The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads - 6.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

Chinmaya Mission :

  

Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Abdul Kalam, Kapil Dev, M. S. Subbulakshmi, Rabindranath Tagore, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Subramanya Bharati, Lalgudi Jayaraman graced the stage as Bala Vihar 6th graders celebrated their achievements. 

They showcased their favorite Indians and their inspiring feats. 

The event culminated in a stirring rendition of the Indian National Anthem on Western musical instruments. 

Swami Shantananda ji praised their performance, emphasizing the significant contributions of lesser-known Indian luminaries across diverse domains. 

He underscored the efforts of Chinmaya Viswavidyapeeth in researching and revitalizing ancient Indian knowledge systems, fostering a deeper understanding of our heritage among the youth.

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Thursday 21, Mar 2024 06:40.

Chapter 6: Some Light on Yoga Practice-4.

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There is a humorous story. There was a small boy whose mother was very ill. She was an old lady. She was lying in bed, almost in a dying condition. Flies were sitting on her body, and one fly was sitting on her nose again and again, troubling her so much that people told the boy: “Please drive the fly away. Don't allow the fly to trouble the old lady. She is in a very bad condition.” “Oh! Yes,” he said. “I will drive this fly away.” But the fly would not go easily like that. Again and again he tried to fan it off, but again and again it sat on her nose. So he took a huge stick and gave a blow so forcefully that it broke the nose of the mother. The fly went off! The poor boy did not know that he was hitting his mother, and instead of driving away the fly, he broke the head and face of that poor lady.

Similarly, this sort of mistake we may commit in rejecting the world. It is not the world that we have to reject. The worldness in the object, the externality in the object, and the non-selfhood, anatmatva, in things have to be thrown off. Here is the crux of the whole matter. Here it is that we always become a miserable failure. When we come to this point, it is hard for us to grasp what this actually means. We think that to leave the house and to go to a forest is renunciation. But it is not, because we are still in the world only. Even in the forest, we are in the world; the world has not gone out of us. The idea that there is a world outside us is to be abrogated. Otherwise, if yoga had been so simple, everybody would have become yogis. A little closing of the eyes, a little japa and a little breathing will not make us a yogi. The intellect is a terrible hindrance; it will never allow us to grasp the truth of things. It always misleads us; it always takes us in the wrong direction. We then say, “I reject this, I fast, I don't sleep, I don't talk.” All these techniques that we adopt in yoga do not even touch the fringe of the actual problem. They are all very necessary things, as fasting before treatment of a disease. But fasting itself is not the treatment; we have to give the proper medicament and take care of the body by positive treatment, etc. So, likewise is the case with yoga.

It is not enough if we merely practise the preliminaries of external detachment, which are important enough, no doubt. But they are preliminaries only, and not yoga proper. Yoga proper is an internal psychological technique. It is the most difficult of things to conceive because the mind thinks of an object even in the act of rejecting the object. This is the difficulty. Even when we try to remove the idea of an object from our mind, we have some object in our mind. The objectness does not leave us, just as when we love a person or thing, we think of that person; and when we hate that person also we think of him. Merely because we hate a thing, it does not mean that it has gone out of our mind. So, even renunciation may be a bondage. We may go to a worse condition, if it is not properly conceived. We should not think that hatred is the opposite of love. It is not true; it is the same as love, in a different form. So it is not so simple an affair to practise yoga. It requires a very careful analysis of what is happening inside. The problems are not outside. They are not in the world; they are not caused by people. People are not troubling us, and nobody is giving us any problem; we are our problems.

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Continued

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