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:

The lecture opens without preamble, on a chain of questions borrowed from the Upaniṣads. What gives light to the senses? The mind. What gives light to the mind? The intellect. What gives light to the intellect?

“It seems it’s not important to ask the question, Who am I? I already know it — my picture is there in the passport.”

Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda continues the Srimad Bhagavad Gita in Chapter 6, Atma Samyama Yoga — the yoga of self-control — at verses 35 and 36. Arjuna has just heard the whole teaching and reached an honest conclusion: it cannot be done. The mind, he says, is like wind, and no one controls wind. Sinc

Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda continues the Tulsi Ramayana — Balkanda, from Doha 196 — through the great charity of King Dasharatha after Rama’s birth and the naming ceremony in which Sage Vasishtha reveals the meaning hidden in the four brothers’ names. As always, Swamiji is not interested in the histo