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THE PLAIN TRUTH |
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Yogi Ashwini
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The first yama as mentioned in Patanjali yogsutras is satya or truth. One may wonder why…it seems so easy to escape an adverse situation with a lie. Just observe your day’s routine. How many times do you lie in a day to get out of situations, big or small? When I ask the spiritual aspirants who come to me whether they practice the yama of satya, the answer I usually get is, ‘I try not to lie’. ‘Trying’ or ‘working’ towards something is equivalent to not doing it. You either do it or you don’t, anything in between is redundant.
Yog is a very practical subject…there is no theory, only practise. Only those who can practise can walk the path of yog, rest simply waste their life and birth having no experience till the very end. When you are driving a car and you are asked to put the first gear, but if you put the reverse instead, would you reach your destination?
Switch on the television these days. You will find hundred men trying to market and sell yog in hundred different ways. Some offer miracle cures, some claim to predict your future, some others have mantras and yantras to solve your problems and the rest are narrating kathas with tears in their eyes. Who among these appears to be speaking the truth to you?
Patanjali yogsutras clearly prohibit lying. The yogsutras are extremely scientific and technical. Every sutra is linked with the next one, gyan of one flows into the next…if you miss one then you miss all the rest that follow it. So why is it that truth has been emphasized upon in the yogsutras?
What happens when you lie?
Somebody told me ‘a lie is spoken for personal benefit and so is wrong’. Everything you do from morning till night is for personal benefit only, even when you do charity it is in the hope that some good will come to you. So what is wrong in lying? Somebody else told me that ‘a lie takes you away from your soul’. You are already quite far away from your soul…Had you been any closer you would not be reading this text—rather sitting in silence somewhere. You would have been seen only if your Guru had entrusted a specific responsibility on you.
Satyanand Paramhansa, the founder of Bihar School of Yoga, around the age of 40 left all that he had established and went and lived in shamshan for the next 40 years of his life and observed silence for the last ten years. Once he had gone to lecture in a foreign country but the very next morning he packed and came back to India, as soon as he got permission from his Guru. He could have gone to the Bihar School in Munger, which he had himself constructed by laying bricks for the building, but he chose to go straight to shamshan. He was a practical person and never imposed any kind of restrictions or lifestyle regimes on any of the practitioners. He simply told them to make a Guru and do whatever they like. Most of you run after name, fame and wealth throughout your life and this gentleman had it all but chose to abandon it to settle in shamshan…Here lies the answer to the question of truth and lie.
Something, which is directly benefits you is a lie. Something, which benefits somebody else and does not affect you, even though a lie, is not a lie.
What is truth?
Your body, the flowers and trees, sun, moon, water…they are all changing all the time. What you looked like 10 years back or even a year back is not what you are this instant. The body is constantly moving towards destruction. A new set of cells replaces the cells in your body every seven years. Even what you see as death has happened so many times before; it is just that you are only able to understand it when the body is taken to the shamshan. Just think about it…today your hair are grey, ten years back they were black. So are you that same person who had black hair? The prana that govern your body too are undergoing a change with every passing thought of yours. In fact, it is because the prana is changing that the body too is undergoing a change.
So which is the truth, what things were a moment back or what they will be this instant? What is changing even that is not truth, because it is not there at all. What is not there, what you are only assuming there to be, how can that be the truth? In fact the biggest illusion is that change only. Because what is changing is nashwar, that is not there at all, because it is there this moment but it will not be in the next. So how can that be the truth? Name any one thing in this creation that is truth.
At the time of Raja Janak, shaastraths (meets where meaning of shaastras were pondered upon) were held. Learned scholars (pandits) would get together and debate on truths of creation. Those who were defeated would behead themselves, take Samadhi, observe penance, etc—their fate being decided by the king.
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- The Writer Yogi Ashwini Ji is
the head of Dhyan Foundation, Delhi.
For details contact: ashwiniyogi@yahoo.co.in.
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June 2013
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