Om yoga meditation: why yoga? - yoga

The subsequent is an passage from the book "Om Yoga: Its Assumption and Practice. "

Om is the Supreme Brahman. (Svetasvatara Upanishad 1:7)

He who utters Om with the aim 'I shall attain Brahman' does verily attain Brahman. (Taittiriya Upanishad 1. 8. 1)

The Self is of the characteristics of the Syllable Om. (Mandukya Upanishad 1. 8. 12)

Meditate on Om as the Self. (Mundaka Upanishad 2. 2. 3)

Liberation-Freedom

Yoga is all about freedom. Only a part of the earth's people is formally imprisoned, but the total human race is imprisoned in the earth itself. None are free from the predictability of sickness, age, and death, nevertheless free of them they may be at the moment. The human clause is area under discussion to incalculable limitations. Who actually pedals his life fully, attains all his goals, and knows no setbacks of any kind? No one. Om Yoga is the way to candor from anguish and limitation. Regarding Om, the Yoga Sutras (1) cleanly say: "Its repetition and consideration is the way(Yoga Sutras 1:28). Even a superficial checking of the Upanishads reveals that the deliberation carry out known and optional by the Vedic Rishis (2), and later Patanjali and Krishna, (3)A Divine Incarnation (avatar) born in India about three thousand years ago, Whose tradition to His believer Arjuna on the eve of the Great India (Mahabharata) War comprise the Bhagavad Gita. ) was based on Om, the sacred syllable that both symbolizes and embodies Brahman, the Complete Reality.

It is my hope that you will test for by hand the spiritual alchemy of Om Yoga that is set forth here. If your apply is closely as outlined and of enough duration, your experience will be the proof of its authority and its efficacy.

"This is the channel to immortality. May you be flourishing in crossing over to the farther shore of darkness. " (Mundaka Upanishad 2. 2. 6)

Why Yoga?

Since the atmosphere is constantly free, and nonentity can alteration it-nor does it ever need any changing-the ask artlessly arises: "Why concern with yoga at all? If our real self is ever absolute and free, what needs to be done? What can be done?"

It is true; the apparition is ever-free, but it has beyond that and identifies with its come across of repression and accordingly (seemingly) suffers. Our condition is like someone who is dead and dreaming that he is being grief-stricken and beaten. In certainty he is not being touched at all; yet he is experiencing pain and fear. He need not placate, overpower, or avoid his torturers. He needs no more dream activity! He needs only to wake up. Yoga is the method of self-awakening.

In his commentary on the Yoga Sutras Shankara (The great reformer and re- establisher of Vedic Religious conviction in India about 300 B. C. ) has an "opponent" say: "How can there be a means to acquire liberation? Freedom is not a thing which can be obtained, for it is basically ending of bondage. " And Shankara replies: "You are wrong. For ignorance [bondage] to cease, a little has to be done, with effort, as in the breach of a fetter. All the same deliverance is not a 'thing,' inasmuch as it is cessation of ignorance in the aura of right data it is symbolically oral of as a touch to be obtained. " And he concludes: "The aim of Yoga is the knowledge of Reality. "

What is Yoga?

"Yoga" is a Sanskrit word that means "to join. " Yoga, then, is union and the way to union. What do we join all the way through yoga?

First, we join our awareness to our own chief being: character that is consciousness. In yoga thinking this is known as the atman or self. Next we join our restricted consciousness to the Endless Consciousness: God, the Supreme Self (Paramatman). In essence they are evermore one, and according to yogic idea all spirits at first dwelt in consciousness of that oneness. But in the crash into the material world for the aim of evolving and extending its scope of consciousness, the characteristic atmosphere has lost its awareness of that eternal union, and therefore los the ability to live in and discernible the union on a doable level. Through yoga the lost consciousness can be regained and actualized in the individual's doable life sphere. So profound and so de rigueur is yoga to the evolving consciousness, there is no more crucial business in the world.

Regarding this, a yogi-adept of the twentieth century, Dr. I. K. Taimni, remarked in his book The Skill of Yoga: "According to the yogic beliefs it is possible to rise absolutely above the illusions and miseries of life and to gain infinite knowledge, bliss, and power because of enlightenment here and now while we are still active in the brute body. And if we do not attain this enlightenment while we are still alive we will have to come back again and again into this world until we have accomplished this appointed task. So it is not a question of choosing the path of yoga or rejecting it. It is a ask of choosing it now or in some forthcoming life. It is a difficulty of fast enlightenment as soon as possible and avoiding the affliction in the expectations or postponing the energy and going through additional distress which is gratuitous and avoidable. This is the denotation of Yoga Sutra 2:16: 'The misery which is not yet come can and is to be avoided. ' No vague assure of an ambiguous examination happiness this, but a assured controlled assertion of a fact verified by the come across of immeasurable yogis, saints, and sages who have firmed the path of yoga all through the ages. "

Yoga philosophy

Yoga must be approached at first as a philosophy-but a beliefs which by its very character stimulates its investigators to engage in convenient applications all through which they will experience-and demonstrate-its truth and worth. That which begins as assumption develops into carry out which culminates in realization. Yoga is thus a philosophy, a discipline, and an experience. It is a revelation of consciousness. And since rational attention all the time precedes rational action, we be supposed to begin with the philosophical side of Yoga.

