Swami Nishchalananda talks to Students in Bangalore, India in December 2001

Swami Nishchalananda's Archives series.

A talk given to visiting Foreign Students at the South Asian Centre, Bangalore, 8th December 2001. The quality of the recording is quite poor in places, probably due to poor microphone placement and a lot of background noise. The sound editing has eliminated a lot of the interference, but some remains.

The students had no idea who Swami Nishchalananda was, they knew he was a visiting guest speaker so we get an insight into Swamiji's training with his teacher, Swami Satyananda Saraswati, and the lineage of which they are a part, which goes back to the Sage Adi Shankara.

The students are given a description of the many different branches and systems of Yoga; Gyana, Hatha, Mantra, Bhakti, Karma and Raja Yoga, also the system of Samkhya, and how Vedanta led to Advaita (doctrine of non-duality)

Swamiji makes the point that because all the spiritual texts are in Sanskrit, we have continuity through to the modern day without pollution of those texts through mis-translation.

There's a section worthy of it's own posting here as a 'short' (hopefully coming soon) on the formation of 'Emotional Blocks' in the course of everyone's lives, and how Yoga can help to resolve such blocks.

An almost prescient (given the state of the world now 20 years later) observation that Politics is not going to be the solution for the World's problems; we need a quantum shift in perception and understanding, in our relationship with life as a whole.

Please enjoy this most delightful exchange between Swamiji and the students, and the effortless ease, his characteristic understated way, with which he imparts his knowledge.