Most Modern People Won’t Learn These 6 Rules Yoga Teaches About Maximizing Consciousness
It was never about just physical health & wellness
The true depths of yoga will never be marketable.
Because it demands something many are not willing to pay: a deep, honest look at how confused, unaligned, & deluded we are.
Yoga is a step-by-step process for expanding human consciousness.
It’s not religion, which bases itself on someone else’s spiritual experience — it’s Dharma, which guides you to discover your own.
If you’re tired of the endless lifestyle ‘hacks’ and frustrated by the empty aftertaste of productivity fads— this article is for you.
If you apply these well, there’s no doubt your life will never be the same, on any level.
Law 1: Purification begins externally.
Yoga has eight limbs — the first of which is a moral foundation for the interaction we have with the world.
These are the rules for entry and progress. Because you can’t climb a mountain if you’re dropping your food supplies with every step.
- Nonviolence in action, speech, and thought help us preserve our energy (and sanity).
- Truthfulness keeps us aligned and directed.
- Non-stealing, non-possessiveness, and celibacy are tools to de-clutter our psyche when we most need it.
These are not oppressive commandments; they are a spectrum of disciplines we can take on, in order to more easily access our inner landscapes.
Law 2: Human consciousness has a disease.
The essence of yoga is to find who we really are; that is, to know what consciousness is without any of the secondary emotions, thoughts, or volitions it perceives.
Clinging onto what we’re not is actually an affliction — the word for it in Sanskrit is asmita, or false identification.
The good news is that the affliction isn’t inherent in who we are. It’s a learned delusion, developed over many reincarnations of natural evolution.
And yoga is all about making evolution conscious.
So recognize when your attention is being hijacked by the magnetism of identifying with what you are not.
Return, constantly, to who you really are: the inherently blissful seer. The detached knower. The fully witnessing consciousness.
Law 3: Who you spend time with either enlightens or deludes you.
A truly yogic lifestyle is hard to follow under America’s version of modernity.
There’s just so much diametrically opposed to the aims of a contemplative lifestyle.
But if you edit out the people who look at you like you’re crazy for caring about something other than a fat salary — you’ve won half the battle.
This is why sangha or like-minded individuals are said to propel spiritual progress: they fuel the right motivation.
If you are the five people you spend the most time with, then engineering your inner circle is nothing less than an act of self-preservation.
Law 4: Skilled concentration heals mental afflictions.
The Dalai Lama once remarked that his definition of “disturbing emotion” is anything that disturbs the inherent tranquility of the mind.
By this definition, we’re practically insane.
Patanjali (author of the Yoga Sutras) says the measure of how much mental health we have is simply the mental fitness to hold an object (or idea) in mind, for an extended period of time.
This is known as dharana which literally means ‘to hold onto,’ and is the 6th limb of yoga.
By this definition too, we’re practically drowning in mental illness.
The optimistic takeaway, however, is that it’s something that can & should be trained to its fullest capacity.
Little by little, or from time to time, we build our mental muscles to let go of distractions, explore ideas more deeply, and release our psycho-emotional knots.
Law 5: What you say and think is karma, too.
When we speak, we influence our own physiology.
Angry speech causes a noticeable shift in our hormones. Even conscious thought cultivation has been shown to impact cortisol levels in the blood.
This is why traditional Tibetan prayers typically involve setting an intention of body, speech, and mind; all these arenas are to be purified and perfected.
Helping the world can’t happen if the mind we’re bringing to it is burdened by misery & confusion too!
The ancients knew manifestation of the outer began with the inner — that’s why their cultures honored the inner human experience at every conceivable turn.
Law 6: Your mind is just another object of perception. Not “you.”
Have you ever known true freedom, even for a split second?
I’m not talking about getting six figures working four hours a week. I don’t mean the bliss of having all your external desires fulfilled.
I mean the kind of happiness that you know won’t ever go away, because it’s your inherent nature. The feeling that nothing can harm you, deceive you, or lead you astray.
I had such an experience once, after continuously observing the phenomena arising in the space of my mind. I was also looking at the mind itself; trying to experientially gauge what it was that made me think I was bonded to it. And whether I was anything more than it.
The exhilaration that accompanied the insight into this was just indescribable. This is where words fall short, and the teachings of yoga become a precious gift, not just a lifestyle.
You can be free of your anxieties, fears, insecurities, and perturbations, because they are all impermanent.
You just have to take steps on the path to developing & maintaining higher experience. And if you don’t know exactly how to do so, you’ve got over 5,000 years of map-making to draw upon!
In Summary
- To elevate your life, curate from external to internal.
- You take for granted what you think you are. Question that!
- Your space is sacred. Set the price of entry to your choosing.
- Learn to catch your habitual state of distraction, and reverse it.
- Speech is energetic currency. Don’t let it put you in debt.
- Your mind is just a tool; you can use it or be used by it.
Given the inestimable value of the consciousness-elevating wisdom of India and Tibet, perhaps it’s time to find out what the word yoga actually means before we practice it!
The worst that could happen is we turn more honest, patient, truthful, non-possessive, disciplined, and content because of it.
