gifted with intelligence that lends purpose and direction to our steps,
striving to live ethically, that is with honor and dignity.
The question that hangs over mankind is, "Can we really achieve
freedom?" We often hold the contradictory notion in our heads that
Gandhi or Jesus or Aurobindo reached freedom, but that we cannot.
And our daily experience, our failures and disappointments, only seem
to confirm our prejudice against ourselves. But read the life of Gandhi,
of Aurobindo. Their lives were full of setbacks, wrong paths embarked
upon, even early immorality. I have already made clear that the basis
of my life in yoga was sickliness, ostracism, ridicule, and my general
uselessness for any other path in life.
To resolve this paradox, we have to cast our minds back to the re
lationship between Nature (Prakrti) and Soul (Purusa). Here we have to
discriminate between determinism and inevitability. We are biologically
determined by nature for our own evolutionary benefit. At the biolog
ical level, this determinism is so strong that it creates inevitability-i.e.
we all have two arms, two legs, and one head, etc. At the level of con
sciousness, deterministic forces produce a strong predisposition in us, for
example, to repeat pleasure, avoid pain, flee what we fear, and allow ego
and pride to swell. But this is not inevitable. It is merely an unlevel
playing field. Yoga is a thoroughly tested technique whereby the Will,
working through an intelligence that can choose and a self-aware con
sciousness, can free us from inevitability. By these means, we can walk
deliberately toward an individual emancipation and, by the grace of
Heaven, a universal freedom.
It is said that Adam and Eve lived in a state of primal or original
Oneness. Yoga says that the highest experience of freedom is Oneness,
the supreme reality of Unity. The predicament of human beings is that
we feel ourselves to be stuck in a no-man's-land between the beginning
and the end of an immense journey. Adam and Eve took the first step
toward individuation when they ate the forbidden fruit and lost their
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