What should be our most precious possession?
The most precious possession of man, in my opinion, is the ability to handle a wild and stormy mind. If you can handle the mind, you can handle the whole world, because whatever has been done by great men in the past and whatever is happening today is due to the power of the mind.
We are common people. We are ordinary people because we have not realized what can be accomplished by a strong mind. Most people do not worry at all about strengthening the mind. They think that if they can control their anger and their passion, jealousy and greed, they have controlled the mind. It is not true.
Jealousy, greed and passion are not the mind. These are a vritti of the mind, not the mind. When I talk about controlling the mind, I do not mean that you have to be a religious person, nor am I talking of morality. Controlling the mind means to be able to hold the mind in front of you. Suppose you are concentrating on Om, on a blue lotus or on the light, you should be able to hold on to that area of awareness and experience for as long as you want. That is the most precious possession in life.
Can you explain what we are ultimately aiming for?
For many thousands of years, the wise have been trying to discover the answer to the question, ‘Why were we born?’ Is it just a biological accident, is it God’s will, or are we a product of nature through the course of evolution? Ultimately, I don’t think they have come to any conclusion. No one has given a final answer. Religions, philosophies, mysticism, occultism, magical sciences, dialectical materialism all have their own replies, as you well know, and there is no final answer.
However, I think the aim and object of man’s incarnation and his birth is nature’s act of awakening the higher mind in him. Man today is not the finer design that nature has created. We are not the last chapter of nature’s creation. After us, another race will come. I will not say that they will have only one foot or four fingers, or that they will be shorter or taller, black or white, but in human features, they will be more beautiful people. We are not physically beautiful. Our eyes and our cheeks, our nose, have no proportion, so we are not beautiful. They are going to be beautiful people and they will be operating from the intuitive plane, from the super mind.
Do you believe that a higher mind is what we are striving for?
I have not been able to reach the ultimate answers, but this much I know, that the next step is man’s discovery of mind. In this century, he has discovered matter in the form of chemicals, elements, and has performed a lot of miracles like creating radios and computers. The next area of discovery is going to be the mind. Man has been able to go deep into matter and analyse it, divide it, split it and then release the energy, whatever energy it may be, electrical energy, nuclear energy, or thermonuclear energy. In the same way, in the future, man will be able to analyse the mind, the wave of consciousness within us which we cannot see but which we know we have, firstly because we can think and feel sorry and happy. That mind has to be captured. It has to be discovered. The discovery of the mind is the ultimate aim of yoga – I won’t say of human life. Yoga can help us to discover the whole mind. Beyond that, I think some other way has to come.
You mean we are not using our full potential?
There has to be something beyond yoga. It is too early to renounce yoga, to talk against yoga, or to indicate the limitations of yoga. It is too early and you should not do it, but there is a time in man’s life where he does not need yoga because the purpose of yoga is to bring him to a point where he will handle the mind. After that, yoga retires. Something else has to come. That something else might be some other swami who might come after a hundred, two hundred or three hundred years; it is too early to talk about it and it is not necessary to think you know.
5 February 1983, Wilmslow, Manchester