School of Santhi
Yoga School in India,
Traditional Yoga Teacher Training in Kerala, South India
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Desire is beautiful
to have. We often desire. If a desire
which springs up is not going along with the ideas,
ideals, or belief systems or well accepted concepts or
existing laws of the society, there will be a conflict.
Desire
comes from a very deep area of the mind, the very
nature of it is happiness. All desires are coming from the source
of happiness within. Another part of our mind, which is the ethical
part says "no" to
the desire if it is against the moral principles.
This side which
says "No" is known as super ego,
which is the product of the social conditioning. Super ego is
the sum and substance of our ethical principles.
As this part comes up with its ideas as against
your desire, there arise conflict. The war starts!
Intellect,
who is the discriminator and judge, finds
it difficult to
make judgements, as deeper inside, there is a
desire for happiness, which is stronger than
the righteousness.
Even
though the cold war is on, you may go for the
desire as it shows a wonderful dream land of happiness, ignoring
the protest from the side of the super ego. Suppose you go
for it, soon after the celebration, you will feel guilt as
you have done something against your conscience. If you don´t
do it, it will add one more feather on your crown. You will
be judged as a nice person by the society. But as you have
not let yourself go into the natural feeling of entering into
enjoyment, you will end up in frustrations due to suppression.
This suffering you can only keep within secretly without
anybody noticing of it. More feathers you add to your glory,
greater will be the suppression. This at the long end leads
to some kind of psychological crises. In either way the poor
human being is squeezed between desire and morality.
It
is important to find a way out. Observation
is the key. In your observation, you will see that the super
ego is a product of social conditioning. As a result of
the social conditioning, you have adopted and created
many strong concepts and believes. You also
have created many ideas and ideals based on
your own life experience. These ideals and
belief systems always come in confrontation
with every moment of your life. Those who are
looking for freedom find it as the base of
all struggles in life.
If
you decide to explore the
belief systems and concepts, you will certainly see that
the concepts are not been observed by the
significant majority of people, but still
been upheld as the ruling principles of living.
Very few great men have seen it fully and
understood. They are confident to
expose the hypocrisy of the society to the world.
Jesus
said those
who have not sinned may cast upon her the first stone, in the
context of the
transformation moment of Mary Magdeline.
Why none of them cast the stone on her?
What happened to the morality of the society?
Society is a great pretext!
Let us go back to
the child hood. In child hood, you are
free to do anything which you like. At the
age of 2, 3, small children used to get a
natural inquisitiveness to explore their
own genital organ. The elders usually get
upset by seeing it. They get more upset
if the exploration is in front of some
visitors to the family. The elders usually
stop the children to contact their own
genital region. In course of time children
understand, this region of the body has
something which is not good and that can't
be contacted. At the same time, it is natural
to have interest to explore these regions.
So they starts to explore everything about it in secrets, which
may breed fear.
After
every exploration there
comes feeling of guilt. Do they not have
the freedom to explore their own body? Whenever
they get the desire to explore, unconsciously
there arises a feeling of sin, a so called
extension of the original sin of Adam! This will
be brought by the child to his adult hood.
Deeper in him, he knows, these concepts are
baseless but still is scared of going beyond
the norms laid down by the society. For keeping
up some kind of orderliness in the society, all
these moral codes do exist.
Those
who explore, will certainly understand
that these are baseless things and a hindrance for the free
enjoyment of
a given possibility of living. Actually
society is a non existent reality when the desire
is happening in the mind.
However the representative of
the society, which is the super ego is alert and
having a watch on your desires. It says 'No' to
your desires and another part of you continues to desire.
The desiring side of
you and the super ego, both are pulling you
from two sides. In this process you become restless.
If you are restless, you have the responsibility
to find out the cause of your restlessness.
Otherwise it will ruin your life completely.
So naturally after long struggle,
you will start to observe. When you become the
observer it is difficult for the mind to be
the actor. It is a kind of shifting of the
duty.
So
the mind starts to rest and relax. May be a while
later the discussion starts once again. If you really wish
to put an end to the discussion, the only possibility
is to go into the concept underlying the
conflict.
The
discussions are coming due to the projection
of some specific set
of ideas against the desire. If these ideas
are really clear for you, based on your
experience, certainly you will have faith
in this. In such cases the level of conflict
will be less. If it is an idea which is not
your own and if it is borrowed the conflict will be severe
as you are
not sure about it.
You
want to enjoy and
you are restraining yourself from enjoying as you want to make
yourself believe what the Master or someone else who you respect
in the society said was good.
In this process you are trying to live somebody
else's life. Here the conflict is twofold, as
at the first instance the desire conflicts with
the idea which you are keeping and secondly the
idea itself is been questioned by someone who
is deeply staying in you, that is you, yourself.
Even the concept itself starts conflicting.
Here,
it is important for
you to explore to see whether it is your
own idea or whether it is a borrowed one you are simply keeping
for yourself without any basis. You are holding this, to project
yourself
to the society as a good and wise guy. You will
also see in this exploration that you are missing each and
every possibility of celebration in your life in the name
of making yourself a beautiful and presentable person.
What is important? Is it to make yourself presentable to the
society and suffer? Or live your life and enjoy without
bothering about the society?
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