Then and now

In the back up part of the Bhagavad Gita Krishna tells Arjuna: "There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any hope in which we shall cease to be. "(Bhagavad Gita 2:12) That is, we are eternal beings, without activation and exclusive of end. Firstly we were points of conscious light in the countless Ocean of Conscious Light that is God. We were gods inside God. And so we still are, for it is not achievable to be exterior of Infinity Itself. Yet we are also here in this ever-changing world-a place that from tip to toe overwhelms the truth of our immortal life contained by God. For countless life-cycles we have found ourselves embodied in cloth cases, a small amount body-prisons surrounded by the bigger prison of the cosmos. And that is where we are right now.

There is a law that governs the place and kind of our embodiment. That law is karma, the attitude of exact and inevitable corollary to our own procedures and mental states, follow-on in a seemingly endless domino achieve of continual birth and death. Yoga offers us the chance of finale this chain of embodiments by arousing and transformation from time and mortality into eternity and immortality.

God and gods

We are gods in God, predetermined spirits contained by the Extreme Spirit. But what is "spirit"? Yoga tells us that apparition is consciousness, hence we are eternal consciousnesses, each of us creature and distinct. ("Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be. ?") Yet we are more. For we do not have an existence autonomous of one an added or detached of God. Rather, we take our being from God as the waves take their life from the ocean, allotment it with all the other waves.

God is the eternal Root or Bring down of our being, our bigger Self. We are not God, but in some deep approach God is us-the Self of our self, the Attitude of our spirit. God is all, and we are the parts-each of us possessing an eternal and final distinction. That is why, as previously quoted, Krishna told Arjuna: "There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any hope in which we shall cease to be. " It is immeasurably important to accomplish this ahead of we can have any viable agreement of or approach to ourselves, to our lives, to others, and even to God. The difference between God, us, and one a new is real and eternal; yet so is our unity.

In God there is unity; in us there is diversity. These two seemingly contradictory states coexist in perfection. For the reason that of this we have the term advaita which does not mean "one," but easily "not two. " Certainty is neither One nor Two. It is a unity that possesses diversity. It is a mystery, but it can be realized by aim experience, and yoga is the means to that experience.

God and creation

God, the boundless Spirit, is pure consciousness, but-as we are experiencing even now-He has complete or emanated Himself as the cosmos: physical, astral, and causal. This seemingly dual characteristics of God as Light and Power, as Consciousness and Matter, has puzzled the minds of even the wise.

God, the First Being, projects Himself as the ever-changing dance of creation, as the evolving light that is the cosmos. God projects the creation, evolves it, and withdraws it back into Himself in a perpetual cycle. Thus the conception can be thought of as God's body-that God becomes in material form in conception again and again. And as parts or reflections of God we do closely the same all through reincarnation.

And us. . .

All conscious beings have existed evermore in the Being of God-living surrounded by the heart of God, one with Him, conspicuous although not separate. Having their being deep-rooted in the infinity of God, the character consciousnesses have surrounded by them a actual impulse to excel their finitude and attain the boundlessness of their Origin. This, of course, is impossible, since the essential, eternal character of a being cannot be altered. Being entrenched in God, and for that reason in a sense a part of God, all beings are as indisputable as God-the only endless Being. Yet the urge for transcendence is part of their nature.

The elucidation to this dilemma is in point of fact quite simple: the being consciousnesses cannot alter their biological state of finitude but they can come to share and participate in the extreme Consciousness of God. As Sri Ma Anandamayi said: "The soul can befall godlike, but it cannot befall God. " That is, they cannot become boundless themselves, but they can come across the infinity of another: their divine Source. Just as a psychically aware character can encounter the belief and feelings of an added but does not develop into that other person, so the creature consciousness can come to come into contact with the Consciousness of God while left over in its inadequate native state.

It is necessary, then, for the creature character to acquire the aptitude for such a state of awareness. And this is done by erudition to fully come into contact with the state of continuation of a being entirely another from oneself-to enter into an all told alien mode of being while retaining the awareness of one's true identity. In other words, the individual apparition must learn to put on the "costume" of a consciousness entirely different from its own and befall able not just to fully be subjected to that other mode of consciousness, but also to arise the capacity to behave as that other kind of being.

Evolutionary creation

To make possible the spirits to enter into this process, God breathes forth or emanates His own Self as the Power from which is manifested all the realms of next of kin existence, from the most cunning worlds of nearly-perfected beings to the most objective worlds of atomic matter. The spirits then enter into family member life by charming on coverings, or "bodies," (There are five such concentric sheaths or bodies: the sheaths of bliss, intellect, mind, life-force and the animal body-the anandamaya, jnanamaya, manomaya, pranamaya and annamaya bodies (koshas) respectively. ) of varying grades and patterns of vibratory energies and descending into this bits and pieces world. Here they begin functioning their way back up the ladder of ever-evolving forms, beginning with forms whose scope of consciousness is less important than theirs and working their way upward, ingoing into elevated and advanced levels of awareness until they can beat their creative extent of consciousness and begin to dine of a life of awareness much clear of their own.

