Yoga is Technology to Find Your Self - Part 2

Continuing from Part 1 -

Modifications of the mind are not only undesirable but are also detrimental to higher spiritual pursuits. Through the unwholesome activities of the mindstuff, the soul is obstructed from revealing itself in its original illumination. But the very moment it is restrained from taking various modifications, the Self, as it were, gets a chance to centre and abide in its own nature.

Patanjali explains the soul not merely as Spirit or as Conscious Intelligence but calls it "Seer", that is the real Cogniser and not the instrumental agents of perception such as the mindstuff and the senses - Physical and others. So what happens to the Soul when the mindstuff is not restrained and when it is in its active condition? In such a case the Soul begins to identify itself with the modifications created by the mind. When the mindstuff keeps modifying, the Self is dragged into the identification of these forms which do not actually belong to it. In reality, it is not the soul which enjoys any action performed by us but the mindstuff. The Soul is well beyond this. Hence the identification of the soul with the mindstuff is undoubtedly a wrong notion. And this false notion remains as long as the mindstuff is not restrained within us. Just as one says that the crystal is red only because it happens to be in contact with a red rose. This is how we usually mix up the real self with the changeable variations of the mindstuff. We say “I enjoyed the scene, I hated the man", so on and so forth only because we identify ourselves with our body and not the real self.

Excerpts of the above come from the Living Tree, musings of Shri Yogendraji and my own interpretation of other book forms and old newspaper cuttings.