|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
After the last lecture, someone asked to comment on something that time did not permit me to discuss in detail, i.e., that “there are surprising analogies that can be drawn between schizophrenia and hallucinations and the clairvoyance of yogis, their vision of God and their teacher, etc.”
Yes, indeed, there are very many similar traits, but this, if you will, is merely the inevitable resemblance…between polar opposites. A teacher of Yoga will never accept a single schizophrenic as a pupil. An experienced psychiatrist will never diagnose a yogi as mentally ill. On second thought, this latter statement is a bit too strong. Yogis, of course, can become mentally, as well as physically ill, it simply happens much more rarely.
The seeming correspondence among individual symptoms of schizophrenia and the phenomena of Yoga does not provide a basis for drawing any sort of parallel. However, the autistic tendencies developed by uncontrolled practice of Yoga may, indeed, although extremely rarely, prove to be the weak link in the chain that causes it to break.
In addition, those with fully developed schizophrenia may turn to Yoga for confirmation of their wild insane ideas or for justification of their autism.
For the practice of Yoga one needs a clear, keen, unclouded mind and an extremely healthy body. This means of course that schizophrenics can not practice Yoga. But the methods of the yogis may be used to treat various diseases, including schizophrenia. Anyone acquainted with Yoga knows how difficult it is, even for those with clear minds under the tireless control of an experienced teacher, to attain their goals. The majority of highly competent students thus fail to achieve any success for one reason or another. It is particularly difficult to treat a person with mental problems. If this is to be attempted, insulin or some other means must be used to attain a stable remission, and only after this happens can an experienced teacher of Yoga attempt to continue the treatment. Furthermore likelihood of success here depends, to a significant extent, more on the competence of the teacher than on how severely ill the patient is.
The problem with all books on the techniques of Yoga written for Europeans is that they formulate the goal of these techniques in an incomprehensible way. Techniques for the sake of techniques cannot exist. Before performing a ritual of a technique, you have to understand clearly within the context of your existing world-view, whether this goal is acceptable to you. There are very many self-improvement techniques. Each of them serves its own goals; if you attended a school or an institute, studied one or another science, then you have already performed some technique that had the goal of enriching you with knowledge, which made you a useful member of society at that time. Society trains useful and necessary members for itself. It trains more technicians than physicists, more physicists than linguists – because society has the greatest need for technicians at the present time. But what society needs most are those individuals who are in the shortest supply. There is virtually always a deficit of people in one or another profession, and the severity of society’s need for this profession is determined by the number of people already working in that area multiplied by the size of the deficit. For example, relatively few people are needed in management, but there are even fewer good administrators with high levels of managerial skills. Thus a severe deficit has developed so it may be said that currently the state needs people with managerial skills more than anyone else. This makes techniques for developing these managerial skills the most valuable at this stage of social development. Of course, such techniques must always and in all respects help to attain this goal. If the goal is separate from the technique, then this is a false technique, and cannot find adherents among normal people. All techniques have as their goals the perfecting of human beings. But in what direction? It is not possible to be perfect in all respects. There is no medicine for all diseases or panacea for all evils.
What are the goals of Yoga?
Let us consider the fate of a boy who is psychologically healthy but physically weak, who lives in a neighborhood where the winning argument in any dispute is the fist. He will either begin to do strengthening exercises in order to make his fist an even stronger argument (take up boxing, wrestling etc.) or he will develop his own inner world in which sweet, refined people who do not fight and curse each other live, and where physical strength is not the main thing, but something secondary, and the main thing is the high self-worth of humanity as a whole. And a tireless instinct for competition or change will cause this child to think up a self-improvement technique, a technique whose practice would not require anything external to himself, and which could be practiced at any moment, without requiring a book, or athletic gear, or other nice people to help, or profound preliminary knowledge, or any other particular conditions, since the boy could not be sure of having anything else available at all times. After all, he would need to be able to perform the technique at any time, to give himself over to his task with complete absorption, to assuage his boundless temperament, which has been driven into the bottle of autism by adverse circumstances. It is just such children who grow up to be yogis. They find in Yoga precisely what they have been looking for – a technique that does not depend on anything external, an exalted goal, the idea of love for humanity and, particularly, indifference to and disdain for violence. The child is given a weapon that he can use to protect himself against violence. He simply stops noticing it. His interests and goals have little to do with the body, which is subject to violence. At the same time Yoga orients such a child towards people, rescuing him from the vise of autism.
In essence the goal of Yoga is to create an island for oneself: the island of one’s own physical safety, to save one from the fear of death and various adverse changes. In addition, the goal is to be physically healthy, with a stable mind and highly developed intuition. Intuition frequently helps people avoid danger in cases where logic is powerless. Furthermore all this must be done with the simplest of means: eschewing special tools, and if possible, in a way that is not even noticed by those around us.
The techniques of Yoga grew out of these goals and requirements.
In the first part of this course I will just present the ideas underlying these techniques. In the second part I will consider certain questions of technique, the simplest of them, so that they might be used, with care, by those who sense in themselves the strong desire and capacity to do so.
|
|
|
|
|
|