A Textbook of Yoga

by Swami Krishnananda

On what will you meditate? We tentatively answered this question earlier. Anything and everything can be the object of your meditation. Your Ishta Devata—that which engulfs you with love and affection, and with the expectation of fulfilment—is the object of your meditation. That is your god. Where your love is, there your god is. Here, the love that is spoken of is a total pouring forth of the soul of the individual for its final expectation, achievement. Finally, the meditator is the soul itself. It is not buddhi, chitta, ahamkara, manas that is meditating individually, isolatedly, in a segregated fashion. The whole of you asks for it.

As I mentioned, when you are drowning in water, the whole of you expects something. The whole of us does not usually manifest itself in daily life. When you work, when you think, when you speak, when you eat, part of your personality is outside. Even when you eat, you do not think of the food wholly; part of your mind is elsewhere. That is why the food is not appetising and cannot even be digested. You do not give sufficient respect even to the food that you eat because some percentage of your mind is in a railway train or somewhere else.

Here, in the case of meditation, that should not be the predicament. We are not doing some occupational duty when we are in meditation. Somebody is not asking us to do it as a job, for remuneration. This is a different thing altogether. It is the ‘must’ and the ‘ought’ in this life. The difficulty that you may sometimes face is the airy abstract form of this concept of achievement, even in the thought of God, in contrast with a solid reality and value of this world that you see with your senses. “Whatever you may say, I have something else to say,” these senses, this ego will go on saying. The reality of the world sets itself in contrast with the reality of the object of your meditation when this object appears to be conceptual, ideational, a thought process, while the world is a solid, tangible thing.

You have to persuade and convince yourself to accept of the real truth about things—namely, that all the so-called solidity of the world is ideational, finally. It is only a centre of consciousness; there are no solid objects. Do not be carried away by the substantiality and the solidity of the world, because this substantiality is nothing but an electrical vibration produced by the action of the sense organs; and if the five sense organs do not operate, the world of solidity will not be there.

Is there not solidity even in the dream world? Stones and mountains appear in dream. Are they not facts for your perception? You can eat a solid meal in dream. You can hit yourself against a solid wall in dream. Therefore, solidity can be purely conceptual even though it may look external and entirely different from the perceptional process. The dream world, the dreamer’s perception, is a great example before you to understand how this world is operating. The reality of the world, which is so tantalising, catching and enrapturing to the sense organs is, finally, cosmically, the same nature as the enrapturing objects and the solidity or the substantiality of things that you see in the dream world. This is a little bit of philosophy in order to give you enthusiasm for the practice.

In the earliest stages of meditation, everything will go on well. The body and the mind will get adjusted to your instruction. But after about twenty-five to thirty or forty percent of your practice has become successful, you will find certain unseen, un­foreseen and unexpected difficulties arising. They will arise from the body as well as from the mind. Even for three years you will not find that anything is happening at all because of the lukewarm nature of the concentrational process. In the beginning, no one can be so intense and ardent in concentration, on account of other external factors intruding themselves. But if you are tenacious in the practice—persist in it wholeheartedly for a long time, giving sufficient time every day for the practice—certain unknown phenomena will manifest themselves before you. One of them is a complaint from the physical body, which will say, “I am not feeling well, so today it is not possible to think like this.” Why does it say that? You may put this question to your own self.

Aches in the body, pains of different types, and an inability to be seated arise on account of a peculiar borderland which the pranas operating inside reach, automatically, by the very fact of the concentration of the mind. I am not speaking about pranayama here; it is a discussion on meditation and concentration. But the pranas get affected even by a thought. Mostly, the pranas are servants of the mind. Whatever the mind says, the pranas will do. If the mind thinks something, the prana directs itself to that particular thing. It may be inside or outside the body. If you think of a tree, the prana will jet forth in the direction of that object. It can touch even a star, if the mind is concentrating in that manner. On account of the desires of the mind, which are multifarious in their nature, there is usually a disharmonious movement of the pranic energy in the body.

The attempt of the kumbhaka process in pranayama is only to harmonise the working of the pranas through the body. Usually the pranas are not harmonious, because our thoughts themselves are not harmonious. Varieties of thoughts arise in the mind—sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes very disturbing, sometimes jubilant, etc. Because these interfere with the harmonious working of the psychic content, the prana is also affected.

When you go on meditating in this manner for a long time, with sufficient attention paid on the object of meditation, you are perforce entering into a new field of action of harmonising, stabilising and introducing a kind of symmetry and system into the working of the prana. Then there is an agitation. You are introducing a rule into the working of the prana which was not its original rule. When a change is introduced in any performance, in the beginning there is doubt and resentment about it: “What kind of thing is coming?” In the earliest stages, the pranas resent this introduction of your new type of meditation, and so they sometimes creates tremors in the body. Oftentimes, those who are accustomed to meditation may have felt a shake-up, a jerk. The yoga shastras tell us that angamejayatva is a shaking up, a trembling caused by the pranas seeking a new course of movement, a course quite different from that to which they have been accustomed under the orders of the sense organs. The pranas order their actions according to the order they receive from above, which are the sensations.

