Yoga is Technology to Find Your Self - Part 1

Yoga has generally come to be understood only as a fitness regimen that is helpful in maintaining a healthy body. Few appreciate the huge promise that yoga holds for benefiting the mind and its capability to aid man in his endeavor to unfold his higher consciousness till he ultimately realizes his Self.

Of all the systems of psychology that we know of today, Patanjali’s system of yoga stands the highest because of the ease of its practice, and its scientific approach to spirituality. Yoga is a scientific process of restraining the mindstuff from taking on various modifications. It imparts to the student the technology which helps him to systematically unfold his higher consciousness by controlling his external as well as internal activities. The student is gradually taken through physical, moral, mental and spiritual exercises before he reaches the ultimate state of realization. There he establishes himself as a free soul never to be born again and again, as defined by the state of Nirvana (eternal salvation).

The word mindstuff is used for the Sanskrit word Chitta which is not only mind but all that goes to form perception. The western psychologists misinterpret mind as the instrumental side of consciousness that is characterized by reason, felling or emotion, sensation and so forth.

The truth is that it is the mindstuff that is a composition of all such instrumental objects:

Brain, as a psycho physical medium, for receiving and sending all sensations
Mind, as an agent of consciousness with its constantly active condition
Egoism, which makes a distinction in the knowledge of the individual as apart from the others.

However, intellect, discriminative knowledge, reason, etc. also form the other half or the positive side of this mindstuff. So in reality Chitta is not merely the mind as we k now it but the whole instrumental outfit of direct and indirect perception. The mindstuff changes its forms every moment of its existence. Anger, hatred or love is nothing else but a variety of such mental modifications. It has to be understood that the mind is the same. However, it takes on different colors or qualities.

What really happens when a man’s temperament changes from loving to happy to jealous is that his mindstuff undergoes modifications. Not his mind. It is the same mindstuff in him that changes merely its forms: once there is a mental modification known as anger, the second time as love and third as jealousy and so on. Our whole life is merely as continuous series of these modifications. As a psychologist puts it, “Life is but a constant expression of our inner activities”.

What has Yoga to do with this mindstuff? Patanjali’s says that the restraint of such mental modifications is the key air of Yoga. Thus Yoga in its real sense is not the process of throwing a rope in air and climbing it, or any such ridiculous notions that we harbor about it.