How do these three principles work together then? How does each complement the other?
As we remodel the cognitive occupants of our mind, we realize some were incorrect and faulty. Out of alignment with the real, true ones. Now, replacing them is not a simple matter of pushing bad ones out to bring in the good ones. Our bad, hurtful concepts of life have an emotional stake in our psyche-minds too.
You may believe rich people are evil because a rich person hurt you. You might not even remember what happened, it could have been an experience far before your current life. Your perception is not dry, it has an emotional stake, an emotional charge. You will realize that this idea is false once you begin to restructure your mind. You will realize it is a misconception, a wrong cognition. You will have to replace it with the correct cognition, a favourable idea. Favourable to you becoming wealthy because it could be this exact fear of wealth’s evil which is keeping you trapped in poverty. It is holding you back, obstructing your progress. Correct this wrong cognition, this misconception. In doing so, you are exhausting it of its negative emotional charge. Deactivate it by discharging it before you can put a new cognition in its place.
It will happen only by processing your emotions. Discharge it by reliving, again and again all related incidents you remember. Incidents which hurt you enough to make you feel this way. Maybe you had a rich uncle who treated your parents and family poorly. Maybe he took away your father’s properties.You picked up this painful idea from your many encounters with him, and it hurt you. Relive the incidents again and again, till they evoke no emotion in you. Till you feel nothing about them. Only then do you have a chance of replacing the idea with a more positive one.
Relive and release them repeatedly to drain the experiences of their negative charge. To deactivate your samskaras.
Ofcourse, this does not apply to negative samskaras alone. But you have to begin with the negative, then turn to the positive, till they have all been destroyed. The good thing is that once you set the process in motion, it grows on its own.
It is a self-evolving program. The yogic sofware just needs to be activated. It will evolve on its own.
Does it make sense now, the relationship between cognition and emotions? You will throw out the cognitions which dis-empower you only by feeling them away. The laws of life relate intimately with emotions.
What about meditation then? How would that play its part in this scenario?
So there are incidents which you are conscious of, which you can recall. Some others have hidden themselves in your subconscious, ones you can still remember, but with focused effort. Then there are still others which happened before this lifetime and there is no chance of remembering them. Yet, they left behind impressions which are giving you new experiences today.
Remember the blog where we classified the samskaras as:
a) Ugra (dominant)
b) Susupti (dormant)
c) Tanu (weak)
d) Vichhinda (Intercepted)
So some samskaras dominate while others are weak or simply latent. You must access the samskaras which you cannot access in ordinary waking states through meditation.
See, meditation is the process of uncovering hidden layers, of pulling the shrouds off many shrouds. Of moving through one curtain to another behind it, uncovering more. Like Russian dolls, one hidden inside the other. When you meditate, you have closer access to these hidden layers and you can uncover them. Meditation brings to the surface those samskaras which you cannot otherwise readily access. We know meditating takes us down into the engine room of the vehicle of our psyche-mind, to the level of samskaras. Deep states of meditation (absorption or entasy) also helps scorch them out of existence.
So in a nutshell, you must remodel your psyche-mind by displacing wrong cognitions with the right, lawful ones. Remodeling will be incomplete without discharging your wrong cognitions of their emotional component. This means you will have to process each idea emotionally as if the incidents which caused them were happening in real time.
You have to become the person you were when they occurred, you will have to regress back in age if it was in the past.
Be clear about this, rationalising away your hurt will be useless.
Talking to yourself, logically convincing yourself about it will not work. Such logic and rationality is for fools. As most of logic and rationality is. That is why therapists’ couches do not work. Talking about it, explaining it away intellectually will not help. Your emotions will not understand logic and intellect. That, again, is a short term solution. A band-aid, a quick fix.
Become the child who was hurt. Cry like you cried then. Think like you thought then. Only then can you discharge your samskaras. Otherwise they will scuttle away to hide somewhere deep in the depths of your mind to keep projecting onto the screen of your life.
So the three principles of the yogic process; the troika are: Meditation, Cognitive restructuring and Emotional processing.
They go hand in hand, urging and encouraging each other. One instigates progress of the other, growth in one pushes the other to advance. Together this troika gives birth to and helps consummate the organism of yoga.
Yoga is an organism growing in your system, just like a baby grows in a woman’s body. It is not a static process, not a set of rules to follow, a set of diktats to be practise, physically or whichever way. It is an organic being, one which takes birth, take shape and finally matures to consummation inside you.
This triad, its three limbs pull each other as they grow along, together.
Continual cognitive shifting; rooting out the misconceptions again and again, helps you gain access to hitherto unknown samskaras. As you sniff out an idea which seems to be causing your suffering, you dig deeper to uncover another idea, one which is actually controlling the puppet strings, one you were unaware of.
Let’s look at an example.
