Sivananda Was Right About Everything Except One Thing

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:02]Somewhere in the middle of his book on thought power, Sivanandanda writes something strange. He's been saying for ages, "Watch your thoughts. Cultivate the good ones. Be vigilant. Discipline the mind." And then almost as a footnote, he writes, "The more you try to expel a thought, the more it repeats itself." He saw it. He wrote it down and then kept going with the same advice.

[00:00:35]I've been sitting with that gap because if you've spent any real time trying to be the gardener, Sivananda describes catching the bad thoughts before they root, replacing them with something cleaner. There is a specific thing that happens that none of the books quite name. The watching becomes its own weight and something in you starts wondering whether the problem was never the thoughts themselves.

[00:01:05]That's what I want to look at here. The premise makes a certain kind of sense.

[00:01:10]The mind produces thoughts constantly and some of those thoughts generate suffering, anxiety, self-criticism, resentment, a free floating unease that doesn't attach to anything specific. If you could see them clearly enough, early enough, you could redirect them, choose better ones, tend to the inner garden, as Sivanandanda puts it. The way you'd pull weeds before they take root.

[00:01:42]There's something honest in that. It acknowledges that the inner life isn't passive, that what moves through the mind has weight, that attention matters.

[00:01:54]So, you try it. You start watching. You catch the anxious thought midspiral and try to replace it with something steadier. You notice the critical voice and substitute something more measured.

[00:02:10]When the mind gets loud, you reach for the mantra. You repeat it 12 times like he says, sometimes 108 and for a while, sometimes a long while. There's something that feels like progress, a sense of agency, like you've stopped being dragged and started choosing. But then something else appears. It comes so gradually that most people don't notice it arriving.

[00:02:42]They just notice the exhaustion.

[00:02:44]Behind every thought, there's now a second movement. The part of you checking whether that thought is acceptable.

[00:02:53]A quiet inspector, constant, always on duty. It notes the anxious thought, flags it, compares it against the standard. It's there when you wake up and still running when you try to fall asleep. What I want to stay with for a moment is that this inspector wasn't there before the practice started. The practice created it. You added a layer to the mind in order to manage the mind. And now the mind has more activity in it, not less. There's the original thought and there's the judgment of the original thought. And sometimes there's the frustration that the original thought keeps returning despite the judgment. And then there's the quiet worry that you're not practicing correctly. that someone more disciplined would be further along by now. It all accumulates and it all lives inside the same space you were trying to quiet. I haven't figured out exactly when that becomes visible to someone who's deep in the practice. For some people, it's a slow erosion. For others, it's one specific moment, sitting in meditation, supposedly watching the breath and suddenly aware that the watching itself is loud. That somewhere inside the project of becoming more peaceful, they became more watchful and watchfulness isn't peace. Krishna Morty put it plainly, "The observer is the observed."

[00:04:33]He wasn't suggesting you stop observing.

[00:04:36]He was describing what actually happens when you try. The thought that evaluates another thought that decides this one stays and that one has to go is itself a thought. It isn't standing outside the process looking in. It grew from the same movement.

[00:04:58]Which means the inspector we just named isn't a solution to the noisy mind. It is the noisy mind in a different role.

[00:05:09]You can check this now if you want. Try to find the part of you that exists separately from thinking, not the idea of it, the actual thing. Look for the watcher that stands outside thought as something other than another movement of thought. Most people when they do this honestly find something uncomfortable a kind of circling the thought looking for the thinker and finding only more thought. This is where I want to go back to Sivananda not to argue with him to look at something he placed in his own text without quite seeing what it meant.

[00:05:50]Near the beginning of the book, he quotes Buddha. All that we are is created by our thoughts. He wrote that and then spent the rest of the book addressing a you who could stand outside thought and master it. A you who could choose, cultivate, discipline, purify.

[00:06:13]Someone who was not themselves. A product of thought. If all that you are is created by your thoughts, where does that leave the one who's supposed to master them, what is that one made of? This is the assumption that's been running silently under every practice you've tried. That there is a self that exists outside the mind, able to look in and manage what's happening, a gardener who is not themselves a plant. Sivananda assumed this so completely that he never stopped to question it. It wasn't hidden from him.

[00:06:52]It was too obvious to see. Of course there's a you. Of course that you can improve. The entire project is built on it. But the inspector, the one the practice created, it lives inside thought. It is thought. The mind generated a second voice to monitor the first voice and both of them are happening inside the same movement.

[00:07:20]Neither of them is the gardener. They're both in the garden calling each other the problem. So the practice doesn't fail because you're undisiplined.

[00:07:30]It doesn't fail because you haven't repeated the mantra enough times or watched carefully enough or wanted it badly enough. It fails because it's structured around a self that may not exist the way Sivananda imagined. Every time the inspector rises, every time the watcher watches, it reinforces the sense that there's a separate you who has a mind to manage. The practice doesn't dissolve that sense of separation.

[00:08:02]It needs it. It keeps generating it because someone has to be doing the managing and that someone has to believe they're making progress. And now back to that gap I mentioned at the beginning.

[00:08:16]The moment where Sivanandanda wrote that the more you try to expel a thought, the more it repeats and then kept going with the same advice. I think he was at a door and for whatever reason, tradition, the structure of what he'd already committed to, he didn't walk through it because what's on the other side of that door isn't a better technique. It's the question of whether the one holding the technique is part of what needs to be seen. I want to be careful here because this is the point where it's easiest to make it sound like I'm offering something better. I'm not. When the assumption is actually seen, not just understood conceptually, but seen the way you'd see something that was always directly in front of you. Something does shift. The thoughts don't stop. The mind keeps moving. But the authority of the inspector quietly loosens. It can still appear. It just doesn't carry the same weight anymore.

[00:09:25]There's less of a someone home who needs it to be right. Or maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe it's just the falling away of a continuous effort that was so constant you'd stop registering it as effort. Sivananda was pointing at something real. The mind does shape experience.

[00:09:47]Attention does matter. He wasn't wrong about the territory. The map he drew just assumed a traveler who may not exist the way he thought. If something here is still open, there is another video on this channel that goes directly into the structure of the observer. what it is, where it comes from, and what happens when it's no longer taken for the one who's watching. You might want to go there after some silence. But before that, just this. Sivananda opened his argument with Buddha. All that we are is created by our thoughts. If that's completely true, not poetically, not metaphorically, but literally, then the person who read that sentence and decided to become the master of their thoughts and spent years watching and cultivating and inspecting and trying.

[00:10:47]Who was that?