Poisoning the King: the Medicinal Effects of Sadhana
By Matthew Krepps, C-IAYT
“Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell.” David Bentley Hart
Spiritual Discipline
This discussion unpacks the nuances of the word Sadhana, generally translated as “practice”, and “spiritual discipline”. The meanings we discover suggest that spiritual discipline has certain characteristics and that its authentic expression is directly related to mind. To delve more deeply into the mind's centrality for spiritual discipline, we offer two avenues of consideration: first, some basic information on the parts that compose the mind, and how they are generally grouped into “higher” and “lower” mind. Finally, we offer an image/metaphor of these parts personified, and as constituting a royal court, composed of King, Prime Minister, and Administration. The details of right and wrong relationships between these images generate a deeper, more imaginative vision of the fundamental forces involved in spiritual discipline and how they are to be embodied in real-time.
Sadhana: Toward a Definition
Sadhana derives from the verb “sadh”, and means “to accomplish”. This same root gives rise to several important concepts: siddhi means “accomplishment” or “perfection”, as in a power or ability that obtains from practice. A sadhika refers to a female practitioner and sadhaka to a male. Finally, a siddha is a “perfected one”, and refers to the Master who is liberated from ignorance (avidya).
So inside the word sadhana we initially find a process that produces new powers, and is oriented in a way that admits of perfection, or the obtaining of mastery, traditionally understood as liberation from ignorance.
In his commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, B. K.S Iyengar says that "sādhanā is a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal. Abhyāsa is a repeated practice performed with observation and reflection. Kriyā, or action, also implies perfect execution with study and investigation. Therefore, sādhanā, abhyāsa, and kriyā all mean one and the same thing.” (Iyengar, 1993, p. 22) Iyengar adds nuance by including abhyasa and kriya as synonyms for sadhana.
From abhyasa we see that sadhana is “repeated”: a rhythmic event, composed of certain actions that repeat specifically over time. These repetitions instantiate in the context of “observation and reflection”, so in addition to specific actions, spiritual discipline is a process of discerning value or one of relevance realization. Sadhana is then a ritual of action as the revelation of relevance.
From kriya we get “perfect execution”: our repetitions express the highest quality. Again, these unfold as an inquiry into relevance, or as “study and investigation”. Kriya is also important here because it signifies an action that purifies, as in removing that which is not relevant for our overall trajectory. Iyengar summarizes: “a sādhaka, or practitioner, is one who skillfully applies . . . mind and intelligence in practice towards a spiritual goal." (Iyengar, 1993, p. 22)
So, I am a sadhaka [of yoga] when I engage in the repetition of high-quality action as the revelation of relevance, in order to embody the spiritual goal of liberation from ignorance. Or more succinctly, I am a practitioner when I skillfully apply mind and intelligence as a means of being liberated from ignorance.
Mind
The importance of “mind and intelligence” here cannot be overstated. As the great scholar and practitioner Georg Feuerstein says, “spiritual practice is first and foremost mind training, that is, the disciplining of those aspects of our inner life that prevent us from realizing . . . enlightenment.” (105) In the same vein, the Ayurvedic tradition identifies mind as the source of our crimes against wisdom (prajnaparadha), or the cause of all diseases that grow from confusion around true identity. But what is most important here is that Iyengar mentions the application of both mind and intelligence, as if they are distinct somehow. For the traditions that have been strongly influenced by the philosophy and cosmology of Sankhya (Yoga Sutra and Gita, for instance) there is a distinction between mind and intelligence. If Iyengar is right, it is relevant for our deepening understanding of Sadhana.
In Sankhya, the concept of mind (citta, and also antahkarana) includes the activity of the senses (manas), the sense of identity, or the ego (ahamkara), and what Swami Vivekananda called “the intellect”, and many more have called “intuition”, “understanding”, and “higher mind” (buddhi). So buddhi is the “higher” part of the mind responsible for Iyengar’s “intelligence”. If we take buddhi to be the higher mind here, this leaves manas and ahamkara.
