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beings, super and divine human beings, ultimately reaching divinity itself. In that march, we use our conscious faculty, the mind, the buddhi, to grow quickly. If we do not use the conscious faculty, we will probably grow very, very slowly in the natural process of evolution. Swami Vivekananda said that it is a process of accelerating one's evolution to reach the highest heights.
Take the problems of the modern era, such as psychosomatic ailments like asthma, diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, epilepsy, migraine, spondylosis and irritable bowel syndrome (30% of people in the U.S.A. suffer from IBS). A very large number of those modern ailments essentially have to be tackled in a multi-dimensional way, and they cannot be tackled in a linear modality as we have been doing, either with infectious and contagious diseases or with the usual surgical operations. That is why most of the specialists today believe that asthma cannot be cured, that hypertension cannot be completely normalized.
Therefore, one has to have a total approach. It is this total approach that we have to use to deal with stress. Unless we have this multi-dimensional approach of the physical, mental, emotional and intellectual levels and at the base, the spiritual level, we will not be able to solve these multi-dimensional problems of the modern era. For that we have a series of techniques available to us. At the physical level we have yoga asanas, kriyas, the loosening practices, the sukshma vyayamas, and many other things to deal with the physical body to bring about the necessary transformation.
At the pranic level we have the breathing practices. There are special breathing kriyas. We have the pranayama techniques. We have the subtler things like the pranic meditation, the pranic energization techniques, the pranic healing techniques, and many others to deal with prana. At the mental level we have two aspects. One is the mind, the other is the emotions. To deal with mind and emotions we have the entire system of raja yoga - dharana, dhyana, samadhi, the three-fold approach. To deal with the science of emotions, we have bhakti yoga – the beautiful bhajans, the devotion sessions, the science of emotion culture. All these things deal with the manomaya kosha. In fact, the manomaya kosha is the base where these imbalances start. From there, they come down to the pranic body,
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