Place: Iyengar Institute-Simply Yoga, in New York (USA)
Year: July 2011
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Satyanarayana Dasa
Subject of this seminar: Samadhi and Sadhana Pada - Klesas
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras are the classical work of the Yoga School of thought, one of the Six Darśanas studied in the Bhakti Tirtha course. They focus on how to attain direct experience and realization of the puruṣa, or the individual self. As the classical treatise on the Vedic understanding of the mind and consciousness and on techniques of meditation and self-realization, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West. For Vaiṣṇavas, the Yoga Sūtras are especially helpful in understanding the first two chapters of Bhakti-rasāmṛita-sindhu.
The Vedas are beginningless. Just as God is without a beginning, then his knowledge is also without a beginning. It may be revealed at a certain point in time to a specific person, but that does not mean that the Veda did not exist before. God’s knowledge is eternal because it’s God’s knowledge. The attributes of an eternal object are also eternal. That is why we are also eternal. We also have no beginning. The soul is not created because it is one of the potencies of God.
