Page 336 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1

The Service of Man
Speech delivered at "Gayathri", Sri Ram Nagar, Madras-18, on 10th January 1968
It is well known that Raja Yoga is the method followed by this system of Sri Ramchandra, but it is a Raja Yoga that has been taken away from the hands of monkery, I mean from monks, and other people who have renounced the world and are thought to make yoga their special way of attainment of the Ultimate. I think that this system radically tries to snatch away the initiative that has been taken on this subject, and on this method, by the monks (those ascetic world-renouncers) and has sought to restore it to its proper place in the life of the ordinary man, the householder. That is not a small thing, for, for nearly two thousand years, the monks have specialised in certain odd techniques called, apparently, yoga, but which had hardly related man or his soul with the Divine being who is the maker of all things in this universe.
The renunciation of life and its values might have sounded very necessary to people accustomed and habituated to that way of thinking, but it has been discovered by some of the finest minds of the Vedic period and of late that the way of life, taught by the monks or the world-renouncers, is thoroughly wrong. Firstly because it denies that the Divine has any sense in creating the world. It denies that the Divine being, or God, or the original Reality is fully and perfectly aware of what it is doing. It condemns God to be the creator of a world illusion. It says that life is fraught with all sorts of miseries and, therefore, life itself has to be renounced. Having been accustomed to this way of life we have always sought to run away from life in order to realise God. Well, you know what the results have been. Yoga has always been looked down upon not only by the householders but also by the house-wives, and every man who had some feeling for practising yoga was looked upon suspiciously by his family, and by society also.
During the last one-century we have had some people denouncing the whole practice of vedanta which centred on the twin principles of vairagya and dhyana, whatever they mean. The correction that was sought to be made by the Indian reformers during the past one and a half centuries was