Home | Hindi | Kabir | Poetry | Workshop | BoloKids | Writers | Contribute | Search | Contact                                                 Shop Online

So according to the Yoga-sutra, consciousness fluctuates, and this fluctuation is what yoga attempts to control. The next natural question is evidently – what is consciousness, how does it fluctuate and why do we need to control it?

Consciousness or citta T

he sense of ‘self’ or ‘me’ is one of the earliest perceptions of a human being. From a very early age a child learns to differentiate between himself and other beings in the world. As a human grows, this sense of self becomes more and more developed, and he begins to see and appreciate the differences between himself and other beings. He becomes self-aware, or aware of himself as a separate entity. This awareness of self has been called consciousness. As a human being evolves through life, many things change. He grows older, his body grows older too, he moves from place to place, has many experiences. His physical body changes but what remains constant is his awareness of self, his sense of ‘me’. The ‘me’ of a human learns new things as well, but does not seem to undergo a fundamental change in its perception of itself.

It is thus clear that there is an unchanging ‘me’ which is separate and distinct from the body and its experiences, for while the body and the world around it undergoes changes, the sense of ‘me’ never does.

However Yoga philosophy says that the ‘self’ is deluded into believing that it is the body, in identifying with its physicality, in believing that it is inherently different from all other beings, and this delusion is reinforced by society and the body’s own senses. This error is the root cause of a fluctuating consciousness – in the sense of a struggle between the inherent knowledge of the ‘self’ that the world is not how it seems, and all the evidence presented by society and the bodily senses to the contrary.

It is thus clear that a large part, or a large amount of time in a human being’s life is passed in this struggle between the inner self and the bodily self and its wants and desires. It stands to reason that for a being who has resolved this inherent conflict, there will be no more ‘fluctuations’, or at the very least they will be resolved to a great degree.

What is the advantage, then, of ‘restricting fluctuations of the consciousness’? Quite simply, a large part of the lifespan of a human being is passed as a reaction to various emotions – joy, sorrow, jealousy, anger, hate, lust, fear, etc. A lot of time which could otherwise have been used better is lost by reacting to these states of mind. Yoga says that these states of mind are produced when the inner ‘self’ identifies with its physical form and offers a way to correct this misapprehension.

– Ashish Nangia
May 2, 2004

Page : 1 | 2

Yoga-Sutra
Yoga – An Introduction 
Questions of Self & Consciousness  
The Seer and the Self  
Another Perception of Reality   
The Question of Truth and Yogic Practice   
Pramana-Viparyaya-Vikalpa-Nidra-Smrtayah 

Top | Hinduism