Darren Main, doesn’t mince words, he gets right to his
point; we often get so caught up in getting ahead of everybody else that we
forget about ourselves. We go crazy because education, jobs, and social life
are so incredibly competitive that we neglect our own spiritual fulfillment.
He begins a chapter by discussing Maya, or the way to
appreciate mundane things. During a meditational exercise, he is able to look
at a tree (a common sight that most would barely care for) and find great
beauty in it. As the book progresses, he describes how yoga helped improve his
health, concentration, and ability to adjust to modern living. Samtosha, or the
state of contentment, is described heavily in this book. He doesn’t trash
materialism; on the contrary, the philosophy here encourages you to never make
rash judgments of others. Samtosha encourages you to seek contentment in what
you have already, before seeking contentment in more than you already have. It
kind of reminds you of that line from Star Wars, where Yoda, thinking Luke is
unready to be a Jedi, says “always his mind was on the future, never was his
mind on where he was!”
Perhaps the problems that necessitate the philosophy of the
Yogi are really an American problem. Everything in the USA is competitive, and
our people are encouraged to take out huge loans to go to college, buy huge
houses, and drive huge gas-guzzling cars. We end up working all our lives to
pay for these things, because the average American family doesn’t want to cram
into a tiny apartment and drive a tiny car. Europe, by comparison, is smaller
on all scales, with small families, small apartments, and small cars. Teenage
girls aren’t pressured to be popular, women don’t go crazy about their hair,
they have children later than Americans.
Maybe the first step in the path to fulfilment is to learn
to live without the things everyone else has.
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