THREE
Karma as Memory
SUTRA #3
There is only one crime against life: to make believe that you are something other than life.
The Mammoth Memory Bank
It happened.
One day Shankaran Pillai got very angry with his wife and left home. After wandering the streets for an entire night, he went to a restaurant for breakfast. When the server came to his table, he said, “Please serve me weak coffee, over-salted sambar*, and rock-hard idlis†.”
The server was puzzled. “But sir, I can serve you some really hot and strong coffee, delicious sambar, and super-soft idlis.”
“You fool, do you think I’ve come here to enjoy breakfast?” asked Shankaran Pillai. “I’m just homesick!”
So it doesn’t matter what it is—once you’ve gotten used to something, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, you cannot drop it!
If it is volition that determines karma, the inevitable question is, From where does your volition arise?
As we have seen, it is from your identification with the notion of separateness.
From where then does this identification arise?
From memory.
You believe you are an individual because your memory tells you that this is who you are.
Perhaps it would be more accurate and more useful, therefore, to describe karma as memory.
Think about it. Everything you consider to be yourself is a result of memory. What you call “me” is a product—in every sense of the term—of your past.
Everything that has ever come into contact with you through these five sense organs—whatever you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched—is there in your memory, influencing your personality. Every bit of memory that you gathered in wakefulness and in sleep is in this bank.
Whether you are conscious of it or not, every cell in your body remembers and acts out of that memory every moment of your life. Life is telling you about your karma at every instant. The problem is that you listen only to your thoughts or to your neighbors! If you listened to the life process, no teaching, no scripture would ever be necessary.
Karma is one big noise. If you cannot hear it, it is simply because right now you are accustomed to listening to the outer world. But once you learn to listen to your interiority, you hear the karmic din loud and clear. The decibel levels are so high, there’s no missing it!
Your body is a heap of food you have ingested over time. Your mind is a heap of impressions and ideas you have imbibed and processed over time. Both are creations of the past. Both are products of memory. So whether you identify with your body or your mind, what you call your personality is simply an accumulation of memory. The essence of everything you consider to be yourself is karmic.
Right now, if you walk from your home a couple of blocks down the street, a hundred different smells assail you. You may not be conscious of these. Only if a very strong smell comes your way will you notice it. But all the hundred varieties of smells that your nostrils have come in touch with unconsciously have actually been recorded in your memory.
Experiments have been conducted that substantiate this: Someone who knows no Chinese, for instance, is exposed to the language when they are in deep sleep. Years later, under certain conditions of hypnosis, they can actually utter the same ten sentences in Chinese that they heard while they were asleep. That is how memory works; the systems of body, mind, and energy are simply soaking in information every moment.
You may not remember consciously what happened twentyfive years ago, but it is working on you. What happened twentyfive hundred years ago is still imprinted on your body. What happened twenty-five million years ago is still encrypted in your body. Everything that ever happened on this planet is still remembered by your body, because your body is just a piece of this planet.
The memory from the very beginning of creation is right here. Your mind might have forgotten life as a unicellular being, but your body still remembers. Your mind might have forgotten your great-grandmother, but her nose still sits on your face. You could dismiss this as genetics. But genetics, as we have seen before, is essentially memory. People think memory means only mind. But that is not the case. The volume of memory that the body carries is a billion times more than the volume of memory your mind is capable of carrying.
The rocks and trees and various objects around you are throwing out different vibrations right now. Every pebble, every stone, is saying something. The problem is only that most people are not sensitive enough to hear them or do not possess enough attention to decipher their language.
Now, if all the levels of memory in you were wiped out this instant, you would have no personality at all. The differences in people’s personalities are entirely due to memory—physical, mental, energetic. As this memory acts itself out, you become an automaton working according to the diktats of your past karma. Your ability to use your discerning mind diminishes gradually, and your ability to choose is impeded.
As karmic bondage builds up, you will naturally try to draw smaller and smaller circles around yourself. At the age of eighteen, most people draw large circles; by the age of seventy, the circles shrink, and people find that they can get along with only a few. By drawing karmic circles, you determine the boundaries of your responsibility. As you keep shrinking these boundaries, you are heading straight toward depression. And yet the human problem is that you are constantly labeling your bondage as freedom!
