What is Knowledge : Ch-7.13.

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline - 13.

This phrase ‘particular area of relationship’ is to be underlined, because this is something very important. The ego is a kind of affirmation of consciousness within the limit of the area of its operation. It can be the whole country or the nation with which the consciousness can identify itself, and affirm the validity, the truthfulness, naturalness, justifiable, legality, etc., of the position that its association with this area maintains.

We can go wrong even in extreme patriotism if it is a position contrary to the welfare of other nations also – irrespective of the fact that it may tend to make one believe that it is in the direction of the welfare of one’s own country – because the existence, the welfare, the security, and the durability of the position maintained by a particular national attitude, at least these days, is well known to be organically related to such positions that other nations also can maintain.

Here again we are coming to the same point of what freedom is, and how it is not in any way opposed to discipline that is required even in an international relationship. Just as there is social discipline, moral discipline, personal discipline, there is also an international discipline which has to be maintained by the comity of nations if they are to survive, or even to exist.

Swami Krishnananda
 To be continued  .....