All are pilgrims on a divine path. This great path is a spiritual path, and steadily and gradually we strive onwards towards perfection. The ultimate purpose of every human being is to make himself more aware of that which is perfect within, to become one and in harmony with the Higher Self, the state of perfection, the state of the Absolute. This great pilgrimage of spiritual life is only undertaken by those of great courage and boldness. The weak and infirm are afraid to walk on this path even though this path is for all, the weak and the strong.
Once you embrace spiritual life, the vicissitudes of life and the vacillations of the mind are no longer present in you. Just as a man dreams of death or of some accident, he overcomes all the tragedies of his dream-life just by waking up. In the same manner, the restlessness of human life, the emotional disorders, the lack of direction and purpose, the distractions of the mind, the anxieties and worries, the erratic and irrational behaviours, and all the psychological errors enumerated in psychology, known or unknown, realized or yet to be realized, discovered or yet to be discovered, all the physical, mental and emotional maladies of life can be overcome by leading a spiritual life.
This pilgrimage takes you from the outside to the inside. The outer consciousness, the human awareness is always in tune with the outer surroundings and environmental situations. The individual awareness is always in tune with the five senses and the mind.
These two types of awareness, the human and the individual, must be drawn inwards and made to penetrate through the veils of darkness by the incessant, constant practice of self- awareness, until this little individual consciousness becomes one with the Supreme Consciousness. Man has been limited to the realm of mental consciousness, his mental plane of existence, since he transcended physical consciousness. This consciousness is limited, finite, not permanent, and subject to change.
As long as your existence is in this dimension of consciousness, you will be subject to the mental vicissitudes of life, you will be subject to emotional crisis, but as soon as you transcend and go beyond this level of consciousness, you will have an understanding as to the nature, causes and effects of your troubles. It is as if you are looking back or down on your troubles from a great distance and the different perspective tends to lessen the seriousness of them. This is how spiritual life and the understanding of it takes you away from your troubles and difficulties. Spiritual life removes the imaginary psychological and mental fears and anxieties.
The whole basis, foundation and structure of a spiritual life can be worked out and drawn from one single plan, from outside to inside, from the point of the individual to the cosmic, from senses to spirit, from outer to inner awareness, from the changeable to the changeless and from the flickering shadows of pleasures and pains to that permanent bliss – ananda. Your whole program, from asanas, pranayama, meditation and studies can be worked out according to the blueprint. The purpose then is to become one with that blueprint. The whole aim is to go within and become one with the blueprint. This whole program of going within is known as yoga.
Once we sit down quietly, it should be possible for us to penetrate through layer after layer until we are able to experience the wholeness within. Of all the experiences, of all that can be said about yoga, this experience is wonderful and takes you into the deepest resources of your awareness.
Yoga brings about a meeting of the two personalities in man. Throughout the history of man, these two personalities have always been separate and in conflict with each other. The individual personality, the jiva, as it is called in Sanskrit, has always been divorced from and unaware of the Supreme Self. It can be described in terms of the father and the son: I am here and my father is there, but we are not together. Either he has to come to me or I must go to him; that meeting point of the two is known as yoga. The process, the path of yoga is not just the meeting point between the two consciousnesses; it is the road, the path of going inwards, the journey of the one consciousness to the other. It is also the remover of obstacles and distractions on that path of the individual consciousness, so that the successful meeting does and will take place. In the beginning, it establishes tranquillity and peace, along the way it removes the darkness of the individual self and its understanding to bring light to that Supreme Self, so that the journey is completed with success.
I am giving you a discourse on yoga. You are quietly and calmly listening to me. You are very receptive in this state and you are able to absorb everything. In the same way, if one of you is crying or screaming, no one is able to hear me and you will not be receptive to undertake the journey and begin. The senses must be silent, calm and quiet. They must be annihilated, driven into silence as they are the cause that tends to disturb the mind. The mind attains peace and tranquillity through the annihilation of the senses. In yoga, that state is known as pratyahara. Pratyahara is that state or act of withdrawing the mind from the outer senses and then it rests in the inner silence.
Meditation should be a spontaneous act, experience or method. It is only after pratyahara that the mind attains the amount of serenity or power needed to meditate spontaneously. Without pratyahara, the mind does not have the required mental peace and balance for spontaneous meditation. So mental power is the first prerequisite. Yoga will ultimately bring enlightenment, that experience of the deepest layer of consciousness, but yoga has a double purpose – to bring mental peace and a state of mental balance to the individual. Due to the so-called psychological frailties of man, the individual, society, the world is in a state of unrest and confusion. Every person has impressions, inhibitions, complexes, phobias and various other disturbances or fears deeply imbedded in their subconscious minds, which have been accumulating for years and years or from birth to birth.
You have been accumulating these experiences, bitter, sweet or mixed. They are imbedded in your subconscious mind, filed away until they come to maturity to the conscious mind. The manifestation, thought patterns taking place in the conscious mind can be defined as feelings. You experience feelings of exhilaration, peace, bitterness, worry or anxiety whenever you do something wonderful or something bad, the feelings are the manifestation of those impressions which have come to the point of maturity.
