Page 445 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1

and expectation that makes the achievement all the richer and greater and profounder. It has then the lyric of love, the passion of the soul and the symphony of life gathered into its essence. This is Yoga, which is synthesis.
The usual criticism offered against the Yoga practices, even by the orthodox Indian Thinkers, is that it is a dangerous method of mystic practice and that it involves great danger to the physical system. The practice of breath control tones up the system undoubtedly, but the hathayogic practice of stimulation of the centres through uniting prana and apana, which constitutes in their opinion pranayama, is really courting disaster. The primary centre of the body is the Muladhara and along with the Svadhisthana forms the physical system and the piercing through these two centres causes undoubtedly terrible metabolic changes culminating sometimes even in death, or great perversions. But, even as the Varaha Upanishad says, the path has to be followed even to its fullness, even till death claims us for its own, for even through death shall we learn to live integrally. This fearfulness of the inert and the incapacitated is not preferred by some Yogins who feel that mere contemplation of the Essence of Existence, the Divine would make for release. The Bhakti and the Jnana Yogins seek philosophical contemplation and emotional expression, which latter sometimes tends to great emotional outburst. Pranayama occupies a regular but minor phase in the life of the ordinary individual and one chooses a life of mere study and philosophic speculation or else intense bhakti through the way of prapatti. The aim of an integral life, the integral transformation of the entire psychonic and the physical system, has been abandoned completely in exchange for aery metaphysics and silent or passive dogmatism, or else to a kind of vehement emotionalism that is not grounded in integral purification. And when the practice has been undertaken, we have not an integral transformation but an effort at mere physical development of muscular control in Asanas, or else mere pranayama without significance or purpose. In both cases, it has led to mere formalism or ritualism. Formalism is the complementary phase of materialism, it too is binding and has no purposive outlook which sustains it. It is as much dead of life and movement as matter itself. The bondage of forms and formal elements once they have standardized or habituated themselves in us, acts as a cog in the wheel of spiritual evolution. Indian thought in its practices has come to the level of formalistic inertness,