Demystifying Yoga: An Introduction

A New Series Devoted to Topics in the History of Yoga

atha yoganuśānam (Yogasutra, 1.1)

“Let us study yoga together.”

The Sanskrit word in Patanjali’s first Yogasutra that tells us what we are going to do here is anuśāna, which means, to study and to study together.  Yoga will be our subject, more about that later.  But properly speaking this is a śastra, a text formulated as an argument that should be taken seriously and for which a case must be made.  No matter how Patanjali resorts to personal experience to validate his claims, his treatise is the shareable, serious argument.

“He is not a serious person.”  I doubt this statement from our current Vice President and candidate for the American Presidency changed one vote when she made the point in debate.  In fact, I don’t think most folks gave it a second thought and, I could be wrong, but I don’t think she was well understood.  The opposite of “serious” here might include frivolous, senseless, pointless, foolish, idiotic but I think she also meant dangerous and inept.  Given Vice President Harris’s target, all of these meanings apply.

“Serious” too often means grim, severe, it is rarely welcomed in any sentence.  Coming to terms with being serious may be a requirement of adulthood but it’s usually one we can postpone, ignore, avoid, or neglect until we have to.

Serious can be seriously unfunny and who wants that?  It will also require thinking; dare we say thinking for yourself and engaging with understanding and the responsibility to create meaning rather than merely adopt it or say things.  None of these matters should be confused with happy though they are not necessarily opposed.  No one in their right mind can oppose happiness though I might suggest we too often substitute it for meaning or resort to it so that we don’t have to cope with more.  None of these invitations to our learning to be human are either simple or natural.  Serious is a complexity, and we don’t learn that without learning to think, which is hardly natural.

Thinking for yourself is not easy; to do it well we must learn what it means to think critically because that’s not the same as caviling, disparaging, much less insulting or being depreciative.  We can be more astute and develop greater sensitivity to the complexities of experience.  It can be hard to express our thoughts, our seriousness without seeming to be on the attack, ad hominem, making it personal.  But that’s why it’s hard to learn and important to do.  (n.b., that might be yet another definition of yoga.)

Yoga traditions considered “argument” an essential skill except when they were too busy trying not to think, as if this were the problem, or surrendering their autonomy to a supernatural force, some or another “blessed one” who somehow mysteriously knows better.

There are plenty of yogas and other spiritual traditions (Can we just call them religions? Please?) that dismiss, dissociate, or decry thinking, much less thinking critically and learning how to be serious about it all.  Let’s not be too much the downer.  But I’m going to let those who insist silence be their teacher and the sole guardian of truth be left to their quietist desires.  Silence is the space between the notes, so it too is music but without the notes, well, it’s just silence.  Carry on.

Traditions also maintained that thinking can and indeed must be taught if we’re to gain greater skill-in-yoga.  As the Gita (2.5) puts it, yoga karmasu kausalyam, that is, yoga is efficacy in actions.   There is no spiritual practice more humanizing than learning to cultivate our cognitive abilities in the service of a more complete sense of embodied existence.

If you’re interested in becoming more than merely human, say, “enlightened,” or “perfected” in some way that obviates human conditions and limitations, there are yogas that purport to bring you to those states or realizations.  Good luck with that.  Blame it on karma or maybe your next rebirth but we’re going to get on with being just human.

It’s only cynical to dismiss such “perfection” claims if you think they are not by definition dehumanizing.  Humans cannot not make mistakes; we remain incomplete and unfinished at our best; and if that is apostasy to certain yoga traditions---and it is to nearly all if you have studied them seriously---there’s still no good reason to think otherwise.

We may want there to be a perfect being, place our faith in an ideal, a purported achievement, or some other claimed possibility, but such a belief is a religious assertion, and there’s nothing about such a claim that retains shared humanity.  Why do we want there to be such perfection?  That strikes me as the far better question than if there is perfection.

This is not a call to reduce our experience to only the rational.  We are as much non-rational beings whose feelings, impressions, intuitions are human and warrant our respect.  I’m sure my teacher was more clearly aiming at the true alternative, the irrational where claims or beliefs reduce to the personal and cannot reach across the boundary to shareable, dare we say, demonstrable or even provable truths.  Resorting to the irrational is serious only insofar as it is to claim there is more we want from human life than to be human.

Rudolf Otto, whose effort to describe religious experience he called das Helige, the Holy, was translated from the German as The Idea of the Holy.  Otto thought that the Holy was a numinous reality and that those who had not had such experiences could never understand it.   He thought the absence of such experiences disqualifying for the “true” meaning of religion or, as we might put it, the spiritual experience.  But this is nonsense or, at best, another assertion that a spiritual life demands some measure of supernormal, supernatural, supermundane experience and that reality is offering just such a thing.  Okay, if you say so.  But am I disqualified from a “spiritual life” if I don’t have or even want such experiences?

Thus “das Helige,” the Holy, includes any kind of superhuman being lest the spiritual life actually have to admit we are merely human.  If folks need those ideals, aspirations, or claims---and they cause no manifest harm to others---you’ll hear no further objection from me, but you may not want to read much further.

I would have to agree with Hitchens that most formulations of God---to which I would add Buddha, Siddha, etc.---create some degree of positive impediment to cultivating a more humane yoga, a deeper engagement with our selves.  Do we need a soporific salve to find deeper meaning and purpose?

What’s on offer?  I’ve studied yoga traditions formally for fifty years now.  Learned some of the many languages in which they have been recorded and travelled to experience and practice with scholars and believers.  I still have much to learn because that too is a requirement of a more humane yoga.  But I will say that only the rarest expressions of yoga (or other religions, call them spiritualities if “religion” rankles) resolve their claims to achievement with an entirely human character.

Many teach us to be more humane, to be gentle, capable, compassionate, dignified beings---and who could disagree that this is commendable when there is so much cruelty and worse in this world?  But virtually none of these spiritual paths are content with ideals that leave us with flawed, vulnerable, uncompleted humans and every last one of them claims more than that limited degree or conditional quality of human potential.

I have two intentions for the essays that will follow in this series.

First, I will take up specific sources, authors, and ideas from across yoga traditions, particularly from Hindu, Buddhist, and other comparable sources, explaining their positions and claims charitably.  Charitably means I will take them seriously, give them every benefit of the doubt, attempt to imagine their experience with sympathy for their assumptions, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions.  I will consider their non-rational claims too.  In short, we need to understand the case and their theory of their case, that is, why they believe what they believe and why we think they believing.

Second, I mean to point out the value and goodness we might draw from their good-faith efforts and then point out the drawbacks, expenses, consequences, and even the damages done by assenting to such claims.  I don’t need our critique to claim any superiority but neither need we demur.  Just because people’s religious or spiritual claims are personal doesn’t mean they are exempt from understanding or from serious criticism.

True, people are tender and that makes the subject unlike others.  If you prefer softball to hardball then that’s okay.  But serious isn’t cruel, it’s just the opposite.  It's trying to keep it real and be honest and get folks to engage.  That’s the kind of yoga I was taught but not all that I have studied.

Being “serious” can appear unfriendly, severe, unfriendly, even hostile but its critical purpose is to be revealing, candid, sober, human and humane.  Meaning is not happiness: it is the deeply human endeavor to find value, worth, dignity, significance in the face of our shared mortal existence.  This yoga thing isn’t just about feeling good or being “happy.”  It’s about deciding to be serious when the world doesn’t often invite or value such prospects.

And it’s gonna be fun if you’re up for the ride.  Because while we might offend or touch tender feelings, being human requires humility.  After all, we’re unfinished and we’ll ask ourselves how we could be mistaken before we claim to be right.  We’re in it to learn so that we can think for ourselves rather than be indoctrinated or just believe.   We’ll not mistake positive thinking, aspiration, or potential for belief: instead, we’ll ask what is possible when all we have are our wits and each other.

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