Have you ever seen this little sentence on your phone: “Searching for network?” I remember looking at that one day and thinking how the mind is always searching for a network, too. Especially when traveling, I look at the phone and it’s going back and forth: “Where’s the network? I need a network!” It wants to hook up to some network somewhere.
If I don’t take charge of which network my phone connects to–if I just walk out the door–my phone will hook on to somebody else’s network. And for some reason, my cell phone grabs on to something called Xfinity. Who told it to do that? Not me. Unless I deliberately disable the Wi-Fi, or I tell it to go to a specific network, it goes right to this bogus Xfinity thing, which does nothing for me, as far as I can tell.
The mind is like that, too. It’s always searching for the network to join. So, choose your network, or it will be chosen for you. Decide where you’re going to hook your mind and preprogram it. Ask yourself, “Which network do I want to be hooked into?” They’re not all equal. The mind always searching for something to log on to, so you have to be really deliberate about it.
The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means “the way we link.” So, continuing the metaphor of the searching for network, yoga means linking your mind to the ultimate network. There are lower networks, there are higher networks, and we can actually link our mind to the ultimate network. We call that brahman–a spiritual network that the mind can be connected to.
In fact, the human mind is very high technology, much higher than an iPhone. It is designed to network with higher spiritual energies, and you can train the mind to hook into that. This is what mantra meditation is all about. No extra charge, just a little bit of paying attention–your most important asset–and you can learn to hook into that network. There are volumes written about the experience.
This excerpt is from Vaisesika’s upcoming book, Your Seven Spiritual Superpowers. Want more wisdom? Join his weekly zoom class here!
6