Does It Help To Analyze Our Past?
The Western view of mental health puts great emphasis on our past with Sigmund Freud popularizing psychoanalysis and our psychosexual developmental stages.
However, Freud’s views run in direct contrast to the Eastern view of mental health when viewed through the lens of the Yogic sciences and philosophy. In fact, the two couldn’t be further apart.
We are all familiar with the more Westernized traditional forms of therapy where one goes to a professional to help dissect the past hoping to find a seed experience that might be shrouded in trauma which helps to explain or at least point to present day subconscious tendencies, poor coping skills, and maladaptive behavior.
People are often in therapy for years on end, endlessly digging, analyzing, and putting what they think are the missing puzzle pieces of their broken psyche back together again.
But the ancient science of Yoga doesn’t place any emphasis on the mind or any of its disturbances. In fact, focusing on the mind and past experiences is of no interest at all to this path of enlightenment and higher awareness.
Yoga instead focuses on the present moment.
But how does one stay focused, present, alert, and aware of what is happening when we have obvious mental hang ups, negative thought patterns, and unbridled emotions that keep us from staying cool, calm, and collected?
Wouldn’t analyzing our past help us to stay aware of the present moment?
Don’t we need to look to our past to know who we are now?
The above questions come from an erroneous assumption. The assumption being that we are our personality or our ego.
But if we are not our personality, then what are we?
Ah, now we are getting somewhere! This is where the path of Western psychoanalysis has an obvious dead end.
No, we don’t need to endlessly analyze and pick through our past traumas and suffering in order to fix ourselves because fixing the ‘person’ is not the point.
Our suffering, in any and all cases, is due to our deep identification with our personhood, our personality, our character, our ego, our likes and dislikes, all of which of course, include our past and projected future.
The crux of the issue is what we identify as or what we think of as “us” or “me”.
Western psychology has not evolved past the notion of the egoic state of consciousness because those that are analyzing and digging through the past are themselves deeply identified with their own personality and egoic structure. It is like the blind leading the blind.
To truly move beyond all your self-imposed suffering one must create a distance from what you call as ‘you’ and start identifying with your greater ‘Self’, as your true and ultimate nature.
This is not the same as simply exchanging one belief system for another.
To be clear, a belief is defined as an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists; trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.
In contrast, knowledge is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education.
The reason Yoga is considered a science is because it has a systematic process that can be replicated over and over again through experiential validation. It is not a belief system and doesn’t require one to believe anything.
All that is required is to follow the process and realize the results.
All those that follow the path of yoga have realized that their true reality can be summed up in one Sanskrit word: Satchitananda or existence, consciousness, and bliss.
How would you like to let go of the past? No longer suffer? Remain present and aware to every moment and not miss the glory and miracle of being alive?
How would you like to be soaked in bliss every moment?
This is not only possible but assessible for everyone right now.
We are not our past. We are not our personalities. We are not our likes/dislikes or even our family bonds and connections.
We are existence, consciousness, and bliss. This is our true nature.
Do you believe this? Or, do you know this?
If one truly wants to discover who and what they truly are, then looking behind you will never free you.
The past is dead.
What is alive is this present moment; this NOW.
Yoga is defined as ‘union’ and describes the union of individual consciousness to universal consciousness.
