N V Raghuram
Swami Vivekananda Yoga University, Bangalore, India
nv.raghuram@gmail.com

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Abstract

Often people give a very mystical meaning to spirituality and spiritual wellbeing or health. These may include finding an aura at an ordinary level to walking on the water or awakening of some serpent power in side the body. Two problems are involved. One problem is in the parts of the world where this language of serpent power etc are not known do we say that they don’t have spiritual health! Second is, only human being can do all the so called spiritual practices and no other species has the practices how ever nice and no injurious maybe. In that case does spirituality not exist in the other creatures on earth, don’t the other creatures have divinity within! This way of thinking is arrogance! Our scriptures say that god has become every thing in this universe and is there in every thing.
‘/tat srustva tadeva anu pravisya…’// /
Once we are free from all these mystifications then we can be very clear in the spiritual journey. Life is like a pendulum which swings from one side to the other and after that again it goes back to the first side. Day and night, spring and fall seasons, and finally birth and death and rebirth, this is how the flow of creation goes and the underlying spiritual principle is harmony. As long as this harmony is there, life will be moving. The moment this harmony is lost then that part of the creation slowly comes to a halt. This harmony is the spiritual health and is there all around us. Human being is not excluded by the nature. But with the development of technology, man started isolating self from the nature and created disharmony, thereby he is going away form the spiritual health and wellbeing.
Harmony at simple level we can think of is hunger for food, rest for exertion and supply for need etc. this is in our hands and we need to strictly manage! Second thing is often people complain of lack of harmony due to the different natures of two individuals. The individuals are diagonally opposite and they conclude that harmony is not possible. When we analyze in yoga way we can understand that human beings are of different natures and harmony is between the things of different natures. The clarification yoga gives is that we have given priority to other things and not to the harmony. Therefore to sub serve our other fixations we sacrifice the inner and outer harmony. Yoga helps in this understanding!