Kenopanishad
"Devotion, self-control, and karma are its pedestal, as are the Vedas and their supplements. Truth is its abode."
How do we realize this state of health within us? Decreasing toxicity in the body and mind through activating the engines of nutrition, movement, connection, and rest are fundamental. This processes and releases trauma and decreases inflammation in the body, which allows our natural intelligence to shine and draw us to its source. The processes described above by the teacher–devotion, self-control, and karma–are aspects of these very engines.
Devotion is devotion to one's path and one's true self. What is your nature? What is it hinting? What is it calling out for? This devotion is not an exclusive devotion to individuality, but to the very life force and state of health that enables the expression of individuality. The constant pouring of devotion unto what is true and deep within us is the activating of the engine of connection.
Self-control here is not about forced restriction; self-control is about harnessing your energy. Whatever you want to do in your life requires the harnessing of energy. It requires diverting energy from other outlets and investing it in a single outlet. If we want to harness electricity, we cannot use it in its raw form. Lightning cannot directly power your smartphone. But the very same lightning and energy in the ionosphere can be channeled through a lightning rod.
Similarly, the dispersed energy expressing through all of our activities can be redirected into a single channel, referred to here as self-control. That single pointed ray of attention, also encompassing the aforementioned devotion, leads to the recognition of health within us. This cannot be achieved through brute force but by movement of our emotions, thoughts, creativity, and the body itself so as to release excessive energy and channel it.
Karma is right action. The right action is that which takes you toward your unique expression. The right action for one person will not be the right action for the next. The customized path to health for one will not be the customized path for the next, but the general principles and the way of discovering the customized path will be the same. Movement of our thoughts and their expression as our unique actions is karma.
Taken together, the teacher is indicating that activating the engines of connection and movement forms the pedestal to health. In other words, they are what support health, what leads to health, what are intimately in touch with health, and indeed are the indicators of the health that is soon to be realized. This is the deepest and truest of knowledge. The word "Vedas" here is not a casual reference to a religious book or written text, but rather to its core meaning of embodied knowledge.
Where does the state of health live? In the abode of truth itself, as truth itself. This truth is not one that has a contradiction. It is not like a yes, to which a no can be countered. Neither is it up, to be countered by down. This is the truth of potential and existence itself, in which all contradictions, dualities, and multiplicities play. It is at the level of these apparent contradictions, dualities, and multiplicities that dis-ease is experienced when the primordial spring of health itself is not recognized as washing over and through us. The moment this fresh spring is contacted, all words lose meaning, and health is seen to have always been our nature.
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