The True Foundation of the Yoga

0:00 We are generally so tied to our external ego personality that we identify with it as what we consider to be our self. We then refer to this body, life, mind complex as our reality and we say that we have a soul. The reality is far different. The reality is that the soul, the psychic being, takes on a particular existence for its own purposes of experience and growth. The difference in viewpoint is profound and has far reaching implications. If we identify with the external personality, we believe that the thoughts, emotions, feelings, reactions, responses, moods and physical action belongs to us, is an essential part of who we are, and thus we neither have the needed distance from it to see it clearly and dispassionately, nor do we realistically have the power to excise the movements that we recognize need to be changed or eliminated. Pretend then to try to suppress these reactions, which only makes them stronger through the factor of compression, or else we acknowledge our failure and fall into depression because we cannot succeed in our yogic endeavour. On the other hand, if we look at the external body, life, mind complex as something that the

1:32 soul chooses to inhabit for its own purposes in the divine manifestation, similar to putting on a suit of clothes, it is much easier to gain perspective and to reject or change reactions or habits as not belonging to anything essential to oneself. Srioro Bindo writes quote. In your dealing with your difficulties and the wrong movements that assail you, you are probably making the mistake of identifying yourself with them too much and regarding them as part of your own nature. You should rather draw back from them, detach and dissociate yourself from them, regard them as movements of the universal, lower, imperfect and impure nature forces that enter into you and try to make you their instrument for their self-expression.

2:28 By so detaching and dissociating yourself, it will be more possible for you to discover and to live more and more in a part of yourself. Your inner or your psychic being which is not attacked or troubled by these movements, finds them foreign to itself and automatically refuses assent to them and feels itself always turn to or in contact with the divine forces and the higher planes of consciousness. Find that part of your being and live in it. To be able to do so is the true foundation of the yoga.

3:08 End Quote reference. Srioro Bindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3 in difficulty, pages 43 to 44.