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Love is a human possibility. If you need a refresher course, you can take lessons from your dog. He is full of love! You don’t have to go to outer space to know love.
Self-transformation is not incremental self-improvement. Self-transformation is achieved not by morals or ethics or attitudinal or behavioral changes, but by experiencing the limitless nature of who we are. Self-transformation means nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life. Knowing this is yoga. One who embodies this is a yogi. One who guides you in this direction is a guru.
Very simply, well-being is just a deep sense of pleasantness within. If your body feels pleasant, we call this health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they become very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking: pleasantness within and without. When pleasantness is within, it is termed
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Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.
If you still believe that someone “up there” is going to rescue you and solve all your problems, just remember that you are living on a round planet—and one that’s spinning. So, whenever you look up, you are obviously looking in the wrong direction! In this vast ever-expanding cosmos, what’s up and what’s down? You have no clue. Nowhere in the cosmos is it marked “This side up”! The only distinction you do know right now is “within” and “without” (although, for the yogi, even this distinction has vanished).
Taking responsibility is not accepting blame instead of assigning it. It simply means consciously responding to the situation. Once you take responsibility, you will invariably start exploring ways to address the situation. You will look for solutions.
Your logical mind tells you, “Give up all responsibility and you will be free.” But in your experience of life, the more you are able to respond to everything around you, the freer you are! The logical and experiential dimensions of life work in diametrically opposite ways. Logic is not without its uses, but these help only to handle the material aspects of life. If you handle your entire life with logic alone, you will end up a mess.
Responsibility and action belong to different dimensions. The ability to respond gives you the freedom to act. It also gives you the freedom not to act. It puts you in the driver’s seat of your life. It empowers you to decide the nature and volume of action you want to undertake. Responsibility is not compulsive action; it offers you the choice of action.
Can you act upon everything in the world today? No, but you can respond to everything in the world today. Action has to be judiciously performed, depending on a careful analysis of resources—strength, capability, energy, age, situation. Your ability to act is always limited, but there are no limitations on your ability to respond.
Take the case of a seed. If the seed constantly tries to save itself, a new life is impossible. The seed goes through the tremendous struggle of losing what it believes is its identity—losing its safety and integrity and becoming vulnerable—in order to grow into a many-branched leafy tree, abundant in fruit and flower. But without that vulnerability, that voluntary openness to transformation, life won’t sprout.
Love has nothing to do with someone else. It is all about you. It is a way of being. It essentially means you have brought sweetness into your emotion. If a loved one travels to another country, would you still be able to love them? You would. If a loved one passed away, would you still be able to love them? You would. Even if a loved one is not physically with you anymore, you are still capable of being loving. So, what is love then? It is just your own quality. You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you. Why are you fumbling with keys when there is no
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“My ability to respond is limitless, but my ability to act is limited. I am one hundred percent responsible for everything I am and everything I am not, for my capacities and my incapacities, for my joys and my miseries. I am the one who determines the nature of my experience in this life and beyond. I am the maker of my life.”
The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence.
Although everything in the universe is the same energy, it functions at different levels of capability in different forms. The same energy functions in one plant to create roses; in another plant it functions to create jasmine.
The walls of self-preservation that you build for today are the walls of self-imprisonment for tomorrow. Boundaries that you establish in your life as a protection for yourself today will feel like constraints tomorrow.
The human predicament is just this: the very seat of your experience is within you, but your perception is entirely outward bound.
Freedom and bondage—both are determined by these five elements. The very existence that traps you also sustains you. This is the paradox of the life process. Love and hate, freedom and entrapment, life and death are all encapsulated in each other.
The yogic science works essentially with the interiority of the human being. Out of its profound understanding of the science of the human mechanism, this science later branched out into various systems. One such outcome was the system of Ayurveda, which is growing increasingly popular once again in modern times. The word ayur means “life span” and the word veda means “science” or “knowledge.”
stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.
Experiencing the orgasmic nature of the breathing process is called ana pana sati yoga, the yoga of incoming and outgoing breath.
Yoga is a journey toward a reality in which you experience the ultimate nature of existence as borderless unity. This experience is possible only if you maintain that space between you and your body-mind.
In other words, once your intellect gets identified with something, it gets chained to the identifications, and leaves you with a completely distorted experience of the world.
Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way.
To enjoy intoxication you must be totally drunk yet fully alert.
I am totally drunk and fully aware.
If you go deeply into any aspect of life, you will move further and further away from any conclusion. Life becomes more mysterious than ever before.
The difference between an idiot and an enlightened being is thin. The two often look similar, but they are actually worlds apart. An idiot is incapable of drawing conclusions. A mystic is unwilling to draw conclusions. The rest have glorified their conclusions as knowledge.
This is why the same patterns keep returning in your life. There are a few variations, but they remain essentially the same, repeating themselves across generations. After a while, this repetitiveness can be deadly. It is important to see that these patterns rule you from within, not from without. No one has to exercise any external control upon you. Your inner autocrat rules you all the time. You may think it is a new day. Circumstances may change, but internally you are experiencing the same thing over and over again.
What you consider to be your personality—the bundle of traits and tendencies that you are—is because of information you have gathered unconsciously. These tendencies have been traditionally described as vasanas. The word “vasana” literally means “smell.” Depending upon what type of garbage is in the bin today, that is the kind of smell that will emanate from it. Depending upon what type of smell you emit, you attract certain kinds of life situations to yourself.
Vasanas, or tendencies, are generated by a vast accumulation of impressions caused by your physical, mental, and energy actions. What you call your personality is just an expression of these tendencies.
The spiritual process does not seek to demolish this storehouse of karmic impressions, but helps you to become more conscious of it, and establish a little space, which allows you to stand outside of it.
Denying, suppressing, or avoiding life brings more bondage than freedom. The desire, “I don’t want karma,” is itself a big karma!
