Hari Om
I don’t see yoga as anything else except as a process of improving the quality of the body, mind and emotion. The moment yoga transgresses this limit of its responsibility and obligation, it will become religion, and we have dozens of them, we don’t want one more. Teachers of yoga will have to be very careful about this. We are not to prepare and manufacture prophets.
We should concentrate on producing that scientific quality of teachers which will be able to give us that aspect of yoga which will go a long way in transforming the quality of the body, mind and emotions.
If you add religions after religions, there won’t be any peace on this earth. In fact, they have failed in the past and they have betrayed history. If peace has to come on this earth and on this planet it is not going to come through a philosophy, it is going to come through man and man.
Three billion restless souls cannot bring peace to mankind, definitely not. At least one billion people must understand how to bring peace into the framework of their personality. Yoga has to accomplish that, and if it cannot, reject it and find out another method. Yoga is not an end, it is a means. When yoga becomes the end, it is going to become a religion and I am going to be the prophet. With this note of warning I wish good luck to the convention.
15 November 1982, Puerto Rico, Opening Speech of Convention