There is a simple way to check if you are increasing or decreasing the size of your karmic circle. When life situations place you in unfamiliar or unexpected terrain, what is your reaction? If you are asked to dress differently for an occasion, or if you find you have misplaced your keys, or if your footwear accidentally walks off with someone else, or if you check into a hotel and find you have to sleep on mattresses on the floor, how would you react? These are small triggers. Think of larger ones, and ask yourself what your reaction would be. If the very thought of these situations makes you anxious, you inhabit a very constricted karmic space.
These unconscious reactions become the unexamined aspects of your personality. Over time, these patterns grow more rigid and frozen, and so you say “Oh, this is the kind of person I am. This is my personality.” Someone might offer you a better way to live, but you find yourself shrugging it off and saying “No, no, but this is the way I am.”
Hasn’t it happened to you any number of times? You made up your mind: “I’m going to make this change in my life.” For three days, you were transformed; on the fourth day, you were back in the same old rut! Although you tried to choose differently, your old patterns ended up ruling.
When you were eighteen, it looked like you could grow in so many different ways. But as you grew older, it slowly seemed like choices were shrinking. It felt like there was only one way for you to be. As the karmic substance increases in volume, the discerning mind becomes almost useless, because you now work largely by habits, patterns, and cycles.
The attraction to one’s own karmic patterns can be powerful, because most people experience a sense of safety in the familiar. Whether the patterns or cycles are small or big is irrelevant. Their recurrence can offer a sense of security, identity, and even power for those who fear the unfamiliar.
It happened.
In the year 2009, a lion in the forest ambled over to a pig and bragged, “Look at me! I’m the king of the jungle. If I roar, the entire jungle trembles in fear.”
The pig laughed and said, “That’s no big deal. If I sneeze, the entire world will tremble in fear right now.”
The business of identity (as the pig during the swine flu pandemic was clearly very aware of) definitely wields more power than ever before!
So if you have to break the tyranny of karmic memory, you have to crack the karmic substance. Otherwise, since you have come here as a human being, with this level of intelligence and awareness, it is tragic to forego the great human power of choice.
Human Beings as Bags of Karma
When I was age four or five, I often saw people as hazy forms. If I just sat down in the living room and looked around at my family—my mother, father, brother, sisters—I would see them as hazy beings, like ghosts, moving here and there. If I was moving around or talking, they appeared as people. But if I simply sat, I would see them as smoky figures floating around. And once you see people as semi-solid smoky beings, the whole drama of everyday life becomes utterly meaningless. Suddenly, my dad would come and ask, “What about your mathematics quarterly exam?” I had no idea what he was talking about! It was like watching television after pressing the Mute button.
One of the things that did not really make much of an impression on me was a person’s gender. This would not register in my mind for a long time. Even later in my life, I never paid very much attention to the physical form of a person. What always drew my attention was a larger, hazier form that I could clearly see around them. I never felt the need to define these forms to myself. But I realized later that these were energy bodies that every living being carries. In yogic terminology, this is termed the pranamayakosha. It is possible to clearly see karma imprinted on this level.
This may be difficult to grasp, but my mind is never inclined to understand anything that I see. If I don’t see clearly, I look at something a little more attentively, but I don’t make an effort to understand something intellectually. If you want to see keenly, you simply learn to sharpen your perception. If you look at a tree keenly enough, for instance, you don’t need to read a gardening manual—you can assess whether it has received enough sunlight or water. (Of course, a sad irony today is that many sit under a tree and choose to read a book on trees instead of learning from the tree itself!)
That is what the yogic discipline is all about: just learning to look. This is why I keep telling people around me: Don’t look for anything. Don’t look for the meaning of life. Don’t look for God. Just look—that’s all. This is the fundamental quality of a spiritual seeker, as life is about seeing what is there, not about seeing what you want to see.
Since people are so identified with their own individuality, shaped by their karmic substance, they reflect the same limitations. They see everybody as limited individuals because they see themselves the same way. Instead of seeing life as just life, they identify with fragments of it.
The time has come for human beings to transcend the distorting lens of karma—the lens that makes them confuse the projection for the real, their fragmented, memory-driven psychological creation for the incredible majesty of life itself. The time has come to wake up to the fact that there is only one crime against life: to make believe that you are something other than life. Unfortunately, our idea of individuality is separateness, and that is the basis of all suffering.
