Yoga Psychology
When we use the word "psychology," we don't use it in the reductionist sense - "my relationship with my mother caused it" - that kind of thing, you know. "Maybe if you talked with my mother, that would help me." That is not what we mean. Rather we are talking about the states of mind that we have cultivated. You see, when an incident "x" occurs in your life, there is no mechanically predetermined response "y" which you must always give. People say, "Well, I am this way because incident "x" occurred, implying that for "x" there is fixed response "y". And that becomes an excuse-making, rationalizing justification for the response that we choose. But, you see, we also have "y1", "y2","y3" and "y4", and also "z1" and "z2" and "z3" and "z4", and all the letters from "a" to "z", and all the possible algebraic formulations you can give, and so we must not use the Freudian-Jungian analytic methods so completely that we are slaves to them - that we are slaves to the incident "x" that occurred, because person A in the face of the same incident "x" will respond one way and person B will respond in a different way. And person A at one time will respond one way, and at a different time will respond in a different way.by Swami Veda Bharati
Purifying Thoughts
"Now, the struggle to purify one's thoughts during meditation can be a hard one. People struggle with these waves upon waves of emotions and commotions arising in the mind and become very discouraged during their meditations, or about their meditations. I'll give you one bit of advice about it and that is this: You will not elimininate these waves of the mind during meditation by fighting them. If you ask me how I stop them, I will say that there is no way you can stop them. That seems very discouraging, but it is not. Really, it's not. You see, think of the ocean. You stand on the beach and you watch the ocean. Mighty waves, storms, waves, ship-tossing waves, rising and falling. Ask a child to draw a picture of the ocean and he will draw waves. That is everybody's idea of an ocean: waves and thundering sounds. But Jacques Cousteau wrote about the same ocean, and he named his book The Silent World.by Swami Veda Bharati
Silence: Save your breath and live long
At some point in one's spiritual progress an urge to silence arises uninvited; a wave that carries the mind self-wards, atman-wards. In all spiritual traditions the aspirant is assigned periods of silence, not to speak of the masters who have maintained total silence for their entire life-spans.by Swami Veda Bharati
Reducing Internal Conflicts
"That chatter in your mind is a product of a nameless, objectless conflict that is in our mind, because there has to be two to chatter with each other. So there are those two or three or five points of view. See? Now if you could integrate these two or three, four or five, and give them each their real balance, then it's no problem, and you know the place for each one.by Swami Veda Bharati
Conquest of Three Worlds
The form and the tradition within which we teach is not a form of being a source of information. You are used to seminars for information. This is not that kind of a tradition. You would say, "Well! Aaaah, if a seminar is not for information, what else is there?" We have a word in India, a very commonly used, a Sanskrit word that is used in all the languages of India, and has found a place in spiritual English also. I don't know if it has appeared in the Webster's and Oxford English Dictionaries yet or not, but it should be a good candidate for them. And that word is satsanga. Without claiming myself to be saintly, the literal meaning of the word is "company of the saintly."by Swami Veda Bharati