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boundary is bad. So, about those who do not belong to my culture, about the way they greet, the way they cook, the way they speak, etc. we say, "It's not as good as mine."
So, in growing up as a modern human being we are, in an insidious way, learning to be discriminative. We discriminate between human beings. Intellectually, we say that we do not believe in caste, creed, religion or color. What we do not realize is that over the years, through the process of growing up, we have this built-in sense of discrimination and a feeling of negativity towards people who do not belong to our culture. It is as if there is something bad about them. If we have power then we also punish them, because of whatever we think is bad in them and we do this most of the time without realizing it.
I was very happy to learn from Swami Karmananda a little while ago that the Australian government is trying to re-emphasize its priorities and to help the Aboriginal people to develop in their own way. I shudder every time I hear the word mainstream in India. It seems that all other streams would have to lose their color and their separateness and be part of a mainstream. Who knows what the mainstream is? But we believe that whatever we have created is good and everything else is bad. That is part of growing up culturally.
The third point is the irrationality of culture. We seldom realize that the great percentage of the things that we learn in a culture are irrational rather than rational. There was an experiment conducted by, of all people, the physicist Fred Hoyle F.R.S., and some behavioral scientists, with four-year old children. The assumption behind the experiment was that these four-year olds have not been sufficiently corrupted by the irrationality of culture, that they retain a lot of the original rationality of the human mind. The experiment showed that four-year olds could pick up four languages without much trouble because they quickly saw the rationality of the grammar, and they also picked up calculus! At the age of twelve or fourteen we are almost crying, trying to learn calculus. So, you can see how gradually we lose touch with our rationality. Therefore, all of us are in need of some kind of treatment to rise above the culture and I see yoga as a wonderful tool for that.
The other aspect that I want to bring into focus, which I learnt about as a management consultant, is the function of transference. We carry in our heads ideas about how we
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