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Written by Swami Vivekananda |
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RAJA YOGA is divided into eight steps. The first is Yama—
non-killing, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, and nonreceiving
of any gifts. Next is Niyama — cleanliness,
contentment, mortification, study, and self-surrender to God.
Then comes Asana, or posture; Pranayama, or controlling
the vital forces of the body; Pratyahara, or making the mind
introspective; Dharana, or concentration; Dhyana, or
meditation; and Samadhi, or super-consciousness. The
Yama and Niyama, as we see, are moral trainings; without
these as the basis no practice ofYoga will succeed. As these
practices become established the Yogi will begin to realise
the fruits of his practice; without these it will never bear
fruit. A Yogi must not think of injuring anyone, through
thought, word or deed, and this applies not only to man, but
to all animals. Mercy shall not be for men alone, but shall
go beyond, and embrace the whole world.
The next step is Asana, posture; a series of exercises,
physical and mental, is to be gone through every day, until
certain higher states are reached. Therefore it is quite
necessary that we should find a posture in which we can
remain long. That posture which is easiest for each one is
the posture to use. For one man it may be very easy to think
in a certain posture, but this may be very difficult for
another. We will find later on that in the study of these
psychological matters there will wil a good deal of action
going on in the body. Nerve currents will have to be
displaced and given a new channel. New sorts of vibrations
will begin, the whole constitutions will be remodelled, as it
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were. But the main part of the action will lie along the
spinal column, so that the one thing necessary for the posture
is to hold the spinal column free, sitting erect, holding the
three parts — the chest, neck, and head — in a straight line.
Let the whole weight of the body be supported by the ribs,
and then you have an easy natural posture, with the spine
straight. You will naturally see that you cannot think very
high thoughts with the chest in. This portion of the Yoga is a
little similar to the Hatha Yoga, which deals entirely with the
physical body; the aim of the latter is to make the physical
body very strong. We have nothing to do with that here,
because the practices are very difficult, and cannot be
learned in a day, and, after all, do not lead to any spiritual
growth. Many of these practices you will find in Delsarte,
and other teachers, such as placing the body in different
postures, but the object in these is physical, not
psychological. There is not one muscle in the body over
which a man cannot establish a perfect control; the heart can
be made to stop or go on at his bidding, and, in the same
way, each part of the organism can be made to work at his
bidding.
The result of this part of Yoga is to make men live long;
health is the chief idea, the one goal of the Hatha Yogi. He
is determined not to fall sick, and he never does. He lives
long; a hundred years is nothing to him; he is quite young
and fresh when he is 150, without one hair turned grey. But
that is all. A Banyan tree lives sometimes 5000 years, but it
is a Banyan tree and nothing more. So, if a man lives long,
he is only a healthy animal. One or two ordinary lessons of
the Hatha Yogis are very useful. For instance, some of you
will find it a good thing for headaches to drink cold water
through the nose as soon as you get up; the whole day your
brain will be nice and cool, and you will never catch cold. It
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is very easy to do; put your nose into the water, and make a
pump action in the throat.
After one has learned to have a firm erect seat, he has to
perform, according to certain schools, a practice called the
purifying of the nerves. This part has been rejected by some
as not beloning to Raja Yoga, but as so great an authority as
the commentator, Cankaracharya, advises it, I think it fit that
it should be mentioned, and I will quote his own directions
from his commentary to the Svetacvatara Upanisad. “The
mind whose dross has been cleared away by Pranayama,
becomes fixed in Brahman; therefore Pranayama is pointed
out. First the nerves are to be purified, then comes the
power to practice Pranayama. Stopping the right nostril
with the thumb, with the left nostril fill in air, according to
one’s capacity; then, without any interval, throw the air out
through the right nostril, closing the left one. Again inhaling
through the right nostril eject through the left, according to
capactiy; practicing this three or five times at four intervals
of the day, before dawn, during midday, in the evening, and
at midnight, in fifteen days or a month purity of the nerves is
attained; then begins Pranayama.
Practice is absolutely necessary. You may sit down and
listen to me by the hour every day, but, if you do not
practice, you will not get one step further. It all depends on
practice. We never understand these things until we
experience them. We will have to see and feel them for
ourselves. Simply listening to explanations and theories will
not do. There are several obstructions to practice. The first
obstruction is an unhealthy body; if the body is not in a fit
state, the practice will be obstructed. Therefore we have to
take care of what we eat and drink, and what we do; lways
use a mental effort, what is usually called “Christian
Science,” to keep the body strong. That is all; nothing
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further of the body. We must not forget that health is only a
means to an end. If health were the end we would be like
animals; animals rarely become unhealthy.
