2023 is a special year for us as we celebrate the birth centenary of our Guru, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. For this occasion, we came up with a project called Yoga Outreach 2023 for Health, Happiness and Harmony. This project has become popular around the country and around the world wherever people have participated with their different activities. While the projects are being conducted globally, at Ganga Darshan we are launching an Applied Yoga Chakra Training, in which, we have first covered Hatha Yoga and Karma Yoga. Now we are initiating Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga as the second step in the Applied Yoga Chakra.
What is the Yoga Chakra? It is a concept developed by our Guru, Swami Satyanandaji, in the early 1960s. It is the syllabus for the complete training in wholistic or integral yoga, as per the mandate of Swami Sivananda, which was to bring yoga for the development of the faculties of head, heart and hands. Although Swami Sivanandaji gave the mandate to his disciples to go and propagate yoga, it was Swami Satyananda who developed the syllabus and the concept of Yoga Chakra in the early 1960s in Munger.
Yoga Chakra means wheel of yoga. Chakra means wheel. In this wheel of yoga, there are six spokes that radiate from the centre outwards. These six spokes represent the six yogas chosen by Swami Satyananda for our day-to-day application and experience of yoga. The first three spokes or branches of the Yoga Chakra are hatha yoga, raja yoga and kriya yoga: hatha yoga for the body, the senses, the brain, the physical and the pranic systems; raja yoga for the mental and emotional systems; kriya yoga for the psychic and spiritual dimension. These three yogas represent our effort to transform the gross, tamasic nature into a positive nature. It is a practice that we do, beginning with hatha yoga, then raja yoga and kriya yoga.
After that we move into the three other aspects of yoga, which are karma yoga, bhakti yoga and jnana yoga. Karma yoga is about how we interact in the world, with our environment, our society, family, with our friends, and with ourselves. How do we respond? How do we react? How do we perform the appropriate, correct, positive and uplifting karma? How can we develop the harmonious relationship based on understanding and support? This is the expressive part of yoga. It modifies or relates to yogic lifestyle, not to yoga practice. After the practice, how we express and live the yogic awareness is seen in how we are able to live karma yoga, bhakti yoga and jnana yoga. Bhakti yoga is emotional management, harmony of emotions. Jnana yoga is applied knowledge, known as wisdom. We are connecting with wisdom. These three yogas become the expressive dimensions of yoga.
The six yogas represent the spokes of this wheel. The progression is in the Yoga Yatras, the courses conducted until now. Hatha Yoga Yatra is a progressive course in hatha yoga. Raja Yoga Yatra is a progressive course in raja yoga. Kriya Yoga Yatra is a progressive course in kriya yoga. We start from the basics and go to the end, and we do not select a little bit from here and a little bit from there. We experience the complete yoga. We experienced and experimented with the aim of deepening the subject of each yoga. This year, as a short form, a variation, a capsule form of yoga, we are combining hatha yoga and karma yoga, raja yoga and bhakti yoga and kriya yoga and jnana yoga.
In raja yoga and bhakti yoga, the focus is on realizing the nature, the behaviour patterns of our mind and emotions, and learning how to deal with them. People easily ignore their mental health. Physical health is never ignored. If we get an upset stomach, we immediately go and rest. If we get a head- ache, we immediately take medication and rest. If we get a boil or a pimple, we immediately do the needful to remove that problem. Anything in our body from a simple pimple or a boil to something major fully takes our attention, and we try to heal the body. If it is indigestion, we know that we are ill and we know that we need to do something to clear the indigestion.
When it comes to mental health, how aware are we of the pimples and boils that pop up in our mind? People think of stress, anxiety and tension as the major factor for mental disturbances and distractions. No, it is not the stress, anxiety or tension that is the main factor for our mental imbalance or mental illness, but the moods of the mind. The last four years when humanity went through the experience of Corona made us confront isolation. In isolation the only connection with the world was the social media, and people engaged more and more in social media.
One simple example: Suppose I believe in something; it may be right or it may be wrong. I go and discuss it with you, I tell you what I believe in and you counter that by telling me what you believe to be right or wrong. There is a discussion. There is talk. My own understanding is changing and your understanding is changing due to the exchange of thoughts and ideas. My rigidity is being diluted and I have become more accepting. Your rigidity becomes more diluted and you begin to understand and appreciate what I am saying. There is good, healthy communication.
For the sake of discussion, let us say that I think, ‘The earth is shaped like a pentagon, like the flat-earth theory. So I put ‘The Earth is shaped like a pentagon’ up on social media. Somebody will come and say, ‘Yes, the earth is shaped like a pentagon.’ There is no communication, and I am reinforcing my own idea. The group which is collecting around me is reinforcing my idea with their own understanding. So, what I believe in becomes much stronger, and later on nobody can change it, go against it or try to dilute it. I have become the person who has believed in this, and now nothing will change it. This has happened to the minds of people. They have become rigid.
Mental rigidity has come in, and psychologists and psychoanalysts the world over are talking of the challenges of mental health. They have even identified what kind of mental problems people suffer from. If they overuse Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, this mental condition is going to come. Young people are already facing it and suffering from it. In the coming decade, mental health is going to be an important subject in the world. How to treat the pimples and boils that come up in our own mind, the cancer, diabetes and arthritis of the mind. When is the mind arthritic? When it becomes rigid and does not bend anywhere. When does the mind become cancerous? When the cells of the mind become distorted.
This is where raja yoga plays an important role, for yoga is the only system in the world, which deals specifically with managing the mental moods, behaviours and functions. It is a yoga which is older than hatha yoga. Hatha yoga is not very old. It can go back maybe three, four, five thousand years. Raja yoga goes back further; it is one of the original yogas. This is an indication that since time immemorial, people have been having mental problems. Even if you are a caveman and a sabre-tooth tiger is chasing you, you will have a mental problem. You only have a wooden stick to beat it, or rocks in your hands to bash the head against. So, stress has always been there from our stone-age existence till today. It has mutated. The stress mutated from a basic to a complex condition today, and that has affected our perception and the conditions of mind.
Yoga has identified six conditions of mind, which become the cause of its infirmity. These six conditions are kama, passion; krodha, aggression; lobha, greed; moha, infatuation; mada, arrogance; matsarya, envy. If you observe yourself or anybody else, objectively, peacefully, you will notice that every behaviour of every individual is coloured by one of the six conditions. That becomes the cause of stress, anxiety, frustration and depression in life. When it is positive, it becomes the cause of happiness in life.
Many times people say to me, ‘I want peace and harmony in life.’ Nobody has asked me ever how to be happy and content, instead everybody asks how to be peaceful and harmonious. I think the opposite. I believe that if you are happy, you are at peace. If you are unhappy, you are not at peace. Happiness is the foundation for peace. Have you ever seen peace without happiness? It will be a very sour-faced peace. There won’t be any joy in it.
People talk of peace; yoga does not talk of peace. Yogis say that there should be peace everywhere, yet the yogic tradition and the yogic scriptures have never said, ‘Let there be peace everywhere,’ except in the Shanti Mantra. The yogic tradition has always said, ‘Let all beings be happy.’ They have believed that in happiness, all the positive experiences of life converge, and you live that. If you want to know yoga, go to the tradition; not to the New Age masters who speak of peace in abstract terms. Yoga is a process of discovery, it is not a process of imagination and fantasy. Through that discovery, you harmonize, balance and uplift yourself. You get rid of the extra baggage, become light, and go beyond the limitations. You experience freedom and transcendence.
4 October 2023, Raja Yoga-Bhakti Yoga, Ganga Darshan, Munger