Disentangle

    The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought have found different explanations for a man's apparently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all of our suffering to original sin.
    The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think we are mere individuals, alone with our flaws and fears and resentments. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. The supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine.
    Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self- mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and you nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.