Are You Imagining Your Own Reality? The Truth About Beliefs and Habits
- Shahid Khan - Yogveda Yoga
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Modern society is obsessed with "mindset" and "manifestation." You are told that changing your habits and thinking positive thoughts will magically change your life.
But before we can even discuss habits, we must look at the foundational error of the modern mind.
In 1637, the philosopher René Descartes wrote the phrase that built the modern Western ego: Cogito, ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am." He equated human existence entirely with the act of thinking.
This is a catastrophic mechanical error. It tells you that you are your thoughts.
At Yogveda Yoga in Bern, I do not teach this ego-based illusion. In the ancient science of Yoga, thought is not you. Thought is merely a biological tool—a mechanical fluctuation (Vritti) generated by your mental software. You are the silent Observer behind the tool. To achieve true Yoga, you must ruthlessly separate your identity from your thoughts.
If you believe that you are your thoughts, you are hallucinating your own reality. To understand why, you must look at how your thoughts were programmed in the first place.
The Making of the Character: Your Biological Programming
Why do you behave the way you behave? Let us look at the mechanical timeline of your existence.
When you are born, you are pure, unconditioned awareness. But as you become conscious of yourself, the programming begins. You are given a name. You are repeatedly told, "You are this name," and you begin to believe that this label is who you are.
Then, you slowly start to interact with your parents. You watch them. You begin to talk like them, react like them, and absorb their unspoken fears and anxieties. There is a very good possibility you will pass on this cycle to the next generation. This is all downloaded directly into your subconscious hard drive. Next, you go to school, you meet friends, and you learn social conditioning. You are taught exactly how you should behave, what you should desire, and how you should speak to be a compliant, functioning gear in society.
By the time you reach 20 years old, your character is completely set. And I use the word character deliberately, because that is exactly what it is. Like a role in a play or a movie, you are playing a part. There is the name, the profession, and the heavily conditioned mind. The stage of your beliefs and habits is set for life. But the true you—the pure Observer—is buried underneath it all, nowhere to be found.
The Mechanics of a "Belief" (Samskaras)
Because the Western mind believes "I am my thoughts," it treats this conditioned character as a profound, sacred personality.
In Ayurveda and Yoga, these beliefs and behaviors are simply Samskaras—mechanical grooves carved into your nervous system. Every time your "character" reacts to a situation based on its childhood programming, you carve a microscopic groove into your mental hard drive. Repeated over 20 years, these grooves become deep, permanent trenches.
Once a Samskara is deep enough, your Prana (life energy) flows into it automatically. You lose your free will. You no longer see reality as it actually is; you only see it through the distorted filter of your character's deep trenches.
The Trap of Habits: The Character on Autopilot
Habits are simply the physical manifestation of these mental trenches.
Your biological vehicle is designed to conserve energy.
To do this, it takes the deepest Samskaras of your "character" and turns them into automatic physical and chemical reactions. You do not consciously choose to eat processed sugar or scroll on your phone when you are stressed; your vehicle is simply running the automatic software programmed into it years ago to numb the nervous system.
Because of the Descartes error ("I think, therefore I am"), you judge yourself for these habits. You feel guilt. You think you are broken. You are not broken; you are just entirely identified with a machine running corrupted software.
The Yogveda Solution: Patanjali's Kriya Yoga
You cannot break these mechanical loops with "positive affirmations." You cannot fix the character by using the exact same conditioned mind that plays the role. You must step off the stage and separate the Observer from the tool.
To achieve this, I teach Patanjali's Kriya Yoga—the precise mechanism to dismantle your conditioning through a natural, uncompromising progression:
Tapas (The practice to come away from conditioning):
You cannot think your way out of a physical habit. Tapas is the intense internal heat and hard effort required to physically break your ingrained patterns so that true self-study even becomes possible. We use physical intensity to force the nervous system out of its comfortable autopilot and shatter the heavy grooves of your childhood programming.
Svadhyaya (Self-study and observation):
Once the physical autopilot is disrupted, you must become silent. You must watch your own machine very attentively. You observe your habits, beliefs, reactions, and triggers. You ruthlessly examine how and why they operate in order to overcome them. When the conditioned thought arises, you realize: I am observing this thought. Therefore, I am not the thought. I am not the character.
Ishvara Pranidhana (The revelation of the true self):
This is the natural progression of Tapas and Svadhyaya. When the barriers of the conditioned character are removed, the inner true self—the Antaratma—is organically revealed. You realize you were never the character to begin with. You were created in the image of the divine. You realize you were always that.
This profound realization is captured perfectly in the ancient Upanishads:
Om Purnamadah Purnamidam, Purnat Purnamudachyate, Purnasya, Purnamadaya, Purnamevaavashisyate.All is full and abundant, always. This, all that is within you, and That, all that is around you, is fullness. From that fullness, fullness is forever born again. Remove fullness from fullness and still, only fullness remains.
Stop identifying with the character you were programmed to play. You have the power to dismantle your conditioning, but it requires uncompromising, mechanical discipline.
👉[Yogveda Asana Lesson]: Build the physical presence to distinguish between what is real in the body and what is just a feeling.
Author, Master Shahid Khan
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