Health benefits of yoga

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Today’s world is busy and quite stressful. People are finding ways to get rid of their stress somehow. They invest a large sum on various treatments for this purpose. Training yoga at home can be a better method for you if you want to ease up your mind.  Yoga deals with mind and body. History has shown the benefits of yoga. Great monks by practising yoga even learned how to gain mind control!

 

Anxiety is our greatest enemy. Anxiety causes various health problems. We may try to deal with it by making ourselves busy with some tasks. Actually by doing that we are not really trying to resolve the problem, but we are learning how to forget the problem. Yoga practice can be an excellent method for this problem. Yoga consists mainly of breathing and stretching exercises and meditation. These methods have found to have various health benefits.

 

Let’s find out the various benefits of yoga. The main benefit of yoga is mental and physical fitness. The ageing process that is mainly caused due to autointoxication can be prevented by yoga. If you want to achieve the maximum benefits from yoga, you have to combine yoga with the practices of pranayama, yogasanas, and meditation. Yoga practice on a regular basis tends to relieve from health conditions such as digestive disorders, high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, asthma, arteriosclerosis, arthritis, asthma, heart conditions and varicose veins. Tests on yogis have proved that they are able to control body’s involuntary functions such as heart beat, blood pressure, and temperature. Research on the effects of yoga on HIV patients currently has come up with promising results.

 

Medical scientists say that the yoga therapy is very beneficial since because of the balance that is created between the endocrine system and nervous system which influences the other systems in the body. By practicing yoga, we will know interlink between the physical, mental, and emotional levels of the body. This awareness leads us to understand more areas of existence.

 

Studies proved that yoga therapy tend to relieve symptoms of some life threatening diseases such as areteriosclerosis, arthritis, diabetes mellitus, AIDS, and asthma. Asthma can be dealt even without any drug combination. Physicians believe that yoga practice help the patients to gain control over their internal environment and restoration of self-awareness. Yoga therapy can be very useful even for pain management. It stimulates the brain’s pain centre for production of the pain killers in the body. Breathing exercises is also used in yoga therapy to reduce pain.

 

Weight reduction through yoga practice is a better method for obese people to loose their weight because there are no side effects. The thyroid gland is associated with the body’s metabolism. There are some specific asanas for stimulating the thyroid gland. When the gland is stimulated, it increases the fat metabolism so that the fat is stored is converted to energy thereby reducing your body weight.  Practicing yoga daily increases your self-awareness; it relieves chronic stress, sharpens your concentration, and relaxes your mind and body. There are many other psychological benefits too. 

Art Of Righteous Living

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Yoga is considered as an art that provide benefits and strength to our body, inner spirit and mind. It is an ancient practice which was originated inIndiaabout thousands of years ago. The Puranas and Upanishads written by Aryans during post- Vedic and late-Vedic periods have references about yoga. A systematic written approach about yoga was found in yoga sutra written by Patanjali. It was written about two thousand years ago. This book clearly depicts the principles of the yogic discipline. This text is considered as the important one regarding the yoga and it spreads the importance of yoga around the world.

Yoga is considered as a spiritual and physical exercise. Through yoga we can attain enlightenment and physical and mental refreshment. Yoga is basically categorized into four different groups. They are Raja yoga, Bhakti yoga, Karma yoga and Jnana yoga. Yoga is considered as an important part in some religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Contemporary yoga consists of a large number of principles and most of these principles are taken from these religions. Hinduism believers consider yoga as a method of getting closer to almighty. For Buddhists it is believed that yoga will help them to achieve a higher grade of wisdom.

Eight stages of yogic disciplines are illustrated by Patanjali. They are Yamas, Niyamas, Asanas, Pranayama, Partyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadi. Yamas deals with abstentions and restrains. Niyamas deals with surrendering the ego, purity, contentment and study. Asanas is related to exercises or physical postures, Pranayama to breathing control, Partyahara to withdrawal of senses and Dharana to concentration of mind. Dhyana means meditation and it will provide a relaxed mind which is free from external interferences. Finally Samadhi means an attainment of a super conscious state. For some yoga practitioners the ultimate goal is to attain Samadhi. It is considered as complicated mental state. In this state a person can achieve ecstasy.

