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always wins because he is more obstinate than I am. That is why I am going to Deoghar tomorrow. I talked with him yesterday and I said, "You should have been here. I am not coming to you," and he said, "Of course you have to come to me, I want to talk with you." I said, "I don't want to come to you. I'm coming tomorrow."
Ah, that's a relationship of love. I do not know whether you have the same thing when you are a guru and a shishya but I hope that with Swami Niranjan I shall have the same measure and order of friendship as I have with Swami Satyananda. Satyanandaji taught me much. He introduced me to my toe. In chidakasha dharana the first thing you do is to bring all your consciousness to this silly toe of yours. This toe is very much a part of your body, a part of your being. I learned from this practice how important it is for the spirit not to be alienated from matter, and that there cannot be spirit without matter and vice versa. Therefore, to me the memory of the body is among the most important memories that yoga cultivates, more than any other code or philosophy or metaphysics that I know.
Let me quickly come to the fourth kind of memory, the memory of evil: the evil within us and the evil outside us. Yoga, or yogic consciousness, educates us about the link between the internal and external evil. A true yogi does not shun, does not erase, does not obliterate and does not exorcize the memory of evil in the self nor evil in the world. A yogi who does so is by my worldly standards a fraud and an impostor. A true yogi lives with the memory of evil, lives with the memory of the structure of mega evil which the modern world embodies in the form of torture and tyranny throughout the world, in the form of the war machine, in the form of violence and vicious kinds of cruelty throughout the world.
The great German thinker, Walter Benjamin, once said that the history of every civilization is at the very same time the history of barbarism. This is as true for Hinduism as it is for all other major religious traditions of the world. It seems to me that yoga, in the best of its tradition, enables us not merely to preserve and understand this memory of evil but also to confront it with the development of collective spirituality.
The fifth type of memory is the memory of mission. The Bihar School of Yoga and the International Yoga Fellowship, in the foundation of which I was a medium and no more than
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