Page 11 - NAMAH-Oct-2023

Namah Editorial

exercises, meant for physical health and mental conscious and concentrated evolution, a
well-being. While these things are important compressed evolution instead of the long
for our immediate utilitarian purposes, they winding circuitous routes of Nature in her
are neither the core nor the whole of Yoga. wife wanderings and long preparations and
As far as physical health is concerned, its sudden unexpected leaps. Sri Aurobindo
importance lies in the purposes to which we helps us.
shall put the instrumentality of the body.
Besides there are a number of different ways “In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life
that one can acquire good health. AAsanas is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga.
are one of them. Though here too there is a For we mean by this term a methodised effort
need to make a distinction between aasanas towards self-perfection by the expression of
and yoga aasanas, as they were once part of the secret potentialities latent in the being and
the original Hatha yoga. A set of exercises — highest condition of victory in that effort
does not automatically become yogic unless — a union of the human individual with
it is accompanied by certain attitudes and the universal and transcendent Existence
directed towards genuine yogic ends. we see partially expressed in man and in the
Therefore, we see in the Assttaanngayoga system Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind
a
a
a
of Patañjali, asanas and pranayama occur after its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who
a
the preliminary purification is practised attempts in the conscious and the subconscious
through moral rectitude. It is followed by to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing
mastery of the sense-mind, concentration, expression of her yet unrealised potentialities
surrender to and union with God. and to unite herself with her own divine
reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first
Of course the idea of God or IIssvara is as time upon this Earth devises self-conscious
wide as the universe, making the system means and willed arrangements of activity by
free from the trappings of religion. Yet which this great purpose may be more swiftly
it brings home the fact that Yoga is not and puissantly attained. Yoga, as Swami
meant for maintaining good health alone Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a
but rather the purpose of good health is to means of compressing one’s evolution into a
ultimately engage in our higher pursuit of single life or a few years or even a few months
the very Highest, the Divine. Good health of bodily existence (2).”
through aasanas, conservation and right flow
of life-energies by mastery over the breath
is important for this reason. But Patañjali,
a great codifier of the then prevalent yogic
practices is not the originator of Yoga.
Nor does he exhaust all the possibilities of
Yoga. Yoga existed much before his classical
u
treatise on Yoga sutras and continued or rather
continues to evolve after him. If we take the
definition given by Swami Vivekananda
and endorsed by Sri Aurobindo, Yoga is

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