Just as inherent power of enormous proportions resides in every atom (enough to unleash unimaginable destruction), the inherent power of human intelligence has similarly been broken down into atomized forms of thought and emotion. These have become a source of unspeakable suffering and destruction. Ask Mother Earth—for sure she will agree! Our identification with our separateness has broken down this magnificent creation and shattered the universality of our lives.
Eventually, however, it is the universal that prevails, not our fragmented identities. In the ultimate scheme of things, human beings count for nothing. Even if you destroy the planet, it means nothing. Creation is like a video game: Once it is over, nothing is left on the screen. Not even a flicker to suggest what once was.
And so, with no intention of demeaning human beings, let me say that when I looked at people, I saw them only as bags of karma. I still do. Some are huge sacks; some are small bags; some are just an envelope. The nature of the load may be different in terms of quality and impact. Lighter karmic content brings life to ease. And how you deal with each individual naturally arranges itself based on this. When you are karmically lightweight, people approach you with much greater ease.
If a hundred people are sitting before me right now and I focus on one person, I can feel their specific vibration separately, and with that I know their entire karma. I may not know what they did in a previous life, whether they married, had children. I may not know the details. But I know the quality of their karma. I know whether the dominant quality is hatred or anger or peace. The moment I see a person, I know that. To know the details, one needs to enter a person’s unconscious mind: this is a different dimension. But simply seeing the karmic bag can give me a feel of their karma.
However, whether it is a large sack, a smaller bag, or an envelope does not necessarily mean less or more karma. It is the density of the material that makes a difference. In fact, an envelope may contain much more karma than any sack can contain, but the difference is of refinement. Karmic substance gathered in fear, anger, hatred, and jealousy will create a density that makes it hard to carry and also hard to approach. And hence the whole tradition of dividing karma into good and bad is a facile demarcation. But the more refined load is undeniably easier to carry. A sack could contain loose cotton; an envelope could have the weight of an epic!
There have been many people to whom I had said in no uncertain terms (sometimes even more than a decade in advance) that certain health issues or accidents or loss of fortune would befall them. I was not giving them an astrological prediction of doom. It was simply a perception based on looking at their karmic trajectory. These were not intrinsically good or bad events. They were occurrences in their trajectory that could be altered either by distancing oneself from the events or by performing alternative karmas to counteract them.
I myself carry a million times more karma than most people. This is because I consciously remember several lifetimes. But I do not carry this as a burden. If you look at most intellectuals in this world, you will see that they have become heavy with memory. I carry much more memory than most, but I am not encumbered by it, because I carry my karma at a distance from myself. I can access it when I need it, but I do not carry the load upon myself all the time. With practice, everyone is capable of this. It is similar to the cloud on which we now store our computer files—accessible when we need it, but that does not clutter our hard disk. Thus I do have access to lifetimes of memory, but it is all on a “cloud”!
Membranes of Memory
The yogic tradition has an elaborate method of differentiating memory. It distinguishes between eight dimensions, or “membranes,” of memory: elemental, atomic, evolutionary, genetic, karmic, sensory, articulate, and inarticulate.
All eight can be seen essentially as human karma. The first four are types of memory in which personal volition plays no role. The next four are those in which personal volition does play a role. In other words, the first four constitute our collective karma; the next four constitute our individual karma.
Let us examine the first four aspects of memory, the ones in which personal volition plays no role:
Elemental memory refers to the way the building blocks of your system—earth, water, fire, air, and ether—shape who you are. They carry with them memories from the very beginning of creation.
Atomic memory—the fluctuating patterns of atoms that make up your body—molds your system further.
Evolutionary memory hones your biology: It is this evolutionary software that makes you a human being, for instance, and not an animal. Even if you eat dog food, you remain a human being! This evolutionary code is imprinted deeply upon your DNA.
What is your body anyway? As we have seen, it is just an accumulation of food, water, and air you have absorbed from the planet. The substance you call earth and the substance you call body are not different. But a complex amalgam of memories transforms the substance beyond recognition. The same soil becomes food when you ingest it, nourishes you, and makes you a human being rather than a plant or a dog. The privilege of being a human being in this life is mainly due to evolutionary memory.
The same external elements of water, air, and food behave differently within each human being. As soon as you ingest them, they begin to work in very different ways. The water in a bottle is very different from the water inside your system. The fruit outside you behaves very differently once it is within you. The transformation is mainly because of the interplay of atomic, elemental, and evolutionary memory within you.
