The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 11.

Very interesting it is, and very inconvenient also, to know this truth because there seems to be something seriously awful with our own selves. The morbid source of suffering is in the recesses of our structure, our own makeup, and to study this is to study the world. As far as we are concerned, the world is what means everything to us in our life. The meaning that we see in life is the world for us, and all the meaning that we read outside is the meaning that is projected from the mind. So to study the mind would be to study life, and that would be to study the world. The proper study of mankind is man. We study the human structure in its psychological makeup, in its entirety, and we know what we are, what others are, what the world is, and perhaps what God Himself is.


This is the psychology of yoga. What I have described just now as the process of sifting of evidence from the objects through the relationships, through the senses and the mind, is known in the language of Vijnanabhiksu, a great exponent of yoga, as samjnas, stages of consciousness. These are stages of consciousness. The first stage is the consciousness of the world of objects. The second stage is the consciousness of the relationship of the objects with us. The third stage is the consciousness of the senses. The fourth stage is the consciousness of the mind. So all these are consciousness states. These stages are the internal states of the mind gradually getting hardened into perceptible relationships with the objects.

Swami Krisnananda

To be continued  ...