This is our body and all around us is the environment.
This is our body and all around us is the environment. This body is also a part of the environment because everything is made of the five elements—earth, water, fire, air and ether. Actually, the body is made up of 24 tatvas. The element that is most relevant to this discussion is ‘I’—asmita, aham, ahankar or ego. That is the most important tatva. It is also the first one to get contaminated. In order to contaminate the air in you, a few breaths of polluted air have to be inhaled. But not even a breath is required to contaminate the ego. It happens in an instant.
If you tell a beautiful girl that she is ugly, immediately she believes that she is ugly. After that even if 100 people tell her that she is pretty, she will continue to think she is ugly. The first thing to get contaminated is the ego and that is also the biggest test of a sadhak. The person whose ego is not affected by anything, no matter what anyone says or does, controls the elements completely.
He/she knows that ego is only one part of him/her, which needs to be done away with. The moment ego dissolves, one gets moksha. Contaminations are present everywhere. At home, if someone criticises the food you cooked, you will get contaminated. Or at work, if you are unable to meet a target and your colleague does a better job, he is praised and you are upbraided—there is immediate contamination within you. These interfere in the interaction between the guru and the shishya.
The subject of yog is called the final frontier. In this lie hidden answers to all our questions and also the state of anand or bliss. This bliss cannot be attained in a contaminated body. It is similar to how in order to enter a specific dimension, you have to have a specific weight. If your weight exceeds that, you cannot enter. Once, when someone was about to die, his weight was monitored. It was found that the moment he breathed his last, there was a fluctuation. Some said it is the weight of the soul.
But that is wrong. The soul does not have weight, it is weightless. That was the weight of karmas, of contaminations. As per the burden of this weight, the soul takes up a body and goes through bhog/rog in its proportion. Social pressure is one of the most important contamination sources. The second important contamination is emotional congestion. When one keeps an emotion suppressed within, thinking that if someone gets to know about it, he/she will come across as weak.
Those pent-up emotions are a major cause of contamination, they rot you on the inside and ruin your entire life. The third contamination is maya or attachment. You have two hands. If you have to pick up a stool, you will have to use both your hands. After that, if I ask you to pick up the chair, how will you do it? You will have to leave the stool first. If you want to take up the ultimate journey of the final frontier, if you have a guru, all these contaminations will dissolve.
Originally published in Indian Express.
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