Unit II

Lecture #1

The 5 layers (Pancha Kosha)

▵ The Five Sheaths of the Body

In yoga, we look at the human system as five sheaths or layers.

Every aspect of the human system, including the mind, is seen as the body, and yoga is a
technology to transform it.

These five layers of the body are called

1. Annamaya Kosha
2. Manomaya Kosha
3. Pranamaya Kosha
4. Vignanamaya Kosha
5. Anandamaya Kosha.

Anna means food. Your physical body or Annamaya Kosha is basically the food that you have
eaten – small or big is your choice, but
it is a heap of food nonetheless. As
there is a physical body that you have
gathered from outside, there is a
mental body. The annamaya kosha is
the outermost kosha, or layer, that
feeds the physical body and sustains
the other koshas.

The mind is not in one particular part of

the body – every cell in the body has
its own memory and intelligence. This
mental body is known as Manomaya
Kosha. The physical body is the
hardware – the mental body is the
software.If you bring the physical body, the mental body, and the energy body into proper
alignment and balance, you will not have any physical or psychological ailments. Manomaya
kosha is considered to be a large part in what constitutes the yogic concepts of personality and
ego. Manomaya kosha creates the illusion of a separate “I” and “you.”

Hardware and software cannot do much unless you plug them into quality power. The third layer
of the body is called Pranamaya Kosha or energy body. Physical body, mental body, and
energy body are all in the realm of physicality, but on different levels of subtlety. To use an
analogy – you can clearly see that a light bulb is physical. But the light it diffuses is also physical.
And the electricity behind it is physical as well. Light bulb, light, and electricity: all are physical but
differ in subtlety. Similarly, the physical body, the mental body, and the energy body are all
physical but differ in subtlety.

The next layer of the body is a transitory body that is known as Vignanamaya Kosha. It
facilitates the transition from the physical to the non-physical. It does not ascribe to any of the
physical qualities, but at the same time, it is not yet completely nonphysical either.

Vignanamaya kosha is the intellect/wisdom/knowledge sheath. It is said to be composed of a

combination of intellect and the five sensory organs. It is also considered to be the part of one's
being that is responsible for will, discernment and determination.

Vijnanamaya kosha is responsible for all inner growth and personal development. This includes
the presence and evolution of morals and ethics. It goes beyond simple perception and into more
subtle knowledge, discernment and wisdom. Vijnanamaya kosha is what seeks to draw
awareness from what is happening in front of the senses to a deeper mental space

The fifth layer is called Anandamaya Kosha, which in English translates as “bliss body”. This
does not mean there is a bubble of bliss in you. We call it a blissful body because in our
experience, whenever we touch it, we become blissful. Bliss is not its nature, bliss is what it
causes for us. Anandamaya Kosha is a nonphysical dimension which is the source of everything
that is physical.

If you bring the physical body, the mental body, and the energy body into proper alignment and
balance, you will not have any physical or psychological ailments. I could show you hundreds and
thousands of people who have come out of their health issues – particularly chronic ailments and
psychological problems – simply by creating the necessary alignment within themselves. It is
misalignment that causes all kinds of problems. When the body is at ease, there is no disease.

Only if you bring the first three layers of the body into alignment, there will be a passage and a
possibility of touching Anandamaya Kosha, where blissfulness becomes a natural state of being.
Not blissful about something in particular – simply blissful because that is the nature of life.

Food Body

What you call the physical body is just a heap of food. The second sheath is called manomaya
kosha or the mental body. These two layers can only function in connection with the third
dimension, the energy body or pranamaya kosha. You can compare this to computers today –
there is hardware and software, but by themselves they cannot do anything unless you plug the
computer into quality power.

Pranamaya kosha is the dimension in which most of the yogic practices function. If you keep your
pranamaya kosha in perfect balance and fully activated, there can be no such thing as disease
either in your physical or mental body. Keeping the energy body in full flow is not about doing
healing or things like that. This is about going to the foundations of your energy system and
activating it in a proper way by building a foundational yogic practice that establishes your energy
in such a way that your body and mind are naturally fine.

Lecture #2

Idea of Self and Other

Activity in a class before the lecture (Describe some sad story and ask few questions )

How did you feel for this (Describe few words)

Do u feel helpless or helpful for them

Empathy, the ability to understand and share someone’s emotions, is foundational to our
connections with other people. Research shows that it’s crucial for moral development,
maintaining close relationships, fostering relations between groups, and inhibiting aggression.
Because of its vital role in so many social processes, it’s important to understand the factors that
promote empathy and make empathic behaviour more likely.

