Yoga
Yoga is not a practice - the word yoga means union. It does not mean standing on your head, twisting your body or holding your breath. Yoga means to know the union of life. When you experience everything as a part of yourself, you are in yoga.
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
It is critical for people who perceive separateness to expand their perspective far enough to see that actually we are all one. All things in existence are one. And then, it is critical for people who perceive oneness to expand their perspective far enough to see that actually there is no “one”. Oneness is the illusion/perception of an identity belonging to that which is beyond oneness.
When you experience life just the way it is, you are naturally in union, It is not that right now you are not in union but you are unconsciously in a state of union but if you become consciously in that state, if you experience the union or the oneness of the existence consciously, if you experience the entire cosmos as a part of yourself, then we say you are in yoga or you are a yogi.
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.
A mind free from all disturbances is Yoga.
Free from anger and selfish desire, unified in mind, those who follow the path of yoga and realize the Self are established forever in that supreme state.
He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.
That they may be one as we are one...so that they may be brought to complete unity.
The word yoga means union. That means you consciously obliterate the boundaries of individuality and reverberate with the rest of the cosmos.
Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
What is necessary, then, is to “know thyself”—advice which every wise person has given. We must know ourselves, not just intellectually in the realm of ideas and theories, and not just emotionally or devotionally, simply accepting blindly what we have heard or read. Such knowledge is not enough. Rather, we must know reality experientially. We must experience directly the reality of this mental-physical phenomenon.
It is a medical fact that even when a physical leg is amputated, the sensory leg is still intact. The sensory body has its own presence beyond the physical body. There is a way to enlarge your sensory body. If you make your life energies very exuberant and ecstatic, your sensory body becomes as large as you want it. Yoga is to expand the boundary of your sensation in such a way that you experience the whole universe as a part of yourself. Everything becomes one. That is union.
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
A yogi means one who has known the oneness of the existence.