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Yoga is a practical science, and it has a very rational foundation as its philosophy. I have practically touched upon all the important theoretical or foundational aspects of yoga; from now onwards, I propose to enter into the practical side of it in more detail, since that is the principal objective of our study in this academy.

People tell us, oftentimes, that there are different kinds of yoga. It is not exactly true that there are many yogas. There are different colours or shades of meaning given to a central approach which yoga really is. The foundations of yoga are deeply philosophical in the sense that they are related to the ultimate structure of things—the very nature of the universe and all creation taken together.

The art of yoga is a universal process. It is not an activity undertaken by any person. Actually, when one enters into the field of yoga, one starts shedding this individuality gradually, little by little, and begins to expand one’s being into wider and wider areas until it becomes impossible even to think except in terms of the whole of creation.

That we are able to think now absolutely individually, almost in terms of this body, is the travesty of the whole matter. We are sunk so deep in utter ignorance which beggars description that we cannot understand how our aim of life can be super-individual—not concerned with this so-called me and, much less, this body.

“I wish to attain salvation. I wish to have a vision of God. I shall contact the Creator.” These ideas are puerile, child-like notions whose meaning is not clear even to the person who makes such statements. No one can contact God as someone contacts an official in the government. This is quite a different matter altogether. But, we are human beings thinking like children, practically, and totally bereft of the inner relationships that are there between ourselves and God’s creation. We think in terms of family relations and our little nationality, our sexual differences, political feelings, and so on and so forth. All of these have gone so deep into our blood and veins that we cannot think, actually, in an impersonal manner. It is practically impossible to be impersonal in the interpretation of experience, since we are hard-boiled individuals and it is difficult to melt this individuality.

If we read the lives of great saints and sages, whether of the West or of the East, we will find that it is not an ordinary task to transform oneself into a spiritual seeker, a truly religious aspiring soul, a seeker on the path of yoga. The austerities to which I made some sort of a reference yesterday, which one is called upon to practise for the purpose of this spiritual transmutation, are unimaginably difficult, because nothing can be more difficult than self-control.

We are always trying to control other people—controlling servants, controlling subordinates, controlling other nations. Everything is externally motivated. No one knows, no one can even imagine, that there is such a thing as self-control. One does not know whether it exists at all. Even to be told about it is a great marvel. Ascharyavat pasyati kascit enam: “A wonder is this teaching!” Wonderful is the teacher, wonderful is the recipient of this knowledge, wonderful is the theme that is discussed. Everything is a wonder when we enter into this field.

Yoga, in one sentence, is self-control, self-restraint—the inhibition of the outward movement of consciousness—which follows as a consequence in the wake of this entry of consciousness into this body. We cannot understand what all this means when we are told that self-control is the withdrawal of the connection of consciousness with external objects, consequent upon its entry into this body, or individuality.

This is all hard metaphysics for the layman, because this position that is stated implies a knowledge of everything that has happened to the individual before the individuality took place at all. If you can recollect what I told you in some of the earlier lessons, you would have noticed that the essence of our being is intelligence, a luminosity, a radiance, a light which does not shed its radiance on something else but is, itself, radiance—light shedding light on its own self. It is not a light emanating from some substance, like the light emanating from a candle, but it is the substance itself.

This, again, is a little difficult for us to understand. We are accustomed to think in terms of substances and attributes, as one distinguished from the other; the quality of a thing is different from the substance in which the quality inheres. So, when we speak of light, radiance, luminosity and such things, we imagine that something is there which sheds this light. Even when we say that consciousness is light, there is a subtle feeling that there is a substance at the back of consciousness of which this consciousness is a light or radiance, because this is the way we are made to believe and to think. But, here the substance and the quality are identical.

Consciousness is not a quality of something which has consciousness. This problem arises in us because we are prone to think that we are individuals from whom consciousness emanates. We are the substance, and our intelligence is our attribute. “I am intelligent; I am conscious.” Such statements imply that I is the substance and consciousness is the attribute. “I am conscious; I am endowed with consciousness.” There is no substance which is at the back of consciousness. We have to try to re-orient our thinking totally in order to enter into a new realm of understanding. The old habits of the linear logic of the mind and three-dimensional geometry have to be shed.

This is the reason why yoga is very difficult. The very purification process itself takes the whole life of the person. Why is it said that one has to live with a Guru for years and years? The reason is that this so-called living with a Guru, or a master, is the process of purification of the very outlook of life and the very way of thinking itself. We are accustomed to totally wrong thinking, right from the beginning, and this topsy-turvy thinking has to be straightened by no other way than by the impact of a living being who is the superior, the guide, the master—the Guru.

