23 часа вне коврика: «Йога-сутра» для успешной жизни (Лос-Анджелес, 2014), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
So, when I got the message of what to teach here, they said, could you teach like basic ideas from the Yoga Sutra. And I thought it would be nice to talk about how to use the Yoga Sutra in your everyday life. And just, you know, normally people, I think when I first studied the Yoga Sutra, I thought it was like very esoteric and, you know, I could only use it during my three-year retreat.

And then, you know, as I get older, I realized that you could use the Yoga Sutra all day in your normal life. And that maybe it was meant more that way. So I think, we tend to think these ancient books of wisdom were meant for, you know, times of deep spiritual practice or things like that.

And I did do a three-year silent retreat from 2000 to 2003. And, you know, I memorized it during that time and I worked a lot on it. And then I still had this idea that you have to be in some kind of a deep retreat for six months or something to really appreciate the Yoga Sutra.

But recently I've been trying to apply it hour by hour, day by day. And I thought maybe you'd like to hear an update on that attempt. So, for me, I thought we could go at it through the Ashtanga.

So, you know, I started yoga maybe about 15 years ago and my first teachers were Ashtanga teachers. And that means they come from the school that started in Mysore, South India. And Sri Bhattabijoy who recently passed away taught there for, I don't know, over 60 years or something.

And... So, I started this kind of yoga and then I went into a three-year retreat. So, I didn't know any other kind of yoga.

I thought that was the only kind of yoga there was. Later, my teachers made fun of me. They said, oh, that's football yoga.

You know, and it is very demanding and difficult. But that's all I knew how to do. So, I just did that for three years.

Then, since then, I've done like, I don't know, 50 different kinds of yoga and I enjoy all of them. Except for...anyway. So, that's how I know the word Ashtanga. Then when I studied the Yoga Sutra, I got to know what Ashtanga means.

And then, that's Ashtanga, okay? So, Ashta means eight. And, you know, I like Sanskrit.

I like Sanskrit words. I got all excited because tomorrow night I get to teach Bodhicaryavatara in Sanskrit, which I rarely get to do. So, I like to show him some Sanskrit, you know.

I think it's good for yoga people to know a little bit about their heritage, you know. So, Ashta means eight. It came into Greek as Akto.

And it's octopus, which means eight-legged. And October, which used to be the eighth month of the year, until January and February were added. Your thing is drunk here.

It looks like me on a bad day. Is that okay? Okay.

So, Ashta means eight. And then Anga means a limb or a branch. In Tibetan, if you care about the Tibetan, it's yenlak.

And that can mean a bank branch also. It can mean a tree branch. It can mean a section of the Wheel of Life.

It's called a yenlak. So, it means a section or a part. So, the root or the core of the Yoga Sutra, which is the oldest book about yoga, if you don't count, you know, very early Upanishads and stuff like that.

It's the earliest book that's devoted mainly to yoga. The core of it is Ashtanga, which means the eight parts of yogic practice. And then, you know, generally yoga people who are very serious about these eight practices, they go off on a...

There's a couple of people here, there's a bunch of people here who just finished a three-year retreat in April. Would you raise your hands? I see a couple there.

Three, is it? Four? Oh, yeah, four.

So, they just finished a three-year retreat in April. Congratulations. Congratulations.

But you tend to think that, you know, that would be the time to do the eight limbs and get to know them. And tonight I would like to talk about the possibility of doing the Ashtanga or the eight parts of yogic practice just in a normal life, you know. Because in the end, most of us don't have time or money to stay in three-year retreat forever as Tamara found out, you know.

You have to come out sooner or later. And then there's a thing called the real world. And, you know, you have to deal with it.

And I think if you're a yogi, the real world is where you prove that you're a real yogi. I mean, in the end, it's easy to stay in a three-year retreat. You can read science fiction books for the whole three years.

But real life is kind of more demanding in some ways, in many ways. So if you could use the eight parts of yogic practice day to day in real life, then what would happen to you? So I kind of structured this evening around the Ashtanga.

And we'll go through each of the eight steps of yoga or the eight practices of yoga. And then we'll try to see how they apply to normal life. And then, where are you supposed to go with those practices, you know?

Like, if I do the eight yoga steps regularly and devotedly, then what will happen to me in three years? What kind of person will I become? And what will happen to my life?

So, what I wanted you to think about is kind of a new idea, especially for people who've known me for a while, about how do you relate to these eight limbs of yoga? How do you use them? And I thought...

We did a reading, so please glance at the reading from time to time. It costs me more than I'm getting for these talks. And...

Because I wanted you to take it home and use it, you know? I wanted you to treasure it, okay? So, take it home.

And the reading is meant to be sort of like a guideline on how to use the Ishtanga in your real life. Okay? So, let's follow it.

Just humor me and don't leave it on the floor when you leave. And you can throw it out, you know, secretly when you get to Starbucks down the corner or something. But...

I love... I love Sanskrit. I love these ancient classics.

I think they should be treated with great honor and we should make color stuff and god damn the expense. Okay? So, anyway...

Follow it, okay? So, we're gonna... I put a picture of...

This is how I think Patanjali would look to me, you know. He'd probably be some skinny starving guy. But anyway...

That's the closest I could come. We don't have any real images of Patanjali. They make up ones with a snake tail and stuff like that.

But I don't find them very attractive. This guy looks like a real yogi to me. And...

I listed the parts of Patanjali's life. So, he wasn't like this guy who sat in a cave his whole life. He was a...

He was more practical than that. And I think if you're gonna be a real yogi, the yoga has to go beyond the physical poses, the exercises. And the yoga has to go into your life.

And you can't spend your whole life in a three-year retreat. You gotta come out sooner or later. And then you have a real life to live.

And I would just like to encourage you to have a stimulating, exciting, challenging life. I think it's more interesting. It's more fun.

Some of my friends who've been into yoga a long time, they just kind of seem to be in hibernation most of the time. And they're not really doing much. And they're kind of just hanging out.

And I think that's a pity. And I don't think Patanjali would approve, you know. So I listed all the stuff that he was.

First of all, he was a yogi. Obviously, he knew all the yogic practices. The kriyas, the bandhas, the asanas, meditations.

He knew them all. And probably he was amazing physically as a yogi. Secondly, he was a physician.

There's a book attributed to him. So he was interested in the inner body, also from the point of disease and treating illness. And there are books attributed to him, which are Ayurvedic, you know.

Ayur means, ayus means life, and veda means the science of life. So Ayurveda, he was a master of that also. So you don't see physicians normally are not like the kind of person to hibernate or to space out.

You know, people come to them with broken arms or, you know, medical problems. And they have to be, they have to be, you know, bright and they have to be inquisitive and they have to be curious and they have to be excited and they have to be kind of like on it. Like you don't want to go to a physician and he's like spaced out or she's spaced out and gives you, you know, too much of this medicine and kills you or, you know, operates on your heart and hits your liver by accident.

You know, I mean, most physicians are a little more together than that. You see? So he was definitely together to be a physician.

Next he was a famous philosopher, one of the greatest in history. The book he wrote, I've seen crazy dates like 5000 BC and I think those are, what do you call that? Like mythical?

According to the ideas in his book, if you study a lot of Indian philosophy, classical Indian philosophy, they're almost all... were hot topics in the 200s around Nagarjuna's time. So, I would say...

and he was a... it's amazing, he has a... basically the Yoga Sutra is a compendium of the hot ideas that were popular around 1100, 1800...

sorry, 1800 years ago, okay, 18 centuries ago. So, he was not a slouch. He's put many schools of classical Indian philosophy in his book.

