Shortly after World War II a team of UNESCO health ex­perts were visiting the Balkans. A woman doctor stopped to talk about mother-and-child problems to a group of peasant women in a Bulgarian village. One of the young mothers, a lusty girl in her middle twenties, turned out to be the bride of the most important man in the community—a great oak of a man past ninety. The girl had felt highly honored when, having buried his fourth wife, the local bigwig had chosen her from among his neighbors' marriageable daughters to be Num­ber Five. Now she was proudly showing off her son, born exactly nine months after the wedding. As the doctor told it afterwards, there was no doubt as to family resemblance. The child was a miniature replica of his father.

The girl seemed puzzled and in the end the doctor asked her question more plainly. Did the nonagenarian really still want sex? The girl's amazement showed in her face. Of course! Otherwise what would he want with a wife? Was the doctor trying to say that in other parts of the world things were dif­ferent?

Granted these rugged mountaineers, raised on mare's milk and goat cheese, are an exception even in their own country. Still the story suggests interesting speculation. Since the vil­lage apparently had never heard of impotence as a must for its senior citizens, might it not follow that, conditioned neither to fear nor even to expect it, the men simply did not succumb to it?

The next question to ask ourselves is, inevitably, this: How often do we succumb to illness, weariness, and especially the creeping symptoms of old age, largely because that is the pat­tern we have been taught to envisage? Youth is a state of the soul, someone once said. Youth is also a state of the spirit, a state of mind, a state of the glands. It is a matter of the way the heart beats and the reflexes function. No one can hope to feel young if he is self-engrossed to the point of being the center of his universe. Now broaden this concept to encom­pass general well-being: again it is a matter of outlook—we feel as we have been conditioned to feel.

Western civilization has for centuries laid so much stress on the individual and his happiness that more than any other group on earth we tend to allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed when personal happiness is lacking. We also tend to set up romantic goals, forever striving toward some perfect ending without end, then feeling devastated because life doesn't work that way. Hence the enormous discrepancy between our dreams and our realities, hence endless worry, tension and dis­content.

Eastern philosophies in general take a vastly different view. The individual counts for less and therefore expects less from life; to put it another way, he neither starts out feeling as im­portant to himself as we do, nor does he lay himself open to as much disappointment. In other words, he starts out with more of a sense of proportion about himself and his relation­ship to the cosmic whole. Yoga puts great stress on this.

Whether this is a better orientation than ours or one not as happy is beside the point. The fact remains that such a philos­ophy does keep the individual from being prey to the restless­ness, unhappiness and hidden fears which help destroy us.

Our Western preoccupation with Self has for a long time been yielding bitter fruit. Among our neurotic Victorian grandparents it was the common thing for ladies to have the vapors and to faint dead away, and both women and strong men "took to their bed" when they felt powerless to cope with problems. Today, with medical science more probing and diagnosis more exact, we no longer fool ourselves with such simple tactics. Escape into illness has to take more subtle forms. It does. Needless to say the long list of disorders classed as psychogenic proves that it remains equally effective.

Our other way of expressing frustration is through mental disturbance of varying intensity and depth. (By this we mean psychiatric and psychological upsets as differentiated from mental illness of physical origin). Today in the United States about fifty percent of all hospital beds are occupied by mental patients. This is a staggering statistic made all the more for­midable by doctors' statements about how many would-be patients remain undiagnosed. In addition we all know that every psychoanalyst, every psychiatrist setting up in prac­tice throughout the country has more patients than he can handle. From this we must conclude that our unhappiness quotient has become the highest in the world. Yet ours is also the country with the highest standard of living, the highest per capita income, the most luxuries. Obviously something is se­riously out of kilter somewhere.

The Yogi would tell us that we permit ourselves to be ruled and torn, looking for happiness outside rather than within. We do not clearly understand the difference between shadow and substance. We wear ourselves down with our unquiet.

Now let us listen to the anguished cry of the patient who seeks the help of an analyst: What is he after as he lies down on the green couch? Here again the overall, meaningless an­swer is happiness. Pinpointed, this means peace of mind, a sense of balance, a sense of belonging, the ability to live with himself and with others.

The analyst listens with an objectivity to which he has been trained, then slowly tries to help the patient see himself ob­jectively too. This generally turns out to be a slow, difficult process; the cost, in financial as well as emotional disburse­ment, exorbitant. It often takes years to re-educate and re­orient the psyche, largely because we all resist honest insights which are apt to be both unflattering and painful.

The patient study of Yoga can often produce the same results much more quickly and at less cost. But the path of at­tainment is very different indeed.

