What About Yoga?
This world is neither good nor evil; each man manufactures a world for himself
Swami Vivekananda
The M.E. meant that the best I could manage was a few light duties around the farm: weeding; holding things; admiring the view; a few minutes of wood sawing; leading April in and out of her shed. Anne suggested yoga as a keep fit aid. Well, why not? I began doing a gentle daily routine she knew of.
I vaguely knew that Yogis were keen on meditation but that meant little. I’d dabbled in a bit of meditation since the days of the Maharishi and the Beatles. I did find that the stillness it generated made me feel more relaxed, but it didn’t bring any insights. The main point of the yoga for me was to enable me to exercise in a way my exhausted body could tolerate.
I came across Richard Hittleman’s 30 Day Yoga Meditation Plan, which included some theory as well as exercises, and I began to realise that the stretches were just a part of an entire philosophy. The physical asanas were intended to encourage one’s extension into meditation, by gently toning the physical system of muscles, joints, organs, and the nervous and lymphatic systems; and especially the spinal column. To a Yogi, meditation is the point that everything else leads towards. And meditation itself is meant to be a means to an end, but an end that I didn’t understand. Samadhi? Nirvana? Eh? What? Meditation relaxes you, I could see that. But mantras? And ‘yantras’? Surely a mantra was just a distraction-tool to stop my mind from wandering? And presumably a yantra was something of the same, a bit like a candle to a Catholic?
§ A mantra can be any phrase, but Hindus favour specific names of God, as dwelling upon the name associates your mind with the quality the name represents. A yantra is symbolic diagram, usually geometric, with a similar purpose to a mantra. (Picture thanks to N Manytchkine.)
There were exercises involving moving light up your nose and into the solar plexus and from there to the forehead. I couldn’t take them seriously, but gave them a try anyway, out of respect for the system as a whole. All that happened was that I discovered I was absolutely awful at visualisation, and I already knew that.
This all changed when I came across a book called Fourteen Lessons in Yogic Philosophy in the traditional musty old junk shop. It had been published in Edwardian times and was suitably tired and battered. I opened it at random and read ‘the etheric body envelops and interpenetrates the physical body, and acts as a bridge for the life force to operate through’. ‘Interpenetrates’…? ‘A bridge for the life force’? This was stunning stuff, and stated in such a matter-of-fact manner. I read on, and was impressed by the simplicity of the tone. This was someone explaining, not trying to convert me or exhorting me to stop pinching my neighbour’s camel or his wife’s bum. What’s more, it was nonparadoxical and entirely plausible, if you could get over the shock of seeing what has been traditionally inscrutable and unknowable being unwound before your eyes and laid open for inspection.
But the thing that struck me most was that the Yogi didn’t just explain; he also insisted that I, the reader, should not take his word for it and should read very critically until I was sure that he was making sense for me and that my sense of reason was not being violated. So different from the thunderings from the desert, and the muddled declamations of Richard Dawkins.
§ The author is ‘Yogi Ramacharaka’. His other major books are An Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy; Gnani Yoga; and Raja Yoga. I recommend them if you are interested in seeing Man and the Universe from a different angle. These books are still in print a century after publication, largely because they are so brilliantly readable, I guess.
§ When I first began reading Yogic Philosophy I tried explaining it to a Christian friend. He flew into a sort of controlled fury and warned me against ‘evil’. But I had found nothing remotely ‘evil’ in Yogic thought. Quite the contrary. Kind common sense, more like, which insists upon the Golden Rule of ‘Do unto others as you would like them to do to you’ quite as much as Christianity does.
So please, if you consider yourself a Christian, or any other sort of Religionist… just read what I have to say without imposing anything else onto it. I am not the devil’s catspaw. I am, like you, looking for Truth.
And please don’t read anything between the lines. There is no hidden agenda.
I did indeed read with a critical mind, looking for the sleights of logic or vague generalisations that I’d become accustomed to in much of my previous reading. But there was none. This was simple honest stuff. Embarrassing, really, to someone brought up to think of Science as the good stuff and everything else as being superstitious rubbish.