Most empathy-building interventions focus on improving the ability to take another person’s
perspective. For example, someone can be instructed to imagine the thoughts and feelings of a
specific person or group, or they can be presented with a video or letter in which another person
describes their experience. Such interventions have been shown to successfully increase
empathy and promote helping.

It’s sensible to try to build empathy by fostering an understanding of others. But there is reason to
believe that, less intuitively, having a clear understanding of oneself is also important for the
capacity to empathise.

One way that social psychologists characterise a person’s sense of self is by assessing their
self-concept clarity. People with high self-concept clarity say that they have a clear idea about
what they are like, that their sense of who they are is stable over time, and that their
characteristics and their beliefs about themselves are consistent with each other.

By contrast, people with low self-concept clarity have a less clear sense of who they are,
including what their characteristics or desires are. The characteristics they use to describe
themselves might be contradictory, or change from one day to the next. Perhaps not surprisingly,
having high self-concept clarity has been linked to several benefits, including higher self-esteem,
the ability to cope with stress and relationship satisfaction.
To understand why having a clear self-concept is also relevant to empathy, we need to examine
an aspect of empathy that’s often neglected. In order to empathise well, you need to not only
understand and share in someone’s emotions, but also remain aware that the source of what
you’re feeling is the other person, not something you are experiencing yourself. This requires fully
appreciating that you and your experience are distinct from the other person and their
experience. Some people are better able to make this self-other distinction than others.

Importantly, researchers have suggested that the ability to make this distinction might be related
to helpful ways of empathising. Empathic concern is an other-focused emotional response that
often leads to a desire to help reduce the other person’s suffering.

For example, imagine your distraught friend calls you and tells you that they’ve just broken up
with their romantic partner. You might try to put yourself in your friend’s shoes to understand how
they feel and, as a result, feel somewhat sad yourself. But if you’re able to hang on to the
awareness that the source of this sadness is your friend’s break-up, not something that’s actually
happening to you (self-other distinction), you’ll likely react with empathic concern and direct your
attention to showing care for your friend – listening, expressing that you understand how they’re
feeling, and maybe inviting them over for dinner.

Empathic concern can be contrasted with a more self-focused, aversive emotional response:
personal distress. This kind of response could result from poor self-other distinction – losing sight
of the fact that the other person’s experience, not your own, is the source of your emotional state.
Overwhelming personal distress can actually get in the way of effective empathic responding,
leading one to withdraw from the person in need rather than helping them. In the hypothetical
conversation with your friend, a reaction marked by personal distress could look like this: you
start vividly imagining what it must have felt like to go through the break-up, as if you had done so
yourself. As a result, you feel overwhelmed with sadness and anxiety. Suddenly, your response
isn’t really about your friend’s feelings, but your own. You might tell your friend: ‘I don’t know how
I would cope with that. It’s so awful.’ After half-listening to your friend for a couple of minutes, you
change the subject to something lighter to avoid the feelings that result from putting yourself in
their shoes.

So what’s the role of self-concept clarity in all of this? Having a clear sense of self should make it
easier to appreciate how you are different from other people, and to mentally separate yourself
from them. This might in turn help you to share in another person’s emotional experience with an
appropriate level of distance. By contrast, low self-concept clarity could lead to a blurring of
boundaries between the self and others, which might make it challenging to separate your
emotional experience from another person’s, resulting in unhelpful personal distress.

In research it is found that self-concept clarity was positively associated with the tendency to
experience empathic concern and negatively associated with the tendency to experience
personal distress. This suggests that people with a clearer sense of self are more likely to react
to others’ distress with feelings of concern and are less likely to get overwhelmed by their own
emotions. Of course, it’s possible that people were not accurately reporting how they generally
react in empathy-inducing situations.

Consistent with our earlier study, participants with high self-concept clarity felt more empathic
concern and less personal distress when listening to Katie’s story. And, consistent with our
predictions, people with low self-concept clarity seemed to have trouble distinguishing
themselves from Katie, which appeared to help account for their greater personal distress.
Perhaps more importantly, self-concept clarity was also related to helping behaviour. After
listening to the interview, participants had the opportunity to donate money to Katie. We found
that people with lower self-concept clarity donated less money, which could be partially explained
by their increased personal distress and lower empathic concern. So, not only might an unclear
sense of self make one vulnerable to experiencing more self-focused distress and less concern
for another person’s welfare, these emotional reactions could have tangible consequences for a
person in need.

