The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self- 3 Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday 10, Aug 2024, 06:40.
Article
Scripture
The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self: 3.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on October 14, 1984)

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The question of becoming another thing is certainly unimaginable to the ego. We have to cease to be in order that we may be another. Now, this is humanly impossible. No one can be another by being nothing in one's own self because that is the complete annihilation of one's own self, the total abolition of the ego and a nihil as far as one's own self is concerned. “I am not, and Thou alone art,” seems to be the instruction embedded in this initial verse. Fix yourself in Me: mayy eva mana ādhatsva. 

Let your mind and your intellect be in Me: 

mayi buddhim niveśaya. And then what happens? 

You shall be in me: 

nivasiayasi mayy eva ata urdhvam. 

There is no doubt about it: 

na samsayah.

But the great Lord is a master psychologist, a person who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure of things and fully aware of the incapacity of the disciple or the student to be able to receive this kind of instruction. Human logic says A is A, B is B, and A can never be B. It is a law of contradiction. We are masters of logic, and this logic is our doom finally, because we think that one thing cannot be another thing. But here it is said that one thing has to be another thing. It defeats our logic. One person cannot be another person, one thing cannot be another thing, A cannot be B; but it has to be, if the meaning of this verse is to be clear to us.

But it cannot be clear to us, so the verse goes on further. Sri Krishna dilutes his advice with another instruction. 

Atha cittam samadhatum na saknosi mayi sthiram, abhyasayogena tato mam ichaptum dhanamjaya (BG 12.9): 

If this kind of total dissolution of your understanding in universal understanding is not possible, at least habituate yourself to continuous practice by the force of your will. While the first slogam may be said to correspond to what is called jnana yoga, the second verse bears some similarity to what is called the raja yoga system of volitional concentration: daily practice and a tenacious betaking of oneself to a centralised objective or an ideal, repeatedly and continuously hammering the same notion, the same idea and the same ideal into one's consciousness. 'Repeated practice' means many things because many things are connected with our daily life. It is a practice related to all the associations of our day-to-day existence.

We live in a place and in a time, and we have a method of work, but all these three facets of our daily life should be concentrated into a systematised abhyasa or practice, which means to say, the place where we are seated for meditation must be the same, the time for which we are sitting should be the same, and the methodology that we adopt in our concentration should not vary from day to day. It should be a continuous concentration on a single pointed ideal. We have very detailed instructions in this regard in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. 

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Continued

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