The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm (the author) going to over-simply define here as the the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to the original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend [again, the author's] Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human dis-contentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute or whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deep divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. The supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."
Note from blogger: Please do not let this post throw you off. This is not a forum dedicated to spirituality or the discovery of the higher/inner/true self. I just happened to be half-way through the book (whose philosophies, by the way, I find very interesting) when the idea for the blog came to me. Hence, a rather thought-provoking first post!
So feel free to quote from anything you are reading, listening to or watching now.
