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

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actions and reactions. He is the supreme purusa (Purusa Visesa), a spe­
cial quality that humans have to know. He is ever pure and clean and
remains like this forever.
To believe in God, we need to believe in ourselves first. Our con­
sciousness, the citta, has limitations. We need to open the horizon of
consciousness to see the other entity, "God." Patanjali knew our weak­
nesses, that our consciousness is caught in fluctuations of mind (vrtti)
and inherent afflictions (klesa). Therefore, we, in general, and in our
consciousness in particular, cannot conceive God. If consciousness can
be purified, then the existence of the Cosmic Force can be felt. As one
increasingly feels the existence and pull of the Divine, one's actions
more easily align with the ethical impulse of the Absolute.


Yama: Living with True Ethics
True ethics are not absorbed from outside conditioning. The innate
goodness of a horse, for example, or a dog, derives from its nature, al­
though some training and guidance are necessary especially during
youth. Morality and ethics come from inside ourselves and are a re­
flection of consciousness. However these get distorted by contact with
society. This disturbs the consciousness (citta) as well as the conscience
(antahkarana), which, as we have seen, dwells next to the soul and per­
ceives the world as One and not as a battle for survival through the
most brutish aspects of our nature. Yoga trains us away from our
selfish, brutal motives and shows us how to complete our responsibil­
ities. This is like a hinge where you educate yourself to accomplish an
inner transformation from self-seeking pleasures toward emancipation,
from bondage to the world to freedom of the Self, from evolution to­
ward the power of knowledge to involution toward the wisdom of the
heart and soul. This striving for self-culture is the onset of true reli­
giousness and the cessation of religion as a denomination or rigid pat­
tern of belief. Spirituality is not playacting at being holy but the inner

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