Furthermore, in the intervals connecting embodiments the atmosphere spends time in the astral regions where development and augmentation also take place. (This is best explained in the forty-third part of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda. ) Upward and upward they evolve until their capability for awareness is developed to such a accurate state that they can in fact be subjected to the Being of God in full chipping in in God's all-embracing Consciousness, thenceforth to live in His infinity.

The master yogi, Dr. I. K. Taimni, in The Best Certainty and Realization, says this: "It is only when the attainment of being a pure attitude or atma has been attained that it is likely to attain the final goal of union of the atma with the Paramatma, the Supreme Attitude which exists ceaselessly clear of the manifested universe and from which the manifested universe is derived. When this final realization has been attained and union of atma with Paramatma has been brought about there is not only a accomplish division of consciousness amid the two but also of the countless Power which is inherent in the Entire Consciousness. ?It is necessary to differentiate concerning the powers which are acquired on the achievement that he is a pure apparition or atma and those which are attained when he is able to destroy the last indication of egotism and his consciousness becomes united with that of Paramatma. The former, despite the fact that tremendous in some respects, are still limited, while the last which are certainly the Powers of the Supreme Attitude are boundless and can manifest all the way through the base of consciousness of a self-realized creature for the reason that there is fusion of the being consciousness with the Supreme Consciousness and the canal connecting the two is open. "

We do not develop into God the Absolute, but we enter into that Answer Life and are one with it. As Shankara explains in his Yoga Sutra commentary: "When the light of several lamps appears simultaneously, it cannot be made out which is the light of which. " As a result we come into contact with the endless Being of God-infinite Consciousness-as our own being. Krishna has described it thusly: "When you have reached enlightenment, ignorance will con you no longer. In the light of that knowledge you will see the total conception surrounded by your own atman and in me. " (Bhagavad Gita 4:35) Buddha called this "seeing with the Divine Eye. " When we are unshakably recognized in that Consciousness the goal has been attained.

As Shakespeare wrote, "all the world's a stage" with the creature spirits exhausting their costumes and before a live audience their parts. Just as actors begin with small parts and progress to superior roles by demonstrating their skill in those less important parts, so also do the spirits development to privileged and more complicated forms of life and consciousness, at last chronic home to God. The Sufi poet, Rumi, wrote: A stone I died and rose again a plant.
A plant I died and rose an animal;
I died an brute and was born a man.

Why ought to I fear? What have I lost by death?
As man, death sweeps me from this world of men

That I may wear an angel's wings in heaven;
Yet e'en as angel may I not abide,
For nought abideth save the face of God.

Thus o'er the angels' world I wing my way
Onwards and upwards, unto illimitable lights;

Then let me be as nought, for in my heart
Rings as a harp-song that we must benefit to Him. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of many great Americans whose belief in re-embodiment is overlooked, wrote in his poem, The Chambered Nautilus: Build thee more august mansions, O my soul!
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at distance end to end art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

That is the end of this concept and our place in it all through a seemingly endless chain of births in this and the advanced worlds: to evolve ahead of all worlds by expanding our consciousness all through form after form, in due course reuniting ourselves consciously with God, exit many "outgrown shells by life's unresting sea. " For long ages away from control this development has occurred automatically, spontaneously, with no belief or intent on our part. But the time comes in our evolutionary scenario when comprehension dawns and we be au fait with that we must take our own evolution in hand from that time forth. This is de rigueur for the development of our advanced potential. As God pedals and directs the macrocosm, we must now begin doing the same with the microcosm that is "us. " And yoga is the means of our self-evolution that leads to our self-mastery and complete union with the Supreme Self: God. Yoga is both the acquaintance of cosmic and human frame and the key to unlock them and ascend to candor in spirit. Yoga is the means by which we come back with for ourselves the prayer:

Lead me from the artificial to the Real.
Lead me from darkness to the Light.
Lead me from death to Immortality.

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Footnotes:
(1) The oldest known copy on the business of yoga, in print by the sage Patanjali, a yogi of antique India, and well thought-out the most commanding text on yoga.

(2) Seers of the Truth, to whom the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of India, measured the oldest scriptures of the world, were exposed in meditation.

(3) A Divine Incarnation (avatar) born in India about three thousand years ago, Whose tradition to His adherent Arjuna on the eve of the Great India (Mahabharata) War comprise the Bhagavad Gita.

Swami Nirmalananda Giri is the abbot of Atma Jyoti Ashram, a accepted Hindu monastery in the small desert town of Borrego Springs in southern California. More of his writings, counting the full book, Om Yoga: Its Assumption and Practice, for which this commentary is an introduction, may be found at the Ashram's website, http://www. atmajyoti. org/