Last day: Menla 2023: Isvara pranidhana

The 5 kleshas build high banks along the river bed of our lives.

Avidya – ignorance, not knowing

Asmita – the ego

Raga – our desires, acceptances, and likes

Dvesa – our rejections, avoidances and dislikes

Abhinivesa – fear (the motivator of the above)

Our internal disciplines can be constructed by our acceptances and avoidances. Therefore, we obstruct our own flow of life confining ourselves within our likes and dislikes, thinking we are free. Prashant Iyengar says that we do this to avoid dukha – sadness. Dukha arises from our acceptances, desires, avoidances and rejections because these make up our “neuroses and psychoses” and, as such, are klista samskaras. We have a “forestation of kleshas, and we want pleasure to get away from pain. We want to repel dukha like mosquito repellent. We do so many things to escape dukha; we are busy and occupied to avoid dukha.” (Prashant Iyengar lecture on Countering Kleshas – Anti kleshotics July 2021).

Tapas and svadhyaya together means we cannot construct or control the outcome. We do, we watch, and through this we let go of klista samskaras slowly and thorougly as we evolve towards ” the highest and noblest aspirations” of ourselves. ” Isvara pranidhana or right orientation enables a spiritual aspirant to look at everything with total attention.” (Rohit Metha; Yoga, the Art of Integration.)

” This is surrender to God (Isvara pranidhana), often equated with bhakti, the yoga of supreme devotion and selflessness. Ego is on an elastic and will always pull you back. Only the practice of meditation will eventually erode the attraction between ego and self-identity.

Surrender to God is possible only for one who has, perhaps by circumstance or adversity or humiliation, discarded ego. For the surredner to be lasting, meditation in its highest sense must be accomplished. Surrender to God is not surrender to what you think God wants. It is not surrender to our conception of the will of God. it is not God giving you instructions. As long as your ego persists (along with the kleshas) your interpretation of God’s (isvara pranidhana) wishes will be fragmented by the distorting prism of ego”. (B.K.S. Iyengar. Light on Life)

Finite and Infinite (Corine Biria)

We want to go to the infinite but nobody wants to go to the end of the finite. Everyone wants infinite, so we are in the jail of the finite because we don’t want to go to the frontier of the finite. So we move partially the body, keeping ourselves with the will to go to the infinite.

What is the frontier of the finite into the arms and legs? When we reach this, see how we reduce our own nerves.”

Unfold Your Own Myth by Rumi

Who gets up early
to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Soloman cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow on drop.
Now there’s a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he’s wealthy.

But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.

The Music Master: Rumi

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

We are tasting the taste this minute

of eternity. We are pain

and what cures pain, both. We are

the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.