Yoga Sutra Reflections Session 16: Vairagya

Integrating Ancient Wisdom in Modern Life: Highest State of Knowledge

1. Human beings are only spices in the universe who are both the most intelligent and miserable. Why? Because only Human beings can grow into consciousness. That’s the reason we always want to go higher.
2. What is Vairagya? Unless you are non-attached to the world you cannot enter inwards. Your back must be towards the world; only then your face is towards the inner centre. So vairagya is the door – non-attachment to the world. Non-attachment, Vairagya means: When desires do not arise even in the face of the objects of enjoyment.
3. Our additions, habits, possessions. All these will take us away from our True Nature. This is the absence of Vairagya. In the in-search one is always alone. One needs certain criteria to feel where one is. And the inner world is uncharted, no map exists which can be given to you. And even if some maps exist, they don’t belong to you; they cannot be applicable to you.
4. Consciousness means when desires do not arise even in the face of the objects of enjoyment, known as the state of vairagya – non-attachment, desirelessness. And when the ego ceases to rise, know it as the highest state of knowledge. This is the criterion for knowledge, wisdom – when there is no ego, when ego doesn’t arise.
5. If you feel that your “I” is strengthened, know that you are not on the path of knowing, you are falling down into ignorance. Ignorance is rooted in misperception. It is due to experiencing: the impermanent as permanent, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant and non-Self as the Self.
6. Your daily practice with awareness to bring yourself into the middle physically, mentally and psychologically. Then gradually you will leave the ego, desires and become aware of yourself. With self-awareness the person has understood Vashikaran Sangya Vairagya and is freed from all bondages, giving up wrong and worthless things.
7. Once you have cultivated awareness of an attachment, you will need to accept it as it is. Seeing and accepting our attachments gives us great power to move beyond them. Once we’re able to accept them, they lose their hold over us and we gain freedom and the strength to let them go.
8. If you continue with daily practice you will arrive at Param Vairagya – Patanjali says the essence of Vairagya is described as: “Dispassion is the conscious mastery of the control of desire for objects seen, perceived or heard.” True Vairagya means detachment or letting go of everything that belongs to the materialistic world, including attachment to material things, emotions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, etc.