So far, in our discussion of the Astanga Sadhana, I have focused on the "Yamas". To recapitulate,Yama, deals with one's ethical standards and sense of integrity, focusing on our behavior and how we conduct ourselves in life. We talked about the following items:
- Truthfulness
- Non-Violence
- Brahmacharya
- Non-stealing
- Non-possessiveness
Whereas the yamas present guidelines for how we should treat others, the niyamas tell us how to treat ourselves, moving us ever so slightly deeper along the path towards enlightenment. I will start my discussion of the second limb which is Niyama. Niyama, the second limb, has to do with self-discipline and spiritual observances.
Niyama consists of the following items:
- Shaucha: Cleanliness/Purity
- Santosha: Contentment
- Tapas: Discipline
- Svadhyaya: Study of the self
- Ishvara Pranidhana: Devotion to God
Today I will discuss the first one, Shaucha or cleanliness. When I say cleanliness, I can almost hear everybody saying, not an issue at all, we are all clean. Please follow my flow of thoughts and make your own judgement.
I would like to look at cleanliness from 3 perspectives, that of the gross body, second the subtle body and finally the causal body. When we talk of gross body and its cleanliness, I mean the physical aspect of cleanliness. Here again, there are three layers of cleanliness. The first layer is personal cleanliness. Most of my readers i am sure maintain personal cleanliness. The next layer is cleanliness of surroundings, in my room, in my closet, my house, my office desk etc. I am sure many of us maintaining personal cleanliness show some slack when it comes to cleanliness of the surroundings. The next layer of gross body cleanliness is the environmental cleanliness. Are we polluting the environment ? Are we keeping picnic spots clean? Are we cleaning up our beer bottles from the beach? I am pretty sure at this layer, many of us tend to further slack off in cleanliness. Let us take a wild guess. If we randomly select hundred people and rate them on the three aspects of gross body cleanliness, what percentage would pass all three levels? I bet it will not be more than fifty percent.
The next layer of cleanliness, that of the subtle body includes cleanliness of the mind and the intellect. What is the dirt in the mind? Obviously, jealousy, anger, greed, hatred are the components of dirt in the mind. The intellect has its own dirt consisting of a sense of superiority by color, country, position etc; Dirt consisting of over blown ego of one's own importance etc. As readers are aware, this dirt is more subtle, more difficult to remove and actually more harmful than physical dirt in the pursuit of spiritual growth.So assuming we continue the above exercise, of the fifty who maybe physically clean, not more than twenty may be clean at the subtle body level. So, almost eighty percent of our sample is eliminated from the path of cleanliness which is one of the requirements of Astanga sadhana.
Coming to the third layer, that of the causal body. This has vasanas or unfulfilled desires from several births as the dirt to be cleaned. Readers of my blogs are aware that the only reason for our taking births and deaths in a never ending cycle is because of our vasanas. Whereas cleaning the earlier two - gross body and subtle body were relatively easier, how do we clean the causal body? For one thing, we do not even know what all we have accumulated in our causal body. The only way we can remove the "dirt" in our causal body is by exhausting the dirt and by not adding additional dirt. Let me give a simple illustration. Assume we have fifty units of vasanas or desires in my causal body and in each birth , ten desires are fulfilled. So, I need a minimum of five births to exhaust and clean out my vasanas. But wait a minute, it is not so simple. In each birth that I take, most of us typically add new desires and when they are not fulfilled, they go back to the causal body and keep on putting us on a cycle of birth and death. So, the key step in cleaning the causal body is to not add new desires. Of course, this is easier said than done. However the first step is knowing the impact of desires and once we know it, making a conscious effort to refrain from new desires. This will hopefully reduce the causal body dirt to nil over a period of time.
What do we get when all the three layers or bodies are cleaned? Beyond the three bodies is the Supreme Soul which is timeless, the very embodiment of Awareness, Truth and in essence the same as the Universal Brahman. If we plot the cleanliness on the X axis, starting with the gross body cleanliness, followed by subtle body and finally the causal body, and level of spiritual growth on the Y axis, I suspect we will get a hyperbolic curves. As we improve in cleanliness at the gross body level, there is an improvement in spiritual growth level, but at a very low rate. As we improve cleanliness at the subtle body layer, the spiritual growth shows an increased rate of growth and finally as we progress over multiple births on the cleanliness of the causal layer, the spiritual growth shows a sharp uptrend and we are finally on the cusp of achieving Divinity. When that final vasana is exhausted, we merge with the Supreme and then it is only Bliss.
Let us take the step to understand the dimensions of cleanliness and walk towards achieving our spiritual growth.
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