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This class is by my maestro, Nanjī Gurudev. Kī Jai. Dear friends, you probably remember we had a lecture about the yamas and niyamas. Today’s theme is, in its own way, a continuation of that. I emphasize the special importance of the last three niyamas. Their special importance is that in the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, they are mentioned not only as part of the yamas and niyamas but right at the beginning of the second chapter as Kriyā Yoga. The second chapter of the Yoga Sūtra begins like this: Kriyā Yoga consists of three elements—Tapas, Svādhyāya, and Īśvara Praṇidhāna. As a brief repetition: Tapas comes from tap, meaning heat, the principle of purification. It means self-discipline, self-control, austerities, or you can say any kind of sādhanā, which we are also doing. Serious sādhanā, like the Kriyā Anuṣṭhāna program, is a type of tapas. When we hold a fasting day, that is also a type of tapas. The second principle, Svādhyāya, means self-study. Study yourself. Find out the truth about yourself. You could say tapas means to purify, and svādhyāya means to find out what I actually have to purify—to find out what it is necessary to purify. Svādhyāya means only one thing: Satya. I want to know the truth, whatever that is. This is sometimes not so easy. I try to find out what I have to work on, and then I work on that. But I come to the result; actually, the success is not really in my hands. That means the ultimate step is to surrender, to let go. Anyway, when it is about the final aim, liberation, we cannot draw ourselves out of the mud. We need someone else; that is the guru, the master. Therefore, the third principle is Īśvara Praṇidhāna: devotion to the Divine, surrender, bhakti. The second sūtra here states the aim of Kriyā Yoga. Now, Kriyā Yoga in this sense is tapas, svādhyāya, and Īśvara Praṇidhāna. The aim of Kriyā Yoga is to reduce the kleśas on the path to samādhi, on the path to final liberation—God-realization, or we can say enlightenment. So here is the connection again to the Rāja Yoga path, or the Aṣṭāṅga Yoga path. It is a subsidiary path to help us reach the aim. Regarding this step to let go, to surrender, we have one beautiful bhajan: "Now I have surrendered everything to you, the burden of my whole life I give into your hands." With the knowing that jit is success, and har is when I don’t succeed, the loss. We do svādhyāya, we try to find out what we have to work on, we keep the discipline, the sādhanā, the tapas, but we come to a result. Finally, the success is not in our hands; we come to the conclusion that the success of all this is not in our hands. As I mentioned before, if we have this surrender, this bhakti, that alone might suffice. The yamas and niyamas really can be like a shortcut. Somehow, the whole teaching of Swamījī aims at developing bhakti. As we know in the mantra, "Mokṣamūlam Guru Kṛpā." To understand it, to accept it, to feel that—that is actually an aim of yoga. We have to try, but however we try, we cannot liberate ourselves. So these principles—tapas, svādhyāya, Īśvara Praṇidhāna, called together Kriyā Yoga (whatever the translation of that may be, I will not go into that point)—help us to remove the obstacles on our spiritual path. Tapas, Svādhyāya, and Īśvara Praṇidhāna help us remove the obstacles on our spiritual path. Of course, we can have different ideas about what these obstacles are. Someone might say, "Oh, I have back pain, that’s my obstacle." Someone would say, "My family doesn’t accept my spiritual path; that’s my obstacle." Or someone might say the neighbor plays such loud rock music, that’s my obstacle. But Ṛṣi Patañjali thinks about much deeper, very basic, very essential principles which are our obstacles. This scripture is some thousand years old, but these obstacles haven’t changed in all this time. He names these five obstacles, the five kleśas. First, to give an overview, this is a sūtra here: Avidyā (ignorance), Asmitā (ego), Rāga and Dveṣa (likes and dislikes), and Abhiniveśa (the fear of death). He explains that Avidyā, ignorance, is the cause for all the other kleśas, like the root cause. He also explains that these kleśas might appear sometimes strong and sometimes less strong. He says these might exist only as a potential problem, or they might be temporarily overcome, or sometimes may be fully active obstacles on the path. But interestingly, he says "temporarily overcome." So if we sometimes find, "Oh, one of these doesn’t apply to me," be careful. It might not apply now, but still, it is there. So what is Avidyā? Ignorance. Is it that someone cannot speak English or doesn’t know mathematics? It is not about this type of worldly knowledge. That’s not a real obstacle on the path to enlightenment. Intellectual knowledge might sometimes be rather an obstacle. In the fifth śloka, he explains what is Avidyā. Avidyā means to regard the perishable as eternal. Avidyā means to regard the impure as pure. Avidyā means to regard the painful as pleasant. Avidyā means to regard the non-Ātmā as the Ātmā. Let’s try to understand: the perishable is confused with the eternal. When do we do that? How do we do that? Are we eternal? Yes or no? But are we aware of that, that