Welcome to this taste today. I understand that you're all applying or interested in applying for a degree at SOAS. It's very good to welcome you here. Southeast Asia is a discipline that's been taught at SOAS for very many years. Burmese has been taught for over a hundred years at SOAS and Indonesian for almost as long I think. I'm not sure exactly how long. My name is Justin Watkins and I'm Professor of Burmese and Linguistics so I teach Burmese language and various subjects in linguistics and I'll be talking to you in a bit later but first of all I'm going to hand over to my colleague Su Chen who is our Indonesian teacher and she's going to do a small presentation about Indonesian and we'll do Burmese a bit later. Thanks. Okay thanks Justin. So my name is Su Chen Marching and I am lecturer in Indonesian and today instead of talking about Indonesian you know like Indonesian language per se I'm going to talk about Indonesian cultures as well okay and if you want to know a bit more about Indonesian language you can actually see the YouTube videos it's called SOAS language and lockdown and then you can type Indonesian and Indonesian grammar and my you know like videos about Indonesian language are there the two videos there okay so I'm going to talk a bit about Indonesian cultures and traditions and please feel free to ask anything okay right so so here it is what people usually know about Indonesia is it's a patriarchal country with the largest Muslim population in the world okay that's what usually people say when they hear about Indonesia but Indonesia is a lot more complex than that so officially Indonesia recognised six religions Islam Protestantism Catholicism Hinduism Buddhism and Confucianism but besides being the largest Muslim population in the world Indonesia also has the largest Buddhist temple in the world and it's called Borobudur so this is the interesting thing yeah um this is because Indonesia also in the past Indonesia has a very long Buddhist and Hindu history now one of the examples for instance Bali people always think that Bali Bali is not Indonesia some some of some of the people not always the some of them think that but Bali is actually in Indonesia okay so 83% of the people in Bali are Hindu and Hinduism has been mixed with animistic and local tradition so the Hinduism in Bali is actually very different from the Hinduism in India um for instance the Balinese make offerings to the ancestors and spirits connected with their local places such as mountains, seas and trees and because of the requirement the Indonesians must believe in one god the Balinese have to adopt the divine oneness yeah which you cannot find in India and the caste system in Bali is not as strong as in India and is now disappearing now what is Indonesian culture if you ask me um my answer is there's no such a thing as Indonesian culture because there are hundreds of traditions and belief systems there are over 700 languages spoken in Indonesia and the language Indonesian became the national language only in 1928 it is so Indonesian is a version of Malay and the language it's spoken is in Indonesia Malaysia Brunei Singapore and in the small part of southern Thailand so if you learn Indonesian usually you will have no problem understanding Malay yeah so you can speak with people in Malaysia you may misunderstand them a bit but it's not going to take long for you to understand Malaysian people and and also Brunei because uh two years ago actually I went to Brunei and I just you know spoke with the people there in Brunei and they they understood me fine no problem at all and also in some part of southern Thailand yeah they they speak Malay there and Indonesian language is almost genderless but the more modern words have gender and I'm going to explain why why Indonesian language is almost genderless now this is this is the most probable reason okay Indonesia has the largest matrilineal society in the world actually now even now okay it's called the Minangkabel and the total population is about 8 million and I'm going to explain to you what matrilineal society is so the family name I think most of you will have your family names from the from your fathers right but in matrilineal society family name and property are inherited from mothers to daughters yeah so the sons in this in this custom the sons don't really get anything yeah they will they will get something but at the discretion of the daughters okay so this is the matrilineal society in Indonesia which is which I think is quite interesting because Indonesia is known to be a patriarchal country and most of these people are committed Muslims but the matrilineal system has started to change because of the stronger Islamic influence now and also the stronger you know like patriarchal systems also also has more and more influence now and women rule the roost while men hold positions of political and religious leadership in this society so it is matrilineal but not matriarchal and in the past actually in the past women had quite high status in the in Indonesia yeah it was not called Indonesia before but in in these islands known as Indonesia now the high status of women in Southeast Asia had been decoded by European travelers especially during the pre-colonial period this did not mean that men and women were equal but they had different roles and women's fears were very extensive compared to their European counterparts during that period and women were active traders and had extensive power in household decision making and until around the early 19th century premarital sexual relations in the islands now known as Indonesia were not regarded as the boo and virginity at marriage was not expected and compared that to the European counterparts at that time yeah because in um in 19 you know like 18 or 19th century my goodness virginity was was uh like required at that time in Europe now however in Southeast Asia if a woman got pregnant there was a requirement that the man must marry her okay and this is another interesting thing about Indonesia so perhaps you think the Indonesia is a patriarchal country and sex is considered taboo but there was this one 15th century Hindu temple located on the slopes of Mount Lavu on the border between Central and East Java the symbols of male and female genitals it was so highly sexualized place this one yeah so the the symbols of female and male genitals couldn't be found everywhere in this place and um and indeed some European missionaries uh have taken notes the missionaries who came in the around 16 or 17th century have taken notes that the people in um on these islands they were just so um highly sexualized and they were just even some of them said that there were immorals because women women were naked women actually um many of them actually didn't wear cuffing on the tops yeah so that's why there were notes like that from European travelers and why have these diversity changed I'm going to have to tell you more in classes and of course I'm going to uh because I teach language of course I'm going to uh teach language in such a way that you also understand cultures and why the language is like that so while teaching language I'm going to talk about cultures as well that's all for me uh you're welcome to ask any questions okay thank you great thank you Susan um right we have uh we have no no questions yet I don't think so I'm going to carry on um and we do some screen sharing first of all um and I'm going to tell you a little bit about um uh Myanmar and the uh the Burmese we teach so just um as you'll all be aware Myanmar Burma has been in the news a lot the last couple of weeks there was a military coup there on the 1st of February and actually I mean it's a terrible event and things are changing fast and we are concerned and worried about our friends and colleagues in Myanmar um but for the people I'm teaching Burmese at the moment it's been incredibly motivating suddenly having this this massive event going on and the language learning resources that it's generated have been really um fascinating so we're all kind of galvanized reading material from Burma and Myanmar um at the moment so um what I'm going to do first of all is um ask first of all if you if any of you are interested in learning Burmese or Indonesian specifically do say so um we're not quite sure what aspect of Southeast Asia it is that you from that they're attracted to um to us and to this session so do please tell us more about yourselves um um Myanmar you'll see is uh in mainland Southeast Asia it's sort of the western edge of the area that we usually define as Southeast Asia um and it's sandwiched between Bangladesh and Thailand with borders with a long border with China and to the northeast as well so that's where it is and culturally it sits between culturally it sits between Southeast Asia India and China so both linguistically culturally um you can't learn any Burmese really without dealing with politics and Buddhism those are two um core features of um of the country hold on I'm just trying to find the chat channel which has disappeared wow too many too many windows open um I think someone sent a message in chat and I can't find it hold on a second there we are good so um this is the BBC News what I'm showing with you now is the BBC News live feed of events in Myanmar related to the coup and a very powerful image there of Buddhist monks wearing their COVID masks so of course we've got the COVID pandemic which has forced us all online and there's a reason why we're all wearing masks at the same time but the streets are filled with people protesting against the um the military coup and the BBC has Burmese language coverage of that and another reason for showing you this of course is to show you the very very beautiful Burmese script um which is one of the most enjoyable parts of learning Burmese it's not like learning Chinese characters it's not that difficult we can learn it in a couple of weeks and I'm going to show you um how we set about learning it um the first steps in a moment um but it's an index script which means it's borrowed from the script's design for South Asian languages so it's related to the script used for Hindi and for Tamil um and those scripts uh travelled with uh originally with um hinduism to Southeast Asia and spread about the region and were adapted to uh to be used for Southeast Asian languages so Burmese has its own adaptation um of that family of writing systems Thai does Cambodian does also old Javanese and um lots of other languages around the region but the Burmese script is particularly beautiful because it's been adapted to this uh sort of round shape and it's very very distinctive and it's fun to learn and um easy to learn easy to learn to read and write it only takes a couple of weeks to get going and so to bring those things together here is some uh coo related uh military coo related material that we've been reading in classes uh this week so this is a an infographic about how to you know how to prepare to go out on the streets protesting what's remarkable is that the protesting happening now in 2021 seems to be fearless and has a sort of carnival um aspect to it uh the last time that people were out in the streets in large numbers was in 2007 you may have heard of the saffron revolution where there were beautiful pictures of uh of monks um marching in long in long lines through the streets but that ended in tragedy people were terrified and the military used live bullets and a number of people were killed including some monks and that was shocking that the military should um turn violence upon monks in its own in its own country the lid seems to have come