Knowing Yourself

When one takes to study of Raj Yoga, the foremost thing one has to understand is that Soul is our essential Being. If we think of the Soul as eternal, I presume we are thinking of it as a pure consciousness, one that is devoid of Sanskars. But at our level of existence, we are an individual Soul, because of the individual Sanskars that we are carrying with it. Therefore every individual Soul is special. This individual Soul is on a journey from one incarnation to another.We are constantly in contact with external material world and therefore tend to be influenced by it. Reason for this is, we have become detached from the Soul awareness. If we are firm in our belief that our Soul is our essential Being, we would have been in Soul awareness and it is then that we don't get influenced by the environment surrounding us. To be in this awareness, we need to do a lot of meditation. In the silence of meditation our belief in who we really are gets firmly grouted. Then we are not influenced by external world of day to day life.  .