One path leads back to this world, to rebirth; one path leads beyond. Your soul stands at a crossword, trying to make a decision, flipping a coin, a nice image for the soul, I think.
Yoga means we accept responsibility for the tasks in our life, and we know that being a king, being an enlightened teacher, being someone who sweeps the streets, we know that nothing is a greater yoga than anything else.
We live in a world of careers. Work, as Sri Krishna points out in the Bhagavad Gita, is a necessary path for everyone attaining enlightenment. It is something that we all do. Some people work very hard at not working.
The road for Arjuna is unexpected. Sri Krishna says you have to face that which you fear the most that which you’re most attached to and eliminate it. In this case he has to fight a battle, and the battle is his attachments.
Krishna says, fight. He says, go out on the battlefield and kill those people whom it’s your job to kill; and whether they were your friends or not, you have to look at the big picture. In the big picture, you can’t go kill anybody, you can’t be killed.
A war is an incarnation. A battle is a day of your life. So we do one day at a time in self-discovery.
Everybody is in the waiting room of life. Yoga is not a waiting. It is a doing, today.
You have to be a warrior in order to become enlightened. If you think it’s tough paying the bills, think about being everywhere all at once and doing everything in all the universes, simultaneously, past, present, and future.
What Sri Krishna is saying, is that it’s a terrible mistake to believe that this life we lead is real. Obviously it’s real, but it doesn’t last very long in its realness. It’s very ephemeral and to mistaken the forms of life, the shapes that life takes, for reality, is not wise.
There are people in the Himalayas who are thousands of years old. But that’s just a power, you see. It would seem to me that would suggest a tremendous aversion to the experience of death.
The body comes and goes. This life, my friend, will come and go. It is a fleeting moment, an impulse in an eternal reality.
Sri Krishna refers, of course, to this world as a joyless, transient world. Obviously, he’s never been to Disneyland.
The dreams of the self are manifold and endless and they exist in all the myriad worlds and conditions that appear to have solidity. When you’re dreaming at night, something seems very real, but when you wake up the dream is gone and so is all that apparent solidity.
Yoga is a science. It is the science of consciousness. Yoga suggests that there is more, other realms, other dimensions, and nirvana – the central nexus where all this comes from.
You have to elevate yourself to that point and bring your mind into the Godhead, into nirvana, into that perfect and pure radiant knowledge. It will not come to you. It never does.
Those who seek liberation want to go beyond individualized perception. The essence of their being wants to dissolve back into the cosmos.
Self-realization doesn’t imply loss, gain, even transition; it’s only a settling. The separate sounds on the beach, the birds, the waves, the wind. They all come together again, they blend, they harmonize.
Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster.
In the Far East, studying yoga is comparable to a mixture of attending one of the best Western universities, and of being an intrepid explorer.
Ramakrishna didn’t suddenly become enlightened. We had years of him meditating, seeking, crying to Mother Kali, going in and out of samadhi; but after many years of this process, he was enlightened. He was no longer a finite individual.