“We do not fundamentally want to have and to do; we only want to be, and we use the having and doing for that purpose. Further, our will to be is not content with anything; it seeks its goal beyond the irksome limits of having and doing. Man will not be really happy until he is consciously one with God, and shares the freedom of that one Reality.”- – Ernest Wood, from Yoga, first published in 1959
I have always wanted to meditate and I have attempted it or practiced it from time to time without ever consolidating my practice into something solid, a regular habit that I can build on. Now, later in life, I’m becoming more serious about doing so. Thus, it was serendipitous that I happened upon a long-forgotten book squeezed onto my bookshelf: “Yoga,” by Ernest Wood. I must have bought it in college, 35 or more years ago.
Ernest Wood was a British Victorian who moved to India in 1910, where he began a career as a headmaster and rose to be the president of two colleges within the Universities of Bombay and Madras. Along the way, he developed a deep interest in yoga, becoming a scholar of the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India, in their original Sanskrit. Wood’s last days were spent in San Francisco, where he died in 1965, thirteen years after Yogananda’s death, also in California.
The deep scholarship Wood brought to his book, “Yoga,” makes for rigorous reading but it is worth it, because many jewels of wisdom beam from its pages. For example, for all of my life I have been confused about the terms ‘concentration,’ ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation.’ All three words seemed to describe desirable states of a healthy mind, but I until reading Wood’s book, I had no idea how they related to each other. Wood’s chapter, “Yoga and the Intellect,” makes their distinction abundantly clear. “It will help,” he says, “if the student remembers that meditation is not a condition in which one is, but is a function one is performing. Compare it with walking; walking is not a condition which you are in, but is a function you are performing.”
Wood illustrates this principle in the following way. “One day a teacher of meditation (guru) told one of his pupils to walk to the far end of the room and back and sit down. Then he asked: ‘What were you doing just now? Were you walking?’ The pupil went over his action mentally, and observed everything that he had done, and then replied: ‘I was not walking. I was watching the body walk.’”
In similar fashion, when I was about seven years old, I remember vividly walking home from school at lunch time, talking to myself in the third person. “He arrived at the corner,” I remember saying or thinking, “and began to walk down the hill.” This third- person narrator in my head was the nascent writer I am becoming today, but also quite possibly he was my true Self observing my body and my mind as they went about their business in my current life form or incarnation.
Wood explains that “concentration, meditation and contemplation form a sequence, always together. The act or practice begins with concentration, which then continues inside or behind the meditation. It goes on with meditation and then continues in or behind the contemplation, which remains within its scope.” Thus, Wood lays out the progression of the subject’s goal – to begin with concentration (mental focus) and proceed through meditation (concentrated thought upon an object such as a flower) and finally to arrive at contemplation (complete knowledge or knowing of the wholeness and unity of the object, with a consequent perceived union of the subject – yourself – with the object. In this way, the human mind is trained gradually to see beyond itself, so that we know that we are not merely our body and our brain. Instead, we are the higher Self who observes our body and brain.
The ultimate goal here is to achieve “an act of being,” not merely doing. This teaching is echoed by Eckhart Tolle’s injunction that the act of being present (in the “Now”) means everything. It is simply Being, the highest value of living.
Bird of Spirit 