The main goal of yoga is to attain physical and mental fitness. Thorough yoga it is able to relax our mind and body. It will enhance our physical and mental functions. People in western region considered yoga as a method of self-improvement and refreshment. Yoga will help us to achieve full control over our mind and body. Yoga will keep our body strong and healthy. The different yoga postures will strengthen your muscles in feet, shoulders, hands, legs and abdominals. Breathing exercises in yoga will increase your flexibility and supporting tendons, joints etc. People suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis will definitely get an improvement by practicing yoga.

There are some athletics forms of yoga which will help us to improve our endurance. Bikram yoga, power yoga, asthanga yoga and vinaysa yoga are some of these. This will help you to attain cardio-vascular workouts and results in a better core strength. Yoga strengthens and stretch your neck and back muscles and so it will provide relief from chronic neck and back pain. It will lower the blood pressure, cholesterol levels and provide steady heart rate. It will ensure continuous flow of blood and oxygen throughout the body.

 

Mysticism – Abusing Power – Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz

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Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz:

We want to be all things, not just to gain power over things — how infantile! The challenge of power is how to use it and not abuse it. When you abuse it, it reverses on you and it hurts you. When willpower is not guided, it’s terrible. Hitler had a lot of will. But he used it for destructive purposes because he lacked wisdom. Power, people are obsessed with it. You can take a nice person and turn them into a slob, into an insane being, craving power, destroying anything that stands in their way. People want power but not wisdom. Power without wisdom is a very dangerous thing. Better to have wisdom first. Without wisdom, power tends to destroy the one who wields it.

Without wisdom, a powerful person does not become more powerful. Their power will turn back on them and eventually destroy them. So those who are truly wise become most powerful. Whatever you want you can get, when you understand the secret of will. But wisdom is needed so that you do not use your will abusively because you’ll get hurt. Say, for example, you develop the ability to make parking meters disappear. It’s probably easier to put a quarter in it. That would be the wisdom on the subject. If you use your will all the time, then it runs out. You deplete yourself and then, when you really need it, it’s not there.

If you try to pull too much power through too soon, you will injure yourself. Some come to a teacher for power. They still have all the desires, angers and jealousies of an unevolved person. Consequently, they become destructive both to themselves and to others. The big problem with power, of course, is obsession. Once you get some of it and feel it, it dominates your whole life and it’s all you can think about. That doesn’t have to happen. We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive, when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, or push them out of the way.

A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. Someone who really wants to discover themselves has to be particularly careful about the use and abuse of power. But even your average human being just passing through another life has to be careful. A person who has power doesn’t seek to challenge others, their battles are within. Only the fool wants to go into battle to beat someone for the satisfaction of beating someone. When you abuse willpower you waste it. There really is not an infinite supply of it at your disposal. There is an infinite supply of it in the universe.

The person of power uses their power to open up their mind to higher levels all the time, which creates tremendous happiness. Power is something that is abused. I suppose use and abuse are in the eye of the beholder. There is a difference between willing and forcing. Willing something simply means you are not being lazy. Forcing something means you are trying to do something inappropriate or in an inappropriate way. I would define the proper use of power as something that creates happiness for yourself and others. The abuse of power takes happiness away. It is not necessary to wrap people up. The reason you’re doing it is because you don’t have enough power. If you had enough power, you could unlock your own personal power, you wouldn’t need to control others.

