I have told you a little about the theory and background of yoga and the time has come when it should be understood in a different way. Yoga came to the West in the form of physical exercises, now it is developing as a new science and many psychologists are thinking in terms of using meditation for psychotherapy. This should be done, but only with a few sincere aspirants. They must come forward and work hard to develop this higher awareness. Out of millions of people all over the world, only a few people actually try to take the path of yoga to attain higher realization or higher experience.
The ultimate purpose of yoga is to experience oneself in the purest state. Now we do not know ourselves in the purest state. What we know about ourselves is mixed up. We know ourselves in terms of ‘I am Christian, I am a Hindu, I am a man, I am a woman, I am a tall man, my name is this, my name is that, I have an M.A.’ We know ourselves in terms of all these things which is a kind of confused knowledge. We have to disassociate from all these types of knowledge and we have to gradually understand ourselves as we really are.
When Socrates said, ‘Know thyself’, he meant try to realize the centre of your personality. When the great saint Ramana Maharshi said, ‘Think, who am I?’ he meant try to realize that centre of your personality. Many great men have been saying this from time to time. Thus you should try to strive to realize and understand this higher aim of yoga, both theoretically and practically. There is no other path and there is no other way by which you will be able to experience your own consciousness. There are different paths by which you can come nearer to God. There are various religions like Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism through which you can worship God in your own way, but when you want to make consciousness free from its limitations, the only method is yoga. This method is called the yoga of meditation in Sanskrit, but it should be translated as the science of self-awareness.
1970, UK