senses and the ego. Where do these dangers come from? They come from certain
encounters of the meditative individual. What does it encounter? It encounters
certain forces which present themselves as personalities, forms, shapes, objects, etc.
These forms, which present themselves before one’s experience, are the very
counterparts of the desires of the senses and the ego. It is to be noted here that
everything that is in our individual personality has a cosmical counterpart. Whether
it is good or bad, whether it is of this nature or that nature, everything that is inside
has a counterpart in the outer world. So, the pressure exerted by any particular
aspect in the individual personality stirs up the corresponding counterpart in the
outer world, and we encounter that. It is something like the operations of a puppet
show. A person operating the movement of puppets with strings is the power that
conditions these movements outside. The operator behind moves the fingers in a
particular way and accordingly, correspondingly, there is the movement of the
puppets outside.
The objects—whatever be their nature outside in the world—with which we come in
contact, are what are invoked and evoked by our inner potentialities. We cannot see
anything which we do not deserve, or which is not intended to be a teacher for us or a
means of passing through experience. Here, in ordinary life, the life that we are living
today, many of these tendencies are pressed down, repressed by the power of a
particular form of desire which we are fulfilling in our daily life and a particular form
of ego-affirmation, which sets aside every other affirmation. Every time one
particular aspect comes to the surface, it pushes the other aspects to the background,
so that we appear to be only one thing at a time, and not two things. We do not have
two moods at one moment; there is always one mood only, though these moods may
go on changing every day, or even in the same day at different times. The different
experiences we pass through and the different objects we face in life are the activities
of these predominant aspects in our inner personality which work gradually, stage by
stage, according to the convenience of the time or when circumstances become
favourable.
But in yoga, something different happens. We are not pushing aside certain aspects
of our personality and presenting only certain predominant features for the purpose
of objective experience. The entire thing is stirred up into action, because the
purpose of yoga is to liberate the soul from the total bondage to which it is subject in
the form of phenomenal experience. Therefore, we have to face everything, every day,
at one stroke. This happens, says the Yoga Shastra, at a particular stage—not in the
very advanced stage of prajna jyotis or atikranta bhavaniya, where we have
completely mastered everything and we know things very well, nor when nothing has
happened and we are just at the rudimentary, beginning stage of practice. These
difficulties start when we are about to transcend the first level—this is what the Yoga
Shastra tells us. When we have entered the stage called prathama kalpita and we are
about to rise to the next one, namely, the madhu bhumika, then there is this
dramatic encounter of the meditating consciousness with everything blessed on earth
or in heaven.
What is it that we are going to encounter? It is not easy for anyone to detail these
before they come. But, generally speaking, they are supposed to be the forms taken
by one’s own weaknesses. Every person has some weakness, which is smothered and
stifled by the apparent personality that one puts forth in human society. But that
weakness still persists. It is kept there in ambush, waiting for favourable conditions