Look Within – Talks on the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Venkatesananda.

[Guest guest]

I don't know how to look and I don't even know that there is a

truth other than what I know.

 

What I know is what I think – my own ideas, my notions, and my

philosophy.

 

And I am so comfortably established in it that I neither want nor dare

to look beyond my own ideas, my own limited field;

 

And when something grander is presented to me I am afraid.

 

A great political leader in India when he was fighting for Indian

independence used a beautiful expression – he said " A bird which

has got accustomed to the cage would not want to be free " .

 

It doesn't know a life other than a cage life. It doesn't know

how to soar and fly in the infinite sky, free – because here in the

cage somebody usually would drop a few grains of food every morning.

 

He said that the bird would be afraid of this freedom and would rush

back into the cage.

 

That is our problem.

 

Why this problem does exist?

 

Because, number one; I don't know that there is a truth beyond this

cage.

 

Number two; I don't know how to look.

 

The art of looking at the truth and thus freeing oneself from this

conditioning to which we have become accustomed, is called yoga.

To be continued..