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Namah Vol. 26, Issue 4, 15th January 2019

and nerves and brain and everywhere else? that IT was all the time there / here right
We do not know. Death may be the end of before our eyes but we knew IT not. It is what
this body but not necessarily the end of our we always carry, nay what we secretly and
‘Self-awareness’. We may just be changing in reality are but we were just unaware of IT
modes of experiencing creation, moving since our attention was never turned towards
in other domains than the physical earth, IT. Yoga teaches us first to turn our attention
encountering other truths than what we do towards this now secret Reality which is the
here. truth of our being and of the world. It does
so by the process of an inward concentration.
The teachings of yoga In other words we reverse the process by
which we lose contact with IT. Ordinarily we
Yoga instead is not a belief-system though live trapped in the sense, turned outwards
it starts with certain premises based on the and our mind keeps playing with outer
experience of those who have gone before events which are nothing but surface waves,
us, much as scientists working in a certain now emerging, now vanishing, out of the
field have made their discoveries that become Immensity of THAT. We mark the waves
our starting-point. It gives us means and but know not the source of their origin and
processes, tools and techniques, methods and power, we can see the ocean surface but
instruments to engage with, enter into contact not the depths that lie concealed within our
with and, eventually become identified with nature and its incessant activity. The first
this ‘Reality’ that we carry within us and thing needed is to go within and this is not
around us all the time. Of course once we possible as long as our surface consciousness
have made this discovery ourselves then it remains restless and tied to superficial
becomes so simple. We discover, for instance, appearances and apparent phenomena.

Dr. Alok Pandey, an editor of NAMAH and a member of SAIIIHR, is a doctor practising at the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

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