Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

will function perfectly in the morning. In other words, your car has a
weakness, a defect, but with a little forethought and trouble, it will not
cause a problem. That is the attitude we should have toward the six
emotional disturbances. As the modern saying goes, we should live in
the solution, not in the problem.
Most Westerners try to solve their emotional problems through in­
tellectual understanding. Emotional issues can, however, be resolved
only through emotional understanding. Emotions lie in a physical sense
in the organs of the physiological body-at the level of the pranamaya
kosa. Think of the irritable, liverish army colonel who abuses his liver
with too much chili and brandy. So too, our positive, beneficial emo­
tions have their seat in healthy organs. It is the health of the physio­
logical body that creates the primary link between Health and
Salvation. Look at children; they are innocent because they are organ­
ically healthy. The two go together. World-weary organs indulge in
world-weary vice.
I have said that emotions have their root in the organic body, but
they do not always stay there. They invade and occupy memory. A dog
can feel angry, but only we humans can say, "I am so angry with my
boss," and record it in memory. When we say we feel angry, it is a
mental perception of our state, and having registered that perception,
we record it in memory where it becomes part of the stock and furni­
ture of mind. The dog might subsequently come across the sensory
stimulus that brings back the anger, or fear, or whatever the emotion
is, but that is a cellular memory, a conditioned reflex, absent when the
trigger that fires it is not activated. The point about us is that we carry
around within the recollection of mind our rancor, resentments, hates,
greed, and lust, even when the motivating stimulus is absent. So when
our boss is on holiday, we carry on hating him. This does not harm
him, but it certainly pollutes and poisons us. It is both a blockage and
a dissipation of our vital energies. Who is rich enough to afford such
waste? Who is pure enough to endure such systemic toxin?