Stage Two: Mind Control
   The ordinary human mind thinks about life but never experiences it. Instead of perceiving the present moment directly, our mind must rely upon information received from the sensory organs. Our senses pick up external vibrations and relay them to the brain in the form of internal vibrations; the brain then processes these, correlating and reconciling them with impressions already stored; and finally, the mind reacts, acknowledging and evaluating the event perceived. What our mind experiences as the present moment is really just the recent past, after it’s been processed, refined, packaged and labeled. This “present moment” bears about as much resemblance to true reality as white sugar does to a living sugarcane plant.
   When it’s not busy processing incoming impressions, our mind busies itself by mulling over memories, creating and solving problems, and fantasizing about the future. Since the unstable mind functions only in the past and future, while the Self exists only in the eternal present, we can experience the Self only when the mind becomes stable.

A Stable Mind
   A stable mind is one which has become completely free of all thought-agitations. In meditation the mind is encouraged to suspend its activity, and because of this some people assume that meditators become dull-minded. This could not be further from the truth, for in fact a stable mind is the exact opposite of a dull one. Such extremes often seem very much alike to us; for example, our eyes can see neither very low nor very high vibrations of light, so both conditions appear to us as “darkness,” though in reality there is a world of difference between the two states. The difference between a stable mind and a dull one is like the difference between a spinning top and one which is slowing down, wobbling to a stop. The stable mind is completely vibrant, fully aware and perfectly balanced, so there is no agitation to obscure our perception of the inner Self which lies behind it.
   To fully understand this difference, we need only think back to times when intense excitement forced our mind out of its past- future warp. Sensual indulgences, roller coasters, monster movies, daredevil feats—these are some of the things we utilize in order to stabilize the agitated mind just long enough for us to get a brief hit of exhilaration from our inner wellspring of bliss. Rather than feeling dull-minded at such times, the experience we have is one of super-consciousness.
   By far, our very favorite method of stabilizing the mind in daily life is through the fulfillment of desire. Throughout our waking hours we constantly lapse into daydreams built around the desire for things we feel would make our life complete. If only I could be a famous movie star, how happy I would be! If only I could possess that sex object, life would be pure heaven! If only I could gel a promotion, all my problems would be over!
Then one day the manager of our department tells us he is leaving and we are being considered to replace him. Suddenly our mind becomes obsessed with desire for that promotion; for days we can think of nothing else, and we are sure that we will die if we don’t get it. We work harder at our present job; we “sell” our self to the boss at every opportunity; we dream about the status that the new title would bring; and we make lists of all the wonderful things we would be able to buy with the additional income. All our other desires have become eclipsed by a single, all-pervasive want: DEPARTMENT MANAGER.
   Finally, the boss calls us into his office and tells us that the promotion is ours! What perfect Bliss! What indescribable Joy! We never been so Happy in our entire life! But gradually, as the days run into weeks and the weeks into months, our daydreams return as persistent as ever, filled with the desire for all sorts of new things which we feel would make our life “more” complete.
   Chances are each one of us has starred in countless little dramas such as this, always telling our self, “This one is really it—this time I’ll win some lasting happiness.” In every instance we are convinced that the object we desire is the source of the happiness we seek, despite the obvious fact that the more we get, the more we seem to want.
   In reality, the fulfillment of desire brings us happiness only to the extent that our mind becomes stabilized in the process. According to spiritual scientists, what really happened in the above episode is this: The mind began to dwell on just one desire, then suddenly that desire was fulfilled, and for a short time the mind became completely disarmed, stabilizing just long enough for a flash of bliss to burst through from the inner Self. As soon as the mind recovers from such shocks of satiation, however, it begins to function in its usual way again, becoming agitated with more desires. As long as we continue to be guided by the mind, we will spend the rest of our days chasing one thing after another; and our death will be tragic and painful, because even as we draw our final breath, the mind will urgently proclaim that our life has not yet been fulfilled.

Meditation and The Mind
In the second stage of meditation practice, our goal becomes to still all mental agitations so that we can reach beyond the mind and immerse our self in the supreme bliss of our essential nature. The moment we succeed in transcending the mind and plugging into the inner Self, we need no longer seek to extract happiness from external things; instead, we will now be able to inject happiness into everything around us all the time.
Our meditation practice begins to focus upon the mind more and more as our body becomes less and less distracting to us: the quieter our body is in meditation, the more our attention is able In center upon the workings of our mind. At this point we will probably discover that when we first begin to aim our full attention at the mind, it will suddenly become alarmingly hyperactive. This is a natural occurrence for which Yoga provides a spectrum of remedies, the main ones involving willful force, the practice of witness-consciousness, or the repetition of a spiritual mantra

. Willful Force
 Any of us who elect this course and attempt to still the mind willfully are certain to learn very soon that we have set ourselves an extremely difficult task. When most people try to still an overactive mind with force, they find that the situation only gets worse. If someone says to us, “Try not to think of a monkey,” chances are that a monkey will immediately jump into our mind, and the more we try to oust the obstinate simian from our thoughts, the more it will obsess us. Trying to still the mind willfully is like trying not to think of a monkey. It’s a course recommended only for those of us with iron wills or fairly quiet minds during meditation.