off now um people stop being afraid to express themselves around 2011-2012 and since then social media and mobile phones smartphones have become ubiquitous in in your mind and so the flow of information cannot be controlled in the way it could be in in um 2007 so information like this infographics photographs means um it's a sort of social media protest event which is uh fascinating so here the infographic I've shared with you on the screen there tells you what you should wear so down the left hand side you should wear a long sleeve shirt two layers you need a hat you should have jeans you should have shoes that you can run in easily I mean it tells you there's on the right there's five pieces of advice so um go to make sure you stay in crowded places don't go out and protest on your own and keep following the news and tell someone in advance where you're going and don't confront the police full on and make sure you get home before dark so then we've been using those instructions as a way of learning the um grammatical the the syntax and the grammar in those instructions which has been really engaging for the students learning and there's some good um some good learning points in there as well and it's great advice if you go on a protest as a student of course which lots of students do I certainly did when I was a summer student many years ago right what I'm going to show you now if I can switch to another set of images also on the shared screen so I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we go about learning Burmese and the first lesson that you come to these are the sorts of things that you'll see so we divide the learning at the very beginning into learning the script which needs to be done carefully and and we'll take up quite a lot of your attention for the first few weeks only of learning the script um and we learn the grammar separately um using a um a transcription system so hold on let me reduce that a little bit so we have handouts like this where you're learning really simple sentences it's hot isn't it it's cold isn't it it's good isn't it learning the basics of putting verbs together but Burmese verbs are quite complicated you learn the basic forms and and build them up and at the beginning we use a transcription system and so a romanization so that's a way of writing that represents the sounds in a way that you can you can read with a bit of help from from the get-go and then later on you'll be learning to write what you can say using Burmese scripts sort of after four or five weeks that's how long it takes um so that's what you'd see on day one um in week one let me give you a few bits of general information about what the language is like so I've taught you told you a little bit about Burmese script and you've seen that it has this beautiful rounded appearance and one of the things that these scripts of Southeast Asia and these index scripts have in common is the design feature which each syllable begins with an initial consonant so here you can see that's that's an M if I can actually can highlight it like that that's that's a letter M in Burmese and the vowel that follows the consonant so if you want to say a syllable like me ma me more or maung you add vowels to the right or to the left or both sides or above or below both sides on three sides and and each vowel has a has a particular direction that it's written in and the syllables are read from left to right so um it's an alphabet with some very funky design features which makes it enjoyable to learn this is how um in section two here you can see how the name of the country the two names for the country Bama and Myanmar which are more or less interchangeable you can see how they're written so this here is the letter ma this is the vowel R so that gives you this syllable here which says ma and then this is the B the consonant B that you stick at the front and that says Bama so but writing Bama and if we were doing this live in a classroom which unfortunately we can't do now because of the um COVID pandemic I would have you get out um pens and paper and have a go at writing the circular shapes of the letters to show you how um how approachable it is so one of the things we know put sometimes puts people off trying a non-European language and is a different writing system um and Burmese and the other languages that we teach with different writing systems are very learnable and we are well experienced in getting people to look take their first steps um so I'm going to move on for um lack of time that's how we write Myanmar and the other thing that sometimes puts people off having a go at learning a non-European language is if it's a tone language and Burmese is a tone language so most of the languages in the world are described as tone languages and if you don't already know what that means is that as well as vowels and consonants the pitch at which a syllable or a word is pronounced is one of the distinctive parts of its meaning and so for Burmese we've got some pairs here like the word go which is spelled like this but the word go means help so if you wanted to tell someone please help me you'd say goobah goobah and these little L shapes here L shapes here are to indicate that the pitch stays low so both both syllables are low in pitch goobah whereas the same uh consonant and vowel but said at a high pitch means it's a different word and means something else the tones are the high tone is represented in the spelling so you spell the tones in Burmese it's very it's much much much easier than Chinese and if you want to and this word goo said in a high a high pitch means to copy so goobah means please copy it but goobah means please help me so goobah and goobah and that's how it works and that's two of the tones you've got a low tone and a high tone here for goob and goob there are in fact four tones in Burmese there's two others that you'd learn but as I say the tones are spelt out in the writing system so if you learn how to spell you remember the tones and it all comes as a package The last thing before I hand over to you for questions if you have any is one of the other interesting features about the sounds in Burmese I said when I introduced myself that I teach linguistics as well so some of the linguistic and nuts and bolts and machinery of the language are the things that I find fascinating and I'm passionate about explaining them as well and and that's a class of sounds that we call voiceless nasals so in Burmese as well as a syllable ma you can also have a syllable ma ma so you turn your voice off at the beginning of the m and you let the air come out of your nose ma ma so ma is a verb that means to be hard there's something that's rigid ma and ma is a verb that means to order so ma there means it's it's hard it's rigid and ma means I order it so there's a bunch of sounds that have that sort of feature you can have and you can have and and you can see in the writing system there's there's a hook pointing to the left that indicates this feature in the in the alphabet so and and then finally slightly frivolously there's a couple of phrases that have a few of these sounds in them one of them is to say to blow your nose which is so is the Burmese for snot and is what you do when you blow your nose which uses two of these sounds and more seriously and capital investment in Burmese if you're reading the financial news the word for capital investment has lots of these sounds in it it's and again if we were live I'd invite you to have a go at pronouncing that and and saying the sounds it's all a lot of fun right so I think that is all I have to say about Burmese language teaching as I say especially at the moment Burmese comes with some very energizing and motivating live current events which has been galvanizing our language learning experience quite a lot and we try to keep in touch with what's going on in the country and what's happening culturally there are plenty of Burmese speakers in London so there's a bit of a scene if you're interested in Buddhism there are we can do visits to London Burmese Buddhist temples if you're interested in films we can have film screenings so there's a large Burmese population in London and I teach with a colleague who is an active speaker of Burmese Mathesim and you'd have classes with both of us I tend to concentrate more on the grammar and the mechanics of the language and she concentrates and reading and she concentrates more on speaking we divide things up that way so Burmese will be running next year as will Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese the four Southeast Asian languages that we are teaching in the moment and I'll hand over to you now for any questions that you may have about either Indonesian or about Burmese or about the other languages we teach or indeed any aspect of how you can include study of Southeast Asia and into your languages and cultures degree thank you very much so do we have any there is a question from the audience member someone asked I think this question is for Sujin why do you think Islam has been so success in Indonesia and how did Islam or originated in Indonesia yeah okay that is actually a long question but I'm going to try to make it as short as possible this is really complicated it's wrong um why Islam was successful it was just um um it was a long story because Islam came gradually yeah very gradually and um eventually I don't know how to make it short eventually uh there were there were more successful partly because they were quite aggressive yeah because they they did it by wars they were quite aggressive to be honest and um yeah and they gained more and more popularities during the colonialism because when the Dutch came people considered Islam as a kind of a symbol to be against the colon the colonizer as well yeah so that's how they gained more and more popularity and um now I'm talking about the more contemporary period why it became more popular um I don't know how to make this short either but it is you know in 1965 there was um there there was a coup there was a genocide uh of uh of the of millions of communist people yeah and um at that time communism in in in Indonesia uh was considered you know they stigmatized the communists they they considered communists as basically as bad evil and atheist they're the same yeah Marxism Communism uh atheism they were all the same and they were evil full stop and the people who were fighting against the the communists was at that time a large part was from the the Muslim fundamentalist groups and out of that Islam gained more popularity after the 1965 genocide I think that's that's uh that's my short answer because I can you know this is like a very long you know it's not enough to explain in my understanding two sutures there's sort of polarization isn't there between secularism and um and Islam there's that the is the Islamization of of Indonesian has has been a polarization of of social values to some degree in some ways yeah I don't know it's not my area yeah yeah in some ways in some ways yes but it's a lot more complex than that yeah it's just it's a huge country right there's an enormous it's an enormous issue you know there's just so many things that's part of it yes but that's definitely part of it okay do we have any other answer your question I'm sorry if it's not yeah but yeah I mean I'm sure um Su Chen you could um direct the the person who put the question to some reading um places where you could find out a lot more about good um do we have any other um questions or comments from the rest of you um Anna Helena or Anna you're very welcome you can unmute and speak if you wish um and do you know do tell