Yoga Sutra 27 Soul Needs Aloneness

“WHEN PURITY IS ATTAINED THERE ARISES IN THE YOGI JUGUPSA FOR HIS OWN BODY AND A DISINCLINATION TO COME IN PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH OTHERS.”

When you are in the body too much you are always hankering for contact with other bodies, a lust to be in contact with other bodies – which you call love, which is not love, which is just a lust – because the body cannot exist alone. It exists in a network of other bodies.

The child is born in the mother’s womb; for nine months the mother’s body feeds the child’s body. The child’s body grows out of the mother’s body, just like branches grow out of a tree. When the child is ready, of course, he moves out of the womb, but still remains deeply in contact: on the mother’s breast the child goes on – not only taking milk – goes on taking the warmth of the body, which is a physical need.

And if a child misses the warmth of the mother, he can never be healthy; the body will always suffer. He may be given everything that is needed – food, milk, vitamins – but if the warmth of the woman is not given to him…. And that too in a very loving way because if you are not loving towards a person then heat is possible, may pass from your body to the other person, but not warmth. Heat becomes warmth through love. It has a qualitatively different dimension. It is not just heat; otherwise you can give the heat to the child. Now, many experiments have been done: the child is in a centrally heated room – that doesn’t help. The mother’s body is giving some subtle vibration of love: of being accepted, of being loved, of being needed. That gives roots.

That’s why, continuously, the man will be after – seeking, searching – a woman’s body the whole life; and the woman will be seeking a man’s body the whole life.

The opposite sex is attractive because the polarity of the bodies helps; it gives energy. The very polarity gives tension and energy. You feed through it; you become strong through it.

This is natural, nothing is wrong in it, but when one becomes pure – through nonviolence, non possessiveness, authenticity – when one becomes more and more pure, the focus of consciousness shifts from the body to the being. The being can remain absolutely alone.

That’s why a man deeply attached to the body can never become free. The very attachment will lead him into many types of bondages, imprisonments. You may love a woman, you may love a man, but deep down you resist also – because the lover is also the bondage. It cripples you, the relationship: feeds you also, imprisons you also. You cannot live without it, and you cannot live with it. This is the problem of all the lovers. They cannot live separately and they cannot live together. When separate they think of each other; when together they fight each other.

Why does this happen? The mechanism is simple. When you are not with a woman whom you can love and who loves you, you start feeling starved of the warmth that flows from a woman’s body. When you are with the woman you are no longer starved, you are no longer hungry, you are well fed. And soon you become fed up. Soon you have taken too much: now you would like to separate and be aloof and alone. All lovers, when together, think, “How beautiful it will be to be alone.” And when they are alone, then sooner or later they start feeling the need of the other and they start imagining and dreaming, “How beautiful it will be to be together.”

The body needs togetherness; and your innermost soul needs aloneness. That is the problem. Your innermost soul can remain alone – it is a Himalayan peak standing alone against the sky. Your innermost soul grows when it is alone, but your body needs relatedness. The body needs crowds, warmth, clubs, societies, organizations; wherever you are with many people the body feels good. In a crowd your soul may feel starved because it feeds on aloneness, but your body feels good. In aloneness your soul feels perfect, but the body starts feeling hungry for a relationship.

And in life, if you don’t understand this, you become very, very miserable, unnecessarily. If you understand it you create a rhythm: you fulfill the bodily need and you fulfill the soul need also. Sometimes you move in a relationship, sometimes you move out of it. Sometimes you live together, sometimes you live alone. Sometimes you become peaks – so absolutely alone that even the idea of the other is absent. This is the rhythm.

But when somebody has attained to aloneness and the focus of consciousness has changed…. That’s what yoga is all about: how to change the focus from the body to the soul, from matter to non-matter, from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the unknown – from the world to God. Howsoever you phrase it is immaterial. It is a change of focus. When the focus has completely changed, the yogi is so happy in his aloneness, so blissful, that that ordinary hankering of the body to be with others by and by disappears.

When the purity is attained there arises in the yogi a disillusionment for his own body: now he knows that the paradise that he has been seeking cannot be attained through the body, the bliss that he has been dreaming about is not possible through the body. It is impossible for the body: through the limited you are trying to reach the unlimited. Through matter you are trying to reach the eternal, the immortal. Nothing is wrong in the body: your effort is absurd. Don’t be angry with the body; the body has not done anything to you. It is just as if someone is trying to listen through the eyes – now nothing is wrong with the eyes: eyes are made to see, not to listen. The body is made of matter; it is not made of the immaterial. It is made of death. It cannot be immortal. You are asking the impossible. Don’t ask that.

That is the point of disillusionment: the yogi simply understands what is possible and what is not possible with the body. That which is possible is okay; that which is not possible he does not ask. He is not angry. He doesn’t hate the body.

He takes every care of it because the body can become a ladder; it can become a door, It cannot become the goal, but it can become the door.

A disillusionment for his own body – and when this disillusionment happens: “… a disinclination to come in physical contact with others.” Then the need to be in physical contact with others, by and by, withers away. In fact this is the right moment when you can say the man has come out of the womb, not before it.

Some people never come out of the womb. Even when they are dying, their need for others’ presence, their need for contact, relationship, continues. They have not come out of the womb. Physically they have come out many, many years before – the man may be eighty, ninety. Ninety years before, he had come out of the womb, but all these ninety years also he has been living in contact – seeking, always greedy for body contact. He has lived in a lost womb again and again in his dreams.

It is said that whenever a man falls in love with a woman – whatsoever he thinks, that is not the point – he is again falling in the womb. And maybe, it is almost certain – I say “maybe” because it is not yet a scientifically proven hypothesis – that the urge to enter the woman’s body, the sexual urge, may be nothing but a substitute for entering the womb again. All sexuality may be a search for how to enter the womb again. And in all the ways that man has invented to make his body comfortable, psychologists say he is trying to create a womb outside. Look at a comfortable room: if it is really comfortable it must have something in common with the womb – the warmth, the coziness, the silk, the velvet – the inner touch of the mother’s skin. The pillows, the bed – everything gives you a feeling of comfort only when somehow it is related with the womb.

Now in the West they have made small tanks, womblike. In those tanks lukewarm water is filled, exactly of the same temperature as the mother’s womb.

In deep darkness the man floats in the tank, absolutely comfortable – in darkness, just as in the womb. They call them meditation tanks. It helps: one feels very, very silent, an inner happiness arising – you have again become a child. A child in the womb floats on liquid of a certain temperature. The liquid has all the ingredients of the sea, the same salty water with the same ingredients. Because of that scientists have come to realize that man must have evolved from fishes – because still in the womb the atmosphere of the sea has to be maintained.

All comfort is, deep down, womblike. And whenever you are Lying with a woman, curled up, you feel good. Every man, howsoever old, becomes a child again; and every woman, howsoever young, becomes a mother again. Whenever they are in love the woman starts playing the role of the mother and the man starts playing the role of the baby. Even a young woman becomes a mother and an old man becomes a child.

In a yogi this urge disappears – and with this urge, he is really born. We in India have called him “twice-born,” dwij. This is his second birth, the real birth. Now he is no longer in need of anybody; he has become a transcendental light. Now he can float above the earth; now he can fly in the sky. He is not earth-rooted now. He has become a flower – not a flower, because even a flower is earth – rooted… he has become the fragrance of the flower. Completely free. Moves into the sky with no roots in the earth. His desire to come in contact with others’ bodies disappears.