partisan, borderless perception of the planet earth that changed their
lives and led them to try to impart their experience through the pursuit
of shared human goals to be achieved by peaceful cooperation. As I
have said, we cannot all go into orbit, but we do have access to space,
our inner space. Paradoxically, looking within has a comparable uni
fying effect as visiting space does for astronauts. I make no excuse for
repeating that inside the microcosm of the individual exists the macro
cosm of the universe. If this truism, however obvious to you or how
ever unlikely, does not hold good, then all yoga is nonsense, along with
Gnostic mysticism, Sufism, Buddhism, and the teachings of Christ.
The wisdom that yoga practice has given me was confirmed
through the sacred yogic books that I have read. Not only have I ac
quired knowledge by my sadhana and the reading of sacred texts but
also through my travels and the people I have met. All these weave to
gether the last threads of our yogic cloth.
The writers of the Vedas were seers, but also poets and visionaries
who saw divinity everywhere, in everything, in animate and inanimate,
organic and inorganic things. Somehow we have lost that art. Stagna
tion has brought insensitivity, but echoes of wisdom persist. The great
Catalan architect Gaudi, for example, said that architecture was a cre
ative relationship between the sensuousness of Nature and the austerity
of geometry. This is a theme that runs through yoga practice. My at
tempts systematically to impose symmetry on asana postures express
this relationship. And, as with the architect, the concept of space is
fundamental. A vase, like a building, like a body, has two spaces-the
one that it contains and the one that surrounds it. When we begin
asana, we worry about the shape of the pose, that is, how we look in
the mirror, in other words, the space we exclude. By now we should be
worrying about the space we include, the space within, for it is largely
that which gives true life and beauty to the asana. It is called yo�a
svarupa-the self assuming its perfect form throu�h yo�a. Thai is
achieved through the inner distribution of space. Essentially th;tl is how
II I I S S T II F II I V I N 1'. 11 11 ll Y I A N .1 N /l .1^1