The river of love, pleasure, prosperity, and wealth flows between
these guiding banks. Personal love, part of which is sexual, is a won
derful apprenticeship to love of the Divine. By learning to love one
woman, we can learn to love all womanhood, the whole female prin
ciple. You simply cannot love your wife and at the same time hate all
other women. That does not mean womanhood is a feast to be con
sumed by one man. On the contrary, the particular is the gateway to
the universal. Parents, and particularly mothers, learn to embrace the
whole of humanity through the love of their children. I said that I re
fused sannyasin because I wanted to live in the world with all its tur
bulence and challenges. I also said that I did not want to swallow the
whole world. That is the madness of addiction. You cannot consume
the infinite. All you can do is taste its essence through the particular.
Dharma and moksa come to our help here.
I mentioned early on in the book how, when I was a young man
away teaching for long periods, sometimes female students took a
fancy to me. I invoked dharma to sustain and protect me from over
flowing the riverbanks of propriety by cultivating a fierce and forbid
ding manner. Like a reverse magnet, it kept people at a distance and
saved me from sliding into easy expressions of intimacy.
On my travels there were other kinds of enjoyment on offer, beau
tiful landscapes and stimulating and interesting films and theatre. I en
joyed them to the full, as Patanjali intended us to, but the detachment
of moksa gave me objectivity. Whatever I saw and learned was con
sidered in the light of "How does this relate to yoga's understanding of
the world? How can I use what I am learning to further my practice
and teaching?"
In human love I was blessed with a perfect partner, and the river
of love ran smoothly. Artha, earning a living, was another matter
whitewater rafting down a dangerous torrent. As a young man I some
times starved-no money meant no food. I married before I was in a
stable situation, and then children started to arrive. I worked fl at out,
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