The soul, the ego, the mind and the Conscience

Small overhaul of what we are, each of us, during the existence because if we are the soul we are also the body, the mind etc You have here the point of view of the path, the lighting of original-yoga in simple if not simplistic words.

en français

Summary:

You are not made of only one part, there are various things which make you.

You are the body, for the duration of this incarnation.

You are the mind and its fruits, the personality, the learned knowledge, the desires, the fears, the memory, the hopes etc the mind is the operating system of the brain. When the body dies, the brain also and the mind disappears.

You are the incarnated-soul i.e.  the soul and the ego linked. The ego is the principle which allows the “divine matter” to become an individualized soul, with a Conscience of itself and the capacity to say “I”, “me'' at the same time as “yes” and '' no”, which is the mark of the free-will.

The matter of this text is to give you the meaning of these four words according to the path. The words often have several meanings, for example spirit does not have the same meaning according to whether it is used by the psychology, the religion or the philosophy. For some it speaks about the soul, for others about the mind.

It is a question of conventions. When you speak with psychologists, you use their meaning. With monks, you use this word to say soul. To follow the teaching of the path it is better to know the meaning given to the words. Coming back to the words quoted in the title here are their lexical meaning according to the small lexicon published on the blog: 

 

- Soul, Heart [Conscience, Âtman - according to the āstika-]: it is the true self, the passenger of your body during the existence. 

 
The soul uses the intelligence but is not the mind. It is immortal and is reincarnated until its achievement. It is used to say that: “ the eyes are the windows of the soul ”. The soul is this Conscience which sees through the eyes. When the soul is incarnated, bound to the ego, it is the Witness who sees by the eyes, understands by the ears and makes use of the mind to think.

''The soul sparkle of One, contained by the Verb
Passes from life to life, from form to form
Up to the human being ''

[Bhaktimàrga 1-2-10]

- Mind, mental: it is the intelligence, the fruit of the brain, the operating system of your board computer, a tool which will produce, according to which is using it, good or less good results. If the Conscience is well or badly centered the production of the mind will be different. You need to keep the control of the mind.

- Ego: it allows the soul to be incarnated and to be aware of itself. Without the ego no individualization of the soul.

''The soul comes from One, the Grace gives it flesh

By the ego offered in present

So that the body has a conscience''

[Bhaktimàrga 1-2-12]

- Conscience or Purusa: it should be specified that the purusa, in the meaning that Raja-yoga gives to it, is the supreme self of the man. Purusa would indicate the incarnated soul, the union of the soul and the ego. The Conscience can be lost in the things of the world.

- False-ego [Màra, that which separates]: it is a consequence of the absence of Knowledge (shruti). When the soul is badly identified, when it believes to be the mind, then the nescience induces a confusion which is the false-ego. It is this inertial force which, mechanically, attaches our Conscience to the levels of the materiality and does everything to keep it attached there. 

 

Its field is the worldly pleasures as only goal, the primary education instincts as only references. The only pleasure, the abuses, the hatred, the confusion, the duality, the unjust war, the concepts, the madness, the unconsciousness, the inconsistency are its creations and he hates peace, the Love and the Holy-Name. It is able to be disguised in lamb for better misleading its world. It builds all the possible traps to prevent the soul from arriving at its ultimate goal. Only the Grace can circumvent the false-ego.

''The false-ego imposes on the soul the weight of the sense

It keeps turned outside''

[Bhaktimàrga 1-2-33]

The false-ego takes part of darkness [of ignorance] in opposition to the Light [of Knowledge] as Mani, the founder of the Manichean religion described.m

It is an absence, a hole. As darkness is the absence of Light, the false-ego is the absence of Conscience. Unconsciousness is the absence of Conscience and ignorance the absence of Knowledge.

Darkness makes that you lose yourselves, taken by blindness. Unconsciousness plunges us in the suffering. The ignorance makes of you the victim of the reverse currents.

The Light absence of darkness?

One cannot say that the Light is the absence of darkness, not more than the Conscience the absence of unconsciousness nor that Knowledge either the absence of ignorance. To make simple: the soul is your true being. It belongs to the Kingdom. Before the incarnation it did not have a Conscience.

Ego

The incarnation of the soul gives it an ego which gives it an individual conscience. The incarnation and the ego are a Grace. The body and the soul live by the Holy-Name resulting from the Kingdom.

The Holy-Name is inside you

Because the Holy-Name is inside you, you can feel it. When you received the Revelation of the techniques, among them the one of the Holy-Name, it becomes possible to you to be centered and to deepen your Conscience.

