Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities.
The experiences of your past life which are stored within come up to the surface to be rejected. By rejecting all these by and by the inside will have to be cleansed.
Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
On the top of the head is a Chakra - Sahasradala or the thousand-petalled lotus. There is a Chakra in the middle of the forehead between the eyebrows and one in the heart-centre. The region between the navel and head constitutes the mental field. From navel downward extending till the terminus of the spinal chord, mūlādhāra, is the seat of the vital.
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
Thus to act under the guidance coming from above, this is one side of the sadhana, the dynamic side. The other one is the discrimination between the Purusha and the Prakriti. The Purusha will calmly observe, give sanction, choose, but will realise that all this does not belong to him - all these are outside him. This is the static side of the sadhana. These two aspects constitute the basis of Yoga.
The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards the universal , the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existance.
To be free from all egoistic motive, careful of truth in speech and action, void of self-will and self-assertion, watchful in all things, is the condition for being a flawless servant.
The navel region is the centre of the vital. It is from here that the movements of the vital rise upward. Above the navel and behind the chest is the centre of the play of emotions and below this takes place the play of the physical. Mulādhāra is the base of the physical. In between the Mulādhāra and the navel, there is another centre of the vital.
The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die... but the forms are dissolved.
The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.