Four Yoga - judicious way f culturing whole man

The goal is to manifest this Divine by controlling nature external and internal.....says Swamiji.

The means of effecting the control of mind or internal Nature and realizing the Divine potentiality of man are what are called the Yogas - Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga and Raja Yoga. These Yogas are based on the three basic faculties of the human mind feeling, willing and thinking. In each of these Yogas, the culture of one or the other of these plays the dominant role, but what  Swamiji always pleaded for was a judicious way of culturing the whole man, taking at the same time into account the peculiarities of the individual's nature.

When Swamiji uses the word 'religion' in his lectures, he really means Yoga, for to him religion is realization. Yoga is the technique that leads to this realization the understanding and expression of the Divine possibilities in man. Understood as Yoga, religion becomes more a psychological concept, and ceases to be a mere set of doctrines, observances, associations and allegiances, as commonly understood. These latter are increasingly reduced to the position of symbols, valuable not so much in themselves, but for their capacity to lead the mind of man step by step to that state in which it gets transformed from animality to the state of divine perception and becomes capable of apprehending the Infinite and the Absolute. The self-conscious mind of man has got in it latent powers of apprehension subtler than perception and inference. Just as dead matter has life involved in it, ...so has the self-conscious mind got involved in it the powers of intuition, the faculty of immediate apprehension of the Divine substratum that is the background and basis of the entire cosmic manifestation. The purpose of evolution is thus the emergence of higher and more complete orders of organization which become in turn the base for the release of higher and higher powers of apprehension, until with the emergence of intuition the ego apprehends its substratum, becomes transformed thereby and realizes its true individuality in its universal infinite background. Up to human level evolution is achieved by living in harmony with nature, but with the birth of self-conscious reason it is through the struggle with, and mastery of, the natural environment, both external and internal, that evolution achieves its end.