Sunday, October 8, 2023
Philosophic Worship Service
11:00 a.m.
“Dialogue with a Yogi”
Service conducted by
Srimati Karuna, Minister
Sunday Bulletin
In the Katha Upanishad, which has been translated by Swami Premananda as the “Dialogue of Death and Vision of Immortality,” our minds are guided beyond all finiteness. This dialogue engages our imagination and lifts our spirit to a purely subjective domain. In the act of meditation, in the solitude and peace of the forest or even amidst the ceaseless activity of our busy lives, we, too, can have a dialogue with a yogi…one in which we aspire to the highest state of self-existence.
“Depend on it, that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully…The yogi absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“These are the two invariable paths of the world: one is the path of illumination in wisdom, and the other is the path of darkness in ignorance. Truly, by one a person attains self-liberation; by the other he returns to the life of self-limitation…knowing these two paths, no Yogi is ever deluded. Therefore, be thou a Yogi at all times.”
—Srimad-Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Swami Premananda
”There is a state of self-existence which transcends all others. Imperfection does not abide there, there time is powerless, and limitations of duality are completely rejected. That is the state of absolute bliss.”
—Katha Upanishad, translated by Swami Premananda