is unchaining”.

In today’s time, passion means intense love, obsession, the kind of love where you can lose yourself. After compassion, we mention obsession as the second face of passion because, if that losing oneself is complete not for a gain but for its own sake, then when you can’t seem to attain it, you are on fire. Because now the taste of life in its absence is unbearable. You miss those moments where there was no you. There was just your object of love actually it only began as an object but as it grew, that person, that subject out there is inside you. It has become completely subjective, it fills you to the point where only that object of your love is and you are not and when you are not, your problems are not. All there is left is your essential nature. It is said that is bliss ananda. So now, it’s like you are in trouble because you can’t settle for anything less. Subject is about passion to be able to lose yourself, to be vulnerable, to be affected.

A specialist works exclusively on skill and mastery, his aim is to lose the vulnerability. His focus is on cutting out error. It’s an objective  approach, where I don’t really “feel my way around”. Feeling your way around implies not knowing, implies not relying on the cerebral cortex, what the ancients called the thinking mind ‘manas’. Feeling your way around makes life subjective. You matter more than any text or lesson, it’s from a different space that you are engaging. It is this passion, where   you feel everything as happening within you, it’s about who you are. It’s about your evolution. There is no limit set on how much of yourself you will give to it. In fact the very idea is to give it all. Now let’s imagine this is how you approach your subject of study. Caraka Samhita says:

“When there was a great pandemic kind of situation and many great sages met to find an answer, they meditated”(*4) .

Why did they not just start exchanging notes and have loads of discussion and analysis and put it all together? Why did they individually get into deep states of absorption to find answers? What was the reason for this approach?

In the third chapter of the Yoga Sutra, called the chapter of powers, it says:

“Binding the mind to one place followed by an uninterrupted stream of the content of consciousness which leads to a state of deep absorption when there is only the subject appearing without the consciousness of one’s own self and then applying the three together called ‘samyama’, there is the dawn of insight. Samyama when applied to different finer states of consciousness, we get knowledge of those finer states (*5).

This way we can get knowledge of every aspect of creation, from the contents of another’s mind to the movement of the stars to the powers of omniscience to developing mind heart coherence “hridaye chitta samvit” doing samyama on the heart. “you get knowledge of the mind” indicating the heart, the seat of feeling is the doorway to the mind where mind here is not the intellect, called manas. It is one’s consciousness, ‘samyama’ is a state of coherence where the objective and subjective co exist. You can lose yourself in passion and yet witness it as if you are watching from outside. In this states you can have a deep insight into objects because you have transcended the disturbed states of the mind called ‘kshipta’ scattered, ‘vikshipta’ oscillating between attentive and distracted states, ‘mudha’ a dull and forgetful state of mind to the coherent states of ‘ekagra’ one pointed where you can fix your mind on a problem or any subject without interruption to ‘niruddha’ controlled where you can apply the mind to deep and subtle problems and have direct first hand knowledge of the subject (*6).

To be able to look at a problem, a disease, without distraction, to be able to go deep into a subject, these are just natural qualities, natural potentials of the mind. It’s not an academic achievement, there is nothing so special about this. Any human being can do it, why are enough human beings not doing it? The disturbed states no matter what the cause, no matter what the content of that disturbance is, it can be calmed without getting into what the issue is or why it occurred. You can take the mind state from disturbed to absorbed. If this is possible without any special device then why not? The disturbed states are also painful, again it doesn't matter what event caused the pain. Once the disturbance goes, so does pain. Samyama is about gaining proficiency in keeping the mind in that pain free state of single pointedness and absorption and applying it to our subject. Question is, shouldn’t the doctor or any professional or any human being be interested in first mastering this art before anything else. 

What risi Atreya and the sages did when they retired to meditate on the problem is probably this; samyama on the various issues that were raised. They must have all had deep insights, discussions must have happened after this and this cycle must have been repeated many times, ever since. Over many thousands of years the text has been edited from time to time, probably in symposiums such as the first but after 1000s of years the updating it seemed to have stopped, maybe  because the text went out of the realm of subjective study of this sort with the dawn of des carte in Europe and their dominion of the East and the objective methodology that came with it. Maybe we went more into academic, objective study, what we do in our current approach to science.

Why should we not want to learn this art of samyama so that when we have our subject. It could be anything from the patient to the art of brewing tea to political science to farming. We can get first hand direct knowledge and the price  one pays for this is by losing pain and becoming joyful because passion has a natural source in our being and in its absence it seems there is no sense in life. For example we are not able to observe our body very well, so we don’t understand there is a particular pain I don’t need to worry about, instead we might just run to the specialist and the specialist might be highly qualified but he may not be in a mental state that is any better than yours. He might be able to prescribe well but maybe there never was a problem. He may not have the space to come to that and tell you that.

So the whole question is why not first develop the art of not being so disturbed and then the art of being absorbed by samyama and learn to apply our mind in this state to the subject of our choice. This is the kind of obsession we are talking about, where you are lost in that subject because of these states of mind of dharana dhyana and samadhi one pointedness meditation absorption. Because if my child or my downline is coming to me with a problem, in that state, my background, my issues, my limitations, don’t operate. We are not looking at special powers. It’s about, I can just listen to you, I can give you complete attention without wavering. I can feel your pain like it's my own. To be able to do this is significant. And to be able to do this matters probably above everything else. That’s what we are talking about, when we say passion for the subject, Yoga’s preparatory practices asana, pranayama  can be a great starting point and it’s not about living in a hermitage, away from everything, master it and come back. Our retreat is our subject, our passion, our vulnerability, our obsession. In the next blog, we will explore the role of art and science in our lives by looking at  the symbiotic relationship between Yoga as the art of consciousness and Ayurveda as the science of life.

Bharat Thakur 

REFERENCES

1* Statement by physicist David Bohm quoted in the essay “Dual-Aspect Monism, Mind-Matter Complementarity, Self-Continuity and Evolutionary Panentheism. Australian Journal of Parapsychology”, Peter B Todd. (has been a research psychologist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, Sydney) 

2* Quoting Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick, in the essay “Dual-Aspect Monism, Mind-Matter Complementarity, Self-Continuity and Evolutionary Panentheism. Australian Journal of Parapsychology”, Peter B Todd. 

3* The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle. Journal: Frontiers. Psychology. Solms M (2019), Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

*4 Caraka Samhita. Charaka Samhita, P V Sharma, Chaukhamba Orientalia, Varanasi.

*5 Four Chapters in Freedom, Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Yoga Publications Trust, Munger. 

*6 Yogasutra Patanjali with commentary of Vyast, Bangali Baba, Motilal Banarsidas Publishers.