Customer Reviews

To Be Victorious in Life (How-to-Live Series, 1)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When the Yogananda brought the message of yoga to his students in the West he emphasized BALANCE, and the essays collected in ''To Be Victorious in Life'' are prime examples. Always acknowledging the central role of attuning our consciousness to the Divine Will, Yogananda still insists that readers attend to the practicalities of life in the modern West. If you read his Autobiography of a Yogi, you will see how successfully he employed this balance, establishing an America-wide and then a world-wide organization for dissemination of yoga-based principles of meditation, following the instruction of Christ to render appropriately unto Caesar and unto God. In the talks transcribed for the chapters of this pocketbook, Yogananda speaks both from his spiritual wisdom and from his experience in translating spiritual principle into action within the world.

The importance of meditation and of practicing attunement with The Divine during wordly activity are given central importance throughout the yoga master's talks, but so are the application of will, discrimination, and self-discipline. Yogananda thus also shows balance in encouraging us to listen to conscience while showing compassion for our weaknesses as we (works in progress that we are) build our spiritual muscles. He discourages focusing on mistakes but instead emphasizes keeping the mind on The Goal and on studying the lives of those we would be proud to emulate. We are ever urged just to do the best we can - and Yogananda's words have an amazing ability to build our faith in the goodness of ourselves and to foster a desire to bring out that goodness.

Always he wants to root out the mistakes - not to disparage the mistake-maker. His encouragement here might best be summarized by his words elsewhere: ''God does not mind your mistakes - but your indifference!''

Easy to read and understand. Very positive in a low key and straight forward manner. Very spiritual and enlightening. Yoganandas teachings are for a lifetime and not just for the moment. He wrote and said these things over fifty years ago and they are as good now as they were then. I highly recommend this book.