The Friend Within: Refining Your Inner Instrument

We live in these little bodies, and from the inside they feel pretty much the same throughout our whole lives. It's the outside that changes. Something inside stays constant. This is one of the central teachings of Swami Rama's Sacred Journey: our true Self — the Atman, the Purusha, by many names — never changes. Our task is to find it.

Swami Rama tells us to begin with the inner instrument, the antakarana. In the West we call it simply "the mind," but the tradition describes four distinct functions: manas, the sensory mind; buddhi, the discriminating intellect that makes choices; chitta, where memories and impressions are stored; and ahamkara, the ego, the voice that says this is mine. The first work is training each of these to do its proper job — because if we don't, they overreach.

Manas, for instance, is meant to ask the question — Is this good for me? Is this not good for me? — and then hand what it finds to the buddhi to decide. Its job is only to ask, not to answer. The problem is manas tends to try to figure everything out by itself. When I was younger, I would get lost in exactly this trap: endless questions circling back on themselves, questions spawning more questions, getting absolutely nowhere. I wasn't using my buddhi at all. I was letting manas run run me in circles.

The buddhi must also be refined — like cleaning a grimy window so you can see through it. Several things help with this cleaning: meditation, gradually reducing our attachments, and simply making choices and observing what happens. I was once in Rishikesh, walking around and stopped at a fruit stand. If you've been to Rishikesh, you know these oranges — they're puffy and bloated, the skin is loose, and they tend to be dry inside and not very sweet. I stood there, wondering which to buy. It just so happened that a swami from our tradition, Ma Sewa, was standing nearby. I asked her which oranges to pick. She told me something Swami Rama himself might have said: "Choose one. Take it home. Eat it. Then you'll know." That's how the buddhi gets clear.

Swami Rama also placed great emphasis on the inner dialogue — an honest, gentle conversation with oneself. "You will discover," he writes, "that the best of all friends, in the external world or anywhere else, is your own self." Inner dialogue will help you become comfortable with yourself. "Fears of the outside world, of others, and of circumstances will disappear." Over time, through this practice, we can learn to distinguish genuine inner wisdom from the noise of ego and fear. Inner dialogue also helps us see through the false identifications of the ego — the voice that says this body is me, my car is me, my house is me. None of these things are truly "me." These are what the ego has merely claimed.

There is a source of knowledge that is often misunderstood. It is called intuition. It comes from beyond the senses. Gandhi was assisted by intuition. The idea for the Salt March — that brilliant, world-changing act of civil disobedience — didn't come through strategy sessions. It arrived in silence. At the last moment, the idea arrived fully formed. He simply knew. That kind of knowing is available to all of us, though it takes time to recognize and trust.

The ego, of course, is skilled at mimicking intuition. Just because an idea arose in a quiet moment doesn't make it wisdom. Swami Veda said that truly knowing the source of what arises in us is, at its depth, a meditative attainment. Until we get there, we do our best: pay attention, make our best guess, observe the results, keep learning.

Which brings us to the most practical point of all: we have to be willing to make mistakes. Fear of mistakes freezes us. As children we fell constantly learning to walk — and then one day we walked. Swami Veda used to quote his father: if you fall in the mud, you push yourself up from the mud. You can't push up from a marble floor. Only by risking the falls can we learn to walk.

So: make choices and observe them. Have an honest inner dialogue. Pay attention without judgment. And don't be afraid to fall. The better the buddhi functions, the more smoothly we move through life — not because everything goes our way, but because we'll know, more and more often, which way to turn.