It takes a lot of energy to manipulate someone and keep them on a string. We see a lot of people who decide to go out and teach meditation. They become so wrapped up in it that they stop progressing themselves and they really don’t have that much more to teach. It is a tremendous waste of energy to try to block anyone else. That same energy could be applied to furthering your own success. When we use power to cause someone else not to succeed so that we can succeed, it slows our vibratory frequency. It slows us down. When we slow down we experience unhappiness. A student of mine is an actor, he used to go into these interviews and sometimes not get the part. He was “taken out”. Someone would use power in a way that would cause him not to succeed.

We learn to avoid blocking others, interfering with others, because that will decrease our happiness, slow our vibratory rate and generally bring us down and make us miserable. You have to look at your own thought forms. Are you sitting around and thinking a lot of negative thoughts? These injure the subtle body. When you hate, when you are angry, you bring that energy through you. When you become angry at someone, your anger will actually have a power. You can hit somebody in a non-physical way and it can injure that being. You must control your anger and jealousy and possessive nature or, as you become more powerful and your will increases in strength, you will injure others.

When you think an angry thought about someone, it’s like hitting them. If you hold a negative thought, then it will become more powerful and not only will it send bad energy to the person, but it will crash your consciousness. People who have power who think negatively of others and seek to injure them are practicing a kind of voodoo, a lower sorcery. Those who practice lower sorcery hurt themselves the most because they interact with negative thoughts and apply power to them; they devastate their own consciousness and their own lives. Deluded beings think that if they get in a battle with a Zen Master or with a Don Juan, that it’s going enhance their life if they win. You can never take power from someone else any more than you can take sunlight.

If you get in a battle with someone, you don’t get their power if you win. Power is something that you have to acquire yourself, through self-inquiry and the practice of meditation. The bully on the block who beats up somebody doesn’t become more powerful. All they do is walk around inside their own mind with an inflated ego. You have been imprinted by people in this world who take power from others. Most people drain each other. Or, what is worse, they are draining you right now, psychically! Most people abuse power. They use power to dominate others. They use power to destroy others. Ultimately when you do this, you lose it.

You can take power from others; you can steal it. It is not a very high-grade power. It will give you a certain amount of access to a better life; but it corrupts the individual. The person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching. It is silly to drain others; for when you drain others, you also pick up their vibratory force. People who want to go to power places all of the time and want to be around powerful people, they don’t last long in the study.

When you do things in a selfish way, let alone a destructive way, your state of mind will go down. You will find yourself becoming depressed, nervous, anxious and upset. If you have gained some powers by your entrance into other dimensions and you use them to attack others, then power reverses on you and pulls you apart because it is not supposed to be used that way. I don’t put much stock in powers that people have to hurt others, in sorcery and all this nonsense. There are murderers and there are dictators. That is just a part of life. The intelligent use of power in yoga can assist you avoiding that side of humanity.

Angry people, unhappy people, people that seek to injure others, these people all have something in common. They waste energy. They don’t conserve it and they don’t know how to increase it. So the intelligent use of power is to never interfere with anyone else’s success. Use the power you get to just be more successful yourself. When you manipulate others your attention level drops and you become prey, for you have dropped to the plane of manipulation. The abuse of power that seems to create the most unhappiness is when a person uses personal power to get ahead without regard for the welfare of others, or when power is used to go into lower dimensions.

If you abuse power, you will be burned and then you will learn.if you live. Jealousy, anger, fear — these are ridiculous emotions that drain your power. You need to control them by being content, trusting that life knows what is best, accepting with an even mind whatever is presented to you. How do you overcome the negative karmas and problems and misery that occur to people who abuse power? You stop abusing power. The teacher has nothing to do with people who use their mental powers to block the enlightenment of others. These people lack control. What can you teach someone who lacks control?

Some people travel to other dimensions in their astral bodies when they meditate. Astral traveling doesn’t bring a person lasting happiness. If astral traveling is not done properly, it can be quite dangerous. Meditation is not this kind of spacey stuff that makes it difficult to orient your life. If that’s your experience of meditation, you’re not meditating. You’re tapping into the lower astral planes, which is not a healthy place for human beings to tap. There is a large difference between spacing out in the lower occult astral planes, weird, junky, fuzzy energy, and meditation. Meditation is sharp, clear, precise, perfect, luminous, shiny, happy, etheric, cosmic, and dissolute. The world is wonderful. It is beautiful when you are in a correct level of attention.

