Posture

Posture

Try to find your own posture. Try to find your own yoga, and never follow a rule, because rules are averages. They are just like, in Poona there are one million people: somebody is five feet tall, somebody five five, somebody five six, somebody six feet, somebody six and a half feet. One million people: you calculate their heights and then you divided the total height of one million people by one million; then you will come to an average height. It may be four feet eight inches or something. Then you go and search for the average person -- you will never find. Average person never exists. Average is the most false thing in the world. Nobody is an average. Everybody is himself; nobody is an average. Average is a mathematical thing -- it is not real, it is not actual.

All rules exist for averages. They are good to understand a certain thing, but never follow them. Otherwise you will feel uncomfortable. Four feet eight inches is the average height! Now you are five feet, four inches longer -- cut it. Uncomfortable... walk in such a way so you look like the average: you will become an ugly phenomenon, an ashtha walker. You will be like a camel, crooked everywhere. One who tries to follow the average will miss.

Average is a mathematical phenomenon, and mathematics does not exist in existence. It exists only in man's mind. If you go and try to find mathematics in existence you will not find. That's why mathematics is the only perfect science: because it is absolutely unreal. Only with unreality can you be perfect. Reality does not bother about your rules, regulations; reality moves on its own.

Mathematics is a perfect science because it is mental, it is human. If man disappears from the earth, mathematics will be the first thing to disappear. Other things may continue, but mathematics cannot be here.

Always remember, all rules, disciplines, are average; and average is nonexistential. And don't try to become the average; nobody can become. One has to find his own way. Learn the average, that will be helpful, but don't make it a rule. Let it be just a tacit understanding. Just understand it, and forget about it.

It will be helpful as a vague guide, not as an absolutely certain teacher. It will be just like a vague map, not perfect. That vague map will give you certain hints, but you have to find out your own inner comfort, steadiness. How you feel should be the determining factor. That's why Patanjali gives this definition, so that you can find out your own feeling.

"STHIR SUKHAM ASANAM." There cannot be any better definition of posture:

Posture should be steady and comfortable.

In fact I would like to say it the other way, and the Sanskrit definition can be translated in the other way: Posture is that which is steady and comfortable.

STHIR SUKHAM ASANAM: That which is steady and comfortable is posture.

And that will be a more accurate translation. The moment you bring "should" things become difficult. In the Sanskrit definition there is no "should" but in the English translation it enters. I have looked into many translations of Patanjali. They always say, "Posture should be steady and comfortable." In the Sanskrit definition -- STHIR SUKHAM ASANAM -- there is no "should." STHIR means steady, SUKHAM means comfortable, ASANAM means posture -- that's all. "Steady, comfortable: that is the posture."

Why does this "should" come in? Because we would like to make a rule out of it. It is a simple definition, an indicator, a pointer. It is not a rule. And remember it always: that people like Patanjali never give rules; they are not so foolish. They simply give pointers, hints. You have to decode the hint into your own being.

You have to feel it, work it out; then you will come to the rule, but that rule will be only for you, for nobody else.

If people can stick to it, the world will be a very beautiful world -- nobody trying to force anybody to do something, nobody trying to discipline anybody else. Because, your discipline may have proved good for you, it may be poisonous for somebody else. Your medicine is not necessarily a medicine for all. Don't go on giving it to others.

But foolish people always live by rules.

Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 6
Chapter #7
Chapter title: Death to The Limited
7 September 1975 am in Buddha Hall