“The unexamined life is not worth living” Socrates (470 BC—399BC)
At the time of Patanjali and the Buddha, yoga was about liberation - permanent freedom from the cycle of birth and death. According to Patanjali, this was to be achieved by a process where identification with Prakriti, the individual self and matter, would be replaced with the realization that we are actually Purusha, the soul of the universe without form, unchanging and uncaused. If a yogi were to be successful in this endeavor they could/would enter Mahasamadhi where they expire at the end of their final sadhana or spiritual practice. A modern book illustrating this story is Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die by Sushila Blackman. Also one can view on the Internet pictures of mummified monks who are thought to have entered Mahasamadhi. Interesting as this story is, Mahasamadhi likely is not something modern yoga practitioners are interested in.
What has changed? Have yogis today gone soft with our Lululemon tights and Manduka mats?
At the time of Patanjali and the Buddha, yoga was about liberation - permanent freedom from the cycle of birth and death. According to Patanjali, this was to be achieved by a process where identification with Prakriti, the individual self and matter, would be replaced with the realization that we are actually Purusha, the soul of the universe without form, unchanging and uncaused. If a yogi were to be successful in this endeavor they could/would enter Mahasamadhi where they expire at the end of their final sadhana or spiritual practice. A modern book illustrating this story is Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die by Sushila Blackman. Also one can view on the Internet pictures of mummified monks who are thought to have entered Mahasamadhi. Interesting as this story is, Mahasamadhi likely is not something modern yoga practitioners are interested in.
What has changed? Have yogis today gone soft with our Lululemon tights and Manduka mats?
Or it may be the environment in which yoga is being practiced. In his book Threads of yoga, Matthew Remski suggests that “we as contemporary practitioners have far less to fear than our forebears, who lived in deplorably worse conditions than our own.” He describes it as a time of “infanticidal parenting, as well as constant war and raiding, starvation, inexplicable disease, terrifying superstition, cast slavery, constant violence against women and children, and barbaric laws and judicial systems.” If this is an accurate depiction of the time in which Patanjali was writing, it is understandable that people would want to stop the world and get off.
Later, Vivekananda, the first yogi to visit the west in 1886 presented a view of yoga as a mental discipline: “In what we call exact sciences, people easily find the truth, because it appeals to the particular experiences of every human being. The scientist does not tell you to believe in anything, but he has certain results which come from his own experiences and reasoning on these experiences.” He was aware of the difficulty of presenting Raja yoga as a religious philosophy and was making an attempt to show that it was “scientific”. But since the time in which Vivekananda wrote those words the requirements for what is accepted as “science” have also evolved: not only is to be based on experience and reason but also has to show evidence that what appears to be reasonable is actually true.
It is also interesting to note that between 1886 and mid 1960’s, when yoga started to become popular in the west, interest in yoga switched from Raja Yoga to Hatha Yoga, in particular to Asana. It was quickly embraced by a counterculture which was impressed with science, anatomy and fitness, and deeply suspicious of western religion. The complexity of Raja Yoga was simplified and replaced by Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga and transcendental meditation. Transcendental meditation gave way to various forms of Buddhist meditation and, for most people, Patanjali’s eight limbs soon shrank to one limb: Asana.
Fortunately, India had a lot to offer in the realm of physical culture. Under the occupation of the British, Indians decided they had to “man up” in anticipation of the fight which would be sure to come. Gymnasiums became clandestine nationalist training centers for body builders, gymnastics and wrestlers. Many of these physical culturists integrated hatha yoga into their training routines. By the time Krishnamacharya arrived at the Mysore palace in 1931 to teach Sanskrit it was already a well established national centre of physical culture revivalism. In 1933 he was asked by the prince of Mysore to set up a yogasala at the palace.
In his book Yoga Body, Mark Singleton sums up the yoga developed at the palace as follows. “On the oral and textual testimonies of the few surviving students from those years…, I contend that this system, which was to become the basis of so many forms of contemporary athletic yoga, is a synthesis of several extant methods of physical training that (prior to this period) would have fallen well outside any definition of yoga. The unique form of yoga practice developed during these years has become the mainstay of postural yoga.”
It appears that “liberation” from foreign occupation, not rebirth, was now the priority.
By the time asana was absorbed by the western students, India had been liberated from the British. But the idea that liberation was somehow still part of the practice, remained. It was often phrased as “getting rid of the ego”. Few stopped to consider what the mental and physical implications could be if the practices for “ridding oneself of the ego” would actually be successful. Remember Mahasamadhi?
If we are not particularly unhappy and don’t accept reincarnation (no scientific evidence,) then the permanent solution suggested by Patanjali and the Buddha are off the table. Still, things might be better with a little less suffering and that is what the Buddha seemed to be talking about.
Buddhist Vipassana meditation, also referred to as mindfulness meditation, is where attention is placed on the breath, thoughts, feelings and actions in order to gain insight into the true nature of reality. From the Buddhist perspective that is anicca or impermanence, dukkha or dissatisfaction, and anatta meaning no permanent self. Insight into, understanding and accepting those three characteristics of existence is said to lead to liberation from suffering. Since many westerners were practicing both asana and Vipassana, it is not surprising that there would be an attempt to combine the two. The result is Mindful Yoga, where awareness of the body when doing postures replaces breath awareness to bring some stability of the mind before observing one’s thoughts, feelings and actions without judgment.