Earth-defying, therapeutic introspectors

                                                                                                                          
TM is pure Tantra – the practicum of the Sri Vidya, Absolute Knowledge. The yoga was obtained from the Western Transmission of the Nath tradition. Tantricism, that is, Mantravada, with mantra, yantra, mandala, puja, and dakshina, is of Tibetan origin and the Tantras are books of mantras composed by siddhas. The siddha alchemist cult was, as per its own tradition, introduced by a Bonpo from Tibet, Shenrap, who came over from Derge.

In contrast, sudroid Shaivism is of Mediteranian and African origin – the old Sudric ‘Black’ Shiva is of Dravidia; his affinities to the
Bantu have been noted. Indeed, one may find Dravidian ‘tantrics’ among the untouched Dravidians living in remote areas – the Banas and Nagas. However, one should not use the word ‘Tantrism’ for this set of beliefs, since Tantra means the 5th Veda from Tibet. ‘Sudra Religion’ or ‘Sudra Shaivism’ are better terms. These are independant of Tibetan Tantricism even if the practices may have been similar, dating back to the pre-Aryan Indus Valley.

It is important to distinguish the White Tibetic Mahadeva, from the Black Old Dravidian Shiva; and the Roman Hermes, Greek Priapus and Nordic Odin; they have no relation. These are similar gods in different religions, but in common usage. In India, the word tantra refers to any non-Vedic practice.

There is a popular tradition that the siddhas were a ‘bloc of earth-defying, therapeutic introspectors’, indebted in all respects to
Bhoga, an immigrant from Odantapur, who, in his methods of ridding the body of impure matter through ‘reverberation’ techniques, came to the point of pracitcally cancelling ultimate demise. It may be true that Mahesh, who merely sought to promulgate the lesser
athanasic precepts of Guru Dev, since the vital objective of the Ghanderved is the transfiguration of the immortalised ethereal body
‘Soam’, into a permanent world body mandala, a new world order, in order to fit it to associate to eternity with the Purush, the
Transcendental Person.

Mysticism – Dreaming – Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz

Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz:

“You are not what you seem to be. You are one of God’s endless dreams in search of wakefulness. Meditation is wakefulness. Reality does appear to exist, there does appear to be birth, youth, people appear to have children. But all of it’s a dream. These are
isolated moments that are only connected by perception. There is no separation. Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts. That is how you know it’s the dream. How do you know you’re even here right now? Perhaps you’re not. Perhaps you’re far, far away and this is just a dream.

The idea is easy to understand.  All of life is a dream. You have dreamed everything that you are and everything you are aware of. You are asleep and have forgotten that you are dreaming. You mistakenly believe you are awake. You have dreamed me into your dream to awaken you from the dreams of life, death and separativity. You certainly do have strange dreams. You must first realize that you are in a dream.  Then you must realize that your current dream is a nightmare. You need to dream nicer dreams.  I come from a world that is a much nicer dream.

We are not really separate beings of light. That’s a dream we are having, the dream of multiplicity. Meditation takes us beyond the
moment to eternal awareness. We dream forever unless we awaken. We move from one dream to another, some beautiful, some we’re the hero or the heroine, some horrible, some nonsensical, some boring. All the lives we ever lead are only dreams, these walking moments, that look so solid to you when you consider yourself awake, are just dreams. We’ve decided what we are. That’s the dream. When the dream fades, it’s not that we don’t exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?

