Because the science of yoga deals so much with techniques and methods, many yoga students imagine the entire process of spiritual evolution to be a mere mechanism. They believe they can find God through technique alone.
Mankind has always been somewhat prone to mistake technique for inspiration (such as when one is playing a musical instrument), forgetting that technique is merely a vehicle for inspiration. Yoga, which approaches the path to liberation more scientifically, also offers the temptation to confuse method with something infinitely more important on the path: the right attitude.
Remember, technique is only a vehicle. What good is a car in the hands of a driver who has no idea where he wants to go?
The fact that yoga practise accelerates one’s spiritual progress only increases the need for the right attitude. Socially responsible attitudes are more important for automobile drivers travelling at high speeds than for bicycle riders.
Concentration on yoga techniques alone without developing the right attitude can prove dangerous. Spiritual progress can never be forced, any more than one can force the delicate mechanism of a watch.
The ability to live more inwardly is the hallmark of a spiritual attitude. The right attitude is the force that sets the wheel of spiritual evolution turning in the first place. The right attitude is what keeps it turning, drawing more and more divine power to itself. The right attitude is, finally, what keeps the whirlpool of self-realisation expanding outward to infinity instead of becoming locked in a narrow cycle of ego-limitation.
But many are the paradoxes on the spiritual path. This inward attitude is not easily comprehended by the worldly mind, for the world has its own power to draw anyone who embraces it. Boredom, fatigue, and reluctance are self-perpetuating cycles capable of generating their own negative energies. For the beginner, therefore, an extra impetus may be needed initially to spark the right inward attitude.
An electric generator needs a strong spark from a battery to get it started. The wheel of inner development, similarly, usually needs a strong stimulus from outside to get it going. Hence the need for contact with other devotees, and particularly with saints. Since saints are not easy to find in this world and not easy to get close to once one does find them, one would do well to also meditate on them from afar. Study their photographs. Try to draw into yourself their magnetic, divine attitudes.
It would be no exaggeration to say that attitude, in the end, is everything? One may have the right attitude and know nothing of yoga or meditation and still eventually reach God. But without the right attitude, lifetimes of yoga practise may develop nothing but spiritual pride.
The world, steeped as it is in delusion, often upholds as the best attitudes those that would most surely enmesh us in further delusion.
Egotism, for example, is often prized by ignorant people as a sign of strength. Self-seeking is mistaken for practicality; miserliness for thrift; restlessness for a proof of inner vitality; and loud laughter for a sure sign of inner joy.
Look, then, to the saints. But since you probably must mix with worldly people, too, and may have to be more with them than with saints, look to them also. But study the end results of their attitudes.
Even in a worldly sense, those attitudes bear the sweetest fruits, which spring most purely from an inner source: self-giving, rather than possessive, love; a wish to correct oneself, not others; an inner freedom in every undertaking and in every human relationship; an impersonal gaze that can enjoy even the world without constant reference to one’s own standing with respect to it.
The developed yogi sees in all things the one, divine self. But the beginning yogi needs to cultivate, in addition to a divinely impersonal outlook, a more intimate, devotional attitude towards the Lord.