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or your spiritual life, because you know so much. Sometimes
too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is said that a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but sometimes too
much knowledge may confuse your mind. All the libraries are
in your head, but how will you start; from which side are you
to take the initial step?
The involvements of your personality in life are the
indicators of where you have to start. What are you involved
in? What are your difficulties? What is it that you like and
what is it that you do not like? There are people who are
involved in something or the other in life. You are involved,
of course, in human society because you are citizens of a
nation, of a country, of a locality, of a village, of a state, of a
community, of something. No human being, none of you, is
totally isolated from human society; you are connected to
other people. Your connection to other people, in some way,
is your social involvement. Your belonging to a particular
country may be your political involvement. You cannot say
there is no involvement. You require protection from society
and political administration, so that is also involvement.
Now, how will you handle these things? How will you free
your consciousness from involvement of this kind? What is
your relationship to the external society?
You are involved not merely in human society; you are
also involved in nature. The five elements  earth, water, fire,
air and ether  constitute your physical body. Do you know
that they are outside you? Yes, they are outside you; you are
seeing them. You see the earth outside you; water is there,
fire is there, air is there, the sky is there. All these five
elements appear to be totally outside, but you forget that
your very body is made up of these five elements. The
building bricks of your personality are the very things of
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which the world outside is made. So, do you know you are
involved in the five elements? Your involvement is not
merely in your neighbour, in society  but vitally, in nature.
 Involvement is a peculiar word which has many
connotations. You may be very pleasantly or unpleasantly
involved in a thing. When consciousness is pleasantly
involved in your body, you appear to be a very healthy
person. When you say you are very healthy and robust, you
mean to say that the prana, the vitality, the consciousness
itself is very harmoniously involved in this bodily
individuality, though it is also an involvement. But when it is
unpleasantly involved, you feel odd, you are sick and you
would like to go to bed. Hence, involvements may be of
different kinds: necessary or unnecessary, pleasant or
unpleasant, right or wrong. When the right involvement is
resorted to, it automatically becomes pleasant. It is only
wrong involvements that seem unpleasant. Therefore, with
society outside, with the people around you, with nature, you
have to conduct yourself in a harmonious manner 
specifically, by practising the yamas, niyamas, asana
postures and other things mentioned in the yoga system.
Never be in a hurry in the practice of yoga. Take only one
step if it becomes necessary; do not try to make a hurried
movement. If today you are capable of taking only one step,
that is good enough. It is better to take only one step, but a
firm step, rather than many steps which may have to be later
retraced due to some errors that you have committed.
Quality is important, not quantity. Many days of meditation
do not mean much; it is the kind of meditation that you have
been practising, and the quality, that is involved there.
Here, the Upanishads, or the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, or
the Bhagavadgita  all are telling you, finally, one and the
same thing:  To thine own self be true, as the poet has very
rightly said. The whole of yoga can be said to be equanimous
with this implication of the poet s words:  To thine own self
be true. Are you true to yourself? Svastha  a person who is
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svastha is a person who is healthy. If you are in yourself, you
are healthy; if you are not in yourself, you are not healthy.
The word  svasthya in Sanskrit, or even in Hindi, comes from
the word  svastha  one who is established in one s own self.
 Swa means one s own self;  stha means establishment. Are
you svastha? Generally we enquire:  Are you healthy, fine?
But the real meaning is:  Are you in yourself or outside
yourself?
Yoga is nothing but yourself being yourself. It is not a
very complicated thing; it is easy to understand. You have to
be what you are. But mostly we find it difficult to be what we
are; we are other than what we are, on account of the
involvement of our consciousness not in what we are, but in
what appears to be what we are through the sense organs.
All our affections are misdirected because the senses tell us
that we are that which we love. All people who hug things
and love things wrongly imagine that they have gone into
that thing which they hug or love, forgetting that they have
lost themselves, in some percentage, in that act of movement
of their consciousness to that which they consider as
themselves. All sensory activity and mental operation in
terms of sensory activity is an aberration of consciousness; it
is un-yoga, non-yoga, anti-yoga, whatever one may call it.
Hence, a daily prescription has to be adopted by one s
own self. I am not asking you all to become yogis, but to be
sensible persons, good human beings, successful in your
careers, friends of humanity and satisfied in your own self.
Let that, at least, be achieved first, before trying to reach God
or attain Self-realisation. It will take care of itself. Unless you
are friendly with what you see, how will you be friendly with
what you do not see? You are at loggerheads with people, in
conflict with nature and dissonant in your own personality,
psychologically, and you want to be in harmony with God
Almighty! Is it possible? Psychological alignment within,
social harmony outside and natural adaptation with creation
as a whole form part and parcel of yoga. Psychologically, are
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you aligned? Do your understanding and feeling go together,
or do you understand something and feel another thing? Are
you brooding over something about the past which is not
capable of accommodation with your present existence? Are
you grieved in any manner whatsoever?
The four facets of your psyche  manas, buddhi,
ahamkara and chitta  have to be blended together into a
single act of mentation. It is not that you think something,
remember something else, brood over another thing and are
conscious of another thing at the present moment.
Otherwise, you will be a dichotomised personality, a split
individual, a psychotic or schizophrenic; it may lead to that.
People are suffering intensely: they cannot sleep; they cannot
eat; they cannot speak one word with people with
satisfaction inside on account of a split personality  the need
that they feel every day to put on some kind of contour in
their daily outer existence while being another thing inside.
You are one thing in your house and another thing in your
office. This kind of gulf that you have created within yourself
 between your inner personality and your outer personality
 will tell upon you to such an extent that you will never be
integrated; you will not be what is called a gentleman. A
gentleman is an integrated person. You feel attracted
towards that individual. He is a whole and he does not have
any kind of split between his inner feelings and the outer
conduct. He is able to adapt his outer conduct to his inner
feelings, and vice versa. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]