What is Knowledge : Ch-5 - 2.

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 relation cannot be maintained when the object becomes a proximate something, such that at a particular moment, you may not find it possible to see any difference or any distinction between yourself and that which you try to know or understand; and you are trying to know your own self, to understand what you yourself are.



The understanding has the necessity to keep an object before its eye in order to understand, and you cannot understand unless there is something which is to be understood.

If there is nothing that you can understand or nothing is there to be understood, the very meaning of understanding is ruled out.


Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  .....