flection of Purusa gives rise to the possibility of I-am-ness (asmita). A devolute of the Prakrti is Mahat, the first “created” entity that has definable properties and which gives rise to ahamkāra. Thus ahamkāra does not have the possibility of direct contact with Purusa. From ahamkāra – on the tāmasika (inclined to “materialize”) side, the tanmatras (properties of tattvas) and tattvas/bhutas evolve. They give rise to substance-like appearances that we may perceive as “matter” (Friedman 2015). On the sattvic side, from ahamkāra the instruments that are needed for perceiving the world are “created”: manas – mind, five cognitive senses, and five active senses (Bharati 2015). This is all what we need to move around on this Bhu-loka (i.e. the “material” universe that we perceive), sphere of our existence, where we experience our present life. Bhu-loka is the seventh existential level, and according to mystical sources (Vay 1923), humans started their existence on the level of Jana-loka, which is positioned five existential levels higher. The ahamkāra, when it started accumulating information on the life of the individual, contained all the data needed for “creating” our inner and outer appearance. Even though the Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras do not speak about this explicitly, the identification with the mind content (vrttis) ties one to the “form and nature of vrttis” (Yoga Sūtras I. 4). In verse I. 5 Patañjali speaks about vrttis that produce samskāras. The vrttis are formed by individual kleśas, “afflictions”, that stem from karmāśaya – the “domain of karmas”. Samskāras, the “unconsciously stored past impressions”, force the vāsanās – personal propensities – to appear (Bharati 2015). In this way Patañjali describes an analogous stream of modifications to the one mentioned above. To sum it up, the ahamkāra (ego) contains all the energies and information needed for creating an individual appearance. For every life span there is a portion of karma – effects of past lives – that have to be processed. By this it is meant that we are born into a prearranged environment – regarding social aspects (parents, family, colleagues, friends, etc.), spatial aspects (where are we born), temporal aspects (when are we born), etc. This is done from a position that takes time as a variable, which makes it possible to predict the type of events and situations, into which one is “led by the force of karma”, in order to learn to have the proper reactions that would not cause new karma to be formed and would free us from the pressure of past karmas. The information, which is channelled through ahamkāra, creates a personality type, a bodily outlook etc., using the tattvic instruments mentioned earlier. An even greater wonder is the “environment” where we are seamlessly inserted for a given life. Here every event that relates to us is shared by others and vice versa. Knowing this, we should approach our own ahamkāra with awe. All the problematic vāsanās as well as the positive ones projected by the ahamkāra into the perceptible area of inner and outer events, are simply the expression of our (immediate or distant) past and when our relevant karma segment becomes ready for our understanding it, our perception related filters allow at first to feel the issue that is there to be solved and later – when we are ready to untangle our attention 64 (2) Gejza M. Timčák
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