"There are always two forces warring against each other within us"
About this Quote
Yogananda’s line compresses a whole spiritual program into a sentence that sounds almost blunt: you are not a unified self, you are a battleground. Coming from a major teacher of yoga and meditation writing for both Indian disciples and a curious American public, the phrasing does double duty. It speaks in the universal grammar of moral struggle (the part of you that reaches upward versus the part that clings, fears, wants) while quietly translating a specifically yogic map of consciousness into everyday language.
The “two forces” aren’t just good and evil in a Sunday-school sense; they’re rival orientations of attention. One pulls the mind outward into appetite, status, and restless distraction. The other draws it inward toward steadiness, discipline, and what Yogananda would frame as the soul’s native clarity. “Warring” matters: it refuses the modern self-help fantasy that change is a smooth upgrade. It’s conflict, recurring and intimate, which makes relapse and ambivalence not a personal failure but part of the terrain.
The subtext is strategic. If your inner turbulence is a war, you need training, not mere insight. That sets up his larger intent: legitimize practice (meditation, breath control, ethical restraint) as a practical technology for choosing which force gets fed. In the early 20th century, when psychology was becoming secular scripture and immigration-era America was hungry for “Eastern wisdom” packaged accessibly, Yogananda’s genius was to frame enlightenment not as exotic mysticism but as a daily contest of habit and will. The sentence lands because it flatters no one, yet offers a clear premise: peace is engineered, not discovered.
The “two forces” aren’t just good and evil in a Sunday-school sense; they’re rival orientations of attention. One pulls the mind outward into appetite, status, and restless distraction. The other draws it inward toward steadiness, discipline, and what Yogananda would frame as the soul’s native clarity. “Warring” matters: it refuses the modern self-help fantasy that change is a smooth upgrade. It’s conflict, recurring and intimate, which makes relapse and ambivalence not a personal failure but part of the terrain.
The subtext is strategic. If your inner turbulence is a war, you need training, not mere insight. That sets up his larger intent: legitimize practice (meditation, breath control, ethical restraint) as a practical technology for choosing which force gets fed. In the early 20th century, when psychology was becoming secular scripture and immigration-era America was hungry for “Eastern wisdom” packaged accessibly, Yogananda’s genius was to frame enlightenment not as exotic mysticism but as a daily contest of habit and will. The sentence lands because it flatters no one, yet offers a clear premise: peace is engineered, not discovered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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