I borrowed, but money remained a huge source of anxiety. The richest
students are not necessarily the quickest or best payers as any teacher
will tell you, and I sometimes let myself be exploited. Even when I built
my own Yoga Institute in the mid-seventies, problems persisted. There
was food on the table, thank goodness, but buildings develop struc
tural faults; governments make tax demands. It is really only just re
cently that this current of the river has run smooth for me. I live as
simply as ever, eat the same, only, with age, considerably less, but I no
longer need to worry, and whatever surplus there is can go to projects
for schools and irrigation in the village of Bellur, where I was born and
that I left in 1925.
Eventually, however, I can say that I have fulfilled artha, raised a
family and built a home through my efforts as a yoga teacher. I always
had faith, and I always got by, but it was for so many years a very
tough ride. I suppose I could have courted rich sponsors and become a
parasite as some "holy" men do. But that is not artha, it is not dharma,
it is not moksa, and I can only thank again my forbidding manner that
kept people at a distance and prevented my river from flooding its
banks. Financial security is essential. My experience is that God will
take care of you if you have full faith in Him and surrender to him
completely.
One way to sum up the four aims of life would be to say that pro
vided you behave ethically on the one hand, surrender to God on the
other, between these two, you will Love, Labor, and Laugh.
I have suggested that moksa is a thousand little freedoms that we
accomplish each day-the ice cream returned to the freezer or the bitter
retort left unsaid. It is our training for the greatest detachment that
leads to the ultimate freedom, kaivalya. But if kaivalya is majestic and
permanent, we must not belittle the small daily victories of moksa.
They come from the persistent and sustained will to be ever more free,
to cut the myriad threads that bind us and of which we talked in rela
tion to tension and bondage in Savasana. Anything, however small,
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