Читать книгу Ashtanga Yoga - The Intermediate Series - Gregor Maehle - Страница 41

The ancient spiritual practice of retelling, listening to, reading, and reliving myths is integral to Indian culture, and it continues today. Myths were and are still considered important because reading sacred texts stimulates the sattvic, or spiritual and noble, aspects of the psyche. This is why Patanjali identified the reading of sacred texts as svadhyaya (self-study) and made it a part of both niyama and Kriya Yoga (yoga of action, preliminary yoga). Even in Patanjali’s time, people engaged their minds for much of the time in activities that stimulated the tamasic and rajasic forces of their personalities, and Patanjali recognized that reading sacred texts was an effective way of engaging and developing the higher aspects of the psyche instead. Reading the myths in the sacred texts was the pursuit of an arya, somebody who strives to develop qualities of his noble, higher, and sacred self.²

Today, we are tempted even more to indulge the lower urges of our psyches, surrounded as we are by mass media, digital entertainment, advertising, and the like. If Patanjali were alive today, he would want us to read holy books instead of watching reality shows or soap operas. How much time do you spend watching television, listening to radio and music, and reading newspapers and trash novels? If you keep feeding yourself with this material, you may invest a lot of effort into your daily asana practice and be surprised by how little you actually change.

If you are currently a media consumer, try an experiment: for a predetermined time frame such as one complete moon cycle (twenty-eight days) or one year, instead of consuming various forms of entertainment promulgated through the mass media, read passages from the sacred texts, even if just for thirty minutes every day. If you reclaim some or ideally all the time and energy you spend on mindless entertainment and invest it into reading holy books, you will be surprised by how much your life will change in a short time.