A more scientific approach was developed by Swami Sivananda Radha, a student of Swami Sivananda, when she integrated yoga with western psychology as a path to liberation, which she defined as freeing ourselves from our mental prisons. I took that to mean I should carefully and often examine the stories and beliefs I had come to accept as truth. I found a neurological explanation for this understanding in the popular book My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor: “As my left brain language centers recovered and became functional again, I spent a lot of time observing how my story teller would draw conclusions based upon minimal information. For the longest time I found these antics of my story teller to be rather comical. At least until I realized that my left mind full-heartedly expected the rest of my brain to believe the stories it was making up…. I need to remember, however that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know.” In addition, the left brain not only makes up stories which it expects the rest of the brain to believe but accepts stories made up by others.
On the base of this brief story on the evolution of yogic thought, even if we are not tempted by liberation through Mahasamadhi, a conscious yoga practice will support us to find stillness, observe and understand our mind and develop the skills to examine our actions. In short, following the statement of Socrates given at the beginning of this message, have a worthwhile life…
Later, Vivekananda, the first yogi to visit the west in 1886 presented a view of yoga as a mental discipline: “In what we call exact sciences, people easily find the truth, because it appeals to the particular experiences of every human being. The scientist does not tell you to believe in anything, but he has certain results which come from his own experiences and reasoning on these experiences.” He was aware of the difficulty of presenting Raja yoga as a religious philosophy and was making an attempt to show that it was “scientific”. But since the time in which Vivekananda wrote those words the requirements for what is accepted as “science” have also evolved: not only is to be based on experience and reason but also has to show evidence that what appears to be reasonable is actually true.
It is also interesting to note that between 1886 and mid 1960’s, when yoga started to become popular in the west, interest in yoga switched from Raja Yoga to Hatha Yoga, in particular to Asana. It was quickly embraced by a counterculture which was impressed with science, anatomy and fitness, and deeply suspicious of western religion. The complexity of Raja Yoga was simplified and replaced by Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga and transcendental meditation. Transcendental meditation gave way to various forms of Buddhist meditation and, for most people, Patanjali’s eight limbs soon shrank to one limb: Asana.
Fortunately, India had a lot to offer in the realm of physical culture. Under the occupation of the British, Indians decided they had to “man up” in anticipation of the fight which would be sure to come. Gymnasiums became clandestine nationalist training centers for body builders, gymnastics and wrestlers. Many of these physical culturists integrated hatha yoga into their training routines. By the time Krishnamacharya arrived at the Mysore palace in 1931 to teach Sanskrit it was already a well established national centre of physical culture revivalism. In 1933 he was asked by the prince of Mysore to set up a yogasala at the palace.
In his book Yoga Body, Mark Singleton sums up the yoga developed at the palace as follows. “On the oral and textual testimonies of the few surviving students from those years…, I contend that this system, which was to become the basis of so many forms of contemporary athletic yoga, is a synthesis of several extant methods of physical training that (prior to this period) would have fallen well outside any definition of yoga. The unique form of yoga practice developed during these years has become the mainstay of postural yoga.”
It appears that “liberation” from foreign occupation, not rebirth, was now the priority.
By the time asana was absorbed by the western students, India had been liberated from the British. But the idea that liberation was somehow still part of the practice, remained. It was often phrased as “getting rid of the ego”. Few stopped to consider what the mental and physical implications could be if the practices for “ridding oneself of the ego” would actually be successful. Remember Mahasamadhi?
If we are not particularly unhappy and don’t accept reincarnation (no scientific evidence,) then the permanent solution suggested by Patanjali and the Buddha are off the table. Still, things might be better with a little less suffering and that is what the Buddha seemed to be talking about.
Buddhist Vipassana meditation, also referred to as mindfulness meditation, is where attention is placed on the breath, thoughts, feelings and actions in order to gain insight into the true nature of reality. From the Buddhist perspective that is anicca or impermanence, dukkha or dissatisfaction, and anatta meaning no permanent self. Insight into, understanding and accepting those three characteristics of existence is said to lead to liberation from suffering. Since many westerners were practicing both asana and Vipassana, it is not surprising that there would be an attempt to combine the two. The result is Mindful Yoga, where awareness of the body when doing postures replaces breath awareness to bring some stability of the mind before observing one’s thoughts, feelings and actions without judgment.
A more scientific approach was developed by Swami Sivananda Radha, a student of Swami Sivananda, when she integrated yoga with western psychology as a path to liberation, which she defined as freeing ourselves from our mental prisons. I took that to mean I should carefully and often examine the stories and beliefs I had come to accept as truth. I found a neurological explanation for this understanding in the popular book My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor: “As my left brain language centers recovered and became functional again, I spent a lot of time observing how my story teller would draw conclusions based upon minimal information. For the longest time I found these antics of my story teller to be rather comical. At least until I realized that my left mind full-heartedly expected the rest of my brain to believe the stories it was making up…. I need to remember, however that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know.” In addition, the left brain not only makes up stories which it expects the rest of the brain to believe but accepts stories made up by others.
On the base of this brief story on the evolution of yogic thought, even if we are not tempted by liberation through Mahasamadhi, a conscious yoga practice will support us to find stillness, observe and understand our mind and develop the skills to examine our actions. In short, following the statement of Socrates given at the beginning of this message, have a worthwhile life…
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