Material Success and Principles of Yoga

Jan 5, 2005, 12.00am IST
Swami Kriyananda.

The purpose of practising the principles of yoga is to raise one's consciousness to the highest state of self-realisation. Yoga gives the "how to" of the spiritual path, through withdrawing one's consciousness from the body and centring it in the spine.

Many obstacles confront you as you make this inward journey. The first is the fact that human understanding is limited to the information it receives from the senses — of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Next, our understanding is limited by the way we use reason to process that information.


We have, in fact, entered a house of mirrors. Everything we see and experience in the world is only a reflection of our own awareness. Happiness, which everyone craves, is reflected to us from the surrounding world, what we project outwardly from our centre. If we lack inner joy, we will find not a hint of it outside. Happy melodies pluck at our heart strings, but sound faint and elusive; we can enjoy them fully only when we realise that the source of happy melodies is inside of us.

We experience happiness or sadness only in our egoistic state. Paramhansa Yogananda defined ego as the soul identified with the body. We reach out to the world through our senses, trying to grasp the joy that we think is our birthright. But ego-consciousness is a delusion. It imprisons joy instead of letting it flow out.

Remaining self-involved even in adulthood means you are still immature. The awareness of the super-egotist is expansive only insofar as it reaches out to take what he can for himself. He wants more and more, indifferent to the needs and interests of others. There are two outward directions in which the ego can grow: towards mature acceptance of objective realities; or towards a desire for possession and dominion over others.


Expanding sympathy helps the ego to be aware of its subtle identity with other people and with the universe. One's own happiness, in consequence, expands exponentially. But if the ego grows more self-centred, this "expansion" of self-consciousness becomes suffocating. With compassion, the ego relaxes and we can effortlessly become aware of the indwelling soul. Ego discovers its identity, in this case, with the Infinite Spirit.

Most people are not aware that a non-material reality exists. The pebbles in a stream become gradually rounded by rubbing against one another. Wisdom, too, shines more and more clearly as the little pebble of the ego gets smoothed by the constant rubbing together of success and failure, joy and disappointment, gain and loss. The maturing of the ego comes in time to understand the ancient Sanskrit saying: "Yata dharma, tata Jaya: Where there is right action, there is victory".

Yoga teachings need to be externalised in daily life, and not taken only inside in meditation. What is learnt must be applied in practice. There is a great need for balance. Striking a balance is especially important in today's world in order to bridge the gap between two realities — the inner and the outer.


For material success to be more assured and lasting, it must be paired with high principles. The science of yoga proves these principles to be dynamically valid. By learning how to direct your activities from your inner centre, and to control your whole life from that centre, you will find yourself becoming a cause, and no longer a passive effect. You will cease being a pebble tossing and tumbling helplessly down the stream of life because of sheer circumstance.

(Today is Paramhansa Yogananda's 113th birth anniversary.)