Because I believed that only yoga could help me in my situation, I devoted myself to it. I carried out breathing practices, as well as concentrations of mind. However, because I could not follow the yogic instructions about the place where yoga should be practised, about the workload and other things, I overstrained my adolescent organism by incorporating into my schedule two, four, six and later eight hours of practice daily. However, these hours of practice didn’t include only breathing, but they also included concentration, particularly out of which I intellectually obtained a lot. The work-related overstrain caused permanent damage to my health. However, let this be an uninteresting detail, as I wanted to say something about the intellectual significance of yoga which is contained in concentration. The yogic concentration, as I have learned from my practice, must be based on the extensity of awareness on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on the intensity of thinking. The extensity of awareness is more or less given by the interest of a person in everything that constitutes their environment. The intensity of thinking is, in the yogic training, based on an effort to focus on an imaginary point as if it was a concrete thing or object which must be created by the person who is concentrating by means of the use of their own thinking. Thus, when the imaginary point or object is so stable that the mind no longer tends to wander and the perception of the world is vivid enough not to allow a dulling immersion, the intellect improves. The psychological conditions for its improvement are simply in the fact that the thinking is to be not only stable, but also with a sufficient volume. And now perhaps just one question is left: why is yoga connected to mysticism, or, sometimes, the delusory mysticism? If a person attempts to fulfil the requirement of concentration in the sense that they ‘hook’ on an imaginary object, and, at the same time, they do not perceive the phenomena of the outer world with sufficient vividness, then their attention presents them with a not entirely conscious or totally unconscious perception of their own inner processes. This appears to a person as a peculiar, or mystical, world. In fact, it is an opposite pole of an extremely strong interest in the outer world, and it adds to the development of inner imbalance. The degree of intelligence of an individual depends, on the one hand, on the intensify of thinking which follows from the mental stabilisation resting on an imaginary object, and, on the other hand, on the volume of awareness which depends on a vivid perception of the outer world. So far it seems that the education towards a methodical development in both directions is only contained in yoga, and due to this reason, even this aspect of yoga should not be forgotten. I believe that yoga understood in this way is not idealistic, even in those of its practices which do not relate to the physical positions, and that pedagogy should devote attention to it. 86 (10) Květoslav Minařík
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