Mental Health Care

One of the most striking marks of a yogi is that he is free of any idea of achievement. Most of us ever work for achieving something, for reaching somewhere, for an improvement in our position, an enhancement in our undertaking. We always happen to wish for some state as an ideal state, depending upon our understanding of ourselves in relation to the world around, and we ever happen to seek to make progress in order to reach the ideal. For a yogi, however, there is no differentiation in the terms of the ideal and the actual’ he has nothing to achieve in life because he comes to see very clearly that his actual state is not different in any way from what others may call the ideal state. There being nothing to be achieved, craved for, or sought after, a yogi has never to take recourse to any discipline, or sadhana, or any practice of virtue, and the like. He does not have to practise Pranayama in order to make his mind silent; nor does he ever have to practise dhyana, or samadhi, because he is always in a state of sahajavastha, which does not come and go. Freedom from seeking, effort, and sadhana, is thus an essential quality of a yogi.

Such an individual is obviously a man of simplicity, honesty and detached love. He is truly a man of vairagya. He loves everyone without any motive, and remains undisturbed like an ocean in every situation he confronts in life. He looks equally indifferently upon the dualities like success and failure, pleasure and pain honour and dishonour, and so on. It is often found that when an individual renounces the pleasures and comforts of daily life, and undergoes rigorous discipline of yoga for years together, he develops a kind of arrogance, and a high feeling about himself and his capacities. He keeps himself rather aloof, and does not mix freely with people, thinking that he is far too superior to others. He is not usually ready to hear others’ viewpoints, and makes much fuss about his own personality and achievements. We have many persons in India today who take for themselves titles like yogiraj, swami, paramahamsa, parivrajakacharya, and so on.

Many of them are not yogis in the true sense of the term, however. Yogi Changadeo (13th century, A.D) was a good example of such a personality. He was very proud of himself, because he had tamed ‘lions and tigers, as the belief goes, through his yogic powers. But he was humbled by a young boy, in their very first meeting. A real yogi, we may say, is a person like Jnanadeo, and not like Changadeo, who, with all the pomp and elegance of the yogic powers, was very far from the goal of yoga, i.e. jivanmukti.

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