Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline - 7. The mind has a peculiar, childish attitude of wrongly thinking that sitting in a particular posture is somehow a discipline; therefore, it is a limitation on its freedom, so you do not want to do it. But somehow you are told it is good for you, and your psyche in one department of its activity compels itself to this exercise called the physical posture; though inwardly, it cannot be ruled out that you would like to be free from this exercise: “I would rather go somewhere – either shopping or to the mountain peak – than be seated in a posture. What good does it do to me?” There is a double attitude on your part, due to which on the one hand you feel it may do you good by performing this exercise of yoga postures, but on the other hand there is resentment to it, because somehow it is not a total freedom that is granted to you. This psychological difficulty which finds that it is not easy to go hand-in-hand with this discipline of exercise, is one ...

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline-6. Now, if everyone wishes to be two hundred percent free, it would mean a total disregard for what may happen to another, because regard for the presence or requirement of another would be a kind of discipline, which you do not want. So you can imagine the consequence that may follow from the erroneous thinking that discipline is opposed to freedom. Freedom is impossible without discipline, because if an undisciplined freedom is conceded to any particular person, the very purpose of the asking of this freedom would be defeated because there would be no freedom, for reasons well known to everybody. Swami Krishnananda  To be continued  .....

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline-5. Discipline is not desirable. Intellectually and superficially, everyone may accept that discipline is necessary, but in the heart of hearts there is some peculiar feeling that discipline is contrary to the freedom of will – that discipline is a restriction of freedom, whether in thinking, feeling, or acting. It requires a herculean effort in the form of adequate training to become convinced that freedom and discipline are not opposed to each other, because freedom is always equated with a sort of license to do whatever one likes, irrespective of its consequences on the atmosphere or people outside. “I can do whatever I like, in any manner, at any time, at any place; this is my idea of freedom.” But this is not a proper attitude of even a rational mind, because the freedom of one person is not supposed to limit the freedom of another; otherwise, there would be a cry and clamour on the part of everyone to be one hundred percent free, because...

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline.4. The mind of the human being is mostly in a distracted condition. It is never concentrated for even five minutes continuously on any particular thing. It is a veritable grasshopper that jumps from thing to thing, for reasons which need not detain us here at the present moment. The fickleness of the mind has some impact upon the activity of the body. Thus, the pain that you feel in your attempt to be seated in a particular posture, even physically, is not totally unconnected with the condition of your mind. It has some relationship with the way in which you are thinking, your aspiration – and pre-eminently, your feelings and your emotional condition. You begin to feel a lot of pain when you are seated in a physical posture for the purpose of yoga meditation; and you will start feeling this pain the moment you sit, because the mind has decided that it has to feel the pain. It knows very well that it is being compelled to do something which it normall...

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline.3 Thus, in the posture that we are to maintain in yoga, known as asana, we should not think that it is merely an action of the body, that whatever the mind is doing is immaterial because the body is the only thing concerned in the yoga asana. I mentioned a few points last time, which would have made it clear that the yoga asana is not a physical exercise like the games played in the fields outside. This is not a game, and it is not a physical exercise. It is an exercise of the human personality, which cannot be identified merely with the physical body. Thus, no benefit worth the while or worth the name can be expected from the performance of yoga asanas if the mind, and the emotions especially, do not cooperate with this performance. There would be no benefit even in the intake of a medical prescription for the health of the body, if the mind is totally opposed to it for some reason or the other. You cannot cure a disease by swallowing a drug i...

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline.2 Some thinkers have given a peculiar analogy as to how the mind and the body collaborate with each other in their action. The analogy comes from the West, from the philosophers of the renaissance, and it is that the mind and the body are like two faces of a clock with two dials facing opposite each other, but with a single mechanism operating inside. This is a possibility, as you can well imagine. You can have a single clock with one machine, with two faces opposite to each other or different from each other in some way, so that you can see the working of the machine and the pointers showing the time from two sides. This is an analogy which tries to make out that the body seems to operate in one way, and the mind also seems to operate in collaboration with it, because of the fact they are controlled by a single operating principle. Thus, mind and body are two faces of action of a single requirement of our personality. Swami Krishnananda  To ...

  Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline.1 While ‘the stabilising of oneself’ is what is meant by asana, or the assuming of a posture in yoga, it is often found by work-a-day people of the world that this maintaining of a posture, in any sense of the term, is not as easy as it may appear on the surface. Many a difficulty is felt by seekers and students of yoga even in this elementary requisite of the asana or the posture which has to be maintained. Many of you might have felt different types of difficulty in this simple exercise. Common causes of this difficulty are sometimes attributed to one's non-habituation to maintaining a single posture or attitude in daily life, because most people have no single attitude throughout the day. Remember that the mind and the body are not two different things. The mind is not contained inside the body as something is placed inside a vessel. When we use terms like ‘mind’ and ‘body’ we are likely to misconstrue their meaning and significance, as...