Vasanas - What Are They?

What are vasanas and why is it important to transcend this unconscious hardwired programming? Kosi explains the complicated nature of our behaviour and the role of vasanas and egoic indentification in repeated patterns of suffering.

Transcript

Vasanas are a term that Ramana used frequently to describe latent tendencies.

These are unconscious tendencies that are karmic and also based on your conditioned mind.

That's everything you've learned,

Everything you believe,

Everything you perceive.

So there's two aspects of vasanas that are important to understand.

First,

The unconscious nature of a vasana and secondly,

The doer,

The feeling that you are the one that is doing.

So Ramana basically said for liberation you have to overcome vasanas and this deep feeling that you are the doer,

You are the one in control making the decisions about you and your life.

And that feels viscerally real,

You feel it in your body.

But vasana is a term that in the West we're not familiar with.

So we hear the word unconscious tendency or impressions from previous incarnations or karmic impressions that are deeply ingrained in your genetics.

And we understand that and we kind of move on from there.

And then the vasanas never are really addressed,

Especially if you adhere to a misconception of the teriya state.

So the teriya state is in your heart and it is constant silence,

Still pure consciousness.

This is the nature of teriya.

You cannot do anything to become that because you already are that.

And this is where the misconception comes in.

It's like if you're already that,

Then there's nothing else that needs to be done to liberate yourself.

And this is the false mantra of Neo-Advaita that does not end in liberation.

It just ends with an inflated ego or a deep sense that you're already enlightened so there's nothing that you need to do.

This does not address the vasanas and this does not address the deep feeling of me or the ego that's deeply ingrained in your physical body.

Vasanas are pretty much 95% of what you do every day.

So your skills,

Your habits,

Your emotional reactions,

Your hard-wired behaviors,

Routine thoughts and feelings,

Attitudes,

Beliefs,

Perceptions.

So there's a lot rolled up in the word vasana.

It lives in your subconscious mind and that's 95% of what you do every day.

This is hard-wired behaviors that your brain performs automatically based on what you've learned,

What you've perceived,

What you've experienced and how you react to different circumstances in your life is based on this subconscious hard-wired programming.

Hard-wired programming.

Now some of it is biological,

It's needed to survive.

So your lungs breathe,

Your heart beats without you consciously thinking lungs please breathe or heart please beat.

Those just go on automatically.

The blood circulates in the body because the heart is pumping but you are not consciously forcing that to happen.

That's hard-wired into your brain for the organism of your body to survive.

But then there's everything you've learned,

Different skills that you've learned throughout your life and they become habits.

So we all have habits that we do every single day.

We wake up,

We follow a certain routine.

We make a cup of coffee,

Some tea and then we move,

We start thinking about our day and what we're going to be doing and we're jumping into the future or we're traveling back to the past,

What happened yesterday,

Last week,

Five years ago,

Ten years ago,

Right?

So what's happening is your conscious mind is only five percent of your waking state,

Only five percent.

So the conscious mind cannot overcome the subconscious mind which is ninety-five percent of what you do because it's hard-wired into your brain.

Now Ramana called this vasanas and this is why it's really important to intimately examine what he meant.

So latent tendencies or impressions from previous incarnations,

It's something that we can easily grasp and understand.

But when you look at the complexity of your behavior as you move through the day,

You can see why patterns of suffering continue.

Because of all of this subconscious programming,

You are literally living in the past every moment of every day.

So you are literally living in the past every moment of every day.

So you're recreating the past and this is how things become habitual,

Patterns that you do every day.

This is also the reason why if you have a pattern of depression or a pattern of sadness or a pattern of fear or anger that those actions and reactions,

The hard-wired behaviors happen again and again and again until you stop and really listen to what is being relayed here about vasanas,

Subconscious,

Unconscious tendencies.

So if you're not aware of these habits and five percent of your conscious mind cannot overcome them,

How do you address repeating patterns of suffering?

How do you do it?

And this is really what Ramana was focused on,

Right?

First you have to address the vasanas and the egoic identification,

Right?

So that you can fall into the Toria state in the heart.

So the Toria state is there but all of this hard-wired programming is in the way of you living from that place of joy,

Peace,

Contentment and happiness.

So how do you overcome a vasana or this deep sense that you are the doer?

And there's fundamentally three practices,

Silent meditation but not passive meditation or meditation focused or a concentration focused on breath or focused on a mantra but meditation as an attention on the source.

The source of your attention lives in your heart.

So meditation from Ramana's perspective was an inquiry,

Is an inquiry.

You must see for yourself where does the mind come from?

What is consciousness?

Where does consciousness itself arise from?

What is the source of your attention?

So meditation is really learning to focus your attention on the source.

And as you all know the mind is extremely powerful.

So the minute you sit down to give your attention on the source what naturally happens is the mind grabs your attention with a thought.

And the thought is usually something that happened in the past or something that might happen in the future.

And then suddenly you're distracted by the series of thoughts that are generated by a single thought.

And then you're no longer meditating.

We've all experienced this.

So part of the practice,

The self-inquiry of meditation is to stop and examine what's really going on.

And when the mind starts to pull you away you pull in the reins,

Bring it back into the heart again and again and again until the mind surrenders.

Now you can make this easier on yourself and surrender the mind to the heart initially and attempt to stay there in the Toria state.

The fire this generates burns through some of these unconscious tendencies.

And the more you meditate the easier and easier it becomes.

In fact you start to look forward to just resting the mind and the heart because it's an effortless,

Peaceful,

Content,

Happy place,

Right,

In your heart.

So meditation as an inquiry addresses vasanas.

Self-inquiry addresses vasanas but it directly confronts the ego.

So the whole purpose of self-inquiry is not to examine your emotions and examining your emotions is essential so that you can see what is an emotion.

And so you see what is an emotion,

What is it made out of,

What does it feel like,

What is it really.

Then you're always at the effect of your emotions.

So there's value in looking at your emotion but it's not self-inquiry.

Self-inquiry is examining the doer.

Who is this me?

What is this me?

Is it even real?

Is your name real?

What is your name?

What does it mean?

So this is the deeper inquiry that enables you to see through the reflective consciousness of ego.

The reflective consciousness of ego is hard to see through because it's infused with your five senses.

Everything you see,

Everything you taste,

Everything you hear,

Everything you remember,

Everything you project.

This is all part of the hard-wired programming that is a vasana.

So when you start to hear this and understand this then you can see how important it is to address the vasanas and this is why Ramana emphasized it.

So meditation as an inquiry is one of the practices that burn through unconscious latent tendencies or vasanas.

Self-inquiry really confronts the egoic identification and naturally drops you into the tree estate of the heart.

And then the third practice is the mantra which is often left out in the Western conversation of Ramana Maharshi.

And you've heard me emphasize this many,

Many times because the mantra has a power.

The mantra is transcendent of mind,

Transcendent of mental activity.

It's not mental.

It's multi-dimensional.

And the sound itself is infused with vibratory silence that literally has the power to rewire your brain and naturally focuses your attention on the source.

The simplest mantra is Om.

And there is a power in Om.

Om is the primordial sound.

It's the vibration of omniscience.

It is a frequency of light.

It is a frequency of light.

And when you use the mantra,

It burns through the unconscious tendencies and it rewires your brain automatically.

You don't have to rewire your brain yourself.

It just,

The synapses start to shift and change because the brain is malleable.

It is not fixed.

It remains fixed when you are constantly in a past loop of consciousness where your memory and your unconscious vasanas are repeating again and again.

So you're reliving the past every moment.

And then the past itself is literally contained in your body.

And if what you are remembering is stressful or painful,

What you're doing is re-traumatizing yourself again and again and again.

And that process can literally create cancer in your body,

Illness in the physical body,

Depression in the physical body.

So one of the health benefits of meditation is to calm the system down and bring everything into balance because the human body is a system.

It's a biological system and energy.

It's a light frequency.

So part of what Rama is talking about is breaking free of the past,

Breaking free of the vasanas and breaking free of the root cause of all of it,

Which is the egoic identification.

