The_Witness_is Self-Illuminating

The mind goes on working, but it is not working for itself. It has a managerial post; the master is hidden behind. It cooperates with the master. Now, this has to be deeply understood.

If the mind cooperates with the master, you are healthy and whole. If the mind goes astray, against the master, you are unhealthy and ill. If the servant follows the master like a shadow, everything is okay. If the master says, "Go to the left," and the servant goes to the right, then something has gone wrong. If you want your body to run and the body says, "I cannot run," then you are paralyzed. If you want to do something and the body and the mind say, "No," or, they go on doing something which you don't want to do, then you are in great confusion. This is how humanity is.

Yoga has this as the goal: that your mind should function according to your lord, the innermost soul.

Your body should function according to the mind, and you should create a world around you which is in cooperation. When everything is in cooperation - the lower is always in cooperation with the higher, and the higher is in cooperation with the highest, and the highest is in cooperation with the utterly ultimate - then you have a life of harmony. Then you are a yogin. Then you become one, but not in the sense that only one exists: now you have become one in the sense of unison. You have become one in the sense of an orchestra - many instruments, but the music is one; many bodies, millions of objects, desires, ambitions, mood, ups and downs, failures and successes, a great variety, but everything in unison, in harmony. You have become an orchestra. Everything is cooperating with everything else, and everything finally is cooperating with the very center of your being.

That's why in India we have called sannyasins 'swamis'. 'Swami' means: the lord. You become a swami only when you have attained to this harmony that Patanjali is talking about. Patanjali is not against anything whatsoever. He is in favor of harmony. He's against discord. He is not against anything: he's not against the body, he's not an anti-body man; he's not against the world, he's not anti-life; he absorbs everything. And through that absorption he creates a higher synthesis. And the ultimate synthesis is when everything is in cooperation, when there is not even a single jarring note.

I have heard an anecdote:

The baby baboon was five years old but had not spoken a word since birth. Its parents were convinced that their offspring was dumb until one night when the little baboon was eating a banana. It suddenly looked up at its mother and spoke clearly: "What is the idea of feeding me a rotten banana?" The mother baboon was overjoyed and asked her baby why he had never spoken before. "Well," said the little baboon, "the food has been okay up to now."

If you are in a harmony, you will not complain about the world. You will not complain about anything. The complaining mind is simply indicative that things are not in harmony inside. When everything is in harmony, then there is no complaint. Now, you go to your so-called saints: everybody is complaining - complaining of the world, complaining of desires, complaining of the body, complaining of this and that. Everybody lives in complaints; something is jarring. A perfect man is one who has no complaints. That man is a God-man who has accepted everything, absorbed everything and become a cosmos, is no more a chaos.

Another anecdote:

The sweet little old lady was proud of the way she had trained her talking parrot, and was showing him off to the vicar. "If you pull his left leg, he says the Lord's Prayer, and if you pull his right leg, he repeats the Psalms," she explained.

"What if you pull both legs at once?" asked the vicar.

"I would fall flat on my behind, you stupid old coot!" retorted the parrot.

And this is what has happened to man. If you pull one leg it is okay; if you pull the other leg, that too is okay; but if you pull both legs, everything is bound to topple down. That's what has happened to man. His whole being has been pulled down. Religions have been trying to pull his body. They are much too afraid of the body, too guilty. They have been continuously trying to destroy and poison the body. They would like you to be like ghosts, without bodies. Their idea is that body is intrinsically wrong, that body is the body of sin. So you should be like spirits - without bodies, disembodied.

Now the materialists - the communists, the Marxists, the scientists - have been trying the other way. They have been trying to pull the other leg. They say that there is nothing like consciousness; there is no self. It is just a combination of physical and chemical things that you are. You should be a body, nothing else. Now, both together have pulled both legs, and the whole man has become a miserable thing, a disease, a dichotomy.

Patanjali says, "Accept everything, use it, be creative about it; don't negate." Negation is not his way, but affirmation. That's why Patanjali has worked so much on the body, on food, on yoga asanas, on pranayam. These are all efforts to create the harmony: right food for the body, right posture for the body; rhythmic breathing for the vital body. More prana, more vitality has to be absorbed. Ways and means have to be found so that you are not always lacking in energy, but overflowing.

With mind also, pratyahar; the mind is a bridge: you can go outside on the bridge, you can move on the same bridge and go inside. When you go outside, objects, desires, predominate you. When you go inside, desirelessness, awareness, witnessing, predominate over you; but the bridge is the same. It has to be used; it is not to be thrown and broken. It has not to be destroyed because it is the same bridge by which you have come into the world, and by which you have to go back again into the inner nature, and so on and so forth.

 

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