{"id":2575,"date":"2013-07-13T01:42:31","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2575"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:42:31","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:31","slug":"14-the-psychology-of-yoga-vol-12-essays-divine-and-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/12-essays-divine-and-human\/14-the-psychology-of-yoga-vol-12-essays-divine-and-human","title":{"rendered":"-14_The Psychology of Yoga.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Psychology of Yoga <\/b>
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As the Indian mind, emerging from its narrow mediaeval entrenchments, advances westward towards inevitable conquest, it must inevitably carry with it Yoga & Vedanta for its banners
\nwherever it goes. Brahmajnana, Yoga & Dharma are the three essentialities of Hinduism; wherever it travels & find harbourage
\n& resting place, these three must spread. All else may help or hinder. Shankara’s philosophy may compel the homage of the
\nintellectual, Sankhya attract the admiration of the analytical mind, Buddha capture the rationalist in search of a less material
\nsynthesis than the modern scientist’s continual Annam Brahma Pranam Brahma, but these are only grandiose intellectualities.
\nThe world at large does not live by the pure intellect, concrete itself it stands by things concrete or practical, although, immaterial in its origin, it bases practicality upon abstractions. A goal of life, a practice of perfection and a rational, yet binding
\nlaw of conduct,\u2014these are man’s continual quest, and in none of these demands is modern Science able to satisfy humanity.
\nIn reply to all such wants Science can only cry, Society and again Society and always Society. But the nature of man knows
\nthat Society is not the whole of life. With the eye of the soul it sees that Society is only a means, not an end, a passing &
\nchanging outward phenomenon, not that fixed, clear & eternal inward standard & goal which we seek. Of Society as of all
\nthings Yajnavalkya’s universal dictum stands; a man loves & serves Society for the sake of the Self & not for the sake of
\nSociety. That is his nature & whatever Rationalism may teach, to his nature he must always return. What Science could not
\nprovide India offers, Brahman for the eternal goal, Yoga for the means of perfection, dharma (swabhavaniyatam karma) for
\nthe rational yet binding law of conduct. Therefore, because it has something by which humanity can be satisfied & on
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which it can found itself, the victory of the Indian mind is
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But in order that the victory may not be slow & stumbling
\nin its progress and imperfect in its fulfilment, it is necessary that whatever India has to offer should be stated to the West in
\nlanguage that the West can understand and through a principle of knowledge which it has made its own. Europe will accept
\nnothing which is not scientific, nothing, that is to say which does not take up its stand on an assured, well-ordered and verifiable knowledge. Undoubtedly, for practical purposes the West is right; since only by establishing ourselves on such an assured
\nfoundation can we work with the utmost effectiveness and make the most of what we know. For shastra is the true basis of all
\nperfect action & shastra means the full and careful teaching of the principles, relations and processes of every branch of
\nknowledge, action or conduct with which the mind concerns itself. Indian knowledge possesses such a scientific basis, but, in
\nthese greater matters, unexpressed or expressed only in broad principles, compact aphorisms, implied logical connections not
\nminutely treated in detail, fully, with a patient logical order & development in the way to which the occidental intellect is
\nnow accustomed and which it has become its second nature to demand. The aphoristic method has great advantages. It prevents the mind from getting encrusted in details and fossilising there; it leaves a wide room & great latitude for originality
\n& the delicate play of individuality in the details. It allows a science to remain elastic and full of ever new potentialities for
\nthe discoverer. No doubt, it has disadvantages. It leaves much room for inaccuracy, for individual error, for the violences of
\nthe ill-trained & the freaks of the inefficient. For this, among other more important reasons, the Indian mind has thought it
\nwise to give a firm & absolute authority to the guru & to insist that the disciple shall by precept & practice make his own all
\nthat the master has to teach him & so form & train his mind before it is allowed to play freely with his subject. In Europe
\nthe manual replaces the guru; the mind of the learner is not less rigidly bound & dominated but it is by the written rule
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& detail not by the more adaptable & flexible word of the
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Still, the age has its own demands, and it is becoming imperatively necessary that Indian knowledge should reveal in the Western way its scientific foundations. For if we do not do it
\nourselves, the Europeans will do it for us and do it badly, discrediting the knowledge in the process. The phenomenon of the
\nTheosophical Society is a warning to us of a pressing urgency. It will never do to allow the science of Indian knowledge to
\nbe represented to the West through this strange & distorting medium. For this society of European & European-led inquirers
\narose from an impulse on which the Time-Spirit itself insists; their object, vaguely grasped at by them, was at bottom the
\nsystematic coordination, explanation & practice of Oriental religion & Oriental mental & spiritual discipline. Unfortunately,
\nas always happens to a great effort in unfit hands, it stumbled at the outset & went into strange bypaths. It fell into the mediaeval
\nsnare of Gnostic mysticism, Masonic secrecy & Rosicrucian jargon. The little science it attempted has been rightly stigmatised
\nas pseudo-science. A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical science into the explanation of psychical movements,\u2014to explain for instance pranayam in the terms of oxygen & hydrogen!\u2014to accept uncritically every experience & every random idea
\nabout an experience as it occurred to the mind & set it up as a revealed truth & almost a semi-divine communication, to make
\na hopeless amalgam & jumble of science, religion & philosophy all expressed in the terms of the imagination\u2014this has been
\nthe scientific method of Theosophy. The result is that it lays its hands on truth & muddles it so badly that it comes out to the
\nworld as an untruth. And there now abound other misstatements of Indian truth, less elaborate but almost as wild & wide as
\nTheosophy’s. From this growing confusion we must deliver the future of humanity.
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