Manas is most often identified with the lower mind of the senses. It is “lower” because the senses are not sophisticated enough to guide themselves and remain out of harm's way. Generally, they orient their path through the world by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, based on the pattern of the ego’s likes and dislikes. So lower mind is automated to a high degree, and prone to addiction. Lastly, the concept “lower” should be further nuanced as “outer”.
It is a bit more complicated with the ego (ahamkara). Some traditions are more charitable, placing it in between the higher and lower mind. In this case, ego has one foot in the lower mind because, like manas, it is strongly motivated by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Ego’s other foot is in higher mind because it can hear and respond to intuition/intelligence under certain conditions. Some, however, are less charitable, and see ego as too dominated by sense activity and self-obsession to be too closely associated with higher intelligence, and consequently, place it in the lower mind with the senses. We advocate for the first position: the ego is structurally connected to both the higher and lower mind, mediating between the two in a unique way.
Now if we come at sadhana this way, Iyengar’s comments show that spiritual discipline depends on a certain relationship between the higher and lower mind and that this relationship hinges around ego. Ostensibly, this looks like the intelligence guiding the senses via educating the ego. Fair enough. But let’s look more closely. To do so, I offer a metaphor from the teaching of the modern Tantric Master Harish Johari (See The Yoga of the Nine Emotions by Peter Marchand, who was a disciple of Johari’s).
The Mind as Royal Court
In our metaphor, the body is an image of a kingdom, with many smaller countries and their inhabitants within it. The kingdom is governed by a triune organization called the Royal court. The court is composed of the administration, the King, and the Prime Minister. In this image, the Royal court represents the mind and its parts, as well as the ideal hierarchical order of operations that show what authentic spiritual discipline looks like.
The administration represents manas: the bureaus, offices, and agencies that compose it are the senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. They gather information about the kingdom and respond to its mundane affairs. That is to say, as long as nothing novel happens, basic sensory activity tends to run on automatic, needing no intervention from higher authority to maintain the status quo.
The King represents Ahamkara, or the ego. The King is the ruler of the kingdom. His word is law. The King’s responsibility is to protect the kingdom, ensure its growth, and defend it against hostile forces from within and without. In this analogy then, the ego is the part of the mind that “rules”, or takes action in the world: if it happens, the ego consents. So in our body-as-kingdom analogy, the emotions that arise do so under the auspices of the King, as do the words that are spoken, the specific things that are listened to or ignored, and so on.
The Prime Minister is the archetypal wise teacher and represents Buddhi. She is the source of understanding, intelligence, intuition, and wisdom. The Prime Minister is capable of organizing and digesting the vast amounts of information gathered by the administration. She discerns what is relevant and produces an image that the King can understand, and upon which he can act. Though the Prime Minister is wise, seeing and understanding more than anyone else, she is not authorized to act in the world: her wisdom can reach the administration and the kingdom only by way of the King.
Avidya as Crisis in the Kingdom: The Blind King
Sadhana is the force that makes inquiry into the problems lurking within the Kingdom’s infrastructure resulting from Avidya, or spiritual blindness. Spiritual blindness “...not only prevents us from seeing Reality but actually distorts it. That distortion is expressed in the illusion that we are separate from everyone and everything else. This is a function of the . . . ego-personality, which makes an island of each one of us.” (Feuerstein, 105) Feuerstein’s linking of spiritual blindness directly with the ego shows the King’s power and centrality for sadhana: if things are not right with the King, the reality of the kingdom will not only be neglected and misunderstood, it will also be altered structurally for the worse.
Because both are strongly guided by the seeking of pleasure and pain, and because the administration serves the pleasure of the King, the King and the administration are prone to colluding in the excesses of the royal office: if the ego wants pleasure, power, and status for itself, the senses will seek that most of the time. This creates a self-organizing, self-perpetuating scenario that generally leads to degradation and decay, as problems in the kingdom go unnoticed, and continue developing in those regions that are ignored.
