Yoga Vasistha 195: Master of the Senses, Not Their Slave

Sage Uddalaka has already gone into deep relaxation and meditation and created an inner atmosphere of sattva, purity. Now he does something unusual. He lines up his own senses as if they were sitting in front of him, and he speaks to them as their boss. Swami Jyotirmayananda explains why this episode is in the text at all: “Through this episode of Uddālaka, you are being given the art of practicing”. This is lecture 195 of the Yoga Vasistha series. It finishes Section 52 of the Upasama Prakarana and opens Section 53. The question running underneath it is simple to state. The senses are indispensable, and yet they lead a person astray most of the time. Who is supposed to be in charge? Swamiji answers with a sequence of plain images. A spoon carries soup and tastes nothing. A child weeps when the castle he built in the air is broken by a call to bath. Craving is the string that holds the beads of a rosary together. Impure desire is a black cloud in front of the sun, and the five kleshas are what keep it black. Vasana, subtle desire, is literally a smell that draws you to the kitchen. Darkness is not a thing at all but a door you have shut. The lecture lands in Section 53, where Uddalaka tells his vasanas that they cannot color him. The individual soul is the sun reflected in the water of a pot, always shaking, while the real I is the sun itself, beyond waking, dream and deep sleep.

Passages

Speaking to the Senses as Their Master

Swamiji begins with how the relationship starts. “In the beginning, senses and you are one and the same.” Uddalaka’s practice is a change in that relationship. “Now you are distancing from the senses.” He does not belittle what the senses do. “One sense gone, one fifth of the world enjoyment gone.” Most people interpret happiness by how much they have seen, experienced and remembered, and all of that rests on sense perception. So he asks the real question: “Should you be a slave to those senses?” The general masses are, he says. Uddalaka is rehearsing the opposite role, “Not a slave to the senses.” Why do the senses run off without permission? “Senses are excited constantly based on your subtle desires.” The person does not know those subtle desires, and the “senses know them better than you.” So they jump around without waiting for approval, and the person falls for it. Uddalaka’s stern address promises the senses a different future once impure vasanas no longer goad them. They become tame, and look to their master for guidance. “You will not cause karmic entanglements, leading to the endless miseries of the world.”

The Spoon and the Soup

The first thing Uddalaka tells the senses is that happiness is not in the object. “Oh senses, you have simply imagined happiness in object.” Swamiji offers a kitchen illustration. “It is not the spoon that tastes the soup.” The spoon takes the soup in and enjoys nothing. The trouble begins when the spoon starts to boast. “Spoon begins to say, it’s a good soup.” “That is the state of instability.” The text adds children and their toys. “Children create toys out of play.” They grieve when the toys are destroyed, and sometimes they build castles with no clay at all, sitting on the bed, until a mother calls them to bath and the castles come down. That is a terrible experience to a child, and Swamiji says the world of the senses is in the same predicament. “It’s a childish involvement.” A life arranged around good things to hear, taste, see, touch and smell is looking for perfection where it cannot be found.

Happiness Is the Self Within

“Happiness is not in the objects of the world.” “Happiness, the source of happiness, is the Self in you.” Swamiji quotes the Upanishad, “ātmanas tu kāmāya sarvaṃ priyaṃ bhavati.” “For the sake of the Self, all becomes dear.” There is a catch. “But your concept of self itself is deceptive.” Happiness follows the way a person views himself. If you are the body, only bodily relatives are dear. If you are more than the body, charity and generosity become sources of joy. When the ultimate goal is discovered, all is the Self, and there is nothing but happiness wherever you look. He gives it in its simplest form. “Think of the sun as happiness.” Every reflected sun is sourced by the real one. “You go after reflected sun, you are going into a Wrong track”. And yet the reflections are not to be feared. “Wherever happiness is coming through, it is your own essential nature.” Waves, eddies, bubbles and foam are not different from the ocean. “In the same way, the objects are non-different from the Self.” The dream makes it easier to grasp. “Your identity in your dream is erroneous.” While dreaming, the question of what is real never comes up, and daily life is the same. “So many things you have recovered, but Self you have not discovered.” Yet the search goes on underneath: “Every breath you take is an urge of the Self, urge of your soul to discover” who it is.

Craving, the String of the Rosary

Now the text names what binds the senses. “It is tṛṣṇā that holds the senses together.” “Just as a string holds the beads of a rosary together.” Swamiji gives a second picture: the senses are horses, and “Those reins are tṛṣṇā, craving.” Trishna is desire gone into an uncontrolled intensity. “You are dominated by craving. You are bound to be a slave to your senses.” The work runs in both directions. Master the senses and craving fades; let craving fade and the senses tame themselves. “It’s a progressive movement.” Then the release. “But just as when the string is broken, the beads disperse.” “When craving is renounced, the senses no longer create bondage.” The same senses, acting as a team of tame horses led by understanding, stop restricting the goal and start to promote it. The vasana that sustains the ego and the senses is made of illusion, so it is cut by the sword of sankalpa tyaga, renunciation of the will to enjoy objects.

Black Clouds and Pure Vasanas

To renounce desire, Swamiji says, means the subconscious desires have become pure. “Subconscious desires come in two categories, śubha and aśubha, pure and impure.” While impure desires remain, the senses rule. “And you will not feel fulfilled, you will be always thirsty.” His picture is a cloud. “A black cloud is like malina-vāsanā, impure vāsanā.” It blocks the sun to a great degree. “The moment blackness moves away from the cloud, the cloud becomes purified.” That is shubha vasana, and the rays begin to come through.

