5. Our wishes and potential of the will.

Our wishes and potential of the will.

Power of the ancient system of yoga is in the fact that whatever you express will to achieve with the help of yoga, sooner or later you will get it. If you want a perfect healthy body and will focus on this result during your practice, then you’ll have it. If you really desire to become rich and famous, you will have this too. And you can reach total liberation from any constraints, from any hopes and fears, from death and birth by practicing yoga with a clearly stated will to achieve this as a result of your practice. Yoga will rocket boost your movement on the route to any aim that you really can’t live without, to what was set as a goal by your Higher Self, the Atman.

But don’t expect fast results from yoga. If you close this book now and spend the rest of the day wilfully meditating on the image of you driving Ferrari heading to your own villa on a golden coast, most probably you won’t suddenly earn this all by the next morning. Why is that? Because you expressed will for it only for a couple of hours while in myriads of your past lives you expressed will to have exactly what you’re having now.

Your every wish will come true, but the question is when. During our lives we express millions of wishes, sometimes contradicting with each other. They all fall into queue and wait until the previous wishes will realize. So, everything we have and see now was desired by us some time ago, maybe even in our past lives, and now it’s finally here.

Are we the eternal hostages of our previous expressions of will? Yoga says that the answer is ‘No’. It doesn’t make sense to blame anyone, including you, for whatever the situation you put yourself into by using the power of your will thoughtlessly in the past. You can fix it by applying the will again, this time with the clear aim in your mind.

But what to do with all the past and current desires that are still about to realize and take their toll from your energy and consciousness? Ancient treatises say, “Abandon the wishes”. It’s not easy to follow this advice though. Modern culture, the whole modern world economy is built on constant consuming of new things, connections, impressions, etc. But why not start small and say ‘no’ at least to the most irrelevant wishes.

Let’s take as an example the gadget-mania that seized the planet in the recent years. Even if you have a good smartphone that works well and most probably can serve you for many years, anyway you will be forced to buy a new one every half-year. Media and movies will show how good and right it is to earn a new phone, your colleagues at work will boast of having it, so it’s hard to resist the mind-set that new phone equals new and better life.

Yoga says that there are no good or bad wishes. There are just appropriate and inappropriate ways to use your resources. So, try to think about this new phone in terms of how much you really need it. In most cases you will come to conclusion that buying a new gadget is just a way for you to look better in the eyes of others. But is a phone, or a car, or expensive clothes the best mean for this purpose bearing in mind that you’re going to need a new one really soon? If the answer is still yes for you, then you’re living the life that does not belong to you. Alternative proposed by yoga is to get over irrelevant desires, turn to asceticism and save huge amount of your life resources by that.

On the other hand, in the treatise The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, it is said that you can get everything by concentrating on an object or phenomena that is really important for you and pushing all the parasite thoughts and wishes off your mind. Mechanism behind this process is again will, more certain it’s your ability to use will appropriately.

Every human has the ability to concentrate will on something, we just need to develop it. “By learning to direct your attention on some object for as long as you want, you learn to control your manifestations (consciousness and energy). When you learned to control them, you stop percept yourself as the sum of your manifestations and get closer to discover of your Higher Self”, says yoga.

People that know how to manage energy and consciousness stand on a higher step of evolution. They possess much more power, achieve goals and dominate in society. To make this real for us we should concentrate on our utter target, have it in our sight always and remember that we can express will for everything we want and this “everything” will come to life. Maybe not instantly, but certainly.

Will has its roots going straight to the true freedom that enclosed in all of us. This is the basis of power of will that nothing can resist to.

Take an average person, everyman John Doe. He doesn’t know that his Atman or his Higher Self is absolutely free, untied and infinitely powerful. John has his karma that push him round and round through his life. He acts good and his karma become a little better. Then he makes a bad move and karma returns to his everlasting equilibrium. How can he know anything about his tremendous potential and break free from the carousel of indistinguishable lives? It seems like there is no way to truth for him.

But there is one ability that nothing can take from any of us. It is our will. If we express the will to discover our Higher Self, then we will come to it. Will is the instrument to jump off the wheel of karma and to eliminate our ignorance about our nature. But at the same time, we can express will to dive deeper to the sea of illusion, to create more and more contrived restrictions and rules in our little universe. There is nothing will cannot do.

And will does not require any trainings. You cannot develop the Absolute any further whatever you do. There is no difference between the will of a successful person who know how to get the things done and acquires power and the weakest and most dependent person you can imagine. Potential of all the people and all the living beings is equal, equal to the Absolute that created the whole world and that is the whole world. So, there is no question of developing will, there is question of how to rediscover it within ourselves.

The Absolute once expressed will to manifest itself in the form of our Universe. And you now can express will to take a yoga practice for 15 minutes today. Scale is different, but nature of both expressions is the same and based on the same absolute freedom. Will cannot be measured, cannot be created or destroyed. It just exists.