Certain dimensions of memory are shared by all of us: the elemental, the atomic, and the evolutionary. However, our genetic and personal karmas are different. Genetic memory is passed on within families, determining several shared physical and psychological characteristics.
Beyond these four types of memory, which make up our collective karma, are the four types of memory in which our personal volition does play a role: they make up our individual karma.
First is our personal karmic memory: the blitzkrieg of impressions that have shaped us over time and turned us into distinctive human beings, each with our own quirks and idiosyncrasies, likes and dislikes, habits and preferences. Every human being carries a vast storehouse of personal karmic memory, which is why no two human beings, even twins, are ever completely alike.
Our daily negotiation with our immediate physical and cultural environment also has an impact upon our system, determining the way our bodies and minds respond to the world and creating sensory memory.
And then, we have inarticulate memory, the enormous reservoir of generic and specific information accumulated over eons, of which we are not aware. It is a base, akin to the foundation of a house, and silently influences how you gather articulate memory—your superstructure. Articulate memory is the impact of all the conscious information that every human being carries within.
These eight dimensions of memory are not separate membranes. They are deeply interlinked, and it is these interconnections that are responsible for the breathtaking diversity of the human beings we see around us. These membranes constitute the entire volume of a human being’s karma.
Evolution is accumulated memory constantly building upon itself to reach higher and higher possibilities of life. But human beings, being the very peak of evolution, can transcend this entire volume of accumulated memory and become the architects of their own destinies.
When the Dead Live Through You
At a program I conducted recently in Los Angeles, I saw four female participants who looked similar. They were not sisters. They simply shared the same doctor! So, there are ingenious ways by which we can reshape our genetic inheritance today.
Traditionally in India, the term samskara is used to describe the enduring impact of our genetic memory on our present. Your body actually carries a trillion times more memory than your mind. The word samskara denotes the maelstrom of hereditary memories and impressions that are bequeathed to us by our ancestors, our clan, or our tribe.
And so, when a child sings exceptionally well, for instance, it is common for people to say “Oh, that is their samskara.” That means that this particular gift has come to the child from their gene pool, their ancestral learning.
These genetic memories are not inherently positive or negative. It is how we deal with them that makes the difference. We carry the memories of our ancestors within us. But whether this memory has become a source of bondage or one of advantage depends on how much distance we have created from it.
The dead are trying to live through you in a host of different ways. Make no mistake about it. Look at your own life, or at the lives of those around you. For many people, having children is a way of immortalizing their genetic material, a way of ensuring that they live on after their time. This is their legacy—one that they hope will live on for posterity. So do not underestimate your ancestors either! They are also trying to live through you. This is the self-perpetuating nature of genetic memory. We owe a great deal to our ancestors. But if we are to live on this planet as independent full-fledged lives—not as puppets of our forebears—we must first find ways of becoming individuals.
Now, though the spiritual process is about dissolving the myth of separateness, an important first step on the path is to become an individual. This may seem to be a paradox, but it is not so. When you are the consequence of many influences, you are a crowd. When you are a crowd or clan of influences, transformation is impossible. Crowds can evolve over a period of time, but they cannot be transformed. Transformation, as the word suggests, necessitates a form. Only an individual can be transformed, or transcend the narrow identification with separateness. It is impossible for a collective to ever be enlightened. Enlightenment can happen only to an individual.
I often joke that only two types of ghosts exist: those without a body and those with one! Most human beings are simply ghosts with bodies. In short, they are phantoms of their past. Their lives are simply programmed by their ancestral memory.
Samskara is important because it is a reminder that we are shaped by memory on many subtle levels that we are not even aware of. You may not be conscious of it, but something within a human being deeply resents the loss of freedom.
The most searing reminder of this is in prison life. I have witnessed this firsthand when I was conducting programs in prisons. The interesting thing about prisons is that they can actually be pretty well organized. The food comes on time; you are given clothing and shelter; the lights are turned on and off for you; doors are opened for you and, of course, closed after you! For some people who live pretty poorly outside, prison life is a structured alternative. And yet if you enter a prison, you feel the pain in the air. This is a deep, inexplicable pain, because security has been given but freedom has been taken away. The loss of freedom is the deepest suffering for a human being.