Five Kleshas Behind Impure Desire

What makes a vasana impure? Swamiji goes briefly into Raja Yoga: subtle impressions gather in the unconscious based on the five kleshas, the afflictions. The first is ignorance, and especially being content with it, which strengthens it further. Ignorance hurts in a job, in a doctor’s practice, even in the kitchen with the spices. Still, choosing not to learn astronomy when someone opens that door is perfectly fine. “So even ignorance has to be handled by you.” “Next to handle is egoism, asmitā.” A fattened ego, rajasic or tamasic, builds a false me and mine, and from it come attachment and hatred, each one recording its impression. Embodiment adds the fear of death: how long one has lived, how many candles on the cake. “All these don’t go in vain, they are always being recorded in your unconscious.” “Five points are being recorded: your ignorance, your egoism, your attachment, your hatred, your fear of death.” These are klishta samskaras, impressions that are the source of pain, lying like seeds in the unconscious.

Vasana Is Just Smelling

When the seeds sprout and push a tender nose up through the earth, they are vasanas. Swamiji goes to the root of the word. “Vāsanā is just smelling.” “First we smell the food cooking. Then we are drawn to the kitchen.” You become aware of a vasana before you can say what it is. The project is that malina vasana must move away, and he is careful about how. “Impurity is not a reality; it is a restriction in the flow of energy, a short-circuited energy.” “Darkness is not a reality.” “You are not creating darkness.” You have shut the door to light, and that darkness spreads out as anger, hate, worry and stress. So the method is correction, not combat. “Short circuited energy is corrected. Not fought against.” “It simply doesn’t exist once correction is made.” “Anger, hate, greed, all these are not natural to you at all.” Once the energy flows again, “All divine qualities begin to develop in a spontaneous way.” The key is renouncing the sankalpa that holds on to the world of the five kleshas and making another one instead. “Oh God, give me śakti to follow the path of bhakti, to attain mukti, liberation.”

O Citta, Merge in the Light

Uddalaka now addresses citta, the whole mind-stuff that supports the senses. “Having discovered the fallacy of your existence, merge in the taintless light of the Self.” A purified citta is a cloud that shines brighter as light passes through it, not knowing that as it shines it is vanishing. “Mind acts like a mirror”, Swamiji says. “Soul is constantly looking into the mirror of the mind.” “From bondage to release, all the story is through in and through the mind.” In the end the mind melts away. He adds a caution. “But understand also with maturity. Literally things are not going away.” What grows is the understanding that you are not confined to the senses or the body. “Your reality, the real I am, is same when you go to sleep, all world moves away.” He closes the section with the kirtan jyoti se jyoti mila do, light uniting with light. “What a delight.”

Section 53: The Self Cannot Be Colored

Section 53 opens with Uddalaka continuing his reflections. Limited objects made of the elements “can become fragrant when treated with fragrance.” “But the Self, which is unlimited, cannot be rendered fragrant.” The world of the senses is good and evil, fragrance and foul smell, gain and loss. “And that world you cannot secure.” A dust storm takes the color off a fine new house. “So all things in the world that you gain, they are subject to colors.” Uddalaka’s point is that “the real ‘I am’ is not colored by vāsanā.” Everything that rests on karma changes, and “No two moments are exactly alike.” Turning to the source within is the shift. “But the real I is the sun.”

Jiva, the Sun Reflected in a Pot

“Jīva, the individual soul, is a reflected self”. Karma creates a pot and water, the body and the mind, and the sun appears in it. Whenever a person says this is me, I did it, the reflection is speaking, and the whole story of past, present and future is built on it. “The real self is ever the same.” The reflected self’s stories are like “stories of your dreams, they don’t matter.” None of this is meant as a sudden jerk. It is a change of attitude that turns impure vasanas into pure ones, which is why the prayer says “Oh Bhagavān, give good understanding.” With that, you have the resources “to enjoy the world, grow out of the world, say goodbye to the world. And stay shining.” “Just as children imagine ghosts in the shadows of the dusk, so the mind has imagined.” Then comes the good news. “I am pure consciousness. Now good news.” The objects of the waking mind do not touch it, nor the experiences of dream. “In fact, I am beyond waking, dream, and deep sleep states”.

Terms

vasana — subtle desire; literally a smell that draws the mind toward its object.
malina vasana — impure subtle desire, the black cloud before the sun.
shubha vasana — pure subtle desire, the cloud that lets the light through.
trishna — craving; the string of the rosary and the reins of the horses.
klesha — affliction; ignorance, egoism, attachment, hatred and fear of death.
asmita — egoism, the second klesha.
klishta samskara — a painful impression, a seed in the unconscious.
sankalpa tyaga — renunciation of the will to enjoy objects.
citta — the whole mind-stuff, the support of the senses.
jiva — the individual soul, the sun reflected in the water of the mind.
bhuta jaya — conquest of the elements.

Three Questions

Swamiji says the trouble is not that the spoon carries soup but that it begins to say it is a good soup: what is the senses’ version of that boast in your own day?
Craving can fade because the senses are mastered, or the senses can grow tame because craving fades: which direction does Swamiji call a progressive movement, and why does it matter that it works both ways?
If darkness is only a shut door, what does it change about how anger or worry is handled, compared with fighting them?

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Sections 52 and 53. Lecture 195 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of Swami Jyotirmayananda’s teachings is free.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.