Page 25 - All India Magazine Jan-2025

Youth

Youth is the capacity to progress
Youth does not depend on the small number of years one has
lived, but on the capacity to grow and progress. To grow is to in-
crease one's potentialities, one's capacities; to progress is to make
constantly more perfect the capacities that one already possesses.
Old age does not come from a great number of years but from the
incapacity or the refusal to continue to grow and progress. I have
known old people of twenty and young people of seventy. As soon
as one wants to settle down in life and reap the benefits of one's
past efforts, as soon as one thinks that one has done what one
had to do and accomplished what one had to accomplish, in short,
as soon as one ceases to progress, to advance along the road of
perfection, one is sure to fall back and become old.
One can also teach the body that there is almost no limit to
its growth in capacities or its progress, provided that one discov-
ers the true method and the right conditioning. This is one of the
many experiments which we want to attempt in order to break
these collective suggestions and show the world that human po-
tentialities exceed all imagination.
CWM 12: 72-73

Energy Inexhaustible
One of the most powerful aids that yogic discipline can pro-
vide to the sportsman is to teach him how to renew his energies by
drawing them from the inexhaustible source of universal energy.
Modern science has made great progress in the art of nourish-
ment, which is the best known means of replenishing one's ener-
gies. But this process is at best precarious and subject to all kinds
of limitations. We shall not speak about it here, for the subject
has already been discussed at great length. But it is quite obvious
that so long as the world and men are what they are, food is an

All India Magazine, January 2025 25