As it was said above, asanas are not an end in itself of yoga, but an instrument of work with one’s psyche. The clue to such work is a system of psychosomatic correspondence, i.e. the projection of psychological problems on certain parts of the body in the form of muscle contractions, strains, in extreme case of diseases in respective organs. However unlike our psyche, our physical body can be seen. Looking at it and analysing certain parameters, we come to conclusion about the general and current psychic state of a person. There is one more aspect: it’s difficult to see and become aware of one’s own psychological problems, because of the «defensive mechanisms» — special psychological obstacles, keeping a person from adequately evaluating his own state. A physical body can always be seen. It can’t be hidden, so looking in the mirror, applying certain schemes, we can conclude about our real psychological state. And vice versa, activating certain parts of our body, working out our muscle contractions, we stimulate respective psychic functions and as a result — stimulate the development and opening of chakras.
From the esoteric point of view unconsciousness is a whole of experience that a soul received during all its existence, which influence a person in the form of needs and aspirations. Besides unconsciously we are keeping a pseudoexperience — memories about some situations, we didn’t pass the right way, which as emotions and attachments continue influencing on our life, actually representing our Carma. Main characters of pseudoexperience are an emotional pomposity and its ability to «hitch up» people’s attention. Indeed emotional reaction inhere animals, not people, but a layerlike structure of experience results in the fact that, if a person doesn’t have his own experience of behaviour in some situation, he reacts according to his experience from previous levels; i.e. the violent reaction proves that he has no human’s experience in similar situations and that he’s accumulated a pseudoexperience of behaviour in these situations.
But from all the above said we mustn’t conclude that people should suppress their emotions. On the contrary, suppressed emotions are a typical mistake done by people under the influence of superconscious directives. As a result, emotional energies excreted from the body don’t come out of the aura, are not realized in a reaction, causing discomfort and stress in this situation and in future ones.
The fact that human consciousness «sticks» in the situations that we didn’t work out, is also explained from the point of view of evolution, representing so to say an instinctive wish to «come back» and «replay» the situation, to get from it all needed experience, but, if this wish isn’t actualised and is not consciously realised, what this chapter is dedicated to, such touching leads only to energy loss and its blocking in the past.
At first glance it may seem that the problem of cleansing our sub-conscious appeared with psychoanalysis and has nothing to do with the classical yoga, but to prove the contrary, we can just open «Yoga Sutra Patanjali» and read its first lines.
«Yoga is liberation of Chitta from Vritti.»
What is that «vritti», preventing a Seeing person from «contemplating true images»? Psychologists perfectly know the effect of distorted perception under the influence of directives, emotional reactions and subconscious complexes. That is why there are enough reasons to claim that the process of «liberation of Chitta from Vritti» has a lot in common with what nowadays is called «the cleansing of consciousness».
Before speaking about precise methods of studying the subconsciousness, let’s study the objects we can meet there.
1. Non-reacted situations.
2. Complexes.
3. Neuroses.
Non-reacted situations is a memory about situations, feelings and emotions that were not reacted as needed, i.e. for some reasons were suppressed and are hidden in the subconsciousness. In everyone’s life such situations are numerous: starting from parents’ inhibits like «don’t you dare to laugh», «stop crying» (while a child needs it!), up to tragic life events we preferred to forget. From the energy point of view non-reacted situations can be imagined as some clots of energy, stuck in the inner part of aura. When we relieve the non-reacted situations, we unblock these clots and release the energy, they contained.
Complexes are a form of reacting, realized or not, on an external stimulus (restimulator) well defined in advance. Such a stimulus can be a person, an object or an event. The reason why complexes appear, usually has to do with the existence of non-reacted situations. An object, which becomes a restimulator could be presented or related to such situation; facing it, a person partly remembers some unpleasant experience, related to this situation, energetically comes back to it. It becomes the vice circle: an object provokes again unpleasant feelings, proving even more the negative reaction on it.
Neuroses are a constantly presented psychological trauma, related to contradictions between person’s wishes and his superconscious directives, which he can’t destroy consciously.
The biggest damage from them is that they keep a certain part of our psychical energy «frozen», in addition to that a certain amount of energy is used by our inner censorship to keep these objects in our subconsciousness. Naturally it lower the energy potential of our consciousness. Besides occasional breakthroughs of unconscious complexes to the conscious level cause neuroses, symptomatically becoming apparent on our health.
The contaminated mind is especially dangerous for those, who do spiritual practices, because for such work you must change your worldview, which in its turn destroys our mechanism of censorship. Besides new directives can overlap the old ones, being in our unconsciousness, and cause additional inner conflicts. Without proper knowledge and critical attitude to one’s experience a person risks to get some severe neuroses and even mental disorders. The most common is a situation where unconscious complexes of the practitioner are percept by his consciousness in a form of images and symbols, which he mistakenly interprets as a result of his «entering to astral plane» (of his Forces, God, opening channels and so on)…
All the said considered, I will emphasize again, that a work over cleansing of the subconsciousness must precede more complicated spiritual practices.
To work out the described physical constrains, we’ll use certain meditations, which are given below.