us what your um what your interests where your interests lie what attracted you to the SOAS degree and what you're hoping to to gain from it we would love to know more about you no are you there I can't actually see the participants just in how if you have to go to um ah here we are so right now you are Indonesian I understand is that right yeah okay do um oh I can allow you to there we are I can allow them to talk oh okay I saw it I saw them yeah right now Anna and there we are right now there we are sorry you were muted can you hear me now yes we can sorry uh yeah uh yeah I'm Indonesian but I'm interested to study Chinese uh yeah well the point that I want to see the session I just want to know how uh the Indonesian is taught uh in university in the UK and also like I'm curious little bit of uh Burmese the language right well well remember that um in your life and in the world the opportunities to learn Chinese are very very many and the opportunities to learn Burmese are very very few yeah so if we can uh if we can seduce you into coming to learn Burmese instead of Chinese um there will be plenty of opportunities in your life to learn Chinese should you wish to but very few to learn Burmese and it's especially encouraging to see Southeast Asians learning each other's languages you know amazingly there's not a lot of learning of other Southeast Asian languages by people in Southeast Asia so really really good to hear an Indonesian who wants to learn um learn Burmese that's great yeah thank you so if you're interested in finding out more I mean either about how we teach Indonesian which is um gonna be interesting to you or about Burmese do um get in touch directly I can put our uh email addresses in the in the chat so my I'm just in what is my email address is JW2 which I'm just trying to type as I speak there we are so if you're interested we can we can have a one-to-one session we talk anytime about about Burmese um and how it fits into the degree um one of the especially valuable things is that it's still possible to learn one of the Southeast Asian languages including Burmese and um depending I guess on the pandemic and the political situation spend um a summer or a year in Myanmar learning Burmese um and there's something that not many not many students um do it's only maybe one or two a year but it's a really incredible um opportunity very rare opportunity to study at um the Yongebol University of Foreign Languages if you want to have a sort of full-on authentic Burmese experience or you can learn um with private tutors and friends and colleagues of ours or a mixture of both um and that gives you the chance to travel around Myanmar and really absorb yourself in the country with um with relatively few responsibilities you know it's something that won't happen again in your life with the opportunity to spend a year somewhere learning language and and following your interests uh is it like if I if I want to learn for example like any languages in so us uh it's like is that the compulsory that I have to go like one year abroad to not at all I think for Chinese it is compulsory as I understand it you have to check with the Chinese teaching section um and I think you have to do you I think you can do a different degree in Chinese studies if you want to learn some Chinese and not do the year abroad but the BA Chinese does require a year abroad um for uh for Burmese um and Southeast Asian languages in general we we leave it up to you it's possible to finish the degree in three years and some people choose to do that and then go to the go to the region afterwards and either study further or get jobs with NGOs or as journalists or whatever they're going to do um and our graduates go on to do really really interesting things and so or you can spend a year abroad as a third year of a four-year degree come back study for another year and then and then do get on with your career after that so we leave it up to you because we know that not everyone is up for a year abroad it doesn't suit everyone's funding or life arrangements whatever they might be so we leave it flexible okay but it's a Burmese like for the BA is that like three years or four years well as I say you can do it in three years or four years and now you do it under the shell of the degree structure called BA languages and cultures you choose Burmese as your degree you can complete the degree in three years without a year abroad or you can spend a third year abroad and completed in four years there's two there's two formats that you can choose and you don't have to decide at the beginning you can decide halfway through okay thank you okay thank you hi what about um Helena and uh and Anna we haven't heard from you but uh you're very welcome anyway you can ask any question if you want yeah yeah so I just asked um you know I just got an email um Anna's email address because I'm doing the survey about COVID-19 so great yeah yeah yeah so anyway let's have more questions now so right now are you in at the moment are you in Indonesia or are you in no I'm in London in London yes yeah are you have you been living in London for for some time or over nine years okay so you've been over nice yes oh that's a long time yeah that's good yeah you live with your parents or here no alone oh okay okay yeah where are you from originally which part of Indonesia uh actually my family from West Java close to Bandung but like I grew up in Jakarta all my education in Jakarta oh okay so what did you do in London like for this nine well at the moment is I'm working and I'm doing some like a Mandarin course right okay good good and you've decided it's time to do a degree yes actually in 2015 I studied in san mary university uh well it was like a mistake actually after one year I just gave up I studied low okay ah yeah it was like very hard what what attracted you to to the sewers degree what did you what did you see that you like to look of uh I think it's like the location as well because I'm living in London and also like there are not many uni in London that has like Chinese degree right yeah yes and also I heard is a good uni I mean I've been there like before there's a lot of like international student as well and I heard that source university is a is a good university to study foreign languages um so Anna has asked a question which I'm very happy to answer live I think we've we've not got a great deal of time left but let me answer your question Anna so you've asked um whether you have to pick a specific avenue for languages and cultures or can you keep the degree quite broad um I think you can keep it broad um and you can you can choose to specialise in a particular language and follow that through the whole degree and there is also some scope for um uh for including more than one language within the degree if you wish so actually what I can do is direct you to the um I'm going to find the languages and cultures web page um which is here so I can show you how that's how that works and how how much flexibility there is and I'm going to share my screen again hold on a second I just move some things around on my screen there we go so this is the um languages and cultures degree page on the SOAS website and if you go to structure that's where you can see how the how the degree is organised um and in general we have um quite a lot of the first year is uh is fixed um and thanks Jeffrey for posting the link there so you'll be doing um you'll do certain courses in um languages around the world some training in how to go about language learning um how to write essays how to do some career planning that's language learning and writing some basic cultures about a basic concept of the um the cultures of the regions that we teach um and you will um normally choose a language as well right so you'll you'll you'll pick a language um in year two you start um specialising a bit more on uh literature or you can also take topics in linguistics there's quite a lot of um of choice um you'll see here the list of modules that we teach which are specific to different regions of Africa Asia and the Middle East which are the three regions that SOAS um focuses on um and here you have the list of languages that we're running and um you will normally have some indication of whether or not a language is available in the given year I we are pretty pretty certain that next year Burmese uh Indonesian Thai and Vietnamese um for Southeast Asia will all be available um we sometimes have Cambodian too that won't be running um next year I teach that as well but not at the moment um and then the other languages so African languages um Haric, Somali, Zulu and Swahili and then Middle Eastern languages so Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew and then languages of South Asia so Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit and Urdu is what Son offer at the moment on Yoruba is the other African language that we teach so there's quite a quite a choice and I think there is some scope um if you want and if it makes academic sense um for you to have a go at uh focusing on one language and maybe doing some of another language um if that's of interest that's certainly certainly possible so for example you might do one year of a second language in your final year if you want to um but uh you'll have an academic advisor to to guide you through your um choices on the degree and how to pick your modules as I say there's not much choice apart from which language you're going to do at the beginning and then you have a bit more choices you go through the degree that's how we've done it so thank you for the um for the question um do we have any more uh I have a question is it Burmese similar with Thai? No not related Burmese is um it is in that it's related um technically it's related to Chinese it's sign of Tibetan but it's like it's like Tibetan and languages of northeast India southwest China um and it's not related to Thai at all um and if you've done any other languages around East Asia so happens that Burmese grammar is very similar to Japanese grammar and it's not related at all to Japanese but it just happens to be organized in a slightly similar way okay normally because I was thinking that uh a country normally have similar language with the neighbour country that's not true in Southeast Asia there's a lot of languages going on um and there so there are five major language families in Southeast Asia whilst most of the almost all of the languages in Indonesia are all related closely or less closely but they're all one Austrian language family um in Southeast Asia there's a there are three big language families and bits of bits of two more so there's Tibetan and languages which are languages like Burmese Thai Kedai languages which are languages like Thai and and then Mon Khmer languages so languages like Cambodian and Vietnamese although Vietnamese has taken on lots of features that make it appear similar to Chinese in some ways actually Vietnamese and Cambodian are related and there are lots of um you know there are about a thousand languages in mainland Southeast Asia that most of them are from those three families and there are two other smaller ones so some Austronesian languages around and then some uh small family called Miao Yao so languages like Hmong spoken in um sort of uh western Lao south-west China a few in northeast in Burma and northern Thailand so there's another small family there so it's very very diverse lots of languages going on and they do share certain features even if they're not um sort of historically related you know if you put what happens if you put languages next door to each other for many