The second obstruction is doubt; we always feel doubtful
about things we do not see. Man cannot live upon words,
however he may try. So, doubt comes to us as to whether
there is any truth in these things or not; even the best of us
will doubt sometimes. With practice, within a few days, a
little glimpse will come, enough to give you encouragement
and hope. As one commentator on Yoga philosophy says:
“When one proof is realised, however little it may be, that
will give us faith in the whole teaching of Yoga.” For
instance, after the first few months of training and teaching,
you will begin to find you can read another’s thoughts; they
will come to you in picture form. Perhaps you will hear
something happening at a long distance, when you
concentrate your mind and try to do so. These glimpses will
come, just a little bit at first, but enough to give you faith,
and strength, and hope. For instance, if you concentrate your
thoughts on the tip of your nose, in a few days you will
begin to smell most beautiful fragrance, and that will be
enough to show you that there are certain mental percepitons
that can be made obvious without the contact of physical
objects. But we must always remember that these are only
the means; the aim, and end, and goal, of all this training is
liberation of the soul. Absolute control of nature, and
nothing short of it, must be the goal. We must be the
masters, and not nature; neither body nor mind must be our
master, and neither must we forget that the body is mind, and
not I the body’s.
A god and a demon went to learn about the Self from a
great sage. They studied with him for a long time, and at last
the sage told them. “Thou thyself art the being thou art
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seeking.” Both of them thought that their bodies were the
Self. “We have got everything,” they said, and both of them
returned to their people, and said, “We have learned
everything that is to be learned; eat, drink, and be merry; we
are the Self; there is nothing beyond us.” The nature of the
demon was ignorant, clouded, so he never inquired any
further, but was perfectly satisfied with the idea that he was
God, that by the Self was meant the body. But the god had a
purer nature. He at first committed the mistake of thinking,
“I, this body, am Brahman, so keep it strong and in health,
and well-dressed, and give it all sorts of bodily enjoyments.”
But, in a few days, he found out that this could not be the
meaning of the sage, their master; there must be something
higher. So he came back and said, “Sir, did you teach me
that this body is the Self? If so, I see all bodies die; the Self
cannot die.” The sage said, “Find it out; thou art That.”
Then the god thought that the vital forces which work the
body were what the sage meant. But, after a time, he found
that if he ate, these vital forces remained strong, but, if he
starved, they became weak. The god then went back to the
sage and said, “Sir, do you mean that the vital forces are the
Self?” The sage said, “Find out for yourself; thou art That.”
The god returned once more, and thought that it was the
mind; perhaps that is the Self. But in a few days he reflected
that thoughts are so various; now good, now bad; the mind is
too changeable to be the Self. He went back to the sage and
said, “Sir, I do not think that the mind is the Self; did you
mean that?” “No,” replied the sage, “thou art That; find out
for yourself.” The god went back, and, at last, found that he
was the Self, beyond all thought; One, without birth or death,
whom the sword cannot pierce, or the fire burn, whom the
air cannot dry, or the water melt, the beginningless and
birthless, the immovable, the intangible, the omniscient, the
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omnipotent Being, and that it was neither the body nor the
mind, but beyond them all. So he was satisfied, but the poor
demon did not get the truth, owing to his fondness for the
body.
This word has a good many of these demoniac natures,
but there are some gods too. If one propose to teach any
science to increase the power of sense of enjoyment, he finds
multitudes ready for it. If one undertake to show mankind
the supreme goal, they care nothing for it. Very few have
the power to grasp the highest, fewer still the patience to
attain to it, but a few also know that if the body be kept for a
thousand years the result will be the same in the end. When
the forces that hold it together go away the body must fall.
No man was ever born who could stop his body one moment
from changing. Body is the name of a series of changes.
“As in a river the masses of water are changing before you
every moment, and new masses are coming, yet taking
similar form, so is it with this body.” Yet the body must be
kept strong and healthy; it is the best instrument we have.
This human body is the greatest body in the universe, and
a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all
animals, than all angels; none is greater than man. Even the
Devas will have to come down again and atttain to salvation
through a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not
even the devas. According to the Jews and Mohammedans
God created man after creating man He asked the angels to
come and salute him, and all did except Iblis; so God cursed
him and he became Satan. Behind this allegory is the great
truth, that this human birth is the greatest birth we can have.
The lower creation, the animal, is dull, and manufactured
mostly out of Tamas. Animals cannot have any high
thoughts; nor can the angels, or Devas, attain to direct
freedom without human birth. In human society, in the same
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way, too much wealth, or too much poverty, is a great
impediment to the higher development of the soul. It is from
the middle classes that the great ones of the world come.
Here the forces are very equally adjusted and balanced.
Returning to our subject, we come next to Pranayama,
controlling the breathing. What has that to do with
concentrating the powers of the mind? Breath is like the flywheel
of this machine. In a big engine you find the flywheel
first moving, and that motion is conveyed to finer and
finer machinery, until the most delicate and finest
mechanism in the machine is in motion in accordance. This
breath is that fly-wheel, supplying and regulating the motive
power to everything in this body.
There once was a minister to a great king. He fell into
disgrace, and the king as a punishment, ordered him to be
shut up at the top of a vey high tower. This was done, and
the minister was left there to perish. He had a faithful wife,
however, and at night she came to the tower and called to her
husband at the top to know what she could do to help him.
