Everybody seems to be terribly interested in yoga. They want to keep young and beautiful. Shall we begin with that? Yoga has now become a business affair like everything else. There are teachers of yoga all over the world, and they are coining money, as usual. And yoga at one time – I’ve been told by those who know about this a great deal -it was only taught to the very, very, very few.
Yoga doesn’t mean merely to keep your body healthy, normal, active, and intelligent. It also meant – the meaning of that word in Sanskrit means ‘join together’ – joining the higher and the lower. I don’t know who joins it, but that’s the tradition. And also there are various forms of yoga. But the highest form is called Raja Yoga, which is the king of yogas.
There that system, or that way of living was concerned not merely with the physical wellbeing, but also much more psychologically. There was no discipline, no system, nothing to be repeated day after day.
But to have a brain that is in order that is all the time active but not chattering, but active, that activity – the speaker is interpreting all this. Probably they wouldn’t tell you all this. The speaker has talked to various scholars and pundits and real yoga teachers. There are very few of them now.
So to have a very deeply, orderly, moral, ethical life, not just merely take various postures but to lead a very moral, ethical, disciplined life, that was the real meaning of the highest form of yoga. Thereby you kept the body healthy. Body was not first, was not of primary importance. What was of primary
importance was to have a brain, a mind, a wellbeing, that is clear, active – not in the sense of movement, but in itself active, alive, full of vitality. But now it has become rather shallow, profitable and becoming mediocre. We were taught… the speaker was taught by one of the – oh, many years ago – something that could not be taught to another. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?
Questioner: Could you go into it more?
Krishnamurti: It’s not to be taught to the casual. It is something that you do, perhaps every day as the speaker does for an hour, to have perfect control of your body. So that you are watchful. I won’t use the word ‘control,’ but to watch your body, not make any movement, any gesture, which is not observed.
There is no unnecessary movement of the body. But it’s not controlled. That’s where the difference is.
You may consider yoga to be something to be practiced day after day, to develop your muscles, have a muscular body. It’s not that at all. It is something you live all day long. Something you watch, observe, and be clear about…
When you see those hills behind there and the blue sky and the line of those mountains against the sky… for a second, the greatness of the mountain drives away all our pettiness, all our worries and problems and all the travails of life – for that second. Then you become silent and look. Right?
Excerpted from ‘Meeting Life’ – Third Public Talk in Ojai, May 1985.
J. Krishnamurti
