Re: What do you believe?

Description: Yoga is David Life's personal philosophy.

Question: Do you have a personal philosophy?

Transcript: That’s hard. I mean yoga philosophy is my philosophy. And what yoga philosophy says simply is, “You are it,” and, “This is it.” There’s no other place and there’s no other you. And so I think that that’s my personal philosophy too – is that I’m not looking for someone to save me or to save the world. I am the one I’ve been waiting for, and we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. You know so often today in these troubled times, I hear, “Well we need to educate the children. We need to get the young people interested in global warming, and in overpopulation, and in . . . in the troubling things in the world, and then they’ll fix it in their time.” I don’t believe that. I believe that action needs to be taken now. And the only thing stopping us from acting is our . . . Basically we’ve given up on ourselves and we feel our time is over. Well it’s not over. The change could be instantaneous, and that is my philosophy. I believe that I’ve felt the instantaneous change that is the just changing your mind. And that’s . . . that’s what I try to do. I try to change my mind a lot, and I try to change it back to its original nature, not a . . . not a covering over with reaction.

Question: Does faith inform your worldview?

Transcript: Sure. I mean faith is an essential element of the yogic path. Since we’re dealing with a realm that is unseen, it depends to a large extent on faith. On the other hand the yogic techniques do give you experiences that verify the existence of these . . . these unseen realms. So faith is important. I think that maybe at some point religions have done well in the world; but I think that today they’ve lost their usefulness, and they’ve created many wars and disturbances in the world. And we need to get back to the basics, and that’s why religions were created in the first place – not to control people, but to give people a way to exercise their inspiration; and to become inspired; to connect to each other; to gather together; and to form political action groups and community service groups. I think these are the good parts of organized religions. The bad parts are the many wars that are fought over religion, and the disagreements that people have over religion.

Recorded on: 10/31/07