Yoga Sutra II- 45 - SAMADHI SIDDHIR ISVARAPRANIDHANANT - By total surrender to God, samadhi is attained.Swami Satchidananda says that "Isvara pranidhatnam is a life of dedication, of offering everything to the Lord or to humanity." Swami Satchidananda tells us that he includes humanity in the category of the Lord because the whole world is God. "When we dedicate out lives to the benefit of humanity, we have dedicated ourselves to God. Whatever we do can easily be transformed into worship by our attitude." We are told that even treating items we have roughly will be felt as painful and that we should have "gentle, Yogic touch with everything." "Convert every work into Yoga with the magic wand of right attitude."
If we can renounce our attachments to our possessions, we will have nothing to worry about. The worries we have come from these mental attachments. When we can possess things without the attachments, Swami Satchidananda says that "This is continuous "samadhi." Real samadhi is tranquility of mind, not just sitting in a corner like a rock. This tranquility of mind can come when the mind is free from all attachment. The Gita is quoted as saying "Either give everything to the world, to the community of your fellow people, or give everything to God." A stanza quoted from the Gita "Do everything in My name. Then you will get peace and joy." Swami Satchidananda says at this point in the commentary that if we can understand this, there is no need to read further. However, this might not be want some people want, thus the scriptures give different paths. He said there are numerous paths*, religions and philosophies. It doesn't matter what path and that "By practicing one these virtues, all the rest will follow. If one is perfected, concentration , meditation and even samadhi will come."
*Some of the numerous paths are referred to in - "How to Know God - The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" translated and commented on by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood are as follows:
- Bhakti yoga - the path of devotion to God through ritual worship, prayer, japa
- Karma yoga - the path through selfless service (God dedicated action). Dedication of the fruits of one's work to God
- Jnana yoga - the path of intellectual discrimination; the way of finding Brahma (God) through analysis of the real nature of phenomena
- Raja yoga - the path of meditation combining all of the paths. Included also is the study of body as a vehicle of spiritual energy.
It is noted that one yoga cannot be practiced to the sole exclusion of the others. It is pointed out that love, discrimination and dedicated action are all included in any religious path. "Just as the devotee may choose a particular aspect of God he feels most inclined to worship, so also he may the particular kind of he wants to establish between God and himself."
This ends the last observance category of Niyama, the second limb of yoga.See related posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment