Authors: Benjamin Lorr
Of course, it also could not.
If you were raised like me, yoga probably conjures up a healthy set of associations: the YMCA; leggings; practitioners with a little paunch; gurus with visible ribs; closed eyes; crossed legs—a big, calm, relaxing pretzel. If
you have a little more experience than I ever had, maybe it also conjures up ideas of nonattachment, nonjudgment, Himalayan caves, internal heat, and righteous breathing. And if you’ve actually picked up some texts and studied, maybe you can recite some dos and don’ts, point to the appropriate glands that correspond to the various chakras, and explain to bored, trapped people at cocktail parties why what the people in leggings at the YMCA do is just one small piece of the big yoga pie.
All of which is why I’m sure there are plenty of people reading my description of Backbending and yoga champions with a steadily escalating sense of outrage. Outrage like: What is going on here? What type of insane corruption am I reading about? Doesn’t this asshole know pain has nothing to do with real yoga! And as much as I empathize with those reactions, their outrage will always be misplaced. Yoga is simply one of those things impervious to certainty, as incapable of corruption as it is of authenticity. And no amount of bossy, possessive attempts to claim a “real yoga” will make it otherwise.
Imagine for a moment if a group of people decided to fetishize the English word
craft.
As in:
“I practice craft.”
“I’m a crafter.”
“Oh, macramé—that is totally an invention of the 1950s. I mean,
sure,
it feels good, but honestly, plastic has no part in craft.”
“I only Bead and Weave, because those represent the true spirit of craft.”
“Macaroni Art? Farce!
How could you have Macaroni Art before Arturo
Boolini invented the mechanized pasta press in 1853? Which he did, by the way,
in Chicago.
Talk about cultural fusion, or should I say
con
fusion.”
You would not like those people very much. An abstract noun like
craft
has no single pure meaning. And these craft-fascists would be profoundly unhelpful if you had a genuine interest in actually learning something. Figuring out the most authentic form of craft wouldn’t let you know where the most aesthetically pleasing crafts came from, and it wouldn’t tell you which crafting discipline would be the most personally fulfilling. Moreover, crafting techniques that were used one thousand years ago would be valuable
only if they were still relevant today. Who wants to weave baskets out of grass in a world where nobody really uses baskets anymore?
In his book
Yoga in Modern India,
Joseph Alter makes a similar point by pulling out the Webster’s of India:
Bhargava’s Standard Illustrated Dictionary:
Yoga:
n. mas.
One of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, a union with the Universal Soul by means of contemplation, means of salvation, the 27th part of a circle, a sum, a total, profound meditation to earn and enhance wealth, unity, conjunction, union, combination, mixture, contact, fitness, property, an auspicious moment, a plan, device, recipe, connection, love, trick, deception, as a suffix used in the sense of “capable, fit for.”
If read with our YMCA expectations, this definition makes no sense. I mean, “a union with the Universal Soul” sounds familiar, but “a profound meditation to earn and enhance wealth” sounds like irony.
A property? A recipe? A trick?
Are you kidding?
If there is a joke, it’s on us.
Yoga is a vast history
: it can be contemplation; it can also be a postejaculatory man attempting to suck his semen back up his penis like a straw.
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It can be sticky mats and creepy Muzaklaced trance music; or it can be an extended fifth-grade fantasy to acquire magic powers and evade mortality. (The third book of Pantajali’s
Yoga Sutras
is entirely devoted to detailing the magic powers or
siddhis
available to an adept.) It is big tent, and the only thing for certain is the more certain someone gets about yoga, the wronger it goes.
Given this multiplicity of meaning, and in order to put the modern
yoga experience in context, it is helpful to go back to first principles and look at the intellectual cauldron where yogic ideas first evolved.
Yoga
, the word, first bounced off the tongues of nomads on the wagon trail.
The Sanskrit verb
yuj,
from which our
noun
yoga
derives, refers to the act of hitching or joining “a wheeled conveyance to a draft animal,” analogous in sound and meaning to English word
yoke.
Yoga, in this practical sense, was integral to their civilization.
These proto-Sanskrit speakers were in the midst
of a several-century migration down from Russia, navigating their oxen-drawn carts over the foothills of the Himalayas into the Indian subcontinent. Most of what we know about them comes from their early religious texts, the Vedas.
The earliest of these, the Rig Veda
(circa 1500 B.C.E.),
depicts a yoga largely practiced by warriors
either prior to charging off into battle (as they hitched up horses to their chariots), or more metaphorically, at death (when driving the horses on a holy chariot “upward through the barrier of the sun”).
This emphasis on the practical yoke behind our esoteric yoga is not to belittle it. The ability to control a horse, an animal then only a few generations away from wild, was a radical technological advance. To practice yoga was an act that invoked the snort and bristle of breaking an animal, as well as dominance over a powerful other.
When the wagoneering proto-Sanskrit invaders
rolled into the Indus Valley, they confronted a civilization more advanced than anything they had encountered before. The people of the Indus Valley were urbanites: They lived in dense cities; they appreciated sculpture; they cleaned themselves using an aquaduct-driven bathing system of a sophistication that wouldn’t resurface until the Romans. But they had no horses, they had no chariots, and they had no agricultural draft. And thus as the proto-yogi, master of his vehicle, lord of his chariot, rolled into town, it was with reverence, terror, and respect that they greeted his arrival.
In the same way the neuroscientific sages of our day draw on the language of the computer to describe their findings, the ancient philosophers borrowed from the radical new technology of their day, the yoke
and chariot.
The
yuj/yoga/yoke
conglomeration appears often in
their writings in a wide variety of allusions: the connection between words in a couplet, the link between a visionary thinker and his vision, a union at death with the divine. At the same time these images were creeping into scripture, the merger between the Sanskrit and Indus Valley civilizations initiated a metaphysical renaissance. The primordial verses of the Vedas were reinterpreted, their stories
translated into teachings or Upanishads
that began to systematically address the major stargazing themes that make up man’s quest for knowledge. The limits of the universe. The nature of perception. The origins of life. And most obsessively, the fabric of ultimate reality.
While contemplative meditative states have probably been around as long as humans have been taking idle walks, the Upanishads began detailing techniques for inducing and cultivating this awareness. When practiced, these techniques—such as breath control, appetite control, and sustained focus on objects, ideas, and vibratory sounds—allowed a person to strengthen control of their mind, in ambition, not unlike the crossword puzzling of today’s seniors. The Upanishadic philosophers believed that acquiring a heightened mental focus was a necessary first step to accurately contemplating the larger questions of existence.
Exactly how and when these practices became linked with a system of thought called yoga is currently the subject of tens of thousands of pages of academic debate. I wouldn’t dare delve into it even I could. It is the stuff that instantly slams me into the meditative state of a nap. However, what pretty much everyone can agree upon is that over the course of approximately one thousand years—from, say, 1500 to 500 B.C.E.—these philosophic ideas evolved while the imagery coalesced.
Until, finally
, during a discussion on the possibility of immortality, a text known as the
Katha Upanishad
bursts forth with the first mention of yoga as a spiritual discipline.
In the
Katha Upanishad,
a young
boy asks the Lord of Death, Yama, the type of innocent question that only young boys can ask Lords of Death:
What happens to people when they die? Instead of answering directly, the god decides that in order to reveal the secrets of immortality, he must first instruct the boy in the practice of something called Yoga.
To impart this knowledge, the Lord of Death relates the following metaphor:
Know thy Self as the lord of the chariot
The body as the chariot.
Know the intellect as the chariot-driver
And the mind as the reins.
The senses of perception are the unruly horses
The objects of sense, the terrain they range over
He who has understanding
Whose mind is constantly held firm
His senses under-control
Like the good horses of a chariot-driver (KU 3:3–6
)
The firm holding back of the senses (KU 6:11
)
And there, looking suspiciously like an LSAT question is the essential yogic metaphor, containing the first principles needed to undertake the spiritual discipline. Mind, body, sensory perception are all aspects of the self—represented here as the chariot driver, chariot, and unruly horses. A person who can control their sensory perception, who is not misled by its illusions, by its false demands, by its nagging aches and possessive jealousies—is unified. Such a person has control over not only their own body, but also how they interact with the worldly sense-objects they come into contact with.
The yoga in this metaphor uses stillness and control to examine sensory inputs and the motor outputs. Practitioners learn to observe sensations, detach from them, and choose instead to yoke their awareness to themselves
as a whole or the universe beyond.
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To practice yoga is to cultivate that connection.
Yama proceeds to elaborate on this metaphor over the sixty-three verses that follow its introduction. However, it is only with his final instruction to the youth that the god ties this knowledge together, explaining its link to immortality and putting a purpose to the techniques described above. In this final instruction, he reveals perhaps the single greatest spiritual insight of Upanshadic thought: the fruit of yoga and promise of successful practice.
Speaking to the youth, Yama explains this insight thus:
There is a Self within the self
Eternally ensconced in the hearts of every living creature.
One should, with one’s intelligence, strip him out of one’s body
One should know him as the shining, pure immortal one. (KU 6:17
)
Yama is suggesting that beyond our reflexive understanding of identity, there lurks within us an authentic self, a self within the self. By using our intelligence and mental control, we can strip out and identify this authentic self. And when we do, we will know him—we will know ourselves—as nothing more and nothing less than gods: immortal, pure, infinite, and connected to all beings.
There is something resonant about the idea of turning inward for salvation.
As ethnographer Mircea Eliade points
out, this concept of transcendence is the exact opposite of the Christian concept of ecstasy, which from the Greek root
ex-
means “to go outward.” Instead, yoga postulates an “instasy,” a journey into ourselves, whereby we discover and come to fully realize that we are made of the same material that pervades all existence: call it atoms, quanta, strings, or spirit. Once we identify ourselves in this fundamental manner, we become connected to the entire universe—not unlike
the individual unique drops of water creating and subsumed within a vast ocean. Separate and yet inseparable; fragile yet impossible to destroy. It is a vision that is simultaneously mystic and purely materialistic, open to dreamer and cynic alike.
In this sense, yoga is a case of mistaken identity, the story of a cognitive error. By identifying ourselves with something that inadequately describes us (our body, our brain, our sensory perceptions) we are prevented from seeing what we actually are (the indestructible matter/energy that makes up the universe). The techniques, the tools of yoga, are simply the somewhat strenuous activities taken to correct this misapprehension. At heart, this is a yoga of recognition:
If consciousness, creativity, memory
, emotion are properties that arise from the periodic building blocks of the universe, then there is, at the very least, a possibility that the universe as a whole is animated with those same qualities. We are energy surrounded by energy. Realizing that union—on a primary, experiential, and nonintellectual level—is what I call the practice of yoga.
The difficulty with the
Katha Upanishad
and almost all other ancient references to yoga is that while rich in purpose and allusion, they are impoverished in detail. The
Katha
does a good job of explaining what this yoga-tool is capable of, as well as the basic mechanisms it operates with, but it gives almost no help in implementation. As with any tool, a how-to guide is critical. Understanding the endpoint of yoga in the
Katha Upanishad
isn’t going to help you arrive there any more than reading a description of a cowboy riding on the trail will teach you how to throw a saddle over a horse, shove a bit in its mouth, and break it under your control.