These findings could have implications for close relationships. Typically, the people we love are
incorporated into our identity, which helps explain why we tend to feel the most empathy for the
suffering of those closest to us. But, our findings suggest that close identification with loved ones
should be complemented by a clear sense of self in order to allow for empathic concern.
Otherwise, people might feel their loved ones’ distress too personally and intensely, making them
(ironically) less likely to be helpful.

This work echoes theory and insights from developmental psychology. A critical milestone in
human development occurs between around 15 and 18 months, when toddlers begin to
recognise their own reflection in a mirror. This is understood as a marker of self-awareness and
as evidence that the toddler has developed a sense of self. What’s interesting is that the ability to
show care for another person and the desire to help them seem to appear only after the
development of this self-awareness. Developmental psychologists take this as evidence that
empathic responding meant to help a person in need hinges on the development of a sense of
self. Our studies suggest that this continues to be true well into adulthood.
Our findings also raise the possibility that people could improve their ability to respond
empathically to others by getting to know themselves better. One way of establishing a clearer
sense of self is by identifying your values – the qualities that are important to you in life, such as
honesty, spontaneity or ambition. Values help to answer the question: ‘What are you all about?’
Figuring out what matters to you is not always easy, however. For many, it can be helpful to work
with a psychotherapist in trying to develop a clearer sense of self.
While empathy interventions commonly aim to help people see the world through another
person’s eyes, our research indicates that the impact of these interventions might be limited when
someone lacks a clear sense of who they are. In these cases, it could be beneficial to focus first
on learning more about one’s self. Being clearer about who you are could make it easier to sense
where you end and another person begins – and to respond to their feelings in a helpful way.
Lecture #3

Hierarchy of Happiness
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory in psychology consisting of a five-tier model
of human needs, often shown as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. Maslow’s pyramid is divided
into five levels of needs, from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards:

● physiological
● safety
● love and belonging
● esteem
● self-actualization

The Hierarchy of Needs-The more we learn about man’s natural tendencies, the easier it will be
to tell him how to be good, how to be happy, how to be fruitful, how to respect himself, how to
love, how to fulfil his highest potentialities … The thing to do seems to be to find out what one is
really like inside; deep down, as a member of the human species and as a particular individual

One of his lasting and most significant contributions to psychology is what he calls the “hierarchy
of needs.” In his quest to understand human motivation and the pursuit of happiness, he
envisioned a pyramid or hierarchy of five basic human needs that had to be fulfilled for maximum
psychological health. Through his interviews and studies, he came to categorise a hierarchical
list, a pyramid of needs that need to be fulfilled to achieve what he called self-actualization, or
self realisation.
 Stage 1: Physiological Needs

The Physiological Needs such as breathing, food, drink, sleep, sex, excretion are largely (and
obviously) biological and physical requirements. When they are not fulfilled, people become
preoccupied with filling those needs above all else. For example, starving people in a war zone
can be oblivious to danger when in search of food (Maslow, 1987, pp. 15-17).

Stage 2: Safety Needs

Once the basic needs are fulfilled, other needs invariably arise (Maslow, 1987, pp. 17-18). Within
the hierarchy, the safety needs come after the physiological needs. Maslow used the word
“safety” to mean more than just physical safety. Economic, social, vocational, psychological
security all fall underneath this second tier of human needs. While safety needs are less
immediate or demanding than physiological needs, when one loses one’s job, family, home, life
savings, health insurance, etc, one is likely to feel terribly insecure and unprotected. Fulfilling the
safety needs might be likened to providing a bumper or airbags on a car; while you don’t always
need them, having them gives you some confidence that you can face minor bumps and bruises
along the road of life (Maslow, 1987, pp. 18-20).

Stage 3: Social Need, The Need to Love and Belong

As social beings, family, friendships and intimate connections get many people through the ups
and downs of life. Numerous studies have shown that the healthiest, happiest people tend to be
more involved in their communities. While there is debate on whether one causes the other is
unclear, there is some sense that having wider social connections and relationships are an
important part of being happy. Lack of interactions, human relationships, and the sense of
belonging may result in depression or loneliness while an abundance of love and community
often sustain people through difficult times (Maslow, 1987, pp. 20-21).

