Suhotra Maharaja: This song expresses the whole purpose of this seminar. It is written by Govinda Dasa Kaviraja. He is addressing the mind as a separate personality and we are going to show you how true that is:
O mind, just worship the lotus feet of the son of Nanda, which make one fearless. Having obtained this rare human birth, cross over this ocean of worldly existence through the association of saintly persons. Day and night I remain sleepless, suffering heat and cold, wind and rain. For a bit of flickering happiness I have vainly served wicked and miserly men. What assurance of real happiness is there in all of one's wealth, youthfulness, sons, and family members? This life is tottering like a drop of water on a lotus petal; therefore you should always serve and worship the divine feet of Lord Hari. It is the desire and great longing of Govinda Dasa to engage himself in the nine processes of bhakti, namely hearing the glories of Lord Hari and chanting those glories, constantly remembering Him and offering prayers to Him, serving the Lord's lotus feet, serving the Supreme Lord as a servant, worshiping Him with flowers and incense and so forth, serving Him as a friend, and completely offering the Lord one's very self.
So, as you can see on the blackboard this seminar is called “The Bhagavata Science of the Mind”. The word “science” is a translation of the word “tattva”, so many of you also attend our course on Bhagavatam which we offer here since December four days a week. So we told you about this class that here we are going to take off our gloves when it comes to tattva. We are going to go very deep in the subject of the mind, what it is, how it works the way it works, why it gives us so much trouble and how we can be free of the trouble.
Actually we can never be free of the mind. This is the first very important thing, if you take notes you should write that down. To think that there will come the day when I will not have a mind, that’s impersonalism. And I am saying this because I heard this sometimes being preached in classes in ISKCON. I found this very remarkable. But actually this is impersonalism. Why is that? Because even in the material world, you will find this in 5 Canto, that the mind is ruled by Soma, the moon, and behind him is Aniruddha. Soma is the Lord of rasa in the material world. So that means we taste the material rasa through the mind and through the purified mind we taste the spiritual rasa. So those who are talking about negating the mind, getting rid of him altogether, this is actually impersonalism. I call this “The male disease”. Male intellectuals have tendency to this form of extremism and later on they end up in very embarrassing circumstances.
Because, as Bhagavatam says, every one of us, sannyasi, or brahmacari, or grihasta, man or women, has eleven wives. Actually we have one wife, the mind, and she has her 10 attendants. That’s way you see here in Bengal so often the pictures of Durgadeva, Sakti, as a woman with 10 arms. Because the mind is feminine, it is canchala, which is a name of the Goddess of Fortune. She is flickering, unsteady, she goes through phases and her 10 arms are the 5 jnanendriyas and the 5 karmendriyas. So every one of us, does not matter if you are wearing safran, or whatever you are wearing, is married to a ten-armed woman. Even if you are wearing a sari. You are in a marriage and there is no divorce, there is no divorce whatsoever.
Therefore we start in our introduction; there is a Bengali saying that wherever one may travel in this life seeking to forget old problems and to start a new life, one must bring his mind along with him. Sometimes we try that. We have got some problems with certain devotees and we decide I will go to some Promised Land. It is amusing that this Promised Land is America for the Indian devotees and it is India for the western devotees. Indians can’t wait to get their green card to get the hell out of here; meanwhile the western devotees are so anxious to come to India. But actually India is the best place to come to turns with this problematic mind because this is the punya bhumi, particularly holly places like Vrindavan Dham and Sridham Mayapur.
So we have to learn how to learn what the mind is, how to control it, how to make it our friend. That’s what Krishna says in Gita – the mind can be your best friend. Imagine what it would be if the mind was so eager to chant and listen and be absorbed in Krishna, as it is now eager for sense gratification. What a friend that would be. If you had a mind who just by hearing “Krishna!” would want to rush – I want to go there, Where is Krishna, this is like the mind of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu. And this is Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s movement and we are devotees only by His blessings. And His full blessings is this type of mind. Like when at Puri, He saw the sand dune and He saw Govardhana. This is called divine madness. In a sense it is crazy if your mind is hallucinating. But in Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu this is the perfection and we should all be anxious, eager to be blessed by a drop of Lord Caitanya’s madness so that our mind may become so easily overwhelmed by Krishna consciousness. By the stimulants of remembrance and love for Krishna.
