Looking from Within -- Summary and Conclusions

0:00 There is a deeply embedded aspiration within humanity to discover some purpose or significance to our lives and to the very existence of the creation within which we live and act. Our training and education from our earliest childhood is fixated on achieving our standing within the external reality of the society within which we live. We are asked to learn a trade, have a career, marry and raise a family. We are then told that we should seek for enjoyment and we search for happiness through external actions and material gratifications. For many people this seems to be sufficient. Yet at times, almost everyone suffers from the inner struggle as to whether there is more to life than a seemingly mindless round of eating, sleeping, working and enjoying ourselves through some form of entertainment. Occasionally someone concludes that there must be something more, something deeper, something significant to make this entire immeasurable creation and energy worth the effort.

1:15 In some cases there is a traumatic event, a near death experience, a catastrophic failure in the outer life, grief from loss of loved ones, pressures to succeed at what appears to be a meaningless life. This causes a period of soul searching and people look into various directions to find the meaning of their lives. They explore religions, they investigate philosophies of life, they try out various entheogenic substances and experience the temporary dissolution of the ego core. They may take up life challenging activities, adventures, and explorations, or they may immerse themselves in some science or art or skill that helps them reach beyond their limits. Eventually they recognize that they have only received partial answers, incomplete solutions, and third hand recitations about the reality.

2:21 At that point they are ready to take up their own practice of inner growth and development, which is called yoga. When an individual takes up yoga, he begins to experience the shift from an externally focused life to an inner developed life. He begins looking from within. This leads to A2 pronged effort in Trioro Bindo's Yoga. First, the liberation of the awareness, the consciousness as a separate witness of the nature and the illusory forms and results that are achieved in the external world. This liberation can lead the seeker away from the life as in the way of the ascetic, or it may become a foundation for the second prong of the effort which Ryorobindo calls the Yoga of Self Perfection. This yoga seeks to bring the Divine reality into full and conscious manifestation here by bringing a next level of consciousness into manifestation to create the harmony and balance that the current accommodation of the physical vital mental being has not yet worked out. Doctor de Lal writes quote 3 chief categories of seekers have been kept in view in selecting passages for this compilation. Those who wish to obtain a greater life mastery and self mastery.

3:52 Those who, while pursuing the common goals of life, also aim at something beyond the ordinary life and seek to grow towards a higher or spiritual state of being. Those for whom spiritual growth is the primary purpose and preoccupation of life. All of the many approaches for the attainment of mastery and inner growth involve the cultivation of certain attitudes which are related to inner or psychological states from which we look at and react to everything in life, both within us and outside us. This book deals with such basic attitudes in the light of Srioro Bindo's yoga. End Quote Reference.

4:41 Srioro Bindo and the Mother. Looking from within. Summary and conclusions, with citations from the preface and back cover.