The Lessons of Mahabharata and “Traditional” Values

Have you ever paid attention to the fact that allgrand classic epics are utterly tragic and their endingsare worlds away from those happy-ends of Hollywoodthat we are used to? So that even if the principal (allegedly positive) characters attain their goals they experience heavy disappointment all the same.Gilgamesh loses the magical herb of immortality andaccepts his destiny of a mortal man; Rama is not ableto enjoy the company of his wife whose bringing backcost him significant efforts, and so he suffers from loneliness; the Pandavas, the principle characters of Mahabharata, having survived the tragic death of almost all of their relatives and fellows-in-arms during the war that they had launched are ill-fated in their attempts to ascend to heaven alive and end up finding themselves in the realms of the hell (having in factcommitted a ritual suicide). 

Sutra 1.15. Some More Words About Vairagya

It was the very same period the year before that Iwas in Varanasi and in this blog of mine I was blissfully and deliberately reflecting upon Vairagya as one of the fundamental methods of yoga. Yet the recentsituation in my country [Ukraine, Dec.2013-March, 2014 – transl.note] not only encourages me to get back to this subject – this time in some other states - but it also gives an immense scope of new experience and food for thought.

As we might remember, in his sutra 1.15 Patanjali gives the following definition of vairagya:

1.15 the disengagement from emotions [related to] the seen and heard objects is the sign of mastery in vairagya. 

I had to spend this last week in Germany from where I had access to both Russian TV channels and Ukrainian internet. The difference between the coverage of one and the same events made by different states is incredible!!!

The Arabic Translation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras made by Al-Biruni. The Problem of Yoga Impact on Sufism

“And when these [Hindu] books were read to me letter by letter

and I comprehended their contents, my conscience could

in no way have me fail to impart them to those yearning to read them. After all, 

avarice is the worst crime and the deepest sin when it is related to knowledge” . 

Al-Biruni

It was at Vienna conference «Yoga in Transformation…» that I for the first time happened to hear about Kitab Patanjal when Noemie Verdon, the doctoral candidate from Lausanne University, was giving her lecture dedicated to this book. As far as I have understood, the lecturer is today just about the only one world expert in this manuscript, and so I was really lucky to have met this source.

The Koans of Zen and Meditative Question

“The Koan is the door,

the answer is the key.

But the basic point is not about opening the door,

It is about what you will see there...»

(Probably, if I have put it here, someone might have said this somewhere…)

In one of the previous articles of this blog in have outlined a fundamental aspect of understanding the meditation (dhiana).

Some words about Kumbh Mela

I have recalled that I have a small thing to be done for the blog. Early last year I visited Kumbh Mela and I promised I would express my opinion concerning the symbolism of this holiday, but I was tied up with my affairs and I have not written a corresponding port. But I will do it now.

So, according to the legend the festival of Kumbh Mela is associated with a story that tells that Garuda had spilled some drops (mela) from the bowl (kumbha) with amrita stolen from Gods. The major portion of the amrita was spilled in the place where the Ganges meets the Yamuna (Prayaga), thus one’s bathing in this place during a holiday is favourable. 

On “Types of Yoga”: Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga

The terms hatha-yoga, karma-yoga, jnana-yoga, bhakti-yoga, laya-yoga and others are familiar to everyone and they play an important role in positioning yoga as a system. Although they are not used in Yoga Sutras (except for the term kriya-yoga), these terms are rather old and one can find them already in Mahabharata [1]. This division of yoga into types was often mentioned in yogic Upanishads and other medieval texts. For European people this division (in some simplified version: only hatha, raja, karma, bhakti and jnana yoga) became available due to Vivekananda.

Sutra 1.10. Coming Back to Nidra. Can Dreams be Referred to as a Form of Vritti?

I hope the reader remembers that in one of previous posts we have considered the category of nidra and explained why nidra had been highlighted by Patanjali as a vritti. However recently I’ve been asked about whether a dream, a night fantasy, can be referred to as a form of vritti. Since I believe the question to be proper I shall answer it briefly here with parallel consideration of some additional aspects associated with this topic.

Let us start with actualization of what dreams are from the point of psychology. I think most of the readers paid attention to the fact that dreaming is related to current situations that are emotionally significant. Upon resorting to the works of Jung and Freud – and one’s own experience as well – we can specify this point in the following way: the dream in symbolic form “shows” a person some information about an actual emotionally significant situation that the person is not conscious of (or the one that he/she represses), and about the core point of this situation.