The Body-Mind and its Vasanas, March 5, 2010

Moderator: A viewer in Australia comments, “I thought I knew what the body-mind is; now I realize it’s as much of an unknown as the Absolute.”

David: Correct. It is the Absolute. It is the Absolute. It can be nothing else. All the understandings of the body-mind arise from what various religious and metaphysical systems have told us. Once you negate their authority and no longer blindly believe what you’ve been told and subject all conclusions and descriptions of the body to common sense and spiritual inquiry, you’ll find that you don’t know what the body-mind is, you don’t even know who you are.

You’re born in to this unique Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic delusion in the West. You’re born in to it whether you like it or not. It’s deeper then what your conscious psyche recognizes. It’s what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. It’s deeper than your conscious mind and it permeates the underlying levels of your thinking process. In other words, these delusions and illusions and hallucinations become imbedded, embedded, near the root of your consciousness. And you don’t even know that they are there, they are not in a place where you can really locate unless you begin to do sadhana which turns your mind or your feeling process, back toward the roots, the root dimensions of Consciousness Itself. And there you can begin to reveal, peel away and explode these root vasanas, these vasanas, these seeds of perspective and energy that perpetuate various mental patterns.

The vasanas produce automatic thinking. Thinking that is not inspected so your consciousness is ready made thanks to the vasanas, and what you need to do as a spiritual aspirant is go back down into those vasanas and produce the heat born in sadhana and roast them. This is all in traditional Vedic literature. The samskaras are roasted, that’s how they become dysfunctional. If you don’t put the heat down there they keep sprouting, which means tendencies keep sprouting. Tendencies are what? They’re habits, habit patterns.

So you have the vasanas, the samskaras, they are very similar. They can be used interchangeably, although they might mean different things in some subtle way, but they both point toward very subtle processes which are ongoing and autonomic until you inspect or meditate through them with your spiritual awareness. And it’s tapas, it’s heat, the fire of Consciousness Itself which will roast those tendencies, those vasanas.

Participant: I thought it was samhadi that, that goes…

David: Samadhi will not kill all the vasanas.

Participant: All the…

David: Until you have nirvikalpa, then you are beyond all the vasanas, you know who you are. Temporary samadhis will not kill them. You’ve got to stay rooted in the Self long enough for the mind to dislocate from the push and pull of the vasanas. You need to bring the mind under control. Not that you control the mind but it is brought under control automatically through meditation and other spiritual practices.