 

Witness-Consciousness
 According to Yoga, one of the easiest ways to experience the deepest aspect of our being is to simply disregard the mind when we meditate. Just as the heart’s job is to heat, the mind’s job is to think; and just as we don’t expect the heart to stop beating when we meditate, we need not expect the mind to stop thinking. Rather, we may choose to equate our thoughts with clouds in the sky, obscuring the sun of the Self; instead of bothering about the clouds, we may simply concern our self with looking past them, striving to glimpse the light which lies beyond. The technique of not identifying with our mind in meditation is called practicing witness-consciousness. This technique is much simpler than stilling the mind through forcible restraint, but to understand how it works we will have to take a moment to consider exactly to whom we refer when we use the pronoun “I.”
   Yoga tells us that the most important question a human being can ask is: “Who am I?” Until we thoroughly understand and experience the most accurate answer to this question, all other questioning is absurd, for how can we effectively understand the true nature of anything we examine if we don’t even know the true nature of the examiner? Yoga is the process of understanding and experiencing the ultimate answer to the question “Who am I?”
   The easiest way to illustrate that most of us do not have a clear idea about who we really are is to look at the ways we refer to ourselves in normal conversation. For instance, when we say, “I am John Doe,” or “I am a doctor,” we are identifying with our name or profession; but when we say, “My name is John Doe,” or “My profession is medicine,” we indicate that these labels merely belong to us—they are not who we really are.
   When we say, “I am sick,” “I am hungry” or" I'm too fat,” we are identifying with the body; but when we say something like, “I almost broke every bone in my body,” we are indicating that the body is just one of our possessions. Exactly what part of us is the owner implied by our statement?
   Could it be the mind? We say, “1 think such-and-such,” “I remember so-and-so,” “I’m smart (or stupid),” etc., indicating that indeed we are the mind; but what about the times we say, “My mind was a blank,” “My mind’s getting tired,” or “I am trying to improve my mind”? Who is the owner of our mind to which we then refer?
   Could it be the Self? Certainly not the self we speak of when we say, “I did everything myself,” “I thought only of myself,” etc., because there’s that little possessive pronoun my again, indicating that our normal impression of “self” is nothing more than our most superficial characteristics—body, mind, name, job, etc.
—all rolled into one. This “self” is but a shadow of its true owner, the pure, perfect, blissful inner Self—and how many of us really know this part of our being?
The practice of witness-consciousness is the subtle act of differentiating between the limited “self’ and the limitless Self which lies beyond it. Once we clearly understand the difference between these two terms, the following statement should be clear as well: Meditation is not being concerned only with yourself, it’s being concerned only with your Self.’
   The Self perceives the universe through both the body (senses) and the mind (ego-intellect). True Yoga teaches us to respect and care for both body and mind with great reverence because they are our most valuable possessions, but we are warned that these are valuable to us only if they are used as vehicles to help us seek the Self. If we become deluded into thinking that the body and mind are us, rather than our instruments, we become vulnerable to endless pain and anguish. Thus, Yoga tells us, it is imperative that we begin to identify with the Self rather than its instruments, and when we do this we are practicing witness-consciousness. Simply stated, witness-consciousness is looking at everything from the point of view of the Self.
   How do we begin to get a handle on this elusive Self which lies beyond the mind, and why is it called a witness’? If we have ever been in a state of extreme excitement due to anger, fear, sorrow or whatever, we may have noticed that no matter how upset our body and mind were, there still seemed to be some part of us which just calmly stood back and watched everything quite impersonally. At any rate, most of us have surely experienced occasions in which we were fast asleep and dreaming, while some other part of us remained aloof and reminded us that it was all a dream. This part of us which never sleeps is the witness who greets us when we awaken each morning and tells us whether we’ve dreamed or did not dream. This one who witnesses dispassionately from some point beyond our mind is the very Self which we seek, and it is through time practice of witness-consciousness that we become more and more established in the Self, making more and more of its treasures available to us.

Mantra
 The easiest way of all to still the mind is by using the natural workings of the mind itself to lead our awareness to the Self. This is accomplished through the mental repetition of a yogic mantra. Since this subject is covered in detail later, we need only say a few words here to indicate how the science of mantra uses the mind to transcend itself.
   In Mantra Yoga, sound vibrations are utilized to affect the energy structure of a person or object. Since all thoughts are vibrations, mantra meditation involves the constant mental repetition of certain syllables, “thoughts” whose vibratory effect is to refine our awareness and modulate it upward to higher and higher levels of the mind until eventually the very limits of the mind are reached and transcended, leading us right to spontaneous witness-consciousness. Through mantra meditation, Yoga offers us a simple-to-use, highly effective means of bypassing many of the obstacles inherent in the quest for Self-realization, and exactly how this is accomplished will be our concern at a more appropriate point further on in our investigation.