When you are aware of the Holy-Name you are in a state of bliss, of achievement. This state is in no way incompatible with an active human existence.

The Observance of the Agya

The purpose of the practice of the original-yoga, more precisely the Observance of the Agya, is to enable you to live in all Conscience while achieving the matter of your coming. It is the Realization. It is not the awakening. You can realize without ever knowing the awakening. 

 

Agya: Duty /Satsang /Meditation

The Conscience can be put in the center of oneself and on the surface of the things at the same time, by the Duty which is one of the three feet of the Agya. When the Conscience is put in the center of yourself, you can read, write, speak, learn, teach, live and assume your obligations.

''The best way of giving of yourselves is to remain in the Duty

Conscious of the Holy-Name in each gesture and all the time''

[Bhaktimàrga 2-3-13]

The purpose of the path is to give you, by the Revelations and the Agya, the means to put your Conscience at the good place and in the good way in order to be able to act while remaining centered. 

The soul remembers

The soul remembers, not the detail of its last lives but it keeps the trace of its original environment and aspires to go back there. You identify with the soul and you will have this aspiration. You identify with your concepts and you will dream of concepts.

En français

Summary:

the soul remembers its original environment. It is not the akashic records, and if the memory kept the “memory” of the bliss from where it comes from it is not a memory made of words and pictures but rather like a feeling that it misses something and the recognition, each time a peaceful happiness comes to it, that it has importance and it is like an impression of déjà vu.

It is often question of the lost paradise.
The Eden is a metaphor
whose origin goes back to the beginnings of the humanity,
when the homo sapiens left Africa,
in the Upper Paleolithic and arrived
in the arid country of Arabia and found there
a green valley irrigated by rivers,
in the current Yemen, at the edge of the ocean.
This place has been named Eden
well after, towards the Mesopotamie,
in memory of the old stories, to indicate the paradise.

But the Christians's lost paradise does exist. Jésus Christ named it the Kingdom. In India some say Satçitananda. It is your destination and your origin.

''The Christ said if the Kingdom is in the sky
The birds will precede you

If it is in the sea, the fishes will precede you

The Kingdom is inside you ''

[Bhaktimàrga 1-1-46]

At the moment of the incarnation the soul is bound to the ego, in order for it to be aware of itself and thus it has the free-will. Your soul remembers the Peace from where it comes and this memory gives you the irrepressible need, thirst to go back there.

The misunderstood suffering

 

As long as you do not identify the source of this thirst, that generates in you a suffering which is difficult to relieve. Here is the latent, chronic suffering, the frustration which pushes you to the unbridled consumption of material goods and pleasures in the hope, unceasingly disappointed, to relieve it. It is a waste of time and effort, because the pleasures and the possessions cannot fill this lack, this lack of the Love of which you have the memory and on which your mental don’t know which word to put.

The romantic love

 
In the West, the spirit invented the romanticism, the feelings, the courtly love. Educated “with the udder of these ideas” some, many, search the woman or the man of their life, as if another person could give a meaning to their existence! It is really showing a sickly modesty to imagine that they were born to love a person and to be loved by her/him, that without someone else they are incomplete! This strange idea blind them and they go from disappointments in disappointments, of sufferings in sufferings letting their spirits turn sour over the spent years.

Greatly reduced

 
Through separations, painful divorces, nervous breakdowns, from which they recover only after many years, they are greatly reduced, scraggy, no longer believing in anything, resentful at the bottom of their dens. However the Love is there, inside us and we can taste it at will.

 

If, tasting this inner love, it comes you the desire for sharing it with somebody and it turns out that the life with this somebody adds, to the harmony, a tenderness made of comprehension and share, then so much better!

The love for somebody can be full of joy
of complicity and pleasure.
It is not forbidden to have pleasure, joy
and enjoying to live in this world.
It is simply a pity to lose yourself in the mistake
and to leave time to slip by in the doubt and the pain.

''But let your first care be for his kingdom and his righteousness;

and all these other things will be given to you in addition''.

[Matthieu 6:33]

Start from a good starting point

 
You can do everything: studying, working, writing, playing music, working out, living in couple, founding a family, buying a house, driving sport cars, doing politics etc. But you must start from a good starting point, in full Conscience. The practice of the path is the good point where to stand to exist and to do all what you owe, you want, and you can while remaining in the Peace of the inside. Here and now is the good place and the good moment.

''The Observance of Agya leads to the Unit ''

 [Bhaktimàrga 2-1-31]