The Power Of Mind

Autobiography of a yogi response. This book heavily impacted my life. When you first hold the book, its spiritual power is palpable and I am always brought to a place of deep peace. Yogananda’s smiling face and gentle, holy glow on the cover is the very picture of compassion, beckoning one to dive deeper into oneself so that you too may find what he has found. During my time reading “Autobiography of a Yogi”, I treated it as a holy book, taking all of its words for fact, all of his proclamations as gospel. During my first period of time reading this book, there was no doubt in my mind that all which he said was true. I figured if one of his ethical vows was to only speak truth, then he may only write true events in this book. Upon reading of saints who teleport, fight tigers, see the future, and heal incurable diseases, I resolved to meditate for an hour on multiple occasions. Animating my mind with colorful images of what is possible in the spiritual world, my spiritual progr...

Nature demands harmony. Due to our individual, anthropocentric (human centered) points of view, we often have difficulty seeing this harmony. In Hinduism, it is believed that the truth of reality underlays this which we experience. The spirit (purusa in sanskrit) is beyond human comprehension, and interacts with the material world (prakriti in sanskrit) to create what we know as the universe. This is lila, divine play. The unfolding of the universe is it’s way of experiencing itself, increasing in complexity every step of the way yet maintaining a balance which is often beyond our view. Hindu iconography I think of there being many different orders of magnitude of time that correspond with changes in levels of consciousness. An order of magnitude is an exponential change of plus-or-minus 1 in the value of a quantity or unit. A change in level of consciousness is scaling up or down in size to find the next level of individual entities creating harmony. For example, one human...

M.D. John Sarno shows us just how important it can be to heal emotional and mental wounds for the sake of the body. In “The Mind Body Prescription,” he shares the concept of psychosomatic disorder/illnesses, their causes, effects, and prevalence. The basic idea is that, evolutionary, it is better to suffer individual pain than to let out uncontrolled emotions which could cause us to lose our pack and thus our lives. Counterintuitively, the pain created by the mind is our body’s survival mechanism. Most people live in a setting where they can express their emotions without horrific repercussions. He told a story of a woman who was severely abused as a child and suffered from chronic pain of which doctors could find no physical evidence. Within days of learning his method, she had a major emotional release and her pain began to subside. An interesting sidenote is that psychosomatic illnesses change from society to society and based on time period; whatever pain is most common will be t...