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THE HINDRANCES
eny, are the two complementary aspects of the one fundamental impulse to keep going on and on.
The five klešas, then, comprise that heritage of tendencies on which creatures thrive, and on which they have always thrived. These "impairments” are involuntary, unconscious propensities, effective within every living creature, which sweep it along through life. According to the Indian view, moreover, they are inherited from former existences. They are the very forces that have brought about our present birth. Hence the first work of Yoga is to annihilate them, root and branch.
This requires a resolute dissolving, not only of the conscious human personality, but also of the unconscious animal drive that supports that personality-the blind life-force, present "both in the worm and in the wise," that avidly clings to existence. For only when these two spheres of natural resistance (the moral and the biological) have been broken can the yogi experience, as the core of his being, that purusa which is aloof from the cries of life and the constant flow of change. The serene substratum is reached, released, and made known to consciousness, only as a result of the most severe and thoroughgoing yogic process of disentanglement and introversion. To which end, three lines or ways of yogic discipline have been developed: 1. asceticism, 2. “learning in the holy teaching," and 3. complete surrender to the will and grace of God.
1. Asceticism is a preliminary exercise to purge away the impurities that stain our intrinsic nature. These dim all experience and expression by impregnating everything with the traces of former acts of the body and mind. The obscuring traces are like scars; they have been cut by passion (rajas) and spiritual inertia (tamas), the two forces of the animal portion of our nature. Ascetic exercises heal us of such wounds. Ascetic practices dispel the impairments, just as a wind dispels the clouds that hide the sky. Then the crystalline limpidity of the inner firmament of the soul-that mirror-calm of the deep inner sea, unstirred by emo
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