We have accumulated a large vocabulary of terms that mostly refer to non-ordinary states of consciousness that one enters through the practice of meditation, right? And that not only opens one to the latent potentialities of higher consciousness, but it also reveals the subconscious and the sedimentary layers that underlie the ego’s current identity. Those go back all the way to the prenatal period and infancy and childhood, adolescence, etc. All of those sedimentary layers can obscure and suppress the presence of the lowest sedimentary levels; but they’re still there, and they often have the power to irrupt and collapse the conscious mind at its current level by triggering a re-traumatization of some forgotten unbearable memory. I’m sure you’ve probably had that experience, right?
So the process of Sat Yoga is one of purification of those sanskaras (there’s one word for you), which are collapsed wave functions—qualium wave functions—which create fixations, predispositions and tendencies, habits of thought, belief systems and attitudes, orientations—all of that kind of thing that will determine the way that you look at a phenomenon. They also include, let’s say, veils of projections into the environment, because you tend to see what you have known in the past, assuming that the present is a repetition in some way: “this person is like your mother or like your father”. That projection then may have a grain of truth (at least at some superficial level of a trait of behavior or looks, etc.), but it will then warp the relationship and provoke a repetition of the trauma that was connected to that original other, right?
So we’re always in one of these kind of psychic whirlpools as long as we’re in the ego level, and there isn’t the power to escape the pull toward what we call the Lower Death Drive—the lower chakra energy forms that have motivated consciousness in its development. But that development often remains stunted because of a repression of unbearable information that, because one doesn’t want to see it, leads one to take defensive measures, reactive traits that, in yoga, are referred to as the gunas.
The gunas are often translated as meaning “qualities” of consciousness. Sometimes you’ll see them translated as “attributes”, and sometimes as “habit patterns” of predictive programming of how your life is going to unfold, etc. But, really, we could say that the gunas refer to “bandwidths”, if we think of consciousness as on a spectrum of frequencies. Your mind is like a radio, with many possible wavelengths from the very lowest (maybe depressed, suicidal, furious, dreading kinds of states) to the most joyous, blissful, ecstatic kinds of states and everything in between. The spectrum of consciousness at the high end goes all the way to the realization of God and the Absolute, beyond the event horizon of duality itself and beyond the illusion of the existence of a cosmos outside of consciousness. All of those fall away at the highest level; but at the lowest level, the consciousness becomes very dense and fixed with a very small—let’s call it a mimetic archive, a set of repertoires of imitations of past others who have become part of the quilt of consciousness with its sub-personalities and its fixed ways of reacting to particular situations.
So the ancient yogis divided the possible sets of qualities, or gunas. The word is guna (or you’ll hear it sometimes as gun—we can drop the “a” in Sanskrit in certain grammatical cases), but a guna is, as I say, a bandwidth. And there are three different levels and types of gunas at different vibrational frequencies. The names of these are sattva, rajas, and tamas—the adjectives being sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic.
The tamasic guna (that quality of consciousness) arises and becomes dominant when there is so much past trauma that one has to be engaged in an active defense against collapsing into it. OK? And that active defense will often require the blacking out of one’s consciousness entirely because it’s too painful to endure—whatever thoughts and feelings are coming up are just too awful. This can lead to alcoholism and the deadening of one’s pain through chemicals and other drugs used for the same purpose. So the tendency to not want to be conscious can lead, in the most extreme, to a suicidal tendency. It’s always a tendency of fear of one’s own consciousness and therefore a desire not to know what’s really going on below the surface. There’s a resistance to knowledge, to truth, even though truth sets you free. But, before you get free, you’ve got to feel all of your bondage. That pain is the residue of the consciousness having been captured under the influence of an Other that it has never been able to fully escape.
So we could say that the ego is the development of a set of defensive reactions and compensations in order to survive that unbearable pain. One way within the tamasic is the elimination of as much consciousness as possible. Another way of being tamasic is obscuring or denying moral consciousness. Then one becomes criminal, psychopathic, completely uncaring about the other, willing to harm the other. If you could imagine someone taking up a career as an armed robber, you know, they would have to be in a pretty psychopathic state. And, of course, there would be a sedimentary history of how that evolved. Nonetheless, the tamasic can be that kind of a demonic choice or a choice simply to minimize one’s capacity to know. That can lead to habits of attention deficit and just general spacing-out, being in daydreams rather than being present, or being in constant states of nostalgia or rehearsal of unhappy moments and experiences of feeling lack and inadequacy: “I should have said this”, “I should have done that”, “I missed my chance to do this”—all those kinds of regretful, remorseful, and basically self-sabotaging tendencies. But also it can enact as an aggressivity and a sabotage of the other. So all of this is within the tamasic, right? Enough said, I won’t belabor that.
The second bandwidth, the rajasic, is more the workaholic. There really are two levels of rajasic, right? The second assemblage point and the third are both generally rajasic; but the second is more obsessive, motivated by aggressivity and by paranoia that has to fixate on particular things and perhaps become obsessive-compulsive—that kind of thing. Then, at the third assemblage point, it’s more of a productivity workaholism that’s a running away from oneself but into producing something that has a value that compensates for one’s internal feeling of a lack of value as a being worthy of love. One will try to work one’s way out of the hole through good works and acts of kindness and generosity, etc.
When the sublimation channels open up, then the consciousness is motivated by the sattvic vibrational frequency, which is much more governed by ideals—ideals of goodness, of purity, of generosity, of becoming a bodhisattva—ideals of communion, sharing, giving, including, and generally creating a kind of one for all, all for one sort of attitude that is necessary if any kind of a sustainable community is to be brought into manifestation. So the sattvic is, you could say, the highest vibrational frequency reachable by the ego-consciousness.
And the ego-consciousness is, you could say, coextensive with who you believe you are as a psychological entity—a being who is basically constantly thinking, constantly identified with the bodily vehicle, and concerned with the well-being of that vehicle, a being with various psychological motivations, complexes, tendencies, etc. But there is an intention to overcome the internal conflicts that are always there below the surface, because that tamasic level of the subconscious is there and because the ego is always governed by an agency of what is equivalent to the Deep State in political terms—a Central Intelligence Agency—a censor that will prevent your conscious mind from even being curious about certain things or remembering certain things or retaining certain information that could trigger an irruption of a past trauma, etc. So there is a governing agency that is not within the threshold of awareness or control by the conscious mind. This always leads to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in trying to transform the ego’s structure and its dynamic way of enacting its pre-installed algorithms. OK?
That’s the psychological entity. There’s one more assemblage point that’s still within the ego but that, I would say, refers to the paranormal capacities of consciousness.
