Patanjali has already told the aspirant what carries a practice forward. Practice and dispassion, held in balance, and held in some degree of intensity. Lecture 13 takes up the sutra that adds a third element to those two, and then the sutra that explains why the third one is needed at all. The firs

Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this class before the invocation has even been chanted, with an image rather than an argument. Think of God as a magician. The magical power and the magician are not two entities; they are one and the same. But if you are deluded by the magic, you begin to study the pheno

Swamiji begins this class by refusing the thing most listeners came for. The Ramayana is about to give him a sage, two princes, a demoness, a wrecked fire ceremony and a woman turned to stone, and before any of it he says plainly: “Spiritual scriptures have to be applied in your life. They are not h

Gadhi got what he asked for. He wanted to see the extension of maya, and Lord Vishnu granted it: two muhurtas with his head under water, and inside them a lifetime as Katanja the outcast, a fictitious kingship, exposure, and a fire that turned out to be river water. He surfaced satisfied. Then trave

Gadhi was a brahmana and a devotee of Lord Vishnu, and he had one question he could not put down. The scriptures kept saying maya, maya, maya. So what is maya? He set the highest goal aside for later and asked to be shown the extent of it, and Lord Vishnu granted the boon.

Sutra 22 of the Samadhi Pada is one line long and it settles a question every practitioner eventually asks in private: why do two people following the same discipline arrive at very different places? Patanjali has just said that success comes through practice and dispassion. Here he adds that both o

The seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita carries a title that is really a pair of terms held in tension: Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga, the yoga of knowledge and realization. Swamiji separates them in the opening minutes and then spends the rest of the lecture showing why the distinction is not academic. Jnana

Swamiji opens this class with a sentence he returns to almost fifty minutes later, in the same words: “He is closer to you than your physical heart.”

A study guide to Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, Lecture 185 — Upaśama Prakaraṇa, Sections 45 and 46, with Swami Jyotirmayananda

Tonight’s class takes up a question that arrives sounding like an objection. The story of Prahlada has just closed, and in it Lord Vishnu appears and grants the boon of supreme devotion, which opens the door to liberation. Rama notices the problem immediately. If the Lord can simply hand over Self-r

Patañjali spends one sūtra on the people who arrive already awake, and then he turns to everybody else. Lesson 11 of Swami Jyotirmayananda’s Raja Yoga Sutras series takes up Samādhi Pāda 1.20 and 1.21, and the shift between them is the whole reason this lecture is worth an hour of your attention. Th

Swami Jyotirmayananda opens the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita by doing something the chapter's own title invites and most readers skip. The chapter is called Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga, the yoga of knowledge and realization, and almost everyone treats those two words as a pair of synonyms stacke