So you don't want to skip over the word vasana and think it's really not that important.

Oh,

Latent tendencies.

Oh,

It's unconscious.

Oh,

I don't really need to do anything about that because I'm already the true state.

That's true.

You already are the true state.

But you will not be able to live from that when 95 percent of your consciousness is hard-wired into your brain.

So the three primary practices generate an energy that burns through this hard-wired programming.

It starts to rewire your brain.

You start to perceive things differently from a more expanded place.

And the more expanded your consciousness becomes,

Then you don't react as violently to different situations in your life.

In fact,

One of the ways you can recognize that you're making progress is that you can see that you no longer react the same way you used to react.

So if you used to get angry or sad or mad or wanted to justify your point of view and fight to be right,

All of that starts to fall away and you feel a sense of peace and contentment and almost like an excitement or joy,

Right?

The joy of now,

Right?

Because now is free.

The past is the graveyard.

The future is also the graveyard of the future.

It's the ghost.

It doesn't exist.

So all you really have is this moment,

But the vasanas cloud it.

And then you react violently to different situations or you don't react.

You run away.

You hide.

You seduce to get what you want.

You're upset when things are not going your way and you're happy when they are.

So you're on this roller coaster of emotions until you stop and really hear,

Okay,

Vasanas must be addressed.

They cannot be bypassed.

There is no spiritual bypass.

That is the great lie.

The spiritual bypass is a lie that generates a huge enlightened ego.

So how do you address that?

Practice.

You have to return to the core practice of meditation as an inquiry,

Self-inquiry,

Confronting the egoic identification and the mantra which transcends all this mental activity.

It's an energy light frequency.

Meditation as inquiry is light.

It's a frequency of light that burns away the past,

Which is literally stored in your body,

Right?

So it cuts through these loops of unconscious behavior that just keep the past recurring again and again and again.

And this is why patterns of suffering continue until you stop,

Are still,

Are quiet,

And inquire.

You transcend the conscious mind with the teria state of the heart.

And when you rest in that continuously,

Then your life unfolds naturally as happiness,

Contentment,

Joy,

The excitement of now,

The wonderment of now.

What's going to happen today?

Not knowing what's going to happen,

But what is happening today?

And looking forward to it,

The adventure of now.

This is the adventure of now and life becomes this joyful play of consciousness,

Which is really the essence of Leela.

But you cannot simply go to teria and say you're done.

It does not work that way.

The unconscious tendencies or vasanas must be completely addressed,

Burned through.

And the egoic identification has to be completely seen through,

Completely by yourself,

Not as a concept,

But as an actual visual experience that the ego or reflective consciousness must be seen through by yourself as a direct experience,

That it is an illusion.

The root cause of all of it is an illusion.

Then you fall into the ultimate reality,

Which is teria,

And then beyond teria,

Which is the teria-tita state,

Which is the state that Ramana was in.

Right?

Ramana was very aware that these vasanas must be addressed and the egoic identification,

Those two things,

The sense that you are the doer.

You must see through the doer.

He said that many,

Many times.

So when we revisit this and you see the complexity of your hard-wired programming,

Then you have a context for sitting down and actually applying the teaching,

Because until you apply the teaching of Ramana Maharshi,

There will be no progress.

You can awake very quickly,

But if you remain in that awake and quick bypass state,

The suffering will continue.

You'll have an inflated ego that feels better than a deflated ego,

But it's still the enlightened ego.

So the transcendence occurs with practice and developing the skill to discern,

Developing the skill to be quiet,

To focus your attention on the source always.

This is living freedom.

Om Shanti,

Shanti,

Shanti He.

Reviews

Thanks for a concise and lovely explanation of vasanas. Would you approve the 4 questions of Byron Katie’s Work as a useful protocol for weakening ego identification?

Thank you this is so enlightening, I have learnt something new today. Om shanti 🙏🏾

Thank you for this most inspiring talk of understanding the mind. Yes peace and contentment is in the now. 🙏❤️💚 My meditation practice keeps me there most days.🥰

Thank you for this to help me in my journey

thank you for this lovely teaching. blessed be@