So that is the real manasa yoga, the yoga of the mind that bhakti-yoga offers us, not annihilation of the mind so that only buddhi remains, that’s jnana-yoga. And as I mentioned, I often think about it as “the male disease”. Ladies, especially the humble ones, often admit, they are mental, and they might lament that this is bad qualification. But of you know how to deal with your mind it is not a bad qualification at all. We are all mental actually and we should begin by admitting it.
I like to give this example of the history of philosophy of one Arthur Schopenhauer who among western philosophers was really hardcore, hardhearted…if you see his picture you wince, you know…He is German and he has got this disgusted look on his face all the time, because he was, among the western philosophers, one of the first to be influenced by Buddhism. Buddhism is sunyavad, voidism. Buddhists say life is suffering and we just have to negate it. Throw out life and the mind. He just wanted to be a pure intellectual. But he was a very angry and frustrated person. He lived in apartment building and he had a neighbor, an old woman who was kind of nosy and whenever he would come out of his apartment her door would crack open and she would look, what are you doing? So finally he got so disturbed by her doing this that one day he just reached in through the door and pulled he out and threw her down the stairs. She was seriously injured and the court decided that he had to pay her a life support for the rest of her days. He used to furiously write all these books full of negativity and hatred towards the world. He was one of the first European philosophers to actually use the word “maya” – everything is just maya, illusion. So this was his mood. And as I said, it was really expressed on his face. While writing one of his books he received the news that this woman finally died. And you can see in the notes of the manuscript he wrote: “The bitch is dead.” So this is the actual utra-masculine, ultra buddhi mentality. But you can see although he was trying to be purely intellectual, pure logical, his whole thing was just about emotions – just that they were completely negative – anger, frustration, he was completely under the control of his mind. Just the darkest aspects of the mind.
This is what happens when someone becomes so fascinated by the vikalpa function of the mind which is rejection. The mind has two functions – sankalpa – this are the things that are accepted because they are pleasing for the senses, like this is nice music, this is a nice looking girl. And everything that repulses the sense the mind puts it in the category of vikalpa. So those who try to be pure intellectuals that is the place where they end up – in the vikalpa aspect of the mind.
We want to begin with an introduction to the subject which will not immediately takes us to the depts of tattva just to talk about the mind, what it is, that it is a very real thing, you see. The good news is that it is not us. That’s the good news, but as I said we can never get rid of it. Why? Because it is energy of Lord Aniruddha and Lord Aniruddha is an expansion of the catur-vyuha which expands for the purpose of creation starting with Vasudev who is in transcendence, then Sankarshan, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. And Aniruddha, the mind is His energy. The feature of Aniruddha which is in everyone of us is the Paramatma, the Supersoul and He is manomaya in the language of Vedanta-sutra, the Lord of the mind, the Ruler of the mind.
So the shape of our mind, the form our mind is in is very indicative of our relationship with the Lord. I remember hearing a lecture by Srila Prabhupada, he said if you are feeling sad, depressed, unhappy, morose, that means you are in maya. Because the Lord is anandamaya-purusa, He is that person whose very form is of bliss. Like the sin is called jyotirmaya, jyotir means full of effulgence. You can’t look at the sun because it is so bright, this is the nature of the sun, in that sense maya means “the nature of”. So the nature of the sun is to be full of light, full of brilliance, blindingly so. So the Lord is ananda-maya, He is just streaming bliss from His very form. His form is bliss and bliss streams of Him, so if a devotee is Krishna conscious he is blissful. He simply shares in the blissful nature of the Lord. And if we are obsessed with our problems and our clouded thoughts how terrible we are, and how terrible people are around us, and how many bad things have happened to us and this and that, being negative, Prabhupada said, we are in maya.
So the mind is like a speedometer in a car, you need a speedometer to know how fast you go, otherwise you are breaking the law. If your speedometer does not work and you are driving you can say, “I did not know officer, my speedometer does not work.” Well, sorry, you still get a ticket for speeding. So the mind is very useful in this sense, we can judge our advancement in Krishna consciousness by how much our mind is attracted to Krishna. How much bliss, how much transcendental happiness we are experiencing in the mind. So the mind is a very real thing.
There are some essential points I put down here. These are the five essential points of the whole course. Having accepted that the mind is real thing listed in Bhagavad-gita as a part of the Lord’s creation, and although it is subtle it has real substance. Here are two quotations from Srila Prabhupada:
Since the mind is a product of the mode of goodness, if it is fixed upon the Lord of the mind, Aniruddha, then the mind can be changed to Krishna consciousness.
