To me, yoga has never been a religion. Not that I feel any disregard for religion, but I have always felt that the organization of the personality is always internal. It can never take place unless yoga is supplemented with religion. Yoga has remained this way for centuries and centuries. People felt that it was a way of renunciation and yogi always meant a recluse, sleeping on a bed of nails, exercising some psychic powers, drinking nitric acid, walking over fire and water. In contrast, a householder was given the word of yoga at the time of marriage. It was considered to be completely out of place. The meaning of yoga was relatively unknown to most people. It was with great difficulty that Swami Vivekananda, Swami Sivananda and a few other great saints brought this great science from door to door.
Today people have begun to realize that yoga is a way of life, and more than that, it is a system of discipline. It does not matter if you are an agnostic, you can take to yoga. It does not interfere with your views or with the values of life you hold. I have been in America and thousands of people in the churches, in the cafés, the hotels, the bars, everywhere, are suffering from mental illness. Mental illness can never be cured by only leading a life of material prosperity. Just saying a few prayers in the morning does not cure mental illness either.
This ‘mental illness’ is a term which must be understood.
A few sensible individuals have become aware of this illness, but there are many people who are living in ignorance with deeper anxieties, worries and fears yet they don’t know them. People say that yoga is not for them, but there is no one in the world who is free from sickness. There is none whose mind is not ill. You are always looking at your body. You have studied the sciences which tell you about headaches, fevers, colds and coughs, but for the time being, let us think about the diseases of your inner personality. The psychic desires are unknown to you but are reflected in your day-to-day behaviour. This mental illness is spreading throughout the world like an epidemic and it has got to be treated immediately or anything can happen.
Individual minds are part of the collective mind. Individual mental illness and collective mental illness can lead to disaster. When the body is ill we are aware of it and take care of it. When our mind is ill, we do not know it and we don’t take care of it. The inner layers of our mind, the psyche of our being, is beyond our conception. We live only in a world of matter.
Yoga is really a method by which we bring about a healthy atmosphere in our system. There are many people who do not think about mental illness, but look at what they are doing, their thoughts, their behaviour, the way they affect society with their system of thinking and philosophy. The subconscious mind and the deeper layers of your subconscious ultimately become responsible for the expression of life. As such, it becomes necessary for every individual to be treated and the treatment of the mind and the inner personality can take place through the practices of yoga. This treatment includes those for emotional disorders which are born out of emotional maladjustment.
Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, is for those people with emotional disorders as it purifies the emotions. Psychic disorders, the twists and errors of the personality can only be eliminated by the practice of meditation or dhyana. When it is said that meditation brings about enlightenment and ultimately self-realization or God-realization, it is true, but at the same time unless there is complete quietness in all dimensions of your personality, God-realization can never take place. Whether you are going to treat your mental personality or you are trying for God-realization, yoga is the common method.
The various aspects of yoga are karma yoga, hatha yoga, jnana yoga and raja yoga. The modern man who has to step into the new dimension of consciousness should realize the new doors of perception, and in order to bring about a healthy atmosphere in the whole of mankind he will have to practise the yoga of meditation. This is called dhyana yoga. What happens is that in all the dimensions of your personality, a process of complete reorientation and relaxation of almost all the muscular, mental and emotional tensions occurs. These threefold tensions are deeply integrated in our personality. They can be very easily eliminated by the practice of dhyana yoga, meditation.
In the practice of meditation, we have two stages. The first stage is the negation of consciousness, where a central point is reached which is called the point of negation, the act of thought withdrawal. Once withdrawal has taken place and the state of transcendence has been acquired by the self, then the self, the consciousness will expand inwards and the awareness becomes more and more expanded and the whole being comes to a point of purity and illumination.
It is in this context that I have been discussing yoga during my world tour. I have been conducting general classes and at the same time classes for psychiatric patients, epileptics, neurotics, people suffering from anxiety neurosis, those who do not sleep for days and weeks at a time and those suffering from psychosis. Without going into details about the operations of the mind, I can tell you that the practice of meditation is one of the easiest and most perfect methods for changing the whole personality, and with it the whole concept of life.
Some time ago, I was living with a criminal who used to be member of the underworld, a terrible man. In the evenings, I gave him meditation. I did not tell him at the time what it was, I simply said, ‘You close your eyes and breathe normally.’ After a period of one and a half months I noticed a great change taking place in him. Finally, he admitted that he wanted to commit another crime but he was feeling too lazy. Every now and then he used to postpone some plans for night attacks, murder and other things. This is how yoga brings about a state of tranquillity in the person. Tranquillity takes place both in the physical and psychic structure of man.
