THREE BODIES FIVE SHEATHS
A PUBLIC TALK AT ASHTANGA YOGA BOSTON
Robert Moses.

RM: I’m going to start with a prayer to Ganesha and the Guru:

Gajaananam bhoota ganaadi sevitam
Kapittha jambu phala saara bhakshitam
Umaa sutam shokavinaasha karanam
Namaami Vigneshvara paada pankajam

Gurur brahmaa gurur vishnuh
gurur devo maheshvarah
gurur saakshaat parabrahma
tasmai shree gurave namah.

Thanks to George for inviting me down here. It’s nice to get away from the highlands of New Hampshire and down to a busy place such as Cambridge. And thanks to my friend, Tim, who came down. The reason I invited Tim is that once a month we have a talk at our place and Tim likes to come to the talks and challenge me with questions that I never know the answers to …
I was thinking about what topic I’d like to talk about, but also something that could be useful for you in your life and your practice, and so I chose a topic, which, surprisingly, is quite often not very well known by people who practice yoga. However, in India this is a very old topic; in the Upanishads you’ll find clear references to everything that I’m going to talk about. Since the time when they were written, to this present time, there has been an understanding of the human psyche that has been handed down from one person to another. So, I didn’t learn this from the book. I learned this instead from my teacher telling this to me and other people telling it to him, again and again and again and again. Afterwards, I looked up these topics in books, the Upanishads and various other texts. So that’s the literary source of this information.

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