Latest / Philosophy and Faith / 10 - Introduction to Book Four - The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Transcript

10 - Introduction to Book Four - The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali · Philosophy and Faith

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Introduction to Book four. The third book of the Sutras
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: has fairly completed the history of the birth and growth
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: of the spiritual man and the enumeration of his powers,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: at least so far as concerns that first epoch in
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: his immortal life, which immediately succeeds and supersedes the life
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: of the natural man. In the fourth book, we are
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: to consider what one might call the mechanism of salvation,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: the ideally simple working of cosmic law, which brings the
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: spiritual man to birth, growth, and fullness of power, and
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: prepares him for the splendid, toilsome further stages of his
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: great journey home. The Sutras are here brief to obscurity.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Only a few words, for example, are given to the
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: great triune mystery and illusion of time. A phraser two
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: indicates the sweep of some universal law. Yet it is
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: hoped that by keeping our eyes fixed on the spiritual man,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: remembering that he is the hero of the story, and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: that all that is written concerns him and his adventures,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: we may be able to find our way through this
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: thicket of tangled words and keep in our hands the
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: clue to the mystery. The last part of the last
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: book needs little introduction. In a sense, it is the
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: most important part of the whole treatise, since it unmasks
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: the nature of the personality, that psychical mind, which is
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: the wakeful enemy of all who seek to tread the path.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Even now we can hear it whispering the doubt whether
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: that can be a good path, which thus sets mind
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: at defiance. If this then be the most vital and
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: fundamental part of the teaching, should it not stand at
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: the very beginning. It may seem so at first, But
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: had it stood there, we should not have comprehended it.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: For he who would know the doctrine must lead the life,
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: doing the will of his father, which is in heaven.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: End of introduction to Book four.