Ashtanga Yoga & Meditation

Yoga and meditation are inter linked, if dealt properly then yoga can lead to meditation, but if it is not understood clearly then it can become just another form of exercise. The eight fold path of Yoga begins from body discipline and slowly moves to mind, it is a pure science just like mathematics, physics or chemistry. Yoga has brought religion to the state of a science: he made religion a science, bare laws; no belief is needed.

Yoga is not a philosophy, it is not a religion, and I say it is not about thinking. Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality. It is just a part, a functional part; it can be trained. And you can argue logically, you can think rationally, but your heart will remain the same. Your heart is your deepest center; your head is just a branch. You can be without the head, but you cannot be without the heart. Your head is not basic.

Meditation is a pure science just like mathematics, physics or chemistry. Physics is not Christian physics is not Buddhist. If Christians have discovered the laws of physics, then too physics is not Christian. It is just accidental that Christians have come to discover the laws of physics. But physics remains just a science. Yoga is a science -- it is just an accident that Hindus discovered it. It is not Hindu. It is a pure mathematics of the inner being. So a Mohammedan can be a yogi, a Christian can be a yogi, a Jain; a Buddha can be a yogi. Yoga is not Hindu, it is not Mohammedan

Yoga is concerned with your total being, with your roots. It is not philosophical.

Meditation gives us the laws of transformation, the laws of how to die and how to be reborn again, the laws of a new order of being. That is why I call it a science. Yoga means now you will have to be a harmony, you will have to become one. A crystallization is needed; a centering is needed. And unless you attain a center, all that you do is useless. It is wasting life and time.

Bliss means absolute silence, and silence is possible only when there is harmony-when all the discordant fragments have become one, when there is no crowd, but one. When you are alone in the house and nobody else is there, you will be blissful. Yoga is a method to come to a non-dreaming mind. Yoga is the science to be in the here and now. Yoga means now you are ready not to move into the future. Yoga means you are ready now not to hope, not to jump ahead of your being. Yoga means to encounter the reality as it is.

But today people are using yoga just as mode to gain good health and stability of mind. Yoga as such if done awareness is a meditation but if you do not move from asana, pranayaam to higher platforms of pratayhara and dhyan then one has really understood Yoga at all.

Yam, Niyama, asana, pratayahar are the base of meditation, in absence of sound base dhyana will not go deep.