《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 64 (141):瑜伽的真諦
This was so obviously another one of Swamiji's jokes.
這顯然又是思瓦米吉所開的玩笑。You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what...
你想當寺院後方那名最安靜的姑娘？好，你猜怎麼了……But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don't know how many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don't know how many more times my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the truth of their most insistent statement:
這卻是在道場經常發生的事。當你爲自己需要做什麼事或成爲怎樣的人下了重大決定後，接下來發生的情形，卻立即讓你明白，你是多麼不瞭解自己。我不清楚思瓦米吉有生以來說過多少次，也不清楚我的導師在他過世後重復說過多少次，我只知道自己似乎仍未能吸收他們所堅稱的事實：
"God dwells within you, as you."
“神與你同在，如同你。”AS you.
如同你。If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn't interested in watching you enact some per-formance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our in-dividuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East "wrong-thinking." Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually de-pression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunci-ation—just for their own sake—are not what you need. To know God, you need only to re-nounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.
此種瑜伽若有其真諦，這句話即概括一切。神與你同在，如同你與自己同在，分毫不差。神沒興趣看你爲了符合自己心中認定的心靈相貌或行爲而扮演某種人格。我們似乎都以爲，想成爲虔誠的人，非得讓自己的個性發生戲劇性的重大改變，非得捨棄自我不可。這是東方思想裏稱爲“誤思”的典型例子。思瓦米吉常說，棄絕者每天都能找到新的東西讓自己棄絕，往往得到的只是沮喪，而非平靜。他始終提醒大家，你該爲自己着想，無須苦行或棄絕。想了解神，你只須棄絕一件事——與神分離的感覺。否則，保持原狀，待在你的本性當中。
