|
Main Index
|
| |
| | | Book Name: Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 7 | Previous Next | |
|
|
|
| |
You only attended my first lecture, and for two years I have not seen your face. How did you manage to get ninety-five percent marks?"
I said, "It must be because of your first lecture."
He looked puzzled. He said, "My first lecture! Just out of one lecture?" "Don't try to befool me," he said. "Tell me the truth."
I said, "Propriety won't allow it."
He said, "Forget all about propriety. Just tell me the truth. I will not mind."
I said, "I have told you the truth, but you have misunderstood it. If I had not attended your lecture I would have got a hundred percent. You confused me! That accounts for those five percent I lost.
Metaphysics, philosophy, all distant thinking simply confuse you. It leads you nowhere. It muddles your mind. It gives you more and more to think, and it doesn't help you to become more aware. Thinking is not going to help: only meditation can help. And the difference is: while you think, you are more concerned with thoughts; while you meditate, you are more concerned with the capacity of awareness.
Philosophy is concerned with the mind; yoga is concerned with consciousness. Mind is that of which you can become aware: you can look at your thinking, you can see your thoughts passing, you can see your feelings moving, you can see your dreams floating like clouds. Riverlike, they go on and on; it is a continuum. The one that can see this is consciousness.
The whole effort of yoga is to attain to That which cannot be reduced to an object, which remains irreducible, to be just your subjectivity. You cannot see it because it is the seer. You cannot catch hold of it, because all that you can catch hold of is not you. Just because you can catch hold of it it has become separate from you. This consciousness, which is always elusive and always stands back and whatsoever effort you make all efforts fail... to come to this consciousness -- how to come to this consciousness -- is what yoga is all about.
To be a yogi is to become what you can become. Yoga is the science of stilling what has to be stilled and alerting what can be alerted. Yoga is a science to divide that which is not you and that
|
|
|
|
| |