“It seems it’s not important to ask the question, Who am I? I already know it — my picture is there in the passport.”
Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda opens with that line, and then answers it: “That means how little you know of yourself.” From the passport’s point of view you are a mortal being, one among trillions of lives — today you are, tomorrow you won’t be. “Is that all? Is that all the thrill you have in your life?” Allow the thought, he says, to go after Who am I?
From there he takes up Sutra 17 of the first chapter of Patanjali’s Raja Yoga Sutras, the Samadhi Pada, and maps the four levels of samprajnata — the lower samadhi.
Patanjali’s Three Gifts
The invocation itself carries a teaching. Patanjali gave the world three scriptures: yoga, for purifying the chitta, the mind-stuff; Ayurveda, for purifying the body; and grammar, for purifying speech. Swamiji calls this the picture of perfection. Your body should be well planned and well designed for attaining liberation — and it does not matter how it looks. What matters is good health, a heart open to the beauty of the world, pranas flowing harmoniously, body and mind well designed.
And that, he insists, is in your control if you want it to be. “How you find yourself is always based on how you have planned. Nobody else is responsible.” Never make your parents responsible for your defects. Never make the world responsible. You point one finger outward, and three fingers point back at you.
Detach, Attach
Before the sutra, Swamiji revisits abhyasa and vairagya as a single twofold movement. Detach from negative things and negative values, from everything resting on the lower self; attach to all that is good and potential and divine within you. The detaching aspect is vairagya, and it must be developed inwardly, gradually, progressively.
But detachment should never be mistaken for being insensitive or hard-hearted. Here comes the image the class is built around:
“The sky is detached from the clouds. The sky is the best guru teaching the art of detachment. But have I ever seen the sky being angry with the clouds? It allows all clouds — silvery ones, dark ones, thundering ones, quiet ones — all float. And it has absolutely no problem with them.”
That, he says, is the ideal of detachment to be reached by every human being, and it is innate in you. At the beginning it will seem like a mountainous job. But you have the potential: you are the soul, a ray of God.
On abhyasa he returns to the familiar sutra — sa tu dirghakala-nairantarya-satkarasevito dridhabhumih — with a simple test. Do not set your mind to a duration. Do not say you will pray daily for a year, or three months, and give it up if it has not paid off. “That’s not abhyasa.” You never set a limit to your eating or your breathing. You would never announce that you will eat nutritious food for thirty days and then quit if you are not strong. First recognise that certain things belong in a life the way breathing and eating do.
The Plan of Sadhana
Integral yoga is the plan. Karma yoga is its most practical aspect: how to live in this world handling duties so that the heart opens to sublimer things. Action well done brings chitta shuddhi, purity of heart. Duties can be of all kinds — serving a patient, consoling a person, advising, guiding, or simply praying for someone as circumstances allow. God has arranged things so that you cannot sit in one place; the body keeps moving. Jahi vidhi rakhe Ram, tahi vidhi rahiye — however you find yourself placed in the world, do not complain against it. Understand instead the divine privilege of human embodiment, and handle your situation with deeper understanding, because then it becomes worship.
Alongside action is bhavana, feeling, allowed to blossom until it becomes profound. You begin to understand that you are loving God in human beings. There are two kinds of love to handle: love based on personal identity — your father, mother, brother, sister — which has its own role and its own real impact on the heart, and the deeper recognition beneath it. Go deeper into it, he says, the way the sky handles the cloud. The source of all love is God himself. Properly understood, a mother will care for her children with tremendous love and that love will not stand between her and enlightenment. Apparently a person relates to you on the basis of your ego; profoundly, every person and every object is divine, and you are being led to love God through little samples of relationship.
Then devotion and meditation, and then jnana yoga — allowing the intellect clearer understanding. Practised day to day it becomes one blend: right performance of duty, japa and meditation, growing devotion, and insight into Who am I? “That’s the message of the Gita.” And once adopted, there is no limit after which you stop. Even deeply enriched, even enlightened, the idea of giving it up will not arise.
The Sutra
Vitarka vichara ananda asmita-rupa-anugamat samprajnatah.
Samadhi is the superconscious state, broadly of two kinds — lower and higher. Samprajnata is the lower, and it has four aspects here (six, more precisely, with detail to come later).
What characterises the movement toward samadhi in daily experience is bhavana, the way the mind feels from a profound point of view. It is a blend of intellect and heart, and feeling functions differently from intellectual analysis. Swamiji’s illustration: a great deal of mathematics goes into musical language, and music and mathematics blend to create melody. “Heart and head must blend to create spiritual melody.” If you have created that melody, your life will be thrilling day by day.