centuries they do take on certain similarities even if they're not related so that's happened okay thank you question I could go on answering that for hours that's exactly what I work on good right I think we may be um at this point uh running yeah I think we'll need to yeah we'll need to wrap up I don't know I know Justin you shared your email address um with with students and Sucin if you if you'd like to share your email address in case you have any questions that would be great sure hang on a second I'm just going to write it down on the chat there and SM 100 SM 100 at soas.ac.uk here it is so you can ask me any question about Indonesia not any sorry I can't answer any question otherwise I get confused if you ask me about Burmese you ask you know about Burmese you ask Justin okay but also Burma asked Justin do remember that all our all our information is on the SOAS website and if you google SOAS Burmese uh or SOAS Indonesian our names and faces will pop up pretty readily we're easy to find so do get in touch if you have any further questions and similarly if you contact Maggie or the um the team um who've organized this event they can um the team um who've organized this event they can forward your inquiries to us very easily so thank you thank you very much for your presentation can I can I um make a one announcement uh if you are Indonesian there will be a talk actually it's organized by the UK the the the society in UK but it's in Indonesian language so it will be about Chinese Indonesian and um Muslim and Chinese Indonesians yeah so it's um just in case you want to attend uh you can you can see the information on my Facebook actually on my Facebook page okay thank you thank you very much thanks Maggie for organizing it so smoothly and uh thanks to all our attendees for your attention and your questions thank you thank you so much everyone


Hello everybody, welcome to part two of our read-through of the Yoga Sutras. Now once again, for people who have been on this channel for a while, you know that typically on Wednesdays we recap what we reviewed on the Dark Outpost the day before on Tuesday. If you would like to join us on the Dark Outpost platform with David Zublik, there is a link down in the description box below for his platform. Now most of you know that normally our project on the Dark Outpost is to read through the missing books of the Bible. However, by David's request, we are actually now reading through the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to try to, I guess, dispel some of the disinformation about yoga. A lot of people have the wrong idea about yoga and in order to understand what things truly are versus hearsay from other people, we have to then look through the material ourselves. So that's what we're doing. We're reading through the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. This is a 5,000 year old book just to show you guys that it's not about demons, it's actually all about your mind and how to calm your mind down so that you can surrender to God. Now because we've dealt with some bullying here on this channel from fundamentalist, I am disabling the comments for any of the videos regarding yoga just to put a boundary up with people who feel like they have a right to name call and to be A-B-U-S-I-V-E towards people who don't share the same opinion that they do. It's actually pretty sad for them, pretty pathetic in my opinion that they have a right to be that way towards people who share a different opinion than them but that's the world we live in. So in order to just kind of control that and put a boundary up with that, that's why we are disabling the comments. I know that you guys understand. I appreciate all of you so, so, so much and I'm so excited. I've gotten so many emails from people who are starting a yoga practice and are looking for a teacher and I think that's fantastic. I can't say enough good things about the practice of yoga and there's many different lineages and many different teachings and so that is something that you are going to have to figure out for yourself which lineage works best for you. Again, I am an ashtanga practitioner, student and an authorized teacher, the only female here in the state of Georgia that's authorized by KPJY to teach ashtanga yoga. We covered that in our introduction to yoga video which I will place a link to that down in the description box below. Now, as most of you know who are following along on the dark outpost, we're probably not going to keep up with the same readings. We're a little bit ahead here on my channel and that's okay because here on my channel it's just me reading where over on David's channel we're able to have a discussion so we're getting through the yoga sutras a little bit slower over there but I'm going to go ahead and push forward here for us so that we can continue to move forward on this journey together. Now, again, I'm reading the yoga sutras with the translation and commentary by Shri Swamimi Satchitananda, that's one of the most popular commentaries. I will put a link to that down in the description box below as well but there's many different commentaries on the yoga sutras. Now we're in the first book which is Samadhi Pada and we're going to be starting with sutra number 15 where we left off after our introduction into the yoga sutras. So if you missed part one of the yoga sutras, I will also place that link down in the description box below because you probably want to start with sutra number 1 to 15 as we read in part one before starting with this part two. Alright, so let's go ahead and get started with sutra number 15. The consciousness of self-mastery is one who is free from craving for objects seen or heard about is non-attachment. So this is probably one of the biggest crux of the pole yoga practice is this idea of non-attachment. So let's go ahead and get into the commentary here regarding number 15's sutra. Normally the mind gets attached by seeing or hearing something. It is mainly through the eyes and ears that the mind goes out and gathers things to satisfy its desires. Before the mind is attracted to something it sees or hears, you should have discrimination to see whether the object is good for you or not. The mind should not just go and grasp as it wants. Non-attachment should not be misunderstood to be indifference. That's a big, big thing there. Non-attachment is not indifference. A lot of yoga students get this confused. They think that in order to practice non-attachment that you have to be indifference. That's not it. You have to stand up for the truth. You have to be able to be a warrior for the truth. However you also need to be able to be non-attached to the outcome and that again goes back to surrendering to God. Every desire brings its own color to the mind. The moment you color the mind a ripple is formed. Just as when a stone is thrown into a calm lake it creates waves in the water. When the mind is tossed by these desires one after the other there won't be peace or rest in the mind. With a restless mind you won't have a steady practice. When you want to do something constantly your mind should not be distracted by other desires. That's why this sort of dispassion or non-attachment must always go with the practice. Any practice without this non-attachment can never be fulfilled. That's why many times people say, oh I have been practicing meditation for so many years, I pray daily, morning and evening, yes they do that. We have to accept it because we see them sitting in meditation every day or going to the church or temple.  There are people who read the whole Bible. There are people who repeat the Bhagavad Gita every day. They won't even eat until they do that.  But still they remain in the same state. The reason is that their minds are still dissipated because of the different desires. How many people stand in front of the altar and think of their business or allow their eyes to wonder about to see how many of their friends are there? Temples and churches became social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the mind of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips may repeat the prayer mechanically. Like a photograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. That's why you can't collect and compose the mind unless it's free from distracting desires. Meditation is possible only when the mind is free from attachment. In fact you need not even practice meditation if your mind is completely free from all selfless desire. You will see that you are always at ease. You will never become restless and never disappointed. So we need to practice and the non-attachment and of these two, non-attachment is the most important.  No, when we say unattached it means without personal desire. If you really want to be greedy, be greedy in serving others. Try to remove the suffering of other people. Once you are unattached in your personal life you can serve others. And by doing that you will find more and more joy. That is why sometimes I say that the selfless person is actually the most selfish one. Why? Because a selfless person doesn't want to lose his or her peace and happiness. Even with God do not have a personal desire or attachment. Many people approach God and say, God give me this, give me that, help me when this can pay, or if you help me pass this examination I will light 10 candles. We try to do business with God. It only shows our own ignorance. Those very candles were given to us by him. So what is the idea of giving them back to him as if we have created something? Our desirous mind deludes us and we become ignorant. The discrimination of a desirous person gets completely faded. His or her interest is to achieve things, that's all. But the desirous person doesn't bother to wait and think. Scripture says even the desire for liberation is bondage. Even if you desire liberation you are binding yourself.  To get liberation you have to be completely desirous. Is it possible to be desirous? No. Actually it's not possible. As long as the mind is there, its duty is to desire. It seems to be contradictory but the secret is that any desire without any personal or selfish motive will never bind you. Why? Because the pure selfless desire has no expectation whatsoever. So it knows no disappointment no matter what the result. But though it expects nothing, it has its own reward. When you make someone happy you see his happy face and you feel happy yourself. If you have really experienced the joy of just giving something for the sake of giving, you will wait greedily for opportunities to get that joy again. Many people think by renouncing everything by becoming selfless and desirous there is no enjoyment, no that is not so. Instead you become the happiest man or woman. The more you serve, the more happiness you enjoy. Such a person knows the secret of life. There is a joy in losing everything, in giving everything. You cannot be eternally happy by possessing things. The more you possess, the more sad you become. Haven't you seen millionaires, people of high position, prime ministers, presidents? Are they happy? No. The higher the position, the greater the trouble. Only a saint, a renunciate, is always happy because there is nothing for a saint to lose. Because you don't have anything, you have your own self always. That is the secret. That is why we say have non-attachment. By renouncing worldly things you possess the most important sacred property, your peace. There is another aspect or benefit of non-attachment. It is mainly a person with a detached mind who can do a job perfectly. As an example, the other day I received a letter from a disciple who runs one of