As the King’s focus narrows to himself, he detaches from the administration and the Prime Minister. Enjoying the tastes, sensations, sights, sounds, and smells that only a Monarch can, he ceases to be concerned with what is most relevant to the welfare of the entire Kingdom: he acts as if the kingdom is his (asmita). The more the King seeks the sensual pleasures of the Royal office, the less his actual presence in the court. The longer he is absent, the more he grows fat on his own sovereignty, eventually becoming sick and blind: sick because he cannot act, blind because he is cut off from the intelligence of his own intuition.
As in the Arthurian legends, the King’s absence casts a curse over the kingdom. The sun is obscured by fog; nothing grows; everything is barren until the return of the Royal presence. The barren kingdom here represents the structural distortion of reality that inevitably grows from the shadow of avidya. This state of affairs is the source of the Alchemical insistence that the blind King must be “poisoned”.
Sadhana as Return of the King
In our analogy of Kingdom-as-body, the ego’s illusion of separateness guarantees that it is blinded by the senses, and blinded from the intelligence of intuition. When the senses are captured by the self obsessed-ego, we cannot see the way things are. When cut off from the intelligence of intuition, we cannot discern what is most relevant, so we cannot feel what we should desire, and hence what we should do. Spiritual discipline is the force that rights the relationship between intrapsychic forces of sensory activity, identity, and intuition: sadhana is the medicine that “poisons” the King.
Feuerstein says, “whatever the system, [sadhana] calls for two things: steady practice (abhyasa) on the one side and dispassion (vairagya) on the other. Practice, or consistent discipline, has the purpose of penetrating the ego-illusion and thus revealing Reality, while dispassion is the means whereby we can rid ourselves of undesirable ballast . . .”. (106, italics are mine) So sadhana is a force of “penetration”, of something from outside the ego’s natural attitude gaining entry to its interior and illuminating (bodha) the Real. The “undesirable ballast” resulting from the King’s absence is a suite of leaden afflictions which the Yoga tradition recognizes as delusion (moha), fear (bhaya), greed (lobha), and anger (krodha). They are the characteristics of the King’s sick mind: he constantly fears the loss of his powers, pleasure and status; his anger flares quickly when distracted from himself; and he can let go of neither old slights, failures, insecurities, or past triumphs that have long since faded from relevance.
However, the heat of sadhana (tapas) slowly cooks and softens his psychic fixations, and the King’s presence begins to emerge, as if from the inertia of a long sleep. As he awakens from self-obsession, his structural connection to higher mind is valorized: he begins to hear the Prime Minister’s wisdom and to see and recognize the images that the wise teacher sends. Within this new light, he again considers the entire kingdom and redirects the administration's focus to those parts of the kingdom that have gone ignored for so long.
The paradox of the King’s transformation is exquisite: the more he is freed from personal attachments, the more clear, or empty he becomes. The more empty of himself he becomes, the more real he actually is. The King’s vitalized presence re-grounds the senses in the intelligence of higher mind. In our analogy of body-as-kingdom, sadhana frees the ego from the delusion of separateness, purifying it of fear, greed, and anger. The ego becomes spacious, or porous, and through this openness, the link between the relevance realization function (intuition/imagination), immediate experience (sense activity), and response (action) is restored.
If Sadhana is “the application of mind and intelligence in practice towards a spiritual goal”, then specifically this means repeatedly and actively holding one’s self open to the influx of higher intelligence, which comes in the form of intuitive images, which we interpret from a space of humility and service, and then act to incarnate in the world. In this sense, spiritual discipline incarnates the King’s ongoing realization that the kingdom is not his, yet he is responsible for it. So it is for our lives: this life and all that comes with it are not mine, as in property that is owned over and against that of others. All are rather profound gifts temporarily placed within my care, for which I am responsible, and which I am required to share. Such is sadhana.
