The ego is opportunistic. Its only goal is survival. You can teach it to love. You can teach it to surrender. You can teach it to dissolve when it is time. You cannot, however, kill it without killing yourself. It is you. You have to learn to let go of this to get that. That is dissolving yourself into the Divine that YOU came from and brought with you. You are both Divine and Ego. You are very lucky. You can choose either. But you cannot self or Self-destruct. You have to let go of one to get the other. Only greed makes you want both. And have neither. Then you let the ego rule you while claiming you are killing it. You prosper its immaturity. It is time to grow up. And become humble. Then you can sacrifice yourself to Yourself. Then the ego lays its head willingly on the guillotine block and waits for the Divine Executioner Shiva to bring it Home. Then your time on this Earth is like time in the Kingdom of Heaven. You are the center that radiates the circle. Remember that and do not get caught in the web of the circle but let it hold you wherever it goes…and it will bring you back to you. You are both the ocean and the wave. The ego can learn not to be attached to the wave when it remembers it is also the ocean.
In a letter to friends 11/27/12

Dharma is the affirmative societal perceptive experience of seeking the higher good for all without prejudice…Adharma is the degenerative societal perceptive experience that seeks individual goals above collective goals, always with prejudice. Logically then the individual is doomed to misery as we are never separate from the collective nor does this world exist for our sole gratification. It exists as a vehicle to reveal impermanence as the Truth of all individual perceptions. By surrendering our individual experience to the resonance of dharma, we discover the Truth of permanence that is beyond the Form of our Being. Then of what importance is the individual experience that rides on the suffering of another?
Posted on Facebook 01/26/13

Every time we hurt another we create an unnecessary distance from our own Divine Nature…so meaningless from that perspective…it reveals only our own emotional immaturity.
Posted on Facebook 01/10/13

“There are three types of beings in this world. Those who know only this world appearance and thus are caught in it. Those who know of both this world and what is beyond and their consciousness moves from disturbance to peace between the two. And there are the wise, who though they continue to inhabit this world appearance, are truly living in the beyond.”
–Paraphrased from THE YOGA VASISHTA
Posted on Facebook 12/04/12

Spanda is pulsation. The Spanda the Rsis refer to is the pulsation between existence and eternity. At any moment that you stop, you are out of existence and in eternity. Then you return to existence. The only place a stop can occur in is “now” because now is not subject to time, space and relativity. It just is the gap between then and then. In Sanskrit the word for both yesterday and tomorrow is the same. They are not different. They exist as past and future. Now does not exist except eternally. Past and future are fixed in time thus the word kala, but now is eternal and escapes a fixed point. It has no fixed reference. It is everywhere. It only becomes fixed by your attention. Then it is trapped and you can file it as something that happened or is going to happen. Thus it is the cause of of an experience that is either pleasurable or painful. To escape this fluctuation (spanda), you must stop in the now with your attention fixed without judgment. Only observe. Then you become separate from your experience. Then you begin to glimpse your true nature which is eternal. Unaffected by happenings and thus not a cause of happiness and unhappiness. Yoga is not a negative denial of life. It is an embracing of the Eternal as the source of all. But separate from it all. It is the seed that plants within the womb of existence and gives birth to time: tomorrow and yesterday. Here we are subject to the laws of time which give us birth, a life span and dissolution of elements only to form again and again. We are caught in the cycle of existence and as the bird in the gilded cage we feel this is all there is. We become afraid to dream of the freedom outside. Spanda is the pulsation that keeps us locked into existence and also the pulsation that sets us free. It is best found in chanting AUM.
Posted on Facebook 8/22/12

Sattva (clarity), Rajas (restlessness) and Tamas (dullness) are the quintessential energies that define our experiences. As such, they manifest first in the quality (guna) of our emotions. Thus our emotional state acts as the fuel for our experience. All diseased states according to Ayurveda are rooted (as a beginning or as a result) in the mind. If the fuel of the mind is the emotion occupying it, then what are our choices? Imagine this then: think good, clear, happy, humble thoughts and you activate sattva. Imagine changing the state of your health by just changing the quality (emotion) of your thoughts!
Posted on Facebook 8/21/12

Our sufferings are always a sign of our humanity…
To suffer is to acknowledge the pain of knowing we have reached the peak of evolution only to find how unrealistic this journey is in terms of searching for peace of mind and eternal happiness in that which is impermanent. Yet, it is a journey we have undertaken since time immemorial, so it becomes essential once we have reached here to stop being afraid and take the great leap across the chasm that separates the impermanent from the eternal. This is the true meaning of yoga.
Posted on Facebook 8/19/12

