Yog is being in union with yourself. It can’t be explained merely verbally. You need to go through certain experiences, which will bring you face to face with what is called atma sakshatkar—your true self. Once it happens, you are in yog; and once you are in yog with yourself, you are a yogi. Yog can be of several kinds; you might choose to be in yog with fashion, with beauty, with sport. A practitioner of yog is in yog with himself or herself… that’s a yogi. Yog is for evolution, the rest are all bhogis.
A rakshas undergoes enormous tap (penance) to impress God. When God finally appears to grant him the desired boon, what does the rakshas ask for? Immortality. Riches. Pleasures… Why? He is limited by his karma, so he cannot ask for anything beyond that. He cannot understand a world beyond. He is bound by his desires, he needs that experience, so he asks only for that.
It’s wrong to think that the spiritual is divorced from the material. Your senses have bound you to the physical, so you cannot comprehend anything beyond that. So even when you go to God, you ask him for something that has to do with your physical world, your senses, your intellectual life. Because you cannot ask for something you don’t understand.
If you were a practitioner of yog, your set of questions would be completely different. The problem with the majority of the population of the world is that it wants to know everything through the intellect. If you’re bound by your physical and intellectual self, how will you go beyond? Somebody has to take you forward. We know the law of karma; everyone learns it; it’s there in every religion, but do you practice it? Why not give everything in your pocket to the next beggar you see on the road? You’re earning good karma; you know it, but you won’t do it! Intellectual understanding is not enough, we need a guru to explain things. If a guru tells you to do something, you will, because the guru will ensure that you have the gyan to do this; he will ensure that you have gone beyond the five senses. He is not full of empty talk; he’s shown you the light and it needn’t be described to you anymore.
If I say to you, “Assess that door”, you’ll say it’s reddish brown, it’s got a knob, a handle, a bolt and it’s used to enter and leave a room. If you don’t understand wood, if your five senses for some reason have never been exposed to it, you’ll never understand that the door is made of something that was living once.
To know and understand wood, you can’t just look at a tree and come to know the quality of the wood or even that it is wood; you definitely cannot guess that a tree is a living thing. You need someone like a botanist who knows and understands wood, the texture, its properties and its qualities. The person who tells you that is a guru because he has told you something that you can’t understand intellectually, and has made you experience what a tree in reality is. You could read everything there is about wood, but you still won’t know it. You need this expert to tell you, the guru who takes you outside the limitations of your five senses and shows you what lies beyond. Once you understand it, your curiosity grows further—where does the tree come from? The specialist will then tell you about the seed, and how it grows into a tree. Then you will wonder where the seed comes from—does the plant rise from the seed or the seed from the plant, where does all this originate? The yog guru is the person who shows you where it all comes from…
(Yogi Ashwini is the spiritual head of Dhyan Ashram.)
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