Indian Doctor Describes Different Kinds of Yoga

Although everyone does Yoga all the time, very few can do the right kind of Yoga, Rammurti S. Mishra, an M.D. and an authority on Raja Yoga from Bombay, India, told an audience of about 60 at the International Student Center.

To demonstrate this, Dr. Mishra opened a two hour lecture on Yoga with five minutes of complete silence in which he asked the audience to think about anything. After the five minutes, Dr. Mishra informed the audience that say thought they might have had was a Yoga, or "moment of attention." Anybody who is conscious has to be doing Yoga, he said.

Raja Yoga, Mishra said, is an "integral and harmonious movement of attention or consciousness by integral fields into integral fields." It is a disciplined movement of psychic forces "from unreality to reality, from sex to pure meditation, from forces of self to the cosmic forces of the universe."

He contrasted this with "moments of attention" which flit from one thing to another, which he cited as the basic type of Yoga.

Dr. Mishra claimed that an application of Raja Yoga can cure all forms of physical illnesses, both psychosomatic and organic. "Since the body is nothing but a manifestation of the mind, all physical diseases must have their origins in the mind."

By knowing the laws by which the mind operates, one can manipulate mind, he asserted that an ability to control the mind implies an equal ability to control the body and its ailments.

Control of the mind can not only produce bodily health, but can also achieve at will other states of being, such as self-confidence, serenity, and cheerfulness.

Mishra concluded his lecture on a further metaphysical implication of Raja Yoga. He affirmed that it can lead to a complete unity of body, mind and universe. Consequently, "if you can know yourself, you can know everything in the universe through an identity."