It is really admirable the way Swami Vivekananda interpreted and exposed Hinduism, integrating it, widening its arms and turning it into a legitimate catalyst of positive transformations for the human being. His Raja Yoga is the externalization of a noble, courageous, and stimulating philosophy. Very few authors are capable of deeply understanding the human condition and offering a solution that does not imply forced repression or the fading of the will. Swami Vivekananda, instead of leading to an aggravation of tensions or an eclipse of consciousness, proposes an active mental conduct directed to the elevation of one’s own nature. It builds, magnifies, encourages overcoming. What a great man!
Tag: philosophy
Anger, Anger…
“Nothing clutters thought like an access of anger.” It is not only tranquility that is lost, but the construction of long efforts, of long improvement that materializes into a seemingly stable state, collapses entirely and abruptly. It is mental progress that returns to square one. From this, it is repeating the whole process. Buddhists assure us that a lifetime of meditation is lost in one of these impulses. If it is not so, it is certain to spoil before and after. Oh, sadness! Oh, the urge to cry!
The Best Decisions Come After Long Meditation…
The best decisions emerge after long, albeit shapeless, meditation, which is slowly concentrated to a point where it violently spills over into an impulse that, by volitional action, is immediately allowed to flow out: it materializes in this impulse, and continues to bear fruit. Intuition, taken in the Jungian sense, when developed, is capable of manifesting itself laden with a certainty that surpasses reasoning. It is the flash of a precious faculty. To go against it, in these cases, is to squander it. That is why patience in important decisions is right—but sometimes the most profitable thing is to have the courage to follow the intuition.
The Western Specialist
I reread Patanjali’s sutras, this time commented by an Indian mystic. What a difference! What an abyss separates him from the master doctor specialized in metaethics and philosophy of language! I lack words… The mystic’s concise comments are intended to facilitate the practical understanding of the sutras; they aim, in short, to uncomplicate any ambiguity they may contain in the work. The confrontation with the master doctor is heartbreaking… It seems that the Western specialist puts himself in an intellectual distance that borders on stupidity. He isolates himself from what he analyzes, draws endless comparisons, as if he were aiming for perfect knowledge of the etymology of the words studied, but indifferent to grasping what they represent. He loses himself in an irrational subjectivity, because it is simply absurd to cut the link with reality from a serious study. It is the scientist who knows the technical details of an experiment whose purpose he ignores, the meditation expert who has never meditated. The three hundred pages of commentary to my Yoga Sutra teach less about yoga than Crowley’s one-line summary: “Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!”—a summary which, I bet my right arm, never crossed the master doctor’s mind.