Q - When you are working all day long with all kinds of people, how do you get rid of the negative feelings and impressions that you are exposed to?
Shri Yogi Hari - It is difficult if you do not have right association, because you will have to keep battling against all these forces. People who are still sleeping, who are not yet awakened to what is right and wrong, exist at an instinctive level, they live a kind of animal existence. Right association, Satsanga, helps to develop discrimination and dispassion which gives you the strength of mind to go in the direction that you know is right. If you know the right direction but you don’t have the strength and will to follow that right way, it will even be worse, because you will suffer from all kinds of guilt and you will lose self-confidence.
In order to seek right association, you must know what is your goal in life, what is your ideal. Then you will seek the kind of association that will help you to reach that goal. These are very basic principles for success in life. You establish a noble goal that help you to grow and evolve constantly, in every situation at every moment. The Scriptures tell you that this goal should be God-realisation, Perfection, whatever you want to call it. And if God is too far away from your perception, from your consciousness, then think in terms of improving yourself all the time, of evolving, growing.
What does that mean? In society, growth, success, means getting a "good” job, making a lot of money, being recognised. But the Scriptures, the Saints, the Yogis, enlightened people tell you that the goal is to free yourself from all that is creating suffering and pain, which is the lower nature: lust, anger greed, hatred, jealousy, envy and fear… How will you free yourself from it? By substituting the opposite qualities, like love, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness.
The Scriptures call the base animal, the undesirable traits in man "the seven deadly sins”, not the "happy” sins. Deadly sins mean that they are the cause of death. Yet still we do not analyse it, we revel in it. We make it a virtue to lust for wealth, power, pleasure. If you don’t strive after it, society will tell you that something is wrong with you and that you have go to psychiatrists, therapists and on. The whole world is involved in that "rat race”. Yet, at the end of the rat race, you are still a rat, not the evolved, divine, radiant being that you are in reality!
So right association will help you to develop discrimination and dispassion. It will give you the support and help that you need to stay on the right path.
Q- Why would you want to get out of the cycle of birth and death and seek liberation?
Shri Yogi Hari - Liberation is only relevant when you feel that you are in bondage. If you do not feel that you are in bondage, in slavery, the word "liberation " is irrelevant. Even on the ordinary level, you have people who are so conditioned in their state of slavery that they cannot conceive the idea of liberation. If you tell them that they are in bondage, that they should fight for liberation, they will be surprised "What are you talking about?". They are so used to their condition that they are not even aware of it. Then you have to constantly drum into their head that they are really a slave and should fight for freedom. Eventually little by little they will see the possibility of elevating themselves. For how many hundreds of years were the Jews enslaved in Egypt? After a few generations, slavery had become their normal condition. They did not understand that they were in slavery until somebody rose up and said it was not the state that was meant for them.
Q- Why does it have to be a fight for freedom?
Shri Yogi Hari - If you fall into a pit how will you get out of it? By wishing you were a free person? You have placed yourself in this condition and you will have to struggle hard to get out of it! When you are in this condition of bondage, in this hole, you want freedom because that is your nature. At all levels you are consciously or unconsciously striving for freedom. That is why there are so many kinds of movements for freedom: freedom of expression and of association, economical and political freedom, women's rights and so on...; But no matter how much freedom you get it is never enough, you still want more, until you reach the ultimate feedom, which is to abide in your real nature.
Q- For example a black person in the south in the early 1900s didn't put himself into that position. He was just born there. What about that?
Shri Yogi Hari - How do you know that he did not put himself there and was just born like that?
This person created this condition through his karma.
When you drop this body you are not dead, there is no death, there is only continuity of consciousness, of existence, but on a different plane. You are the Soul, the Atman, infinite, pure consciousness, but you are entangled in all this Maya, or illusion, through your own action and thinking. Your thoughts determine your actions and your actions either elevate or degrade your consciousness. This is what determines where you are going to be born next and in what condition. Nothing happens by accident. Everything follows the law of cause and effect, which is the law of this universe.
As a Yogi, as a seeker of Truth, you have to find the cause behind the effect in every aspect from the physical to the most subtle. Yoga is a science and a true scientist tries to find the cause behind the effect and the cause behind that cause. If you do not want to find the cause, you stay on the superficial level of the effect.
The Rishis, the men of wisdom, discovered that this whole universe does not exist only on this physical plane of atoms and galaxies, but also on subtle planes like astral and causal planes, with so many levels and sheaths on each plane and all are governed by the law of cause and effect.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that people of divine nature will be reborn in the home of pure beings who will provide them with the best conditions for their further evolution until they reach liberation. Divine nature means a state of evolution and refinement where their consciousness reflects its divine origin and is more in tune with the divine laws. Those of a demonic nature who have no discrimination, who take right for wrong and wrong for right, and who continually degrade their consciousness through their thoughts and actions will be cast again and again into the homes of degraded parents where they will get further entangled in bondage and illusion.
In every culture, in every place, every race you find examples of such degradation and slavery. It is not limited to the condition of black people in the past centuries. Slavery does not mean that somebody commands you to do this or that, slavery is within your own mind, your own consciousness. People are so enslaved by their senses, by their mind. You create your own hell and your own imprisonment.
So the knowledge of Yoga is there to help you to understand this process so that you strive for ultimate freedom.
Extracts from Yogi Hari's book "Sampoorna Yoga"
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