Subject of this seminar: "Samadhi and Sadhana Pada" - Chapters 3 and 4
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras are the classical work of the Yoga School of thought, one of the Six Darśanas studied in the Bhakti Tirtha course. They focus on how to attain direct experience and realization of the puruṣa, or the individual self. As the classical treatise on the Vedic understanding of the mind and consciousness and on techniques of meditation and self-realization, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West. For Vaiṣṇavas, the Yoga Sūtras are especially helpful in understanding the first two chapters of Bhakti-rasāmṛita-sindhu.
God wants to give us His mercy, but our mind is not free. It is filled with lust, attachments, and greed. Our mind is like a pot in which lust and greed need to be removed so God can fill the pot with his mercy. Either we can have Krishna or we can have maya. We may think that God is doing an injustice by taking away our wealth, but He is actually making space so He can give us something that we can’t even imagine.