We live in a sensory world. All of us have something of the sensory pressure even in our thoughts and our feelings. We think sensorially, feel sensorially, argue sensorially. Finally, it is only sense organs that are ruling the world. This is the way in which we live. This also is the way the pranas act. Now a new system of law and order is being introduced into the organisation of the body, and in the beginning there is a suspicion about it. “It may not be good. I will not do it. I will not cooperate.” But if you insist on it, there is tremor, agitation, pain and a cessation of activity for some time. There can even be a dislocation of the working of the physiological organs—lack of appetite, sleeplessness, and new kinds of pain in the neurological system which you have not had earlier. But these are secondary matters. The main problem will arise from the mind itself. It will get fatigued.

Physical fatigue can be tolerated to some extent, but mental fatigue is intolerable. It will not permit you to do anything at all. You will say, “This is no good.” Psychic fatigue is a very peculiar phenomenon before us. Why do we feel exhausted? What is the reason? There are two reasons. One reason is that perhaps the body-mind system has been loaded with some work or performance beyond its capacity. Even a donkey cannot carry bricks beyond a certain limit. Maybe the work load has increased so much that the mind cannot get on with it any longer. The other reason is that we do not like that work. We do not feel that anything is going to come out of it. It is not that the workload is too much, but that it is useless. “Why should I do it?”

In meditation, the workload may not be much because you are not going to meditate all twenty-four hours of the day, so that aspect of the complaint is irrelevant here. But the mind may say that this is not worthwhile, finally. People come to the ashram saying, “For the last twenty years I have been meditating, but I am in the same condition. I have not achieved anything—no visions, no sounds, nothing like that.” The mind may be concentrating, meditating for twenty years, but it is like an unwilling labourer—a person who works without heart, without mind, and without knowing at all what actually is being done. The god of the object of meditation has not entered the heart.

Unless God calls you, your heart will not concentrate on God. Many people say, “Only the grace of God is the final solution.” Grace implies the Almighty Power cooperates with your effort. There is a question whether effort is necessary or grace is important. This is difficult to answer because grace and effort go together. The response from the cosmic forces is directly connected with the effort that you make from this side.

In the Bhagavadgita, for instance, the symbology of Krishna and Arjuna seated in one chariot and wanting to achieve a single purpose is an illustration of the need for a combination of effort and grace. Why should Krishna be there? Arjuna alone is sufficient; he knows how to fight the war, so why should Krishna sit there? Or, Krishna is Almighty and can do everything, so why should Arjuna be there? The individual and the cosmic are commensurate with each other, and they have to join hands with each other in a mysterious manner. Yatra yogesvarah krsno yatra partho dhanur-dharah, tatra srir vijayo bhutir dhruva nitir matir mama: Where God and man work together... You should not expect God to do everything for you—to even lift your plate. This is a mistaken understanding of the phenomenon of grace in religious practice.

Because you are consciousness of being there as a person, an effort on your part is called for. It is true that, finally, only God does everything; it has to be accepted. But if that is the case, you cease to be there in one second. But you also seem to exist there, and you are conscious that you exist. Arjuna felt that it was not only Krishna; he was also there. You are yourself the creator of the problem. You create the problem by feeling that you also are there. Do you not believe that you are there? Or do you believe that only God is there? Because of the fact that your feeling that you are there is inseparable from your very existence, effort is called for. But, as you are a part of the universal energy, grace is also necessary; so grace and effort go together.

Thus, prayer to God is also a very, very essential medium for your success in meditation, together with your own effort of concentration. When a little child is learning to walk, its mother holds it by the hand, but it also moves its feet back and forth. Both efforts are necessary at the same time. If the mother lets go, the child may fall down; but if she merely holds on, what is the purpose? The child will not learn how to walk. A little effort on the part of the child to move its legs should go together with the support of the mother, until the child is able to walk on its own.

Ultimately, yoga is a super-religious practice. I do not want to call it religious, because it does not come under the category of any kind of religious denomination. It is religion in the sense that it is connected with ultimate divinity, and therefore it is religious, but we may say it is super-religious. Yoga is also an art of intense human effort of the total soul rising up into a complete action—because when God calls us, the whole totality of the universe responds. The response does not come from any particular part of the world.

The Bhagavata Purana tells us that when Suka Maharishi, the son of Vyasa—a little boy who was a brahmanishta—was walking, unconscious of even his own physical existence, Vyasa called, “My dear boy, where are you?” and the answer came, “Father, I am here.” But who gave the answer? Every leaf of every tree around started vibrating, “I am here.” It was not a little boy responding. Before that boy stones would melt, leaves would speak, and every tree, every shrub would smile. The response comes from everything, because of something being there in everything. When God calls us, the whole world calls us. If God loves us, the whole of humanity will love us.