Something that pricked my ears up was Yogi R’s explication of a traditional technique a guru (a master) will use with a new chela (a seeker). It’s very simple.
Briefly: ‘Who are you?’ That’s it. It reminded me of the inscription at the Delphic oracle, and Socrates’ exhortation to people: ‘Know thyself’. But whereas the Greek version was bald and gnomic, the Yogic one followed through, something like this:
Are you your body? No, you are not. If you were your body, you would be less ‘you’ every time you cut your nails. If you were to suffer an amputation, would you be any less ‘you’? You may be less capable, but you would not be in any doubt about the youness of the ‘you’ who knows you are now less capable. More on amputation later.
And since you were a child, you have grown enormously in size. Has the essential ‘you’ also changed? No. You may have greater capacities as an adult, but the ‘you’, the awareness who experiences these developments, remains precisely the same. Add to this the fact that we speak of ‘my’ body, meaning ‘something I own and can control’, not ‘something I exclusively am’. My hat, my bike, my body.
§ Modern Science tells us something the Yogi (presumably?) could not have known: that every cell and atom in your body is replaced every few years, including the atoms of your DNA. Thus, you are quite literally several different people during a lifetime, if your physical body is your only true being. But we all know that our inner ‘I’ remains constant.
It’s true that you might say that you are now ‘a different person’ from when you were a feckless youth, but by this you mean that you now have different ideas and standards. The ‘you’ that now has these different standards is still the same ‘you’, otherwise how could you judge the changes that have occurred within?
This was precisely the opposite of what the Materialists have been preaching with ever-increasing volume for the last 180 years. They claim we are nothing but our bodies; Yoga claims we are ultimately not our body at all. And as Materialism is non-sense, well, maybe the Yogis are right. Maybe they must be right!
This was an almost shocking thought to me, as a child of my culture. It might be to you too. But I couldn’t fault the logic.
I am definitely not my body alone, at the very least. For a start, I can dream and can thus visit all sorts of venues without my body. I can experience delight and terror without its active participation. I can talk and dance and fly, and it all seems perfectly real at the time and so does the body I seem to be inhabiting at the time. Overall, I am never at any point in my dream in any doubt that ‘I’ am ‘I’, and that I am alive and conscious, and that what I am experiencing is real. ‘Conscious’? ‘Real’? Whatever these words might mean, ‘I’ am still and always ‘I’.
§ Another thought that struck me was that the Yogi uses the word ‘etheric’ as being a sort of medium of transmission for a force. Newton the physicist also required an ‘aether’ for the transmission of light. An interesting coincidence.
Next, says the Yogi, is the question of ‘If you are not the body, then what?’ Are you your emotions? Obviously not, because we speak of ‘my’ emotions; they are, like the body, something we own and use. Are you a different person when you are happy from when you are sad? No; you are always the same person who is experiencing these emotions. You know this. When you are angry, you know there is a distinction between the ‘I’ and the anger; that is how you are able to know that ‘you’ are angry; not that ‘you are anger’. ‘You’ also feel the remorse that follows upon anger, and can compare the two conditions. Who does the comparing? ‘You’ do. Again, I could not fault this. I remember moments in my life when I’ve been distraught with some powerful emotion, but was always aware that the real ‘I’ was witnessing the drama as a separate entity. I truly am not my emotions. The fact that I can control them (usually) is proof enough of this.
This analysis struck me forcibly. I was used to psychological analysis involving complex and incomprehensible Freudian constructs, which never seemed entirely believable, and which took a lifetime to investigate if you were to become confused or unhappy (‘neurotic’ they call it), frequently unsatisfactorily, but always expensively. But here was a man telling me that I am neither my body nor my emotions, and that I am thus not at the mercy of either of them. In fact, I am in charge of them, and have not just the option, but the obligation to be in charge.
§ Quite shocking stuff to me, coming from a culture soaked in the psychoanalytic mind-set of the West, which assumes weakness while the Yogis assume strength. I found myself thinking that the Yogi’s analysis must have profound implications for the concepts of health and wellbeing.**
So if I am not my body or my emotions, what on earth am I?