He's got the cream of all those ideas. So it's almost like... I don't know, I think there's 210 verses or something like that.

And he... each one represents a great idea of a classical school of India. So he wasn't a space cadet.

You know, he had studied widely. And this book is like the cream. Each shloka or verse is...

is one of the great ideas of Indian philosophy. He was a dancer. He's the...

considered the... the founder of classical Indian dance. So...

So, in my mind, he kind of goes up another notch. I have this old lady, she's 87. Nick is trying to compete with me on her, but...

I left him in the dust. But I took her to Swan Lake last Sunday. And it was the most beautiful dance performance I ever saw in my life.

You can't be a space cadet and dance either. I mean, Indian dance is very demanding. It's very...

you have to memorize hundreds of steps. Indian music is very difficult. You have to memorize many hours of music.

And, you know, he... he was very aware. And he was...

I don't know how to say it. He's just a very capable person and a successful person. He wasn't sitting in a house doing nothing and doing yoga once in a while and meditating once in a while.

He wasn't doing that. He was super capable and successful. Okay?

And my assertion tonight that I want you to think about is that if you studied the Ashtanga well, you should be successful. And when you're successful, you can serve other people. And you're more bright and you're more aware and you're more like capable and you're doing more things to help people.

And it's like... you would want a doctor, for example, to be like that, to be up on the latest treatments and like that. They're not like some kind of...

they're not like spaced out and kind of just not doing anything with their life. Okay? Linguist.

He wrote books on Sanskrit and very famous. And classical Sanskrit is very difficult. There are many...

I think there's 120 verb tenses and, you know, like... It's extremely difficult to learn really classical Sanskrit and he was good at it. So he took the time to master that.

Meditator. So he wasn't just practical, he was also a great meditator. So I think that's a goal for a yogi in modern life.

You should be good at your physical poses. You should be successful in your career. Aware, curious, bright, happy.

And then you should be able to sit down and go into an hours meditation and go deep. You know, like you shouldn't be frenetic all the time. You should be frenetic when you need to help people.

Like if there's an emergency. And then you should be able to come back to your room and go into deep meditation for an hour. So he had that...

You should have the whole range of capacities as a good yogi, as a well-trained yogi. Okay? And then obviously he was an author.

He was a great writer of Sanskrit. The book is written very carefully. It's all correct Sanskrit, except for what people have messed up later, which is frequent, especially in America.

But it's good Sanskrit and it's correct. He was a good writer, which was difficult in those days. There was a test.

People would check your book, read it, and if it was no good, they would tie it to the tail of a dog and chase the dog around the town. So, apparently he never got... Yoga Sutra survived, never got tied to a dog's tail.

And he's a good writer. So he's... What I mean to say is he's successful, he's bright, he's curious, but he can have a meditative side, he can go into quietness, solitude, stillness, and he has all of these capacities.

Okay? And I think we should be like that. You know, we should have a career where we can...

Erin's just studying the law, and she's taking bar exams for the first 20 years of her life. And I think that's cool. And then comes home and meditates and then teaches yoga to poor people in the roughest part of Phoenix.

And I like that. I think that's how we should be. We should have all these capacities.

And if you're a real yogi, you should be successful in many... in your quietness, and in your career, and in your physical practices. You should be successful in everything.

How to get successful? I'm gonna do that now, so skip to the last page. Okay?

And it'll all make sense by the end, okay? I hope so. The last page is a very famous concept which is covered in different sections of the Yoga Sutra called Karma Marga.

Say karma. Marga. So, I like people to repeat the Sanskrit because it sticks in your head.

And I hope in my next life I'm gonna teach people Sanskrit in Tibetan. So, karma, you know... Karma means...

seeds that you plant in your mind are called karma by what you do, by what you say, and by what you think. So, every action you take makes impressions on your mind and then becomes a karmic seed. Then those seeds open and create your world.

So, karma is that... Marga means what? A path, a path.

I have this British friend. Anyway, path. So, karma marga means a full karmic path.

So, there's ancient scriptures of India make a distinction between karma, just doing an action, and then doing a full-blown karma. So, full-blown karma is called karma marga. In Tibetan it's called Lekig Lam.

And so, we distinguish between sort of like an accidental action that you create, which is called karma, and a very conscious and carefully crafted mental seed which you... which you tuck into your mind in order to make something happen next month in your world, like that. And if you get good at that kind of thing, you have a very interesting life, you see?

You can plant December in November. You see what I mean? And you can plant who you're gonna meet, what you're gonna see, what your income will be, how you get along with your partner, your physical health, your mental state.

You can plant these things if you're aware of how to do a karma marga. So, I'm gonna talk a little bit about karma marga at the beginning, here at the beginning. And then by the time we get to the end, we'll see how that relates to the Ashtanga.

Okay? So, we're gonna talk about how does crafting December, how does that relate to the Ashtanga? Okay?

Because that's the point of the yogic scriptures. So, how do I change my world? How do I help my world?

How do I make it a good place for everyone? Okay? So, there are four steps to a karma marga.

And I'm gonna say them the way I learned them. I learned them in Tibetan. Say, shi...

shi... sampa... sampa...

jorwa... jorwa... tartong...

tartong... shi... shi...

sampa... sampa... jorwa...

jorwa... tartong... tartong...

Oh, so maybe, there's one person in here who doesn't know my life. I ended up in a Tibetan monastery, two Tibetan monasteries for 25 years. And I was trained in all this stuff, and then nowadays I just...

go around the world and help people do it. Okay? So, shi means...

shi means... decide what it is you would like to happen in your life. Okay?

So, you know, I go around the world constantly. There's people here, Nick goes with me, Scott goes with me, Ari goes with me, Ellen Tolles goes with me. We just got back from...

I forget where... Mexico. And before that, Russia, Warsaw, Bucharest, Vienna, Ekaterinburg, and Geneva.

And before that, Singapore, Johor Bahru, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo. Okay? So, we go all over.

And... and I tell people, what do you want to happen in your life? And there's five normal answers.

The first one is like, I would like to have a successful career. You know? Most people are not greedy, but they'd like to have enough money to do everything they want.

That's my situation. Like, I don't want to have a big car, because it's hard to park. And I don't want to have a big house, because I don't want to clean all day.

I want a nice, high class, tiny house, with a nice car that works well. And I don't want to think about money. You know?

So that... most people would like that. I just want to be set.

I don't have to think about money. I can concentrate on other things I want to do. So, that's the first one.

Then other people say, I want a good partner. I think a nice partner... I don't know.

I'm 61 years old. In my life, in my mind, to have a really beautiful relationship is probably the nicest thing in the world. You know?

If you have a really deep, and especially if it's spiritual relationship with another person, that's like one of the brightest things in a lifetime, right? Then, third one is like, you'd like to have health. You don't want to be tired all the time.

You want to look nice. You want to be strong. And then I think, on the inside, we'd all like to be peaceful and happy, joyful, peaceful.

And then the last goal is that we would like to see the whole world be that way. It's no good if your life is going really well. You almost feel guilty if you're around unhappy people all day.

You know? They're like, I'm a wham, wham, wham. You're like, I'm sorry I'm having like a perfect life.

You know? And then they're like, wham, wham, wham, wham. You know?

So, I mean, everyone would like to help other people be happy, right? That's a big part of it. That's probably the biggest pleasure of life.

So anyway, shi sampajor tatuk. Shi means, decide what it is you want to work on. Okay?

