Image courtesy: leirwilliams.com
We have picked many of our ideas and concepts, perceptions and worldviews from our environment. From our families and our cultures. These are our samskaras, our impressions we have collected and are still collecting in our current lifetimes. Many of our other ideas and conceptions arise from our old samskaras, whose origins we are unaware of. Remember, we talked about how a samskara needs an experience to exhaust itself? Like latent potential energy converts to kinetic energy in movement?
A samskara is latent, potential energy, which needs an equivalent experience to convert to the manifest, kinetic energy. This is how experiences happen, how life happens.Your current life experiences are just physical manifestations of your older samskaras. They have become ripe, ready to play out on the canvas of your life. Your older samskaras are providing you your current life experiences, and these life experiences are in turn giving you new samskaras. The people you meet, the job you do, the pleasures and sufferings you encounter. The cycle, remember?
No bearded God perched on a throne, no super-man raining down luck or misfortune, no one is doing anything to you. It is the physics of life working on you. The laws of existence, like gravity or electromagnetism.
Your life is unfolding as your older impressions, your older samskaras are playing out. Hidden reels being projected onto the movie screens of your life. So in effect, the kind of samskaras, the kind of perceptions and cognitions you carry are giving you the kind of life experiences you have. Hence, if you are battling with heartbreak, or your business is failing, you either desired this or feared this greatly before. The strong emotional residue of a previous bad experience, which lies hidden inside you, is playing out. It is becoming a new experience. This is a cognition which has become a physical experience.
In another example you may have samskaras with a strong negative charge, a strong impression of being unlovable. You might not be conscious of it, but your samskaras state, “Nobody really loves you; they will eventually abandon you.” The origin of this belief could go back to your childhood when your mother did not love you because she was angry. She was angry at your father for having abandoned both of you. As a well put-together adult, you wish for a loving relationship with a woman who will never abandon you. However, what you want and your emotional impressions are at odds with each other. Your samskaras scream ‘unlovable’ because many past experiences have left those impressions. You might want and want to be loved, but you see, your samskaras will win. You are not in control. They will become physical, you will experience a lack of love and abandonment, again and again. Until you intervene. Until you decide to exhaust these samksaras in another way.
Until you wish to jam this cycle, this vicious loop. Samskaras to experience, and back to samskaras.
Until you decide to activate new ones. Until you decide to create samskaras which say “I am lovable, I will always have people to love me”.
That is restructuring. It is realigning your cognition with objective Yogic truths. That is a Yogic law, for you and for everyone. That you are completely lovable in spite of everything. In spite of yourself. Just by virtue of existing. Just because you are.
So cognitive restructuring is about aligning with these Yogic truths to take away your suffering. We know that suffering arises because you are violating some natural law. You are not a victim of bad people when they do not love you. It does not work that way. Your painful samskaras are simply playing out and bringing you experience where you feel unloved. Experience is confirming your impressions. You are violating the law that declares “I am lovable simply because I exist”, and hence you are suffering. No one is doing anything to you, at least not in the way you think. They are living through their own painful samskaras of maybe say, incapacity for loving others. They are suffering too.
All conflicts of our world comes from the interaction of the sufferings of two people. Each with his own variety of pain, his own variety of painful samskaras in action. In action as experience.
So once you align, the suffering vanishes, and it was as simple a matter as that.
You must discover these absolute truths, just like physicists discover the laws of physical nature. These are the laws of existence. They are the laws of Yoga. You are working against them and inadvertently hurting yourself. You have to align with these absolute laws.
What are these absolute truths? Not so soon. You will have to wait. You will have to discover for yourself.