I am something else. ‘My mind’, presumably? This would not be a great surprise, as clearly we identify ourselves with our thoughts and ideas rather than with how tall or violent we are. It’s our beliefs and understandings that make us what we are.
But the Yogi goes on: Are you your mind? No. Again, the clue is that we speak of ‘my’ mind. We know full well that our minds are things we own and use, just as much as our emotions and bodies. Our minds develop as we mature and use them, but it is still the same ‘I’ who does the thinking, either as a toddler or a professor. The mind’s capacity changes. The ‘I’ does not change. We have linguistic clues to this: ‘I have changed my mind’; ‘I’m in two minds about this’; ‘He doesn’t know his own mind’; ‘I have made my mind up’. There is no doubt about who is in charge here.
You use your mind for many things. You can switch your attention; you can concentrate; you can seek out a memory; you can re-live a moment, a feeling, a sight, an aroma, and a fear; you can attach a name to a face; you can compare two scents or the tastes of two wines; you can compare a present musical chord with a remembered one; you can subtract abstract numbers; you can envision a beautiful face or scene; you can focus on one voice in a crowd; you can recognise someone you haven’t seen for twenty years; you can invent a fantasy animal from as many parts as you wish (my own zebraffe is particularly stylish); you can plan several moves ahead in chess or even in tennis; you can gauge relative forces when moving an awkward object; you can deliberately learn something; and a million other things all by controlling the mind and using it. And who is doing this ‘using’? The ‘I’.
§ Students of Freud and Jung might like to see how their own analytical tools relate to this system. No terrifying id, for a start.
This was so simple, and with even the most critical analysis I could muster it was so clearly rational thinking, and as such, very different from the blusterings of Big Religion and Big Science. But was it actually true? If I need any proof that I am neither my Body, my Emotions nor my Mind, I need only remember that I can control all three of them. Thus ‘I’ am superior to them. I am in charge.
§ From now on I will capitalise Body, Emotion and Mind when referring to them as technical elements. I hope this will aid in clarity and not just be an irritant.
And I knew from my experience of meditation that one can switch off the Mind, and just…. be. It is not easy to do, but it is possible. And if it is possible then it means that the ‘I’, the condition of just being, with no thoughts present at all, can not be the Mind. Instead, ‘I’ am the condition of pure being: consciousness: awareness, into which the six senses feed: sight, sound, taste, aroma, touch; and also Mind, the sixth sense to a Yogi. ‘Mind’, he would say, ‘processes the input from the other five senses and adds memory and calculation to the mix’.
§ The Yogi accepts that part of our Mind does automatic jobs for us, like breathing or blinking. We can choose to have other acts set to auto if we wish, like playing the piano or driving a truck. It is the ‘I’ that chooses, consciously or subconsciously. Yes, he agrees, there is an ‘unconscious mind’, and a ‘superconscious mind’ as well.**
We are stimulated by the senses: a smell; somebody shouting at us; a colourful sunset. We respond to these stimuli via our Emotions, which are, basically, the responses of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. Nice smell; nasty smell; frightening shouting; beautiful sunset.
§ Advertisers understand basic stimulus/response better than we do ourselves: ‘Monkey see shiny.. Monkey want shiny’ (‘shiny’ being a reflection of ‘light’, and thus ‘desirable’). Obviously the ‘monkey’ business above is metaphorical, and often refers to ‘beauty’ rather than ‘shiny’. No time to investigate this thread here, alas.
The ‘I’ is in charge, and can use the Mind to analyse the incoming stimuli to select a considered response to them rather than just accept the unconsidered knee-jerk reaction of the Emotions. We make countless decisions every day. It is the choice of our ‘I’, every time. Do we pinch our neighbour’s sensationally beautiful camel or not? Our ‘I’ chooses. Do we pay our bus fare when it’s possible to avoid it? Do we leave a mess for someone else to clear up? Do we smile or frown? We choose, just as the Desert Three were so keen on us doing.
Interestingly, sometimes our ‘I’ chooses to let itself be overridden by its Body or Emotions (or is too weak to prevent it). Hence the plaint from the girlfriend ‘And I thought your mind was in your head’ (referring to a partial Body-Domination of the man’s ‘I’), evoking the response of ‘How many more pairs of shoes do you need, for God’s sake?’ (referring to a partial Emotional-Domination of the woman’s ‘I’).