Meditation is an outlet for these impressions. The moment you sit for meditation, so many thoughts come to the conscious mind, because of the relaxed or respective nature or state of the mind. There is always a certain part or certain portions of your life or lives which are just coming to the threshold or gate of your mind, to the threshold of your personality. They are trying to find an outlet for expression and elimination. Meditation is the outlet for the elimination of all the thoughts in such a manner that you do not regain them but they are eliminated forever.
It is in this light and from this point of view that yoga is used as a treatment for the ills of society. The whole theory behind yoga is based on the purity of your subconscious mind and the elevation of your conscious mind with the expression and elimination of the manifestations of these dark forces within you.
Society has given us everything. It has provided us with the comforts of the body, abundant prosperity and total social security, but society also gave us crime, juvenile delinquency, insecurity and unrest among the population. Society did give us mental, emotional or physical tensions or the need for pills, tranquillizers, alcohol or cigarettes. It did give us clubs and night clubs, methods of escaping from the realities of life and ourselves. Lastly, society has not given us a cure, but the situation, the state of mind goes from bad to worse and finally to hopelessness.
It is in this light that yoga can be thought of as a treatment, a relief from the ailments of our minds and of society as a whole. For example, people who have succeeded in life tend to suffer from coronary thrombosis, the disease is a product of having no faith, no security in success, they are always anxious of losing it. Yoga instils faith in a person, faith in himself and his abilities to the extent that the question of success never troubles him, and success comes automatically.
Yoga can also instil a sense of spirituality in a person, a faith in himself as a servant of God so that if success comes, it is only due to the grace of God and if success goes it is only due to the grace of God. God has become the power, the force behind the person; his life, his work, his success or failure is dependent upon God. God is carrying the luggage, the burden of life. As God is your guiding light, your personality, your mind is pure and relaxed, tension free, you have been breathing, thinking, acting, going about your daily habits unconsciously, in fact your entire life is moving from day to day unconsciously.
If you are unaware that you have never tried to breathe, think and act, then how is it possible that these things can and do go on automatically. You must accept there is some other law, some other director who has been doing these things for you. As you have been unconscious of your life, you have also been unconscious of Him. This is the basis, the theory behind yoga, the awareness of this other self.
Each one of you has provided yourself with a room, some type of shelter and heater in the cold and cooler in the heat. In order to keep your room clean, you must have a vacuum cleaner. Even if you keep your room closed all day, dust will collect daily. In the same way, the brain, the mind, your personality must be provided with a heater, a cooler and a vacuum cleaner. When the mind becomes agitated, angry, a cooler is required to bring the mind back to its original condition. When the mind becomes depressed, cool and melancholic, a heater is needed to stimulate and heat the mind. Even by closing your eyes, mouth, nose and ears, your subconscious will still produce dirt. These mental disturbances of your metabolic process go on continually. So your mind, your room must be cleaned daily.
There is a nice comfortable bed in the room, so you can provide your life with the proper amount of sleep and rest to refresh, to renew your energies to meet the requirements of the day. In the same way, your mind requires a bed and a certain amount of rest to renew its energies. Yoga provides the mind with rest, with the practices of meditation, asanas and pranayama. With a little reading from scriptures, this is equal to the sleep and rest required for the body. It gives the same rest to the mind as the bed gives to your body.
As you give shelter to the body, you also provide it with a kitchen, food to nourish and keep the body healthy. In the same manner, there must be some provision in your life for the food of the mind. Good thoughts are the food, the nourishment for the mind. With vitamins, carbohydrates, fats and starches you feed your body with a balanced diet. In the same way, with the reading of scriptures, the listening to mahatmas, yogis and learned people with wisdom and knowledge, keeping the company of the good and wise, you feed the mind, with the proper nourishment, balanced diet to keep it healthy and happy.
You have a room with a bed, heater, a cooler, a vacuum cleaner and a kitchen. All you need now is a house, but it must be a house with a good lock on the door, so you can sleep well and so all that you have accumulated for the purpose of making your life comfortable, will not be stolen by the three burglars. These three burglars are not outside but they are within you. If you are not careful, they will steal everything you have accumulated, the good thoughts, the heater, the cooler and vacuum cleaner. You will have to be careful, aware of who is coming to visit you, you must know which thoughts are going in and by proper security which ones to let in the room.
In this one illustration, the whole scheme of yoga has been discussed. Yoga is a life-making science. It is not an act of renunciation, it is not an act of escape, and it is not the negation of life. It is not rejecting life, but it is the correction of the wrong notions, wrong impressions that we have formed over the years. You do not have to reject society or renounce your actions. You do not have to renounce love, serving people, good acts, good intentions and acts of self-purification. It is said in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Three acts should never be renounced, good actions of charities, helping others and acts of purification.’
What you have to renounce is the frailties in your own personality. You have to reject what is not wanted within. It is not possible to do it intellectually. It is only possible by having complete faith in yoga, a complete life in yoga. You must say, ‘I am a yogi’. You must feel it every day. You must not be afraid. In this way, the practice of yoga, the moment-to- moment awareness to live a life with higher principles, with absolute faith in that higher Spirit who shall be made known to you through yoga, transforms the values of your life little by little. Make resolves and keep revising them. Finally remind yourself every day as to the purpose of your life and that while the ultimate purpose of yoga is to bring enlightenment, the primary, preliminary purpose is to clean the road, to light the path and to make the journey itself.
1968, Integral Yoga Institute, New York City, USA