Yoga and Psychology: Schizophrenia and Enlightenment

Schizophrenia is a diagnosis around which medical science examines, clarifies and disputes in the last century. As one of the most common mental illnesses, schizophrenia attracts the attention of scientists and society, but a century later the truth is that this disease remains a mystery. Medical knowledge describes and distinguishes the symptoms, the possible physiological consequences, and to some extent manages to suppress the sharp manifestations with the help of psychopharmacy. And opportunities are so far out there. Even the limits of the disease can't be outlined with the precision with which modern science suggests to treat the material world. The reason is obvious, though still formally unrecognized: man's psyche and its disorders are not directly part of the material world. And if scientists are trying to avoid this topic today as they go deeper into the details of neurophysiology and genetics, we find guidance from the very beginning of modern psychiatry that this approach will inevitably run into failure.

Sigmund Freud defines the psychoses, the most famous of which is schizophrenia, such as the clash of the Self with the outside world, and a little later - with the ID - the outer world. Something in our souls can't agree and accept what is welcoming us out. Yung, who for the first time translates deep ancient knowledge and yoga into the language of psychology of the 20th century, formulates psychosis as a pouring, immersing the self from the archetypal contents of the unconscious. Some part of us who is outside of us because it is more than us, at one point takes control over what we have been able to build in ourselves, and we are powerless to preserve our inner walls. Disturbances in the pattern of thinking and feeling are generally defined today as schizophrenia. Violations are both productive, positive - that is, manifestations that are not seen in "normal" people (such as hallucinations, delusions, speech disorders, disorganization of thought), as well as negative traits that have crossed the border of "normal" emotions are flattened, pleasure or social connections can not be felt. In other words, modern psychiatry from the positions of power sets the limits of what and to what extent is "normal"; describes and postulates norms for the inner world of man that are publicly accepted. All the symptoms of the diagnosis of schizophrenia, both positive and negative, have been known to thousands of years of yoga as partial manifestations of the awakening kundalini - the hidden in every person force that brings the energy to the full realization of the inner potential for enlightenment. The process in which we begin to move from the world of the human psyche - the world of "normal" existence - into the world of the superhuman, the divine, the self world in the territory of the Superheaz, is accompanied by profound restructuring and changes in the internal world, which can't be described in the terms of the commonly accepted norm.

Does that mean that yogis are schizophrenics? If you ask someone from the street, with ideas of yoga from fairy tales on the table, he will no doubt answer affirmatively. But yoga exists, though unknown to many practitioners today, a clear boundary between mental disorder and mental growth, between illness and enlightenment. Instead of the material model of modern science, yoga describes what is happening in the human psyche through the energy model - with the knowledge that each of us and all that is in us and which surrounds us is part of a single field of universal energy in free movement. Kundalini is the charge, the potential we bring to change, to increase the vibration of this energy in ourselves, to move away from the harsh vibrations of the material universe to the subtle vibrations of the divine world. This opportunity brings each of us within, and yoga provides a way for it to be fully realized. But when kundalini begins to awaken - as a result of external influences or misconduct - in a pathological way, the result instead of self-realization is precisely psychosis, a mental disorder of the mental apparatus. Therefore, the technology of yoga over the centuries has been passed carefully, with years of student-teacher training. From the point of view of the energy model, neuroses are a disruption of the balance between the two main energies in the human psyche, between the feminine and male energies, and the pillage. Because this balance in today's world is generally destroyed, it can be said that today all people (except those who consistently deal with practices to regain inner equilibrium or are sufficiently isolated from modern society) are neurotics. Psychosis is always a pathological manifestation of the "superhuman" in the psyche. It is provoking, raising kundalini before the psyche is mature enough and prepared for that. In the language of energy roads - the nations, psychosis is an attempt by the Kundalini to break its path through the yoga and the ping, instead of the central energy channel - the Sushumna, which is still blocked. Or an attempt to pave its way into the Sushumna, when the chakras, the major energy centers along the central canal, are still closed, immature, not ready to endure and transform the incoming flow of energy. Then a psychic collapse occurs.

At the same time, the climbing of kusdalini on the Sushumna is associated with stress and tension in the overall reconstruction of the human (as a consequence of the body) human constitution. Therefore, the process of enlightenment often brings together, as concomitant effects, those symptoms that today's psychiatry diagnoses schizophrenia. But there is a fundamental difference: the person in the process of enlightenment is not crazy. His psyche is not disorganized, but organized by other, new, higher laws. Mental conflict does not exist. The flow of experiences may be entirely in-focus (the outer world at certain stages of the process completely loses significance), but it is consistent and permanent rather than chaotic. The ability to make decisions and judgments (perhaps odd and unacceptable to others) is inviolable, unlike the destruction of the schizophrenic potential. Enlightenment is not a loss of internal control, but internal control of a new, next, higher (albeit incomprehensible and unreachable for "normal" people) level. The system of classical yoga in practice has very quickly managed to separate and distinguish the signs that one has gone on the path of self-realization by the symptoms of mental illness. People with awakening kundalini have been directed to appropriate places and teachers to be able to pass successfully and painlessly through the process of inner awakening. Today, these people also go to psychiatry. In recent decades, the topic of mental illness is extremely popular, because the task of realizing the internal potential is becoming an immediate task on which our survival depends as humanity. And while at the same time there is still no general culture of the essence of this process, it can be said that the epidemic of schizophrenia, of the psychoses that has taken hold of the planet, is primarily the result of illiteracy, the absence or forgetting of basic knowledge . No matter how proud we are that we have the most information, with the most facts and details of the material world compared to any other age. A bitter contradiction, for which we may pay too high a price.

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