Vitarka — the Mind That Opposes Itself
The first level deals with feelings that oppose right conduct. The five yamas give the outline: ahimsa, satya, brahmacharya, asteya, aparigraha — non-violence and not hurting anybody, sincerity and truthfulness, purity of mind, not entering perverted desires, not being greedy. When the mind moves against these, bhavana becomes polluted; this is durbhavana.
No one lives without bhavana — the mind is always planning, scheming, imagining. Even a thief has his. “How wonderful it could be: I could get into the house and know exactly where the money is, break in, and take all of it.” And he feels a thrill at every step. But you do not have to be a thief. Even for ordinary people, Swamiji says, “your project is to become super normal. Normality doesn’t satisfy.”
So watch the mind. How long does anger stay? What do you do when you are provoked — do you sit back and plan revenge, and when you run out of ideas, recruit someone to help you? That is durbhavana, and it is the vitarka condition of the mind: never satisfied, shaking, shimmering, wasting its energy.
The right course is pratipaksha bhavana, the counter-movement. First notice: this is not helpful to me. “This doesn’t become me — this anger, this hatred. I, whose heart is going to be a divine temple, why should a roach enter into it? Why should pollution enter my heart?” That counter-movement means you are no longer accepting it.
Then three stages, taking anger as the example.
Suppress. Do not allow it to express through your speech or your action. Keep it at the mental level.
Substitute. Merely holding the anger thought will itself waste your energy — and the mind will start hunting: when did I first notice my anger? You may need a psychologist. You may get cleverer still and try to find which birth it came from. That is a fast road into distraction. Instead, simply: “This is not me. I am an embodiment of love, a ray of God.” Switch the mind to the positive counter-thought — instead of anger, forgiveness; instead of anger, love. And keep switching, again and again, however many times the mind turns. “The moment you begin to do that, you are moving towards saintliness.”
Sublimation. The anger energy becomes sublimated, and the mind enjoys its victory over anger, experiencing immense satisfaction. Seeing an enemy revenged gives satisfaction of a gross type. Seeing an enemy changed into an angel by your own patience and persistence “speaks of the glory of your soul.” And Swamiji adds the line worth keeping: “When you glorify your soul, you feel wonderful. When you degrade your soul, you feel miserable.”
When negative ideas still come but you can handle them, you have reached the first level of samadhi — savitarka.
Vichara — the Higher Storey
The next level is thought itself, and it feels much better: like moving to a higher storey of a building from which you can see more.
But here too there is a fork — sad-vichara and asad-vichara. A highly intellectual person can turn that intellect toward finding the defects of others, hunting “the footprints of the thieves.” A healthy intellect turns instead toward discovering your own defects and removing them, letting your thinking grow more magnanimous. Vichara is enhanced by satsanga, study of scriptures, and spiritual guidance, and it opens a whole forest to be explored — a forest of divine glory. “Nothing can give you a greater joy than having clear thinking in your mind.”
Here Swamiji brings Kabir in twice.
Man nirmal bhayo jaise Ganga neer, pache lage hari phire, ghat Kabir Kabir. As long as the mind is muddled and clarity is missing, God seems to run away from you. You suffer, you are told to turn to God and surrender, you go to the temple — and even there you are looking at others, interacting, letting the intellect be dominated by negative thoughts. But when the mind is purified by devotion and daily sadhana, pache lage hari phire — God goes after you. You do not even have to remember Him; He says, I am with you, here. The divine presence is a perpetual presence in the heart. Most people feel God has somehow run away and must be reached at Badri or Kedar through great trouble, and they go, led by their own minds. But with clarity, with satsanga, with the art of reflection, God in all His majesty is right there in the heart.
Man changa to kathwat mein Ganga. When the mind has become positive, you see the Ganges flowing in your own bathtub. And if the clarity has not come, you can go to the actual Ganges in the Himalayas and hear only dogs barking and see only vultures. He is careful here: “I’m not discouraging pilgrimage — that’s always wonderful.” The point is that without attention to the mind itself, you gain nothing.
Vichara asks the subtle questions: Who am I? What is the goal? What is the nature of the world? In dream, consciousness splits three ways — the dream subject, the dream world, the dream experience — and all three are illusions. The same applies in waking. And what do you know of yourself? You don’t. Vichara is what is needed to know Who am I? — and what I really want.
Swamiji lays out the classic three attitudes. Deha buddhya tu dasoham — as long as you view yourself as the body, take the attitude of an instrument in God’s hands. Jiva buddhya tvadamshakah — when the mind focuses on being a ray of God, develop that: I am a ray, God is the sun, and there is a constant inner link through japa, devotion, surrender. Atma buddhya tvamevaham — go beyond mind and intellect: the I am in you is absolute.
