will find that we have to face our own selves. Whom are we facing and encountering
there? We are facing and encountering and fighting with our own selves. Therefore, it
is an arduous struggle indeed. Who can sever one’s own throat and commit suicide, if
at all we can call it suicide? It is a suicide of consciousness. It is a complete uprooting
of the very bottom of the ego, which was there like a hard, concrete, substantial
something, swallowing up all the realities of life, appropriating all value to itself, and
appearing as the most important thing in all life. Such a thing is now regarded as
nothing. That which once paraded itself as the most magnificent of things in life is
now regarded as a worthless thing—the most worthless of things. So we can imagine,
with the stretch of our analytical mind, what we are up against, and how it is hard for
even a well-boiled, trained seeker to pass through this crucial gate of communion
with the object of meditation.
Here, we have only one sutra. Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras, does not give
much detail. Though he gives details of certain other mental transformations which
we have to undergo later on, he does not touch upon further details about the actual
difficulties of a seeker in entering into this state of communion. He simply says,
tadeva arthamātranirbhāsaṁ (III.3). There the meditating consciousness does not exist
at all; it has become the object of meditation. This is what he tells us. It is the object
which is contemplating itself as being. Previously, the being was of consciousness of
the mind, of oneself, of the subject that meditates. Now the being of consciousness is
shifted to the object, and the object assumes the character of the subject, so that the
object has become the subject. It is here that we have intuition of the object. Just as
we have a direct knowledge of our own selves, much more than any knowledge that
we can have of other people, we will have a direct knowledge of anything in this
world, of any object, because the subjectivity that we appropriated to ourselves alone,
exclusively, up to this time, and would never allow this subjectivity to anybody else,
has now became a common property. Previously, we were the only subject;
everybody was an object for us. Now the tables have turned; we are now so generous
that we allow everyone else in the whole universe to also enjoy this prerogative of
being a subject.
Hence, the universe is full of only subjects now; there are no objects. It is not merely
a conception of the presence of subjectivity in others that we are speaking of, because
here, in this advanced stage, there are no conceptions. There is no idea about
something. It is a self-identical awareness, such as can be compared with the feeling
of our own self, even when we close our senses. We close our eyes, close our ears,
close all the gateways of sensory cognition, and yet we will feel a kind of self-identity
of ourselves—‘I am’. This consciousness of oneself being there is independent of any
kind of sense activity. Such a kind of awareness will arise in us in respect of
everything else in the world. We will not any more say ‘you’, ‘he’ or ‘she’, or ‘it’—such
a thing will not be there. ‘I am’ is the only experience. This ‘I am-ness’ is not an
affirmation of our bodily individuality, as it had been the case earlier; it is a Universal
‘I’ asserting itself. There, everything that we once upon a time regarded as an object
has become part and parcel of its own being. This is a very great problem indeed for
the mind that is used to thinking in terms of the body and social relations. But this is
the problem of yoga. If you properly understand the significance of the difficulty that
I have placed before you at this point of meditation, you will also know how hard it is
for a human being to practise yoga.