my centers. Another yoga teacher visited his center and asked him, Don't your students ask for something more? In my classes if I don't teach something new each class they say, What is this? We paid you and got this yesterday. You are teaching us the same thing today. Why should we pay more? Unless you give us something new we won't pay you more. So I carefully arranged my lessons in such a way that every day I can add something new so that I can ask for more money. But here I see the same old stuff every day and people are coming more and more and nobody seems to be disappointed. Then my child said we don't sell yoga. We just teach for our joy. The people contribute as they want. There is no business here, but rather the heart is working. Probably in your case you expect money. And so you are interested in teaching something new every time to get more people and more money. It is a fact. The same thing is happening in our other Hatha classes also. For years now people have been coming to classes and each class has been more or less the same. And every time they come they contribute something without ever getting tired of it. They could practice the same thing at home but still they come to classes because they don't feel the vibration of business there but the vibration of yoga. That is what they don't want to miss. Even in my lectures I don't quote many scriptures or try to give something new every time. Probably if I were to play back tapes of my past talks it would be the same ideas again and again. People might say the Swami says nothing new, the same old Swami, the same old stuff. Why do they listen again and again? I feel happy and they all feel happy being there. So they make me happy and I make them happy. We just spend a little happy time together, that's all. We just talk about something or do something in the name of yoga, yes that is the secret. There is a joy in being together, that's all. So that is the life of detachment. There is no expectation. We just come together. They don't feel that they are losing their money and I don't feel that I am gaining their money. We are all as one family. We pull our money, our energy and our ideas. What else do we want in this life? And that is yoga. So when the mind is free from personal interest, we do our work well and feel joyful. Our lives become meaningful. Our minds are free from selfishness and there is a sacrifice in everyone's lives. The very world becomes a heaven and a boat of peace and bliss. Everything in this life gives. Sacrifice is the law of life. That is why we admire and adore people who have given their lives for the sake of humanity. Why do we worship Jesus in the cross? Because sacrifice is the meaning of that cross. He sacrificed himself and we worship that quality. It is not the piece of wood we appreciate but the sacrifice it represents. He gave his very life for the sake of humanity. It is because of that sacrifice that all the prophets, sages and saints are worshiped as divine beings or like Jesus as God himself. So for those who think yoga is demonic, that right there shows you that you are very wrong about that and if you actually picked up the yoga sutras you would see that you have more in common with the people who practice yoga than you actually know. It is not only saints but everything in nature, trees, birds, animals, they all live for the sake of others. Why does a candle burn and melt away to give life? Why does an instant stick burn to ash to give fragrance? Why does a tree grow to give fruit and flowers? Is there anything sentient or insentient in this world that lives for its own sake? No. When the entire nature sacrifices, why should we human beings alone lead selfish lives? We are here to give and give and give. What is due to us will come without our worrying about it. Of course even here we can wonder, if I am to lead a sacrificial life, how can I eat, how can I clothe myself or have a house of my own? You can have all these things to equip yourself to serve others. You must have a bed to rest in to feel refreshed in the morning to go out to serve others. You must eat to have enough energy to serve others. So you do everything with the idea that you are preparing yourself to serve others. Even the practice of meditation is not done just for your own peace, but is done because with a peaceful mind you can go out in the world and serve well. With that very idea you can meditate. So even your yoga meditation becomes a selfless action. This is what it is meant by even with God do not have attachment. This non-attachment alone is enough to change your entire life into a joyful one. This brings us to sutra number 16. When there is non-thirst for even the gunas or constitutions of nature due to realization of the parusha or true self that is the supreme non-attachment. In this sutra Patanjali goes on to explain the higher forms of non-attachment. The detachment of the mind from its personal desire and enjoyment of this ordinary non-attachment. The mind might want something, but having control you tell the mind no and it stays away. But in the higher non-attachments you don't even think of attaching yourself. In other words with the ordinary non-attachments you may be completely free from new things coming in to tempt you. But what will you do with the impressions that are already in your mind? The memory of having experienced something will still be there. For example after many years of thievery Robert decides not to steal anymore. But in the memory of having stolen so many things and enjoyed them for himself remains in his mind. In the yogic term these memories are called impressions or samskaras. Now and then the samskara will come up. Oh how nice it would be if I had just stolen that car. How I would have enjoyed it. But these people came and told me not to attach myself and I accept it and I am staying away from this or I remember how much I enjoyed smoking and drinking. This yoga business came in and somehow I don't have those joys anymore. Many people feel like that sometimes because the samskaras are still there. You can't just go into the mind and erase the impressions. Would they get themselves erased at one point when? When you succeed in going within and realizing the peace and joy of your own self. The moment you understand yourself as the true self. You find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments of your experience before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun. You lose all interest in them permanently. This is the highest non-attachment. Before that you are in between. You have not tasted that great joy but you have experienced some mental peace. However this peace is just a reflection of the true peace on your tranquil mind. You should understand this point well. To use the analogy of the mirror again being a brilliant light reflected on a mirror. If the mirror has a crook or colored surface the reflection gets disordered. The disordered or colored reflection is like the disordered happiness you enjoy from outside things. By detaching yourself from these things you make the mental mirror steady and straight and see a steady image of yourself. But still the image is not the true original self or bliss absolute. Once the mind becomes pure and steady you experience a steady happiness. That is the result of the first detachment or lower detachment. Although it is only the reflection it is almost the same as the original. Once that steady reflection is achieved the true experience will happen automatically. You need not do anything more to get it. The mind automatically seizes to exist and all that remains is the original peace and joy which we call God. If that supreme non-attachment comes even once, even for a second you experience that joy. That's why we try to sit for a while in meditation every day. If we get even a glimpse of that we will not try to go here or there to taste other things. If you find a delicious dish in one restaurant you will never go to any other restaurant is it not so?  In the same way you will just leave all these things saying how can these things compare to that? You will not want to lose any opportunity is to sit and enjoy that peace. Even if you slowly get rooted in it you can allow your hands and even your mind to work but you will always be in peace. In Hindi there is a saying in the mind God in the hand work or it could be said more clearly as keep the heart in God and the head in the world. If you know how to put your heart in God you can rest there always and still play in the world.  Nothing can bind you. You can enjoy everything as play. You can be an expert player. If you don't know how to play something get kicked. I still remember the first time I played cricket. I was just looking around and somebody hit me with a ball. I just threw down my racket and left. Cricket became a terrible game to me because I couldn't play well. But by knowing how to play many thousands of people enjoy that game. How many people are always in the water from morning until night? Whereas other people are dreadfully afraid of it. In the same way we can never be afraid of the world if we learn to enjoy it. We can really enjoy the world and even give all the pleasures to our senses. Nothing needs to be starved but when? Only when we have found the source and connected one part of the mind there. Then you can enjoy everything otherwise we will get lost. So enjoy the world doesn't mean immediately. Achieve supreme non-attachment first and then enjoy. That is the secret of success in life. One who does this will always succeed. There can be no failure in his or her life. Everyone should do that. That is our goal in birthright. Nothing less than that. This brings us to sutra number 17. Distinguished contemplation is accompanied by reasoning reflecting rejoicing and pure I am-ness. In the first section of this portion, batanjali gives the theory of yoga. Now he speaks of the final practice called samadhi, a contemplation and its variations. Batanjali is completely scientific in this respect. He sees yoga as a rigorous science and never hesitates to give all the aspects of the practice and their ramifications. It is the duty of the scientist to understand and explain every aspect of his discoveries. It is just as when a chemist formulates a medicine. He has to explain its proper usage as well as any adverse reactions that could occur if not used properly. In case you might think you are ready to practice samadhi, right away, you should know that the practice of samadhi only becomes possible after a person has achieved perfection in concentration and meditation. The mind must have acquired one pointedness and have been brought completely under control because the entire mind must be used in the practice of samadhi. In this and the following sutra, batanjali talks about two kinds of samadhi, distinguished and undistinguished. Batanjali further divides distinguished samadhi into four forms. To understand them we have to understand the makeup of what he calls nature or prakriti. According to batanjali, prakriti also has four divisions. The very gross material, the subtle elements, called the ten mantras, which ultimately express as the concrete forms which you see, the mind-stuff and the ego or individuality. So samadhi is practiced first on the gross objects, then on the subtle elements, then on the mind devoid of any object except its own joy. In other words, on the saktvik mind and finally on the eye feeling alone. There is a gradation because you can't immediately contemplate the very subtle. First you have to train the mind to focus on something concrete. When the mind is focused on a concrete