From "The Bhagavad Gita - God Talks With Arjuna" by Paramhansa Yogananda
“O Partha (Arjuna), surrender not to unmanliness;
it is unbecoming of thee.
O Scorcher of Foes, forsake this small weakheartedness! Arise!”
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, verse 3.
“O Devotee, son of renunciation, surrender not to the behavior that is unbecoming to the positive nature of your true Self, the Soul. O Scorcher of Foes, use your fiery will of self-control to overcome this frail weakheartedness resulting from your attachment to sense habits. Arise! Lift yourself from the sense strongholds to the higher spiritual centers of divine consciousness.
By the devotees continued meditation, divine guidance becomes more and more tangible; God manifests His presence to the devotee through a profound peace, joy, or wisdom felt in the thousands of sensory channels in the inner lining of the body and its encompassing cuticle. In this state, the advancing devotee is intuitively instructed by the Spirit as he hears, within, the voice of the Infinite.
Every man has the power to resist the influence of sense-identified, habit-bound existence. This power of renunciation does not involve any loss to the devotee, but gives him the opportunity to remove and forsake all those things that retard his spiritual progress.
The Inner Voice says: “Forsake attachment to the senses! Use the power of renunciation to relinquish all unmanly qualities! Do nothing that goes against the grain of the soul!"
“Unmanliness” signifies that which is unbecoming to the positive aspect of the soul. To be unmanly is to be either negative or indifferent. The devotee in a negative state of mind has lost sight of this manly positive will factor. Without the positive action of will, the devotee succumbs to unmanly neutrality, the condition that has overtaken Arjuna. The Spirit therefore warms him not to be neutral; that state is worse than negativeness! In the negative state the devotee is afraid to forsake sense attachment; in the neutral state he has attachment neither to God nor to the senses - his entire powers of activity are paralyzed.
Paramhansa Yogananda on the Importance of Meditation
A rare audio recording from the Master
"Ever-new Joy is God. He is inexhaustible; as you continue your meditations during the years, He will beguile you with an infinite ingenuity. Devotees like yourself who have found the way to God never dream of exchanging Him for any other happiness;
He is seductive beyond thought of competition..."