With the ashtanga. Okay? With the help of the eight limbs of yoga, decide what you'd like to work on.

Okay? So, everybody in this room has some issue going on in their life. Or they have something, dream, in their life right now.

And put that at the front of your mind this evening. You know? Like, she wants to get the fall collection done.

I said, which fall? She says, 2015. I said, well, so you didn't tell me you work on your collections a year ahead.

For Juicy Culture? Something like that. Then I'm like, dang, I could have been really hip.

I could ask her what's going to be popular next fall. And be that way six months ahead of everybody. You know?

So anyway, maybe she wants to finish the fall collection that she's supposed to do this week, but we were coming and she had to arrange all this. So, that would be her thing. That's her goal this next week.

She wants to finish the fall collection that she stalled for a week because of these talks. And then, I don't know, a lot of people just want to know what they want to... what they want to do.

You see what I mean? And that's okay. That's a goal also.

A lot of people tell me, I don't know which one of the five I want. Then I say, okay, then what you want is to know what you want. So, make that your first one, okay?

So, she means what do you want? Sambha means in this system, to get what you want you have to plant a karmic seed. Okay?

Very consciously, like planting a garden, okay? And I could give an explanation of the pen, but everyone knows it. I'll give you the pen in five...

in three minutes, okay? I'll talk really fast. This is how we teach about the principles of Ishtanga, okay?

So, what is this thing? Quick, quick. Pen.

If a dog comes in here and I show it to the dog, what do they do with it? They all bite it. Does the dog see this as a pen?

No, they see it as a... chip toy. Who's correct, the dog or the human?

Good. If I leave it here... You can give the answer before I ask the question, that's even better.

If I leave it here and the dogs leave and the humans leave, then which one is it? You can say neither, or neither, depending where you're from. I can go like that.

And then, then I ask, so therefore... Oh, sorry. When the human comes back in the room, it becomes a...

Pen. Therefore, is it coming from the human's mind, or is it coming from itself? Which way?

Yeah, it's coming from the human's... mind, it must be, because when the human walks back in the room, it becomes a pen, okay? Why does it become a pen?

And then, it's important that this... when you teach it, it's important to pause and say, you know, can you close your eyes and wish that it were something else? Is that what it means when you say it's coming from your mind?

And then you can try that. And in fact, that's what every human being of the seven billion human beings does every day, is close their eyes and try to wish that things were the way they want them, but it doesn't work, okay? So, it's coming from my mind, but I can't close my eyes and turn it into something, like a gold bar or something, okay, or a diamond.

I can't do that. It's coming from me, but it's not conscious. It's forced upon me.

By we say, something I did last week, or something I did last month, and that's karma, okay? So, how is karma planted? Then you have to jump to how is karma planted, okay?

Then, if I want a pen, I have to... Step two. Step one, I want a pen.

I want to see pens. I don't want to be a... dog.

Step two, I have to find someone else who wants a pen. And then I have to make a plan to give it to them. And the planning itself creates karma.

The planning itself, thinking about how I'm going to help this person, plants karma. Step three. Do it.

Just do it. Nike, okay? Then you put it in their hand.

Put it in their hand. When you let go of the pen, and your mind watches your hand open, that image of those... that outline of the fingers opening touches your mind and like...

leaves like a thumbnail print, an impression on your mind. And then that slowly turns into a karmic seed, okay? I think it's important to go to the next step.

How does the seed open? So those three things plant a karmic seed. Decide what you want.

Plan on how to provide it to someone else. Help someone else get it. Those three plant a karmic seed.

How does it open? And we talked about it, I think, last weekend or the 200 weekends before that. So karmic seeds are only the size of a tip of a needle.

You have billions of them in your mind. According to Indian philosophy, the mind is located at the heart chakra, Anahata chakra. And there are billions of karmic seeds there.

Each one is like transparent, non-physical, non-mental. It's a potential. So you can't see it, but it exists in the heart chakra.

And then they open one by one at the rate of 65 per second. And they throw out images in your world. And it's nice, as a meditative exercise, to reflect on how the seeds open.

When they crack open, like us. And this is not mine only, okay? It's also Madhyamika.

Where it hits is mine only question, okay? Anyway... So, like a silver image comes out of your mind, like a hologram, comes out of the karmic seed.

And then that goes over the person you're looking at or the object you're looking at. It coats the object you're looking at and you see it as a pen. And then the dog has a different hologram coming out and they see a...

a chew toy. Then we always say, but the picture is so good that you can write with it, right? But technically that's not correct.

You want to go deeper? Then when you... when you use that inert stick that your hologram is laying on, it creates curves and...

and color patches on the paper. And then your mind throws a hologram on that and calls it words. You see?

Cool? It's not that the pen works. You got to cook that, okay?

I'm trying to make the old people happy and the new people happy. That's for the old people, okay? It's not that the pen is...

It's not that the hologram is so good that the pen works. It's that when the pen scratches lines and curves on paper, new holograms are thrown onto the paper from your mind, depending on how coherent you've been in the last few weeks. Okay?

So you might like the novel you're reading or... you might hate it, but each time you turn a page, your mind is... karmic seeds are opening and holograms are being thrown down onto those black and white curves and you make sense of it.

And that's what happens to autistic people or Alzheimer people. They lose those seeds. The curves are there and the lines are there, but they...

there's no holograms going down to make sense of them. So... It's not that the holograms have their own sense any more than the pen is coming from itself.

Okay? So that's step three. Step four?

Yeah, it means... We call it coffee meditation. At the end of the day, you have to enjoy whatever seed you planted.

So if I want a partner... If I don't have a partner and I want a partner, then I should try to help lonely people at the nursing home. And when I help...

When I see and hear myself helping them, that... Those images come into my eye and into my ear. They make an impression on my mind.

That becomes a karmic seed. That cracks open under the right circumstances. And that creates a hologram that goes over a stranger in Starbucks and creates someone who's suddenly interested in me.

Okay? And that's how you meet a boyfriend, okay? Or a girlfriend, okay?

It's all holograms coming out of your mind. Onto the data, the sense data out there, okay? Then...

So when you're happy about helping a lonely person and when you enjoy what you did pranically, prana... Lungsam jupa jipa, right? So where the mind goes, there goes the prana.

Because they are connected. So, if you think about a kindness you did in a nursing home to an elderly person, then prana is automatically transmitted to that potential, which is called a karmic seed. Or, what do you call it?

Vasana or sanskara. And then it... What do you call it?

It charges it. And it makes it wake up, like water does to a corn seed or something like that, okay? So, the prana actually warms the potential of the vasana and then it will open faster.

My Chinese students at this point in Shanghai... We're going to go back there, right? It was so cute.

They said, Oh, let's call it chicken on the egg. You know? Like when you enjoy something good you did in your life, it's like a chicken sitting on the egg and it warms it up.

And then it opens faster. Because lots of people do nice things and don't get anything, right? They help lonely people and they never find a boyfriend.

We would say, it's because they didn't do step number four. Shri Sambhaja or Tartu... They forgot Tartu.

No one ever taught them about Tartu. So, you got to go home. You got to lay down in your bed just before you fall asleep.

Think about the lonely person you visited. And that... That cracks open the karmic seed.

That waters the karmic seed, okay? So, that's the... That's the end.

Now let's go back to the ashtanga. You ready? Go back to page two or whatever it is.

I'm going to tie them together eventually. I guess it's page two, yeah. So, I put the...

I put the ashtanga there. Yama, Niyama, Asana, Panayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi, Ashtanga, Ashtavangani. These are the names of the eight limbs in Sanskrit, okay?

