Every Terrible Thing

Or, Human nature is all good and all bad

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

~ Paul of Tarsus, Romans 7:15 (NIV)

Conversion of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus by Hans Spackaert (c. 1570)

I have a very vivid memory of being perhaps five years old at my paternal grandparents’ house. Maybe it was Christmas, maybe my birthday. It was definitely a gift-giving occasion, and I was handed a gift. I unwrapped it with gusto and opened the box. Inside was an outfit of sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt. In my mind, it was blue. Maybe not, though. But I was definitely disappointed. As a five year old, I wasn't interested in clothes. I wanted toys! And I said so. I wasn't trying to hurt my aunt’s feelings, I was just impulsive. I immediately felt terrible, realizing that my private feelings had erupted in such a way as to cause harm.

Which among us hasn't acted outside of what we know to be right and good, whether out of convenience, to get something we dearly desire, to avoid some bad fate, or in a moment of pique?

In the psychology of Yoga, we recognize the infinite layers of experience which make up our individual psyches. We do not enter this world as blank slates. Anyone who has spent time around very young children can tell you that they seem to arrive pre-loaded with some personality and will rapidly develop interests having perhaps nothing to do with what their family members value. Though we may not carry conscious memories of our functionally infinite past births, the impressions of them are equally infinite and functionally indelible until the little self dissolves. Metaphysics aside, this means that you and I each possess the capacity for every good and every evil within us, and in equal measure. Though equal in absolute terms, the balance differs as to which tendencies are frontmost in this particular body, which actions are coming to fruition through this specific brain.

Though we cannot control which of these piles of impressions have grown large enough to peek through in this lifetime, we can deliberately choose which pile we wish to add to and which we would rather starve. Of course, we are working against inertia when we do so; it does take sustained effort, and we will certainly backslide. But as we puzzle over the evils of the world and of ourselves, we can do well to think in terms of this inertia that we must push off against.

The three threads (gunas) which form the fabric of Nature may be described as the capacities toward manifestation, action, and retention. The inertia or momentum of our patterns — their tendency to continue as they are — is the force we are working against as we try to make better of ourselves. It is like struggling out of a powerful river current or against Earth’s gravity, or again like sailing. We may not be able to immediately reverse our worst natures, but we can begin by tacking rather than directly resisting.

A sailer knows how to turn the sails just so in order for the wind to propel the boat at an angle different from that in which the wind blows. They may not be able to move against the wind’s current, but a skilled sailer knows how to harness the power of the wind to movie at extreme angles which a non-sailer would think impossible. That is our own task in self-development. We cannot immediately reverse course, but we can change course. We just have to begin with less severe angles and eventually we'll have fully come about without even realizing it.

The hope of the world isn't that we all make an instant about-face, but that we each recognize our own ill tendencies and begin to turn about in concrete ways which sustain in daily life. The hope of Yoga is that, though we each have committed the most abhorrent acts in previous births, we have also been heroes at some point in eternity. What we have done before, we can do again, and greater. We must resolve now, urgently, to no longer leave it up to unconscious patterns which we shall be henceforth, but to take up the problem of our own salvation with diligence.

---