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Stephen Cope Books

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“Desai talked that morning about the preciousness of a human life. “In the world of yoga,” he said, “you must remember there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide.” But the human realms, he said, are most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realm of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to prod us toward the path of liberation.”

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Book:Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
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“The great Theravadan monk Ajahn Chah used to teach that the whole world is teaching the dharma (the truth) to us all the time. . . . In order to hear the teaching, we must slow down, cultivate awareness, and tune in. Most of all, we have to drop our hopes and dreams and preconceived notions of how it should be. We must look at how it is. We must look with a mind that lets go. Then we will see.”

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“….[O]ur lives only make sense when understood as a sacred quest for the true self. The practices of yoga. . . are organized around the belief that all humans have the innate capacity and longing to mature to full aliveness, that all humans are born with the seed of the awake, conscious mind. . . . [W]hen we finally commit to the quest for the true self, we will discover that we are not alone on our journey. One day, to our astonishment, we will find that the true self for which we are searching is also searching for us.”

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“Now we have become exclusively identified with our physical bodies, with our possessions, with our thoughts, with our personalities. We think we’re our ideas, our careers, our families, our countries. We live our lives in utter ignorance of the vastness of our real nature, estranged from our true selves. This is the source of our suffering. . . . The soul gradually becomes completely identified with the material plane of existence, even though this “gross material plane”--the physical body and the personality–is only the most outward and visible aspect of her true home. This is a disastrous misidentification because, in addition to the body, mind, and personality, yoga teaches that the true home of the soul is also beyond time and space, in the eternal now of consciousness. When we live disconnected from these vast roots of the Self, we suffer.”

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