Listen to this. The mind can be changed to Krishna consciousness. Do you get the full impact of what Prabhupada is saying here? We talk about Krishna consciousness, we talk about the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, in a sense we are talking about the International Society of the Mind, the pure Mind. Nothing else than that. The pure state of the mind, that is what the society is meant to bring about.
So it is stated by Narotam das Thakur that we always have desires because the locus of our desires is the mind. That’s why the mind is the chief sense because the senses fulfill desires but these desires come from the mind. They often come from a place beyond our conscious mind. When we talk of the mind we generally talk only about the part we are aware of, but the mind goes much deeper than that. But that’s for later. So here we continue with the quotations:
It is stated by Narottama dasa Thakura that we always have desires. Desire cannot be stopped. But if we transfer our desires to please the Supreme Personality of Godhead, that is the perfection of life. As soon as the desire is transferred to lording it over material nature, it becomes contaminated by matter.
The essential point is that the mind, which is contaminated by material attraction, has to be bridled and concentrated on the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
In these two quotations there are five basic points. They are the basis of the whole seminar.
1. The essential substance of the mind is the mode of goodness which is the energy of Lord Aniruddha who is the localized Supersoul feature of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
2. When this sattvic substance is dedicated to the Lord it is transformed into Krishna consciousness, the state of infallible goodness above the three modes of material nature. That is called “turya”, or visudha sattva, or vasudev sattva, transcendence, and that’s the constitutional position of the jiva. Or this is the jiva in its own glory, as we sometimes read in Srila Prabhupada’s translations. This is the pure mode of goodness. The material mode of goodness it is impregnated with rajogun, tamogun. Just like there is that old joke. It is acceptable joke. The father of a teenage girl hears the rumor that his daughter of which he was so proud of being so chaste and virgin is actually pregnant. So this disturbs him very much so she comes home from school and he sits her down and he says, “Dear, I need to know the truth, are you pregnant?” Her face goes red, she looks down and she says: “Just a little bit, daddy.” So just a little bit pregnant means in 7-8 months you are going to be a lot pregnant. So similarly to be just a little bit in maya, to be in the mode of goodness but to have just a little bit of rajogun, tamogun, means that in time they are going to become very obvious. When a woman is 7-8 months pregnant it is very obvious, you see. So that’s not good enough for Krishna consciousness.
3. To dedicate the mind to the Lord we must channel the flow of our desires towards His lotus feet. Now, this is very important, I want you to understand this point very clearly. Because it may sound to you like I am introducing some personal ideas, but no, I have really prepared this course and I am going to show you that this is really what Prabhupada is saying in his books. Hence there is no question of “controlling the mind”. In that very masculine, logic, as I explained, “I am going to take charge here” way. No way, the mind cannot be controlled in that way, it cannot be fixed in that way, it cannot be pacified in that way – simply by our own strength. Desire has to be reformed. Then the mind can be controlled. Our quality of mind is a subject to the quality of our desires. This is where we start. The project of controlling the mind is not, as I told on the morning Bhagavatam class, like that bhakta, I heard about it from Visnujana Maharaja…as I always like to say, he was the person who thought me the meaning of the word God-brother. I always so fondly remember him…So he told me this story about a bhakta in LA who had a harmonica holder he use to wear around his neck; instead of harmonica he had a picture of Krishna…so he walked around the temple with this picture of Krishna always in front of his face. This was his idea of always remember Krishna and never forget Him. As Visnujana Maharaja said, he did not last very long…So there is no question of controlling the mind, even in this way, by keeping a picture of Krishna in front of your eyes 24 hours a day, without reforming desire, without addressing our desires. If your mind is full of desires you can…there are so many examples we can give from India, there are pictures of Krishna everywhere, deities of Krishna everywhere, and what is going on in the place is sinful activities everywhere. The prakriti-sahajyas perfect this. Because they are not in control of their desires and they have some philosophy to rationalize it and say we are Krishna’s devotees.
From the logic of the above mentioned point 2 it follows that the original condition of the mind is Krishna consciousness. So it is not that we are trying to get rid of the mind, to blow it up, or to dissolve it in acid, or leave it behind, bloke it up in a closet and throw away the key. Our original state is Krishna consciousness – jivera svarupa hoya krishnera nitya dasa. In a sense we can say that it is the mind that defines the jiva. Of course, Krishna has His mind too but that is infallible. Infallible and unfathomable. That original condition of the mind is contaminated as soon as our desire flows towards lording it over matter.
