Swami Krishnananda Shashtyabdapurti Mahotsava Commemoration Volume
A Souvenir released on Swami Krishnananda's 60th Birthday
The Meaning of Yoga
by H.H. Sri Manuvaryaji
All Yoga is for the Divine. It is the conversion of the human soul into the divne soul and the natural life into divine living.
Let us explain what Yoga is. It is not a special religion or a particular philosophical doctrine. It is the wisdom of life. It is experience. Yoga is the intelligent and self-conscious effort of man towards achieving universal existence. Yoga is a means by which man transcends human limitations and becomes the cosmic man – his feet no more clay firmly based on earth, his head high in the cloudless sky above.
People who have freed themselves from childless dreams and illusions, who have seen through the game of life, its fleeting joys and sorrows, successes and failures, loves and hatreds, have come to realise that life is lived mostly in utter ignorance. We are out of touch with reality. We are lost in our petty ignorance, groping in the world in search of Light. We live in false hopes and foolish reveries and are bound. There can be no redemption from all this, unless we find a higher truth. Yoga is the search for and the realisation of this truth.
The highest truth of life is a spiritual experience; it is not an intellectual conception. Yoga is a method of training the mind and developing its powers a subtle perception so that man may discover for himself the spiritual truths on which religious beliefs and moral values finally rest. Yoga is the realisation of our hidden powers.
Yoga is the art of life. It is also a technique for achieving the purest form of self-awareness devoid of all thought and sensation. Today some kind of reconstruction of thought is necessary to understand clearly what the great Yoga teachers of the past had sought.
Maharshi Patanjali's book is very well-known. Because of its prestige, there is a general misconception that Yoga is based on this book. It is not so. Patanjali was not the founder of Yoga. He was a very important systematiser. He represents a view which is dualistic and an attitude which is ascetic. A broader and more positive expression of Yoga is found in the Upanishads and in the Gita.
Yoga arose in the age of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It had its beginning among a healthy, powerful and independent community which had attained a high level of culture. The founders of the tradition were drawn from learned aristocratic families, from scholars and warriors. They examined life and sought its meaning and true goal. They saw the limitations of existence, its tragic reality, its dualities, the inevitable pain and suffering and the myriad illusions which surrounded life. They saw that our experiences in the world had meaning within limits, but those experiences did not invest life with the kind of significance the heart longed for. They realised that without such ultimate redeeming significance, the fragments of joy and sorrow, which wove like light and shadow through our life, were in the long run absurd and pointless. This is the central problem of existence and the starting point of the existential search for the deeper truth which reason alone fails to discover. What is it that inspires man to tireless striving for goodness, beauty, truth and justice if the world is ruled by blind mechanical necessity and there is no concern in the heart of the universe for man, his values and aspirations?
These men realised their deep bond to humanity. They were moved by the suffering they saw around them and wanted to help man find freedom. They had attained the highest development of individuality through the discipline of reason and emotion, through the development of character. And today we have a crisis of character. We act as we like, misunderstanding real freedom. But those wise men saw that although unique individuality was precious, its significance was limited by its obvious isolation and self-centeredness, and it could never encompass the total meaning of life.
That there is an answer to our search for truth and freedom and that there is a way to redeem our life from tragedy and pointlessness is a hope based on faith. But this hope and faith can be only verified by experience.
Faith in human freedom, perfectibility and redemption is natural to us, and is analogous to the faith on which science rests. Faith in the possibility of a rational order in the universe is the basis of science. It is a belief which has been increasingly verified by practice. Yet, in the beginning, there was nothing except hope to assure man that there was indeed such an order. Truth comes through inquiry, practice and revelation.
We noted above that Yoga is the art of living. Our life is given to us to live and not to suppress. It is upto us to live it sensibly and not to dissipate our forces stupidly. Life holds a rich promise for us.
We find a positive attitude towards life in the Upanishads and in the Gita. The world is the manifestation of the Divine. The Gita tells us that the Divine is working in the world. The man who has insight into the cosmic purpose, and expresses himself in harmony with it, lives true life. The world is not without meaning, but the meaning is not wholly maintained therein.
A true life is a life in which action and contemplation blend. A life of contemplation without action is empty. We need both power and vision, strength wisdom to make life meaningful. We need the experiences of the world in order to grow. There is nothing wrong with the world except our attitude towards it. It is the worldly attitude that is decried in the Upanishads—that outlook which makes the world, its success and pleasure, its power and glamour, its own gods. The blind pursuit of such phantoms estrange man from his essential truth and lures him into greater bondage.
Man has both the animal and the divine in him. There is nothing wrong with the animal as such; it is how the animal expresses itself which determines its value. The animal has to be given its due or it will not release us from its fetters. The animal may help or hinder our divine self-expression.
A true and meaningful life is one which has come to terms with all sides of the personality and become integrated on the basis of a spiritual insight. Repression brings suffering and hinders growth, and man's life is growth. But the repression from which civilised man suffers today is not the repression of instincts, but of the divine in man.
The limit to man's growth is his vision. There is no end to man's self-expression. Anything which helps the reality of man to emerge from the obscure depths of his personality is Yoga.
Let me attempt to clear some misconceptions about Yoga. It has often been thought that extreme asceticism and celibacy are the marks of a Yogi and the conditions of Self-knowledge. This is not true. The great teachers of the Upanishads, the founders of Yoga, were family men who instructed their sons in self-knowledge the two great teachers of Hinduism were Rama and Krishna, both of them prances and married men.
