and tell us, “My dear friends, you are not human beings.” But we will say, “We are
human beings only; what else are we?” If somebody tells us, “You are a superhuman
supreme power,” we will not believe it. We will say, “This is all nonsense. I am a
human being; I can see it. I am like anybody else.” So we require a leonine master, a
great Guru, to come and enlighten us into our true nature.
The yoga practice is terrific in the sense that when we deal with the so-called subject
of knowledge which is the mind, we find that we are killing ourselves, as it were. It is
like a suicide committed by the so-called empirical subject. And the worst thing that
one can conceive of is suicide—death of one’s own self. Here, the return of the
reflected reality in the form of the individual to its original source—an absorption of
the objective character of knowledge into its universal subjectivity—is the so-called
death of its empirical existence. Well, it is true. When we become healthy, sickness is
destroyed. It is a suicide of illness. There is a destruction of disease when we are to
recover health. But it is worthwhile; we cannot say it is suicide. Can we say that the
disease is commiting suicide? Well, it is so, in one sense. But yet it is a recovery of the
original status of the organism—that is called health.
Thus is the necessity by the practice of yoga to recover one’s spiritual health, which is
universality of nature and pure subjectivity of existence. Citeḥ apratisaṁkramāyāḥ
tadākārāpattau svabuddhisamvedanam (IV.22). This is the sutra in this context. Citeh is
consciousness. When the consciousness ceases getting involved in a procession of
ideas, as it used to earlier, as it appears to be in ordinary knowledge and experience,
and when it assumes its own nature just as the lion’s cub would realise its own
leonine character, then there is Self-consciousness, not object-consciousness. This is
the knowledge of the true Self, by the Self. The whole difficulty here is that there is no
means of knowing the Self. While there are instruments of cognition and means of
acquiring knowledge in respect of outside things, we have no possible way of
knowing the Self by a means which is communicable.
How can we know the Self? What is the means of knowing? Not by the senses, not by
the mind—then what is there? Nothing! It is an immediate knowledge, as they call it,
non-mediate—without any kind of mediation or instrumentation in the sense of
anything that is external to the object that is to be known. The instrument of
knowledge is generally different from the object of knowledge. But here, the
instrument and the object are identical. So we can imagine the difficulty. The worst
form of difficulty is where the object that is to be known is inseparable from the
process of knowing, and it is the same thing as the subject that knows. The matter
becomes still worse when we contemplate the possibility of the knower of the object
being the same as the object, and identical even with the process of knowing.
This is the aim of yoga, and this is the realisation of the Pure Subject. This Pure
Subject is not the individual subject, because the individual subject is set in
opposition to an object outside, whereas here, this Subject that we are speaking of,
referring to and aiming at is not set in opposition to anything else. It is inclusive of
everything that is there really. So it is that this Subject is comprehensive enough to
include within its gamut everything that is existent anywhere. Such is the ultimate
purpose of yoga, which is an inclusive awareness of Universal Subjectivity, and
ordinary efforts are inadmissible, inapplicable and insufficient.