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 Miracle or Mess?  Once it happened…A man wished to acquire supernatural powers. He went from one guru to another, desperately in search of instruction. He eventually found his way to a remote hermitage in the Himalayan wilderness.  The guru of the ashram divined the purpose of his quest and tried to dissuade him. “What will you do with these powers? So what if you learn to walk upon the water? After three days, a boat will be better! Don’t waste your life on these irrelevant pursuits. Let me teach you meditation instead.” The master made many attempts to dissuade him, but the man was adamant.  The guru finally said, “Well, if you’re so determined, take a dip in the river tomorrow morning at four o’clock and come to me. I will initiate you into the secrets of the supernatural.”  The man was excited. He took a pre-dawn dip in a freezing Himalayan river, turned half blue, and came and sat expectantly before the master.  The guru said, “See, this is very simple. I have a secret mantra. If

  Morsel of the Earth  Your physical body, as yoga reminds us, is annamayakosha, or a food body, just a heap of the nourishment you ingest. The food that you consume is, in turn, just the earth. You are a small outcrop of this planet prancing around and claiming to be an autonomous entity. But since you are a small extension of the earth, whatever happens to the planet happens to you too—in some subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways.  This planet is part of a larger body that we call the solar system. What happens to that system affects the planet. This solar system is part of a larger body we call the universe. Maybe it is beyond your perception right now, but because your physical form is just a fragment of the planet, everything that is happening to any part of the universe is also in some way happening to you!  As incredible as it sounds, if you maintain your physical body in a certain way, you will become aware of subtle changes that happen in the planet and the cosmos. Once you

 INTENSITY OF INACTIVITY  Logically, somebody who never put effort into anything should be the master of effortlessness. But it is not so. If you want to know effortlessness, you need to know effort. When you reach the peak of effort, you become effortless. Only a person who knows what it is to work understands rest. Paradoxically, those who are always resting know no rest; they only sink into dullness and lethargy. This is the way of life.  For the Russian ballet dancer Nijinsky, his entire life was dance. There were moments when he would leap to heights that seemed humanly impossible. Even if one’s muscles are at peak performance, there is still a limit to how high one can jump. But in some moments he would seem to transcend even that limit.  People often asked him, “How do you manage this?”  He said, “There is no way I can ever do it. When Nijinsky is not there, only then it happens.”  When someone is constantly giving a hundred percent, a point comes when one surpasses all limits a

  Life Sense: Knowing Life Beyond the Senses How does the human body make sense of the world? What is its source of knowing?  The answer is obvious: through the five senses.  Whatever you know of the world or yourself is information you have gathered only through the five sense organs—by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. If these sense organs fold up, you would know neither the world nor yourself. When you sleep every night, suddenly the people around you disappear, the world disappears, and even you disappear. You are still alive, everybody around you is alive, but in your experience everything evaporates, because these five sense organs have gone into “shutdown” mode.  The sense organs are limited. They can perceive only that which is physical. If your perception is limited to the five senses, naturally the scope of your life will be restricted to the physical. Additionally, the senses perceive everything only in relation to something else. If I touch a metal object a

 “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”  It takes a certain amount of awareness for a person to see the limitations of this fantastic machinery. As a machine, the body is actually faultless. The only problem is that it does not take you anywhere. It just springs out of the earth and falls back into the earth.  Isn’t that enough?  If you look at it from the perspective of the body, it is quite enough. But somehow, a dimension beyond physicality has infused itself into this wonderful mechanism. This dimension is the very source of life. It is this dimension that truly makes us who we are.  Life is one thing, but the source of life is another. In every creature, in every plant, in every seed, this source of life is at work. In a human being, this source of life is even more magnificently obvious. It is because of this that suddenly after a while, all the wonderful gifts that the body offers somehow seem to turn irrelevant and trivial.  It is because of this that you and every other

Body- The ultimate machine The most intimate part of physical creation for all of us is our own bodies. The physical body is the first gift of which we are aware. It is also the ultimate machine. Every other machine on the planet has come out of this.  The yogic sciences, as explained above, do not speak of the mind or the soul. Everything is just a body—whether it is a food body, a mind body, an energy body, an etheric body, or a bliss body. There is a deep wisdom in this approach. It does not allow us to escape into deluded psychological states or into flights of metaphysical abstraction. It grounds us firmly in the tangible, even as it leads us into subtler realms of physicality and, gradually, into the beyond.  The physical body is designed and structured to function by itself without much of your intervention. You don’t have to make the heart beat, the liver perform all its complex chemistry, or even try to breathe; everything that is needed for your physical existence to manifest

Yoga Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, one of the most profound documents on the yogic sciences, begins with a strange line: “…And now, yoga.”  A great document on life starts with just half a sentence! Why?  This is because you arrive at yoga only when you realize that your desire is essentially for the limitless, and that absolutely nothing else will settle you. Every human being lives in a perpetual state of insufficiency. No matter who you are or what you have achieved, you still want a little more than what you have right now. This is human desire. But the fundamental desire within every human being is for boundless expansion.  Most people are not aware of the nature of their longing. When their longing finds unconscious expression, we call this greed, conquest, ambition. When their longing finds conscious expression, we call this yoga.  If you still believe that everything will be okay the moment you find a new girlfriend or boyfriend, get a raise, buy a new house or car, then it is not y

No Boundary Once it happened…An argument arose one evening between a husband and wife. The argument was over the burning question: who should close the front door today?  Not a simple question. And not a laughing matter. These are very serious issues in domestic situations. Who should close the door today, who should switch off the garden lights this evening, who should take the dog for a walk— these are questions that can drive couples to divorce.  The argument grew more and more heated. The wife decided, “Every day, it is I who in the end accepts defeat. Today, I am not going to give in.” The husband also grew equally determined. “She pushes me around all the time. I am not going to give in to this woman today, no matter what.”  It was one of those grand rows. Now, every home has its own system of resolving these arguments. In this family, when confronted by an impasse, both husband and wife would sit silently; the person who uttered the first word would have to go and close the door