IMPORTANCE OF YOGA

THERE are certain concepts that are part and parcel of the teachings of yoga, which is really an all-embracing approach to life. One of these key concepts is that this world is made of consciousness. It is not our brain that produces consciousness, but rather consciousness that produces our brain. In physics they speak of potential and kinetic energy. If the potential energy isn't present, let's say for a pendulum at the top of its swing, there won't be the kinetic energy of its downward swing. Even at the time when the rocks were formed and the planets began to take shape, consciousness had to exist as a potential. If it had not been there, you and I would not be here talking. There had to be the potential for it from the beginning of time for the universe to produce life, consciousness, and the reality of my talking here and your listening.
This underlying reality of consciousness is something our Western civilization has not understood yet. Because of this, we have attempted more and more to discover answers in technology. I've actually reached the point in my own life where, you might say, I'm a rebel against technology. I use it all the time, but the fact that every time you buy a toothbrush you have to read a manual on how to use it makes you get fed up with the whole thing. I'm a human being, and I want to live by human values.
Yoga is going to bring people back to their intuitive center of consciousness. Perhaps it won’t take place quickly, because the process of dissemination is very slow. But I've been teaching now for nearly fifty years, and I've seen a great change in the way people write, in the media, in books, in television. I've seen that people are talking more and more about an intuitive approach to things. It's becoming more current, and what a few people do, gradually everybody will do.
Realize that your life is basically karma yoga; and in that karma yoga, don't keep things for yourself, but give support to others. Realize, in the last analysis, that you and others are the same being temporarily defined as separate—the ocean temporarily defined as the separate little waves. The veriest stranger is a part of you. But behind all those waves is the consciousness of God ever waiting for us to merge back into Him.