What all beings consider as day is the night of ignorance to the wise, and what all creatures see as night is the day for the introspective sage.
The Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Verse:69
Huh? What is that suppose to mean, crazy lady?
Well maybe this makes more sense:
Getting what you want is so overrated it is ridiculous; avoiding what you don't want is so overrated it is ridiculous....What you are needing is not outside!
Michael A. Singer
Man, I cannot get over how much on the same page Singer and I seem to be. I write about certain things I have been reflecting on and almost immediately after that I open up a podcast where he is talking about that exact thing. It feels so serendipitous. Rationale minds says..."Duh! It is all about Yoga and we are both yogis ( him, I am sure, much more of a yogi than me). What we share, then, is bound to correlate from time to time." But still, it gets me everytime. I like to think it is serendipity at work so that I can once again validate that what I do here has meaning. :)
When we talk about why we are unable to tap into that "river of joy" that is inside us...why we are so unhappy...we have to realize, as hard as it is to, that we are responsible for blocking that flow with our distractions. That we are responsible for following the antics of the personal mind/personality/'little me' with our attention and responses. Our resistance to what is (our avoiding, pushing away, suppression, repression, preferring and clinging) in an attempt to compensate for the not okayness we feel inside, is blocking that River of Joy, Yogananda talked about. Our attempts to get what we want and avoid what we don't want is not the way to this river. This outward seeking and avoiding pulls us away from the river of joy, from our true nature: Sat Chit Ananda. It distracts us away from truth. It blocks the flow and prevents us from experiencing "eternal, conscious bliss".
Yogis know growth is an inside game, not an outside one . A Yogi knows that the scraps of love, peace, and joy we have been grasping or clinging to from the outside world in things and other people, may be what people here adore, but it is not universal truth. They are just compensatory mechanisms. There is so much more hidden in the darkness of what we have yet to see. This "outer growth approach" that the average person would call reality, the day, is the night of ignorance to the yogi.
The personality is an accumulation of these distractions and consciousness is often distracted by the personality . We need to see that what we are needing is inside us already, and instead of spending all our energy fruitlessly trying to compensate for a lack of inner okayness "out there", we need to go inside, past the personality's pull, and work with the energies from there. We must learn to approach Life like the introspective sage does.
All is well!
Note: I felt compelled to open up a page on Medium and I am going to be moving many of these posts over there. I will not close this site. It feels too much like my kitchen table now and though it never really gave me the opportunity to get to know who I was chatting with over tea, (or if I was just talking to my cats and dogs...like I tend to do), I do feel at home here. Writing is easy here..maybe because I never know for sure if I have a readership, so there is little "performance anxiety" etc. Anyway...I just don't want to get up and leave completely. Oh, I don't know...I am just spreading my wings, I guess, in this new year...I may fly right into a brick wall lol but off I go anyway. Once I get settled over there and then figure out how to, I will invite you over for tea on my Medium page. :)
Namaste
This translation of the Gita from https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/69
Michael A. Singer/ Temple of the Universe ( January 1, 2024) Outer Growth and Inner Growth.https://tou.org/talks/
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