You work really hard to get to medical school even though your passion lies in music. This is a source of suffering for you, because you really miss music, in spite of being good at school. You feel creatively trapped, but you cannot help it. You just ignore your creative urge and trudge away at school.
Let’s go deeper into the way you think about this
You : 1. I must gain admission to medical school.
Why MUST you gain admission to medical school?
2. Because medicine is a coveted profession.
Why is medicine a coveted profession? Why can you not be successful elsewhere?
3. Because doctors are intellectuals who serve society.
What is wrong with serving society another way?
4. I would not be worthy enough if I were not an intellectual.
Worthy? What would happen if you were not worthy enough?
5. No one would love me.
Who will not love you?
6. My family. My father for sure. Me, myself.
Your father for sure?
7. Yes, and that would be a terrible thing, I could never survive that. He must love me.
What if he did not love you?
8. I would rather die.
As you dig deeper, you arrive at sources of your suffering you are unaware of. Fundamentally, you want everyone, and most importantly, your father to love and accept you. You see the path of medical school as the only way your father might. Maybe you are thinking wrong. Maybe you need not buy love and acceptance that way. You can love and accept your own self enough to follow your passions and succeed. Maybe there are other ways. You need to re-model your belief that makes you unworthy without a medical degree. The belief that ties everything you are to everything you do, possess and achieve. The belief that you, in yourself, without these embellishments are worthless. Worthless enough to be dead.
Now simply choosing to think, ” I love myself enough to make a career out of my passion”, will not be enough. This is because your ideas of self worth and success link with your emotional stakes of love and acceptance. Sometime, somewhere, someone did not love you for exactly who you were. As deep as its roots look, it is possible your father dismissed your passion for music when you were a child. Maybe he expressed outright disdain. He might have repeatedly told you an intellectual profession would make him happy. It might have hurt you, you must have been sad, often. In fact he did not love you or accept you as far as you can remember. Its possible; parents do this with their children unknowingly, out of their own suffering, their own samskaras.
So if you were to go about remodeling your mind, you will have to relive all these incidents. As for the incidents you cannot remember, you meditate for them to rise to the surface. With such a high emotional stake, this samskara is certainly strong and deep rooted. You must process it emotionally, exhaust its negative charge again and again.
For what seems like an average problem in today’s world, its roots run dangerously deep. It a heavy cross to bear. This heavy, bloody cross dictates a large part of our lives; makes us dance to its tunes, leads us onto paths we think we absolutely must take. It makes us do things we think are essential. When in reality, it is an utter waste of your time and talents.
Once you have dealt with such a strong samskara emotionally, Yoga has just climbed a few notches higher in your system. Not only have you uncovered and cleaned a minefield, you have now planted beautiful new saplings for a garden to grow in its place! You imbibe new cognitions, new truths which are absolute and essential. ” I am lovable in and of myself. I am perfect now as I am. I desire to be greater, but I am great as myself, even now”. This is one such absolute, objective truth. One of the laws of life, of existence. Of nature.
You remodeled your ideas, you burnt up those unhealthy samskaras with meditation and cognitive processing.
Don’t you see how each limb of the triad helped the other, urged it to progress?
I have to mention that this example is very basic in the whole scheme of Yogic progress. It accurately expresses how the Yogic program unfolds, but the cognitions, the laws of life you must learn about are much more complex and vast.
You have many unknown, hidden samskaras lodged deep inside our psyche-minds. Ones which you can access, process and kill by this yogic technology. When the psyche-mind is free of samskaras, it collapses. It was actually an illusory construct standing on emotionally charged impressions. Your psyche-mind unit dissolves, and no, don’t worry, you do not lose your mind to death or madness or any such thing. It is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to you, this collapse of the airy smoke house of your psyche-mind-identity complex. You arise fresh and anew, with a brand new, enhanced cognitive structure and senses.
It is as if a beautiful, lush, rolling grass valley of unimagined beauty and pleasure was always there, but you could never see it, far from ever reaching it. A solid mountain seemed to block your view, not letting you see beyond. You now drop into these lush, rolling greens through a new bridge you built, the bridge of Yoga. Funnily, as you were building it, the mountain began to crumble. Finally it collapsed and vanished. To your utter shock, you see that it was made of loose sand. It was not solid at all. Beautiful, exotic flowers, ones you never saw before cover this rolling green, thick and wide. Beauty with no parallel! Exquisite, heavenly bliss. Suddenly, you see yourself dissolve into this exotic beauty; you realize these exotic flowers are inside you, they make you up, every part of you. You can taste their nectar, you can smell their fragrances inside you. You are them, these exquisite beauties.You are them and they are you, with no boundaries.You take intoxicated dips in this beauty of yourself; you taste your own nectar as it flows into your bones. Then into your limbs, into every corner of you. This sweet, viscous nectar, makes you. You are it.
You are not thinking it, you have become it.
That is yoga! The highest union.