And we're going to go through each one and talk about them. And then you can say, I'm an ashtanga expert without ever doing that more difficult yoga, okay? The eight limbs are self-control, commitments, the physical poses, control of the breath, withdrawal of the senses, focus, fixation, and perfect meditation.

Then those of you who care, you want to go deeper, learn the Sanskrit, okay? When I put it there, it tortures me when I go to a yoga class and the teacher doesn't know Sanskrit and they're trying to say Sanskrit and it's... it's like hearing someone go, Aibugubitibubabibubu.

And I'm like, no, just... just spend a week and learn ten Sanskrit words, you know? So, if you want to learn ten...

I put some here, okay? You should learn them. These are like minimum for someone who's doing yoga, okay?

You should know these words, okay? So I put... I put the Sanskrit, and then I put the...

the roots. There are 800 roots in Sanskrit. If you memorize them.

I memorized them on the bus going to New York for my corporate job. If you memorize them, you can... you can read anything in Sanskrit, okay?

So... if you don't have anything to do, that's a good thing to do. So I put the...

and I put the cognates. Cognate means... English words that have come from Sanskrit, usually through Greek or Latin.

Sometimes through what's called Indo-European. And... and you should learn them, you know?

You shouldn't just be... I don't know. Americans are unbelievably lazy.

Extraordinarily lazy. And... we're going to talk about that tomorrow.

Tomorrow night. But no self-discipline, you know? Not really.

I mean a few, just a few, but... Like I have a... He's Brazilian.

I have a Brazilian guy who teaches me guitar. You know? And he's practiced eight hours a day for 22 years.

And he's good. You know? And to see him play is like unbelievable.

But very few Americans have any kind of discipline like that. We'll talk about it tomorrow. If you want to learn discipline tomorrow, okay?

Anyway, try to have enough discipline to learn like ten Sanskrit words. If you're going to teach yoga, it's nice to know them, okay? Or if you're going to teach yoga sutra.

So I put the Sanskrit word, the root, and the related English words, okay? And there are rules about how Sanskrit gets into English. Like all...

most A's change to E. And... most...

I don't know how to say. Most... like most Q...

most... K words or C words in English came from a KV or a KW in Sanskrit. Or things like that, there are rules, okay?

And you can learn them, it's fun. Okay. Okay, we're going to go through the...

Ashtanga, okay? The eight Ashtanga. And try to relate them to your everyday life, okay?

Now, I want to tell you a trick, okay? Before we start. We're going to go through the eight limbs of yoga.

You should master them. Meaning, you should make them part of your life. You should get good at them, okay?

If you wanted to master the first one, for example, which is called self-control. Self-control means... not acting like an animal, you know?

Animals don't have self-control, you know? If they want something, they just kill. They kill the other animal that has it, you know?

Or children... you know, very young children... they just lie.

Because no one ever told them not to lie. And some of them are never corrected for the rest of their life. Or, you know, sexual misconduct.

People see a woman they want, and they just take her. And they don't care that she has a partner or something like that. This is...

This is the way animals act in the... I have deer around my house. I watch them.

That's what they do. They don't like ask, you know, is your committed relationship over? The buck comes and tries to kill the other buck.

You know? It's like that, and we're not animals. What distinguishes us from animals is that we can be sensitive to other people, and we can control our animal instincts, okay?

Because that's called yama in Sanskrit. Yama... yat means to reach for something.

The root means to reach for something. And then... ma is a suffix that makes nouns out of things.

Like karma. Yama. So, yama means a thing made by reaching.

And then it came... There's this story in Sanskrit that you often reach for the reins of a horse to control the horse. So, the reins of a horse were called yama, which means the thing you reach for to control.

And then... Y changes to G in Greek, A changes to E, and you get Gemini, meaning the twins. So, yama meant the two reins of a horse.

It meant the pair, or the twins, meaning the two reins of a horse. So, I was thinking I needed a picture of a guy riding a horse, and I looked on Google and tried to see what I wouldn't get sued for if I used it. And then I realized I have a...

The only photo I have of my dad is on a horse, and that's my dad. And he was a great hunter, unfortunately, and used to take us out on horses in wild places and shoot deer. Anyway...

So, that's a yama. So, yama means to control a horse or to control yourself, okay? So, it means to control your natural instincts.

Naturally, you would kill to get what you want, or you would steal what you want, or take what you want, or lie if it would get you. You think it would get you what you want. And yama means try to control yourself, okay?

Like the reins of a horse, okay? Try not to be like an animal. Try to be like a human, okay?

Then he lists them. Here... ahimsa satyasteya brahmacharya bharagraha yama jati-deshe kala samaya anna vaschina sarva-bhumi sarva-bhama maha-vratam Ahimsa, which is not pronounced...

Ahimsa, okay? There's no such thing. You don't have an...

There is no M before an S in any Sanskrit word, at all. If there's a million Sanskrit words, there's not any that has M-S, okay? Ever.

So, anyway, it's an irritant to me when I hear it. It's like you put sandpaper on my tongue or something. Ahimsa, say Ahimsa.

Yeah, it's like a French, you know, wah, wah, wah, Ahimsa. Okay? It's a nasal, to your Ahimsa, okay?

And that means not to hurt... not to kill, okay? Ahimsa.

Hin comes from a root Han, which came into English as gun, okay? So, it means no guns. Ah is the primitive negative, which means like not, like apolitical or apathetic or...

atheistic. The initial A in Greek is negative, okay? An-anahata.

If you have an A that bumps into an A, you put an N between. So, not... not very much beating is an-anahata.

Okay? So, anyway, not to kill anything, any living creature. Satya, not to...

Lie. Lie, good. Asteya, not to...

Steal. Steal. Brahmacharya, not to...

basically not to steal other people's partners and disturb other people's committed relationship. Brahmacharya. And then, aparigraha is added here as not possessiveness, but traditionally, the fifth one is the use of intoxicants, like alcohol and drugs, okay?

Because they just make you stupid and then you do stupid things, okay? You can say, I'm very mature, I have drunk wine since I was a kid. But at some point, I'm sixty-something, okay?

But at some point in your life, you realize that alcohol makes you stupid. It makes you do stupid things. It makes you unhappy.

It costs a lot of money. You know, one quarter of the barley crop of the United States goes to... alcohol?

It's junk. Could be saving lives. It's just dumb, okay?

Anyway, that's usually the fifth of the yama. So, yama means... If you take the ashtanga, okay?

I'll... I'll... I'll tell you three categories of the ashtanga.

You tell me how many in each one. Some are karma, okay? Some are collecting mental seeds.

Some are dealing with the inner body. And some of them are dealing with the mind, meditation. Okay, Earl, are you ready?

Yama is... Huh? Karma, yeah.

Like affecting the world by affecting... by changing your karmic seeds. Yama.

Ethics. Morality. How about niyama?

Commitments. Yeah, that's karma. Asana.

Yeah, yoga is... Inner body work. Pranayama.

Yeah, inner body. Pratyahara. Withdrawal of the senses.

Inner body. And then we move to... Dharana, jhana, samadhi.

These are three forms of meditation, or three steps of meditation. So you can say the first... two...

of the eight limbs have to do with collecting karma. Basically, okay? And the next three have to do with working on your physical body, your subtle body.

And then the next... the last three have to do with working on your mind. Okay?

So we're in the two that have to deal... have to do with collecting karma. Now...

This is my... Okay, this is my great idea for the class. Okay, we just got to it.

