Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

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preying on them, but at the level of intelligence and consciousness, we
are collaborating with them in a sacred rite, for the intelligence that or­
ganized their form and function also organized ours.
So this chapter is about moving beyond separation. It is about ex­
tension of intelligence and expansion of consciousness so that the bar­
rier around "my" intelligence and "my" consciousness begins to
dissolve. This brings the beginning of the end of loneliness. It is a fu­
sion-or rather a transfusion-for we are transfused with the riches
of natural cosmic resources. Where our common intelligence can be
called "instinctive," we call this higher intelligence "insight or intu­
ition." It penetrates barriers. The prison of particularity will soon no
longer be able to hold us captive. The growth of universality will
crumble its walls. As we shall see, it is meditation that crowns this
process, when duality gives way to oneness. No more subject and ob­
ject, this and that, me and it. It is at this point that the totality of one's
being is experienced, from every cell onward, all incorporated in
unique oneness, which is why it brings the vision of the individual
soul. All that makes me up is now known, and I live in the awareness
of the sum of its parts.


THE YOGI SAYS, according to Patanjali, in only his third sutra,
"What reality would we see if the mind of man could still its restless
waves for just an instant?" Would we be unconscious or would we be
super-conscious? The answer to that is unknowable except by personal
experience, which is why you can prepare for meditation, but ulti­
mately you cannot teach it. You can do everything up to it, but it hap­
pens when it happens. You can force a piano up three flights of stairs,
but you cannot force the febrile human mind to be still. All you can do
is train it to be vigilant toward all that disturbs its equilibrium. That is
why yoga spends so much time and effort identifying the negative, the
unwanted, and the subversive, because they disturb the tranquil cqui-


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