Whether your freedom is taken away by a prison, by your own samskaras, or by genetic or evolutionary memory doesn’t really matter. Either way, you will find, after a while, that your life will be permeated by unexplained suffering. You will not know why, but your entire existence will seem stifling, repetitive, constraining.
A landmark experiment at Emory University in Atlanta in 2013 established an interesting finding. The fragrance of cherry blossoms was introduced into a cage of mice. At the same time, a mild electric shock was repeatedly administered to the mice. After some time, there was no need for the shock. Merely at the smell of cherry blossoms, the mice would run in the opposite direction in fear.
The amazing thing, however, was that the reaction of fear held true for the next generation of mice as well. When this new generation encountered the smell of cherry blossoms, they experienced the same fear and recoiled from it. This was without any personal experience of the electric shock. A heightened sensitivity to the fragrance continued in the second and third generation as well.
This milestone experiment is a reminder of how insidiously samskaras can work. It is a reminder of how your impressions today can influence generations after you. You need genetic memory for survival, continuity, and well-being, but you also need a distance from it to live a life of consciousness, joy, and freedom.
But how do you create distance from a memory that you are not even conscious of? How do you step away from memory that throbs, unknown to you, in every cell of your body?
Indian spiritual traditions created an elaborate science around making use of genetic memory in a way that can enhance human capability and success. On the other hand, this science also enables us to consciously distance ourselves from genetic memory in a manner that supports our spiritual growth and liberation.
On one level, there are special rituals and practices (referred to as karmas or, when performed at a deeper level, as kriyas) that are immediately performed for the dead by their families. These practices refer to ways by which we honor the memory of those we love and, at the same time, strive to become free of their influence. These rituals are performed not just for the generation before us. They can be done for twelve generations in some cases, or for seven, or at least for three.
Every culture has variations of these rituals. Jesus urged his disciples to leave the dead to the dead. And we have to do so if we seek to become truly alive. These rituals signify our desire to wipe our slates clean. They are our ways of saying that we do not want to live out recycled lives. We want to start fresh. We want to write our own scripts.
In addition to the death rituals, certain yogic practices can be hugely empowering. A spiritual initiation is an intervention on the level of the energy body that separates you from your genetic memory in a certain way.
This is also why many powerfully energized physical forms were consecrated in the Indian subcontinent as deities created for the well-being of a particular clan or community. When one person performed a ritual or process for that energy form, all the people from that genetic pool benefited from it. Today, when these close-knit groups are dissipating and the genetic pool is more mixed than ever before, many of these deities have grown largely irrelevant. But there was a very real technology involved in their making.
This is theoretically possible with certain yogic practices as well. If you take a hundred people from the same genetic pool and teach powerful yogic practices to ten of them, you could well find, in thirty months or more, all one hundred people manifesting the benefits of this yoga. That may sound strange, but it is very much possible in situations of genetic commonality and geographic proximity. When a person is touched on the level of the etheric body (vignanamayakosha in yogic terminology), it is possible for them to influence others who share the same samskaras. This is more difficult in the modern world, where communities are more mixed and scattered than ever before. But the benefits of an initiation on the etheric level can still impact others in the larger family context today, even if the impact is to a lesser extent.
In traditional Indian culture, there were also elaborate guidelines for a pregnant woman—the kind of foods she should eat, the kind of situations and atmospheres she should be exposed to. These detailed guidelines around conception and pregnancy were very much part of the Eastern cultures because they knew the mechanisms by which samskaras could be transmitted generationally.
One of the fundamental responsibilities for each generation is to realize that we are just baton carriers. We are simply handing over the baton from the earlier generation to the next. It is our responsibility to hand over a better planet. Ecologically, it is no longer possible to hand over a better planet, so we have, unfortunately, already failed at this duty. We may bring some improvement, but we cannot return things to the way they were.
But we also have another responsibility: to create a better generation of human beings. We can accomplish this only if we truly care about who we are today. Since memory is constantly transmitting itself in so many different ways, it is our duty to support the next generation by first taking responsibility for our own.
When you live by the memory of a single book, you are religious. When you live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When you live by the memory of several generations of people, you become a truly compassionate human being. But when you live beyond the memory of generations of people, you become a mystic.
