To become a Yogi

To become a Yogi, you have to be conscientious all of the time.
You have to practice concentration each hour of your active life. Now you scatter your thoughts for many hours, and you wonder that you don't succeed. The wonder would be if you did. You have to listen each day to everything you do. That is, doubtless, tough to do, and you will make it less complicated in the 1st stages by selecting out of your day's work a portion only and doing that portion with wonderful, unflagging attention. Don't let your mind ramble from the thing before you. It does not count what the thing is. It could be the adding up of a column of figures, or the reading of a book. Anything will do. It's the angle of the mind that is vital and not the object before it. This is the only real way of learning concentration. Fix your mind rigidly on the work before you for the moment, and when you have done with it, drop it. Practise gradually in this fashion for some months, and you'll be stunned to find how straightforward it becomes to focus the mind. Likewise , the body will shortly learn how to do many things immediately. If you force it to do a thing continually, it'll start to do it, after a time, of its own will, and then you find that you can manage to do 2 or 3 things at the same time. In Britain , as an example, ladies are terribly keen on knitting. When a girl first learns to knit, she is required to be awfully targeting her fingers.

Her attention must not ramble from her fingers for a second, or she is going to make a mistake. She is going on doing that day after day, and currently her fingers have learnt to focus on the work without her supervision, and they could be left to do the knitting while she employs the conscious mind on something else. It is further feasible to train your mind as the girl has trained her fingers. The mind also, the psychological body, can be so trained as to do a thing mechanically. At last, your highest consciousness can always remain fixed on the Ultimate , while the lower consciousness in the body will do the things of the body, and do them completely, because completely trained. These are practical lessons of Yoga. Practice of this sort builds up the qualities you would like, and you become stronger and better, and fit to go on to the definite study of Yoga.