object, that is a form of samadhi. Remember that at this point the mind is already well under control. The moment the purely focused mind contemplates an object it goes to the very depth of that object and understands every particle of it. A focused mind gains power. When that powerful mind concentrates on an object the entire knowledge of that object is revealed to it. So this kind of, I know you guys probably heard me speak about this in the introduction about the idea of the three big stars of the yoga sutras are prakriti, parusha and ishvara, and I've said many times that prakriti is nature. Perhaps this is why we use the physical practice of yoga, the asana or posture practice, to find that acute concentration because your body is a form of prakriti. It's a very solid form of concentrated prakriti. And so I as someone who's been practicing for a really, really, really long time understand what he's saying here because there is a difference between the understanding of the gross body, the natural body, and then an understanding of the subtle body. And yeah, when you first start practicing yoga you have no idea what the subtle body is. You have absolutely no contemplation of what that means within you. It takes a long time of concentrating solely on the gross body or physical body to start to pick up on the actions of the subtle body. So again that's why we use the asana, a very physical practice, a very demanding practice, in order to find these different elements within ourselves. And a lot of the yoga asanas, especially the ones that I do in my practice because I practice traditional yoga, force you to concentrate. They're not super easy. It's not easy to balance on your forearms or to put your legs behind your head. It takes you concentrating on your body and what's going on in your body in order to do that. So that's why traditional yoga is often very, very demanding. Now as Westerners we look at practices like ashtanga yoga, like these very hard practices and we think, oh this is about achieving physical greatness or losing weight or whatever but no actually it's just, it's really about the mind and learning how to use the mind properly to find again non-attachment as we spoke about in the last sutra. You do learn a lot of non-attachment within the practice of ashtanga yoga because the postures are so complicated that it takes a long, takes many years to really get the posture, to be able to execute the posture. And so that does teach you a level of non-attachment because you can't be attached to the result of the posture because if you are it's going to push you into a deep, deep depression because it's going to take a long time to actually achieve that. So I hope that makes sense. As I'm reading this again as I said, I understand what he's saying because I am a longtime practitioner, however I don't know if you guys are, if you're not practitioners if you understand what he's saying here but I'm hoping, I hope that my explanation helps you understand what he's saying here if it's, if it's weird to you. Alright, let's continue. Knowing this we can easily see that the scientist who probed the matter and discovered atomic energy was practicing this form of concentrated samadhi. They were practical and wanted to know, they focused their entire minds on that and even the small particle of matter revealed itself and getting the knowledge we gain power over the atom. That is what is meant by samadhi. So the benefit of this contemplation is the understanding of the inner secrets and powers of your object of contemplation. But what will you do with this power? The danger can easily be realized by seeing how atomic energy has been used for destructive B-O-M-B-S, that's a word I cannot say, on YouTube. But you guys see what he's saying, right? You can misuse these powers of being able to focus on something. You can focus on something to find joy and to find an attachment or as he said by what people have done on the darker side of life. There is a danger in getting all the extraordinary powers. And if this samadhi is practiced without the proper moral background, the results will be dangerous. But as a scientist, Patanjali must explain it anyway. In the next form, you contemplate the subtle elements. There is no concrete object to see. You contemplate something abstract like white or red or love or beauty because they are abstract. A normal person cannot understand what redness or love is without the help of a concrete object. But if you are able to contemplate and understand the concrete object well, your mind gets the capacity to understand the abstract things even without the concrete object. Then you rise above time and space also. This samadhi is called reflection. Further on, we go into the still subtler one in which even the discrimination or reflection is not there. You don't use the intellect here but to contemplate just as the tranquil mind itself, in that you get joy which is called the blissful samadhi. There is only joy there and no reasoning or reflection. In the fourth samadhi, it is awareness of individuality. You contemplate the inus.  It's impossible to visualize what that could be but still let us understand theoretically at least. The samskaras are impressions are still in the mind in their seed form even though you are only aware of the eye. The samskaras are still buried in the mind. This is the process of going inward, not evolution but involution. Originally the world or property was manifested. When it begins to manifest, the ego comes in first, then individuality and then the mind, then the gross elements. That is the natural evolution. And Cindy talked about that in one of our conversations about the Shiva and the Shakti, how Shakti is the action of the Shiva, the action of the I am. You see that now coming about how matter has to evolve in some aspects in order to be and then we have to go backwards in order to find the source of where we come from. I hope that makes sense. It makes sense to me. I hope it makes sense to you guys. In psychic meditation we experience the involution. It can be called the creation and destruction but actually there is nothing created in you nor is anything destroyed. As the Bhagavad Gita explains, the unmanifested appears as manifested and then returns to the unmanifested. That is what we see outside in the manifested, the in-between. That is what we call the creation. That is why according to yoga we say that God is pure consciousness and then property is also there, its nature being to evolve and then dissolve. And that makes sense.  And then your soul came in through your mother's body and created its own nature or property and goes through its life on this earth and then that property dissolves as we pass over and the soul returns back to its source. The soul just basically took a ride in a body, nothing happened to the soul. It just went through life in a human body that is not permanent. Property is the unmanifested condition as both matter and force which are inseparable like fire and heat. Without fire there is no heat, without heat there is no fire. When the nature is an unmanifested condition the force is dominant or static. For example, when dynamo doesn't revolve no electricity is produced but the moment the motor starts rotating it produces electricity. This force or prana has three constitutions called gunas, satva, rajas, and tamas, tranquility, activity, and inertia. So again prana is life force, alright and the gunas, I talk about the gunas a lot with my students, they're like little rivers of different life force, shakti that's always running it through your body that you learn to work with throughout your life when you are participating in action. So again that's satva, rajas, and tamas, tranquility, activity, and inertia. When all three qualities are in equilibrium they do not affect the matter but once there is a little disturbance in the gunas it creates motion in the matter which gives rise to all kinds of forms.  So without friction there is no change. All matter carries these three gunas and if it's left in its natural state there is no change but that little disturbance or friction it creates, as he's saying here it creates motion in the matter which give rise to all kinds of forms. That is how the entire universe appears, the sky, the earth, the fire, the air and all the elements are created. So the one that is unmanifested slowly evolves itself and ultimately we see the concrete forms. Now we are in the concrete world with satva, rajas, tamas, and full swing. We have to work from what we see now, from the known we work back towards the unknown. We can't just ignore the known and directly tackle the unknown, it is easier to do something with the concrete things which we can feel, see, touch, and taste. So that is why the mind is given a concrete object contemplate first when it has been made tranquil by concentration. Once it understands that then it goes a little deeper into subtle elements, then the still subtler ones until it reaches the original matter. Unless you understand the property very well you can't get out of it, you can't just ignore it or set it aside. That is why the four samadhis are to be practiced first, one after the other. But there is a danger in these samadhis also. It is to be practiced but we have to face the danger of it. That is why you have to prepare yourself with purity and selflessness, otherwise you will be in danger with your newfound powers. Take for example, Jesus was able to heal the sick and crippled people. He used his godly powers to bring good to others. But he never used the same force to save himself when he was to be crucified. If he really wanted to he could have done it but he didn't. That means that these mysterious forces should not be used for selfish purposes. So again, this person that is doing the commentary on the Yoga Sutras is making a lot of references to Jesus and Jesus' role in humanity.  That just shows you that we have to start researching things for ourselves. When you're saying Yoga is demonic and you're not even reading any of this stuff, that is the absolute opposite of demonic.  God doesn't. And so hopefully this is a wake up call for everybody listening who thinks Yoga is demonic that it's actually not. Alright, this brings us to Sutra number 18. By the firmly convinced practice of complete cessation of the mental modifications, the impressions only remain. This is the other Samadhi. So in this deeper Samadhi, the buried seeds can still come into conscious mind when the proper opportunity is given and pull you into worldly experiences. This is why all these four stages should be passed and you should get into a deeper Samadhi where even the ego feeling is not there and the seeds of the past impressions are rendered harmless. In that state, only the consciousness is there and nothing else. Once that is achieved, the individual is completely liberated and there is no more coming into the world and getting tossed. Although you appear to be in the world then, you are not involved. Having achieved this, the world is just a shadow from which you are completely free. This is what is meant by liberated person. It is not that a liberated person just goes away from the world or dies. He or she is called Jeeva Mukti, one who lives but at the same time is liberated. And isn't that what we're trying to find in the Christian faith as well? I mean, Jesus made it very clear that this world was not our world, that we still have to live in it but it's not ours. We have to find liberation from it. This is what the original Christians taught, the Gnostics, the inner knowledge. This is what yoga is. It's Gnosticism. It's inner knowledge, not ideo or outer knowledge. Jesus said, behold, the kingdom of heaven is inside of you. It's not outside of you.  