Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-6. Inasmuch as one thing is hanging on the other, and 'that' thing is influencing 'this' – things seem to be standing in a position by mutual relationship. We cannot say that things are standing by themselves. The planets and the other heavenly bodies that seem to be hanging in space are maintaining their position due to the orbit which they have been forced to chalk out by means of a mutual cohesive influence maintained by what is called a cosmic gravitational pull. As I mentioned the other day, the bicycle maintains a position only when it is moving; if it is not moving, it will fall down. In this way, it appears that our satisfaction with any kind of stability in our life here is based on a kind of relationship which itself is relative. Thus, an absolute value is non-existent in this world, and we cannot know things as they really are by any amount of outward relation. Swami Krishnananda To be continued  ..... ...

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-5. What sort of existence is evil? This is not clear to us. The enigmatic term 'existence' can cut like a double-edged sword; it can take us both this way and that way. And the existence that we attribute to our own selves in our operations in daily life is mostly an artificially concocted related existence, not a substantive in the proper sense of the term. A thing that stands merely because it is related to something else, really does not stand by itself. Most of our relationships are the very values of our life. What we consider as worthwhile and valuable in life is that which has been produced out of a kind of relationship that we establish with something else – a contact that there is between ourselves and others. There is, for instance, political importance, economic importance, social importance, or any kind of value that you attribute to your own self in relation to something else – which means to say, inasmuch as you are s...

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-4. If you have already lost yourself, who are you to gain something else? What sort of 'you' can possess another thing, inasmuch as you have already lost yourself? The object that you possess will also be a substanceless, balloon-like emptiness, because the possessor thereof himself has become empty due to the loss of personality. This was a great question which Draupadi posed in the court of the Kauravas: "How can Yudhishthira lose me, inasmuch as he has already lost himself?" To this question no answer can be given, and nobody gave an answer. Likewise, how is it possible for anyone to possess anything in the world after having lost oneself totally? The object that is possessed also will be an ephemeral appearance which has no content or substance. These ideas will make you cogitate a little bit on the difficulty that you are facing in this great adventure you call "acquiring knowledge". It is not an easy thing...

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-3. What are you going to understand when you are trying to understand yourself? Where is the object? And which is the subject there? When I see an object, I say, "I see this. I know this table, this desk, this person, this something that is in front of me"; but I am not in front of me, so I cannot make such statements in regard to my own self. I cannot say, "I am seeing myself"; nor can I say, "I am touching myself". These statements, which usually apply to persons and things outside, do not apply to our own self. Hence, this understanding may not be adequate for the purpose of understanding your own self. All knowledge fails when it becomes a means to the knowledge of one's own self, though it becomes a great success when it is a weapon to know what is not itself. There is this peculiar difficulty which is easy to miss, because of the fact that the only thing that we miss in our daily o...

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-2. Now, what is it that you are made of? That substance, that stuff, that peculiar something that you are or you are made of is what is to be kept in position, in a state of balance. You have heard it said that yoga is a state of balance – but what sort of balance? With what are you setting yourself in balance? Though this is not difficult to understand, it is not easy to grasp at one stroke. One may imagine that to know one's own self is the easiest thing, because one's own self is the nearest thing to oneself, one's own self is completely under one's control, and nothing in the world can be easier than to know one's own self. But, nothing can be more difficult. As I pointed out the other day, the nearer an object comes to you, the more difficult it becomes to understand it. You hold opinions of a particular type in an external relation you maintain with things outside, but you find that such a rel...

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-1 It is a well known fact that in the practice of yoga, maintaining oneself in a position is pre-eminently important. The maintaining of a required position is sometimes called asana. You all perform asanas, or yoga exercises. These exercises are positions maintained by you and, in a very significant sense, the whole of yoga may be said to be the maintenance of a specific position. This word 'position' has to be understood in a very comprehensive sense. It has a vast implication, and it covers practically everything that is required of you – though, in common parlance, people understand by 'position' only a particular posture of the physical body. Though the posture of the physical body is a requisite position and it is essential in yoga, yet this understanding of the posture or position in yoga as a physical exercise does not include all its suggestions and meanings because you will certainly agree that your l...

Chapter 4 : Yoga – An Integration of Consciousness-23. Thus, you are to struggle throughout your life, and not only for a few months or years. You have to lead a dedicated life of organically struggling – not mechanically striving – in order to establish this union with your own higher psychic forces, and finally with your own conscious being, until the finale of your conscious being becomes indistinguishable from what you may consider as an unlimitedness of achievement, beyond which you need not have to struggle to achieve anything. These are difficult things for the brain to receive, and more difficult to put into practice in daily life. But you will find that it is not so difficult as it is made to appear, provided you are sincerely asking for it – and not merely making fun of it, or mocking at it, or experimenting with it, and just looking upon it as an object of diversion, intellectually or sentimentally – because the aim of yoga is not an abstraction lying beyond t...