The Ultimate Goal of all Yoga

A Step by Step Revelation

In some traditional Asian cities, monkey families move in and live in abandoned buildings. When they are hungry they grab some food from your hand or from someone’s kitchen if a window is left open, or that lovely fruit tree just when the fruit was ever so luscious. The Discovery channel has done an interesting series on these monkeys called the monkey thieves, for that is what these monkeys are, thieves. However, you cannot really present the poor lot to a judge for these folks did not go to school or church. No one taught them a lesson in morality and ethics. They were simply satisfying their basic need or self interest – hunger.

Humans have evolved out of creatures similar to monkeys and although humans consider themselves as way superior, in truth they are not really much removed from monkeys and Chimpanzees. We have descended from such like creatures and on a planetary time scale measured in billions of years that is not very far removed. The chimps are our cousins.

It is therefore not surprising then that there are very many humans too that will base their actions just simply on self interest without questioning the morality of it all. Thus when a pissing (is the spelling OK?) scammer sends out millions of spam emails declaring that he knows of an unclaimed secret inheritance and that he could get you a share too, seeking your collaboration, something that most email users would be familiar with by now, the hope is that some rare naive soul would believe that lie and fall in his net. He does not question that even if someone did believe in that lie, it would be against their moral principles to usurp an inheritance illegally. You see the pissing scammer has not yet evolved to that level. He is closer to the Chimp who lives merely on the principle of self interest.

The principle of working for self interest is not limited to individuals. Collectively it applies to organizations and nations too. Thus it is in the self interest of many corporations- the interest of maximizing profits – to pollute human foods with genetically modified strains that may cause cancer just long as it makes that lovely pile of dollars. Many a politician that rules us will cheer them on just as long as they give him a campaign contribution or a cut, because it is in his self interest to get power and perhaps even that lovely mansion by the ocean. It is only a very small handful of corporations that have evolved to put customer satisfaction as their prime goal within not just the constraint of making some profit that they have to for surviving and growing but also the constraint of not causing harm out of their sense of ethics and not just because of the law.

The same applies to nations. When President George Bush invaded Iraq, he said forcefully that he is doing so because it is in their self interest to do so. That went down well with the public. It is a different matter that things did not turn out so well later and he was blamed. Had they turned out fine he would have been heralded as a hero in the pages of history. However, to be fair to Bush, even morality appeared to be on his side at that time, not just mere self interest because a picture of Saddam as a brutal dictator, who was no good for his people, had been pre-painted in the media.

Of humans, who have attempted to evolve to the point that their actions are based on morality and ethics and not just self interest, the path is not an easy one too. Whenever a course of action is followed one does not know how the future will emerge and if the future turns out to be bad there is a feeling of guilt. In my own life there have been many occasions like that, a few tragic as must be in the life of all. Just to give one example, in India, the practice of arranged marriage is still widely prevalent in rural areas. Therefore when the parents of a young boy known to me arranged his marriage and even went ahead with some of the ceremonies on their own, he was not happy. He came to consult me and I told him he was still young and had to establish a career, he should refuse. However when he began to do that there was coercion and this is when I told him to put his foot put down firmly, that he could do fortunately, because he worked in the city and was not dependent on his family. But it was fortunate only for a while. Some years later when he married a girl of his choice it turns out that the wife has very difficult habits and his life has become full of stress and difficulty. I feel guilty about this because had I not encouraged him to resist the first marriage it might have turned out to be much better one.

A human may never know fully how the results of any decision may turn out to be in future. While acting on the basis of morality and ethics rather than just self interest is a superior path in that it at least brings the satisfaction or consolation of doing the right thing, the advanced yogis of Himalayas have gone further. In their view while humans may neither understand morality fully nor know how the future will unfold, there is someone who does – God or the Universal Consciousness who is beyond the confines of space and time. Yoga is an attempt to unite the individual consciousness with the universal one and then to do in all things not as the individual consciousness ascertains but what the universal one dictates. True the Universal consciousness has given individual ones the freedom to choose but it has also given it the freedom to surrender that will to Universal will, the ultimate goal of yogis.

Physical exercises and postures that are taught in many modern yoga schools are just the first baby step in yogic practice. The Ancient Father of Yoga - Patanjali - has devoted only one line to it in his founding text of yoga. Its purpose is so that a human may learn to be still without physical discomfort and discomfort from the elements.


Note: For those interested in learning more about yoga, while it is good to know what the ultimate goal is, it has to proceed step by step from simpler things like 1. Entropy Yoga, a modern reinterpretation of basic principles of orderly living by the author (see here) 2. Kriya Yoga as taught by Baba Haidakhan but not its modern version, 3. Mindful breathing. You may search for those through Google or in the blog https://someitemshave.blogspot.com if you are interested.