A person who sees everything topsy-turvy due to some defect in the organic structure of the body cannot be taught anything by any amount of lecturing or teaching. That requires an organic approach, a medical treatment which is not merely a theoretical administration. We can never imagine how our basic substance is consciousness, and that this substance is consciousness. Consciousness is being; being is consciousness. We have been told this again and again—sat is chit, chit is sat. This consciousness that our being is, is infinite, essentially. Here again is a shock injected into us. How could we be infinite? How could any person have an infinitude at the root of his being? We are little bodies, almost nothings, insignificant before the magnitude of the physical universe.

Again, a deep analytical process has to be undergone in order to convince ourselves that our root is infinite. The study of the three states of consciousness—waking, dream and deep sleep—has adequately revealed to us that it is impossible to divide consciousness into parts, into bits of individualities or localised existences. Here, we have to exercise a little bit of our purified reason to understand how consciousness cannot be tied to a body and it cannot be partitioned into bits of process. It cannot be divided. It has to be undivided, and an undivided thing is, also, an unlimited thing.

This unlimitedness that is at our back is the reason for our asking for unlimited things in the world. We are, basically, unlimited existences—not ‘existences’ in plural, but one single existence into which we all converge at the root. The asking for eternity of living and infinitude of possession, which is the characteristic of every human being, is an outer expression of what we really are at our base. There is an endlessness behind us, both in space and in time. This endlessness, spatially within us in terms of magnitude, is the reason behind why we cannot be satisfied with any amount of possession in this world. Even if we are the rulers of the whole earth, we cannot be satisfied. There is nothing that can satisfy us, because we ask for more and more things until the limit of possession is reached, which is nothing but the unlimitedness of possession.

At the same time, we ask for endless existence. We do not want to die, to perish in one moment. We do not want to exhaust our lives, even after three thousand years. There is no limit to our asking for time; there is no limit to our asking for space. Therefore, there is a mystery of an eternal asking, and an infinite asking, within us. And, if that had not been the root of our being, we would not have been kept restless here, asking and getting nothing.   We keep on asking for endless things in space and in time; yet, we can get nothing in this world. No one has purchased infinity or eternity by any amount of struggle or wielding authority or power as an emperor. Everybody has turned to the dust and gone to the wind.

What is this mystery? Why does this happen? How is it that on one side we ask for that which is endless, and on the other side we seem to turn to dust? It is because the phenomenal and the noumenal pull us in two different directions. Because of the phenomenality of our body, our egoism, our individuality and our social relations, we can get nothing that we ask for. That which we ask for pertains to the noumenal existence at the back of our being; but the manner in which we conduct ourselves, or the method that we employ to fulfil these askings, is phenomenal. There is a contradiction between the methodology and the nature of the asking. While we ask for that which is permanent, we employ an impermanent means to fulfil this wish. That is why we go on asking, and get nothing, finally. Everybody asks till the end of life, and departs with open hands.

This is a philosophical argument proving that man is infinity and eternity, though, unfortunately, caught up in phenomenality. Yoga is self-restraint. It is a restraint of the phenomenal nature and a reverting to the noumenality within us, which sometimes is called the Self in man, the Atman, the Brahman, the Absolute, the Supreme Being. The noumenal existence is commonly present, uniformly spread out everywhere, so that when we enter into the Atman, or the Self of ours, we are not entering into any particular person’s Atman, but the Atman which is the soul of the cosmos—as, when a ripple or a wave in the ocean subsides into its base, it is entering into the base of all the waves in the total ocean and not merely into its own little root. The little root of this one wave is the root of all the waves because it is the single ocean spread out at the back of all the waves.

The limitations of language and the poverty of the meanings attached to the words we utter make it difficult for us to explain the significance of words like ‘Atman’, ‘Brahman’, etc. We are hypnotised into a feeling that the Atman is a candle flame that is inside our body. It is unfortunate.

This substance of ours is the Atman. This hard thing that we feel as we are seated here, this solid, rock-like existence of ours is the Atman which has solidified, concretised itself into this phenomenal body. It is more real than this phenomenal body, but due to our involvement in sensory contacts and in this body’s operations, we may imagine that this Atman is an abstract concept. We are unable to believe that it is a substance.

Can we ever believe that the whole universe is constituted only of mathematical point events, as our scientists tell us? We feel that they are talking through their hats. It makes no sense. How can the hard world be made of mathematical point events? But, this is what the world is made of. It is an ethereal emptiness, finally—shunya, a void. There is some substance in this Shunya-vada, a doctrine which says that, finally, there is nothing in this world. There is some truth in that.