One Reality Only

Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Yoga means communion of the individual self with the cosmic self. At the same time, it is complete detachment or departure from the outside world into the inside world. It has to be noted that just by meditation with your eyes closed, when you develop awareness within, is not sufficient. Take it from me and also experience it in your own life. It is necessary that the awareness is applied in your day-to-day life.

Let us say you produced a bomb and kept it in your room, you did not make use of it, and it remained there. Similarly, through meditation, you heighten and purify your awareness, but when the question comes of applying it in your day-to-day life, you do not do it. The daily life and the life in meditation become two different and contradictory realities. If you want your developed awareness to help you in your spiritual life and in your daily material life, you must know the method of squeezing out a little energy from that fundamental source of awareness and putting it in touch with your day-to-day activities.

In yoga, as in other sciences pertaining to yoga, there are methods, ways and means by which the supreme awareness can be applied. This is called applied yoga. In meditation, the vision, the psychic experiences are not everything. They are just symptoms of growing concentration. They are symptoms which prove that your consciousness is transcending different dimensions and stages of your awareness. It only means that.

If you want this yoga or awareness to become a reality in your life, you should also know the method of synchronizing the spiritual awareness with your day-to-day life. Unless you do that, you will never realize that potential.

Therefore, you will find many spiritual aspirants, renunciates or householders, who have gone very deep in meditation, and some of them lose complete awareness with the outer body but they have not been able to accomplish anything. They have not been able to understand anything in life. If you ask them something, they forget. They lack the power of memory and the faculty of understanding. They have completely dimmed the power of constant awareness.

If they are meditating correctly, why does it happen? It means that their day-to-day life in the senses and the world and their life in meditation become two different lives. Therefore, side by side with the practice of meditation, the practices of raja yoga, hatha yoga, bhakti yoga and jnana yoga, one will have to do karma yoga.

May 1968, California, USA