Attentiveness is Necessary in Yoga Practice
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Jun 09, 2017
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Yoga exercises which means asana postures and breath infusion techniques suffer terribly if one is distracted during practice. The same holds for meditation sessions. If there is any distraction, the student should still go ahead with the practice but with the understanding that there will not be full effects.
We cannot control everything. We certainly cannot pass through a life in a body without disturbances. Nature is just not going to permit anything like that. Therefore one should push ahead with practice even if there are disturbances but with the honest view that the practice will not be as effective.
There is also the factor of students. As soon as one learns a little bit of yoga, one usually attracts students. This is a mistake but it cannot be avoided in every case. I have met many people over the years, who teach yoga and who know little or nothing about yoga kriya or Patanjali and yet these persons pose as yoga teachers. Some of them even have certification from institutions of yoga. Something that I lack in every respect.
However students are a distraction, and a very serious one too. A teacher inevitably is drawn into various social complications which occur in the life of his or her student. This affects practice, even though many teachers pretend that they can handle any or all karmic reactions which are rolled out in the fate of such students.
When I started an ashram some years ago around 1974, it was trouble and complication from start to finish. Fortunately for me, I took a hint from that and stopped teaching like that. But I have met many people who are total dunderheads when it comes to mystic perception. Some of these people do not even take Krishna seriously and still they are saying they are yoga teachers. But such is the situation.
Those who are lucky will remain as students for the rest of the present life, and will not be distracted to become teachers especially of a yoga system which it took God to explain in the Bhagavad Gita.
People even in the Buddhist religion like to run away with the idea that what Buddha did any person can do but they fail to take note of the fact, that the 3 or 4 yogis who were doing gruesome austerities with Buddha when he began to meditate in isolation, when he stopped eating period, were told by Buddha that he was the only person who knew anything about enlightenment and that it was him alone out of all the people present in the world at the time, who knew anything about it in real terms.
These guys thought that Buddha was just another yogi, but Buddha corrected them and stated that he was the special person and that there was not going to be anybody like him in the human race for thousands of years.
I just do not see how one can know this and arrive at ridiculous conclusions about what one can achieve.
Down in India, Buddha is rated as an incarnation of Vishnu, not as an ordinary entity who attained liberation. Hindus do not like Buddhism for two reasons mostly. Reason number 1 is that Buddha did not promote Deity Worship which is innate in Hindu culture. Reason number 2 is that he preached celibacy and encouraged young men not to get married. Hindu culture consists of arranged marriages and rituals to deities. Buddha did not support that. Instead of telling young men to marry, he told them to do tathagata which is to go (gata) out of (tatha) the worldly way of living which is epitomized by marriage.
It is amazing that Buddhism became popular in the West when one of its essential tenets is celibacy because in the West, celibacy is considered to be a load of crap.
Buddha did gruesome austerities and was very attentive to the practice, so attentive that it was noticed by the devatas of Hinduism, persons like Brahma who Buddha said came and spoke to him. These are supernatural beings who observe and monitor human history. Without attentiveness one can go on doing yoga for millions of years, and one will not reach the culmination of it.
