The Great and Ancient Secret

Control can lead to greater ability to let go.

Traditionally niyama is translated as observances. These include opening to ones teacher, daily worship, and Patanjali gives one as surrender of self. What I am trying to do in my definition above is to state the essence and essential.

Two of the great forces active in your life are control and release. We see this in every full breath - the active drawing in, and the release as we breathe out. To some extent you can control your actions, your breathing, perhaps even your emotions; but these are tiny in comparison with what you cannot control. The controlling aspect of yama is, I believe, a means of strengthening oneself in order to meet and allow the action of what you cannot control - or what should not be controlled. Part of what emerges from the uncontrolled is the process of your developmental growth and ageing. What is vital to understand in connection with this is that we have two wills active in us. There is your conscious will with which you can direct the way you move or speak, and there is the unconscious will that directs your heartbeat and all the millions of other functions underlying your existence.

This is not a new idea. Many ancient thinkers and writers have expressed it in one way or another. For instance Jakob Boehme who lived between 1575 and 1624 wrote that:

Part of the instructions to allow the Ancient Secret to be experienced was that in our usual life, often blighted by sorrows or difficulties, our conscious will is in many ways in conflict with what Boehme has call the superior will. This is still obvious today if you look around. Countless people struggle, even to their death, with the natural will of their appetite for food. Just as many or more people have a conflict with their sexual drive, their breathing or going to the toilet. Even sleep is difficult for many.

In these struggles we see how the personality is in some way conflicting or struggling against the larger internal will. Of course these are extreme cases, but from the point of view of experiencing the Secret most of us are out of harmony with the wider will that gives us life. The process of Life itself is often blocked, distorted or misdirected in some way in most of us. The signs of this are the loneliness, despair, depression, suicidal impulses, sense of meaningless or feelings of being isolated from life and cut off from oneself. Because of this learning to let go, to drop control, to open to what past cultures have seen as the inner divine is vital for health and to live fully. Quite apart from any rewards of knowing the Secret such as the wonderful freedom and creativity it brings, it is also a healing process that clears out and deals with things from the past that cloud ones mind and heart.

The Secret might lead you into what seems like walking into an abyss

Putting this is modern language, it says that seeking the unity of self means quieting the normal and habitual manifestations of thought and emotion. When this is achieved the practitioner experiences themselves beyond the surface illusion of their senses and thoughts. When this is not done the practitioner is lost in the illusory world of thoughts and feelings.

The Christian mystics also give a similar instruction. In the classic The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author, writing about 500 AD, tells us to approach with 'naked intent'. But the title of the book tells it all - to stand before that Secret without knowing. Here is both a letting go of all you hold in your personality, and at the same time a quieting of the wayward mind and soul.

But in the original Christian symbols the same is told in a different way. Taken as a symbol instead of a historical character, the Virgin Mary shows us how to approach that forever indefinable Secret - like a young woman freshly become fertile and open with all her heart to the invisible that gives life.