perception and action. You would not congratulate yourself by saying,
"How well I saved that child." That's because you would not feel your
self to be the author, but rather the instrument of something that was
simply "right," existing purely in the moment, without reference to
past or future.
For this reason, the final chapter in this book, "Living in
Freedom," concerns ethics and returns to the first two stages of yoga
(yama and niyama). By seeing how the free or self-realized man or
woman lives in the world, we will see what we can learn for how each
of us lives not at some ultimate destination but each step along the
journey inward and the journey of life onward.
Learning to Live in the Natural World
Before beginning this journey inward, we must clarify its nature. There
is a frequent misunderstanding of the journey inward or the spiritual
path, which suggests to most people a rejection of the natural world,
the mundane, the practical, the pleasurable. On the contrary, to a yogi
(or indeed a Taoist master or Zen monk) the path toward spirit lies en
tirely in the domain of nature. It is the exploration of nature from the
world of appearances, or surface, into the subtlest heart of living
matter. Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek but a
part of the divine core of each of us, which we must reveal. For the
yogi, spirit is not separate from body. Spirituality, as I have tried to
make clear, is not ethereal and outside nature but accessible and pal
pable in our very own bodies. Indeed the very idea of a spiritual path
is a misnomer. After all, how can you move toward something that,
like Divinity, is already by definition everywhere? A better image might
be that if we tidy and clean our houses enough, we might one day no
tice that Divinity has been sitting in them all along. We do the same
with the sheaths of the body, polishing them until they become a pure
window to the divine.