The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 16. ( Last Part )

The senses have this defect that one sense can perform only one function and, simultaneously, the other senses cannot come to the knowledge of what the other senses perceive. While this is the case with the senses, the mind has a defect of its own. It can see things only in a limited manner – as a quantity, as a quality, as a relation or as a condition. There is no other way of thinking. Whatever we think of has a quantity or a mass. It has length, breadth, height. It has a three-dimensional structure. Can you think of a four-dimension or a hundred-dimension thing? Impossible. This is a limitation of mental operation or the structure of the mind. We think of only quantities or, if not, we think of certain associated qualities, attributes: it is of this nature or of that nature. Nothing can be thought of unless it has a character, a relation, or unless a thing is in some condition. Everything has to be in some state. So these are the operative limitations of the mind, like the limitations of the senses.


So we have ultimately a wild-goose chase pursued both in rational metaphysics of the mind and the observation of the sciences of modern physics. We are nowhere near the truth, either this way or that way. Hence, mere philosophical augmentation, logical disquisition and metaphysics as we usually understand it in the academic sense are of no use, nor are the observational techniques of physics of any use to us.


We come to yoga for a different technique altogether. Instead of observation and rational disquisition, we come for self-discovery. “Know thyself” is the oracle of Delphi. This is what the Upanishads tell us. The science of yoga, therefore, is a science of self-culture, self-study, and self-discovery by the process of self-restraint. Everything is concerned with the self, ultimately. From the objects of the world we have now come down upon the self itself as the source of all our agonies of life in this world.


This is the art of yoga, the scientific technique of self-mastery for the sake of self-unfoldment and self-discovery, which will be so startling to us that it would look as if we are awakened from a dream of world perception.

END

Swami Krishnananda

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