Expanded
Consciousness Allows Us
To Take a Rest
from External Perceptions
Carlos Cardoso
Aveline

Like an old dog who comes back to be near his master
The Yoga Sutras
say:
“Yoga is the suppression of the transformations of the
thinking principle”. [1]
This cannot be done from the outside or from the
periphery of one’s consciousness. Attempts to control the whole mind from its
external layers are at best neurotic. Effectiveness is attained when the
ability to stop one’s mind - or move it at will - is exerted from the very
center of the thinking principle.
And this depends on the purity of the heart.
A “pure” heart is that level of human consciousness that
is free from personal desire.
When the soul has “seen enough” of a lower scenario of
life, it transfers its focus to a higher level. Yoga happens as one’s
consciousness feels at home in the absence of lower-self desire and fear, and aspires
to nothing except Goodness in itself.
It does not emerge as a goal being achieved by
someone’s personality. It takes place as the cure of all suffering and as that
kind of stability that contains the best of every movement.
It is felt like the feeling of the old dog who comes
back to be near his master: everything is OK for the mind that is next to its
teacher or spiritual soul. It is not necessary then to think, in order to
understand all things.
In the life of a spiritual pilgrim, the lower self
will sometimes gravely realize that “there has been a stoppage, and a vast wordless, soundless insight occurred together
with an absence of chronological time”.
It is not up to the personality to produce a
transition to higher states of mind. However,
it can humbly pave the way for it to occur, in the present lifetime or in some
future incarnation.
Sooner or later, right effort produces right insight.
NOTE:
[1] Sutra 2 of Section One, in “The Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali”. One of the best editions available has translation, Introduction,
Appendix, and Notes by Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi. Click here to see the book in one of our associated websites. It
was published by Tookárám Tátyá for the Bombay Theosophical Publication Fund,
1890, 107 pages.
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The above article
incorporates the note entitled “Commentary on a Sutra”, which was published - with
no indication as to the name of the author - in the December 2016 edition of
“The Aquarian Theosophist”.
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