Chapter seven of the Bhagavad Gita carries a compound title, and Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this lecture by pulling it in half. Jnana is intellectual grasp. Vijnana is intuitional realization. Both are knowledge. Only one of them is the goal, and the illustration he uses is a mountain: a great many

Tulsi Ramayana 92 · Balakanda, from Doha 217 · Swami Jyotirmayananda A bow is standing in King Janaka’s court, and whoever can break it will marry his daughter. Read as a story, that is a contest with a prize. Swamiji spends the first quarter of this class making sure nobody reads it that way. The b

There is a moment in tonight's class where Swami Jyotirmayananda stops the text and corrects a misreading that has probably shaped your practice without your noticing.

Vasistha does not describe the mind once in this section. He describes it six times, and each picture arrives with its own way out.

Patanjali does not define God by power. He defines God by freedom from affliction.

Chapter 7 of the Bhagavad Gita has just finished making its largest claim. In the verse before this lecture opens, Krishna says that all this is strung upon Me like clusters of gems on a single thread. Lecture 79 is Swami Jyotirmayananda taking that image apart to find out what it obliges a person t

A renunciate in this lecture has given away everything he owns. One shirt, worn for years, and a water pot that came from his teacher. He seeks out King Janaka to correct him, because Janaka is famous for being free while living surrounded by a palace, and that looks to the ascetic like a fraud the

Detachment has a public-relations problem, and Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this lecture by naming it. The word arrives sounding like subtraction. Give up the things you love, want less, feel less, and call the resulting flatness progress. Anyone who has tried to practise dispassion on those terms ha

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Section 50. Lecture 188 by Swami Jyotirmayananda. The previous section closed the story of Gadhi, the brahmana who asked to be shown the extension of maya and got a whole exiled lifetime inside two muhurtas with his head under water. Section 50 does not add to the s

Patanjali has already told the aspirant what carries a practice forward. Practice and dispassion, held in balance, and held in some degree of intensity. Lecture 13 takes up the sutra that adds a third element to those two, and then the sutra that explains why the third one is needed at all. The firs

Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this class before the invocation has even been chanted, with an image rather than an argument. Think of God as a magician. The magical power and the magician are not two entities; they are one and the same. But if you are deluded by the magic, you begin to study the pheno

Swamiji begins this class by refusing the thing most listeners came for. The Ramayana is about to give him a sage, two princes, a demoness, a wrecked fire ceremony and a woman turned to stone, and before any of it he says plainly: “Spiritual scriptures have to be applied in your life. They are not h