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

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each photograph shows a picture and then there is a jump, however
slight, to the next reality. They do not slide together unless you watch
them in movement, when they appear continuous. The psychological
flow of time ties us to past and future identities and events. As long as
we are caught in the flow of time as a sequence of movements, we
cannot fully be in the present. Therefore we live in a sort of compro­
mised reality. That is why I say that time seen as movement and not as
presence is an illusion that limits our freedom. Savasana frees us from
this. I said that in meditation we open the gap in the curtain of time. It
is in Savasana, by becoming nobody, literally nothing and nobody, that
we become small enough to pass through the infinitesimally small
crack in the curtain. A practitioner who can put aside his every iden­
tity can access places where no plump ego could squeeze through.
If skeptics seek an analogy for the seeming continuity or seamless­
ness of what appears to us a flow of change, you should look at the
phenomenon of water heating. It does not get a little bit hotter gradu­
ally as it seems to us. Like the individual slides in our film, it jumps.
Very small jumps, of course, but water being heated is first one tem­
perature, and then it jumps to another, slightly hotter. There is no
between. What this suggests is that life is a series of discrete transfor­
mations. We are in one state-we practice, we detach-then we are in
another. What we experience as growth or evolution is in fact a long
series of little jumps. These jumps are instantaneous, which means they
exist outside time as we conceive it. The ultimate yogic triumph is to
live in kaivalya, outside time, you might say, but really inside it, inside
its heart, disconnected from past and from future. That is to live al­
ways in the kernel of the present. It is the integration of the true nature
of time in consciousness, and Savasana is the key. By all means, relax,
go to sleep even; we are all human, but in Savasana you are on the edge
of a great mystery, and if Savasana is the most difficult of all postures,
at least it has the saving grace that we can all lie on the floor as Wl' ar­
tl'mpt it.

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