So nature has given an emergency device; the chest is an emergency device. When a tiger attacks you, you have to drop natural breathing and you have to breathe from the chest.
Then you will have more capacity to run, to fight, to burn energy fast. And in an emergency situation there are only two alternatives – flight or fight. Both need a very shallow but intense energy – shallow, but a very disturbed, tense state.
Now if you continuously breathe from the chest, you will have tension in your mind. If you continuously breathe from the chest, you will always be afraid. Because the chest breathing is meant to be only in fearful situations. And if you have made it a habit then you will be continuously afraid, tense, always in flight. The enemy is not there, but you will imagine the enemy is there. That’s how paranoia is created.
In the West also a few people have come across this phenomenon – Alexander Lowen or other bioenergetic people who have been working on bioenergy. That is prana. They have come to feel that people who are afraid, their chest is tense and they are breathing very shallow breaths. If their breathing can be made deeper, to go and touch the belly, the hara center, then their fear disappears. If their musculature can be relaxed, as it is done in Rolfing…. Ida Rolf has invented one of the most beautiful methods to change the inner structure of the body. Because if you have been breathing wrongly, for many years, you have developed a musculature, and that musculature will be in the way and will not allow you to breathe rightly or breathe deeply. And even if you remember for a few seconds – you will breathe deeply – again when you are engaged in your work you will start breathing shallow chest breathings. The musculature has to be changed. Once the musculature is changed, the fear disappears and the tension disappears. Rolfing is tremendously helpful; but working is on pranamaya kosha, the second – bioplasma body, bioenergy body, chi body, or whatsoever you want to call it.
Watch a child and that is the natural breathing, and breathe that way. Let your belly come up when you inhale, let your belly go down when you exhale. And let it be in such a rhythm it becomes almost a song in your energy, a dance – with rhythm, with harmony – and you will feel so relaxed, so alive, so vital that you cannot imagine that such vitality is possible.
Then there is the third body, manomaya kosha – the mental body. The third is bigger than the second, subtler than the second, higher than the second. Animals have the second body but not the third body. Animals are so vital. See a lion walking. What beauty, what grace, what grandeur. Man has always felt jealous. See a deer running. What weightlessness, what energy, what a great energy phenomenon. Man has always felt jealous. But man’s energy is moving higher.
The third body is manomaya kosha, the mental body. This is bigger, more spacious than the second. And if you don’t grow it, you will remain almost just a possibility of man but not a real man. The word “man” comes from man, manomaya. The English word also comes from the Sanskrit root man. The Hindi word for man is manushya; that too comes from the same root man, the mind. It is the mind that makes you man. But, more or less, you don’t have it. What you have in its place is just a conditioned mechanism. You live by imitation: then you don’t have a mind. When you start living on your own, spontaneous, when you start answering your life problems on your own, when you become responsible, you start growing in manomaya kosha. Then the mindbody grows.
Ordinarily if you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian you have a borrowed mind; it is not your mind. Maybe Christ attained, to a great explosion of manomaya kosha; and then people have been simply repeating it. That repetition will not become a growth in you. That repetition will be a hindrance. Don’t repeat; rather try to understand.
Become more and more alive, authentic, responsive. Even if there is a possibility to go astray, go astray. Because there is no way to grow if you are – so much afraid of committing errors. Errors are good. Mistakes have to be committed. Never commit the same mistake again, but never be afraid of committing mistakes. People who become afraid of committing mistakes never grow. They go on sitting in their place, afraid to move. They are not alive.
The mind grows when you face, encounter, situations on your own. You bring your own energy to solve them. Don’t go asking for advice forever. Take the reins of your life in your own hands; that’s what I mean when I say do your thing. You will be in trouble – it is safer to follow others, it is convenient to follow the society, to follow the routine, the tradition, the scripture. It is very easy because everybody is following – you have just to become a dead part of the herd, you have just to move with the crowd wherever it is going; it is none of your responsibility. But your mental body, your manomaya kosha, will suffer tremendously, terribly it will not grow. You will not have your Own mind, and you will miss something very, very beautiful and some – thing which functions as a bridge for higher growth.
So always remember, whatsoever I say to you, you can take it in two ways. You can simply take it on my authority “Patanjali says so, it must be true” – then you will suffer, then you will not grow. Whatsoever I say, listen to it, try to understand it, implement it in your life, see how it works, and then come to your own conclusions. They may be the same, they may not be. They can never be exactly the same because you have a different personality, a unique being. Whatsoever I am saying is my own. It is bound to be in deep ways, rooted in me. You may come to similar conclusions, but they cannot be exactly the same. So my conclusions should not be made by your conclusions. You should try to understand me, you should try to learn, but you should not collect knowledge from me, you should not collect conclusions from me. Then your mindbody will grow.
