Yoga is the process whereby the mind is silenced and transcended. It is not merely a set of physical postures or breathing practices. Its chief method is meditation, not any outer action.

Yogic postures bring calm and balance to the body. Yogic breathing brings harmony and energy to the breath. While these are of great value, they cannot in themselves take us beyond thought. They must be used as the foundation for meditation, or their use is incomplete.

Mental techniques like mantra and visualization are also tools to help calm the mind and are additional aids to meditation. They serve to stablize the thought process, which is necessary to allow it to be put to rest. However, if we do not look beyond them to the Divine consciousness within ourselves, they can even become obstacles.

While many tools and practices have been invented to facilitate the practice of yoga, the main process of yoga is very simple. It is to no longer look outward to find truth or happiness, but to rest in our real nature free of all other considerations. This requires inquiry and surrender, which are the two main aspects of all yoga practices. Inquiry means giving our attention to the thought process and tracing it back to its origin in consciousness. Surrender means openness to the inner reality and a willingness to relinquish all outer seekings in order to enter into it.

Without some sort of practice of yoga, which means meditation, we cannot get beyond our human problems. All other approaches, however secondarily useful, will not prove sufficient to bring about real change in ourselves or in our society. Hence we must once more return to the science and practice of yoga as the basis of our lives and our culture.

Meditation requires that we leam to give space to what is beyond name and form to reveal itself, that we set aside our opinions and come to commune with things as they are. This is only possible when we give up our belief in matter or the known, and give our prime value to awareness itself. Through meditation we enter into a different dimension of existence wherein falfillment is in seeing and we no longer require either sensation or thought to make us feel alive. This state of seeing allows us to merge into all the universe and what is beyond all manifestation.