From Chapter 1: What Is Yoga?

In the West, Yoga is widely practiced as a form of calisthenics or fitness training. The headstand, which many newcomers eagerly aspire to master, has become a symbol of this approach. For the outsider, this posture (asana) looks intriguing and difficult to do. In fact, it is reasonably easy to learn, and there are far more difficult postures that require many months, or even years, of daily practice before they are fully mastered.

More importantly, the postures are only the "skin" of Yoga. Hidden behind them are the "flesh and blood" of breath control and mental techniques that are still more difficult to learn, as well as moral practices that require a lifetime of consistent application and that correspond to the skeletal structure of the body. The higher practices of concentration, meditation, and unitive ecstasy (samadhi) are analogous to the circulatory and nervous system.

At the core of Yoga is the realization of the transcendental Reality itself, however it may be conceived. This aspect of the yogic work is not at all obvious when we watch someone perform complicated postures with great flexibility and elegance. To be sure, many Western (and Eastern) practitioners are themselves not particularly aware of the spiritual dimension of Yoga. Without it, however, Yoga remains on the level of a pastime. The traditional purpose of Yoga, however, has always been to bring about a profound transformation in the person through the transcendence of the ego. It is therefore good to remind ourselves of the purpose of authentic Yoga.

Yoga is not easy to define. In most general terms, the Sanskrit word yoga stands for "spiritual discipline" in Hinduism, Jainism, and certain schools of Buddhism. Even when the term is not explicitly used, these three great traditions are essentially Yoga. Thus Yoga is the equivalent of Christian mysticism, Moslem Sufism, or the Jewish Kabbalah. A spiritual practitioner is known as a yogin (if male) or a yogini (if female). Viewed more narrowly, Yoga is a particular branch on the huge tree of Hindu spirituality, withVedanta and Samkhya forming the two most prominent other branches. The word yoga is derived from the verbal root yuj ("to yoke" or "to harness"). What must be yoked or harnessed is attention, which ordinarily flits from object to object.

As I have shown in my book The Yoga Tradition, the roots of Yoga reach back into the distant past. Probably arising from archaic Shamanism, Yoga developed into an immensely complex tradition with rather fuzzy edges, which makes it difficult at times to demarcate it from the other branches of Hindu spirituality.

In its earliest identifiable form, Yoga was connected with the sacrificial ritualism of the Vedic peoples, who created the world's oldest extant literature—the Vedas—and apparently also were the authors of the so-called Indus-Sarasvati (or Harappan) civilization. Vedic Yoga consisted primarily in techniques of mental concentration, breath control, chanting, and ritual worship. It served the purpose of invoking, envisioning, and even merging with various deities. The Vedic male and female deities (deva) were considered great allies in the invisible realm without whose benediction life could not run smoothly. Only by focusing attention, by turning it into a laser beam, could the barrier between the visible and the invisible be melted and the deities contacted.

It is widely held that the early Vedic worldview was plainly polytheistic, gradually giving way to religious monotheism and metaphysical nondualism. But this opinion has been called into question by some researchers, who see monotheistic and even nondualist notions already in the archaic hymns of the Rig-Veda. Some think that the early hymns reflect polytheism while the later hymns (especially those in books 1 and 10) express non-dualist ideas. The idea that the invisible realm is populated with beings (deities = angels) who are somehow relevant to human beings in the visible realm does not necessarily exclude a felt sense that behind all manifestation is just One Being. In monotheism, that Singularity is given a personal face (usually that of the "Creator"). In philosophical nondualism, the same Singularity is understood in abstract terms as an impersonal "It." Both orientations have coexisted in India since time immemorial.

Yoga operates with both a personalist conception of a Supreme Person (be it God or Goddess) and an impersonalist notion of an Absolute (often called brahman). Sometimes, as in the Bhagavad-Gita (Lord's Song), an attempt is made to integrate both ideas. Thus some forms of Yoga are more religiously oriented, while others tend to be more philosophical. For example, there are numerous religious elements connected with Bhakti-Yoga, the path of devotional self-surrender to the Higher Reality, whereas Jnana-Yoga, the path of self-transcending wisdom, tends to be more philosophical or metaphysical.

However, Yoga's growing technology of physical and mental practices came to be associated with a nondualist (advaita) metaphysics. According to the earliest teachings of Hindu nondualism, as contained in the Upanishads, the multifaceted world is an emanation from the singular transcendental Reality called brahman ("that which thrives"). Yoga was introduced as a way back to that Singularity (eka).

The sages experienced that unitary Reality, which is supraconscious and utterly blissful, as being the core not only of the whole universe but also of the human personality. As the core of the personality it was called "Self," or atman. The Sanskrit term yoga was accordingly redefined as the "union" between the lower or embodied self and the transcendental Self (atman), and this is still the prevalent understanding of the word inside and outside India. However, even Yoga as union includes an element of yoking, for the lower self cannot merge into the higher Self without proper focusing of attention.

With the exception of a single but influential school—that of Classical Yoga—all Hindu schools of Yoga are based on the metaphysical idea of nonduality. The same is essentially true of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. Classical Yoga, also called "Royal Yoga" (raja-yoga), was formulated by Patanjali some time in the second century CE, apparently in dialogue with Mahayana Buddhism. As is obvious from the Yoga-Sutra, a work consisting of 195 short aphorisms (sutra), Patanjali taught a dualistic metaphysics. He pitched the Spirit or Self (purusha) against Nature/Cosmos (prakriti), regarding both as irreconcilable ultimate principles.

According to Patanjali, there are many (perhaps even innumerable) transcendental Selves, just as Nature comprises countless individual forms. However, only the Selves are conscious. Nature is insentient, and this includes the mind! The seemingly independent consciousness of the mind (citta) is thought to be entirely due to the "proximity" of the Self's supraconscious awareness (cit). Nature and its products can never evolve to become the Self, and the Self does not emanate the different categories of Nature. Creation is a process whereby the transcendental foundation (pradhana) of Nature gives rise to lower levels and forms of existence.

The Self, or Spirit, is merely a witness of this cosmic process, which runs its course automatically, just as the ultimate destruction of the visible and invisible universe is preprogrammed. The Self is neither born nor dies. It is indestructible because it does not consist of any parts. Only from the viewpoint of the unenlightened mind does the Self, or transcendental Consciousness, appear to be implicated in the various realms of Nature.

For Patanjali, the purpose of Yoga was to extricate the Spirit from its involvement in the processes of Nature. That involvement is a case of mistaken identity: the Self falsely identifies with the body-mind, thus causing the phenomenon of individuated consciousness, which suffers its presumed limitations.

Patanjali's dualist philosophy is unconvincing but it does have a certain practical merit, because from our finite viewpoint, the conscious subject, or Self, does indeed appear to be an "other" that must be carefully distinguished from the objective world and matter. Through progressive discrimination (viveka), we cease to identify with what we are not in truth. Finally, the Self awakens to its true status as an eternally free and independent Consciousness. This condition is not merely an altered state of consciousness, because even high ecstatic states still occur within the orbit of Nature. Rather, Self-realization is an utterly transcendental "nonevent." It is a nonevent because the Self is never actually in bondage to Nature but is essentially and perpetually free. It only deems itself attached to a body-mind and therefore seemingly suffers all the limitations of embodiment. The whole drama of bondage followed by liberation is enacted on the stage of the mind alone.

In Classical Yoga, Self-realization is called kaivalya, which means literally "aloneness." That which is "alone" (kevala), or separate from Nature, is the transcendental Self. But the Self is not a windowless monad, which would be a dreary prospect and hardly worthy of the kind of sustained spiritual aspiration that marks all authentic Yoga. Although Patanjali says nothing about this, we must assume that the many eternal Selves are all copresent and thus intersecting in infinity. In Patanjali's understanding, Self-realization presupposes the demise of the body-mind. This is the ideal of videha-mukti or "disembodied liberation." Not surprisingly, one of the traditional commentators on his Yoga-Sutra defined Yoga as viyoga or "disunion" or "disjunction," that is, the separation from Nature/Cosmos.

By contrast, most nondualist schools of Yoga teach the ideal of jivanmukti or "living liberation." According to this teaching, we do not need to die before we can realize our true identity, the Self. Rather, liberation is a matter of recovering the Self in the midst of the hustle and bustle of life and then transforming life in the light of that realization. This is the ideal celebrated in the nondualist tradition of Vedanta, which has long been closely associated with Yoga.

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states.

From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ananda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption.

Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yogini is in touch with the Reality beyond the body-mind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gita (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: "Yoga is balance (samatva). This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the "vision of sameness (Sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame.

This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samadhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration.

Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.