When we reference ourselves, we invariably point to the centre of our chest, implying that I am my heart space.

Intuitively we know we are more than a physical form with a thinking mind, we know we are at our heart a unique expression of pure feeling. Yoga does not refer only to the physical body – it refers to bodies’ plural. It is alluding to the multiple sheaths that layer our essential being- the physical only the outer form.

Everything in our modern lives tries to isolate us from anything but the physical, material, and external world and universe. This is like looking at our image in a mirror and finding ourselves only there and nowhere else. An Image without a soul, a play of shadows without an essence.

Today we are encouraged to generate complex layers of persona as identity which includes the physical body. Not only that, but the current madness of our world would also have us think we can be any array of mixed metaphor and gender to describe ourselves. This is psyche based existence and it leads to an impoverishment of true identity or any chance of contentment in mind and heart. Yoga beckons us to cast off the costumes and masks and clad ourselves in the sky.

We certainly do not need more external identity. We need less fixation in the external and a reorientation toward our internal reservoirs of energy, pure feeling, and higher intellect. We need less burden of confusion, impressions, and memories and more a quality of expansive freedom and power born of right knowledge of what truly animates us at the physical level and refines us at the subtle level.

Every imaginable piece of technology is born only of the human mind. We can only imagine such devices because within us we carry the very same capacities but in a much less limited form. Yet our societies beg us to bow to tech, enslave ourselves to tech and in fact integrate our very humanness with tech. This is such backward thinking. When we already carry potentials that far exceed any technical device we reduce ourselves to only the external world and become entrapped within it.

It is high time for us all to look in another direction before technology robs us of our unique human nature and capacity. Drones and clones are empty and vacuous mimicry of the creative force that made a human form and empowered a human existence.

Knowledge of our subtle layers of existence and gaining the skill to be fully aware of them at an experiential level will free us and inform us of the true intention of a human life. We are a physical being and this is our least mobile and conscious aspect. We are also an energetic form which gives energy to all discreet layers. This is the most potent, more than subatomic level of our creation. Without the throb of our energetic foundation, we would be no more than a corpse and without breath or life.

Beyond the energetic layer we are mind, a four-fold psychic instrument. Its aspects are the thinking mind influenced by the senses and organs of action. This aspect is influenced by our ahamkara (loosely translated as ego or I-maker) the aspect of mind that appropriates experience to create identity based on attractions and aversions. A deeper aspect acts as a storehouse within the mind in which is sequestered all our memories as impressions which causes us to react without skill at even the slightest provocation. The fourth aspect that we must awaken to and cleanse is our buddhi, which emanates wisdom, higher intellect, ability to discern, discriminate with the capacity to view all experience from a larger perspective than the small I- self who struggles and remains lost and confused. Healing begins when the buddhi awakens.

Beyond even the mind is a causal layer. We visit the causal in deep sleep, when there are no dreams, the body and mind and all sense of separate I-ness has receded. We must train to make unconscious deep sleep conscious. Once we achieve this nothing can ensnare us. Conscious capacity at this level takes deep practice - It is then we can achieve knowledge and direct experience of our true nature, it is so very near. It is when we can achieve this, we can release the chains and limitations of the small self-appropriated identity and persona. It is at this level we begin to find a powerful freedom and access to a perceptive capacity that reveals indeed what is real. We can be freed from the game of illusion that powerfully enshrouds our physical world. We are like people living in a prison in fear of our own demise until our consciousness is truly freed in all states and bodies.

Knowledge of the subtle layers of being is liberating for the body, mind, soul and consciousness that are all aspects of our human incarnation. We owe it to ourselves and all of humanity to gain such capacity. The time is now.