This is the way to strive to begin each and every Yoga poses kneeling day. Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore was born to a Hindu family in Bengal in 1861. Yoga poses kneeling Educated in Bengal and in England, he experienced early success as a writer and soon gained wide popularity in the West, as well. He became known as the voice of India’s spiritual heritage and, though he was a writer of all genres, including music, his poetry made him a living institution. A friend of Gandhi and a major voice in the social, political, and cultural movements in early twentieth-century India, Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for his poetry. He died in 1941. I believe I can truthfully say that I do not own a single thing I could not live without. Anything I have ever lost, I have learned to live without.
The overall target is however clear in the Katha. The goal is for the adept to realise’ that his true self – atman – is eternal and unchanging’. With this notion, it appears that it is the immovable self’ of the Sramanic discourse, which is being alluded to. The Katha informs the adept that if he realises that the soul is unmovable and unborn’, then he will be released from the cycle of re-birth. This claim, to modern eyes, seems to support the interpretation, that realisation’ must signify a cognitive process – an act of understanding the soul’. But how does this concept of liberation as Gnostic realisation – presumably happening while the adept is alive as there is cognition involved – harmonise with yoga as a process of mortifying the mind and enabling release after death? There is clearly a contradiction here. The Katha might subscribe to a third model of liberation.
In order to grasp the signification of realisation’ we could instead turn to the non-dual ontology, which we know often gives meaning to Brahmin signs. The Brahmins at this time developed the philosophy that things, even if they seemed different (being dual), were actually one (being non-dual). The second claim in their philosophy was that realising this one-ness in all things would have the implication that the knowing consciousness would also become one with this one-ness.
Hence, if we perceive the Katha through such non-dual lenses then realisation’ signifies an ontological deletion of duality: consciousness as it realises non-duality becomes this nonduality. This realisation-as-an-ontological-transformation-of-consciousness is accomplished by yogic mortifying meditation. As it seems that the Katha connects yoga meditation with death we can assume that this realisation must happen in death. So it seems that as the meditator slides into death, his soul in death realises that it is eternal and by doing so, it becomes eternal and does not return.
