Bear insult. Bear injury. This is the highest yoga, the highest Sadhana.
Sadhana means spiritual practice. Why is bear insult, bear injury considered to be the highest yoga? In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, yoga is defined as the cessation of the mental thought waves, yogas chitta-vrtti-nirodhah. Suppose someone tells me that I’m a great yogi—I’m happy. Then another tells me I am a crook—I’m sad. My emotions swing like a pendulum from left to right, between praise and insult. The techniques of Patanjali’s yoga stops the thought-waves arising in the mind.
Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita states that yoga samatvam ucyate, yoga is evenness of mind (BG Ch 2 v.48) a state in which the mind remains unmoved, steady amongst the dvandvas, the pairs of opposites. The whole world is made up of pairs of opposites. If there is day, there will be night. If there is darkness, there will be light. If there is cold in Canada, there will be heat in India. If there is victory, there will be defeat. Today you win ten thousand dollars on the sweepstakes, tomorrow you lose twenty thousand on the stock market. Praise and censure are the same for one who has control over the mind. Heat and cold are one and the same for a yogi, victory and defeat are one and the same. A yogi who accepts pleasure and pain, victory and defeat, gain and loss, heat and cold as one and the same, his mind is steady.
But we are not steady. Today there is no salt in the food! What a terrible cook! The next day—a sweet juicy pear. What happiness! The mind is like a yo-yo. Today the stock market goes up, so does the blood pressure. The next day the stock market goes down, you jump through the window. This is not yoga.
The difference between a yogi and ourselves is that the thoughts which make us go here and there, backward and forwards, roundabout, do not affect the yogi. He remains one-pointed and focused. Nothing will disturb one with a steady mind; he is like a mountain, strong and powerful. In a balanced state of mind injury and insult, glory and praise have no meaning.
But don’t think that by practicing yoga suddenly everything will go well. This is not so. We have to work out our karma. What we do now does not change the current karma resulting from our past actions and which has to be worked out in this lifetime. A yogi accepts his present condition whatever it is, whether it is painful and full of suffering or pleasurable and full of joy. He keeps his mind in the same steady, one-pointed state.
Nature tests us every minute and the tests are not easy. The higher you go, the harder the fall. All great sages had to undergo this most important of tests. Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Sivananda our master, all were put to the test. People used to worship Gurudev Master Sivanandaji; they worshipped him with gold coins and garlands of flowers. After receiving such treatment he would go to his room and he would take an old shoe and beat himself saying ‘You like the gold coins and garlands? Do you like the shoe also?’ The yogi sees no difference between gold coins and a shoe, flowers and dirt. What are flowers? They come from earth go back to the earth. You are given a flower or dirt; both are the same. What is the difference between gold and iron? Both are made up of atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, just waves of energy. If you are enlightened, you see no difference. But we don’t get it. The mind inflates with praise, how beautiful, how clever I am, and sinks on insult and criticism. This is not yoga. Gurudev Sivananda reminds us again and again to bear insult, bear injury. To do so shows that the mind has achieved a state of steadiness; the emotions are under control.