Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

24/02/2017. Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -4. This ‘environment’ is a very intriguing peculiarity, because every person has his own or her own idea of this environment. For some person, the environment may be a little office in which he or she is working: “I have no other environment. I am concerned only with my office, and if I don’t come in conflict with my colleagues in the office, I am supposed to be perfectly all right.” But this is only one way of looking at the environmental condition. Everyone is not only in the office, but everyone is somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ is one’s environment. It may be a shop in which we are working; it may be a laboratory, a school, a university, a train in which we are travelling, or any blessed place. But it is certainly true that we are somewhere, in some way. That peculiar ‘somewhere’ or ‘some-when’ is our environment. This is always with us wherever we go, because our movement in any direction, in any part of the world, is not going...

15/02/2017. Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -3. The thing we call peace of mind, inward satisfaction, or even security is that friendliness and a state of en rapport with which we are not only related in our day-to-day life, but from which we cannot in any way extricate ourselves, because our very existence is inseparable from this environment. If environment is something different from our own selves, then we need not bother about anything in this world, because the world itself is an environment about which we seem to be feeling the necessity to bother. The need to think of anything is, at the same time, the need to think that there is an environment around – otherwise, there would be no necessity to think at all. The thought of any particular thing is nothing but the thought of that which is outside us, which I call the environment, the atmosphere, whatever be our notion of that particular thing. Swami Krishnananda   To be continued ....

02/02/2017. Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -2. The environment in which we are placed calls for this adjustment of ourselves we call meditation – call it yoga, if you so like. We cannot independently live, freeing ourselves from all associations with our environment. The very meaning of ‘environment’ is that area which is sticking to our personal life, as our skin is sticking to our body. We are not living in an environment with which we are vitally not connected. The very meaning or significance of this term is that it is an unavoidable association of our very existence or life in this world. Plainly speaking, yoga is this unavoidable obligation on the part of any person to place oneself in harmony with the environment in which one is, whatever be that environment. To come in conflict with an environment would not be yoga, and to be perpetually feeling a sense of opposition from an environment outside is also not yoga. Rather it is not meditation, at least, because t...

02/02/2017. Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -1. If we had leisure and time to concentrate on the implications of our studies and analysis, we would have realised that this system of living known as yoga is a sort of hackneyed name that we give to the most normal way of living, which again, at the same time, is invariably associated with what is known as meditation. Neither yoga, as anyone would like to understand it, nor meditation, as one may be accustomed to, can be considered as something or anything outside the normal way of living, if ‘living’ or ‘life’ is to mean a progression towards larger and larger successes, achievements or attainments. If living in the world – or life – is not to mean merely existing like a stone or a tree, and if it does not mean merely vegetating, but is a purposive advance or movement in a given direction, this purpose towards which life is an advance can be fulfilled or achieved only if this something called ‘yoga’ or ‘meditation’ becomes nothing...