What is discriminative intelligence ?

Greetings Yogis and Yoginis,

This week in class we are considering discriminative intelligence.

Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.

                                                                   -Ramana Maharshi

Much of our daily behavior is conditioned by forces deep below the conscious level of our minds. This means we are limited to a conditioned, automatic way of thinking and responding to the events of life around us. When such a conditioned behavior is strong, we think of it as a fixed part of the personality. Othello is jealous, Hamlet indecisive, Macbeth ambitious; that, we say, is their nature. To many biologists, this is something that is built into our very genes.

I do not agree. Jealousy, vacillation, competition, and the rest are not permanent mental furniture; they are a process. A mental trait is a thought repeated over and over a thousand times, leading to words repeated a thousand times, resulting in action repeated a thousand times. At the beginning it is only a burgeoning habit of thought; you do not necessarily act on it. But once it becomes rigid, it dictates behavior. It is possible, through the practice of meditation and the other disciplines, to go against these conditioned ways of thinking and actually change ourselves from the inside out.

Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day – Eknath Easwaran

The homework is to evaluate areas in our lives where we are holding on to rigid ways of being that are not healthy for us or those around us. See if you can use your Yoga practices as a way to challenge this rigidity and create positive change.  Start by challenging yourself when your mind encourages you to avoid a posture or come out of a pose.  Instead of following your mind see if you can observe the thought and use your discrimination (viveka, see Patanjali's Yoga Sutra II:26) skills to make a more informed decision about what you want to do.  Then generalize this discriminative intelligence to situations off of the mat.

Blessings,

paul cheek
Rushing Water Yoga

417 NE Birch St., Camas, WA 98607
360.834.5994

www.rushingwateryoga.com
info@rushingwateryoga.com

Serving Yoga to Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver Washington since 2003