For the past few years, we have been talking about yoga and many people all over the world have been listening with great interest. To me, it appears as if a new age has begun because the inspiration and the message of yoga has awakened in the mind of people so spontaneously and with such ease.
There was a time when people were scared of yoga and thought it had little to do with life and very much to do with something like magic. Many centuries have elapsed during recent history when mankind was in a state of total confusion and misunderstanding about yoga and the yogic practices. In 1928, I attended a show in my school where a yogi sat on a bed of nails, drank nitric acid, walked on burning coals and did so many other things. When I went home my father asked me about it and I narrated the whole program. He only replied, ‘This is not yoga.’ He had been a keen student of yoga, the disciple of a swami, and he instructed me that yoga was something more to do with normal human affairs, with day-to-day duties.
Over many centuries, mankind and its wise leaders have emphasized the training of man, but this training has never been properly represented or interpreted. During this period, the training that was imparted to man was in the military, in a civic sense, in social etiquette. There was no training for individual progress. Man is a storehouse of different faculties and he requires integral training. We cannot neglect the training of the individual self, of consciousness or of the mind of the person. Intellectual training does not influence the deeper personality of man. Integral training has to be imparted to the individual so that he behaves in a balanced way in all dimensions of life.
The training of yoga is primarily aimed at the deeper nature of man. This deeper nature of man is mysterious to many people. This deeper nature which has been discovered anew and endorsed by the scientific minds influences all the action in the past as well as the present. It is this nature of the individual which has to undergo a systematic process of training. The system of yoga aims at the root of personality. This root of personality is the background of our existence, the basis of our actions and the background of our emotional personality – the pain and the pleasure, success as well as failure, the agony and the ecstasy. If we face an experience in our day-to-day life, it is not from the objects outside but it is from the background of our personality, which is called unconscious. Your thinking, reactions, experiences and all that you have known and experienced through your mind originate from the very depth of your consciousness.
The practice of yoga gradually enables you to go deeper into your consciousness, like an expert diver in the ocean. A diver goes into the ocean exploring the depths. In the same manner, the yogi, you and I, we go into the mind. The purpose of going in is not to withdraw from life or to escape from the reality of life, but to go deeper into our being and there discover the root of life, the nucleus of life and the basis of our experience and action. The training of a yogi begins at the point when he goes into the consciousness and faces his own mind – his distractions, passions, hallucinations and his thoughts.
When we are busy with our daily life, driving a car, working in a factory, running a shop or a household, our mind is extroverted. This extroverted mind experiences external experiences like sounds, forms, taste, touch, smells. It is so busy with the external experience that it has no time to see what is happening inside. Even as we people are talking here, we do not know what is happening in the streets of Copenhagen. We are not there, we are here. Our mind is outside, it is extroverted and therefore it is completely unaware of what is happening in the field of its consciousness. It is necessary that we know what is within us, and what is happening to us. What is the mind? Emotions? Hallucination? Thought? Conflict? Emotional confusion? Mental distress? Though we experience these things in our daily life, we experience them without knowledge. That is where we are caught and that is where we suffer.
19 April 1977, Copenhagen, Denmark