Whew... If you wanted to improve your first anga, your first limb of yoga, what could you do? You could use the four karmic steps at the end.

And what I wanted to point out, what I wanted to get you into is... If you master the eight steps, you'll be a successful person, in every sense of the word. You'll be career-wise, relationship-wise, physical health, mental peace, and how you serve the world.

You'll be successful in the five great things, if you master the eight limbs. Okay? What you could do with each of the limbs is just use the four steps of karma.

That's the big idea I want you to work on tonight. Okay? So, if I wanted to improve my yamas, I could use the shi-sampajor-tattva.

Okay? That's why we went through it at the end. So, the first one, shi, would be...

I want to be... I want to collect better karmic seeds. Okay?

I want to follow the yamas better. Okay? Two?

Huh? Yeah, find someone else and help them. Do it.

Okay? You might want to teach the Yoga Sutra at yoga studios. With Y as high.

Okay? That's a very good way to improve. Okay?

Then, you know, or if you meet a person who's having a challenge with stealing or... or vegetarianism or... lying or...

then you help... you take them out and you talk to them and you help them. Okay?

That would be number... step two and three, right? You make a plan, and then you help them with their...

with their... behavior. Right?

And then the last one? When you get home at night, you think about what you did and you appreciate it. Because if you do not, that karmic seed might take hundreds of years to open.

And personally, I don't want to wait. Okay? There's a big problem with waiting, which is that the human mind can't connect the effect to the cause.

If it takes me ten years to get a girlfriend by visiting somebody in a nursing home because I didn't water the seed enough, I will never connect the visits to the nursing home with getting a partner. I'll think the partner just happened. Nothing just happens, okay?

There's no such thing. Okay? So, the faster it works, the more you can connect what's happening to you with what you did last week or last month.

And then you become an enlightened person. Okay. Alright.

So, that's how to use the four limbs to master the first of the ashtanga. Okay? You get where we're going?

You can almost do it yourself, but... I have to finish this. I'm gonna go for another...

I mean... I personally don't need a break. What time are we supposed to stop?

9.30? Huh? 9.30. What time do they get mad and start blinking the light? Yeah, okay. Let's go... Let's do one more anga, okay?

And then we'll take a little... We have a small refreshments out there. You know, we can take a five minute pee pee break or something.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
Just to frustrate the ladies who have to stand and... Okay. Okay.

Alright. You should see the ballet. Oh my god.

Like 400 women outside of one bathroom. That's something. And I have an 87 year old lady.

I'm trying to get her to the line. Everybody thought I wanted to get into the room. Okay.

There's a beautiful sub-verse to that verse which says... It doesn't matter when in history you're talking about. It doesn't matter what country you go to.

It doesn't matter what religion you are. It doesn't matter what race of person you are. These are mighty forms of conduct.

They have been recognized by smart people throughout history as the way to behave. Okay. Alright.

And you have the roots there. Okay, number two, limb number two, which is called Niyama. Okay.

Niy just means down, but it implies like permanence and commitment. Okay. Upanishad means to sit down next to somebody.

The name of that genre of literature is called sitting down next to Upanishads. The Upanishads. So, sad is the root, right?

After I, sad must become sa. It's not allowed to... There is no sad after an I in Sanskrit.

So, you can't say... You can't call this chakra at the lower part of the spine svadhisthana. It's got to be svadhishthana.

Okay. Say sthana. svadhishthana.

After an I, like Ishvara, s must become sa. It's required. Okay.

So, Niyama. Okay. Upanishad.

Sad. Niyama means a commitment, okay, to follow a certain practices. These are more like commitments that you make.

shaocha, santosha, tapah, svadhyayeshvara, panidana, niyama. Shaocha means cleanliness. It has...

a deeper meaning and a less deep meaning. On a... On a basic level, it means neatness and cleanliness.

Cleanliness in your personal life. So, especially your... you know, how you wash yourself, how you keep...

What do you call it? Personal hygiene. And it also extends to simplicity in your home and your office.

Like, he's very good at making these beautiful Spanish offices. That's kind of like... I don't know if you're still doing it, but he used to do that.

Oh, well, anyway. It's to have a clean, simple, elegant living space. And that's called shaocha.

That's one of the means of shaocha. Santosha means... Tush means...

I think it might be related. Like Tushita, heaven. The root tush means to be contented.

Okay? And santosha means contentment. It means be happy with what you have.

Like, don't be greedy. Like, I have... People are always giving me stuff, you know?

And... Like, if people... If I have my shoes are like worn out, I get like 12 pairs of shoes.

You know? And actually, I'd rather wear the old ones. Because they're comfortable and they look a little scruffy, but...

So, santosha means you have a relationship with your stuff. Like, you have a car. You know how to fix it.

You take good care of it. You have old shoes. You don't have a lot of shoes.

You have a couple of good pairs of shoes. They're old friends. And like that, your refrigerator or...

your desk or your laptop. You take good care of them. You're friends.

You have a nice relationship with them. That's santosha. And you just kind of get to know them and happy with them and contented with them.

And you're not always looking at the latest Retina Super Mac that comes out and getting dissatisfied with your old one. Okay? Like that.

Tapas means... difficult spiritual practices. In some traditions in India, they include stabbing yourself or burning yourself or sitting for a couple of days between five fires and trying to...

or standing on one leg until the other leg withers. And in our lineage, those are considered foolish and harmful. You know, you're not supposed to hurt the temple of your body.

You're supposed to respect it and take care of it. You know, you're supposed to like almost pamper it by doing a lot of yoga and stuff like that. So, real tapas.

Difficult spiritual... What's the most famous tapas? Yeah, putting up with a really irritating person is more difficult than going and living in a cave.

Like, so if you want to be a real yogi, you should seek out the most irritating people you can find and stay close to them. And then you can keep your commitments. Okay.

Svadhyaya... I've heard all these funny things in yoga classes, like self-knowledge or something like that. It's completely, utterly wrong.

Okay. Svadhyaya just means... kathen in Tibetan, it means memorizing scripture, being able to recite it.

Okay. Okay. atar yogana-sasanam yogas citta-vartindro dada dada-drashti-svarupi-suddhanam Like that.

You memorize the yoga sutra or something like that. It's not some kind of academic exercise. It puts it in your mind.

And then your mind is singing it all day in your head. And it's beautiful. And, you know, instead of thinking about Google's latest thing, you have Patanjali singing in your mind all day.

Like you're walking down the sidewalk and these... these things are coming into your head all the time. And it's a holy exercise to put them in there so that they bang around for the rest of your life.

Okay. So that, in the old days, that was a big deal. In our training it's also...

we have hundreds of thousands of pages we have to memorize. And it... There's a joke in the monastery, I've memorized...

I've forgotten more books than you've ever memorized. And that's my current condition. But...

but they still jump up in your head from time to time. Like I was reading the Bodhisattvacharya Tara, which I studied when I was 21 or 2. And I memorized.

And it comes back for tomorrow night, right? The chapter on effort. We're gonna study that.

And it all comes back to you. It's there. It's in your mind, okay?

So, swadhyaya means memorization. And then... Isvaraparidhana means like...

calling on higher powers, especially your teacher. Okay? So, those are the commitments.

Now, let's take a commitment like... I put the one... I put a high school teacher there, okay?

So, in the photo, there's a high school teacher there. And one of your commitments in your life, one of the most important niyamas, probably the most... definitely the most important niyama is the last one.

Which is what? Seeking your master's blessings. Your master...

I like... What's his name? David Swenson.

