What is Knowledge : Ch-7.23.

Chapter 7: Yoga Discipline-23.

Thus, reality is not merely social existence, as psychoanalysis may say. Yoga considers reality as something which is superior to what is merely visible to the eyes. Therefore, in our advance in the pursuit of yoga, we do not merely content ourselves with being a little good with people in the form of what is called yama and niyama, or even being contented with maintaining the positions or yoga asanas. There is something more about yoga than all these things told to us. The qualities of being a very good person, a very helpful person, a very serviceful person, a well-respected person, and a very great master of physical yoga exercises – with all this, yoga is not complete. Perhaps, it has not even started.
It starts with a deeper understanding of the profounder implications of one’s relationship with the universe. The egoism of the human being apart, there is a common difficulty felt by every one of us in exercising even proper understanding in regard to anything. We are egoistic, no doubt, in one sense or the other; that is one picture, one side of the matter. But is our understanding adequate to the purpose of what yoga would expect of us? What is our understanding?

What sort of understanding do we have about anything? Again, we are conditioned even in our understanding by social environments, family upbringing, political motivations, and the type of education that has been imparted to us. This is again a conditioning and a limiting of the concept of reality, even from the point of view of our intellectual understanding. While egoism mostly goes wrong in its notion of what is good for it and what is reality, our understanding – which is mostly associated with our egoistic affirmations – is in a very, very inadequate position, at least from the point of view of the requirements in yoga.

Swami Krishnananda
 To be continued ....