Blessed spiritual seekers. I have in mind to speak about yoga. Yoga is something which has much to do with life. In the past, people in the West thought that standing on the head was yoga, but now it appears that it is not standing on one’s head, but standing on one’s own two feet is yoga. It is not that we do not have to practise yoga exercises; we have to practise them, but yoga is something more than that. It is a process by which one brings about a state of peace with one’s own self. It is not a system of treatment, but it is a method of orientation of the entire personality, the pure personality in all its dimensions. Unless one realizes or communes with one’s higher being it is not possible to become free from the miseries of life.
Those who are after higher realization, who seek to unite themselves with the higher self, for them it becomes absolutely necessary that they pass through this state, when you are at ease with your own self, at peace with your own self and when you have attained or united yourself with the pure inner being.
The word yoga means to join, to unite, to commune and to become one. Yoga means the unity of two things or two states. Union between the little I and the cosmic I, where the little I is completely lost in the cosmic I, it becomes one with that. Yoga is union between the little self and the higher self, where the little self becomes one with the higher self. Yoga means the experience of oneness, the experience of unity as against the experience of duality in our daily life.
In this world where we are aware of the empirical universe, the universe of objects and senses is the world of duality. From this we make a departure within, through a path, a passage, to become one with the supreme or the higher states, call it God or name it anything you like. This is the ultimate purpose of yoga, but it seems to be very difficult and we talk so much about it. Nobody has seen the higher self and when you think that the little self becomes one with the higher self, it comes to our minds that a little river joins a big ocean.
Since we have never tried to become one with that supreme self, it is our experience and our conviction that it is a most difficult path. But I have to say now that this path with which one goes inside from outside and which starts from the objective universe and culminates in spiritual experience, is the easiest one. When you make up your mind to dwell outside on the external objects, it brings stress and strain, tensions, fatigue, exhaustion, and ultimately a life with nothing, but when you draw your mind in, all the stresses and strains are dissolved, and you practise it every day and every night.
Coming out is a job and going in is an ordinary thing, it is just a simple affair. But somehow or other it has been put into our minds that going in is a great job and the becoming aware of living in the outside world is the easiest thing. We have to change the understanding and this conviction. Remember how when you go to bed every night, you cry for sleep; you want it and the moment you go to your bed you are still. This is the way of going in and you know the art of going in, but half the way.
There are two roads, one leads to the unconscious and one leads to awareness. The path that leads to the unconscious leads to sleep, and the path that leads you to awareness leads to samadhi or the higher awareness. Therefore, the path of yoga is not difficult; it is an act of realization as Swami Sivananda has said in many of his books. Meditation is not an action; meditation is not an exercise; meditation is not doing something; meditation is a spontaneous manifestation of the state of mental relaxation in man. When your mind is completely relaxed, when your mind is not tense, when your emotions are not tensed and when your heart is pure and the body is completely at rest, meditation must manifest itself. I say it the other way. When you are completely tired, when the room is very dark and the bed is very comfortable, you do not have to sleep; sleep comes to you; the manifestation of sleep becomes spontaneous.
In the same manner, in order to succeed in meditation there are certain conditions which should be fulfilled first. I do not mean you should stop your meditation that you have been doing in the morning and in the evening, but please, that is not enough. If you are trying to concentrate your mind, I am not against it, but that is not enough. If you are trying to practise any of the exercises in meditation go ahead with it, don’t stop it. But if you have been trying hard to bring about a state of concentration it means that you have not fulfilled the conditions and when you fulfil the conditions of meditation, you don’t have to meditate, you have to experience it.
Swami Sivananda said in his books that meditation cannot be done; it can only be experienced. Sleep cannot be brought about; it can only be experienced; hunger cannot be created, it can only be experienced, but for that you need a condition. What are the conditions for meditations? A lot has been spoken about it, but still people feel that it is possible to meditate without the fulfilment of those conditions.
There are not many conditions; there is only one condition, and if you are able to fulfil that one condition, you can get into meditation anywhere you like or perhaps meditation might come to you without you even wanting it. That condition is the dissolution of the state of tension, that’s all. Find out a method, a technique by which the deeply embedded tensions of your personality are completely annihilated. Before you try to practise meditation, please try one thing, try to relax your tensions. When you try to relax your tensions, you must try to understand at the same time that it is not taking rest in bed, but there are different kinds of tensions and mostly emotional tensions. These emotional tensions which we create in our day-to-day life and which become a part and parcel of our being, they stop, they pull us back when our consciousness tries to get into the deeper state of meditation. It has been my experience. It has been the experience of many people. This tension is seen in man. This tension is not the worry that you can feel.
When you analyse the problem of tensions, you will know that apart from the physical and mental tensions, there are emotional tensions which cannot be eradicated until you follow the path of bhakti yoga and jnana yoga, the path of devotion and the path of self-analysis. Before you succeed in meditation, you must take to the method of bhakti yoga and jnana yoga. Meditation is not difficult, provided you are free from tensions. You can get rid of tensions provided you follow a path. Sometimes when we sit down for meditation, even if we try to bring our minds back to the point, we cannot; and we wonder why it is not possible. On deeper analysis you feel that there was something working in your mind.
In the yoga shastra there is a method which is known as pratyahara. Pratyahara means complete relaxation, to a point when you are able to transcend the outer state, you are able to forget everything around you. Practices for meditation should be such that within fifteen or twenty minutes, your mind begins to take complete rest and goes within. It dives deep into your inner being. There are of course various methods of meditation and all of them are quite useful and effective, but in most exercises of meditation it is the mental factor that is brought into operation and the mind has to be exercised. When the mind has to be exercised in meditation it is brought under tension.
Therefore, for the practice of meditation the easiest method should be taken up, in which you do not bring your mind into use. The whole thing becomes automatic, and you will be surprised to know that the easiest method for meditation is japa yoga. There is no method like that. There is a method of ajapa japa, kriya yoga, trataka, nada yoga, but out of all of these the method of japa yoga in which you take one particular sound and rhythmically mentally repeat it for a hundred times or a thousand times, or five thousand times, constantly for about one hour. It is very effective and brings a useful result very quickly, you do not have to go through many parts.
In spiritual life, in yogic life there are various paths, and one feels perhaps that the more complicated the path, perhaps the most effective it is. That is not true, from the experience of all great men of all great ages. I have come to this conclusion, that it is ultimately japa yoga, the yoga of mantra, the yoga of sound, the yoga of a syllable that brings about not only the state of serenity and peace to a human being, but it brings the state of communion. During my world tour I have also come across, hundreds and hundreds of people who have been practising japa yoga and have come to the point of higher realization.
The people who have been practising the complicated yogas have been misled. Some of them have been following the path of confusion and complication, and I have not found any practitioner of japa yoga who has come to the point of confusion and complication. The most simple person and the greatest intellectual, when they sit down for half an hour or so, enter a state of meditation, of communion. There is one thing which you have to remember, japa yoga brings you to a particular point and leaves you there.
27 July 1968, Amsterdam, Holland