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Right
Attitude is Everything
Excerpts from The Art and Science of
Raja Yoga
by Swami Kriyananda
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"The ability to live more inwardly is the hallmark of
right, spiritual attitude. "
—Swami Kriyananda
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Because the
science of yoga deals so much with the awakening of subtle energies,
many yoga students imagine the entire process of spiritual evolution
to be a mere mechanism. They think by technique alone to find God.
Mankind has
always been somewhat prone to mistake technique for inspiration,
forgetting that technique is merely a vehicle for inspiration. Yoga,
which approaches the path to salvation more scientifically, offers
at the same time a stronger temptation to confuse method with something
infinitely more important on the path: right attitude.
Remember, technique is only a vehicle. What good is a car in the
hands of a driver who has no idea where he wants to go? And of what
use is it to be a technically skilled driver, if one's driving attitudes
are anti-social? The fact that yoga practice accelerates one's spiritual
progress only increases the need for right attitude. Socially
responsible attitudes are more important for automobile drivers
traveling at high speeds than for bicycle riders. Concentration
on yoga techniques alone, without developing right attitudes, can
prove dangerous. For spiritual progress can never be forced, any
more than one can force the delicate mechanism of a watch.
The ability to live more inwardly is the hallmark of right, spiritual
attitude. Right attitude is the force that sets the wheel of spiritual
evolution turning in the first place. Right attitude is what keeps
it turning, drawing more and more divine power to itself. Right
attitude it is, finally, that keeps the whirlpool of Self-realization
expanding outward to infinity, instead of becoming locked in a narrow
cycle of ego-limitation.
But many are the paradoxes on the spiritual path. This inward attitude
is not easily comprehended by the worldly mind, for the world has
its own power to draw anyone who embraces it. Boredom-fatigue-reluctance-boredom
is a self-perpetuating cycle capable of generating its own negative
energies. For the beginner, therefore, an extra impetus may be needed
initially to spark the right, inward attitude.
An electric generator needs a strong spark from a battery to get
it started. The wheel of inner development, similarly, usually needs
a strong stimulus from without to get it going. Hence the need for
contact with other devotees, and particularly with saints. Since
saints are not easy to find in this world, and not easy to get close
to once one does find them, one would do well also to meditate on
them from afar. Study their photographs. Try to draw into yourself
their magnetic, divine attitudes.
It would be no exaggeration to say that attitude, in the last analysis,
is everything. One may have right attitude and know nothing of yoga
or of meditation, and still reach God, eventually. But without right
attitude, lifetimes of yoga practice may develop nothing but spiritual
pride, and an outward focus thereby for one's energies.
The world, steeped as it is in delusion, often upholds as the best
attitudes those which would most surely enmesh us in further delusion.
Egotism, for example, is often prized by ignorant people as a sign
of strength. Self-seeking is mistaken for practicality; miserliness,
for thrift; restlessness, for a proof of inner vitality; and loud
laughter, for a sure sign of inner joy.
Look, then, to the saints. But since probably you must mix with
worldly people, too, and may have to be more with them than with
saints, look to them also. But study the end results of their
attitudes. For even in a worldly sense, those attitudes bear
the sweetest fruits which spring most purely from an inner source:
self-giving, rather than possessive, love; a wish to correct oneself,
not others; an inner freedom in every undertaking, and in every
human relationship; an impersonal gaze that can enjoy even the world
without constant reference to one's own standing with respect to
it.
The developed yogi sees in all things the one, divine Self. But
the beginning yogi needs to cultivate, in addition to a divinely
impersonal outlook, a more intimate, devotional attitude towards
the Lord.
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