Good question actually. All life is Yoga implies two things. First, it means that there is a yoga going on subconsciously through a slow and diffuse process even in the densest state of our ignorance. This is so because God is hidden in Nature covered by the veil of ignorance. Living on the surface of life, tossed and troubled by situations and circumstances we do not understand the real purpose, if any, of this random game. But it is actually slowly preparing us, pushing us to manifest something of the Divine even through our unconsciousness.
Then a time comes and the process becomes intensified like the labour pains and then we hear or rather feel the call for the yoga. If we heed the Call then the process becomes quick and conscious and concentrated through our active collaboration. If we do not heed the call and miss the moment then we fall back into the old process until the next moment. But this falling back leads to a state where we no longer enjoy the world even though it is out of attachment to it that we delayed the plunge. This goes on until one day we take the pilgrim staff and lighting up the fire of aspiration enter the path. Then the subconscious yoga becomes a conscious yoga.
It is an inner change that is being hinted here and not any external renunciation. It is a question of belonging to the Divine inwardly rather than to the world and its ways though nothing may change outwardly.
‘…..the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