4. That what we know as our material mind in essence is simply the condition of material attraction. That’s sums up what the mind is. It is our state of being attracted to matter, gross or subtle, however it is, but one who is attracted to matter has a material mind. And one who is attracted only to Krishna has a spiritual mind, but it has to be a mind. Because we are jivas, we must always be attracted to something, we can never be independent. Madhvacarya makes an interesting point, that the soul is always…you see, in our Vaisnava vocabulary we have the term nitya badha (eternally conditioned) and nitya siddha (eternally liberated). Madhvacarya says that actually every soul, whether here in the material world or there in the spiritual world, is nitya badha, is bound. But it is a question of bound to what, those there are bound to Krishna, those here are bound to maya. But if you are jiva you are bound to something. And what you are bound by? The mind. This is what makes us jivas. This is what I really wanted to establish, that there is no question of negating the mind and that type of preaching has been very damaging in the past. So we want to correct that. There is very much place of psychology in Krishna consciousness and what we want to show you in this course is that psychology is one of the main topics in Srimad Bhagavatam, our problem is that we miss it, we don’t know where it is, although it is right in front of us. So we are going to point out where it is and going in it very, very deeply. So as I said, when it comes to philosophy, tattva, the gloves go off in this class. But now we are giving you nice introduction so that you feel comfortable with where we are going. But ones we get where we are going, it is going to be very deep, profound philosophy.
O, I think we can just go to the point which our dear Nita-Gouranga wanted to make about quantum physics and its relation to mental phenomena.
Nitay Gauranga das: I would like to talk mostly about the science of perception which falls into the category of psychology. I think the ultimate conclusion of this science of perception is that we don’t really have direct contact with the world around us and our representation of the world is at best subjective, perhaps, at times, entirely false. At the end we can’t trust our sense perception, it is not an accurate method to understand the world which is interesting in light of the Vaisnava Theology. The ideas we are going to talk about today come from a book written by Owen Barfield, he was a good friend of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. He wrote a book called “Saving the appearances – a study of idolatry”. He begins his book posing a question – what is real and what actually exists? He gives a example of a tree and a rainbow and he asks does the rainbow exists in the same way as the tree does? So rainbow we see always far of in a distance, but everybody has an experience of a rainbow, we can get a group of people together and we can say, hey, do you see that, and they will say yes, we see it. But you can’t touch the rainbow, you can’t come close to it.
So we can say in that sense that the rainbow is real, we can see it, we all can have a perception of it, but may be not as real as a tree is real. We can touch the tree, we can smell it, perhaps we can pick up a fruit from it and eat it, we can kick it, it is real in the realest sense that real can be, as far as we know it.
He makes an interesting argument that just as the rainbow is composed of rain and moisture and light and us observing it, us having our eyes open to it, in the same way the tree is composed by particles and we can perceive it. According to Vedic Psychology this is an interesting idea, I can’t remember the Sanskrit term right now but there are three aspects of perception – 1) something exists in the world, it has physical properties, it is real, 2) the physiology, the fact that we have the ability, the perceptual apparatus to perceive this object, for example, there is that green plant over there, I have eyes that can perceive that green color, and 3) the psychology, the fact that I am conscious of it, I want to noticed, I notice it, I see it, I am not blocking it up, these three aspects of perception are there therefore I see the plant .
Suhotra Maharaja: The Sanskrit terms for these three are adhibhautik, adhidaivic, and adhyatmic.
Nitay Gauranga das: Right. He wants to make the argument that the particles of the tree or in this case the particles of the plant can be akin to the rain drops of the rainbow and are actually they are of the same substance. Because this is not my field I will just read a paragraph out of this book which is terribly interesting:
“And yet we also know that the very material of which the tree is made is itself made of other things – molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, which are made of even smaller, elementary particles, which themselves are made of, well, something that is increasingly difficult to describe using the idea of a thing. Charges of energy, probability fluctuations, quarks, and all sorts of others increasingly…entities some of which are said to exist only for most inconceivable fraction of time, while others are said to move from future to past and not, as most of the particles, the other way around. The world of elementary particles is, science tells us, what is really, really there. According to the new physics the only really real things are the mathematical equations. The old model of the atom… has been obsolete for decades, as has the idea of trying to model the behavior of these mysteries non-beings…When popular science writers talk about atoms as the building blocks of the Universe they are perpetuating a misconception. The Universe is build of no thing. Except perhaps for mathematical formulae, something that the ancient philosopher Pythagoras suggested millennia ago.
