Tapas, which is an adoration of God, is different from austerities which merely subjugate the senses or restrain the mind from its normal operations, while it is true that in an honest presenting of oneself before the Almighty which is the greatest tapas, these operations automatically take place. The life which is saintly, austere and devout is in a way a great enigma, a difficult enterprise which has many sides which look like many different features of approach, yet forming a single endeavour for a concentrated purpose. The way in which one looks at things through the eye of the mind is the portrait of one's true personality, and the personality of a saintly figure is thus pictured by the inward operation of the psychological perceptive faculty which sees things with the mind not merely with the physical instruments with which we look at the world of persons and things.

In austerities and performances of tapas, Yoga Sadhana, the one thing that is aimed at is a collecting of oneself, a gathering up of oneself into what oneself has to be. Does it mean that we are not ourselves in our normal days so that in a religious mood or while performing a spiritual exercise, we have to collect ourselves as if we have been scattered otherwise? We are indeed dismembered personalities-a thing which is not noticed by us in our busy hours. We may be physically sitting in one place but we are really in many places at the same time. Wherever our interest is, there we are, not necessarily on the physical chair or the seat on which the body may be fixed. The human person is basically a psychic entity and not a physical body. What all occurrences to the body really are occurrences to the person.

A person may be unaffected, even if the body is affected in some way. Do we not see physical operations taking place, medical treatment being administered thus causing changes and transformations of various kinds in the physical system yet unaffectedly leaving the person? Nothing happens to the person. The person is intact while changes take place in the physical system, in the organism, in the limbs of the body. Sometimes the body may be put to hard work yet the mind may be very happy, if this work that a person puts the body subject to is a means to the satisfaction of the mind, all which show that we are not exactly what the body is. We may even put ourselves to the condition of physical starvation for the sake of a mental happiness. We may walk long distances if only we may be mentally secure and psychologically happier. We may not eat for days and not sleep at all, all which is a great discomfort to the body, if only it would enhance the satisfactions of the mind. They are heartened longings of the inner man which will not mind any kind of physical hardship. Thus we may try to understand the difference that seems to be there between what we really are and what our physical framework appears to be.

Hence, it is not necessary that we should be regarded as sitting in one place just located in one spot merely because the body is in one place. What the body does is not what the person does and where the body is need not necessarily be where the person is. The person is a different subtle mystery inside, which cannot intelligently be identified or equated with the body. Hence it is all the more true in the case of a religious exercise. Bodily exercises are not necessarily the exercises we perform. We cannot say that we are doing what the body is doing. We may be doing something quite different from what the body is doing simultaneously with the body's actions and operations, and it would be immaterial to the man inside whatever the body may be doing. The body may be comfortably seated, well-fed physically, but the mind may be tormented inside and I give the other analogy that the body may be put to hard work voluntarily undertaken for the sake of a satisfaction of the mind. These are principles of interesting psychology. If this is the case, anything that we do is not to be mixed up with what the body does, because what we do need not necessarily be the same thing as the body does and alternately the body's actions need not necessarily be our actions.

Hence our bondage and freedom may be said to consist in what we do and how we are related, not what the body does or what the manner is, in which the physical body is related. A physical body may be placed on the throne of an emperor. It does not mean that the person has become a king, because the king is not the body. Hence the enthroning of the physical body does not make that person a king. The body is not the king; who else is the king? Here is the mystery of man. The rich man is not the physical body, the poor man also is not the physical body. He who cannot get what he wants is poor. He who feels that he has everything that he needs is rich. These are all interesting pen pictures of our inner subtleties giving an insight into what we really are and what is expected of us when we place ourselves in the exalted expected position of a spiritual seeker or a Yogin, so to say.

Yoga is self-control. It is the control of ourselves. Now, who are we that have to be restrained? The restraining of the various relations in which we have been placed and severing the relations which we have established, mark the word we, the real we, the real Me, and maintaining one's own real status so that all the energies that have been channelised in relations are brought back as forces in an administrative organisation are summoned back to the centre under conditions of necessity. When a front confrontation for a specified purpose is requisitioned, all energies are centralised and the greatest confrontation is the practice of Yoga. Here all the forces are centralised in oneself, and no permission is given to any part of the personality to move outward for any other purpose than the chosen one that is the great engagement religious, we call austerity, tapas.

