One term at a time · second of the series
वैराग्य vairagya
Dispassion — not dejection, and not the loss of feeling.
Something closer to the loosening of a grip.
The words for what your mind is already doing.
Vasana, samskara, viveka — an older psychology named these patterns with a precision English never developed. Fifty of them carry nearly all of the teaching. Four are filmed. The rest arrive as they are made, free.
One word, one film. We will not email you about anything else, and you can stop any time.
Two minutes, and then he says it himself.
The card carries the definition. Swamiji carries the rest — he almost never defines a term outright, he shows you one at work.
2 min 39 sec
Your life should be so joyous.
The question of detachment does not arise.
Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda · The Yoga Vasistha, Lesson 189 · at 36:19
He refuses the gloomy version of the word outright. What follows is a wave told not to cling to other waves, but to love the ocean instead, which is the same thing arriving from the other side.
This one is the turn.
Vairagya is not a word to collect. It is the second step of an argument that runs through four terms, and each of the others has its own film.
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वासना vasana
Where the pattern starts.
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वैराग्य vairagya
Dispassion, and explicitly not dejection or the loss of feeling. Something closer to the loosening of a grip.You are here
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सत्सङ्ग satsanga
What decides whether it comes back.
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विवेक viveka
What finally makes the letting go possible.
About seven hundred Sanskrit terms appear across our written study guides, but only about fifty come back again and again. Those fifty are the set, and they are what we are filming.