The physical brain is undergoing a state of tension at all times. Even at night, when we are sleeping, the brain is tense. The physical matter is always tense. If you observe the waves which are emitted by the brain, they are so negative. It is impossible for man to relax his mind without having a method. It is this condition of tension in the mind which becomes the basis of evil thoughts and the expression of the personality is completely disorientated.
During the practice of meditation, the individual consciousness passes through different spheres of tranquillity. In those different spheres of tranquillity, a process of exhaustion or elimination of abnormal complexes takes place. Finally, a state comes when the mind obtains serenity, wisdom and strength.
For many years, yoga was associated with theology but today it will have to be understood in terms of personality.
Since you are all educated, you belong to a race of intellectuals. You are not aware of unhappiness, of frustration, but they are embedded deeply in your subconscious. If you were put into deep hypnotism by a psychologist and asked about your problems and difficulties, your conscious personality would not outwardly want to admit the problems. You try to hide the dark side of your soul.
The time has come when we will have to be free with ourselves. First we treat the problems of the personality. After this has been done, the mind is able to express its inner faculties. Finally after a long time, self-realization will come, which is the ultimate purpose of life for which we are all born. Whether you come from the East or the West, the innermost consciousness in all of us belongs to transcendental dimensions. The supreme being, the supreme consciousness, the highest intelligence is within all of us.
During the practices of meditation, you can see the vast collection of impressions. In the deeper states of meditation, you will see the different symbols of your personality. What you see, the instincts of man, can be seen in the forms of symbols. You can see a tiger, a serpent, an angel, a divine figure, a star, a flower, a river, a cross, and thousands of things. You must understand that they are patterns of your consciousness. They are symbolic expressions, whether you understand them or not, it does not matter. Let them come and exhaust themselves.
When you sit down quietly for meditation, try to concentrate on one point the point does not remain but this is to be developed by continuous practice. The point develops the subconscious elimination, the subconscious expressions, the instincts, the impressions, the behaviour, the hidden motives and many other things. They all come to you in the shape of images, in the shape of forms and it is not necessary for you to analyse and understand them. There comes a time when all those images come to an abrupt end. The pictures of the film move very slowly. It means that the inner dimensions of your personality are being unfolded. It is arriving at and reaching the ultimate point of elimination. At this time, the mind is free from desires, sins and sickness.
As you are aware of your physical movements, in the same way you will have to be aware of your psychic movements. With the help of modern science, you have eliminated many terrible diseases from the earth, and maybe in a few decades we may completely eliminate the remaining diseases. A psychic epidemic is spreading with the same speed that cholera or the plague used to spread in the past. We have been able to achieve victory over one aspect of health and the second aspect, the mental aspect, still remains to be achieved.
Psychologists have a big job facing them. They are treating the symptoms whereas yoga does not treat symptoms. It does not cure anger, or treat passion, or jealousy, or phobias, but it changes the whole structure. It is the reorientation of the whole system. The foundation, the basis, the structure, everything is changed. That is the fundamental difference between psychology and yoga.
In psychology, only the symptoms are treated. If the treatment is successful, the person feels better but at the same time, he does not feel secure. He cannot say with firm conviction or faith that he will never suffer mentally thereafter. He knows that he was suffering from some mental ailment, but it may happen again in the future. An emotional breakdown can put him down at any moment and his whole being would collapse. Once you take to yoga, the great path of meditation, you may declare with confidence that though anything may come your way, you may face success or failure, you may be frustrated or undergo tensions for many days at a time, but you will face life with strength and courage. The turmoil of life cannot put you down because you understand the secret of a correct mental outlook or attitude. This is the contribution of yoga.
In this modern century, yoga is helping hundreds of people.
Could any psychologist help thousands of boys and girls who have taken to LSD? No, but one man, Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, has helped with the simple method of Transcendental Meditation. I have interviewed thousands of young people and they have all thrown away their drugs. They are leading new lives. They practise meditation in the morning and evening. This is just one practical illustration, one example which proves that through meditation, without fighting with yourself, or religion, or morals, or even without fighting with your own willpower, you can change. Even if you speak truthfully and live a life of honesty, you do not live spontaneously, but by the practice of yoga that great change will take place in your life.
1972, Hindu Centre, London, UK