All Life is indeed the yoga of Nature striving to unite and manifest her Lord. That is what the story of Shiva and Parvati is meant to symbolise. But it is largely a subconscious Yoga. It is only when man enters the stage that the possibility of conscious yoga or a conscious participation of the human in the vast yoga of Nature becomes possible. This is the only difference. In man Nature has deviced conscious or partly conscious means and processes that are not available to other forms that have emerged from her womb. This is exactly what Sri Aurobindo says and proposes in The Synthesis of Yoga.
‘In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being andβhighest condition of victory in that effortβa union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self-conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained……
The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is Yoga.”‘
Affectionately,
Alok Da
