What is Knowledge : Ch-6-9.

Chapter- 6:- Being in Balance with the World-9.

From a purely psychological or psychoanalytic point of view, reality is social existence.

When psychoanalysts tell us that mental illnesses arise on account of conflict with reality, they practically or entirely mean the irreconcilability of our ideas, our desires, our passions, our emotions, with the norms prescribed by the society of people outside.

Whether they are right or wrong, or you are right or wrong, is a different matter.

The question of ethics does not arise here. It is a principle of irreconcilability between what you think is proper and what society thinks is proper which causes illness.

 As you have not the strength to fight with society and its regulations, you try to be submissive to these forces exerted upon you by society; and in this assumed submissiveness of yours, you drive your passions and inclinations, your desires and longings, and all your impulses into the subconscious and unconscious levels of your psyche.

You become an embodiment of tension, craziness, erratic behaviour, and complexes of every type, and you are no more a normal human being.

This opinion of psychoanalysts is a great truth on one level of analysis.

Hence, according to psychoanalysts, reality is social existence with which you have to be in harmony.

This is a fact that is established and accepted by the yoga system also; and by yamas we mean nothing other than what Freud, Adler and Jung have said.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  .....