A Textbook of Yoga

by Swami Krishnananda

Well, it may be true that the things of the world are made of such stuff as dreams are made of. But, they are still worse. Even dream objects can be seen for the time being, and they seem to be giving us a tentative satisfaction. Dream objects are much better than what we consider as dear and near in this world. As they do not exist at all, they are not even as valuable as dream objects. With these deliberations, you must detach yourself from the involvement of consciousness in pleasant things, or even in what you call unpleasant things. The pleasant and unpleasant are created by the human mind; they do not exist in the cosmos. This is very important to remember.

After this inward analysis and conscious conviction, your true meditation starts. When you are absolved of all these social relations of attachment and aversion, you begin to find yourself as part and parcel of the physical cosmos. Now you do not feel that way. You never feel, even for a moment, that your body is made up of the same substance as the physical world. You are made up of only wealth, belonging, love, and a merrymaking atmosphere of family life. This is what you think your life is. But really, your life is a different thing. It is an actual belonging to the very physical nature itself. The very stuff out of which a tree is made, or a brick is made, is also the stuff out of which this body is made. Thus, your real friend is this nature, this world outside. People, in the sense of a psychological or social relation, are not your friends. Nature is your friend because the very substance of your body is the substance of nature. This meditation is the first step in cosmic meditation.

Earlier I had given you some indications of different types of meditation. Now I am trying to take your mind along another line which may be called cosmical contemplation, where true yoga begins, where you begin to see things as they really are and not as they merely appear to your eyes. You are not contemplating on concepts of people, but on realities as they are. Can you imagine for a moment that you belong to this vast physical nature? Sit for a few minutes; go to your room or to a temple or under a tree or any other place, and sit for ten or fifteen minutes. Begin to contemplate that every atom in the world is vibrating through your body, and every atom in your body is coextensive with the structure of nature outside physically. The sun and the moon and the stars are touching you, as it were, because of the inseparability of the substance of physical nature from your own physical body. The yoga shastras consider this as a kind of samapatti or samadhi itself.

An attainment which is superb in nature is called samapatti, and the equilibration of consciousness with the structure of things is called samadhi. Both these things mean one and the same. Your consciousness is set in tune with the structure of things, with the physical nature, so that physical nature does not stand outside you as something to be handled by you, to be harnessed, conquered or utilised. Are you going to harness your own self or put your own self to use? Such ideas will not arise. You have no need of conquering nature. These days conquering nature is spoken in scientific and astronomical terms. This is ignorance, pure and simple. Why do you wish to conquer yourself? You are not outside yourself. It is a stability that you have to establish in your own consciousness, in terms of your belonging to nature as a whole.

In the parlance of medical science, naturopaths say all these things. Medical textbooks such as the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita in the Ayurveda Shastras tell you how the very first, very cosmic elements of earth, water, fire, air, and ether are vibrating through our body. You are prone to illness of various types because of the disparity between the working of nature outside and the body inside. You are at war with nature when you assert your physicality and independence beyond a certain tolerable limit, and fight with nature instead of considering it as your friend and well-wisher. Nature is not merely a friend and well-wisher; it is inseparable from you. You are yourself. You are now in a state of cosmic consciousness. Do you realise this?

If these thoughts have really entered your mind and you have appreciated what it means, you are veritably on the borderland of a universal appreciation of things. You will love a leaf in the tree; you will embrace the stem of a plant that is in front of you; you will be happy looking at the flow of the river; you will be rejoicing by looking at the sun; the very sky will thrill you. You will not complain that the world is wretched, very bad, hopeless, as you go on saying. There will be nothing hopeless in this world. The entire nature will reveal beauty, like the opening of a rose flower. The ugliness of the world, the uselessness of it and the dearth that you see is because of the extent of separation that you have established between yourself and the world of nature outside. The more you are distant from nature, the worse is the world for you. So you create hell. Hell does not exist by itself.

In this samapatti, as it is called—I am using the terminology of Patanjali’s yoga shastra which uses the specific words samapatti and samadhi. These words are a little difficult to understand, but they need not frighten you. It is a simple matter of being always in a state of equilibrium with the perceptible objects in the world. Everybody is a friend. “My dear friend, please be seated. My enemy, get out!” You do not have to say that. There are no such things as friend and enemy in this world.

Samapatti or samadhi of the earliest type is an earnest attempt, deeply felt from within, to commune one’s consciousness with all perceptible phenomena—the world of nature involved in space and time. I will give a little hint on certain subtleties of the system of Patanjali’s yoga. In the earliest stages of this practice of communion with nature, there is a consciousness of the similarity between you and the world of nature outside. This is one aspect of the matter. Another aspect is the dissociation of the object of perception from false associations foisted upon them.

