What is abhyasa and what is vairagya? Abhyasa means persistent practice with knowledge of the technique, with diligent examination of the practice and steadfastness. That is known as abhyasa. You do one practice today and another practice tomorrow and a third practice the day after. That is not abhyasa. Repetition of the same practice day in and day out, with full knowledge of the technique of that practice and a full knowledge about the graduated stages of the practice, that is abhyasa. While practising one and the same thing, you will be able to stop the different experiences at different levels.
There are certain experiences which cannot be consciously transcended. If you are having a peculiar experience in your vertebral column, how are you going to stop it? If a neurotic, psychotic or schizophrenic person has certain experiences, how are you going to help him to transcend those experiences? Or if a yogi is practising meditation and having images, forms and visions, how is he going to stop them? Not by practice alone. Practice is necessary, but not enough. There comes another ingredient in the picture. This other ingredient is vairagya.
Ordinarily, vairagya is translated as dispassion. Raga means attachment, it also means involvement and even obsession, a positive obsession. There are negative and positive obsessions. Positive obsessions are raga and negative obsessions are kleshas – hatred, dislike, anger are negative obsessions.
Vairagya is a series of practices in which you overcome both forms of obsession. One must develop control over the functions of the mind. Regarding the memory of those objects which you have seen and heard about, to explain it a little more: Whichever objects you have seen and heard of in your life, maybe a person, maybe a pleasure or maybe an accident or maybe a catastrophe, seeing it and hearing about it has an impact on your subconscious and the mind is always being drawn by these objects.
Every time a person is thinking about his son who is dead; every time a husband or a wife is thinking about getting a divorce; or every time an industrialist is thinking about a business which has collapsed or which has grown fantastically, there is an involvement of the person in the nature of the experience.
When you want to practise vairagya, you should be able to control these impulses which happen in the mind. A nature or spirit of disinterestedness needs to be developed within your personality.
13 September 1980, Zinal, Switzerland