The One Reality

Divine Life Society Publication: The Yoga System by Sri Swami Krishnananda

There is the vast universe, and we know it with our senses. We live in a world of fivefold objects. The senses are incapable of knowing anything more than these elements. The internal organ, as informed and influenced by the objects, deals with them in certain manners, and this is life. While our psychological reactions constitute our personal life, the adjustment we make with others is our social life. The yoga is primarily concerned with the personal life of man in relation to the universe, and not the social life, for, in the social environment, one's real personality is rarely revealed. Yoga is essentially a study of self by self, which initially looks like an individual affair, a process of Self-investigation (atma-vichara) and Self-realization (atma-sakshatkara). But this is not the whole truth. The Self envisaged here is a consciousness of gradual integration of reality, and it finally encompasses all experience and the whole universe in its being.

There is only one Reality, where the universal object and the universal subject become a unitary existence. Neither is that an experience of a subject nor an object, where is revealed a knowledge of the whole cosmos, at once, not through the senses, mind or intellect - for there are no objects - and there is only being that is consciousness. Yoga is, therefore, spiritual, superphysical or supermaterial, because materiality is shed in its achievement, and consciousness reigns supreme. This is the highest object of yoga, where the individual and the universe do not stand apart as two entities but come together in a fraternal embrace. The purpose of the yoga way of analysis is an overcoming of the limitations of both subjectivity and objectivity and a union of the deepest within us with the deepest in the cosmos.

Excerpts from

The One Reality - The Yoga System by Sri Swami Krishnananda