Life is a series of dreams, a series of interlocking awarenesses. What you have known of this life so far is only a dream, a slim dream
at that. As one who has traveled greatly in the worlds, I can assure you there is much to see and much to become. There are other times. There are other adventures. There are other dreams . Who is that is dreaming all of this? Ecstasy. Pure ecstasy. Joy beyond
understanding. Bliss beyond the dry dullness of the mind’s philosophical ranging. Light beyond any light in this world. The
substance and the essence of all existence is this light, the transcendental light. The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the self.

The dreams of the self are manifold and endless and they exist in all the myriad worlds and conditions that appear to have solidity. The ten thousand states of mind are hallucinatory. Hallucinations are real. Dreams are real. But there are some things more real. When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings.  We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams. I think that the world ended a long time ago and no one realizes it. We’re in a dream somewhere in a vortex of energy that just hasn’t realized its nonexistence yet.

Seriously, I think that the world is always ending and always beginning at every moment. Everybody goes into different dimensional planes. You do it every night when you dream. You are journeying into other dimensional planes. Dreams are not just functions of the cerebral cortex. Then you’re dreaming at night, something seems very real, but when you wake up the dream is gone and so is all that apparent solidity. When we wake up in the morning and we make decisions, these decisions come from the night, the night of eternity, our other side.

The Indians in the Southwestern United States went to many places of power. They were able to have profound dream experiences where they could see into the future or know what do to and make proper decisions. Will something else. Have dreams and believe in them. They don’t have to come true. They are just as true as a dream is. Life itself is a dream. Dreams are just silly things that pass through your mind at night. “Dreaming” is out-of-the-body experiences where you are traveling through the different dimensions – most of which you don’t remember. Some astral dimensions are bright and filled with ecstasy. Advanced cosmic beings live in them. But there are also very dark astral dimensions, often inhabited by beings that are filled with hate and despair.

A great deal of energy is lost in the study by people who interact with non-physical beings. They get into your mind and your body by
approaching you in the dream plane, promising you powers, playing on your desires. They sap your life force. Entities can see a certain amount because they are outside of the physical dimensional plane. They might see that you are going to meet a beautiful woman or a beautiful man. They will come to you in dreams and tell you this is going to happen because of them.

Who do you think of first in the morning?  Good manipulators do it in the dream plane. The morning practice of meditation increases the aura to ward of negative energy. Where you live is important. It is where you dream. You lose or gain a tremendous amount of energy there. In dream yoga we use the etheric double and go beyond the confines of the physical, it’s very ecstatic. You can move in and through the astral worlds once you have gained control of your subtle body.  The astral worlds are the back corridors of eternity!

The astral dimensions afford you opportunities to have experiences and gain insights into the structural nature of how dimensions are made up and phased together.”

 

Shallow breathing?

Gee, I hope your life hasn’t been to long. This sounds like a very uncomfortable condition. If it is a specific medical condition I am not
aware of what it might be called. Hard to say with the information provided. I can say that breathing high in the chest is very common. I used to be a chest breather. Problem is I can only access 20-30% of my lung capacity there. So one of the very best things I have ever done is to learn and then retrain myself to breath into my abdomen. I believe it was Hittleman’s “Introduction to Yoga”, from which I learned the basic technique. Then a year or two of “awareness” of where and how I was breathing and it became second nature. I have to admit I have a bit of “Buddha belly”. Some would call it a “beer belly” but really it is mostly because I am in the habit of relaxing the abdomen and allowing it to stick out. This has been a difficult habit to foster and I still find myself “sucking” in my gut and holding tension there. Afraid of what people might think of me. A deeply rooted, subconscious fear. The indoctrination I received when I was young to stand up straight, suck in you belly, push out your chest, was very effective I guess. Even though it served to make me quite unhealthy for a long time Breathing “low” also requires wearing loose cloths that do not restrict.

