The Bhagavad Gita has a verse which I paraphrase: “reclaim the kingdom ruled by the senses.” This verse states that we have given away our kingdom to our mind’s addiction to the pull of the outer world, the world of the senses.
What does this mean? The kingdom is our body and with it comes our ability to know and experience the world through the window of the senses and our mind’s ability to make sense of them.
Our mind then creates the story of what is happening and what it all means. Past experiences and knowledge then shape future experience, creating the apparent reality we are living if we know it or not. This veil of the mind and senses has diminished our ability to know our true nature and to discriminate between what is real and what is not. Consequently, diminishing our innate authority and making us the victim of what arises from them. The King/Queen has been overtaken by his/her vassals.
The Gita tells us in this and many other verses that restraining the pull of the senses is how we can break our enthrallment with them and thereby our mind’s ability to distort and veil us from what is real. As a result, we regain our true authority and with it the kingdom that is our true heritage. This is the principle revealed in this verse.
The purpose of yoga is to regain our kingdom, to recover the veiled authority we are, the truth of our being, the eternal and unchanging Reality that lives us. With this regained authority, we can undo our enthrallment and discover the true purpose of our existence and of existence itself.