Here, however, it is important to make very clear to the reader that we are not counter-posing the two methods on an either-or basis. Certainly it would be both dangerous and fool­hardy, if you were feeling ill, to decide for yourself whether or not your symptoms were real or mentally-induced. Such decisions are best left to a competent doctor. The same holds true for cases of severe mental stress; it would be throwing out the baby with the bath to turn one's back on techniques which modern science has made available to us. Remember, Yoga does not decry medicine. It does not turn its back onplain common sense. Certainly it is not a form of faith healing. But it has its own ways of dealing with inner turmoil which, for want of a more concrete name, we might call soul-sickness. Over the centuries it has discovered and learned to utilize age-old truths and a combined knowledge of body and mind which modern medicine and Sigmund Freud have only recently con­cretized for the West.

Do not think that even in India the path of the Yogi disciple, the Chela, is easy. We are told that often people seek out a personal Guru not for wisdom, but in order to gratify some inner weakness. They want him for the purpose of self-escape. They hope to pass on to him their own burden of cares or re­sponsibilities, thereby making life simple and easy, precisely as some Westerners seek a father-confessor and others an analyst. But neither in the West nor in the East is there any easy road to wisdom.

Like the patient on the couch, the student of Yoga makes progress only as he takes upon himself alone the responsibility for learning. Unlike the man or woman in analysis, he starts with the physical, then progresses to controlling the mind. Take as an example the basic exercises in concentration and the way these may eventually be utilized for self-knowledge.
A typical exercise is to sit on the floor, tailor fashion, choose a mental target of the simplest kind—a spot on the wall before you, a piece of paper, your own nose—and concentrate on that target for thirty seconds. You may close your eyes and con­tinue visualizing it until you lose it—and lose it you will— then open your eyes and capture it again.

The best profit performance of the constant-ratio plan showed up in the 1919-1920 period, with a gain of 89.4 percent. The worst was in the 1930-1940 period, which produced a loss of 12.7 percent (the Dow-Jones Industrials dropped 47 percent in the same span of time). Miss Tomlinson concludes that the best results are produced by the constant-ratio formula "when stock prices fluctuate over a fairly wide range but there is no extreme in either direction."

This may seem absurdly easy—until you try it. Few of us realize how our minds are apt to flit from thought to thought and how much discipline it takes to conquer this tendency. It does little good to be stern and make good resolutions about self-control. They won't work. What will work, however, is steady, repeated, conscious practice. At the end of a few weeks the daily thirty seconds' concentration stint may even be stretched to a whole minute. You will be surprised how long the minute lasts.

Now consider the many ways in which developing your power to concentrate can benefit you in your search for self-knowledge. We all know how quickly, how instinctively we shy away from unpleasant thoughts, especially if these thoughts happen to be directed against ourselves. Yet in order to learn to know ourselves it is essential to turn on the search­light of the mind and survey without turning away or glossing over whatever we find inside, unattractive and unflattering as the discovery may be.

One reason why self-analysis is all but impossible for the average person is because such sustained examination is in it­self all but impossible. We may start out with every intention of being objective and ruthlessly honest, but when the going gets tough our mind will play tricks on us. All at once we will find ourselves thinking, not of the facet of our personality we have just discovered we do not like, but of how interest­ingly that same weakness colors the behavior of a friend, and how understanding we have been of the friend in a time of need, and why didn't we get more appreciation, anyway? Once the chain of association starts, there is no stopping it.

A basic exercise in concentration, however, can serve to break the habit of flitting until we have learned to stay with the thought we have chosen. In this way it becomes the key— or rather, one of the many keys—to mastering the art of self-analysis.

Another striking parallel between the analytical method and Yoga practice is in the realm of dreams. In a general way everyone is now familiar with the use analysis makes of dream material. Yoga, on the other hand, makes it possible to con­trol dreams until they flow in orderly fashion, are remem­bered and provide revealing insights; this the advanced student can accomplish simply by willing himself to dream, just as he can will himself to go to sleep and wake up at a certain time. He can thus make the subconscious work subliminally, to good advantage, while the conscious mind rests.

But perhaps the most important contribution to self-knowledge, and the one which can do most toward freeing you of anxiety, is that as you practice concentration and re­laxation exercises, as your thoughts learn to flow where you direct them, you will gain a deep awareness of who you are. Without becoming either detached or indifferent, you will nevertheless learn to detach yourself from your surroundings enough to no longer feel constantly and closely identified with everything that happens around you. You will be able to do this for the simple reason that you will no longer have the same need to lean. You will have found strength within yourself to be yourself. You will be able to meet the world on your own terms, on a basis of maturity and independence. And that, above all, means getting the very best out of yourself.


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