The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going – liberation.
The awareness of liberation is not liberation. The awareness of time is not liberation.
The awareness of place, space, or condition is not liberation. You can’t say what it is, but you can sure say what it isn’t.
Sri Krishna’s message is the message of anyone who comes from far away. His message is the same as Buddha, Lao Tsu, Bodhidharma, Milarepa, Padmasambhava.
One day the play ends and the screen goes blank. There is nothing. Everything returns to its original formlessness – and then another dream begins.
Krishna says meditate and you’ll see the various ephemeral worlds, the various ephemeral beings, all of them going through the same thing; some are rich, some are poor, some are more knowledgeable, some are less knowledgeable – in countless myriad universes, forever.
We are immortal life. Think of the opportunity of self-realization. What a gas!
In order to create heat, you have to have something to burn. So what we do in yoga is, we burn ourselves up to create light.
Yoga means we go a step further back. In yoga we go to the cause. The cause of pain is not the world. The cause of pain is us.
When the sun sets, beautiful though it may be, billions of stars appear. The ego is but one sun. When that sun sets, there are endless suns, endless horizons beyond it.
Yoga is a removal of the conscious awareness from the world as you know it – the world that you’ve constructed – through your focus within your mind, to something else.
Trying to use the power of yoga to improve your life, this is a terrible mistake. Because all you are doing is binding yourself more. You’re putting more of your attention into the transient world.
Observe your actions but be so busy that you never contemplate their possible effects. It is only this consciousness that leads to liberation. Everything else is illusion.
Illumination in the outer world is to be happy no matter what is going on. In the inner world, it’s more ineffable. It’s harder to express.
Self-realization: No ego, no desires, no weight problems, no tax forms, no death to die, no life to live.
Self-realization is a very quiet thing. It’s not flashy. No one might see you light up a room. No one might observe anything.
If you are with a fully enlightened being, a jivan mukta, liberated soul, the quality of light is so clear, that you don’t really know that it is there until later.
Self-realization is liberation. Liberation is self-realization.
Sri Krishna says whatever role we have in life, we have to play it to the hilt. We have to take it all the way. We have to assume responsibility for our role. To run away from it causes misery.
The directions for meditation that Sri Krishna gives are very exacting. He tells Arjuna exactly how to get past all the things that cause suffering and transient pleasure to something that is perpetual ecstasy. His directions are that exact.