But then how do we get to the tree? When I look at it I do not see electrons buzzing… what I do see is a tall structure…with genuine green, grew and brown color…so how is this so?”
Then what he says is that what we see is a representation of energy. It is part of our psychological disposition towards something that creates it actually. There is something there but we don’t know what it is exactly. But we do know that it is something and our seeing that as a tree, or a plant is our way to interface with something which is much more complex than that – the energy, the building blocks of things that are really, really there.
If one aspect of the perception is missing there is nothing to perceive and no object actually exists. So in this case if we say, OK, there is this building we are under right now, if there is nobody to observe this building, to perceive it, it is just a energy…the way we perceive this building is just a representation of this energy so if we are not here to perceive it, to interpret it in our mind then it is simply an energy and nothing more.
Suhotra Maharaja: I would like to make a comment and I think these are like summary comments. One thing that comes out of this is that everything we are experiencing is actually mental phenomena. The sense are simply the portals of the mind to access something that is out there that we really don’t know what it is. So the senses are the portals of the mind to this “out there”, and what we are experiencing is all within the mind. You see. Everything we experience in this world is formed inside our minds. So we are all living inside of our own heads. But from this we should not come to the conclusion that, there is a philosophy called solipsism, which conclusion is that I am the only conscious living entity in the universe and the rest of you are just my imagination. Because we all agree that we can count the same number of pillars here, we talk about the same greenery over there, there is shared experience which indicates that there is objective reality. But whatever it is we are getting only indirect impression of it in the mind. This mental picture that we have…may have no resemblance at all to what is really out there, we don’t know.
The second point I wanted to make, it is made in that book too, is that this is a very excellent argument against the theory of evolution. When you see those nice books that show dinosaurs, and before the dinosaurs where those amphibian creatures and these 18 feet long fishes, and finally they say earth was just steaming ocean of chemicals, and there was this fiery ball that come from the sun, they tell you that with such confidence. But the problem in all this…is that this is all from the human perspective. But according to evolution there were now humans then. So the thing could not have looked that way. They could have no looked as those pictures show. If, as they say, there was no consciousness, then it was just energy and you cannot talk about ball of fire been thrown out of the sun and bubbling chemical soup, you can’t talk about that, all you can say is that there were some formless energies, that’s all that you can say was there. In reality that is the logical conclusion of what we just read.
In this way science totally undermines itself. Therefore Prabhupada once said, my mission is to kick the scientists in the face with a boot. Everything they say is full of contradictions. They talk so confidentially about the evolutionist theory but on the other side the quantum physics theory totally disproves it.
Question: If all is just in our mind then what about the demigods and the Spiritual World?
Suhotra Maharaja: Let’s clarify what we are saying, we are not saying that all the material in the universe is in the mind, what we are saying is that our experience is only in the mind.
Question: But then what about the sages who visualize in their mind different demigods like Brahma, Sarasvati…
Suhotra Maharaja: They were in a state called turya, beyond the mind. The great sages which gave us the Vedas were on the platform called turya, the fourth stage, beyond the modes of nature. At best the material mind is in the mode of goodness. By bhakti yoga one goes beyond this material realm to the spiritual realm which’ is the realm of the Lord’s mind.
Suhotra Maharaja: So Nitai Gouranga Prabhu is going to continue with the Freudian drive theory. Of course this is Freud’s theory, actually Srila Prabhupada, although he spoke very strongly against Freud for being so atheistic and for propagating seeming solution of human’s problems totally devoid of any reference to God, in fact Freud’s purpose was to overturn religion with his system of psychoanalysis. Prabhupada charges Freud for that, but there is one aspect of Freud’s theory which Prabhupada readily acknowledged to be true and that is his drive theory. That ultimately everything in the material world, not only human beings but what every living entity is doing is based on sexual attraction, the sexual drive. Nitai Gauranga will proceed now.