I am certain that a google search on “yogic breathing”, “abdominal breathing”, “proper breathing”, etc will net you lot’s of information
and guides for learning and practicing “natural breathing”. There are also a number of hatha poses specifically open the rib cage and promote deep breathing. I will defer to the practiced hatha yogis in the group to give you more specific advise. Any Hittleman book will explain these as should any good hatha yoga book. I am certain a brief search will also identify these. In general everything about hatha practice if conducive to deeper, slower breathing.

Hinduism – Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz

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Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz:

“In the Far East, a peasant has no problem that someone can be born from another universe into a human body, walk up to their hut one day and ask for something to eat, sit down with them, and transport them by their mere presence into infinite galaxies of awareness. A very advanced master can glow so strongly that you see divine in them. You see that glow. You look into them and you see infinity constantly changing, evolving and radiating in new forms. Life is endless reality. There is reality after reality, spinning on
endlessly into the cosmos, billions and billions of manifest universes. Underlying all of this is the unmanifest, the absolute reality.

The self plays among the waves of existence. It surfaces, it comes up for a while, and then it disappears again. In Sanskrit they say, “Tat twam asi.” Thou art that. You are God. The bubble of your awareness bursts and you’re flooded with immortality. Everything that you see before you with your physical eyes is an illusion. In other words, you are not seeing correctly. Life is made up of light. But if you are only looking through the senses, it seems solid and physical.

All of the universes are but phantoms, mirages, and while they have their own essence, their own pantomime — they pass forgotten.Self-realization is not the awareness that this world is a dream, that’s a part of self-realization. The perceiver of the dream, the one whom the dream is unfolding before, is what we call the self. Once you have personally experienced enlightenment, you will see beyond the ocean of death to the everlasting shores of immortality. The planes of light exist. Yoga is a method of unifying the energies of the body, the mind, and the spirit and directing them towards infinity, the planes of light.

The dream is so thick; the Maya is so thick. There’s no magic as long as there’s all this thought. So the first condition for the practice
of higher magic is the stopping of thought. Now, stopping thought is only the beginning. As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked, “The inner life begins with samadhi.” This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person
who meditates, that it could begin with samadhi.

Krishna once said to Arjuna: “Consider the past and future with an equal mind, and pass the peanut M&M’s”. Your much too hung up on all of your ideas and your desires. You still have not penetrated the essence of yoga. Sri Krishna is said to be an avatar, which is a human way of trying to define “very big”. That is to say that Sri Krishna is not from the local area network, but he has come from a world that is different because his mind is different. The void is ready to snatch you up like a Pac Man machine and Lakshmi
is on vacation. You chant, ‘Sring’, and you get her answering machine. Gods and goddesses are not what people think they are. Their names are terms with which we try to convey a certain experience, a state of consciousness.

Isis, the Egyptian goddess of renewal is symbolized for the Hindus by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the sustainer, and Shiva the transformer or destroyer – the Cycle of creation. In the Upanishads they talk about the path of the sun and the path of the moon. The path of the moon is rebirth. The path of the sun leads to self-knowledge, from which there is no return. One path leads back to this world, to rebirth; one path leads beyond. Your soul stands at a crossword, trying to make a decision, flipping a
coin. A nice image for the soul, I think. Yoga means we accept responsibility for the tasks in our life, and we know that being a king, being an enlightened teacher, being someone who sweeps the streets, we know that nothing is a greater yoga than anything else.

We live in a world of careers. Work, as Sri Krishna points out in the Bhagavad Gita, is a necessary path for everyone attaining
enlightenment. It is something that we all do. Some people work very hard at not working. The road for Arjuna is unexpected. Sri Krishna says you have to face that which you fear the most that which you’re most attached to and eliminate it. In this case he has to fight a battle, and the battle is his attachments. Krishna says, fight. He says, go out on the battlefield and kill those people whom it’s your job to kill; and whether they were your friends or not, you have to look at the big picture. In the big picture, you can’t go kill anybody, you can’t be killed.