But people take shortcuts. They say, “If you have known, it is finished. What is the need for us to try and experiment? We will believe in you.” A believer has no manomaya kosha.
He has a false manomaya kosha which has not come out of his own being but has been forced from without.
Then higher than manomaya kosha, bigger than manomaya kosha, is vijnanamaya kosha – it is the intuitive body. It is very, very spacious. Now there is no reason in it; it goes beyond reason; has become very, very subtle; it is an intuitive grasp. It is a seeing directly into the nature of things. It is not trying to think about it. The cypress tree in the courtyard: you just look at it. You don’t think about it; there is no “about” in intuition.
You simply become available, receptive, and reality reveals to you its nature. You don’t project. You are not searching for any argument, for any conclusion, nothing whatsoever.
You are not even searching. You are simply waiting, and reality reveals – it is a revelation. The intuitive body takes you to very far out horizons, but still there is one body more.
That is the fifth body, ANANDAMAYA KOSHA_ bliss body. That is really far out. It is made of pure bliss. Even intuition is transcended.
These five seeds are just seeds, remember. Beyond these five is your reality. These are just seeds surrounding you. The first is very gross; you are almost confined in a six-foot body. The second is bigger than it, the third still bigger, the fourth still bigger, the fifth is very big; but still these are seeds. All are limited. If all the seeds are dropped and you stand nude in your reality, then you are infinite. That’s what yoga says: you are God – aham brahmasmi. You are the very Brahman. Now you are the ultimate reality itself; now all barriers are dropped.
Try to understand this. The barriers are there surrounding you in circles. The first barrier is very, very hard. To get out of it is very difficult. People remain confined to their physical bodies and they think their physical life is all that there is to life. Don’t settle.
The physical body is just a step to the energy body. The energy body is again just a step for the mind body. That too in its turn is just a step for the intuitive body. That too is a step for the bliss body. And from the bliss body you take the jump – now there are no more steps – you take the jump into the abyss of your being, that is infinity, eternity.
These are five seeds. Corresponding to these five seeds, yoga has another doctrine about five bhutas, five great elements. Just as your body is made of food, earth; earth is the first element. It has nothing to do with this earth, remember. The element simply says wherever there is matter it is earth; the material is the earth, the gross is the earth. In you it is the body; outside you it is the body of all. The stars are made of earth. Everything that exists is made of earth. The first shell is of earth. Five bhutas means five great elements: earth, fire, water, air, ether.
Earth corresponds to your first, annamayya kosha, the food body. Fire corresponds to your second body, energy body, bioplasma, chi, pranamaya kosha; it has the quality of fire.
Third is water; it corresponds to the third, manomaya body, the mental body. It has the quality of water. Watch the mind, how it goes on like a flux, always moving, moving, riverlike. The fourth is air, almost invisible. You cannot see it, but it is there; you can only feel it. That corresponds to the intuitive body, vijnanamaya kosha. And then there is akash, ether; you cannot even feel it – it has become even more subtle than air. You can simply believe it, trust it that it is there. It is pure space; that is bliss.
But you are purer than pure space, subtler than pure space. Your reality is almost as if it is not. That’s why Buddha says anatta – no-self. Your self is like a no-self; your being is almost like a nonbeing. Why nonbeing? Because it has gone so far away from all gross elements. It is pure is-ness. Nothing can be said about it, no description will be adequate for it.
These are five bhutas, five great elements, corresponding to five koshas, bodies, within you.
Then the third doctrine. I would like you to understand all these because they will be helpful in understanding the sutras that we will be discussing now. Then there are seven chakras. The word chakra does not really mean “center”; the word “center” cannot explain it or describe it or translate it correctly because when we say “the center,” it seems something static. And chakra means something dynamic. The word chakra means “the wheel?” the moving wheel. So chakra is a dynamic center in your being, almost like a whirlpool, whirlwind, the center of the cyclone. It is dynamic; it creates an energy field around it.
Seven chakras. The first is a bridge and the last is also a bridge; the remaining five correspond to five mahabhutas, the great elements and the five seeds. Sex is a bridge, bridge between you and the grossest – the prakriti, the nature. Sahasrara, the seventh chakra, is also a bridge, bridge between you and the abyss, the ultimate. These two are bridges. The remaining five centers correspond to five elements and five bodies.
Tags: Five Great Elements Patanjali