we are eternal in our daily life? You see, if I speak here as a spiritual question, everyone’s viveka is like switched on—oh yes, Swamījī says we are eternal, you know, we remember that. The question, so in everyone that light bulb turns on, you remember, yes, Swamījī says it like that, it is so, we are eternal. But we identify ourselves with this body. That’s what Swamījī always says, that we don’t know who we are. Usually, when someone asks you, "Who are you?" you say your name. But the name is an attribute given by the parents to this body when it was born. That would mean, when this body was not yet existing before the birth, or when we die, when the body dies, then I don’t exist. And this is exactly what he says: we regard the perishable as eternal, so we forget that it’s actually perishable. That means whatever could disturb us in this identification with our body, we try to remove from our view. And it also means that as soon as something disturbs us in this view of ourselves as our body, we try to remove it. Practically, it means old age and death. No one likes to live just beside the cemetery, you know. And no one actually likes to be confronted with this topic all the time. Old people are already a reminder, so let us put them in old-age houses, nursing homes. It’s somehow a cultural agreement, a social agreement. Let’s put these problematic points a little bit out of our view. Same as everything we have, what we possess. We always think it’s ours, it will always be ours, but it is not. Partnerships, relationships, all that—we always think, hold on, like it would be permanent, and then when it turns out it’s not permanent, then it’s a disaster for us. That means we somehow know the truth and somehow don’t want to know. And we somehow know from anatomy books how a body looks. So when you see now a map with all the muscles and the bones, is it really so beautiful? Or when there’s some surgery and they have just the stomach open, and now they do something. Is it really so beautiful to look at that? What is your body? It’s a nice way of meditation. Just meditate on the reality of your body. So the body, this is bones. Then see how your bones look. So, this is then muscles and other tendons and so on, no? Then you have intestines, and think what is all moving in the intestines. If you eat a beautiful apple, how does it look after some time? And how does it look in the end? Is it really so beautiful? And all this, what we have in our nose and inside, there are many things going on in our body. So beauty is just skin deep. Already a little bit cut, some blood comes and... Everyone is always looking after beautiful bodies, beautiful men, women, and so on, and tries to be beautiful. We identify ourselves so much with this body. But we all look at a beautiful woman or a handsome man, and we try to be like them. To regard the impure as pure, that’s it. To regard the painful as pleasant, that’s also Avidyā. Many people think if they have a lot of money, then they will be happy. Or a nice partner, and family and children, then they would be happy. If they become famous as an artist or as a scientist, then they would be happy. If they would win the Olympic Games—we had it just now in Vancouver—then they would be happy. If they can travel around the world and see many, many things, then they would be happy. But how long? It always ends in disappointment. Whatever happiness we can find in this world through so many different means, and everyone has their own strategy, it ends in disappointment. That’s Avidyā: to regard the painful, that which will turn out as a disappointment in the end, as pleasant. Avidyā means to regard the non-Ātmā as the Ātmā. Ātmā means eternal. That, Swamījī says, is like the sky, it’s everywhere, untouched. Our pure divine inner essence. And how much do we care about that? Only when Swamījī sometimes reminds us, then we remember, oh yeah, there was something. But in our daily life, we are not really aware of that. And all this, what is called Avidyā, he says, is the root of the other problems, the other four kleśas. Very directly, the second one is called Asmitā. It’s a word which Swamījī doesn’t use so much; he would usually say Ahaṁkāra. The ego, or let’s say the ego sense. But now we must be careful what we mean by ego. Ego, we can say, okay, there’s a certain amount of food, and if someone takes more than his share, that’s ego. But again, Śaṅkarācārya is much more basic in his approach. That is just an excessive ego, I would say. He defines Asmitā like this: Asmitā or Ahaṅkāra is wrong self-identification. That means we identify ourselves with something which we are not. It means to identify the Ātmā, which is consciousness itself, with the body and mind, which are mere reflections of the consciousness. So he says we are actually the Ātmā, and the Ātmā is consciousness. But we identify—and we spoke about this already before—with body and mind, with all these social roles which we have in this society, and these are just reflections of that. And that’s the whole thing of the Yoga Sūtras, that we should overcome our wrong identification and find our right identification. From "how am I" to "who am I." So in this sense, already to see a duality is ignorance, is Asmitā. This consciousness, where is its limit? In space, does it end here or there? There is no limit. Where is its limit in time? Did my consciousness start yesterday, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago? And where is the limit in time? There is no limit. So already, when I say "I" and "you," that’s ignorance. That’s Asmitā. Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, who brought the Vedānta philosophy to us, said: The thought of "I" and "my," that is the root of ignorance. And we are in this identification. We do distinguish between "I" and "my." That’s my paper, that’s my watch, don’t take it away, it belongs to me. And first of all, that’s my body, don’t touch that. Because we are wrongly identified with our body and our mind, everything that is connected with us in this sense creates a duality. And then comes the real ego. Now I see you have more food than me, so give me that. So then comes actually the ego finding, that this is just a result of Asmitā. What in common understanding we call ego is just when the ego shows in excessive forms, you can say. But the ego itself is much deeper. We all have ego, however humble, however respectful we might be. Who has no ego? He will say one thing, and Śaṅkarācārya said that, "I am one without a second." That is the highest realization; that is samādhi. That means there is no duality anymore. Duality is the result of this Asmitā. So it is a very basic principle that we must understand. It is not just some small thing which we can overcome so easily. And out of this Asmitā, I will now skip the next two principles and go to the last one, because it is very nicely connected. The last of these five kleśas is called Abhiniveśa. Abhiniveśa means the fear of death. Or, for daily life, we could say the other way around: the clinging to life, holding on to life. The commentary here from Patañjali is, he says, it is a strong tendency which is found even in advanced yogīs. That means, even when we have progressed a lot in our spiritual path, even then we must be aware that this principle is still active in us. We are fighting for our life. We are protecting our life. Even every animal is doing that. So it’s a very, very deep-rooted principle in us. And it’s obvious that some Kriyā Anuṣṭhāna will not be enough to remove that in us. So these principles are really deep-rooted in us, and basically we can finally purify them only in the last step, when we reach liberation. But now come two points, and they are very, very practical for our daily life, every hour, every minute. And this is the core, I would say, of this, because the other three principles are really very basic, but here we have something to work on every minute. This is a pair called Rāga and Dveṣa. Rāga, now I quote from Patañjali again, rāga is the liking of that which gives pleasure. Dveṣa is the dislike of that which causes pain. There comes a little bit of an echo of what we had before. Remember when he explained about Avidyā, ignorance. He said, Avidyā means to regard the painful as pleasant. Pleasant means pleasure. So here we have a direct outcome. Because we are searching for happiness in this world, we are searching actually for pleasure, for enjoyment. And this is a mental principle, a principle of our mind. Swamījī used to explain that our mind follows two basic principles. One is Rāga and Dveṣa, likes and dislikes. And the other is Saṅkalpa and Vikalpa. Saṅkalpa means I make up my mind, I want that. We use it in yoga nidrā as a resolve. And Vikalpa means I give up this idea and say, "No, I don’t want it, I want something else." So we could say in English, to make up your mind and to change your mind. Think a little bit in our daily life how we make decisions. How do we make choices? How do you choose when you go into a shop? For example, which kind of furniture to buy? Which kind of clothes should I buy? How do you choose and decide, when you go to the barber, how he should make your hair? When you chose your profession, how did you choose that? When you chose your hobby, how did you choose that? When you choose your food—that was our topic today—how do you choose that? When you choose how to spend your money, for what? When you decide what to spend your money on, how do you do that? And the answer, when someone would ask you about some of these points, would usually be, "I like that." It’s true. In most cases, you would not give real reasons; you would simply say, "Oh, I like that." And you might add, "I don’t like that." Now, for example, it happens, someone gives you the wrong present and you don’t like that, then it’s real trouble. There we are, likes and dislikes, Rāga and Dveṣa. That’s a very nice topic for self-inquiry meditation. Next time you sit down and want to know about yourself, think: all the choices which I make in my life, very, very practical. How do I decide that? How do I choose that? And then put all these where your answer is, "I like," on one side. There might be a few points where you say, "No, I have other reasons." For example, you really like ice cream. But your dentist told you it’s not good. So, I’m going to always give six examples. And you understood it, you accepted it, and you decided, "I don’t eat ice cream," and really you don’t eat ice cream. So, in