I don’t know if my ideas will be palatable to you and if you agree, but the time has come when you will have to understand yoga in a different way. Yoga came to the West in the form of physical exercises, now it is developing as a new science and many psychologists are thinking in terms of using meditation for psycho-neurosis. It should be done, but with a few sincere aspirants, not many. They must come forward, and work hard to develop that higher awareness. Out of millions of people all over the world, only a very few people actually try to take the path of yoga and try for the higher realization or higher experience. The ultimate purpose of yoga is to experience oneself in the purest state. Now, we do not know ourselves in the purest state. What we know about ourselves is all mixed up.
We know ourselves in terms of ‘I am a Christian, I am a Hindu, I am a man, I am a woman, I am a tall man, my name is this, my name is that, I am MA, or BA, I am a manufacturer, I am a businessman’. We know ourselves in terms of all these things, which is a kind of confused knowledge. We have to dissociate from all these types of knowledge and we have to gradually understand ourselves as we are. Therefore, when Socrates said ‘Know Thyself’, he meant to say, try to realize the centre of your personality.
When the great saint Ramana Maharshi said, ‘Think who am I’, he meant to say, try to realize that centre of your personality. Many great men have been trying to say this from time to time. Thus you should try to strive to realize and understand, both theoretically and practically, this higher aim of yoga. There is no other path and there is no other way by which you will be able to experience your own consciousness. There are different paths by which you can come nearer to God. There are various religions – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism through which you can worship God in your own way, but when you want to make the consciousness free from its limitations, the only method is yoga. This method is the yoga of meditation in Sanskrit, but it should be translated as the Science of Self Awareness.
June 1968, Prana Restaurant Berkshire, USA