Some of the terms used in Yoga are necessarily to be known. For Yoga
takes man for a special purpose and studies him for a special end and,
therefore, only troubles itself about two great facts regarding man,
mind and body. First, he is a unit, a unit of consciousness. That is a
point to be definitely grasped. There is only one of him in each set of
envelopes, and sometimes the Theosophist has to revise his ideas about
man when he begins this practical line. Theosophy quite usefully and
rightly, for the understanding of the human constitution, divides man
into many parts and pieces. We talk of physical, astral, mental, etc.
Or we talk about Sthula-sarira, Sukshma-sarira, Karana-sarira, and so
on. Sometimes we divide man into Anna-maya-kosa, Prana-maya-kosa,
Mano-maya-kosa, etc. We divide man into so many pieces in order to
study him thoroughly, that we can hardly find the man because of the
pieces. This is, so to say, for the study of human anatomy and
physiology.
But Yoga is practical and psychological. I am not complaining of the
various sub-divisions of other systems. They are necessary for the
purpose of those systems. But Yoga, for its practical purposes,
considers man simply as a duality—Mind and Body, a Unit of
consciousness in a set of envelopes. This is not the duality of the
Self and the Not-Self. For in Yoga, “Self” includes consciousness plus
such matter as it cannot distinguish from itself, and Not-Self is only
the matter it can put aside.
Man is not pure Self, pure consciousness, Samvid. That is an
abstraction. In the concrete universe there are always the Self and His
sheaths, however tenuous the latter may be, so that a unit of
consciousness is inseparable from matter, and a Jivatma, or Monad, is
invariably consciousness plus matter.
In order that this may come out clearly, two terms are used in Yoga as
constituting man—Prana and Pradhana, life-breath and matter. Prana is
not only the life-breath of the body, but the totality of the life
forces of the universe or, in other words, the life-side of the
universe.
“I am Prana,” says Indra. Prana here means the totality of the
life-forces. They are taken as consciousness, mind. Pradhana is the
term used for matter. Body, or the opposite of mind, means for the yogi
in practice so much of the appropriated matter of the outer world as he
is able to put away from himself, to distinguish from his own
consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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