this case, there is no like and dislike. Someone might invite you for ice cream, and you say, "No, no." And the other person might ask back and say, "You don’t like ice cream?" Because he cannot imagine there could be another criterion than likes and dislikes. Or someone invites you for eating, but it’s not vegetarian. You say, "No, no, thank you." So there are certain decisions in our life which, I hope, we already make not based on this Rāga and Dveṣa principle, but from a higher point of view. So, when you now would try to explain it, how would you say? You would say, because it’s not really good. If it’s food, for example, you would say it’s not healthy. Or if it’s vegetarian food, you would say, "Oh, it’s harming others." You would give some concrete reasons. And someone who just comes with likes and dislikes would realize that, in contrast with such arguments, his like and dislike argument is quite weak. So what is it now, actually? What makes us make these decisions? This also comes from the mind, but I think it was yesterday that Swāmījī said the essence, the cream of the mind, is the intellect. But still, the intellect often is misguided, so the cream of the intellect is what? Viveka. There we are. And that is the one principle which helps us to beat likes and dislikes. Viveka means to decide for that which is really good. Not just in the short run—oh, that’s a nice enjoyment—no, on the long run. For example, it’s good to have a healthy life. And not to suffer, and especially in view of our spiritual aim, that is a step which will bring me forward, help me on my spiritual path. It will help me on my path to enlightenment. That essentially is the meaning of Viveka. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, I always think back on that. It’s one sentence which puts it very, very clear and very, very practical. It is said: Two paths are in front of us, every moment. And we have the choice. One is the path of the pleasant. And the other is the path of the good. The path of the pleasant and the path of the good, that is our choice every moment. The path of the pleasant, that means Rāga and Dveṣa, likes and dislikes. The path of the good, that means Viveka, what is really good for me and also good for others. That is what, in the end, will bring us really forward. And I guess with these two principles, Rāga and Dveṣa, we have a lot to do. And in this way, I think these principles of the five kleśas are for us something we can really apply in our daily life, in our yoga path, in our meditation. This is what I wanted to share with you. And we have one beautiful bhajan from Holy Gurujī where he speaks quite clearly about this. You know, the root principle of the kleśas is what? Ignorance, Avidyā. Or Agyān, which is the saying. Ignorance. So Holy Gurujī says, "Awake, awake, all you ignorant ones." Chaitā, chaitā, abhijīva agyānī. And I was astonished when I lived in India these years how the Indians accepted and loved that bhajan. Though usually we would not want to be addressed as an ignorant one. But everyone feels that he is a person who has the right to say that he is a real saint. If we would say that to someone, it might be some kind of offense. But if a saint like Swāmījī or Holy Gurujī says it, we feel that’s the truth and we can accept it. And the whole bhajan actually tries, exactly as Patañjali, to remind us of these basic points in our life. That we forget that everything is perishable. He says, "Whatever you possess, it will stay here." When you have to leave this world, you have to leave everything behind. Until some day, Jīva Jaya Akīlo, in the end, when your life comes to the end, you have to go alone. He speaks also about mātā, pitā, kutumb—by that means all our relationships, partnerships. He says that only awakens worldly attachments in us. They are only temporary, but when it comes hard on hard, when the desk comes and calls you, they cannot help you. When it comes to the point and death calls you, then no relatives, not even the closest, will help you. And that’s the saint, the master, the guru. And therefore, he emphasizes the importance of following a master, and that he is the only one who can really guide us, help us, and liberate us. And he also picks up the point of our wrong identification with this body. We think the body is for beauty. We think the body is for enjoyment, and he says, "No, this body is to realize God." He doesn’t say it’s worthless, just the opposite. He says it’s priceless. He tries to make clear what is the real value of a human body: to use our life for the spiritual purpose and not to get lost in Rāga and Dveṣa, in struggle for enjoyment, and ending up in disappointment. That means, when your time has passed, the time which has passed doesn’t come back, and then in the end you are disappointed. We are awake, but too late. And that’s the job of Swāmījī and Holy Gurujī to try to awaken us in time before it is too late. So let’s sing that bhajan. Can we have some dollars and so? I have a suggestion for that. Food fasting is good, but maybe tomorrow we make Rāga-Dveṣa fasting. That for one day, whatever you have to decide, try to do with Viveka and not with Rāga-Dveṣa. Do you think you could try that? Not easy, huh? That will be something fast.