Hindu spiritual literature – the Vedas, the epics, the Puranas and the Tantras – is all replete with accounts of men and women, high-born and outcastes, from all walks of life, who attained the highest knowledge of Yoga through enlightened living, following their diverse occupations. The Mahabharata relates how an ordinary housewife and to meat-seller instructed a proud ascetic in higher wisdom.
Yoga is no retreat from the world; it is not a repressive but a direct psychology. For nearly all men, a normal level of life is an essential condition of growth into proper manhood and spirituality. Sex is neither wrong nor sinful. Sex is a part of love. But we have the feeling of shame, because sex is such a powerful drive that under its influence we often lose sense and self-control, becoming selfish and mean, using other individuals for our own. Under the influence of sex, people often become forgetful of their obligations; they become blind and deceitful, dishonest and mean, ugly and vulgar, cruel and sordid; in a word, they become devils. It is enough if we try not to be blind. Thus we find that Yoga advocates no suppression of instincts, no regression to some plane of primeval mass consciousness.
Since we are born in this world, we have to act. In studying Yoga, one often comes across the expression “the bondage of Karma". Yoga does not mean renunciation of action and pursuit of contemplation alone.
The aim of Yoga is not to relinquish action. Action is not opposed to freedom. Freedom is knowledge or wisdom and is opposed to ignorance alone. Nobody can give up action entirely, nor is it necessary or right to do so. The highest life is not without action; it is a life where action is combined with wisdom.
For Sri Krishna in the Gita, action is sacrifice. Certainly, the instinct which leads so many to reject the idea of an actionless life in spite of all arguments is a sound one. To reject action is to create a dualism between Brahman, the absolute, and the universe. There is no ultimate dualism in Reality. It is not the action that binds, for the surging tides of the manifested cosmos are truly the manifestation of the Supreme Brahman as is the calm bliss of the stainless witnessing Self. What binds us is a wrong attitude to action, the "knots of the heart" which, springing from ignorance, make us fancy that we are so many separate individuals, isolated from each other and "free" to perform actions for our selfish ends. This, and not action in itself, is what binds us.
It is not work which has to be renounced, but the 'Sankalpa', the formative will which seeks its own aim, an attitude that is found in too many would-be Yogis who seek in Yoga, not the "Atman" but a power of moulding the environment to a pattern more pleasing to the personal self.
For, in truth, it is in action, disinterested selfless action, that the way to Yoga lies. Forcible opening of a bud will not produce a blossom.
The Gita advocates the following discipline for meditation; a quiet place, a seat not too high, then a comfortable posture (Asana), direction of the gaze and regular, smooth and rhythmic breathing and the aspiration purely directed towards the one Self (as otherwise the practice of meditation will give rise to visions and hallucinations which will mislead the disciple). Purity of aspiration and the proximity of a wise Guru are the only safeguards against such delusions. The first stage in the manifestation of inner knowledge comes in the form of a perception that within the self is "That" which is immortal. This perception is of fundamental importance, because without it the spiritual life can find no lasting basis. Unless the core of man's being is rooted in something immortal, there can be no ultimate value in his life.
Self-discipline, `Tapasya', is essential in Yoga. But it is no torture of the body. The body is the field in which we have to work, and later, it will be needed for the service of the One. To weaken or destroy it by injudicious austerities is to destroy a valuable instrument. A weakened body means a weakened mind, and if the body is unnecessarily abandoned before the goal is reached, it only means that valuable years will have to be spent in educating a new one and bringing it to the point at which the "Path" was left.
Self-discipline must begin, not with the senses, but with the mind. The disciple must bend all his energies to the task of controlling his unruly mind, and when that is accomplished, he may be sure that the outer senses will offer no serious obstacles to being brought under control. Trying to control the senses without having first subjugated the mind is like trying to bail water out of a sinking ship without first stopping the leak.
It is true that the mind is the crux of the whole discipline, but it is also true that the ordinary disciple is quite unable rise to the level of functioning in his true or higher mind, and that the mind in which he does live is very closely bound up with the physical body. This being so, it is obviously foolish for the ordinary disciple to attempt a fine disregard of the bodily and external aspects of life when his mental life is intimately bound up with them.
A mind at peace with itself and a unified will are absolute essentials on the path. The disciple therefore may be content to grow harmoniously as a flower grows, and may not try to force his development by renunciations which spring from the will alone and not from the whole being. The sex desires must be de-energised by withdrawal and not pushed away by mere will. Only when they are drained of their energy is it safe to "renounce" them and then, indeed, renunciation is no longer needed.
The mental discipline is in fact the most essential of all, since it is in the raising of the mind to its true nature that the essence of the inner life is found. The mind must be tranquil, gentle and free from wandering thoughts; then there is "Mouna, inner silence; which signifies the ability to remain calmly still in the face of those outer stimuli which usually make the mind jump about like the monkey to which it is often compared.
The disciple must be united to the 'One Life' by pure "Buddhi". This implies purification of the mind. The wasteful rush of the mind must be checked by firmness that it moves by its own power and is no longer pulled and pushed by the blind force of attraction and repulsion. The objects of the senses must be dedicated to the service of the One Life and not for personal enjoyment. Studiously detaching himself from the forms, constant in that inner meditation which needs no special time or place or posture, the disciple will cut the knot of egoism so that the distorted movements of lust, hate, violence and greed, to which that not gives birth, will cease and die.
Then the disciple is ripe for becoming the external Brahman. He who was human has become the Cosmic Man, his feet firmly based on earth, his head high in the cloudless sky above. Serene in his true nature, he now, if he has come along the Path of Love, attains to that supreme devotion which has no cause for any conceivable gain, not even for the greatly coveted goal of Liberation. He seeks only to serve Sri Krishna, the Purushottama.