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“Eternal Quest”
Title:Man’s Eternal Quest Author:Yogananda, Paramahansa Editor:n/a Review in brief: Highlights:
Classic collection of fifty of Yogananda's most important spiritual lectures. The first of three such collections;
see also The Divine Romance and Journey to Self-Realization. |
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Full review:
This collection of fifty public talks and reflective essays spans an amazing universe of human issues from the perspective of a yoga master who was trained in his youth by one of the most revered sages of India and who went on to Europe and the Americas to instruct tens of thousands of westerners in the practicalities and spiritualities of raja yoga. “Raja” means, literally royal or complete yoga - not just the calisthenics of the average class taught in an American gym. Raja Yoga subsumes the same essence of ethical, cosmological, and practical teaching that runs like a silver thread through the original fabrics of Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu teachings (though ignored by dogmatic sectarians and muscle-bound materialists alike).
Take as a first gift, chapter one: How Seekers First Found God. For perhaps the first time in the English we have a clear explanation and follow-up to Christ's puzzling pair of directions: Seek first The Kingdom / The Kingdom of God is within you. Yogananda gives us an unsurpassed overview of thousands of years of yoga experimental scientists studied how to “seek the kingdom within:” Here we learn why we are instructed to "be still and know that I am God" (PS 46:10) -- because stillness is necessary for us to go deeper (and higher) than sense perception to hear the omnipresent whispering of Spirit to our souls.
With the press of "civilization" ever urging us to be active and outer-directed, we become strangers to the very qualities that would help us experience our soul-natures and our souls’ yearning to express their divinity. The yoga methods of relaxation for body, breath and mind are beneficial to pursuers of all religions —even to those of no religion who yearn to awaken a higher level of functioning in mind and purer health in body — for yoga is truly the original wholistic system. Raja Yoga shows how all human functioning can be optimized, including (if you’re so inclined) the human search for its divinity.
Throughout the variegated chapters of this volume you will find that the lotus of yoga blossoms in every realm of human existence: health, personal relationships, psychotherapy, and all spiritual searches. As the “complete” yoga instruction, Raja Yoga considers the importance of evolving your human work as spiritual work: in outer activity, heart-felt devotion, and discriminative rationality. But Yogananda always takes the reader back to the unique core of Raja Yoga: deep, single-pointed meditation upon the Unifying Source of our beings. It is impossible to describe the volume because it is so expansive in the applications it makes of yoga. Yet it offers a fundamental yoga lesson because it is also focused... in ever returning you to the unifying goal of all religions, all human yearnings, all quests: the empowerment of your soul with the experience, knowing, and manifestation of its Divine Source.
NB: You might reasonably doubt the authority of any author to offer advice that promises so much. The preface by Sri Daya Mata to this volume gives a close student's tantalizing glimpse of the author's stature and of his practice-what-you-preach authenticity.
For a look in more depth at the genuine humility with which this exalted soul expressed his insights, please see review of his Autobiography of a Yogi in his expanded 1951 edition, available in hardback, quality paperback, mass paperback, and audiobook. —RP, 12/14/2002
© Richard Pinneau, 2003 Your feedback is appreciated: rp(at)richardpinneau(dot)com |
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