A war is an incarnation. A battle is a day of your life. So we do one day at a time in self-discovery. When you pick up that sword and you start to fight, a power comes to you. When you shy back from it, that’s when all the little doubts, the insecurities, the terrible deadness of the human condition surrounds you. Everybody is in the waiting room of life. Yoga is not a waiting. It is a doing, today. You have to be a warrior in order to become enlightened. If you think it’s tough paying the bills, think about being everywhere all at once and doing everything in all the universes, simultaneously, past, present, and future. What Sri Krishna is saying, is that it’s a terrible mistake to believe that this life we lead is real. Obviously it’s real, but it doesn’t last very long in its realness. It’s very ephemeral; and to mistake the forms of life, the shapes that life takes, for reality is not wise.

The Soldier is willing to give their life, perhaps for someone they never even met in their country. That’s a type of very high love.
That’s why it’s always said that when one is a soldier who dies in battle, you go to a very high world. There are people in the Himalayas who are thousands of years old. But that’s just a power, you see. It would seem to me that would suggest a tremendous aversion to the experience of death.

The body comes and goes. This life, my friend, will come and go. It is a fleeting moment, an impulse in an eternal reality. Sri Krishna refers, of course, to this world as a joyless, transient world. Obviously, he’s never been to Disneyland. The dreams of the self are manifold and endless and they exist in all the myriad worlds and conditions that appear to have solidity, in dreams. When you’re dreaming at night, something seems very real, but when you wake up the dream is gone and so is all that apparent solidity.

Yoga is a science. It is the science of consciousness. Yoga suggests that there is more, other realms, other dimensions, and nirvana – the central nexus where all this comes from. You have to elevate yourself to that point and bring your mind into the Godhead, into nirvana, into that perfect and pure radiant knowledge. It will not come to you. It never does. Discrimination, vivika, means you know the difference between the transient and the eternal. That’s what discrimination means in Shankara’s yoga.

Those who seek liberation want to go beyond individualized perception. The essence of their being wants to dissolve back into the cosmos. Self-realization doesn’t imply loss, gain, even transition; it’s only a settling. The separate sounds on the beach, the birds, the waves, the wind. They all come together again. They blend. They harmonize. Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster. In the Far East, studying yoga is comparable to a mixture of attending one of the best Western universities, and of being an intrepid explorer.

Ramakrishna didn’t suddenly become enlightened. We had years of him meditating, seeking, crying to Mother Kali, going in and out of
samadhi, but after many years of this process, he was enlightened. He was no longer a finite individual. The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going. Liberation. The awareness of liberation is not liberation. The awareness of time is not liberation. The awareness of place, space, or condition is not liberation. You can’t say what it is, but you can sure say what it isn’t. Sri Krishna’s message is the message of anyone who comes from far away, anyone who’s come from that world, anyone who has been to, seen and meddled their mind with the eternal light. His message is the same as Buddha, Lao Tsu, Bodhidharma, Milarepa, Padmasambhava, Eastern famous spiritual people whose names we don’t know.

The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance  of life, the lila. One day the plays end and the screen goes blank. There is nothing.
Everything returns to its original formlessness. And then another dream begins. Krishna says meditate and you’ll see these various ephemeral worlds, or various ephemeral beings, all of them going through the same thing — some are rich, some are poor, some are more knowledgeable, some are less knowledgeable — in countless myriad universes forever. We are immortal life. Think of the opportunity of self-realization. What a gas!

Beyond the parameters of the self is an ocean…and it’s most excellent. In order to create heat, you have to have something to burn. So what we do in yoga is, we burn ourselves up to create light. Yoga means we go a step further back. In yoga we go to the cause. The
cause of pain is not the world. The cause of pain is us.

Refuting “commonsense” on love and experience

I address two “common-sensical” falsehoods – first about experience, second about love – and show them to be wrong. First there is the “commonsensical” idea that loving oneself must precede being loved by another. This likewise falls apart under scrutiny. The person who has high standards for himself or herself finds it harder to love himself or herself than does someone whose standards for self are low; however it is by having such standards and meeting them at least part-way that makes one lovable to the next person. Thus, the same quality that makes it harder to love oneself – high standards – also makes one more lovable to the next person. And the “commonsense” on this subject stands refuted.