Nitai Gauranga das: Freud actually was not trained as a psychologist; he was actually trained as a neurologist. In the course of being a neurologist and at that time there was a phenomena known as an hysteria, the literal meaning is floating uterus, at that time they thought that the uterus will start float in the body and cause an erratic behavior. I think around Freud time already it was suspected that this was not exactly what was going on. So hysteria meaning erratic or illogical behavior. Neurologists came across this quite often because, well not quite often but from time to time they would come across something they called glove anesthesia, someone who does not have feeling in their hands and the doctor would poke around the arm in a certain places, do you feel that, yes, I feel that, well, the nerves in the arm are connected to the nerves in the hands so there is really no way that there can be no feeling in the hand and at the same time to have feeling in the arms so this is not a neurological problem, this is psychological problem.
So Freud began using treatment with hypnosis with patients who had hysteria. In the process of bringing people on the hypnosis he found that under hypnosis people would often bring up conflicts that they were having or traumas that happened in the past, these would be the first things that come out of the hypnotic state. And as they went through the process of talking about their traumatic experience… the symptoms of hysteria would diminish and they would feel better. The glove anesthesia would often leave and the hysteria would often leave. And then Freud began to think about things psychologically. When I say “think about things psychologically” that means try to consider something beyond the superficial explanation of things. In the example of glove anesthesia we see that it is not a nervous thing, there is something much deeper going on, that’s what it means to think psychologically. And in Freud’s case, what he considered thinking psychologically is to somehow make the unconscious content conscious, how to make people aware of the unconscious, how to dig in the unconscious and to resolve the conflict or the trauma which is causing the erratic behavior.
Freud eventually moved away from hypnosis because, one, he was not a very good hypnotist, and two, probably more importantly, at that time the endeavor was being made to establish the psychology as a rational science and as Freud once said, hypnosis seems just “too mystical”. So it could not be considered a hard science if you work with hypnosis so he discarded the hypnosis and instead went to what he called “free association”. Free association means that the patient makes an effort not to censor anything that comes out in his mind. If he does not make an effort to hide things the unconscious content that has a direct relation to the patient’s trauma will become manifest and the person becomes aware of these issues and be able to deal with them and perhaps with the help of the psychiatrist solve them.
Besides free association Freud used a process called analysis of the transference. In one sense transference means how one person relates to another, in this case how the psychiatrist relates to the patient, but not just how they deal, but what are the pathological patterns in their dealings. That means that the patient is taking content from their previous trauma that they are generally unaware of and superimposing it on the psychiatrist.
Question: Why did Srila Prabhupada call Freud one of the three big demons of the modern world?
Nitai Gauranga das: I would say one reason would be that he propounded a theory of religion which was not favorable. He considered religious activity to be a form of neurosis. There are drives inside the religious activities, there is nothing genuine about it.
Further he propounded a world view that a man is not a rational, that he is irrational. When people speak about the most important proponents of atheism he is one of the main six.
Suhotra Maharaja: Yes, to get back on the antireligious point, he proposed that the idea of God came simply out of everybody’s’ relationship with his father. God is kind of metaphysical mental projection of the relationship with the father. And it is not healthy because we should grow up and become independent from our parents, so similarly we should give up this god-idea. And just to elaborate on the point Nitai Gauranga made that religious behavior is neurotic, Freud would say that when every morning we reach for our beads and chant 16 rounds this is like there are crazy people who always are washing their hands, it is exactly the same type of behavior – crazy, they have to chant on their beads over and over again because there is something wrong up here.
And another thing is that I read some Freud and he makes comments about the Indian yogis and they are also extremely negative. Not a lot was known in Europe at that time about yoga, they were just discovering it, but anyway, he was really making a mockery of the whole thing. Because enough was known in Europe by that time that yoga is the traditional Indian psychology, of calming the mind, of fixing the mind through meditation. And all the practices like yama, niyama, asana are meant to control the mind. And he was saying really extremely negative things about the whole concept of yoga. I never read that he said anything about bhakti yoga but you could include bhakti yoga also because in our bhakti yoga there is an equivalent for all the astanga yoga practices. We give it different name and of course we engage in activities rather than trying to stop the senses but there is an equivalent, so he certainly would have not appreciated the Hare Krishna movement.
So of course this thing, as I came to understood form a God-brother of mine, it was a mistranslation form German to English, but still in the English-speaking world which is the most influential at the moment, and in the USA Freud use to be very big and still have some influence in England, so in the English speaking country the Freud term for an ideal personality who has worked out through all these neurosis’ and is sane as much as a person can be, the term for this is the “genital personality”, a person who is totally at ease with his sex desire and has no neurosis about it.
It is not necessary that he himself was an advocate of the “free love” in other words the free expression of sexuality but the logic of his system very strongly leads in that direction.
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