Much has changed since Paul Brunton, author of A Search in Secret India , asked an Englishman who had lived in India for a long time if he had ever met a Yogi and the man wondered if Brunton meant an exquisite animal. The fact that 175 countries are co-sponsoring the resolution at the U.N. General Assembly to declare June 21 International Day of Yoga, following Prime Minister Modi’s suggestion at the same forum in September last year, reveals that the change covers the entire world. This reminds us of Brunton’s prophetic observation: “Thousands of Englishmen live in India and hundreds visit it each year. Yet a few know anything of what may one day prove more worthy to the world than even the prized pearls and valuable stones which ships bring us from India. Fewer still have taken the trouble to go out of their way to find the adepts in Yoga…”
Concepts of Yoga and Yajna, like several great ideals, have been misused, misinterpreted and exploited. While Yajna — imperfectly rendered in English as sacrifice and symbolising man’s aspiration rising towards the Supreme — remains alive as a mere ritual fire-rite, Yoga’s plight has been worse. Irritation caused by enterprises such as ‘Yoga and massage parlours’ in India turns into despair when you see, along the Californian shore, offers of ‘Cosmic Cushions’, which could elevate you to cosmic consciousness if you practise Yoga on it, or the assurance of Nirvana through a telephone.
Nevertheless, Yoga is asserting itself, even if not in its pristine purity, as a fosterer of health and spirit, a promoter of harmony between body and the outer aspects of our consciousness, the life-energy and mind. During the past half century, quite a few modern gurus have formulated codes of Yogic discipline, combining Hathayoga principles (mainly asanas and pranayama ) with psychology and assuring their followers of pragmatically more satisfying living. They are to be appreciated, for scores have benefited by them. Of course Yoga, in its classic sense, will remain an individual’s goal.
Yoga means union, which implies that there has been a separation. According to its philosophy, it is our separation from our source, the Divine, which is at the root of all our problems. The way to return to the source, surrendering all our thoughts and actions to the Divine, is Yoga. Nothing is beyond the Divine’s transforming power. For Arjuna who was taught by Krishna to act not through his ego (our superficial self, the true self being our soul) but as an instrument of the Divine, even a battlefield became a field for Yoga.
Multiplicity is an intrinsic trait of Nature and Yoga too proceeded in different streams towards its goal. Some seekers approached the Divine through love or adoration (Premayoga or Bhaktiyoga). Those who sought knowledge of the mystery of creation and its creator were pursuers of Jnanayoga. Those who believed that the phenomenal creation was the Supreme Consciousness in action and offered their own actions to it were Karmayogis.
Often Yoga became bracketed with otherworldliness, which is a wrong association. Yoga intends perfection of life, not escape from it. The Divine made this world an imperfect statement; its own consciousness of light and delight plunging into its self-created opposite, a Nature marked by ignorance and suffering. Nature in the process of reversing that situation through its own Yoga is evolution.
As Sri Aurobindo put it: “Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and the Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and become possible for life to manifest perfection.”
Even if the ultimate purpose of Yoga continues to be pursued only by awakened individuals, the practice of asanas and pranayama — the preliminary prescriptions — will go a long way in establishing harmony within the self. Once we realise that all life is unconscious Yoga, our values would undergo a radical transformation. A Yoga-realised world will be a world of light and delight.
