kriyayogamalaysia

Taking Responsibility and Empowering Ourselves

From “We are Here to Celebrate”

Yoga is the cessation of identifying with the fluctuations arising within
consciousness. – Patanjali (source: Kriya Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and
the Siddhas by Marshall Govindan).

Subjectively, we all share the same divine essence; we are one in the
Divine. – Rudra Shivananda.

All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas. It is like water and
ice: Apart from water, no ice. – Hakuin, Zen Master.

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself but it is impossible to find
it anywhere else. – Arthur Schopenhauer.

All dharma is empty. – Buddhist Sutra on Emptiness.

The moment you ask, “Where is God?” you have raised a wrong question because God cannot be indicated anywhere. He is not in a particular direction, he is not a particular thing, he is not a particular being. God is universality. – ‘This Very Body, the Buddha’ by OSHO.

Your real Self is the abode of eternal peace and happiness. Every
human being tirelessly seeks it in the world through action, emotion
and knowledge. The search for bliss goes on. None has ever found it. –
‘Vedanta Treaties’ by A. Parthasarathy.

In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and
information, not solid matter. This energy and information is an
outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning the
universe. – ‘Ageless Body, Timeless Mind’ by Deepak Chopra.

All the above quotes are just pointing to one fact: We are not our mind-body personalities (our egos). Behind the veil of our egos, is happiness. It is so simple and easy but the world is so distracting! The world is like the video games our children play. It makes them forget themselves; forget to eat, forget to bathe and forget to sleep! Our egos are the layers of beliefs, perceptions, habits and conditioning that cover our true self, which is Love. But once we are aware of them, they fall away by themselves.

These quotes also indicate that God is not a person or entity separate from us. When we were young, our parents solved all our problems and we did not have to worry about anything. We did not have to take responsibility for our decisions because we knew that if anything went wrong, our parents would solve our problems. However, as we grew older, this comforting illusion started to fade until a point that we began to feel vulnerable. So, most of us started to look for another father/mother figure in God. But by doing so, we separate God from ourselves and this creates a lot of confusion in us. We ask God, “Why, of all people, did you allow this to happen to me?” or “Why do you allow such cruelty in this world?”

This is something very difficult to swallow because we want God to bless all our decisions. We want God to lead us to the right spouse, job and so on, so that we are comforted to assume that everything will be alright and we do not need to take responsibility if things do not turn out right. It appears to be the only way we can feel safe in this world of uncertainty.

However, if we accept that the Divine lies within us, we begin to take responsibility for our experiences and truly learn from them. We empower ourselves and unleash the creative forces within us. We start to look at our negative experiences in our lives and associate them with our weaknesses so that we can work on them to improve ourselves. We stop blaming God or others for our negative experiences and we start to see the opportunities for growth that our experiences present us.