Concrete
Advice in the Practice of Yoga
The path of yoga has many branches, but the prominent ones are the
path of knowledge and the path of devotion. All the other paths can be brought
back to these two significant approaches. They are two roads—if at all we would
like to call them roads—which lead to the same destination. The concrete, the
subtle, the conceptual and the spiritual are the normal stages of
accent—whatever be the path or the approach. These different stages are
applicable to bhakti yoga as well as to the jnana path and to any
path, because all these ways of approach are ways of the transcendence of
consciousness from the external to the internal, from the gross to the subtle,
and from the visible to the invisible. All lead finally to the Universal and
the Absolute.
The difficulty of the practice consists mainly in our not being
prepared to take to it wholeheartedly. I have said many times that we should
not approach yoga with an experimental attitude, because if we do, we will get
nothing out of the practice.
The moment we try to experiment with nature, it is understood that we
are suspicious of nature. If we approach anything with a suspicion in our
minds, we will never gain sympathy from that object. If we approach an object,
a person or even God Himself with a suspicious attitude, we will receive only a
limited response. Nobody wants to be approached with suspicion—our hearts
should be open, candid and receptive. ‘Empty thyself, and I shall fill thee,’
is a great psychological truth of the spiritual path. To empty oneself is
difficult, because we have prejudices which are like conceptual idols for us.
Whenever we try to approach anything, we approach it with a critical and
preconceived attitude, and this is why yoga fails in practical life.
Concrete Advice in the Practice of Yoga
The first and the foremost of all things is that a teacher is very
important—a competent master and guide is crucial. The tradition is that we have
to live with the master physically for some time and not merely be in
correspondence with him. Physically we have to live with him for a considerable
time until we imbibe in our personalities an understanding of the vital and
practical steps to be taken in the practice of yoga. The second thing to
remember is that we have to take yoga as our ultimate course of action. It
cannot be taken as just one of many diversions in life, just as God should not
be viewed as merely one of many things available in the world. He is all
things, and yoga must mean all things to us.
But here again, we may be harassed by a doubt. “How can I take yoga as
my all-in-all? I have got many responsibilities in life. I have got my wife; I
have got my husband; I have got my job, and I have got this and many other
things in the world to be done. How can I take yoga as a career?” We have this
doubt because we do not know what yoga is. We have made the mistake of
imagining that yoga is one of the things among the many things of the world. If
it were only one of the many things, naturally it would be difficult to take to
it wholeheartedly and exclusively.
Fortunately or unfortunately, yoga is not just one of the many
things—it must be the precondition of our approach to life as a whole. How can
we say, “I have no time to do it?” If we have time to breathe, then we have
time also to practise yoga, because yoga is a way of thinking and an attitude
to life. How can we say, “I have no time to have an attitude to life?” It is
meaningless to say that. Yoga is an attitude that we have towards the whole of
our lives, so there is no need of time to practise yoga.
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