Every living being loves their life, from the smallest bug to the elephant. All love their life. All want to find happiness and to experience the joy of life. All want to avoid suffering and death.
This is built into the nature of living beings. Naturally, how it is expressed will vary greatly as the beings change and change, as the societies of living beings alter. But human beings in this society of living beings have the most potential to discover real happiness and joy, and the most potential to inflict pain and suffering on themselves and on others.
Humans are those species that have developed beyond animal existence, beyond the grasping and needing. They have developed a self-reflective consciousness. When a living being develops this self-reflective consciousness, the ability to ask, “Who am I? Why am I here?”—when a living being develops the ability to ask these questions, they shift from animal existence, merely following the drives of nature for food, shelter, procreation, to the self-reflective inquiry within the mind.
When this self-reflective inquiry comes into being in a species and they transit from animal existence to human existence, the ability to do harm increases, along with ability to do good. Because with this self-reflection comes the capacity of personal choice, comes the ability to make decisions based on self-reflection, analysis, and understanding, and to choose to be in harmony with life, or to choose to be destructive to life. These choices are made every day by every human being.
That is why the practice of Yama and Niyama has been given, so that these choices can be choices that are made from clear thinking and not from the reactive mind steeped in Samskara or reactions to your past experiences. This ability to make clear choices is fundamental to your humanity, fundamental to your connectivity to yourself and to the world. And from this transit’s connection to divinity. In this ability to make choices, there can be the choice to deepen the connectivity to the essential wholeness of being, to the love which flows from the infinite. For those in animal form, that love flows in a guidance—their lives are guided. There is no need to make a choice. Choices are made by nature, by circumstance, by Prakriti, by Mother Nature. And the living beings are carefully guided by divine presence.
But in the human realm, the ability to perceive that guidance fades, because there is sufficient intellect that the individual feels that, “I can guide myself with my own choices. I can be what I want to be. Or perhaps I have no control, but I feel responsible.”
These feelings come into human life. And from this comes the deep urge to be connected. The sense of loneliness and separateness grows, is more pronounced, because there is a cut-off that in animal life is there—to Prakriti, to Mother Nature—there is a cut-off from that; there is more extended loneliness, not that animals cannot feel lonely, but humans have capacity to feel very separate, very isolated, very alone. Human capacity to suffer because of this is greater. And the human capacity to have hatred and anger and inflict harm is greater, as is the human capacity to love and to care, to have empathy, to care about the pains of others, that also is greater.
And because of this self-reflection, this self-analysis: “Why am I here; what am I doing?” Human beings have the capacity through this inquiry to touch divinity, to touch the source of their being, and to feel the wholeness and connection with the infinite.
This is a specialty of human life. It is the Dharma of human beings to search for, to connect with the infinite. There is a longing inside of each of us, a yearning to be close, to feel union, to feel wholeness, to move out of separation and pain and into love and wholeness.
Every person has this capacity. No one is without this capacity. But due to the wounding of our past experiences, not everyone can access this capacity.
But for those who are able, aligning yourself with divine love and divine qualities is the best approach to life. For this, the Yamas and Niyama’s have been developed. They are practical methods for leading an ethical life through altering your psychology, altering your behavior, and thus altering your thoughts.
If your intention in life is to do no harm, to live without harming others, it sets in motion an entire relationship to yourself and to all living beings around you. You are saddened by the times when you feel you have done harm to any creature, great or small. And you are happy to feel you have helped another. This is the right direction for human life, the direction towards divine qualities and divine presence.
When you are truthful, honest with yourself and others, leading an honest life in this world, you feel connected because you are truthful. You live in integrity. To live with integrity means to live with honesty, kindness and right actions towards others, and alignment between your inner self and your outer self. If the inner self is one and the outer self another, that hypocrisy, that duality of self, will eventually cause great disruption, for your inner presence does not get properly expressed in the world.
So having this alignment between your inner self and your outer self, that the man or woman that you are within is the person who expresses in the world, this is important. You have come into this life to learn, to grow, to give something to the world, and to pass, to connect with the infinite. But in order to be connected, you must be connected to your own self, to live the person you truly are, not to live as someone else, but to live as you, and to bring forward in your actions right thinking and right behavior through cultivating the Yamas and Niyama’s. But before you can cultivate them you must find you, the person who has gone from one life to another, and find your place, your expression in the world. If your passion and your love is one thing but what you are doing is another, you will find separation, you will not really be expressing who you are. But you have come into this life, in this world, to manifest your own being.
Take time to align yourself with your inner passions, with your inner longings, with your inner truth, and let that be the truth that you bring into the world. Let those things which are close to your heart be what you pursue in the world. Be yourself, fully.
And then you can transform yourself. If you don’t know who you are, if you’re living a lie, you cannot do that. But if you are living an authentic life where you are authentically your own self, you have the opportunity to connect even deeper. Because that self who you have known as a personality and a persona is only a reflection of something deeper.
There is a basket of Karma in which there are all the reactions to all the things you have experienced, but beneath that there is your soul, the Atman, the one who knows your I-feeling, the one who knows “I exist,” the one who knows that you exist, the Atman. And when you sink deeper into yourself in this inquiring human mind, you discover the Atman is not separate. This knower of your existence is no different than the knower of everything else. There is only one knower, one true Self.
So, when you sink back into yourself, through your experiences and your reactions to experience, to the I-feeling, to the knower of your experiences and your I-ness, then you come, finally, to a broad wholeness of being, a knowingness, and a love which is unwavering, unconditional, an immense intelligence in which the whole universe abides. And when you fall back into that, the source of your essence, you connect with the divinity which is all around, within you and within all beings, and you feel the wholeness, the completeness, the connection.
As you deepen into this connectedness, you find that you are one with all beings, you are one with the source of love, an essence that flows throughout the cosmos, and that there is no separation. This is the truth of all that is. It lies within you.
But to access it you require this authentic presence, to be who you are, to be in complete honesty, and then to live in lovingkindness, avoiding harm to living beings, not grasping for what others have, seeing divinity everywhere, leading a life of simplicity, not hoarding, trying to protect yourself with all sorts of things. Things will never make you safe. Only love is your safety, your shelter in the storm.
So, when things go awry, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and reconnect with that deep subterranean essence of your being.