Part I: Chapter II / I – (i)

Origin and Technique of the Yoga System

From the Yajnavalkya Smriti, we learn that Hiranyagarbha (Brahma) was the original teacher of yoga. But the yoga system, as a system, was first expouned by Patanjali, the great thinker and philosopher, in his Yoga Sutras, sometime before the Christian era.

The yogic system is one of the six schools of Indian Philosophy (Khat Shastras) that were systematized and developed to set in order Indian thought concerning the cosmos, the individual soul, and their interrelation. These philosophies resulted from an attempt at reformation and restoration of the ancient and time-honored concepts on psychological and metaphysical matters.

The word yoga in common parlance means method. In its technical sense, it connotes yoking or union of the individual soul with the Oversoul or God. The English word yoke signifies 'to unite' or 'join together' and 'to place oneself under yoke' (discipline). In this context, the yoga system denotes a methodical discipline, which aims on the one hand at viyog (unyoking), or separation of the individualized soul from mind and matter, and on the other hand, yog, or yoking it with Brahman. It therefore, means and implies the search for the transcendental and the divine in man, or to find the noumenal in the phenomenal by reducing the physical and metaphysical states to their most essential common factor, the basis and the substratum of all that exists, whether visible or invisible. As such, yoga methods imply a system of mighty effort, most strenuous endeavour and hard striving to attain perfection through the control of the physical body, the ever-active mind, the self-assertive ego or will, the searching and questioning intellect, the pranic vibrations, the restless faculties and powerful senses. Allegorically, the present state of the individualized soul is described as riding in the chariot of the body, with dazed intellect as the charioteer, the infatuated mind as the reins, and the senses as the powerful steeds rushing headlong into the field of sense objects and sense pleasures. All this goes to show that a student of yoga discipline has to undertake a course of an extremely strict and ordered activity as may help to depersonalize the soul and free it from all the limiting adjuncts of life, physical, mental and supra-mental, and then to contact it with the Power of God and achieve union with God.

The word yoga is however not to be confused with yogmaya and yogic powers which denote respectively, the supreme Power of God per se (creating, controlling and sustaining the entire creation), and the physical powers (Riddhis and Siddhis) that one may acquire on the path of yoga.

Again, yog vidya or the science of yoga has a two-fold aspect; the physical as well as the spiritual. In its former sense, it has come to mean a yogic system of physical culture aiming at an all-round development of the various component parts of the human body. But we are concerned here with the spiritual aspect of yoga that aims at the well-being of the spirit or soul, the real life-principle in man, at present neglected and ingnored. The term yoga in this context is, therefore, to be strictly confined to one of the systems of philosophic thoughts as derived from the Vedas, and is concerned with the sole object of regaining the soul (through spiritual discipline), now lost in the activity of mind and matter, with which it has come to identify itself by long and constant association for aeons upon aeons.

Yoga, in brief, stands for a technique of reorientation and reintegration of the spirit in man, the lost continent of his true self.