Yoga of Discrimination

“There are four major paths to self-realization.  Of the four, jnana yoga, from the point of view of the beginner, is the most difficult.  Jnana yoga is the graduate school of self-discovery.  Ordinarily in spiritual practice, one begins by practicing bhakti, the path of love.  The path of love leads to the path of self-giving. The third pathway in the normal course of evolution is jnana yoga: discrimination and absorption.  Mysticism, the fourth way, is not practiced by all…”

“Discrimination means seeing that which is real and knowing that which is unreal.  That which is real is that which is eternal, that which lasts forever.  That which is unreal, or less real we might say, is that which is transitory, temporal, that which does not last but erodes in time… The path of knowledge is said to be difficult in that it is the path of samadhi… Samadhi is absorption in God.  In the state of samadhi, one has only the sense that one is a perfect being.  There is no awareness of separativity.  There’s no sense of time, place, or condition.  Samadhi is the actual awareness of what you really are.” 

“The yoga of knowledge is the yoga of perfection.  It is the end and the beginning of all things.  It is neither favorable nor unfavorable because there’s no one there to favor it.  There is nothing and there has never been anything but the self.  Know this.  You are the self.  You are eternity.  There is nothing else.  There is no world, there is no time, there is no place, there is no condition.  There is only the self.  You are the self.  There is nothing and there can be nothing else. Thou art that and beyond, beyond words, beyond condition, beyond immortality and mortality. Be absorbed in that truth.”  Rama – Dr. Frederick Lenz

Of the four major paths to self-realization, this yoga is the most difficult:  “The Path of Samadhi”.   First we must practice The Yoga of Love and The Yoga of Selfless Giving, but it is The Yoga of Discrimination that takes us to our final destination: Nirvana.

Talk 5 of 28 in the Lakshmi Series.

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