We all know that those who break the law forbidding manslaughter are legally persecuted. All Indian philosophers talk about the immortality of the soul. Therefore, no one can kill us nor can we kill others. It is only our body that is mortal. This, as all things on earth is finite: we have one body in childhood, another in adulthood and another as we grow old.
But humans kill themselves all the time. Humans have a tendency towards being violent, towards engaging in the continuous struggle of body, mind and emotions. For instance, we wake up in the morning and our mind tells us: “You have to get up and go to work”, our lazy body, however, refuses to follow this order. As a consequence a conflict starts between them. In another occasion, maybe, we are in love with somebody, but our mind tells us that this is not allowed, that it is not moral. In yet another occasion, our emotions may want to feel elation and fulfilment, but our body is sick and weak. Again conflict arises! This state of affairs makes us impotent, irritable and violent against the world. The real reason for this situation is however in ourselves: body, feeling and mind - as in Esopos’ myth of the swan, the crab and the fish - pull us in very opposite directions.
True life improvement requires, first of all, the union of body, emotions and mind. This Oneness is only possible when, by becoming free and by training our will power - as an ability to control the body, the emotions and the mind - we can eventually become independent of them. Failing this, we shall forever remain enslaved by the conflicts arising among opposite inner ‘wants’. We should also remember that to repress something does not free us from it. Quite the opposite, in this way, we push it further within the depths of our subconscious only to see it come back to the surface at some point and, once more, cause us conflict.
Let us examine this situation in depth. The human brain is made up from thousands of small cells (neurons). When we become aware of a new object the neurons, under the impulse of this stimulation, unite into small agglomerates, which serve precisely the purpose of retaining this information about people, work, home, friends etc. When we call into action one of these agglomerates, an acquaintance or an event that has occurred in our life comes to our memory. If we develop good concentration we could be able to recall all past events so realistically that we could even totally immerse ourselves in the past.
The neurons’ agglomerates subsequently form larger groups where unpleasant and pleasant, edifying and depressing memories are stored. It should by now be clear that the brain is divided into several ‘compartments’ constantly fighting with each other, as for instance the ‘compartment’ responsible for morality and that responsible for sexuality or the ‘compartment’ responsible for freedom, autonomy and independence and the one constantly reminding us of a person who once made us scared or oppressed us. In this last example, we may feel hatred for this person, yet all we manage to do in this case is to destroy that part of the brain where the information about this person is stored. Hatred, anger and envy as well as other negative emotions are catastrophic. We may hate someone who is not even in our surrounding environment, even someone who has been dead for a long time, and this because in a part of the brain the compartment responsible for this memory is still active.
The first point that one needs to realize is that all we know about the world is within us as ‘memory’. This kind of knowledge divides because it contains conflict: every compartment has a special kind of energy and each fights the other. You really should make the effort of realizing that everything is within you. On the surface it might appear that all people and events are real, but in facts all these are nothing else, but mere parts of your own brain in constant internal dialogue with each other. Yoga is, first of all, that which unites all these parts into one, without having any of them oppressing the others. There are three paths leading to this union: the love which units all our internal and external ‘pieces’ and dissolves all conflicts among them. Let’s look within ourselves to that ‘I’ who already loves the whole world, without forcing it, without pushing ourselves to love.
Each part of the brain has a constant telepathic connection with the object found in the memory. When you have negative thoughts about a person, you send negative emotions to them. If the other person, on the other hand, does not have any negativity, your feelings will not meet similar feelings and will bounce back to you. If you have managed to influence the person in a negative way and he or she become like you, as soon as you meet a conflict will arise. In the case where this person has no hostile emotions, you will turn into bait attracting more negative feelings.
When every area in our brain is predisposed to a specific flow of emotional state, it attracts similar energy and information from the environment as well as from other people. Magic is based precisely on this. People who are aware of it create in their being a condition attuned with the Highest or, in other words, with religious emotions through prayer, mantras, faith, through offering service to God, elevated feelings and receive higher knowledge through creative acts, philosophical thinking, the development of intuition etc. This highly evolved side takes control over the whole brain and, thus, the present knowledge and methods of yoga, as well its effects help uniting the various parts of the brain, so that it becomes possible that people can develop their uniqueness. This path crosses the threshold of the conflict between inner and outer and in this way; people learn to live in harmony both with their inner and outer worlds.