THE SPEAKING TREE: Material Success and Principles of Yoga

The purpose of practising the principles of yoga is to raise one's consciousness to the highest state of self-realisation. Yoga gives the "how to" of the spiritual path, through withdrawing one's consciousness from the body and centring it in the spine.

Many obstacles confront you as you make this inward journey. The first is the fact that human understanding is limited to the information it receives from the senses — of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Next, our understanding is limited by the way we use reason to process that information.

We have, in fact, entered a house of mirrors. Everything we see and experience in the world is only a reflection of our own awareness. Happiness, which everyone craves, is reflected to us from the surrounding world, what we project outwardly from our centre. If we lack inner joy, we will find not a hint of it outside. Happy melodies pluck at our heart strings, but sound faint and elusive; we can enjoy them fully only when we realise that the source of happy melodies is inside of us.