It's all within you. And so the teachings of yoga line up perfectly with the teachings of the original, the true Christian faith. So you first understand the nature completely. Then bring it under your control and then push it aside and get liberated. Sometimes people try to renounce the world by retiring to a forest or a cave thinking that otherwise they will get caught. But such a person can never be free from nature. He can never hide anywhere, wherever he goes, nature will follow. There is no other way except to understand it. Handle it properly and then rise above it. That is why with this Samadhi and with its four variations should be practiced. Then you can easily understand because then you understand the property. You can brush it aside and turn it to see yourself. You can understand yourself to be pure self or the Purusha or soul. So Purusha is the soul which seemed to have been entangled in property and is now finally three. So again, property is nature. Purusha is soul. Ishvara is God. Purusha is what connects to God. Property is just nature. Sutra number 19. Those who merely leave their physical bodies and attain the state of celestial deities or those who get merged in nature have rebirth.  Do you lose all the benefits? Patanjali says no. Once you gain a certain mastery over nature but lose this body before attaining the highest goal of liberation, you go on to become one of the controllers of nature. Suppose you have mastered the gross elements without going into the subtler ones. You become the controller of gross elements of nature. If you have stopped the practice having reached the very depth of nature, you have become the master of nature. But whoever they become, they have come back to study further and get liberated. Temporarily they have dropped out of nature but get the final degree. They have to enter the university again. We drop out temporarily. But if we are interested in getting the degree, we have to go back to the university. Property is the university. You go to a certain point and get into a higher abode and control that nature. But still the seeds of desires and attachments are there. You are not completely liberated. So you come back again to fulfill the other practices and get that degree. That's why it is only on the human level that there is a possibility of getting liberated. So this is something that Jesus spoke about in the Gospel of the Holy Twelve. If you remember, I know people have an issue with reincarnation that are of the Christian faith, even though we've explained many, many, many times that the original Christians actually taught reincarnation. And we've explained that the church does not teach reincarnation because in teaching reincarnation you are teaching a form of liberation. There's no fear of death. And when you have people in a fearful state, you have them in a vulnerable state. And when you have someone in a vulnerable state, you can manipulate them and control them, which we know. If you've watched my videos on Constantine and our videos on the busy books of the Bible, we know that the church, the Christian church, is not a Christian church. It's a Mithraic church. Let's get that straight. They don't worship God that we worship. They worship the Son, God, Mithra.  The real Jesus, or Yeshua, is someone who spoke about reincarnation.  And we see that. We call those people that have gone through this a lot old souls. And my teacher once said that a lifetime you spend practicing yoga, it will take you seven more lifetimes for the lessons learned in that one lifetime to totally sink into your psyche. And so we're constantly evolving on ourselves. It's interesting. Many of you know that my grandmother just recently passed away, my last remaining grandparent. And it's funny because at her funeral, the pastor that led the funeral, I mean in my opinion, it was one of the most disrespectful funerals I've ever been to, but the further and further and further I step away from the church, the more and more and more I can see the deceptions of the church. Her funeral was all about the church. Really was nothing to do with her. It was about the church, which is a 501c3 business, which is the business as part of the deep state. It's all part of Satan's world. So my grandmother, who went to church though every Sunday, she was an organist. She also believed in reincarnation. She's the one that first taught me how to meditate when I was eight years old. And even though she herself was a Christian, she believed in reincarnation. She studied it. She believed that that was part of God's plan. And so I think that the more and more and more you live, the more you can see the beauty in life and how life is, it is a university as this commentary is saying. It's about learning and finding God. And thank God, thank God that we have multiple chances to learn and grow and evolve within our Shakti, our expression of nature, of the Shiva. So anyway, I think that's great that they're talking about this because that was the original teachings of Yahshua as well, was that you are going to keep coming back again. The fact that you have a divine spark isn't going to change from lifetime to lifetime to lifetime. When God created the heavens and the earth, He created you as well. We've all been around since the beginning, just not in these bodies. All right. So this brings us to Sutra 20. To the others, this Samadhi could come through faith, strength, memory, contemplation, or by discernment. These are some of the methods Patanjalin gives that will be discussed further in the second chapter on the yogic practice. Just briefly, faith must be there, or at least courage. You must be strong and you should have a good memory of all the mistakes you have made and the lessons you have learned so not to fall back into the worldly rut again. And of course, there must be contemplation, as Patanjalin is talking about all along and finally discernment or discrimination between the real self and the unreal. So the real self is Purusha, or the soul and the unreal is Prakriti, nature. Sutra 21 says, To the keen and intense practitioner, the Samadhi comes very quickly. Sutra 22 says, The time necessary for a success further depends on whether the practice is mild, medium, or intense. Sutra 23 says, Or Samadhi is attained by devotion with total dedication to God or Ishvara. So the commentary says, Here he says there is another way to get success. And this is called self surrender to God. By the term Ishvara, Patanjalin means the supreme consciousness, not the individual soul, but the supreme soul. Patanjalin goes on to explain who Ishvara or God is. And he goes on to talk about that in Sutra 24. Ishvara is the supreme Purusha, unaffected by any afflictions, actions, fruits of actions, or by any inner impressions of desires. This means he has no desire, so he has no action and no need to reap the fruits of actions. Then what is he? So basically he's saying God does not have to take action because God is not confused about who God is as we are confused. Sutra 25, In him in the complete manifestation of the seed of Omniscience, in other words, he is all knowing. Interesting, the Bible says that too, doesn't it? Let me read that again for the people on the back. In other words, he is all knowing. He is knowledge itself. The cosmic knowledge or the supreme soul. How can we imagine or visualize it? Imagine a circle. You see the space within it and the outer space outside of it. The inner space is finite, the outer is infinite. If you accept the existence of the finite space, automatically you have to accept an infinite one. Without infinite there can be no finite. The moment you said I am man, then there must also be woman. If you say left, then there must be a right. The thought of one implies the thought of the other. We feel that our minds and knowledge are limited in finite. So there must be a source of infinite knowledge beyond that. So again, a wonder into God, into that connectionness to God. Again, yoga is all about God and I think we're going to leave it there today. We're going to pick up next week, we went through 10 sutras today, so next week we'll pick up at sutra number 26 where we're going to get deeper into the discussion of the mysteries of God. So once again I hope that you guys are having a wonderful day. I would say leave me your thoughts and your opinions down in the comment section, but yes that has been disabled. I think again you guys understand why that's been disabled and I thank you so much for your patience regarding that matter. Again, I'm going to put a link to the commentary of the sutras that I'm reading out loud to you guys. So if you want to get your own book and read along with us, that would be awesome. And I will talk to you soon, bye.


We're back, baby. Mike says I've been sitting in a chair in my studio recording a video to what is going to be an insane 12 episode series. You think you know Wheel of 2K because maybe you watched it last year the year before that. You don't. This is completely new. Let me get some stuff out of the way first. Number one, I was in Hawaii for like two months and then I spent like three weeks in limbo. Basically just trying to move everything here which is my house in Michigan. And if you're wondering what all this is, this is one corner of that Wheel of Mutt studio. I'm not going to show you everything yet. I want to give you a full house tour. This is basically my makeshift studio until this whole place gets finished. It's not done yet. But that is not why we are here today. We're here today for Wheel of 2K.  I didn't say that right. Regardless, I hope you're excited for daily uploads of this series. The next 14 days will be fully consumed by Wheel of 2K. Here is the plan. Each league is a 12 game series. Now the way this differs from what you've seen in the past is we are playing for a record. Depending on my record at these 12 games, I will have one incredibly shitty challenge to complete for you guys. And they go as follows. If in my 12 games, I go 0 and 12. I don't know how the hell that would happen. But you guys can choose a permanent tattoo that will be on my body for literally the rest of my life. If I go one in 11, I will live stream FaceTime all of my access. Yeah, there's a lot of them. I get it.   I don't plan on not having it either. If I got two in 10, I will get a haircut of your choice.  If I go three in nine, now we're kind of getting into the realistic realm. I have not played an ounce of 2K in about a year now. I will do a 24 hour live stream. Now if I go four and eight, I will get a henna tattoo of your choice. Henna tattoos stay around for like a week or two.   So yeah. If I go five and seven, I will learn, record, and post five different TikTok dances. Honestly, I don't know why I made that for five and seven. That should have been 0 and 12. I didn't think this through. That's like probably the most likely record I will have. Yikes. If I go six and six, I'll do the 1,000 pushup stream. I've talked about this before. I can't end the live stream until I've completed 1,000 pushups. I have no idea how hard that is. It could take me 12 hours. It could take me an hour. I have no idea. If I go seven and five, I will recite a video essay. So you guys will all agree a full essay. You guys can write it up and I have to read it word for word and then post it. Whether that's a TikTok or a YouTube intro, I don't know. If I go eight and four, you guys can write up a tweet and I have to tweet it off of my Papa Meeg's Twitter. If I go nine and three, I am safe. Everything past nine and three, I am safe. I should be rewarded if I play that well. I don't really expect to. If I go nine and three, you have to write a paragraph on how handsome I am and you had to put it in the comments of that video.  