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Summary of Talk by Adil Palkhivala at the Indo-American World Yoga Conference, 2024
At the Indo-American World Yoga Conference, 2024, Adil Palkhivala — lifelong student, teacher, and proponent of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy — shared profound insights on yoga, humility, and transformation. Drawing from decades of experience as a yoga teacher and his deep spiritual grounding in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Adil spoke of yoga not as escape but as an instrument for refining humanity and spiritualizing life itself.
Adil began by emphasizing humility as the foundation of yoga. Quoting Krishna’s dialogue with Arjuna, he reminded the audience that the first requirement for yoga is humility.
Without humility — namrata — the mind becomes a full cup, unable to receive anything new. He observed that students in India and parts of Asia often approach yoga with greater humility, while in the West, ego can sometimes obstruct growth.
Humility, he clarified, is not weakness. It is the softening of the ego that allows the divine to enter. Without humility, no transformation is possible.
Among the most profound teachings Adil shared was from Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy: God did not create the universe. God became the universe.
This understanding dissolves the false division between creator and creation. Everything — saint and sinner alike — contains the divine. The saint realizes it, the sinner denies it, but both are expressions of the same source.
When this truth is grasped, humility arises naturally. Humanity is not a collection of isolated fragments struggling alone. At the core, each being is divine, refining itself to manifest that truth more fully.
Adil read a striking passage from Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Glimpses:
“Wherefore God hammers so fiercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity as a mass is still a crude and vile ore which will not otherwise be smelted and shaped. As is his material, so is his method.”
He explained that humanity’s suffering is not punishment but the refining process. When the material is crude, it requires the hammer and furnace. When refined into gold, only the goldsmith’s gentle touch is needed.
This, he said, is the purpose of yoga: to refine ourselves into purer vessels of consciousness so that the divine no longer needs to shape us through suffering, but through grace.
Adil described his life’s mission as teaching Purna Yoga — the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo — through centers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and India. Purna means “complete” or “whole,” and this path embraces all dimensions of existence.
Unlike approaches that deny the body or the world, Purna Yoga seeks to infuse divinity into every aspect of life: body, mind, heart, and spirit. As Sri Aurobindo asked, if the soul’s purpose were only to escape the body, why would it enter in the first place?
Yoga, then, is not about fleeing matter but about revealing the spirit within it. Or, as Savitri so beautifully declares: “Matter shall reveal the spirit’s face.”
Adil concluded his talk with Sri Aurobindo’s Gayatri Mantra, offering a call to action: refine the material of one’s being through humility and practice.
He reminded listeners that when consciousness rises, life is no longer hammered by the furnace of suffering. Instead, the individual is shaped gently, like gold in the hands of a master craftsman.
The journey of yoga, he said, is not only about self-realization but also about the collective evolution of humanity — step by step, breath by breath, with humility as the foundation.