Who is coming? It is Rama coming, or John, or James, or Jacob. Who told you that this person is Jacob or John, or Rama or Krishna? Is it written on their skin or in their blood? Is he made up of this name? It is an unnecessary psychological foisting. Though it may be necessary for social life, it is not really a part of the existence of that person. Nobody is a John, a Krishna or a Rama. He is just what he is, like anybody else. Tomorrow they can have another name. There are people who change their names with an announcement in a government gazette. He is this today, and tomorrow he is another. That means to say that the name is not an essential ingredient of the human personality. Yet, you are so much attached to the name that even in sleep, you know you are that person only. Atul Parikh, suppose you are in deep sleep and I say, “Mr. Jacob, please get up.” You will not wake up because even in sleep, you know you are not Jacob. So much attachment is there. “Mr. Atul Parikh, get up!” and immediately you will get up. So you know how much association you have consciously established between yourself and a flimsy quality called name.

The yoga shastra says that in the practice of meditation, dissociate the object from the name that is attached to it. That is one aspect of the matter. You are not Mr. Parikh; you are not this; you are not that. You are just some person, whatever the person be. You can be anything, any person. What does it matter? Today you are an officer, tomorrow you are something else, but you are the same person. So the yoga shastra tells us to dissociate the truth of the person from the name.

There is another thing as well. You also have some idea of the person. When I see a thing or think of a thing, I associate some qualities of my own making with that object: This person is like that; this thing is like that; gold is valuable; iron has such a value; the tree is sandalwood; this is a mango which is worth eating. Various qualities are associated with the objects of perception by the thought of the object. It is easy to dissociate a person from the name, but it is more difficult to dissociate the thing from the idea that you have of that particular object. But, actually, your idea of the object is not the real object. From your context of location in this world and the manner of your mental operations, you have some notion of the object. But why should you think the object is made like that? Gold is very costly, though it has no value at all, actually. It is like anything else. It is like a stone; it is like mud. It has become valuable because of certain characteristics and utilitarian values that you have foisted upon it. If the whole earth was gold, perhaps gold would have no value. If it is rare, then it has some particular worth. Hence, the idea, the value, the utility of a thing or the notion that you have about a thing is not a part of the thing.

The thing as such, the object as such, is to be the ideal of contemplation. Can you meditate on something free from the notion that you have about that object, and also free from the name associated with it? This is a tree in front of you, a sandalwood tree. Why do you call it a tree? You could have called it by any other name. It is some substance, made up of some material, which is also the material that is the component of other things in the world. It has a shape, it has a form, it has a location. It need not be called it a tree; it can be called anything. It is something, a substance belonging to this cosmos of physicality. Remove the idea of tree. Do not say, “It is a very valuable thing. I can extract oil out of it because it is eucalyptus.” Remove these ideas. Let there be oil or let there be nothing; it does not matter. It is just what it is.

The concept of the object as it is in itself, free from the notion or the idea about it and also the name attached to it, is also connected with this first step of meditation. Technically, this step, this stage, this communion, this samapatti, this samadhi, is called savitarka. The idea is that it is a total revolution that you are introducing into the very process of thinking—veritably a revolution, a transvaluation of everything, including your own self. You begin to find yourself in a new world, as it were. It will look as if you have woken up from a long dream. Look at the change that you must endeavour to practice in this technique of meditation. The whole world has changed; it is a different world altogether. You have to think differently than you thought earlier through the operation of the mind, and you see a thing which is not at all the thing which you saw earlier. You see the world of nature, and not friends and enemies, not belongings, not yours and not-yours, not beautiful and ugly things, not useful and useless things. You will see things as they really are, located in some particular point in the context of creation.

Here is what the yoga shastra calls the first step in samadhi. Though it is called the first step, for us it is something like the final step, because even this cannot be attained easily. You have understood the whole thing; your mind is accepting it, “Yes, this is like that,” but the old habit of the mind in thinking in terms of its own odd relations persists to such an extent that it is flowing through your very veins.

To get into the habit of this new perspective of thought—which according to the yoga shastras is a first step in samadhi—is indeed a herculean task. Days and nights have to be spent in order to achieve at least a modicum of it. Man instantaneously becomes a kind of superman with this new outlook, new sense of communion, a new detachment and a new sense of belonging—not to people and things, but to the creation as a whole.