There is nevertheless a chance that we can break free from the im
prisoning past and individually train ourselves to control this reactive
mechanism in such a way that the old patterns are not repeated; new
things truly can happen, and real changes can in fact take place. This
dawning clarity is, in essence, the path of yoga.
The evolutionary process I have just described can be summed up
individually as "Getting more of what I genuinely desire and less of
what I don't." The trick is to recognize which is which and then act on
it. The paradox arises in that to train ourselves to achieve this, we have
to start by doing a fair bit of what we don't want to do, and rather less
of what we think we do. Yoga calls this tapas, which I've translated as
sustained courageous practice. The French philosopher Descartes said
happiness does not consist in acquiring the things we think will make
us happy, but in learning to like doing the things we have to do
anyway. Try this when you're waiting for a late train or doing the
washing up.
If you want to learn how to repair a car, you first need to learn the
parts. Similarly, we must now discuss the three components of con
sciousness and look in detail at the user's manual that yoga offers for
the human condition.
Yoga philosophy identifies three main constituents of conscious
ness, considering them to be an evolution of nature. We all admire the
myriad complexities of nature's long evolution-opposable thumbs,
the eye of the fish or eagle, the metamorphosis of the frog, a bird's
wing, the bat's radar, or at a more subtle level, our own linguistic and
grammatical abilities, hard-wired into the brain cells of every healthy
human. Yoga asks us to look at the unfolding complexities of con
sciousness on the evolutionary path that are even more subtle-such
as mind, "I-shape," and intelligence-and to question what they are
and how they work. Our mind processes our thoughts and lived expe
riences. The !-shape allows us to establish a distinction between our
selves and others, whether our mother or the person on the bus next
II K S I Y 1'. N l ; A II