Your will is equal to the will of Buddha, Jesus Christ and all the greatest men and women that left their trace in history. The only difference between us and them is that they used their will appropriately, and we don’t use it at all most of the time. But the only way to know the full potential of your will is to use it again and again, the more the better.

The greatest people that you can remember – rulers of nations, sages, artists, poets – they applied their will in a mindful and unidirectional way to reach some targets and changed the world they were living in. Billions of other people then and now made and make it other way, spending their will on everything at once and nothing at all. Most of us are addicted to constant controversial desires, we tend to make one steps forward, then two steps left and so on until we return to the place we started from.

Yoga invokes the sleeping gods inside us to awake and steer the wheels of our lives. World that we see is not solid and unchanged, it is the sum of efforts that were started by the Absolute and then added up by all the living beings. All the efforts have their directions and sum of those directions defines where the whole universe is going. Do you like what you have in the universe you know? Then take the wilful effort to keep it that way. If you don’t like what you see then decide how your ideal universe should look like, advance that way and nothing will be able to stop your truly expressed will.

Remember about the power of your will, think about it over and over again and take it to action properly. But besides this guidance yoga also gives us one very important advice. It is simple: minimize the harm to all the living beings that you cause by your actions. If there is a possibility to avoid causing harm then avoid unless of the absolute necessity, unless your duty tells you to cause harm. This advice is called the first principle of yoga, the principle of kindness

Why is this so important? Well, if you possess the instrument with the absolute power, any thoughtless act may lead to infinite harm to everybody, including yourself. History of humanity tells us about many really powerful and wilful leaders that caused entire civilizations and vast lands to burn and collapse destroying those leaders as well. So, for the sake of logic, you should think before your take an effort – and think as more as far you progress in gaining the power.

But it’s not that easy in real life to follow this advice, as it’s not always obvious where the path of the least harm lies. Somebody may think, and there are numerous examples now and then, that genocide of a neighbour nation might be a good idea for everybody. But the first principle of yoga cannot be understood or proven by any logical calculations. Logic, or in other words the ability to understand the cause and effect, only works in our physical world, the world of karma.

Yoga says that understanding of the principle of kindness, as well as understanding of the real nature of will, is only possible when you get rid of all the illusions, of all the obstacles that divide you and your Higher Self. That is the space where superlogical knowledge lies. But how to get there? You know the answer now - the only thing you need is to express will to it, will to know what the will really is.

Recurrence of meditations

If you developed a habit to repeat some action again and again your consciousness and energy become tied to this action by a tight link and distract from many other things and deeds that you unknowingly spent them to. If you’ll repeat your meditation regularly it will have greater effect to your life. It doesn’t really matter what exact schedule you’ll choose – every day, once a week, every 29^th of February. Recurrence leads to habit. When you have habit to meditate, time starts to work for you. You naturally learn to concentrate resources. When certain level of concentration is achieved you can do anything you want.

Meditation may be done by two methods: the method of consciousness and the method of energy. Choose any of them that fits you best and stay with it for long. Or use one method after another in one practice. But it’s important that you repeat a fixed setup time after time.

If you jump into meditation, spend an hour to it one day, then second, third and then just forget about it for long, you will not get any positive results. But if you’ll meditate in solidly set periods, you’ll start to feel yourself comfortable in meditation soon. Three minutes practice every day is much better than chaotic hourly rushes.

It’s very good to practice each time on the same time of a day and at the same place. 15 minutes in the morning before breakfast, or 10 minutes just before sleep – you decide. If you follow this advice the whole universe will start to resonate with you, powering up your practice multiple times.

If you do something good and calming for yourself and you do it at certain intervals, a powerful effect is achieved. You meditate for the first time - you calm down, then you meditate for the second time; you keep practicing for a week, a month, a year, three years... Then you find your inner resonance with the Universe, and your meditation undergoes a quality change. Suddenly, you indeed reach that very height, at which everything ceases to irritate you at all. You reach a whole new level. This is the very level we mentioned when we were talking about a big tree you could tie elephants to. But again, you have got to approach it. Now, periodicity is very important. It is clear that modern life imposes certain constraints – we do not always have an opportunity to meditate at the same time, at the same place. So, if you have trouble practicing at the same time or you do not have an opportunity to practice at the same place, at least stick to a larger interval: say, once a day, anyplace, wherever you can.

Yogis have a meditation on the rising sun. Clearly, this is possible at India's latitude: sunrise and sunset do not depend on the season there, they are always at the same time. However, if you live above the Arctic Circle, where six months of day are followed by six months of night, you cannot afford such a wonderful meditation that is steeped in so many legends in Indian treatises. That is why you should always remember that your practice needs to be adjusted depending on where you live. The same is true for Moscow. If you always adapt to the sunrise and meditate upon it, then the time when you fall asleep and wake up will change drastically. And this is not very good.

Now you begin to practice day by day. If you have trouble practicing every day at the same time, then at least practice when you can. If you still miss a day, never mind, at least keep some intervals. The key thing is periodicity.