The Way of the Body

If you go by the ways of the body, it knows only self-preservation and procreation. It is incapable of anything else. These are the only two aspects of the body. If you go by the dimension beyond the physical, there is the longing to become boundless.

Unfortunately, most of the time, trying to find physical expression to this longing to become boundless leads a man into all kinds of insatiable activity. Even if someone's body is aching, you cannot make them sit.

Do you see? Your body is aching, “enough” it says, but no, you must go to the top of the mountain and come down, because you always want to be a little more than who you are all the time. This longing is a never-ending longing. This longing is not seeking for a little more, it is seeking for an ultimate expansion.

It seems like a conflict between the instinct of self-preservation and the longing to become boundless. These two forces are not against each other, but when you look at it from a physical perspective, when your whole perception is limited to the physical, they seem to be in conflict.

These two aspects come into conflict because of a strong identification with the physical. Once you get deeply identified with the physical, then these two fundamental forces – one which helps you to root yourself well on this planet and another which is supposed to take you beyond – instead of working in collaboration, they unfortunately become a conflict. All the struggles of humanity in terms of “Should I be spiritual or materialistic” are just coming from this ignorance.

So because of this one aspect, a human being is in constant turmoil, in constant struggle between the physical and that which is beyond the physical. This is the only thing which is setting him apart. This is the only thing that puts him in contradiction with the physical. Though he is also physical, though he also has the compulsiveness of the physical, he has the consciousness of not being physical.

Any method that you employ to enhance and heighten the presence of the non-physical within you, the presence of that which is the source of creation within you, is yoga.

All of yoga, every kind of spirituality that you can find, I refer to it as yoga because it is all different types of yoga – either done systematically or blindly, but still it is yoga. All this yoga became necessary because of the seeming conflict between the physical and that which belongs to a dimension beyond the physical.

I would not really call it a conflict. If one is identified with the physical, then there seems to be a conflict between these two fundamental forces, which make a human being what he is right now. But if one has the necessary awareness to separate the two, then there is no conflict.