09/09/2026
SUTRA 2:6
ASMITA ARISES FROM
THE APPARENT ONENESS
OF THE POWER OF THE PERCEIVER
AND THE POWER OF PERCEPTION
Asmita is the false sense of self-identity.
Asmita causes us to turn a blind eye to the purity
and expansive nature of our consciousness. Instead of seeing ourselves as pure consciousness, we are aware only of our limited identity, which is composed of the subtle impressions of the past. These samskaras, under the leadership of avidya, bring forward our deep distrust in our own eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. They force us to believe we are transient beings with limited knowledge and capacity. On the firm foundation of this belief, asmita creates an immensely vast and variegated world known as pratyaya sarga, the world of cognitions and re-cognitions.
We now see the world through the lens of our asmita. The
samskaric properties of this false self-identity create a world filled with friends and enemies, virtue and vice. Asmita leads us to experiences of success and failure, gain and loss, honor and insult, and burdens us with inferiority and superiority complexes. Our inner luminosity becomes dim and (figuratively speaking) purusha, our inner intelligence, becomes blind. This blind fellow now seeks help from nature, which has been rendered lame by our avidya-driven belief system. The endless miseries that fill our life arise from this union of the blind and the lame. We will continue to suffer until this union—grounded in avidya—is broken.
This is a general description of the dynamic of asmita and its
mother, avidya. As humans we have the privilege of disrupting
this dynamic and extricating ourselves from the torrent of sorrow it brings. Compared with other species, our veil of avidya is
relatively thin. Consequently, our individuated consciousness is
neither completely blind nor completely lame. We have the power
to discern, decide, and act, as well as the ability to distinguish the real from the unreal and the good from the bad. Because our retentive power enables us to hold a long chain of events and their consequences in our mind, we have the ability to perceive how a series of causes leads to a distinct effect. We also have the ability to disrupt, change, modify, or even completely nullify the chain of causes and engender a desirable effect. We can decide what our dharma is, the force that infuses our life with sustainability and leads us to our highest good. We have the freedom to purify our entire field of I-am-ness, which includes our mind, senses, and the vast range of our mental impressions. By making proper use of our inner luminosity, which is not affected by avidya, we can assess ourselves accurately. We have the capacity to decide what we must renounce and what we must acquire. We have the capacity to stretch our shrunken asmita and begin to live in an expanded world, the world created by primordial nature and illumined by nature’s intrinsic intelligence.