Those who share our genes absorb our legacies so much more easily than others. However, the science of yoga is about raising yourself to a place where your genetic memory has no influence upon you whatsoever. Now you become what the world regards as a seer—someone who sees ahead with piercing clarity and insight. With deepening yogic practice, you find your samskaras are no longer limited by categories of class, tribe, or community. You are now capable of influencing just about anybody. As a world citizen, your bequest becomes truly global.
Runanubandha: The Honey Trap of Physical Memory
What is the role of committed relationships in a fast-changing world? How necessary are they? Has commitment outlived its utility? Has it outgrown its relevance?
These are questions I am often asked.
While these may seem to be sociological questions, a very real karmic aspect is involved here. Committed relationships and marriage are social arrangements. Therefore, their value may seem to be only social. However, the capacity of the human body to remember is enormous. The implications of this memory for human life are tremendous, too.
This is not a moral argument. It is based on very simple sense. Your body is brimming with memory: everything about it is the result of programming, from its shape and color to its texture and size. This is why you still have your greatgrandmother’s arthritic knee and find it difficult to erase your monkey ancestor’s habits! (Don’t forget: a human being and a chimp share 98.6 percent of their DNA!)
Now, body memory works on all the levels we have discussed earlier in this chapter. But a very important and large aspect of this memory is physical (as distinct from psychological and energetic). In Sanskrit, this physical memory of the body is called runanubandha. Runanubandha is the physical memory you carry within you. It is a result of blood relationships, as we have seen earlier, but also, more important, a result of sexual relationships.
Wherever there is physical intimacy—particularly of a sexual nature—the body registers the memory deeply. And so the arrangement of committed relationships in any society is based on a bedrock of profound intelligence. The logic is simple: since a significant exchange of memory occurs in any physical encounter, if you confuse the body’s memory with too many physical impressions, your system grows confused. Once your memory system becomes complicated, it could take a lot more work to settle your life.
It is important to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with runanubandha. It is an essential part of life. Without runanubandha between a couple, for instance, a future generation could not be perpetuated. And without runanubandha between a mother and child, a child could not survive. The only question, however, is how to make it supportive rather than entangling; how to ensure, in short, that a bond does not turn into bondage.
For anyone on a spiritual path, simplifying runanubandha becomes particularly important, because the ultimate aim for the seeker is to transcend physicality. If one nurses such an intention, it is wise to keep the body as a simple process, uncluttered by the encumbrance of too much memory. For only if physical memory is kept minimal can the spiritual begin to unfold.
The implications of physical memory are many. The sexual act creates maximum runanubandha between people. In this exchange, the female body, being more receptive, registers physical intimacy much more deeply than the male. When the woman bears a child, a large part of this memory is downloaded onto her offspring. This explains a common occurrence: when a woman becomes pregnant, her partner often becomes a much less important presence in her life. That is because a deep transference of memory—in terms of genetic and physical karma—is taking place for a new generation to be created. The earlier receptivity to her partner is replaced by her new role as a transmitter of physical memory to her offspring.
Women also often notice that when they get pregnant, the intensity of their feelings for their parents and other people who were very important to them begins to decline. The level of emotional attachment in other relationships often begins to dip. This is Nature’s system at work: If the body remembers its own parentage too much, it will not be able to house the new child—who is of different genetic material—as effectively. If there is too much memory, there will be struggles within the body.
As we have seen, the Sanskrit term kula vedana (collective suffering) implies that the whole clan’s memory runs through you. Your body tends to behave in a particular way because it is the carrier of these deep physical memories that make up the suffering of your people, your tribe. If you complicate your system with further runanubandha, the suffering can be enormous.
Now, let us distinguish between the memory of the mind and the memory of the body. When the mind encounters memory, a certain amount of discernment is involved. But the body takes on memory without discernment. Take the example of food: your mind can discern whether something is nourishing, but the body only can taste and then either get sick or be nourished. It is the same with physical relationships. The mind has some measure of discernment about a partner, but the body does not. It simply receives.
What the body does have, however, unlike the mind, is the ability to perceive. The mind can compute, calculate, process, assess, but it is not an instrument of perception. The mind simply interprets what the body perceives. Sharpening the body’s ability to perceive is the whole purpose of yoga. When your hard disk is full, you cannot take in any more memory; it is already memory saturated. But when the body is uncluttered, it becomes a tremendous tool. If you simplify and reduce the volume of physical memory through yoga, the body can turn into a powerful instrument of perception.
