If anybody has to practice yoga at a young age, people would remark, “Yoga, so early?” Even now many people still think that yoga is only a pastime for retired people, but I always felt that yoga has more to do with the evolution of the human mind and the human body.
Mind preparation for yoga
When you want to prepare a garden, grow flowers and trees, what do you do? Do you just sprinkle seeds? Many people might do that, but nothing would grow. First you have to prepare the soil, make it soft and pull out the weeds. Then you can sow the seeds and they will grow into nice flowers and fruit-bearing trees. The same law applies to the human mind. The mind has to be prepared for accepting the seeds.
The mind assumes many stages. There are certain stages where nothing goes into the head. Surely you have met such people in your life. Whatever you tell them falls on deaf ears; nothing penetrates their brain. They are like hard soil, and the best of seeds will not grow there. No matter
how much you work at it. Then there are some people who are like soft soil. When you tell them something, they are completely responsive. These people have what are called receptive minds. Therefore, what is important in yoga is that we try to transform the quality of consciousness. They everything can be planted in the mind without any obstruction.
Place of Super Mind
In fact, millions of years ago pineal gland played an active role in the development of the human brain. Therefore, people of those times has greater psychic and spiritual qualities and better control over their emotions, but with the passage of time the pineal gland has followed a course of degeneration.
In yoga, the pineal gland is said to be the physical correlate of ‘ AJANA CHAKRA’. Mystics and occultists refer to it as the third eye and philosophers call it the super mind. The pineal gland is very active in children, but by the time they reach the age of eight or ten it begins to calcify, and in elderly people it has little or no role to play in life.
This is very unfortunate because in yoga the pineal gland is considered to be the controlling and monitoring station in the brain. Just as an airport has a control tower. The human brain also has a directing, regulating and blocking tower, which controls all the faculties of the brain. In yoga we call this control station ‘AJANA CHAKARA’ ; the word ‘AJANA’ itself means monitoring, ordering or regulating.
When the pineal gland starts to degenerate, the pituitary gland comes into action and the action and the emotions shoot up. This is the reason why so many children become emotionally unbalanced and disturbed during their adolescent and adolescent years.
Adrenal glands have a very important role to play in the child’s moral behaviour. Usually, those with criminal tendencies have a overactive adrenal system.
Yogic system of education
There are various processes through which knowledge can be implanted in the human brain. During the last few decades many methods have been introduced into the educational system. The oldest method, of course, is teaching in a classroom with a cane. When the child is intelligent give him high mark, and when he is dull give him a big zero. The teacher gives a lecture, writes the points on a blackboard and the student is expected to understand. If he does not then give him a cross. This is a system of teaching, but not a system of education.
At every moment of our lives, right from birth, we are constantly receiving impressions, but these are not registered in the same form as when they went in. they are registered in the form of symbolic vibrations. Have the educators developed a system to teach children which works like this?
Geography, history, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, botany or anything can be taught through symbolic methods. This is the form of education which has to be used for the dull type of student. You can explain a certain concept to an intelligent child and he will understand it, but the dull child will not know what you are talking about because his conscious brain, his intellect, is incapable of receiving the knowledge that you are giving him. Therefore, you will have to transmit the knowledge in a symbolic form directly into his subconscious mind. This is precisely the system of education in yoga.