So, he's a big ashtanga teacher. And... I like...

His book has sold 500,000 copies, okay? His ashtanga one manual that you can open. Like, it made him rich.

The idea to put a spine on it, that you could lay it down flat on the floor and do your practice. I mean... And...

And did you ever read... What's on the first page? Yeah, there's a photo of his mom.

And there's a photo of his dad. His mom's got this beehive hairdo. And then his sister is there.

He has another photo of her sister. I love my sister. She's been a teacher to me.

And this guy is like... one of the most famous ashtanga teachers in the world. And the whole front page of his manual is...

Thanks mom. And thanks dad. And thanks sis.

And... My sis works in a bank in Houston, but I love her anyway. And, you know, like...

So... To honor the people who have taught you in your life is the ultimate niyama, okay? Like...

school teachers, your parents, the people who taught you your career in Deutsche Bank, or Banque Lyon, or the trade embassy in... I forget, Saudi Arabia or something. In Ben Gomi's case, Hlami's case.

So, you know, it's like... to thank mentally the people who trained you in economics or banking, even though it's been 20 years since they did that. And keep thinking about them and thank them constantly in your mind.

This is a big... This is a big yogic practice, okay? And it creates great karma.

So, let's say... Okay, you're not gonna get your refreshments until you can tell me the four steps to being better at recognizing your teachers. Gratitude towards your teachers.

So, step number one, shi-so-to-shi. I want to... I want to appreciate my teachers more.

Meaning my parents and... the kid who used to beat me up in high school, Dennis Diamond, who later got arrested for lying. Anyway...

But... Number one, I would like to appreciate my teachers more. I'd like to feel more gratitude.

Number two... Yeah, find someone who has trouble expressing their gratitude or feeling gratitude. Number three...

You can help take them out to the Starbucks and say, you're the person I was thinking of who shows the least gratitude. No, okay. I'm gonna give you a clue on number three.

Take them out and say, I have trouble expressing gratitude, I thought maybe you could help me, okay? That's more diplomatic. Doesn't give you a nose-butt.

And then number four... Yeah, when you go home at night, think about... you know, just appreciate what you've done, you know.

I found... I wanted to increase my gratitude, so I did it the karmic way. And I helped someone else increase their gratitude.

And I appreciate myself on two levels. Can you guess?

[Speaker 2]
For trying a new system?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Yeah, good. So I appreciate that I...

that I tried to help someone with their gratitude. But I also appreciate that I'm trying a new system. You know, I'm not...

I didn't go out to Barnes & Noble's in... what do you call that place? The Promenade?

To buy a book on gratitude, you know? That's not the way. I just tried to help someone else have more gratitude.

I'm trying the karmic method to get the things I want in my life. And then appreciate... if you appreciate that you're doing that, then your whole life changes, okay?

Got it? Because then those seeds are watered. What seeds?

The seeds for trying to try a new system in life. Instead of searching for a boyfriend, you... plant them.

It's worth so much... it's so much less stressful. You know?

Oh, step number one, I want a partner. Step number two, find a lonely person in a nursing home. Step number three, take them to Swan Lake.

It's fun, except for that 400 lady lying at the bathroom during the intermission. And she's really got to go. And then...

step number four, when I get home, I think about that I'm trying a new system to find a partner. And then, it's so much less stressful. I don't have to go to...

what do you call it? Obnoxious places where I might meet a partner? Like a club or internet or...

I don't have to go sifting through... what do you call it? What do you call useless potential boyfriends?

Deadheads? No, that's the kind of band follower. I don't have to sift through stupid deadbeat guys to try to find a good one, you know?

Like, I just plant them and relax. And then they show up. Wherever I go tomorrow, they're going to show up at 9 o'clock.

If I'm at Starbucks, they're going to come there. If I'm at Vaughn's grocery store, they're going to show up there. If I'm at the beach, they're going to show up there.

The same wonderful man. And I don't have to sift through deadbeats. Okay, got it?

Like, I'm doing the new way. And the same with a career, a job or... money or, you know, stuff like that.

Improving your yoga puzzles, but we didn't get there yet. Okay, so we finished the two Angas, the two limbs of yoga, of the Ashtanga, of the eight Angas, which have to do with planting karmic seeds in your mind. Okay, we're going to move on to the three...

or is it two and a half Angas, which relate to my inner body. Okay, so we'll cover them next. Okay, so take a...

take maybe a five minute break, okay? I'd like to finish all of them. We don't have that much time.

It's 8.52. How about we come back by 9 o'clock, okay? Yama niyama, what's next? Asana.

Asana, okay. Then I would just encourage you to play around with doing Asana all day. Not like Anatole does, like all day, but...

There's a way of... So, in the Tibetan presentation of Asana, one of the most famous ones, there are four classes of physical exercises. And...

So the first one is... how would you say? Twisting, right?

And we believe that that helps untie chakras in your body. And then the second step would be? Stretching.

And the third step would be? Gathering, which is like core work or tightening your abdomen area, abdominal area. And then?

There's a thing called distribution, which is where you try to shake your body, like you might dance or something like that, okay? So the idea is, in this class, could you be doing that all day? And I encourage you to try, okay?

So like, I don't know... Balanchine? Balanchine?

Balanchine? I don't know how to pronounce his name. The greatest ballet teacher...

Balanchine. He encouraged his ballerinas to do... to kind of move through the day as if they were dancing all day.

So like if you're in the kitchen, you would pas de bourrée over to the stove and then you would do a pirouette to get to the silverware drawer. And there's a way that... I had a teacher named David Leif, right?

And he's very big on that. And he kind of talked to me a long time about it. And it was...

you know, like there's ways to pick up your bag off the floor or you can just kind of do it without being conscious or aware. And there's other ways you can try to do a nice Uttanasana and purposely stretch your hamstrings and go down and try to do one of those four movements. You know, like make the four movements part of your daily habit.

How you move across the floor. I asked him what was his favorite asana. He said, walking across the kitchen floor.

You know, he can do almost anything. And he's really strange. Like sometimes he'll spend six months on perfecting one asana.

And then he said, my favorite one is walking across the floor and just trying to be conscious and trying to do those movements and be aware of them. And then that moves prana through your body. And it changes the way you think.

So I'm just saying, try it the other 23 hours of the day. Like, think about doing asana as you move, you know, as you make the bed or as you clean up the house or as you pack the car. Then try to consciously do the four movements of asana.

Okay? And then that affects your prana and that affects the way you think. Okay?

So that's the idea of 23 hour ashtanga. Do your asana all the time. Every movement.

Like right now, you could practice sitting up straight or, you know, tucking your tailbone, moving your stomach in a little bit or keeping your shoulders back or, you know, keeping your shoulders down and bringing your head up. I asked a ballerina, how do you get this thing with your neck? She said, I'll tell you a secret, you don't do anything with your neck, you just lower your shoulders.

Yeah, like... I said, how do you get this neck, you know? She's like, you don't do anything, because you can't.

You just lower your shoulders. And like that, I mean, try to be conscious as you move through the day and do asana. As you're sitting, like, do things that open your channels.

Okay? That's the idea. How could you apply karma marga to the asana?

Number one, I would like to... I would like to... my asanas to be more effective.

Something like that. Number two? Yeah, financing.

Especially there are... there are... in America, there's overweight people and there's people who have abused their body their whole adult lives.

They have overeaten. They have sat on their bottom in offices for their whole adult lives. So, there's many, many people to serve and to help.

And just turn them on to something simple they can do, like turn them on to a few poses that they can do just at home, you know? The trick is to get them to do it at home. I like to teach elderly people poses that are not going to hurt them.

