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Rajayoga
MAN fulfilling himself in the body is given Hathayoga as his means. When he rises above the body, he abandons Hathayoga as a troublesome and inferior process and rises to the Rajayoga, the discipline peculiar to the aeon in which man now evolves. The first condition of success in Raja- yoga is to rise superior to the dehātma-buddhi, the state of perception in which the body is identified with the Self. A time comes to the Rajayogin, when his body seems not to belong to him or he to have any concern in it. He is not troubled by its troubles or gladdened by its pleasure; it has them itself and very soon, because he does not give his sanction to them, they fall away from it. His own troubles and pleasures are in the heart and the mind, for he is the rajasic and psychical man, not the tamasic, material. It is these that he has to conquer in order that he may realise God in his heart or in his buddhi or in both. God seen in the heart — that is the quest of the Rajayogin. He may recover the perception and enjoyment of God as love and God as knowledge. The processes of the Rajayoga are mental and emotional. Patanjali’s science is not the pure Rajayoga; it is mixed and allows an important element of the Hathayoga in its initial processes. It admits the āsana and the prānāyāma. It is true, it reduces each to one of its kind, but the method of conquest is physical and therefore not Rajayogic. It may be said that the stillness of the body is essential to concentration or to samādhi; but this is a convention of the Hathayoga. The Rajayoga concedes no such importance to the body; he knows by experience that concentration can be secured in any easy and unconstrained posture, which allows one to forget the body; it is often as much helped by rhythmic motion as by stillness. Samādhi, when it comes, itself secures stillness of the body. The pure Rajayogin dispenses therefore with the physical practice of āsana. The real reason why Patanjali laid so much importance on āsana, was that
Page – 406 he thought prānāyāma essential to samādhi and āsana essential to prānāyāma. It is difficult though not impossible to do the practice of prānāyāma, according to Patanjali’s system, without perfect bodily stillness. It can be done and has been done, even while walking about, but this is not so easy or usual.
Now prānāyāma,
in its proper sense, the mastery of the vital force in oneself and Nature, is
essential to every Rajayogin, but it can be brought about by much simpler methods.
The only process that the Rajayogin finds helpful enough to be worth doing is
nādi-śuddhi The kumbhaka or cessation of the natural breathing is essential to the deeper kinds of samādhi, not to all; but even so he finds that by the cessation of the lawlessness, the restlessness of the mind, which we mistakenly call thought, we can easily, naturally and spontaneously bring about the cessation of the breathing, a calm, effortless and perfect kumbhaka. He therefore dispenses with physical processes, easy or laborious and goes straight to the root of the problem, the mind. Rajayoga is of three kinds, sacesta, upacesta and niścesta. Patanjali’s, the systematised, though each is quite methodical, is sacesta, involving great strain of effort, throughout. We may best compare the systems by taking each of Patanjali’s steps separately and seeing how much the three kinds of the Rajayogins
Page – 407 will deal with them. (In the present article, we shall deal with Patanjali.) The first step is the preparation of the moral nature, the perfection of the heart in the four great qualities of love, purity, courage and calm, without which siddhi in the Rajayoga is impossible. Patanjali prescribes the practice of the five yamas or regulating moral exercises, truth, justice and honesty, harmlessness, chastity and the refusal of ownership and the five niyamas or regulating moral habits, cleanliness and purity, contentment, austerity, meditation on scriptures, worship and devotion to God. In order to establish these habits and exercises and remove the impurities of the heart, it is evident that Patanjali intends us to use the method of abhyāsa or constant practice. Any one who has made the attempt will realise how difficult it is to compass all these qualities and how long and tedious a discipline is required to establish them even imperfectly. Patanjali seeks to purify and quiet the life, while the heart and mind are yet impure and restless, a system possible only to hermits in an āśrama. For this reason, the Rajayoga has fled from the homes of man and taken refuge in the forest and cavern. Afterwards Patanjali recommends the quieting of the body and mastering of the prāna by āsana and pranāyāma. The reason of this is clear enough. The Pranayama in Hathayoga does not lead to purity, but to force and intensity, every quality that it finds potent in the system, it raises to tenfold activity and power. Unless therefore the life and character be made quiet and pure, pranāyāma done in one’s own strength may do immense mental, physical and moral mischief. Allowing for the overcome of this initial difficulty and for the admission of Hathayoga into Rajayoga, it must be admitted that Patanjali’s system is admirably logical and reasonable in its arrangement. Next comes the control of the mind, that restless, self-willed and shifting force which is difficult to control. Again, as in his previous steps, Patanjali relies wholly on practice. He arranges concentration in four stages of development. Pratyāhāra or the drawing inward of the senses from their objects; dhāranā or the success in this process resulting in the fixing of mind for a moment on a single thought, feeling or object, such as the
Page – 408 nāsāgra or the bhrūmadhya for preference; dhyāna or the continuation of this state for a fixed period; samādhi or the withdrawing into oneself for an indefinite time. The preliminary exercise once successful, the rest follows with comparative ease, but the preliminary process is so enormously difficult that one should be amazed at Patanjali’s putting it first, if one did not perceive that he is relying on the rigorous and thorough mastery of each step, before the next is attempted; he trusts to the Hathayogic kumbhaka to bring about pratyāhāra with comparative ease. Even as it is, most Yogins prefer to take dhāranā first (on a single object), trusting to the practice of dhāranā to bring about pratyāhāra by a natural process. This is undoubtedly the more easy and straightforward process, though Patanjali’s is the more logical and scientific and if mastered may lead to greater results. Concentration, once attained, we proceed to what Patanjali evidently considers the essence of Yoga, the coercion of all vrttis or functionings of the mental or moral qualities, so as to arrive at samyama or throwing the whole passionless intelligent will in the spirit on whatsoever he wishes to possess from the realisation of God to the enjoyment of mundane objects. But how is this silencing of the vrttis to be effected? For the yamas and niyamas only establish certain good habits of life, they do not thoroughly purify the mind and heart. We have to do it by a process of removal, by replacement, always depending on abhyāsa, replacing bad vrttis by good, the many good by the few better, the few better by the still few best, until we arrive at absolute samyama. This can be done, not easily but daily without insuperable difficulty, if the power of concentrating is thoroughly obtained by Patanjali’s method. Samyama is a mighty power. Whatever the Yogin does samyama upon, says Patanjali, that he masters. The knowledge of one’s past lives, of the thoughts of men in this world and spirits in the other, the vision of the past and the future, the knowledge of all that is, is in his grasp. As to what he shall do with the power, Patanjali leaves the choice to the successful Yogin.
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the purification of the nerve system by regular breathing, and this can be done
while lying, sitting, reading, writing and walking. This process has great virtues.
It has a wonderful calming effect on the whole mind and body, drives out every
lurking disease in the system, awakens the yogic force accumulated in former
lives and even where no such latent force exists removes the physical obstacles
to the awakening of the kundalinī-śakti. But
even this process is not essential. The Rajayogin knows that by tranquillising
the mind, he can tranquillise the body, by mastering the mind he can master
both the body and the prāna. This is the great secret of
the Rajayoga — that mind is the master of the body, creates it and conditions
it, body is not the master, creator or law-giver of the mind. It may be said
that the body at least affects the mind; but this is the other discovery of
the Rajayogin that the body need not in the least affect the mind, unless by
our consent we allow it to do so.