A FEW REVELATIONS🔗

Maybe I'll share few things with you all, a few revelations....

The base of Patanjali's yoga is called ashtanga yoga. People always translate this as the eight steps of yoga or eight steps to yoga. However, Raghupati Yogi used to say, 'It is not eight steps but eight parts'. He meant that all eight parts should be practiced together! We can't do number one first, then number two, number three and number four, etc. No!

The first part is yama (which includes satya (truthfulness)). The second part is niyama. If you decide that you will try to accomplish the first step before advancing to the second step, you will never be able to go to the second step! Why? Because the first step (truthfulness) happens in you only when you are in samadhi (the eighth part). Only after you achieve samadhi can real truthfulness can happen in you. Until that time, whatever we speak is a lie or at the most, facts. That's all. It is not the truth. Fact is not truth. Fact is truth as understood by your senses. Whatever part of the truth you understand with your senses, you call that as a fact. You can neither speak the truth nor live the truth until you experience the eighth part samadhi (bliss or enlightenment). It can't be steps of yoga. It has to be parts of yoga.

There are so many other beautiful revelations that I had from him. One of the most important revelations came when I asked him, 'Why are you making me climb all of these pillars? I don't find any books saying or any sutra saying that climbing pillars is a yogic technique'. He told me a beautiful thing. He said, 'For any purpose that you bend or move your body, that memory, that idea will be completely inserted or recorded into your body and mind'. It is a very shocking revelation! He would say, 'With any intention you move or bend your body or make your body active, that intention, that purpose will be recorded into your body. That purpose, that idea, that samskara will start expressing in your body'. He meant that the way in which you bend your body, the method in which you stand up or the method in which you do yoga asana (postures), are not too important. He meant that the intention that we have in our mind when we move our body is what really matters. For example, if you have the intention to have good health and do whatever you want for that intention - move your body any which way for that intention, simply health will happen to you.

Particularly in the West, too strong of a connection has happened between disease and asana. For this disease you have to do this asana. For that disease you have to do that posture. For this problem you have to do this technique. This idea, this connection is relied upon too much in the West.

Raghupati Yogi gave me this shocking revelation. Any asana practiced, not only asana, any movement practiced, any physical movement practiced for some purpose or with some intention will create that effect in your body.

He said that this is true with even ordinary sitting. If you strongly believe that by sitting you will have health and you sit just for health, simply you will see the health happening in you.

I used to question him, 'How can this be?' He would simply reply, 'That is the way it is'. I used to expect an intellectual explanation from him, however he would simply say, 'That is the way it is!' It was only later I understood that our body itself is made out of our memory. Whether we believe it or not, accept it or not, we are an expression of our own self-hypnosis! Any way that we move the body with the faith that this or that will happen in us, simply it will start expressing. Raghupati Yogi used to say that memories are recorded in our muscles and he also strongly believed even if some parts of your body are removed, memories related to that area will disappear from your inner space. He used to strongly believe in the idea that memories are recorded in your system, so when you change the memories you can change the system also. Your system can respond to the memory that you are creating.