So that would be... the second step would be to find a person who's abused their body, which in America is very common, more than any other country. And then thirdly, help them, like teach them some poses.

I like to take people to yoga classes for fun. I find an easy class and I say, let's go together, you know? Let's go.

And they say, no, I don't want to go, like my brother. The way I got my brother to go was I told him, just come and watch me do it. And he came like three times and the teacher let him sit in a chair, the whole class.

And he just stood there and watched me, you know? He's like, you're sweating really hard. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know?

And then now he's doing... I taught my stepmother... Recently, she said...

I said, would you like to learn some yoga? She's 87, I think. And she said, no, I do yoga every day.

And I'm like, I didn't know you did yoga. And she said, yeah, I do yoga every day. I said, so, how did you learn yoga?

She said, you taught me like 20 years ago. And I've been doing it every day. And she's in Jordan on an archaeological thing.

She's 87. She's probably fighting with ISIS guys or something. And...

She's, no, but I mean... Turn other people on to yoga, you know? And then, it affects your own practice, okay?

Affects your own practice. Then, you have to go home and appreciate yourself, right? In this system, in the classical system of karma, it will not open.

The holograms won't come out unless you heat the seed up with prana. The only way to direct prana to the seed is with your thoughts. And the only way to do that is to...

What do you call that? Not contemplate, but... Not that...there's a slang term. Anyway, cogitate about the nice stuff you've done for other people. So, in this system, you cannot use this system unless you have a very active practice of appreciating the kindness that you do for other people, without pride. It's a kind of a healthy self-esteem.

We're gonna talk more about that tomorrow, which is the opposite of gilug, which we're gonna talk about tomorrow. There's an ancient teaching on low self-esteem that we're gonna cover tomorrow. And there's a way to overcome that karmically, okay?

Alright. Alright. That brings us to the fifth...

Oh, sorry, fourth, which is... pranayama, okay? I like the word, okay?

I like to take it apart. Prana is pra. Pra means forward.

It came into English as proud, or prow of a boat, or fore, meaning in front, like before. And...so that's pra. An means to breathe, or to be alive.

And it came into English as animated, or anime, or animus, or animal. And it means living being, or breathing being. So pra-ana means to breathe consciously.

And then, a-yama. A-yama is two words. There's a short a, which means not, right?

Like ahimsa. But there's a long a that means very much. So when Americans mispronounce them, they're saying ahimsa means to do great violence.

Anyway, with pranayama, it's a-a means to very much yama. So yama means very subtle control of your breath, conscious control of your breath. So pranayama means breathing consciously.

So during the day this is a very sweet practice. If you're gonna be a real yogi, that's a physical practice you can do all day, which is watching your breath. And I think I put...let me see. Yeah. Bahya-bhyantara-stambhavartir-desakala-sankhya-bhih-paridrsto-dirga-sukshma. It means there are aspects of your breath that you can watch during the day.

If you want to simplify it, it's be conscious of your exhales, okay? If you have dirga-sukshma, if you have long conscious exhales during the day, your mind will be clearer and kinder, and your prana will move better. So it's just a simple pranayama.

What's the most famous Tibetan meditation that you can do in the pranayama? Huh? Tonglen.

Yeah. So you can take away other people's problems with your breath, and give them comfort with your breath. And you can change nostrils, and you can learn to control the flow of the breath.

And this is a pranayama combined with a kindness meditation. So, that's a... Those are things you can do during the day in pranayama, okay?

You don't have to be in a three-year retreat, in your cabin, you know, doing all this thing, or... you got this thing, or you know... You can...

I like to... I used to go to work everyday on the subway in New York, and I would do the pranayamas on the person opposite me, sitting opposite me. And I would...

You reach your breath, you do an exhale so long that you imagine the breath touches them, and gives them comfort. And then you bring it back through the other nostril, and you take their troubles. And you can be in a noisy subway car, going down to Greenwich Village from Port Authority.

It's like 20 minutes. And you can do a pranayama, while you're in the car, in the subway. And it's a very beautiful practice, it affects your health, it affects your state of mind.

You don't have to sit there and do pranayamas on the seat. You can do it in the subway, you can do it in traffic, you can do it on an airplane, although it's harder. But you can do pranayama all day, okay?

You don't have to wait to get to the yoga studio to do pranayama, okay? If you want to make it easy and simple and powerful, watch your exhales. If you want to go deeper, imagine that with your breath you are taking away people's problems and giving them comfort, okay?

And those are two extremely powerful and profound pranayamas that you can do all day. And if you do it all day, it changes your... it changes you a lot.

All of these change you a lot. And if you do them in sequence, you know, first collect the karma, then make commitments, then start to do physical movements, then start watching your breath. If you do them as a sequence, it changes your being.

And that's the whole idea of the ashtanga, okay? What's the next one? I'm watching the time.

Rosa, not to get worried. Twelve minutes left. Two minutes per...

Anga. What's the next one? Yeah, Pratyahara.

Which just means withdrawal of the senses, okay? The opposite of that is to spend a lot of time on Facebook or searching... Don't send me YouTube videos, I don't want to see them.

Okay? I don't care about this new amazing video. Really, seriously.

You can waste your time, but don't waste my time, okay? I don't need them. My life is more interesting, okay?

Than any video they show on YouTube, except my videos. But... But don't waste your time, you know?

Don't sit there and look at the next amazing video and like that. It's just a waste of time. And then your mind wanders out, and your prana leaks out, and you get weaker, and your mind gets weaker, and your resolve gets weaker, and your discipline gets weaker, and your whole inner self gets weaker, you know?

Like, use the internet wisely, like a rattlesnake. You know? Like, have this relationship with it.

Don't let it bite you. Don't let it waste your time, okay? And your phone and all those things.

Like, learn to... Don't let them use you. Use them.

There are very wise ways to use it. It's very wonderful. You can use it...

I found out last night, she was driving with me, and who else? Kat was in the car. What did we do as we approached the post office?

We figured out how to ask Siri to play... We figured out how to ask Siri to play Jimi Hendrix songs without tapping the phone. You just say, Siri, play some old Jimi Hendrix songs.

And she does, you know? So there are useful things. But don't let it get...

Don't let it water down your mind and dilute your focus, okay? Like, that's Pratyahara. Pratyahara means...

Now we have the opposite, you know? You don't need to know the news. I read the news at Starbucks.

I go in. I glance at the front page. That's all you need to know.

The rest is all, what did Obama have for breakfast? It doesn't matter, you know? You don't need to know that.

And it weakens your inner body to learn all these useless things. And to surf the net, because you don't have anything else to do all day, it just weakens your inner body, okay? So that's Pratyahara.

And food, don't both... You know, eat. Eat two times a day, it's enough.

Twice a day is enough. I ate twice a day for like 20 years. And it doesn't hurt you at all.

And you feel great, and that's enough. And then don't eat all day. There's no...

It just hurts you. It weakens you. It makes you sick.

You get sick more often. You don't need it. Like, bring all your powers into yourself, your inner body and...

focus. Okay? That happens to be the...

next time. Isn't it? Dharana.

So dharana means focus. It means... Sometimes they call it ekagra.

Ekagra means the ability to focus your mind. Oh, by the way, if you had trouble with Pratyahara, what might you try? Four stems.

Karma marga. Okay, number one. I want to be less addicted to the internet.

To surfing, useless surfing. Okay? Not useful surfing, because that's useful.

