Sublime

Along with the primary theme of letting go of our attachments, especially to self-image, this book attempts to bridge the gap in contemporary yoga between practice and theory. My aim is to not only reconcile theory and practice but to explore how both theory and practice come alive when integrated in daily life.

As we journey within, we discover many different inner selves. We need maps to sort out the many kinds of consciousness that make up our totality.

Here I could go as deep into my inner darkness and as high into my inner Light as I had the courage to go.

We need to find the level of the lower self in which we choose, of our own free will, to deny our divine connectedness with all life in favor of our egocentric limitations. This level may appear in the form of a demon or a devil, an archetypal negative voice of the collective negative unconscious which we share with all humans who exist in duality.

12 The unhealthy patterns of our personality can be recognized and transformed into a healthy expression of our natural temperament.

The Practice of Inquiry

The unitive level is the experience of the ground of being, the state of cosmic consciousness, an awareness that all of life is truly one, that there really is no separation. It is all one gigantic pulsating energy-consciousness. It is all God.

Self-realization, then, means activating the maximum potential of God in oneself.

In our transformation work, we learn first to identify with the positive ego in its functioning as objective, compassionate observer. As our identification with detached and loving selfobservation deepens, we become the bowl of awareness itself, rather than the contents of that bowl.