We have so many “things” for the ego to feed on, no wonder it gets so fat and demanding!
Posted on Facebook 8/16/12

If we reduce yoga to asana practice, we are at best mediocre gymnasts.
Posted on Facebook 8/16/12

What if every action you took to intentionally affect another’s experience is one you will inevitably also have to have as an experience. What if there was no question that this is a law of the Universe that cannot be avoided. Would it change the way you act?
If you have even the slightest inkling that this may be true, would you create only good experiences for others, even if only as insurance for your own future experiences?
“heyam dukkham anagatam: Yoga Sutra 2:16”
Posted on Facebook 6/26/14

Everybody is now an expert on tantra, well yes, if we take tantra to mean “how to indulge”, sure…but the thing is, no one actually seems to know what tantra is. So a few pointers: first of all, if you talk about the austere nature of vedic thought, then as a foil there must be the opposite: tantra represents that. Secondly, everything has a center and so where vedic and tantric meet is in tanoti: expansion and trayati: liberation…its just how do I get there, by avoiding action or diving fully into it? So the question then becomes, what is your nature? To dive into it all exquisitely, pain and all, or abstain in contentment and peacefulness, pain and all?
7/30/14

It is said that when evil becomes indestructible, good goes into hiding. In the very heart of evil. Where evil would never dream to look. It stays there till this supreme evil has conquered everything and comes to rest in its own heart, where it finds its nemesis. For evil this is the greatest fear and its only redemption.
Posted on Facebook 8/26/14

It is all perception. A curse and a blessing. A sinner cries piteously: Oh I am cursed to suffer! And shares this suffering upon all others. Yet a saint cries joyously: Oh I am blessed by my suffering! I see that the only joy is to spread joy upon all else, let them be sinner or saint!
Posted on Facebook 8/6/14

As long as someone else is responsible for your condition, you are dependent on them for your healing. Not a very dependable source for healing then, yes? But a great source for the blame game, oh yes indeed!
Posted on Facebook 8/5/14

Yoga is ultimately a path of surrender. You surrender your ego. And you do it willingly. Because you know it is the cause of your suffering. Till you know this, what is the point of asking to whom do I surrender? It is of no consequence, you do not surrender to ANYBODY/THING/GOD. You just surrender and you are surely-rendered into what some call the Divine, becoming that.
Posted on Facebook 9/18/14

Brahman is that which is ever expanding. That means it is never contracting. That means it is not subject to the laws of nature (prakrti). That means no methods you know of knowing a thing, will work if you wish to know brahman. The only way you can know brahman is to become it. And that is a paradox. How do you become that which you already are? By remembering that you are not this. You are not your nature. You are not your name. You are not your form. You are not your suffering. But as long as you believe you are any of these, you are all of them. You cannot even imagine who you are. To be brahman is to have extinguished the illusion that you are. Most difficult indeed to know yourself.
Posted on Facebook 2/27/15

This is what I have discovered about human nature. It is obvious that as a species we face challenges that we often fail at. The challenge to not hurt each other is the first. The challenge to not deceive or manipulate each other is the second. The third is the challenge to not take what is not freely given to us. The fourth is the challenge to not turn loving and compassion and sharing into lust, whether for each other or for other sensory weaknesses such as food cravings. The fifth is the challenge to not be greedy.
Failing in these challenges, we create suffering for others.
There is one base cause for this and one base cause only.
We cannot face our own suffering, so we pass it on.
There is only one base cause for us not to be able to work with our own sufferings. It is that we believe someone or something else is responsible for our suffering.
This is a weakness, a madness if you will. It is based on the assumption that we are not complete.
It is this false understanding that is the cause of our suffering. The separation that turns our completeness into loneliness, as though we are to be completed by something outside of ourselves.
Awakening to being complete allows us to share our completeness with others who may or may not feel complete. This is emotional maturity. And this is love.
Posted on Facebook 3/15

There is no demon not worth fighting.
Just do not externalize your demons.
There are enough external demons we have created collectively.
They all originated within the familial, societal, cultural, national models.
Even for these, the battle begins within us. We are useless at fighting outer demons until we have fought our own internal ones.
Om Namaha Sivaya Posted on Facebook 5/18/15

Posted on Facebook 6/30/15

Ayurveda is the consciousness of medicine. We are conscious beings taking bodies. It would be better to subscribe to a medicine that addresses our deeper being rather than our vehicle only, don’t you think?
Posted on Facebook 8/17/15