In that realisation three illusions break: the illusion of your subjective presence, the illusion that the world is real, and the illusion of the experiences themselves. He notes that the world’s unreality does not even require philosophy or religion — science explains it every moment, a world of vibrations and energy, reached only through five channels. Lose one sense and a fifth of the world is gone; lose two and two-fifths. An unreal you interacting with an unreal world, and the experiences, however impressive, also only illusions. Yo sapne sir kaate koi, binu jaage dukh door na hoi — if someone cuts off your head in a dream, the suffering ends only on waking.
So let the intellect be your flashlight, directed at the deepest project, and let everything you do in the world stay in harmony with that question. Then you have attained vichara samadhi.
Ananda and Asmita
Vichara leads to being centred on your own being — and that has stages. First you are centred on the ego, but the ego stripped of egoism. The moment you reach that state there is tremendous joy: like a person who has carried a big burden and had the whole load taken away. “You have found the key to the kingdom of heaven.” The whole matter, he says, lies with your ego sense.
Then the deeper level, asmita, the cause of the ego — and the cause of ego is non-discrimination. The intellect is not yet purified enough to separate the Self from the not-Self. The body, the pranic layer, mind and senses, intellect and ego, and the unconscious: these are not the Self. Vedanta teaches that you are beyond the five sheaths and beyond the three bodies. When that insight develops, it is sasmita samadhi — a state of enlightenment in which you understand “I am close to the absolute Self.”
And then the last question: when will this “I” drop? A river has come to the ocean; there is only a momentary deviation left. “The moment the ego within the river moves away, the river has become the ocean.” Reaching asmita, you have come to the climax of the lower samadhi.
From another angle, the ego becomes increasingly transparent, and the three gunas describe the stages. A tamasic ego is dark and crude, and you cannot see anything beyond it — in the Ramayana, Kumbhakarna. A rajasic ego is Ravana with ten heads. A sattvic ego is Vibhishana, who lived among those brothers and then suddenly turned to Rama.
As the ego clears, the vision of the Self grows, and with it atma-rati, ishvara-rati — the joy of being the Self. That joy is present in all your experiences already; it has simply become polluted. Swamiji distinguishes vishaya-ras from atma-ras. The joy received through the senses and the fulfilment of desires has its root in the divine joy, but it has mixed with your samskaras the way pure water passing through rock picks up sediment, so that what emerges is polluted. That joy, in conjunction with objects, keeps you in ignorance. Through samadhi you come to discover the source of all joy — pure ananda. And you realise that even remaining with the purest ego is not as joyous as letting that ego go and being one with That.
He closes by naming the four again — vitarka, the mind corrected of negative thought; vichara, the intellect grown thoughtful; ananda, where the focus rests at the ego level and karmas no longer obstruct, the treasure already in your hand though the relief comes only when you dig it out; and asmita, in close conjunction with the highest enlightenment. “And I will leave you with these four.”
Reflect
Which cloud are you still arguing with — and what would it cost you to let it pass?
Scholar’s Corner
- Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Chapter 1 (Samadhi Pada), Sutra 17: vitarka vichara ananda asmita-rupa-anugamat samprajnatah — the four aspects of samprajnata (lower) samadhi.
- Yoga Sutra I.14 also invoked: sa tu dirghakala-nairantarya-satkarasevito dridhabhumih — practice made firm by long duration, uninterruptedness, and reverent joy.
- Pratipaksha bhavana (cf. Yoga Sutra II.33) worked out in three practical stages: suppress, substitute, sublimate.
- Kabir: man nirmal bhayo jaise Ganga neer, pache lage hari phire and man changa to kathwat mein Ganga.
- Tulsidas: jahi vidhi rakhe Ram, tahi vidhi rahiye; and yo sapne sir kaate koi, binu jaage dukh door na hoi.
- The three attitudes: deha buddhya tu dasoham, jiva buddhya tvadamshakah, atma buddhya tvamevaham.
- The tamasic, rajasic and sattvic ego read through Kumbhakarna, Ravana and Vibhishana.
Glossary
Samprajnata samadhi: the lower superconscious state, still accompanied by an object of support.
Vitarka: the level at which the mind is still pulled by feelings opposing right conduct.
Vichara: the level of clarified thought and inquiry; the “higher storey.”
Ananda: the level resting in the joy of being, the ego stripped of egoism.
Asmita: the level of pure I-am-ness, the climax of the lower samadhi.
Pratipaksha bhavana: deliberately cultivating the opposite thought to a negative one.
Durbhavana: a polluted or scheming feeling-state.
Chitta shuddhi: purity of the mind-stuff, the fruit of action well done.
Vishaya-ras / atma-ras: the joy tasted through sense objects, versus the joy of the Self.
The five yamas: ahimsa, satya, brahmacharya, asteya, aparigraha.
The five sheaths and three bodies: the Vedantic layers the Self is beyond.
This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.