5.0 out of 5 stars
A book for heart and mind
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2016
Verified Purchase

I was looking for a book that would give me practical steps to help me in my daily spiritual development. I was hoping for something that spoke to both the heart and the mind. "Your mind your best friend" is one of the most balanced spiritual texts I have encountered. It gently brought me back to the attitudes and emotions that are essential for experiencing more grace in my life. Highly recommended.

Become a Yogi

Who is a yogi? The yogi is one who understands the limitations of individuality, the falsehood of the personality. The yogi is one who understands the falseness of appearances and tries to penetrate reality. The yogi is one whose heart is longing to be in union with the Cosmos. The yogi’s heart melts at the suffering of others. The yogi’s heart, the yogi’s mind, is not clinging to selfish interests.

The yogi is one who is contemplative, who is meditative. The yogi is one who cultivates a positive, befriending mind, the continual, living awareness of the full truth of his or her existence. Through meditation, the yogi realizes what a great gift it is to be a human being.

What a great gift it is to have a human mind! What a grace to have this wonderful, unique system of mind, heart and soul, which can commune with Nature in totality, provided we keep the instrument properly tuned.

Regular practice is essential. Everyday practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Practice being more awakened. Practice being more aware. Practice being more accepting. Practice becoming more conscious. Practice understanding the presentations of life that come to you. They come to you at every moment from an unknown, unseen Divine source.

The more we are open to this reality, the more we can listen to that Song Celestial which is going on in the heart of our hearts, we don’t only remember God when we are in distress. Then we remember God, we remember grace, we remember the love which surrounds us, at every moment. We recognize light. We recognize its source: the Light of all lights that is God. We don’t forget that for a moment. We realize that we don’t see through our eyes. We know that God sees. God sees through our eyes. God is the doer.

Then we know: the source is universal. The source is Divine. My eyes can see only through the light of the Divine. My ears can hear only through the light of the Divine. My heart can beat only through the light of the Divine. My whole being pulsates and lives only through the being of the Divine.

The more you feel Divine grace within every moment, the more you open yourself to it, acknowledging it in your prayers, in your words, in song, in chanting, in mantras — in all your practice — the more Divine grace grooms your mind.

Divine grace disciplines your mind, trains your mind, soaks your mind with Divine love. One day, your mind will melt. Your ego will melt. Your ego then becomes supple, humble, simple. The more the ego becomes humble and supple, the more wisdom dawns in you.

It is the ego, our sense of separation, which is the obstacle to wisdom and to all that is our essence. The more we remove our ego from the path, the more we allow Divine light to penetrate through us, the more we begin to recognize everything happening around us as the moving hand of grace.

What is needed is to practice cultivating the befriending mind. We need to befriend ourselves by discovering our one, true friend. What is needed is to practice yoga, to practice union. To practice yoga is to be humble. It is to be simple. It is to be available to others, to be available to the highest energies of the universe, to allow them to flow through us for the good of the world.

All the yogis of the world have said it time and again: Nothing can be achieved until and unless you open your heart and surrender yourself to the higher power of the Divine. Nothing can be healed until and unless you acknowledge the magnitude of your own limitations and seek that Divine power, that Divine love, that Divine compassion which is infinite and limitless. Nothing can change for us until and unless we reckon with the limitations of individuality by which each of us is separated from the Indivisible Cosmic Principle. Until and unless we recognize that it is this separation from the Cosmos, this separation from the whole of Cosmic Consciousness that is the root of all our miseries, there is no escape from suffering.

Ignorance creates all separation. Until and unless we pierce our ignorance of the nature of individuality, we remain shrouded, clouded, and imprisoned by a mind that identifies with this tiny body. That is the bottom line of all the agonies of our lives! Until and unless we understand this deeply, true longing for a spiritual awakening cannot happen.

Meditation can happen only when we open our heart to this reality, to this dimension. As long as we are sensually bound, as long as we are emotionally bound, we are fettered. Until and unless we try to open ourselves up to that Divine light, Divine grace cannot flow through us.

We are the ones creating the obstructions and obstacles. We are the ones who suffer. We have created our own miseries. We are also the ones who can create happiness for ourselves.

There is the need for a fundamental acceptance. We cannot make anyone or any situation responsible for our unhappiness in life. We need to bring all the focus to our individual self to find out what the larger, infinite Self is all about. Then we come home to the realm of our own mind.

It is in the mind that we are bound. It is in the mind where we can be totally freed. It is in the mind where we feel bondage and pain. It is in the mind, also, where we can feel bliss, the joy of true freedom.

We can experience true freedom provided we are not shackled, provided we don’t cling to petty desires. If we open ourselves, if we acknowledge that this human birth, this human body, this whole human existence has a deeper purpose to uncover, we find the path to freedom. The more we remind ourselves of that deeper purpose, the more we become an instrument moving toward Unity.

Every time I do good, all goodness dawns in me, all goodness comes into me. That is the message of the positive, befriending mind. It is the message of the Gita. It is the message of yoga. It is a simple message of awakening.

We all are born to awaken. We are born to awaken from the slumber of our unconsciousness, to awaken from our ignorance which is the root cause of all unhappiness. We are all born to fulfill our own nature and our nature is Divine. Grace is eternally available to all of us. No small effort toward awakening goes in vain. Brick after brick, each step takes us toward the mansion of our true, Divine home.

May the Divine grace of God touch all our hearts. May it open our heart center and the music that is the anahat naad, the unstuck sound of silence, the music that flows only from the Divine, Eternal, Cosmic Self. May we grow out of all our worldliness, narrowness, limitedness, into the world of unlimited, infinite Divine grace, joy, love and compassion.