(Based on a talk given by angel Kyodo Williams, November 8, 2007, Center for Transformative Change | New Dharma Community, Berkeley, CA)
Good evening. It seems like the next place to go is to the next verses [from the Yoga Sutras]. Just to give you a reference point, the last verse we talked about in chapter one, verse two was about yoga––union––and still the patterning of consciousness. Verse three says, "Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature. Otherwise, awareness takes itself to be the pattern of consciousness."
Read the full essay here: http://transform.transformativechange.org/files/stilling_patterns_mind.pdf
We practice our habits as if we have no control over them, forgetting that we are the thing that keeps the habit going. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to stop. But stopping is the only way you’ll begin to understand who you really are, and it is the only way you’ll begin to see your true nature.
“Your human form took millions of years, millions of years, to be an expression of the universe wanting to be awake to itself. Who are you to deny that responsibility? How could you possibly do anything else? How could you waste your time scratching emotional itches all the time instead of rising to the occasion of what you were born for, to see yourself, you, as the universe, as all consciousness? Recognizing the truth of that is what you’re here for.”