In the quiet town of Lalgudi, where the days followed one another like beads on a familiar string and the river moved without hurry, young Krishnan had begun to feel a gentle restlessness. He went to school, played cricket, ate his meals, and slept at night, yet something inside him wondered whether this ordinary round of activities was all there was. The world of marks, games, and daily tasks felt real enough, but incomplete—as if he were seeing only a part of a larger picture.
One evening on the terrace he shared this feeling with Uncle Venkatesh.
“Uncle, I do everything that is expected of me, but sometimes I feel divided—pulled this way and that by the things around me. Is there a way to feel more whole?”
Uncle Venkatesh opened a well-thumbed copy of the Bhagavad Gita translated and explained by Eknath Easwaran. He turned to a page and read slowly:
“Yoga is the discipline whereby a person disidentifies himself from the conditions of perception in Maya and wakes into a higher mode of knowing in which the Unity of Life is apprehended directly. The word Yoga comes from the Sanskrit yuj, meaning to yoke or bind together. Yoga means making oneself whole—undivided. That is the goal of spiritual life. It leads to the experience called Samadhi, and the state attained is Moksha or Nirvana, which means going beyond the conditioning of Maya—beyond time, space, and causality. In that state we realise we are not merely a physical creature, but the Atman, the true Self, and not separate from the Divine.”
Krishnan sat in silence, letting the words settle.
“So Yoga is not only the postures we see people practising?” he asked at last.
“Those are helpful,” his uncle replied, “but the deeper meaning is this inner yoking—the gradual freeing of oneself from the limited ways we usually see the world, so that we may recognise the unity that holds everything together. It is the work of becoming whole.”
In the days that followed, Krishnan began a quiet practice of his own. Each morning he sat for a few minutes by the window and simply watched his thoughts and feelings without immediately claiming them as “I.” When pride rose after a good mark, or disappointment after a poor one, he gently reminded himself that these were passing conditions—part of Maya’s play of time and circumstance—and not the whole of who he was. When he walked by the river he tried to sense the same life moving in the water, the trees, the birds, and himself. Slowly, the sharp sense of separation softened.
He did not expect sudden visions or dramatic experiences. He only persisted, day after day, in the small discipline of disidentifying from the narrow view and turning toward a wider one. At school he still studied and played. At home he still helped with ordinary tasks. Yet something underneath the activities began to feel less divided.
Weeks later he sat again with Uncle Venkatesh as the evening sky deepened into blue.
“Uncle,” Krishnan said quietly, “I am only a beginner. I have not reached Samadhi or Moksha. But when I practise remembering that I am more than the passing thoughts and events, I feel a little more whole—less pulled apart by every small success or failure. The unity of life seems less like an idea and more like something I can touch for a moment.”
Uncle Venkatesh smiled with gentle approval. “That is the beginning of Yoga as the Gita teaches it. We do not become whole all at once. We yoke ourselves, little by little, to the deeper truth. Continue the practice. The Atman is already present; we only learn to recognise it.”
In the soft dusk of Lalgudi, while the ordinary world of shops and schools and family duties continued around him, young Krishnan walked home with a quieter heart. He had begun the long, patient work of making himself whole—of gently loosening the hold of Maya’s conditions and turning toward the unity that underlies all things. And in that simple daily effort, the boy took his first real steps on the path that leads, in time, beyond division to the undivided Self.