Patanjali does not define God by power. He defines God by freedom from affliction.

Chapter 7 of the Bhagavad Gita has just finished making its largest claim. In the verse before this lecture opens, Krishna says that all this is strung upon Me like clusters of gems on a single thread. Lecture 79 is Swami Jyotirmayananda taking that image apart to find out what it obliges a person t

A renunciate in this lecture has given away everything he owns. One shirt, worn for years, and a water pot that came from his teacher. He seeks out King Janaka to correct him, because Janaka is famous for being free while living surrounded by a palace, and that looks to the ascetic like a fraud the

Detachment has a public-relations problem, and Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this lecture by naming it. The word arrives sounding like subtraction. Give up the things you love, want less, feel less, and call the resulting flatness progress. Anyone who has tried to practise dispassion on those terms ha

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Section 50. Lecture 188 by Swami Jyotirmayananda. The previous section closed the story of Gadhi, the brahmana who asked to be shown the extension of maya and got a whole exiled lifetime inside two muhurtas with his head under water. Section 50 does not add to the s

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