It may be the adding up of a column of figures, or the reading of a book.  Anything will do.  It is the attitude of the mind that is important and not the object before it.  This is the only way of learning concentration.  Fix your mind rigidly on the work before you for the time being, and when you have done with it, drop it.  Practise steadily in this way for a few months, and you will be surprised to find how easy it becomes to concentrate the mind.  Moreover, the body will soon learn to do many things automatically.  If you force it to do a thing regularly, it will begin to do it, after a time, of its own accord, and then you find that you can manage to do two or three things at the same time.  In England, for instance, women are very fond of knitting.  When a girl first learns to knit, she is obliged to be very intent on her fingers.  Her attention must not wander from her fingers for a moment, or she will make a mistake.  She goes on doing that day after day, and presently her fingers have learnt to pay attention to the work without her supervision, and they may be left to do the knitting while she employs the conscious mind on something else.  It is further possible to train your mind as the girl has trained her fingers.  The mind also, the mental body, can be so trained as to do a thing automatically.  At last, your highest consciousness can always remain fixed on the Supreme, while the lower consciousness in the body will do the things of the body, and do them perfectly, because perfectly trained.  These are practical lessons of Yoga.

Practice of this sort builds up the qualities you want, and you become stronger and better, and fit to go on to the definite study of Yoga.

Obstacles to Yoga

Before considering the capacities needed for this definite practice, let us run over the obstacles to Yoga as laid down by Patanjali.

The obstacles to Yoga are very inclusive.  First, disease:  if you are diseased you cannot practice Yoga; it demands sound health, for the physical strain entailed by it is great.  Then languor of mind:  you must be alert, energetic, in your thought.  Then doubt:  you must have decision of will, must be able to make up your mind.  Then carelessness:  this is one of the greatest difficulties with beginners; they read a thing carelessly, they are inaccurate.  Sloth:  a lazy man cannot be a Yogi; one who is inert, who lacks the power and the will to exert himself; how shall he make the desperate exertions wanted along this line?  The next, worldly-mindedness, is obviously an obstacle.  Mistaken ideas is another great obstacle, thinking wrongly about things.  One of the great qualifications for Yoga is “right notion” “Right notion” means that the thought shall correspond with the outside truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible.  Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and vice versa.  Lastly, instability:  which makes Yoga impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable man cannot be a yogi.