§ Yes.. stereotyping, and I don’t care. Clichés are always based on truth, and have their value now and then. But please feel free to switch the male and female round if you wish. It really doesn’t matter. The point is made, either way.
A Yogi will say:
*People are almost always in control of their physical Bodies.
*Most of us have good control of our Emotions (those of us who are not good at this are likely to spend time in prison on charges of assault or acts resulting from unresisted temptations to greed, like theft and embezzlement).
*But few of us are in proper control of our Minds. This is demonstrated by how susceptible we are to misleading advertising; to blustering demagogues; to impulse buying; to being ‘led on’ by peers; to charismatic preachers or Scientists; or to voting for the one with the prettiest tie.
We have a progression here: the animated Body; the reactive Emotions; the considering Mind. One might compare these three states with the vegetable, the animal, and the human. When we call someone ‘an animal’ we mean that he lets his emotions rule him; when he is reduced to mere existence, after a stroke or an accident, we refer to the Persistent Vegetative State; it’s only when we properly control and use our Mind that we become human.**
§ I was intrigued by this Yogic analysis, as it confirmed that Descartes really had got it the wrong way round: we don’t exist because we can think; we think because we exist. I appreciate that Descartes said ‘cogito ergo sum’ to prove that he exists. But I suggest he’d have been nearer the mark by saying ‘I can think as a result of being; and I accept my being as self-evident, after a prolonged series of experiments with the Wet Fish Test‘, whatever that is in Latin.
§ Intriguingly: if ‘being’ is the precondition of ‘thinking’, what might that mean for the mental (and emotional) capacities of lower ‘beings’ like dogs and molluscs?
This analysis (that ‘I’ am not my Body, Emotions or Mind) is the bedrock of the Yogic Philosophy. This seems logical and reasonable, and it fits well with the world as I experience it. It is non-paradoxical and self-consistent. It does not fly in the face of any observed phenomena; and it is simple. Why do we in the West know so little about it?
§ Perhaps because of the overwhelming influence of Christianity in insisting upon us being Children of God? The Yogic view, that we are essentially Units of Self-Reliant Consciousness (as opposed to children, with its overtones of dependency) sounded like a more philosophical way of looking at ourselves. I could sense the phrase ‘personal responsibility’ looming. Oh dear..
(Of course, the other overwhelming influence on the Western world.. Materialism.. rejects all this airy-fairy stuff without suggesting anything rational to replace it with.)
***
The analysis above took a long time to sink in. It was simply too different from what I’d been brought up with. Naturally, it raised a dozen questions in my mind. As examples:
*If I’m not my Body, Emotions or Mind then what am I?
*Where do Mind and Emotions come from?
*How do I relate to them? How should I?
*What is the point of emotions?
*What on earth is my Body? ‘Oxygen and carbon’ is no answer at all.
*Why is my Body shaped the way it is? And how?
*Why am I living in it?
*Why aren’t I someone else?
*How does my dream Body relate to my physical one?
*And if I can move without a Body in my dreams, why do I need a Body at all? Or a brain, it being a part of my Body?
If ‘I’ am neither my Body, Emotions or Mind, then ‘I’ must be something else that is essentially non-physical, but which can control Body, Emotions, and Mind. This was a rational proposition, in accordance with the requirements of basic Idealism, and was not encumbered by religious fripperies.
There’s more….
Karma
Whatever one sows that will he also reap
St Paul in Galatians 6:7
The meaning of karma lies in the intention
Bhagavad Gita
Live by the sword and die by the sword
Proverb derived from Matthew 26:52
The next thunderbolt was an explanation of that hugely misunderstood word, ‘karma’. The root of the word is the ancient Sanskrit for ‘action’. The twin principles of the Law of Karma are:
1) Every action causes a result.
2) Every action causes a reciprocal reaction.
If the issues I raise here (and elsewhere) make sense to you, please tell your friends so they can examine them for themselves, too.