What is Knowledge : Ch-5 - 1.

Chapter 5: Maintaining One's Position-1

It is a well known fact that in the practice of yoga, maintaining oneself in a position is pre-eminently important.

The maintaining of a required position is sometimes called asana. You all perform asanas, or yoga exercises.

These exercises are positions maintained by you and, in a very significant sense, the whole of yoga may be said to be the maintenance of a specific position.



This word 'position' has to be understood in a very comprehensive sense. It has a vast implication, and it covers practically everything that is required of you – though, in common parlance, people understand by 'position' only a particular posture of the physical body.

Though the posture of the physical body is a requisite position and it is essential in yoga, yet this understanding of the posture or position in yoga as a physical exercise does not include all its suggestions and meanings because you will certainly agree that your life consists of more than just what happens to your body.

The incidents concurrent with the bodily position and the occurrences commensurate with bodily activity – or, for the matter of that, anything related merely to the physical body bereft of any other relation – cannot be said to include everything that you are.

Nobody believes: 'I am only the body; there is nothing else in me'.

If there is something in you other than the body, then yoga posture is not exhausted merely by physical exercise; but it could be said to be a complete system of yoga if you are only the body, and there is nothing else in you.


Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  .....