Yoga Sutra II- 39 - APARIGRAHA STHAIRYE JANMAKATHAMTA SAMBODHAH - When non-greed is confirmed, a thorough illumination of the how and why of one's birth comes.
Swami Satchidananda tells us that "Aparigraha is abstention from greed or hoarding--which is a form of stealing ---or not receiving gifts. " He says that many times gifts are an advance of future obligations to the giver, and that accepting them binds us and makes us lose our neutrality. However, if one is strong enough to remain free from obligation, then the gifts can be accepted. "Feel, 'I am giving her an opportunity to use her money in the right way, but I am not obligated by this gift.' " The commentary ends "When the mind becomes calm and clear by being free of desires and obligation, we gain the capacity to see how our desires caused our present birth. We directly see the cause and effect relationship because we are detached from it; we are no longer bound up with it."
"Attachment, and the anxiety which accompanies attachment, are obstacles to knowledge. As long as you are clinging desperately to the face of a precipice (and thereby to your life) you are in no condition to survey the place you climbed up from or the place toward which you are climbing. So Patanjali tells us that freedom from attachment will result in knowledge of the whole course of our human journey, through past and future existences. Such knowledge would, of course, be in itself proof of the theory of reincarnation." - "How to Know God - The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" translated and commented on by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
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