Detachment and non-attachment. Detachment means that you become indifferent, you become indifferent to the world. You seclude yourself from the world. You withdraw yourself from the world in detachment.
And that, in most cases, is a form of escapism. I’ve always said ‘escapism’ – Amrit taught me the right way! Escapism. Through my travels in the Himalayas and through the various Ashrams and all over the world, I have seen detached people. All those Yogis and Saddhus and Ascetics were nothing but escapists. They could not face life, they could not face the world.
They could not handle their problems and their troubles, so this was the easy way out.. There was a time in India when there were six million Saddhus. They call them Saddhus – I call them parasites, living on the fat of the land, not wanting to work, going around begging for their food.
Of the six million, there might have been six who were sincere. There might have been six, the others were sick.
That is escapism, where they can’t really handle themselves in life and they become detached from the world.
That is detachment. What we want is non-attachment, where you are functioning in the world.
You have your three square meals a day, you love your wife and children, you are close to them. You have all the ties – a wardrobe full! Yet you are not emotionally attached. That is what the Bible means when it says ‘To be in the world, but not of the world’.
That is what is meant. It does not mean run away. It means come, be in the world. And if everyone starts running away from this world, I tell you what will happen, the cities will be emptied and new cities will be built in the jungles. So you still live where you are. Man can never run away from himself. A geographical change does not help. So in non-attachment, we face our problems.
We face them squarely and we try and find solutions and if we are sincere enough the solutions are there. Because there is no problem that has not the solution inherent in it. The solution to every problem is in-built, built into the problem.
So we have talked about non-attachment to these ties. It does not mean do not have ties, but view the ties objectively. View the ties objectively, and when we view these ties objectively, we do forget the curse of mankind. And the greatest curse on the head of mankind is ‘me and mine’. Me and mine.
This is mine, this is mine, this is mine – If it was really ours. As a matter of fact we are just on loan here, on holiday. We do not even belong to ourselves, we belong to the Almighty.
But as we spoke about the ego this morning, the ego assumes all supremacy and says I, I, I. That is only an I-dea. It is an idea, and an idea is a function of the mind, created by the mind. So this little I, which I call I, I, I, and which causes all this me and mine, is an idea of the mind.
So when we start recognising that the whole world does not revolve round me, and funnily enough that’s what people think, all their troubles are because they think everything revolves round them, everything that happens, happens to me.
What me? . And that is why there’s such little love in this world, such little love in this world because everything is just me, not you, me.
Now if you write ‘ME’ and have a reflection of it, that ME looks like WE – try it. It does, me, turn it around – we. And when we start functioning and understanding t he meaning of WE, then there’s no ME. And when there’s no me there’s no mine.
So all this falls under Aparigraha, the unnecessary attachments to which we have, we attach – there attach comes again, we attach so much importance.
So that is one of the limbs of Raja Yoga.
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