By control of the mind through exerting force or power of will, its strength can be enhanced. As you know hunger increases by starving, the opposite is the result that follows from a particular intensified action. The more you eat the less you feel the appetite, the less you eat the more is the appetite. This is how things work. So here, the less you concern yourself with what is not you, the greater is the strength that is generated within you because if you distribute all your wealth in a thousand directions, you know that you become a poor person. When you withdraw all this distributed wealth and concentrate it in yourself, you have the satisfaction of all the possession. It is difficult to practice tapas because it is not easy to know what exactly is meant by the restraint of oneself.

Many a well-intentioned seeker can miss the mark here in this practice because the objective, the aim, the purpose of the practise may not be clearly placed before one's mind. Once it is clear as to what is meant by these processes of restraint one has to be in one place only and not in many places. You may say, "I am always in one place, I cannot be in two places at the same time." But it has been pointed outthat we can be in a thousand places even if we are physically in one place only, and perhaps every one of us is in many places, at least in more than one, because that which we think is the place where we are. Now it is not difficult for anyone to appreciate where work is located at a particular time. We have distributed ourselves in thousand directions by scattered interests and segregated occupations which pull us in many directions and we place ourselves in the very condition of a man who has to dole out his wealth to many children, many relations and many enterprises, thus having practically nothing with himself or for himself. Why should we be in many places? How is it that we can be specialised?

Here is another difficulty and very intriguing indeed. Can we become special entities without being which we cannot scatter ourselves in this manner? Can space cut us into pieces and locate us in one thousand centres, unless we have become the non-we, or to put it more precisely, the Atman has become the Anatman, the self has become the non-self? Such a situation cannot arise. It is impossible for us to have multitudes of psychic locations of interest unless we have divided ourselves spacially into bits so that we have become bits of psychic action rather than a single person. Certainly in this state of affairs we are poorer than the poorest in psychological standard because all the strength has gone out - it has gone out, it is not within us because the outwardness of the particular centre in which we are interested is the explanation for our being scattered in that manner. The isolation of our psychic components in this way can be accounted for only if we have become other than what we are, because if that has not taken place we cannot have any interest outside ourselves. The outsideness of interest is the segregation of the self into the not-self. This is the foundation of the very art of understanding mental operations, the very root of the study of psychology, and a seeker of truth, a student of Yoga, has to be a very good psychologist-at least in the sense of a knowledge of one's own mind and its operations. We are not actually as we appear psychologically.

Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a master in the knowledge of the subtleties and the tricks of the mind. He was not enamoured of the reputation which was his glory during the days he lived in Swargashrama and you can imagine how hard it is for a single person to live in one place for twelve years continuously unbefriended by people, unspoken to, unattended by anyone and having none to call his own or anything to regard as his own. Any one of us may try this art of living alone, having nobody who can speak to us, because the Sadhus in Swargashram were independent persons. They would not speak to one another, they lived in their own worlds, they had their own problems and aspirations and one had no occasion to speak to another. In that state of affairs it was a wilderness of humanity, literally, and in that condition of human isolation, how could one expect a person to live with all the aspirations, emotions, impulses and propulsions, characteristic of a human nature? Yet it was done, and it was done with one single intention: it was the summoning of the divine spirit for a vision for which he appeared to have come to this world.

The miracle that he worked is its own explanation. That tapas which he performed is the seed and the tree of whose fruit we are tasting at this present time as this vast organisational work and the wave of spiritual enlightenment. In our scriptures it is always said that concentrated practice should be carried on for at least a period of twelve years. There should not be any other occupation during these years of self-discipline. The years which were twelve were practically years of his utter solitude. We have to struggle hard in our minds to understand, to appreciate and to discover any meaning in the way in which one could have lived for such a long period in such hardship with a terrific heat of the sun in summer and the pouring of rains in monsoon and the shivering cold in winter where cold winds howl and one has to bathe in the freezing water of the Ganga during rain on at least six months of the year with a diet I described yesterday. All that is difficult was the legacy of these mahatmas, these Sadhus in Swargashram. However, as it is said, intense forces become recognised and broadcast by their own powers as the blazing sun cannot be hid even by thickest of clouds. His presence is always felt and the aura or the magnetism, we may say, of this personality must have reached some distances and seekers began to gravitate to that centre of this austere personality, and today we had some unknown old old disciples, Swamis-I may name a few of them-who were the pioneers during the time of the construction of the very idea of a society called the Divine Life Society.