Stage 4: The Need for Self-Esteem and Self-Love

Abraham Maslow felt there was a clear distinction between love and respect or esteem. He felt
that an ability to feel self-esteem and personal uniqueness sprung from being loved and
embraced by families and communities. As individuals, we naturally wish to excel or be
exceptional, to be noticed for our unique talents and capabilities. Once one has some measure of
self-esteem and confidence, one gains the psychological freedom to be creative and to grow as
well as to be more generous to others (Maslow, 1987, pp. 21-22).

Stage 5: Concept of Self-Actualization

What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization…It refers to the
desire for self-fulfilment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he
is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more
what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. (Maslow, 1954,
Motivation and Personality, p. 93)
The top ‘pier’ of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy is dubbed “self-actualization.” Maslow studied
happy people in order to determine what it was that made them happy or self-actualized (Maslow,
1987, p. 22).

Abraham Maslow refers to peak experiences as the experience of happiness. He notes above
that self-actualized people tend to experience a steadier, grounded sense of well-being and
satisfaction with life. According to Maslow, self-actualizing people perceive reality accurately; they
have a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude about life. They are not self-centred but rather
problem-centred and focus on how to improve and are not deficiency-centred. They are
independent thinkers and are not overly influenced by the general culture. Their sense of humor
is not sarcastic or hurtful but rather “life-affirming” with a philosophical sense of humour. They
have a deeply felt sense of kinship with the human race.

Within the hierarchy of needs, Maslow called the bottom four levels “deficiency needs.” He claims
that the lower needs, such as the need for food, safety, love, and esteem are needs that humans
cannot do without. A deficiency in any of these interferes with one’s psychological health and so
one might react defensively, or at times, irrationally, from a place of weakness rather than
strength. And so, consciously or unconsciously, one works to fill these needs – literally or
symbolically. But it is important to note that Maslow viewed these as “needs” and necessities. On
the other hand, healthy people who have fulfilled these lower needs are able to act based on the
desire to grow rather than being motivated by deficiencies. Simply put, their deficiencies do not
determine their actions and instead, they are motivated by growth and fulfilment! It is from a
position of psychological well-being that one is able to pursue what Maslow perceived as the
universal human tendency to strive for growth, autonomy, identity and the excellence of
self-actualization

Is Maslow’s Hierarchy Useful in Our Quest for Happiness?

In Maslow’s views, the secret to authentic happiness is reaching the top of the pyramid. However,
that’s easier said than done. The road from physiological needs to self-actualization needs is long
and demanding, but it’s worth all the time and effort in the world.
You only have one life; you’re only going to be here for a limited time. Do you want to spend your
days living an ‘average’ life or seize the moment and reach for authentic happiness?
When you cease to drift through life absent-minded and choose to be in control of your destiny,
good things will happen.
People who’ve reached the top of the pyramid have a clearly defined personality. They are
charismatic, and they seek to inspire those around them. And that’s because climbing their
hierarchy of needs has taught them to accept themselves – with qualities and flaws – and
prioritise their needs above everything else.
They are not afraid to show the whole world their true colours and interact authentically.
Recent studies indicate that for people who are under hospice care, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
can be a viable tool for achieving human potential. [2] For terminally ill patients and people who
are dealing with chronic conditions, knowing they can still significantly boost their overall sense of
well-being.
Furthermore, some experts believe this needs-based model can even explain police
organisational behaviour. As one 2017 study has concluded,

“Lower hierarchy of needs tends to be associated with pursuit of traditional policing while a
community with higher level needs tends to pursue community policing. Similarly, organisational
complexities influence the implementation of different policing models.” [3]

In other words, communities where individuals can easily satisfy their physiological and safety
needs, tend to drift away from traditional policing and move towards community policing where
officers are in a proactive partnership with citizens.
All and all, it seems Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs proves to be a valuable approach, with serious
implications on an individual and social level.
But climbing the pyramid is a lifelong journey filled with challenges that can quickly throw you off
path. You need patience and determination if you wish to achieve lasting happiness.
Fortunately, a step-by-step approach can help you reach the self-actualization level and reap the
benefits of a truly joyous and fulfilling life.