The Breath of God.

We all are suffering with the three afflictions; fear of being ignorant, we all want knowledge, fear of death, and fear of sorrow, we all want to be happy.  So how do we work toward this so-called happiness or limitlessness, how do we transcend ourselves?  We can transcend this suffering by learning our true nature by understanding the reality about ourselves, to become free from our limitations and by following one of the four main paths of yoga; Jnana yoga, we need to look at and study the philosophy of Vedanta.  Vedanta teaches us how to be completely content with ourselves.  Veda is the scriptures or knowledge and anta means highest, so from the Veda’s comes the highest knowledge, the truth.  We are all coming and going continually in our births, death and rebirths, but the truth never undergoes any change, Vedanta teaches us to recognise that I am that.  That the divine is within us, our individuality is false it is just the ego that is this ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ but ultimately we are all one.  Vedanta also teaches truth about the Universe, stars, planets and the milky ways and that we are just visiting in these temporary vehicles called our bodies.  It teaches us the relationship between God, the Universe and ourselves and that out of these three only one is real.  So what is the benefit of the study of Vedanta, well to lesson the misery in the Universe, not just for us but for all living entities.  When we become happy the world around us becomes happier. 

Vedanta comes from the Veda’s of which there are four; Rik Veda which is more like poetry, Yajur Veda more like prose, Sama Veda covers music, the kirtan we chant and Atharva looks at the rituals like puja’s etc.  Each Veda contains the Upanishads, the ultimate truth, like a summery of the whole.  They weren’t written as such; they have always been, with no beginning and no end, like gravity has always been Einstein didn’t invent it.  Sages in meditation received the mantras because of their purity of mind; they saw the knowledge that was already there.  The medium was in Sanskrit and was passed down verbally through generation to generation and people are still chanting today in the same way as of 1000’s of years ago.  In the beginning there was only one Veda but a sage called Badarayana thought it would be too difficult to preserve like this so split it into four.  They all exhaust themselves in teaching us about our true nature, that we are happiness, we are truth, existence and bliss, that all the happiness that we are searching for is actually within us already. 

As Yogis there are three main scriptures we should look at, the Upanishads; the breath of God, the Bagavad Gita from the mind, and the Brahma Sutra’s, which thread the two together and clear the contradictions between the two.  When all these are looked into with humility and patience, then the knowledge will come, when we shed our ignorance like an onion skin, you will find the knowledge and well of happiness is already there within you. 

So dive into the breath of God, dive into yourself.

Hari Om Tat Sat

mangala / nicky