For instance, if a plate of food is placed in front of me, if I simply put my hands over it, I know how the food will behave inside my system. Depending on what I need to do that day—whether it is initiating a group into a kriya or playing a game of golf—I will decide whether to eat the food or not. It is possible to cultivate the body in such a way that its perception is razorsharp. To develop such discernment, however, the memory’s impact on the physical body needs to be minimal.
When yogis choose a place as a site of practice, they will usually walk around the area for a while, get a feel of the space, and then choose a particular spot. That is how sensitive their body has become; it can discern what spot is suitable for spiritual practice.
Their choices have nothing to do with personal likes or dislikes. There is a certain New Age impulse to speak of positive energy and negative energy somewhat indiscriminately. Many people say “I don’t like the vibe” of a person or a place without a clue of what that means. It usually means that they have likes and dislikes and have not yet transcended them. For the yogi, the discernment of the body has nothing to do with personal attraction or aversion, craving or recoil, likes or dislikes. The body for the yogi is as clinical and impersonal as a barometer—it does not judge; it simply perceives.
So, to return to the question of relationships, does this imply that a committed relationship is natural? Natural is not the appropriate word. But we could deepen our understanding of what natural means. You could think of it this way. Nature works on many different levels. One aspect of nature is purely physical. If you go according to the diktats of physical nature, you might want to mate with just about anyone. But other dimensions of nature exist within you as well. If you move into another dimension, where emotional intimacy becomes important, and if you fall head over heels in love with another person, a monogamous relationship is fine.
If you step into an even more profound dimension, you do not want contact with even one other person; you simply want to be left alone. This is because you have experienced the body as a complete life process. You realize that it does not need another body to support it. You do not want to disturb this process by involving another body. You want to keep it as it is. So there are many levels of nature within you. It all depends on what level you are living at.
It is in an attempt to reach the deeper dimensions of nature that ascetic traditions developed all over the world. Sexuality is a very big way of building memory. The reason people go into asceticism is not because they are against sex, or are anti-pleasure. It is because they do not want to add any new memory into their system. This body already remembers too much. They know that the old karma—which is quite a big heap—needs to be worked at. And that is the work of a lifetime.
Without dropping physical memory, the body is ridden with compulsions. Most people are aware of this. You may decide with great determination to abstain from certain substances or to wake up early every morning. You may even manage for a while, but that is only in the initial phase. Mental determination alone cannot eradicate physical memory. It takes time and effort to work runanubandha out of your system.
You can see how difficult it is already. So many triggers exist. The memory of tobacco may provoke the body to move in one direction; the smell of alcohol in another; the aroma of food in one direction; the memory of sexuality in yet another.
Once all these memories have been reduced, however, life is very simple. Now if you want to simply sit still, the body does this very easily. Life now unfolds in the best possible way. With unexamined accumulation, the body can turn into a living hell. But once this receptacle is reasonably empty, once there is a certain ease in the system, this body is extraordinarily perceptive.
SADHANA
If you want to test your own levels of runanubandha, you could try sitting alone in an unfamiliar place on an unfamiliar piece of furniture. Observe yourself closely. How comfortable is your body? Is it uneasy? Does it seem to want to be elsewhere? You may have noticed that older people often have a favorite armchair. In many families, people gravitate toward the same chairs at the dining table. Some of this is a matter of convenience or habit. But very often what is at work is runanubandha.
The more runanubandha you build, you can be sure you are moving backward on the ladder of spiritual evolution. Karma sets a boundary for you. When that boundary becomes too comfortable, it is time to start becoming vigilant. The same chair or room may give you physical privacy, but if you find yourself growing territorial about it or disturbed as if your very identity depends on it, it is time to start shaking up your karma.
The reason many spiritual traditions offered monasteries and ashrams to seekers was to enable them to live in a circumscribed geographical place that was free of runanubandha. This sometimes created a new set of boundaries and territories, which is unfortunate. But the aim was always to empower the seeker to expand horizons, rather than to contract them. In the outside world, their runanubandha would often draw them to a certain set of people or places or circumstances over and over again. Kshetra sanyas—a Sanskrit term that refers to a vow to never leave a certain consecrated geographical space—was a way for seekers to liberate themselves from the overpowering tentacles of physical memory.