Yoga Does Wonders!

The following excerpt is taken from the article "Yoga Does Wonders" written by B.N. Bhatt, Bombay, Maharastra, published in 2001: Science Today, June 1990 issue.

... Yoga does not just involve body gymnastics but it is a psychic and spiritual phenomenon that joins one with the supreme power....... Yoga is something subtle that the mind experiences and hence planting electrodes on a yogi's body and reading various physiological parameters on a polygraph will not reveal anything; it would be as effective as measuring the depth of the sea by dipping into it a scale made of salt!

Says Aurobindo: " It is my experience that pranayama makes one's intellect sharper. I felt that there was a great accession of light and power to the mind....... I used to write poetry at Baroda (1904-1905). I could write only about 200 lines a month. After I began pranayama, I could compose 200 lines in half an hour..... and remembered it fully, till I committed it to paper..... I felt that my brain was encircled by a ring of electricity ...... Poetry came like a river and prose like a flood and other things, too, that were mental, vital and psychical...." This experience of Aurobindo's "words flowing from a source above mind" is similar to that experienced by Swami Vivekananda when he addressed the Parliament of Religions at Chicago.

Swami Vivekananda's phenomenal memory to quote any topic verbatim from Encyclopaedia Britannica is attributed to his practice of yoga. Aurobindo was found in a yogic pose of levitation in Alipore Jail. His whole body was in a peculiar pose balanced only on one knee! His hair acquired an oily shine there and in later years his body had an extraordinary golden shine...