The Highest Yoga
Path of Spiritual Heart

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Be Careful!

In the book [13] we described, among other things, how people pervert the Teachings of God. Such things happened in the past and continue to happen now.

One of the reasons for such perversions consists in the incompetence of translators. For example, there are highly perverted translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching. The same thing can be observed now with the translations of the books of Sathya Sai Baba (and books about Him).

Therefore I have to advise readers to be careful when reading these books; it is especially important with translation of certain terms.*

For example, some translators incapable of comprehending information from Sathya Sai Baba translated the word buddhi as “intellect” — in contrast to the mind (manas). It may look reasonable: some people have a lesser mind — while others have a large developed intellect!

But such an error in translations completely destroys the large methodological importance of the theme of development of buddhi, and of entire buddhi yoga in general!

Reading about the contrast between the mind and the intellect, what useful can the reader find in such ideas? Nothing!

Someone may even think in a lofty way about themselves: I have an intellect! While they…

… Even worse consequences were caused by incompetent attempts to translate the word Atman. This term literally means “non-darkness”, that is the Divinely Shining Main Essence of man, which everyone has to cognize in order to merge then with Paramatman — with the Primordial Consciousness, with the Creator.

Some English-speaking translators, Who had no idea about the higher stages of the methodology of spiritual development, instead of leaving this unclear term non-translated (i.e. just writing Atman), translated it into English as Self.

And those who translated these texts from English into Russian made this absurd tendency even worse: they translated it as Samost (Selfhood)!

So it turned out that God suggests to us to develop selfhood! Hurray!…

… Thus the translation was made with the opposite meaning! The term selfhood may denote viciously inflated self-appraisal, haughtiness, inflated lower self!

But God teaches the opposite thing: to destroy selfhood in ourselves! It is absolutely necessary for cognition of the Atman and in general for making progress on the spiritual Path!

… Those who created and published such ignorant translations believed apparently that they do a good thing… While in reality it turned out that they perverted the Teachings of God to the opposite!

No wonder that many reasonable people, after reading such texts, refused these Teachings and decided that this is nothing more than another ridiculous and harmful sect...

… In Sanskrit there is also the term viveka denoting the ability to discern between truth and false.

Ramakrishna named one of his disciples Vivekananda — Blissful One Possessing Viveka.

On the Path to Bliss attained in Mergence with the Primordial Consciousness we necessarily have to master viveka!

I wish you success!

Vladimir Antonov, Ph.D. (in biology)
(chapter from the book Anatomy of God)

Translated from Russian
by Mikhail Nikolenko


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