SAMSKARAS & HOW WE ACT
Samskaras get strengthened in different ways. Some samskaras are strengthened only when you repeat the action. Some samskaras are strengthened just by receiving information about them, when you receive input from the world about them. Then there are some samskaras that need neither action nor information, just remembrance is enough, and they are strengthened!
Samskaras can be strengthened even without your awareness.
Usually, you don't even know that you are being driven by your samskaras. When you habitually respond to a particular situation in the same way, after a while you will start reacting in the same way to every new situation, without even trying to understand it.
You form a judgment about the person or the situation, and then collect the evidence to support that judgment. Understand, you have made the judgment already. All you need is a few bits of data to support that conviction, that's all!
FROM UNDERSTANDING TO EXPERIENCING Preparing your Inner space SAMSKARAS & HOW WE ACT
It is as if your mind is a projector.
You have a number of slides which you have gathered throughout your life, some even from your past births. These slides are the projections with which you live your life. Each time the slide is repeated, it gets more powerful. The first few times you see it, it may take several minutes for the slide to impact you. As the samskara* gets engraved deeper into your mind, all that is needed is a quick glimpse. Before you know it, your mood changes and you make your decision based on that samskara*.
Molecular biology experiments have revealed a startling Truth: each time you experience a powerful emotion like anger, new cellular transmitters and receptors for anger get activated in our body-mind system.
Understand, this happens not only in your brain, but everywhere in the body.
The first few times the emotion happens in the system, it may be just a brief drizzle. Once more and more cellular structures get built for this emotion, the drizzle turns into a shower, then into a storm and finally into a tsunami!
With each act of anger or violence, the conditioning gets deeper and stronger at the cellular level. It is like cancer. Just like malignant cells can grow, multiply and kill, these cellular receptors also multiply, allowing the emotion to simply flood your system.
Suddenly you find that you are no longer in control! If you are not aware, your samskaras can just take over your entire personality.
THE SEVEN ENERGY LAYERS – STOREHOUSE OF SAMSKARAS
What happens to all the samskaras we accumulate throughout our lives?
These engrams get deeply embedded in the various energy layers of our system.
Understand, you don't have only one body, as you think!
At the energy level, you are composed of seven energy layers or energy bodies or shareera.
Just like the five koshas we discussed earlier, these energy layers are also arranged in a concentric way, from the grossest to the subtlest energy layer. The outermost layer is the physical body, and the innermost layer is the nirvanic layer or the space of enlightenment.
Each of your energy layers becomes the storehouse of a particular kind of samskara.
Samskaras are like viruses in your system! They can simply multiply and corrupt your inner space.
If you are carrying too many samskaras, your inner space cannot hold the experience of Truth.
That is why, all initial-level meditation techniques focus on throwing these samskaras out of your various energy layers.
SEVEN ENERGY LAYERS OF THE BODY
The first (outermost) energy layer is your physical body, made out of flesh and blood.
The second layer (within the first layer) is made up of the prana movements inside your body. Prana is sometimes translated as breath, but it is actually the life energy which you take in when you breathe. The air you breathe is only the medium that carries prana into your body. The third layer is the mana shareera or the mental body. This is a subtle layer, composed of your 'inner chatter', the words and thoughts that are continuously bubbling up in your system.
The fourth layer is the emotion layer.
I can say that intense inner chattering which does not respond to your logical analysis is what we call 'emotions'!
That is the fourth energy layer or etheric body.
The fifth or causal body is the layer which you experience in deep sleep. The sixth layer or cosmic layer you experience only rarely, maybe when you have a joyous spiritual experience during meditation.
The seventh or bliss layer is the space of pure enlightened consciousness.