So whatever. I'm already safe. I don't care. 11 and one, you have to cop my next merch drop. I don't even know what it's going to be yet. I will drop one like four months from now. I'm not going to go 11 and one. So it doesn't really matter.  I don't care how it happens. Send me her deeds. Give me the phone number. Give me her Instagram. I don't care.  If I haven't already. Actually, no, I'll have sex for anyway, even if I already have. Doesn't matter. No, no, no. These are the rules and don't worry. I'm going to Photoshop. I'll make it a whole graphic for this and I'll play it every single episode. So you guys don't forget and I'll make sure as we're going, I realize what's attainable and what's not. So after today, one of these things is already going to get knocked off. If I win, I won't be getting a permanent tattoo.  Although, all right, I'm done. On the bad side of the way, we got to get into the rules of actual wheel of 2K. I'll keep this quick. This will be the longest episode for sure because I got to go through all this stuff. Here is my lineup right now. Now I know you're looking at this. You're going to pop with me. Is your lineup supposed to start out super dog shit? Yes, but I called Denver. You guys probably remember Denver. He's my go-to editor. He makes awesome 2K videos and I asked him about the current state of 2K. He was like, bro, everybody has a 99 God squad.  A base team would be about a 91-92 overall. So I took this advice. I think my team is, yeah, a 92 overall right now. So to improve this team, I'm going to take one spin on a wheel before each game and that wheel is just to hell. We're guaranteed to get something really, really good. So right now it's Damiel Lillard, D-Wade, Yannis, Anthony Davis and Mo Bamba. I like that starting lineup I picked it. It's cute. And then on the bench, you just got some amethyst. So I'm not going to go nine and three with this team, but as we go here, hopefully I can keep upgrading the squad and getting better players. If I win the game, I keep the player I added. If I lose, I do not keep the player. We will not be doing a challenge wheel. All I'm worried about is the record of my four fits, but we will be doing a rage quit wheel. So if I can somehow get somebody to rage quit, we'll get an additional spin on a different wheel. So the way this is going to post is starting today for the next six days, we'll be the first six episodes. Then we're going to have an intermission, a little halftime. We'll post a wheel of mud, and then the last six episodes. Without further ado, let's get our first wheel spin in the books. This is the wheel of 2K. Oh yeah, I brought out the Motor City, Blake Griffin, Jersey, despite the fact that he completely finessed the entire Pistons franchise. I'm tired of suffering. Boys, this wheel is juiced. Hopefully we can get a dark matter player on the squad right now. Galaxy Oblejack, I'll take that. Ooh, we're definitely, definitely getting a dark matter. If you've ever explained it to me a little bit, I, like I said, I haven't played 2K in a year. Galaxy Opals are no longer the best. Dark Matter is the best now. So we have a team wheel jackpot. So I can take any single NBA player, but they must come from the team we land on here. So we get one player, but they must come from the Grizzlies, Jammeram. I have no idea if he has a very good card in this game. I have to assume he does Memphis Grizzlies. See, that's my problem is I don't know any of the 2K players either. I don't know the cheese. I don't know what's good. I don't know what's bad. We're about to learn so dark matter. There's got to be a Jammeram, yes. That's exactly what I want. I don't want anybody else wrote 99 overall dark matter Jammeram. I cannot wait to use this. Let's go. All right, we got to win our first episode for sure then. We just got a dark matter right out the bat. I got Mavericks Unison, Mavericks Court. Those of you who don't know, I'm technically a Detroit Pistons fan, but I'm a big time Dallas Mavericks bandwagon because of Derek Novitski. So keep that in mind as we go here. Jammeram, let's look at these stats, my friend. 20 years old, that's crazy to me. Driving Duncan's 98, it's actually a lot better than I thought, he's got 99 ball handling. Damn, okay, this is exactly what I want. I love the fast, fast point guards. Our first game of my team unlimited is about to get under the books. There's no challenge wheel. We're just hopping straight in. All right, boys, we're hopping in, let's get it. First game, please just give me someone else who just downloaded the game. I don't know who he's got in there. I'm excited. I'm here to play, baby. Oh, that's how we start out. That's how we start out, let's go. On ball defense, it's slept on. Oh, who's where? Who's where? Jaw. Gonna pull it. Come on. Oh, that's how we start this out, boys. Yo, not another rip. I love it. Good D. Great D. Try and blow by him. Nope, nope, Yanis. Yup, good pump. Down into Marant. I might have had a bucket somewhere in there, but I didn't get it. Oh, get the hoop, get the hoop. Oh, that's my ball. Ooh, we don't have a lot of time here. I'm just gonna walk into the paint and just look.  Here's my ball again. Here's my ball again, and that resets the clap. Okay, sweet. That is not what I meant. Shit.  Ooh, somebody hit on him. I don't know how I feel about that. Okay, ball the line. Oh, dude, he jumps. He jumps like crazy. Get it to Bamba. You're dry. I just, oh, bubububub. Dude, there's no way you missed that. Zion's going hard down there, but he missed it too. All right, Marant, all the way to the rack. Oh, shit, a good D. Wait for the spin. Oh, you gotta finish. Wait, what? Oh, it's a trash release. Oh, he's gonna get one now too. Dude, low scoring game here. We're both just getting kinda unlucky. Yup, off to John Marant. Wide open A, my first green. Oh, 2K21, I'll take it. He might be able to blow mine you there. Oh, what? Yo, I don't know what happened.  Oh no, no free buckets. Good, good. I'm gonna get the spin again.  Damn, no respect for the D-Wade 3 at all. No way. Oh, thank God. I was gonna throw something if I just got a charge. He's on Bamba, right? D-Wade for 3? That was not the greatest release, but I just gotta work on my releases. Oh, oh, Bamba, get on the floor.   Kinda threw that into absolute nothing, though. All right, it's okay. Mo-Bamba's getting the boards for sure right now. Oh, Larry Bird, Larry! Perfect, it's cause he's an amethyst, bro. That was a perfect release. No way. All right, good. As long as you don't hit that after I break. All right, fake it. Fake the shot, get in the paint. Bro, he was not about to do that. He was not about to do that double clutch reverse. Larry Bird, you dog. Oh, that would have been nasty. Oh, no way. No way. There is no way. And our first step, dude, I'm actually kinda bummed out cause I wanted to play a whole game, but just like Wheel of Mud, if we get a rage quit, we have to end cause it's one game per episode. We just got a rage quit, so we keep John Moran. That's amazing. And now we get to spin on the rage quit wheel. All right, the 2K rage quit wheel. Who would have thought we'd get our first game with honestly the lowest overall team we're ever gonna have? Oh, let's go. Oh my God. Bro, that's like the best thing on this wheel. We can spend 90K MT on one player. Bro, John Moran was 59K. We are gonna get it. I'm getting dark. I'm getting dark. There has to be. There has to be a dark matter, Dirk Niewitzki. Dirk Niewitzki is the greatest player of all time. He's the greatest basketball player of all time. Oh, bro. What's it called? Invincible Dirk Niewitzki? Wait, are there literally none? It makes sense though, because he's literally a God. He's literally the greatest player to ever play basketball. He's literally the goat of all goats. Of course I can't just buy him. Although he has a Galaxy Opa, my MT would be better spent somewhere else. I don't care. I have a free chance to put the goat on my team and I'm putting him on my team. Dirk is gonna carry this team. I promise you that. 9,950 MT. In the long run, I'd really like to get like a superstar three-point shooter at Shooting Guard. We are on our way. Thank you so much as always for watching the first episode. As of right now, I cannot get a permanent tattoo. It's the only thing that I've locked in. I cannot be getting a permanent tattoo of your guys' choice. We still can go one to 11, so I hope all the X's are ready for a FaceTime session. All right. I love you boys. Thanks for watching as always. I hope you enjoyed this series. It's gonna be a banger. Make sure you let me know your thoughts. See you tomorrow for the next episode. See you soon.


Welcome to this short video that introduces you to using the Ethereum Studio to build and deploy your first Dapp. So the first thing you'll see when you get to studio.atherium.org is this template picker. We have a series of templates that get you started with the framework for a Dapp, basically in increasing complexity. So I will stick to the Hello World example for the rest of this video. And you can also use the empty project to just start from scratch. Let's pick Hello World and then create project. Give it a few seconds to initialize. And here we go. We have the IDE interface. The first thing you'll see is this read me, which gives you some explanation of the application as a whole. And you'll also find comments in the code in each case, and the preview tab, not much happening here right now, but will vary soon. At the bottom, you have some statistical information. And at the top, you can pick the network, just the browser for now, but more to come soon. You can also create new accounts to transfer balances between. You can fork the project. And you can also share it to a whole bunch of different places. I'm especially a big fan of the embed. You can embed the studio into documentation, blog posts, things like that. All right, so let's look at the smart contract. As you could see, this one is relatively simple. And you can see the comments there to help explain some of the concept here. If you click configure, you can change the parameters of the public variables into the constructor. So if I change the variable there and save it, I will now compile. And we should hopefully get perfectly good output here. And now I deploy. And we can see the variable past plus the block number passed into the front end. If we look at the HTML, we can also see what is creating this page. And then the JavaScript that is binding the smart contract and the HTML together. Everything here will live reload. So if I change this and hit the save icon or your operating system shortcut for save and refresh the preview, you will see the HTML reflected live there. In the transactions tab, you can also see the transactions being sent backwards and forwards. And the gas used as well. And next to the explorer tab is also the interact tab where we can do something similar to the configure. And we can see the message sent by the configure tab. But we can also use the update function, which is exposed as a public function to change the message. And if I click the update button, we can see the transaction here. And the text changes here. So to recap that, the configure lets us change the initial message sent to the constructor. And the interact tab lets us change the variables of any other public functions here.