which we become bogged down. That is why we are compelled to con
tinue our practice.
The third, fourth, and fifth steps of niyama form a unit. The first
is tapas, zealous, sustained practice that is at the heart of all yoga. I
have repeatedly referred to tapas in earlier chapters as it is the thread
that holds together the whole of yoga practice. It is literally heat, the
heat that, in an alchemical sense, transforms. It is the practice that can
never be abandoned, a continued application to human evolution.
Without the severe and penetrating insight of self-knowledge
(svadhyaya), the fourth niyama, tapas would lead to power but neither
penetration nor integration. It would merely generate energy but
without direction. Tapas gives us the energy, svadhyaya the light of
knowledge. Self-study is clearly intended to penetrate inward, and so
the transforming fire of tapas enters progressively our different sheaths
of being and illuminates us with self-knowledge. Self-knowledge may
begin with recognizing the difficulty we have in controlling our desire
for ice cream, but in deeper realms it concerns our duplicity, self
seeking, lust for power, desire for admiration, arrogance, and ulti
mately our wish to set ourselves up in the place of immortal God.
Self-knowledge is not always comfortable. If we do not like what we
find, we are, in all honesty, obliged to do something to alter it.
The fifth niyama is lsvara pranidhana, which means devotional
surrender to God. This is the most theistic of all aspects of yoga. Isvara
is Divinity in a general and nondenominational sense. What it defi
nitely does not mean is using the ego to second-guess the will of God.
It is, on the contrary, the surrender, through meditation (dhyana) and
devotion (bhakti), of the ego itself. It is the absolute abandonment of
the personal self. Therefore, personal ideas about what God may or
may not want do not enter into the equation. It is offering oneself and
all one's actions, however trivial, from cooking a meal to lighting a
candle, to the Universal Divine. What the intentions of that Divinity
IIVINI; IN 11 1\l'.l'.llllM