He told her to return to the tower the following night and
bring with her a long rope, a stout twine, a pack thread, a
silken threat, a beetle, and a little honey. Wondering much,
the good wife obeyed her husband, and brought him the
desired articles. The husband directed her to attach the
silken thread firmly to the beetle, then to smear his horns
with a drop of honey, and set him free on the wall of the
tower, with his head pointing up. She obeyed all these
instructions, and the beetle started on his long journey.
Smelling the honey before him he slowly crept onwards and
upwards, in the hope of reaching it, until at last he reaches
the top of the tower, when the minister grasped the beetle,
and got possession of the silken thread. He told his wife to
tie the other end to the pack thread,, and after he had drawn
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up the pack thread, he repeated the procedure with the stout
twine, and lastly with the rope. Then the rest was easy. The
minister descended from the tower by means of the rope, and
made his escape. In this body of ours the breath motion is
the “silken thread,” and laying hold of that, and learning to
control it we grasp the pack thread of the nerve currents, and
from these the stout twine of our thoughts, and lastly the
rope of Prana, controlling which we reach freedom.
We do not know anything about our own bodies; we
cannot know. At best we can take a dead body, and cut it in
pieces, and there are some who can take a live animal and
cut it in pieces in order to see what is inside the body. Still,
that has nothing to do with our own bodies. We know very
little about them; why do we not? Because our attention is
not discriminating enough to catch the very fine movements
that are going on within. We can know of these only as the
mind, as it were, enters the body, and becomes more subtle.
To get that subtle perception we have to begin with the
grosser perceptions, so we have to get hold of that which is
setting the whole engine in motion, and that is the Prana, the
most obvious manifestation of which is the breath. Then,
along with the breath, we will slowly enter the body, and that
will enable us to find out about the subtle forces, how the
nerve currents are moving all over the body, and as soon as
we perceive that, and learn to feel them, we shall begin to
get control over them, and over the body. The mind is also
set in motion by these nerve current, so, at last, we shall
reach the state when we have perfect control over the body
and mind, making both our servants. Knowledge is power,
and we have to get this power, so we must begin at the
beginning, the Pranayama, restraining the Prana. This
Pranayama is a long subject, and will take several lessons to
illustrate it thoroughly. We will take it part by part.
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We shall gradually see what are the reasons for each
exercise and what forces in the body are set in motion. All
these things will come to us, but it requires constant practice,
and the proof will come by practice. No amount of
reasoning which I can give you will be proof to you, until
you have demonstrated it for yourselves. As soon as you
begin to feel these currents in motion all over you, doubts
will vanish, but it requires hard practice every day. You
must practice at least twice every day, and the best times are
towards the morning and the evening. When night passes
into day, and day into night, it has to pass through a state of
relative calmness. The early morning and the early evening
are the two points of calmness. Your body will have a like
tendency to become calm at those times. We will take
advantage of that natural condition, and begin then to
practice. Make it a rule not to eat until you have practised; if
you do this the sheer force of hunger will break your
laziness. In India they teach children never to eat until they
have practised, and worshipped, and it becomes natural to
them after a while; a boy will not feel hungry until he has
bathed and practised.
Those of you who can afford it will do better to have a
room for this practice alone; do not sleep in that room, it
must be kept holy; you must not enter the room until you
have bathed, and are perfectly clean in body and mind.
Place flowers in that room always; they are the best
surroundings for a Yogi; also pictures that are pleasing. Burn
incense morning and evening. Have no quarrelling, or
anger, or unholy thought in that room. Only allow those
persons to enter who are of the same thought as you. Then
by and by there will be an atmosphere of holiness in the
room, and when you are miserable, sorrowful, doubtful, or
your mind is disturbed, the very fact of entering that room
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will make you calmer. This was the idea of the temple and
the church, and in some temples and churches you will find
it even now, but in the majority of them the very idea has
been lost. The idea is that by keeping holy vibrations there
the place becomes and remains illumined. Those who
cannot afford to have a room set apart can practice anywhere
they like. Sit in a straight posture, and the first thing to do is
to send a current of holy thought to all creation; mentally
repeat: “Let all being be happy; let all beings be peaceful; let
all beings be blissful.” So do to the East, South, North and
West. The more you do that the better you will feel yourself.
You will find at last that the easiest way to make yourselves
healthy is to see that others are healthy, and the easiest way
to make yourselves happy is to see that others are happy.
After doing that, those who believe in God should pray—not
for money, not for health, nor for heaven; pray for
knowledge and light; every other prayer is selfish. Then the
next thing to do is to think of your own body, and see that it
is strong and healthy; it is the best instrument you have.
Think of it as being as strong as adamant, and that with the
help of this body you will cross this ocean of life. Freedom
is never to be reached by the weak; throw away all
weakness; tell your body that it is strong; tell your mind that
it is strong, and have unbounded faith and hope in yourself. |
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