Page 5 - All India Magazine Sep-2020

What is yoga

Life and Yoga
In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either con-
sciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a
methodised eff ort towards self-perfection by the expression of
the secret potentialities latent in the being and — highest condi-
tion of victory in that eff ort — a union of the human individual
with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially
expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look
behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in
the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an
ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and
to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker,
she for the fi rst time upon this Earth devises selfconscious means
and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose
may be more swiftly and puissantly attained. Yoga, as Swami
Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compress-
ing one’s evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few
months of bodily existence.
CWSA 23: 6-7

The object of Yoga
The object of our Yoga is self-perfection, not self-annulment.
There are two paths set for the feet of the Yogin, withdrawal
from the universe and perfection in the Universe; the fi rst comes
by asceticism, the second is eff ected by tapasya; the fi rst receives
us when we lose God in Existence, the second is attained when we
fulfi l existence in God. Let ours be the path of perfection, not of
abandonment; let our aim be victory in the battle, not the escape
from all confl ict.
Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically false
and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them the

All India Magazine, September 2020