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niyama v0.1: Depth and The Long March

· 3 min read
abhiyerra

I have most things for my spiritual journey set and now the long march starts.

  1. Sastras. I have the sastras that will be my focus. Hanuman Chalisa, Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, and Bhaja Govindam. All other sastras will be in relation to how they support my understanding of these four. My goal is depth over breadth at this stage. These four texts I can take with me whatever state of my life. If I internalize them by memorizing them then well they become a part of me.
  2. Gurus. Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna will be the primary teachers I will follow. These three will be the core of the philosophical study that I will focus on. Others like Chinamayananda will add clarity to this but added sparingly. But my core focus is on the three teachers who give a complete Bhakti, Karma and Jnana.
  3. Sanskrit. I will be focusing on language learning especially to read the sastras. My goal with Sanskrit is to eventually read Yoga Sutras and commentaries, Bhagavad Gita and commentary, and Upanishads and commentary without English. This will be a consistent and continuous process.
  4. Routine. My day is split into the appropriate blocks of time with the goal of getting work done, time with family and home, and spirituality divided into Raja study, Jnana study and Bhakti study. I also have Karma study. This is all structured around the 8 Limbs. The purpose is to use the appropriate times to study and perform the appropriate things. I don’t want it to become like I am only ever studying one thing. I want to study and work on worldly things as well as spiritual things.

So I did the easy part. A structure to my life. A core set of scriptures and a core study. What I am missing now is depth. And depth will be the rest of my life. There won’t be anything to add to this list the routine is largely set.

It will be a long tail of practice and concentration and fighting and disciplining my brain. This will be work. It won’t be easy and it will be continuous.

  • continuously improve each of the limbs. My simplified setup means that there are only six that I need to work on. If I improve one everyday then I have a 6 day cycle of wha to need to improve.
  • No more addition of texts. Just a long term study to get into the depths of the four.