RE: Yoga. Life. What's the Point?
Thank you for this detailed description of Yoga.
The following words really hit home with me:
But, with commitment/dedication/courage (abhyasa) and non-attachment/surrender to the outcomes (vairagya), progress and success are certain.
I've intuited this through my own experimentation with self-searching/ remembering and I've always seemed to struggle with the non-attachment/ surrender part. I realize that it's the small-self (ego) trying to stay along for the journey, subtly trying to have it all go its way. I can sense too that the more I keep my attention focused on what's real about this I, which is at the core of my existence, the weaker the sense becomes of desiring to control outcomes and desiring to know how everything will play out; the less tense I feel; the freer and more contented I become as the identification with the person whom has such fears fades more and more into the background of awareness.
There's a definite ebb and flow to this growing realization, along with moments of stagnation and sudden leaps forward, as you mentioned.
I liken my own experience of spiritual growth to a stock that's trending upwards on a macro-scale (say on the year, or decade, time-frame), but experiences intermittent shorter timescale downtrends (such as the hourly, daily, weekly or monthly time-frames). I find that it's easy to get caught up in the drama of the present situation, making it appear for some time like all the past insights are forever lost, just like a trader can easily lose sight of the big picture in the daily or weekly price movements, unwittingly allowing oneself to be fooled into trading out of their original plan, only to have the stock behave exactly as they had originally figured that it would.
The main factor, common to both contexts, is that the truth, or direction, is always easier to determine with a clear mind that's not caught up in the immediate action or happenings of the moment, and the right decision comes far more frequently when I am in that head-space (silent mind).
I'm certain that the right decision will only come more and more frequently the more I live from that space and the more I come to know the Truth. Once the little-I merges with the One (Existence), then only right decisions can come - this is me extrapolating and theorizing a bit, which I feel isn't the best practice to develop, as it seems to me that conceptualizing what Truth is, or could be, creates a high potential for unnecessary mental road-blocks to actually seeing what is (Truth).