The heart of yoga is yoga of the heart
[Talk at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA]
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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
what I spoke today and then we can have some questions I spoke today on the topic of the yoga of the heart the heart of yoga is the yoga of the heart started by yoga’s enormous popularity in today’s world and along with that there is yoga which can offer us much more yoga is a multi-level concept so to understand the multiple levels of yoga I talked about the eight stages where the initial stages focus on physical then they move towards the mental and then they move towards the spiritual they progressively go inwards to understand these three physical, mental, spiritual levels of reality I talked about the metaphor of a computer body, mind and soul is like the hardware, software and user and it is a thought experiment to understand how there is an outer screen outer scene there is an inner screen and there is an inner seer and then we talked about how we can, yoga as it is practiced at the physical level through asanas it can, it is like trying to make the physical reality better but beyond that we can try to make the mental reality better by pacification that is also good but we need to go beyond pacification to purification not just curb the agitating thoughts, desires emotions but to cure them and for that we talked about the spiritual dimension of life that we are finite consciousness and there is an infinite consciousness our longing to live forever and to love forever is as out of place as is the longing of a tribal child for some unheard of food like pizza so our longing for eternal life, to live forever points to the core of ourselves which lives forever and our longing to love forever points to eternal object of love so the yoga which essentially means connection so yoga connects us with ourselves, it takes us from the physical to the mental to the spiritual and at the spiritual level it connects us with our core with the whole whose parts we are and bhakti yoga is the process by which we channel our emotions the emotion of love, we channel it towards the divine and by that channeling of emotion towards the divine we experience life’s supreme perfection so just as a baby experiences comfort although the baby is not seeing the mother and infers the mother is present similarly through bhakti yoga practice we can experience peace purity and pleasure and that points to our coming in the presence of a higher reality so bhakti yoga invites us to stop living apart and to start living