The art of yoga is the procedure which the deepest in man adopts in the solution of the mystery of life. I have been mentioning on different occasions that yoga is not what we actually do as a human being. It is an art of being. We will not be able to make any sense out of this mystery of the art of being. What does it mean, after all? What do we mean by being? Being is that which has to be distinguished from becoming, by a subtle distinction that has to be drawn between them.

The world that we see, that we are experiencing before us, this body in which we are caught up, this visible life, is becoming, because it is a movement. It becomes; it never is. We, also, become, every moment of time. We have been growing and growing, right from our babyhood, and we are growing, decaying, moving, undergoing transformation. Even our human individuality is a becoming; there is no being in ourselves. But, the fact that we are able to know that we are involved in becoming is an answer to the question as to what is behind becoming. All becoming, all movement, all evolution is an impulse to being, so that becoming is the response of the universe to the call of that which is Pure Being—that which we call Eternal, that which we consider the Infinite, that which is beyond the transitoriness of perception, space and time, that summons all becoming towards Itself as the periphery of a circle may be summoned by the centre thereof.

We are pulled, in spite of ourselves. We run fast in a direction of which we have no consciousness. All the religions of the world and all the philosophies have racked their brains in trying to know what this call is that keeps man restless from moment to moment. Why should we be restless, if we are totally involved in becoming? We die every moment of time, and in this perpetual process of dying, there is no time for us to get restless. There cannot be any such thing called joy and sorrow in a world of total transitoriness. This stands to logic; but, there seems to be a secret hidden behind the transitoriness and the dying process of things. That secret keeps us ever restless.

The feelings of joy and sorrow, and the anxiety, insecurity, and difficulties that we experience in our lives cannot be explained if everything is purely passing, because a thing that passes cannot have an experience that it passes. Then, there cannot be any experience at all. No one can know anything. Even the thing that tries to know a thing cannot know that it is doing so. It would be a fool’s paradise to the core, but it does not appear to be such. Even in the contradictions of life there is an impulse from within us to resolve these contradictions. Otherwise, why should there be organisations, conferences, or efforts of any kind, whatsoever? Why should man do anything at all, and think anything at all, if everything is passing, dying, and nothing exists, finally?

Here is an indirect answer, arising from within our own selves, to the question of life as a whole. We are the answers to our own questions. Not the books, not the scriptures, not even the Gurus of the world can help us, finally. We have to stand on our own legs. Finally, we will find that the Guru is within us; God is within us; the secret is within us; immortality is within us. That which we struggle for is being carried by us from place to place every moment. The treasure is within us. But, this within-ness of ours is, again, a mystery that eludes our understanding. We are empirically brainwashed. Empirical-ridden senses tell us that the within-ness of experience is nothing but the within-ness of the body. That which is inside the body is within; that which is outside the body is without. The existence of the body is the reason behind our entertaining notions of inside and outside. If the body were not, there would be no such idea. But, can we think as Pure Consciousness, which we seem to be?

The conclusion we arrive at is by self-analysis itself. The three states of waking, dream and sleep, when they are analysed thoroughly, threadbare, reveal to us that we do exist under conditions bereft of the awareness of even the body and the mind—for instance, in deep sleep. There is a subtle suggestion in the state of deep sleep that we do exist independent of body encasement and mental restrictions. In what condition do we exist in deep sleep, except as a bare minimum of the awareness that we were—nothing more, nothing less? We existed; we were; we are; I am. Nothing more can be said about the condition in which we persisted at the back of the condition we call sleep.

This bare, featureless transparency of consciousness seems to be our essential nature. And, consciousness is an indivisible something. No one can cut consciousness into pieces. It cannot be divided into parts. No one can imagine a division within consciousness. We cannot divide ourselves into two parts, or into any number of parts. The very attempt at imagining a division in consciousness asserts the indivisibility of consciousness, because the consciousness of there being a gap between two parts of consciousness is, again, filled with consciousness itself. Therefore, a conception of the division of consciousness is impossible.

There is no dividedness in the being of consciousness. Consciousness is being; being is consciousness. Being is consciousness; consciousness is being. The awareness that I am is, also, the awareness that I exist. I am-ness is nothing but existence affirming itself as being conscious of itself. We cannot separate being from consciousness, or consciousness from being. When I feel that I am, it is a summing up of the blend of consciousness and the being thereof, and vice versa. So, the minimum of our being is the barest residuum of consciousness.

We are not bodies, not men, women or children—nothing of the kind. The root from which we start the practice of yoga is the operation of consciousness, not of the senses and the psychic operations, all which have to be restrained by nirodha, as yoga puts it—chitta vritti nirodha. The restraint of the senses and the mind is the restraint of those conditioning factors which compel us to feel that we are always bodies, individuals, human beings. We have to melt down, in a way, these impulsions to the feeling that we are pinpointed to one place through a body and segregated from others. But, this suggestion and hint at the nature of the Ultimate Reality as Pure Consciousness and indivisible Being leaves us in a peculiar difficulty, which sometimes overwhelms us with an impossibility to move onward.

The reality of the world persists even here, at the point of our coming to a final conclusion that the final reality of things is Being-Consciousness, sat-chit. The winds of life blow so hard upon us, and they will not easily leave us to ourselves. Again and again we have to persist in this meditation upon the conclusion we have very wisely arrived at through this analysis of Being-Consciousness as the final reality of things, notwithstanding the fact that we are tossed hither and thither by the waves of empirical existence as a person caught up in the waves of the ocean sinking down this moment, and rising up on the surface another moment, only to sink down again. We, in this ocean of life, go within and come up to the surface only to see the world again with our eyes; yet, we should develop within ourselves a hardihood and a toughness of conscious behaviour by which we shall stand firmly on ourselves. We should apply the whole of our will to a dedicatedness of whatever we are in our entirety for this great purpose of bringing to the level of our conscious experience what has remained only as a suggestion at the barest minimum of our being.

Now we have only logically come to a conclusion that the whole universe seems to have at its core the reality of Being-Consciousness, Existence-Knowledge, sat-chit, but logical assertion should become part of feeling and experience. Mere intellectual analysis does not suffice in a world where instincts are strong. We know very well how logically and scientifically we behave in a court of law or in an office in which we are working, but we are poor, instinct-ridden people in our own families, in our little circles of private relationship. Our public life is different from our private life. We know very well that we are not within us what we are outwardly in external relationships. This is proof of the inability of logical conclusions to guide our life wholly. The strong emotions, feelings, instincts and sentiments, which have become part of our living, have to get blended with logical understanding. All the logic of the reason should go hand in hand with the deepest feelings within us. We should not feel something and understand another thing. Otherwise, we will be like people being convinced against their own will. As the poet puts it: “A person who is convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” He doesn’t change.

Hence, all the teachings go over our heads, mostly, because the teachings are on the surface of our life. They remain as communications in the empirical realm of our sensory existence. But there is a trans-empirical being in us which is subliminal and is not merely what we see with our senses. This has to be brought to the surface of consciousness. In a way, we are conducting a super-psychoanalytical inquiry where we bring up to the surface of consciousness not merely what is subconscious and unconscious, but what is spiritual. The Atman, the Self, is brought to the surface of conscious experience, so that the indivisibility of experience which remained only as a suggestion in the state of deep sleep becomes a direct experience in our waking consciousness. When we are conscious, we are not conscious that there is a divided world of isolated individuals. We become conscious of the indivisible connectedness of our being with the whole cosmos. Yoga is a movement towards this larger interrelatedness of our being, so that when we think in yoga, we think in a way as the whole cosmos thinks.