wife might separate and go their different ways into the forest to meet
their Maker alone and as naked souls. This is no longer the way. There
are no longer enough forests, and besides, modern medicine has con
vinced us that we can cheat death forever in however debilitated a con
dition. But the yogi meets death as a servant, a warrior, and a saint. He
continues to serve God by his devotion and actions; he steps toward
death fearlessly like a soldier who would be ashamed to cling to life,
and like a saint because he is already part of the Oneness that he has
recognized as the Supreme Reality. The yogi cannot be afraid to die,
because he has brought life to every cell of his body. We are afraid to
die, because we are afraid we have not lived. The yogi has lived.
This is how the aims of life that must be accomplished marry nat
urally with the evolution of the human life cycle. There is an Indian
blessing, "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies." This blessing means
that the natural cycle of life has not been interrupted by calamity and
has allowed each one to fulfill his destiny.
Everything I have said has been about living life to the full, en
joying and transcending nature, and encountering the Divine within.
All this exists on an ethical foundation, it exists within ethics, and eth
ical perfection is the only true proof of its thorough accomplishment.
One's spiritual growth is only ever demonstrated by one's actions in the
world. The first two petals of yoga are yama and niyama, the Universal
and Personal Ethical Code, which I touched on in earlier chapters. We
must return to them now in full, because it is here that they guide us
as we try to live with ever greater freedom.
Ethics: Universal and Personal
As we have seen, for the yogi, spirit and nature are not separate. The
evolution-or involution-that we have achieved in discovering our
soul must now be made manifest in our bodies and lives. In fact, one
cannot grow spiritually without increasing one's moral and ethical
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