Second is the idea that one has to have one’s life in order before he can do anything good for anyone else. In fact, a person with the
highest variety of emotional states is going to find it hardest to have a stable existence (if he were even to want such a thing as a stable
existence) – but, because of the variety of emotional states that he experiences, he has the most wisdom to offer others. Because he or she experiences a wide range of emotional states, he or she has the most experience with different feelings that people may experience and with the resulting outcomes. Whereas a person with stable emotional makeup will find a stable life easier to come by, but will be far less knowledgeable of people’s feelings and will have little worthwhile ideas to offer. Furthermore, along with the experience of different emotional states, it is through experience of different ways of living that one also gains wisdom; and these likewise correlate negatively with stable existence. This refutes the commonsense on this subject. The same quality that leads to instability and hardship in one’s own life leads likewise to wisdom that one can impart others. Thus a Coleridge or a Byron or a Blake has more of wisdom to offer than does someone whose life is predictable; and the person who has much of value to say is frequently the person whose own life is disheveled. I love refuting “common sense” in all its manifestations. The monkey brain is both stupid and cruel, and in fighting it I stand up for all whom it destroys.

Yajna means ‘oblation’, a magical sacrifice

According to the Upanishads there’s no higher knowledge than transcendental experience in which the sadhak performs the yajna of the sacrificing of mental thought. Shakya the Muni and Maharishi Patanjali agree with this. Yajna means ‘oblation’, a magical sacrifice – the devine sacrifice of the cosmic Purusha – the model for all sacrifices. The purpose of the sacrifice was to ensure fertility and the well-being of the individual, his family and domestic animals, and ultimately the whole community as enumerated in the Grhya-sutras. In fact, Sri Buddha blew to bits the presumed efficacy of the burnt offerings of the Vedic Brahmins! It is a fact, needing no further explanation, that magical sacrifices, including all cermonial performances and shows, tantric or Vedic, are totally ineffective and useless against birth and death and rebirth. The practice of deep meditation that is transcendental is the only means of aquiring merit in this life – sacrifice your own thoughts man!

Mantras for sepcific situations?

Hey, some good ones that I learned for those sort of things are, “I like myself”, ” I feel terrific”, “I’m the best”, “I can do it”,
“I love my work”, “I’m unstoppable”

   First thing in the morning when you wake up, is to sit up staight and say the mantras with emotion, “I like myself” 10, 50 or even 100 times.   The more you like yourself the better you perform at whatever you do.  And the better you perform the more you like yourself.

   At first you might have to say it through gritted teeth – until your mind gives up and your subconscious mind accepts it. Then you
will become unstoppable at achieving your goals. Apparently we all have a self-image and lots of minor self-concepts.

   For example we have a self concept for how good we are at yoga, another one for how good we are at playing the guitar, and another one for how good we are our job, and another one for how good we are with money etc etc. Saying, I like myself is a really good mantra. The more you like yourself, your capacity for loving others expands too.

   And if you can maintain a happy, joyfull and cheerful attitude despite the ups and downs of life then that’s also non attachment and
self-disciplin or mind control.    Our true nature is happiness, love, joy, peace and gratitude etc. Sometimes going for our goals
helps reveal our true nature to ourselves.   Life here in a human body is a boon, like a rare precious gift- not to be wasted. It’s best to live life to the full, and practice things like gratitute, joy and happiness.

  Apparently the rules for spirituality change every 100 years, and majorly every 1000 or so years, and especially after the millenium- a lot of stuff is going out of date fast, especially old fashioned strict spritual regimes that are becoming totally unecesary in this new yuga.  The best thing about hatha yoga is that it compliments and facilitates ANY spiriutal practice that you do.