Then number two. You know, think about your friends and who has trouble with... wasting their time.

There's some people who are truly wasting their lives online. And then three. Do something to help them, like reach out to them and say, look, you look like you're addicted, I am too.

And usually it's really helpful to say, I am too, even if you're not, okay? Say, it looks like you're having trouble with... It just looks like you can't put down the...

It just looks like you're wasting your time on Facebook, you know? It's like... sometimes it's good to find out what Scott did at DCI the night before.

That's useful. But to spend your whole day on Facebook, it just wastes your life, you know? It really wastes your life.

We'll talk more about it tomorrow. But then... find someone who has this problem, help them, and then...

number four. Yeah, go home and appreciate that you're bringing some sanity to the world, you know? Like, you're trying to help people to get over this addiction, you know?

And it's... it's getting more serious, you know? What children will be like who are born...

who are now using their parents' iPads at age three. What they will be like when they get to fifty is frightening to me. Like, I think it will be very violent society.

In a society where people are not accustomed to caring for others. Because they never relate to others in person. Only online.

So... it's a... it's a virtual...

it's already a virtual reality. Next? Yeah.

Dharana Dhyana Samadhi, okay? Dharana Dhyana Samadhi. Dharana means the ability to focus on something.

I... what was the photo I put on the reading? I'm just checking to see if you're on the same page as me.

It's a runner. It's a lady running a race. She's a...

I forget. I don't know. Czechoslovakian or something.

The thing about her, look at her eyes. Athletes have a lot of Dharana. My lama made me watch a baseball player's eyes as they're hitting the ball.

And their eyelids go up. Wider. They get like that.

As the ball comes down at ninety miles an hour, their eyes go like... And then, they get this focus. And that's Dharana.

Dharana means the ability to shut out other... They're not listening to the fans. They're not aware of the umpire anymore.

They're not even aware of the pitcher anymore. They're just... I heard an interview with...

I think it was Gerald Strauber or something, but he said... They said, how come you can hit home runs all the time? He says, when the ball gets close to me, it's about the size of a watermelon.

It looks this big to me. Really. It looks that big to me.

Cause it's focus. Focus means... What do you call it?

Bolo mayimale lopa. Say bolo. Bolo mayimale...

Lopa. Bolo mayimale lopa. The opposite of all which is not the baseball...

is focus. Okay? The opposite of all which is not the baseball is focus.

It means for that person, for a batter who has dharana, the only thing in the world is the baseball. And there's no awareness of anything else in the stadium. The grass, or the sky, or the people, or the hot dogs, or the beer, or...

the announcers, or... It's just baseball. The ball is the only thing.

That's called ekagra. Eka? Eka-agra.

One point. Single point. Single point doesn't mean a state of mind.

It means you choose one object and you... What do you call it? You...

How much time I got? Oh, four minutes. You arrive at the object by canceling all which is not the object.

And that's dharana. Okay? Then the whole world becomes that thing.

It's like when you're really jealous of somebody. Okay? Okay.

Dhyana... You have to sustain that focus over a long period of time. So in this exercise, called ashtanga, it's no use to have it occasionally.

You have to be able to focus on 2015's fall line for eight hours a day, for like three weeks, without thinking of other things. And if you're a really creative person and you go into the throes of a muse, it's cool. It's amazing.

Then you just shut out everything. I was working from Rimlok to... to LA.

And I was in a car, and I was in the line at the ticket, and I was in the security, and then I was at Starbucks, and then I was in the plane. But I didn't stop. I just did it.

We did the reading for tomorrow. And it's good. And it's...

I had to get ancient Sanskrit from all over the place and translate it. And you just shut out everything else. And you're not aware of anything else.

But it's sustained over like a four hour period or something. That's dhyana, okay? So dhyana means to be able to sustain that, turning off other things, than what you're focused on, okay?

Last one, then we're done with the shun. Samadhi. So samadhi generally means meditation, and it has many, many, many meanings.

But in the Ashtanga, I'll read it to you. tadevārtha-mātra-nirbhāsaṁ svarūpaśyānyam tat samādhi It sees the object as its simple self, its clear light, totally void of any nature of its own. Okay?

Why do we want to talk about that? He's talking about the pen, okay? He's talking about the pen.

Is this a pen? Yeah. Anybody says no, come get a mustache.

Come get a mustache. Okay? Especially ladies.

Okay? Of course it's a pen. You can write with it.

Is it a pen from its own side? No. It's coming from a...

It's a hologram, floating out of my mind, because I... I did the four steps and I gave other people pens in the past. Okay?

So... So, is there any such thing as a pen which is coming from its own side? No, and that's what the Buddhists call emptiness.

Okay? That's what the Buddhists call emptiness. Why is that interesting?

You can fill in that emptiness with the four steps. The fact that everything is empty is lucky. Okay?

There is no such thing as a boy you meet by accident. There's no such thing. It doesn't...it never existed, it never will exist, it cannot exist. Why? Boys are always coming out of your own seeds. Okay?

So if you want to meet a boy, you just...plant the seeds. Got it? Why do they have a place to grow?

Because there's no such thing as a boy that doesn't come from my seeds. Got it? Like for the hologram to go somewhere, there can't be anything already out there like boys who don't come from seeds.

Okay? There are no boys who don't come from seeds. And that leaves enough space for all the boys who come from seeds to have a place to invite you out.

Okay? Got it? Now, you have trouble keeping up with that, especially if you're not familiar with that language or if you haven't heard it every day for the last hundred years.

It's a little difficult to follow such a quick description because we've got zero minute left. But... what's cool is that the first seven limbs were designed only to get you to the eighth.

Okay? Collecting karma of the first two limbs, moving your physical body in four different ways, controlling your breath, and then the three levels of focus. The only purpose of them is to get to a point where you realize that everything can be done with the four steps.

Cool? How did we achieve each of the Angas in this class? We use the four steps.

Why do you want to achieve the Angas? What's the point of getting to the Ashtanga? So you realize that the four steps work on anything.

And you cannot get there unless you do each Anga one by one with the four steps. Okay? And at the end, because your body and mind are clear and clean and focused, you can truly see that the whole world is coming from the four steps.

Okay? So the point of the Ashtanga is to bring you to a place, Svarupa Shunyam Iva Samadhi, where you understand that things aren't happening any other way. And that's...

that's the definition of the eighth limb. Got it? The purpose of the first seven limbs, all the yoga exercises you ever did, you, and all the pranayama you ever did, and all the morality and seeds, is to get you to the eighth step where you understand that things are coming from the four steps.

And the way to get there is to use the... four steps on each Anga. Got it?

It's very beautiful. It's a very beautiful practice, okay? How are you going to...

how are you going to reach this point where you can get anything in your life? Use the four steps. How are you going to reach a point where you understand there's no other way?

Ashtanga. Do the eighth. Got it?

It's very beautiful. It's very cool. The purpose of the first seven limbs of yoga was to reach the eighth, which is not simple meditation.

Read the definition in the Yoga Sutra. Svarupa Shunyam Iva Samadhi. You realize things don't happen from their own side.

Got it? And if you want something, use the four steps. And that's all.

You won't truly believe it unless you control your breath, unless you do your yoga exercises, unless you maintain a moral way of life, unless you keep your commitments, unless you try to focus. Got it? You won't be able to understand the four steps.

And that was the original purpose of all those yoga exercises. And all those breathing exercises was to get to number eight. Okay?

But I think what's sexy is you can use number eight in the first seven. Okay? Got it?

Now you know the secret to life. I expect you to be successful by tomorrow.