Kausalya has just finished dressing her infant in his ornaments. She lays him down, performs her worship, offers food to the deity, and steps away to the kitchen. When she comes back, Rama is eating the offering. She runs to where she left the child and finds him asleep, exactly as she put him down.
This lecture closes the story of Prahlada and then does something the story could not do on its own. It takes the finished picture apart and names the parts. Sage Vasistha has spent several sessions on a boy-devotee who reached the highest goal; here, in section 42 of the Upasama Prakarana, he stops
Prahlada, the demon king who became one of the great devotees, has gone into samadhi and not come out. Sage Vasistha has been telling Rama this story for several sections now, and at Section 41 of the Upashama Prakarana it reaches an odd resolution: Lord Vishnu arrives, wakes him, and tells him to g
Raja Yoga Sutras, Lecture 10. Samadhi Pada, sutras 1.19 and 1.20.
Arjuna has asked the question that every honest practitioner eventually asks. What happens to the person who takes up the spiritual path, works at it for years, and dies without arriving? Not the person who never tried. The one who tried and fell short.
Tulsidas spends most of this section of the Ramcharitmanas describing a baby. The four sons of Dasharatha have been born, Sage Vasishtha has come to name them, and from Doha 197 through Doha 200 the poem does very little except look at the child Rama: his complexion, the moon of grace in his heart,
Two verses open this lecture, and both of them sound, at first hearing, like something a scripture should not say. One declares that a certain kind of person deserves to die. The other declares that a certain kind of person will never really die at all. Swami Jyotirmayananda spends the first six min
Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, sections 37 to 39 — lesson 180
Patanjali spends three chapters elaborating what he states once, briefly, in the first. Sutras 1.17 and 1.18 are that statement about samadhi itself, and Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda returns to 1.17 in this ninth lesson deliberately rather than by accident. “Seventeenth Sutra, I have already talked abo
There is a fear that sits underneath any long practice, and in the closing verses of the sixth chapter Arjuna finally says it out loud. He does not ask about the person who never began, or the person who abandoned the path. He asks about the one who tried. Someone with faith, someone sincere, whose…
This lecture takes up Balkanda from Doha 196, in the stretch just after Rama’s birth, and it turns on a distinction most readings of the passage skip. On the surface the verses record a royal celebration: King Dasharatha opens his treasury and gives away elephants, chariots, horses, gold, cows and d
“In the name of wisdom, if your personality begins to lose softness of the heart, goodness of the heart, generosity, charity, joyousness—if your heart loses these, you are not going to be really liberated.” Swamiji states the warning before a single mantra is chanted. A moment later, the diagnosis:
