“And now, the Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Question,” said Rudi.
“Who’s the Real One?” I said.
“Yes!!”
We were now settled into Maggie’s parlor. Susan had made a batch of spiced tea. The storm had abated and Jake opened the leaded-glass doors to the back terrace, scenting the room with the smell of rain-soaked leaves. The late afternoon sun sent shafts of golden light along the aging oak floor.
We were already several hours into our afternoon’s explorations of pattern with Rudi. In our exploration, we had discovered that each of us at any given time is running many, many patterns. There are dozens of characters inside us whose roles we know. Dozens of voices on endless loop tapes. Dozens of Tweetie Bird and Sylvester the Cat moments. And the kicker is this: oftentimes they don’t really fit together that well. This web of patterns is full of paradox and contradiction.
“Jake,” said Rudi, “you say that Desperado is not you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then who is the Real You?” Rudi shot back.
Jake made a stab at describing the Real Jake. It came out something like this: The Steady and Earnest but Wronged and Misunderstood Boy Who’s Just Looking for Love and Working as Hard as He Possibly Can Against All Odds to Get It.
Maggie rolled her eyes.
Kate took a stab at it: “Well, I have one who kind of manages the others. Like I manage the household. I would call her Boss Lady. Would that be the Real Me?”
“I have one of those, too,” said Maggie. “I might call this one Mother. The Mother part seems like it must be the Real Me. But somehow it doesn’t feel that way.”
“I have one that makes lists,” I said. “Huge numbers of lists with things to do. Mine is a relentless organizer.”
We shared more about Real Me for a few moments, and as we described our “Real Me’s,” they sounded much like Kate’s and Maggie’s and mine: managers. Real Me as a kind of manager of all the crazy internal drama. Some were the intellectual part. Others, the organized, steady part. Others, the caretaker.
Rudi’s point began to make itself: Even Real Me began to sound more and more like a pattern. It just happened to be the pattern that was in the foreground (Ms. Manager, The Intellect, The Director). The pattern with which we happen to most identify.
Who is the Real Me, then? This is an unsettling question, to be sure. The fantasy that we’re just one synchronous person is something we work hard to convey—to ourselves and to others. Much of Western history since the Renaissance is tied up in an attempt to make a unitary “I”—to make a Real Me. This is a highly charged endeavor. But when we investigate our own experience more deeply, it turns out to be a shell game. Where is “I”?
Yogis discovered that the belief in a central “I” is driven by equal parts wish and fear. Actually, what yogis observed (as we’d been discovering all afternoon) is that we’re composed of many patterns, and, indeed, many patterns that do not even fit so well together—like a puzzle that has both too many and too few pieces. And none of the pieces it does have seem to have exclusive title to “I.” It is partly the driven attempt to make all of the pieces fit nicely together that keeps us so often at right angles to life.
It is true, of course, that we need an integrator—a symphony conductor of sorts. But what is the nature of this integrator? And how well does she function in her role—even in the best of times? Much of the time, the orchestra just plays on in spite of her—going its own highly programmed direction.
Yogis’ investigations led them to see that the self as we want to think of it, as we hope to think of it, as we long to know it, does not exist. This “self” is more circumscribed than we want it to be—and replete with paradox. When we examine “ourselves,” all we can find is a grouping of functions, all arising as a result of the laws of cause and effect.
Furthermore, the clinging to our ideas of self—to the particular set of vāsanās that we choose to call “me”—causes suffering. Patanjali sees this as an extremely problematic affliction, and he gives it the name asmitā. Asmitā is the phenomenon of “self-feeling,” the sense that “I am a self.” It involves the deepest and most intractable kind of klesha—the clinging to a nonexistent entity. It involves the reification of an “I,” of a “me,” and a “mine” which don’t really exist.
Patanjali describes how the vast array of patterns and perceptions masquerade as an individual self:
Feeling like a self is the frame that orients consciousness toward individuation.
A succession of consciousnesses, generating a vast array of distinctive perceptions, appears to consolidate into one individual consciousness. (4.4–5)
One of the central discoveries of yoga is that we are not the self we think we are. This “self” masquerading as a single entity under its own power is really only a confederation of interacting samskāric patterns. The “self,” like all aspects of the created world, is compound in nature, not singular. It is determined by antecedent causes and conditions, and is not in any way “under its own power.”
Says Buddhist scholar Mu Soeng: “It is through delusion or distorted perception that we project a permanent and substantialized self in a separated and autonomous relationship with the world. The task of practice is to see that.”1
The fire crackled. The room was still, as we all sat with this classic understanding of asmitā. Kate looked seriously unsettled, her brow furrowed. Jake was closely examining the tassel on the arm of Maggie’s tattered damask sofa. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking—but I sensed that he had taken himself away to an inner world.
Susan, however, was right there with me. “Well, in a way it makes sense,” she said. “I mean for years I’ve been feeling like Sybil anyway. I thought I was a multiple personality disorder.” She smiled wanly.
Secretly, of course, we all think we’re multiple personalities at times. And why wouldn’t we? There are those unsettling parts of us that don’t really seem to fit. Those mysterious urges. Those intrusive thoughts and behaviors we try to hide from ourselves and from others (like Crazy Uncle Fred who we keep locked up in the basement). And then there are those infernal hijackings.
Since the birth of modern Western psychology, a number of its leading thinkers have come to the same conclusion as yogis: we are more like multiple selves than unitary selves. But this view has always been marginalized in Western psychological thinking. Roberto Assagioli, the Italian founder of psychosynthesis, described a multiplicity of selves and the idea of sub-personalities, but his work never gained wide acceptance.2
Jung also recognized this multiplicity, and used a process called active imagination to gain access to the inner world of the “parts.” But even though Jung has made a profound impact on our understanding of the psyche, this particular aspect of his teaching has usually been ignored.
There is undeniable genius, though, in seeing human personality as the sum of multiple interacting patterns. In fact, we are just beginning to have some neurobiological data to show that this may be precisely how the mind works. Richard Schwartz notes that “neurobiologists and computer scientists have recognized the multiplicity of the normal mind and come up with their own explanations and models. Computer scientists find that parallel processing computers, which consist of many small processors all working independently on a problem, operate more similarly to the human mind than the older, serial processing computers.”3
So, who is the Real Me?” asked Kate with a sense of urgency. “We still haven’t answered Susan’s question.”
“None of them is the Real You,” said Rudi. “The self is a process, not an entity. And a very complex and paradoxical process at that.”
Yogis found that the entire human bio-psycho-mental complex is composed of patterns created by causes and conditions, and triggered by any number of random stimuli. These patterns are impersonal. This is their central feature. Once we grasp this central characteristic, we have already begun to free ourselves of their capacity to drive us.
In the view of yoga, the only Real Self is the Witness—the mind that sees and knows it all without judgment. The eternal Seer that does not choose for or against any part. Says Patanjali:
Patterns of consciousness are always known by pure awareness, their ultimate, unchanging witness. (4.18)
The Witness is clear-seeing, nonreactive, and free of pattern. The Witness is the only real force for integration (for making it One)—the only real Ground in the picture. This seeing, knowing experience is the only place of rest.
Knowing this, we can stop the war with all of the fantastic parts of our experience. We can soften our clinging and craving for “I,” “me,” and “mine.” We can soften our aversion to difficult parts. We can stop trying to make them all fit together nicely.
Jake, where are you?” I asked. He had been somewhere else for virtually the entire conversation.
“Huh?” he answered.
Something about this conversation had so challenged him, that we were getting to see Desperado right there in the room, in the moment. He had left. Gone wandering.
“It’s all bullshit,” said Jake, now slightly irritated to have been brought back. “What does it have to do with me, anyway?”
“Well,” said Rudi, “it means that you don’t have to choose between The Earnest Boy and Mr. Desperado. You don’t have to choose one side and disavow the other. You can allow yourself to see both, and to accept that they are both patterns you play out.”
Susan had understood this in a visceral way. “It has everything to do with you, Jake,” she said. “Seeing in this way gives you a lot of freedom that I would think you might want.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Kate, now frustrated. “I have to have a self, don’t I?” she said to no one in particular. “Otherwise I’d be psychotic!”
Jake gave a vague nod to Kate’s frustration. Maggie looked puzzled, but was not going to commit herself one way or the other. Only Rudi, Susan, and I seemed to have any sympathy at all for this facet of the yogic view.
Kate’s question was important—and her skepticism completely understandable. She needed an answer, and I was pretty sure the classical answer would not satisfy her. In the view of the yoga tradition, it’s just more complex than Kate would like it to be. The belief in a unitary “I” is a useful organizing device and a necessary stage in our development as adults. Our belief in a solid, unitary self under its own power serves as a stepping stone, or a way of remaining internally organized, until we can know the paradox and complexity of living as simple presence.
This interim “I” is for a time, a kind of sustaining fantasy. Without it we can never proceed to a more nuanced view of self. (Indeed, for those of us with shaky childhood foundations, much of adult life can be a quest to simply establish this important sustaining fantasy.) But if, in the process of development, we get stuck here, if we continue to confuse this illusory “I” with the Witness (with pure seeing and knowing), then we begin to deepen our duhkha—as Jake did in the years just before his summer at Kripalu. When we continue to identify exclusively with this “I” well into middle age, we begin to live more and more at right angles to life—struggling to get from life something it cannot give. Belief in this nonexistent subject is inherently deluded, and therefore inherently afflicted.
Again the Buddhist teacher Mu Soeng says it well:
Through ownership of something that’s going on exclusively inside our heads, we are constantly and unconsciously defining ourselves, and creating self-serving feedback loops of immense complexity. We create layers of selfhood that become their own trap. In all these feedback loops, the contents of the internal chatter present themselves as compellingly real and valid. Rarely do we realize that they are nothing more than mere views and opinions, created by a specific set of feedback loops. Such is our investment in our views that we are always willing to defend them over the views of others, implicitly believing that our views are real while others’ views are mere opinions.4
Yogis in their cave-laboratories found that grasping for this “I” is one of the deepest roots of unhappiness. Why?
First of all, in order to create this “I,” we must create a “not-I.” So we draw a boundary around “I,” and everything outside that boundary is experienced as alien to it. In order to create the boundary, we must choose for some aspects of our process (our patterns and behaviors) and against others. Jake had to choose against some part of his experience: so Desperado was disavowed. Susan chooses against Food Pig. Maggie against Pulitzer Prize winner. This is how we create “I.” To bolster an inherently tenuous position, we cling to “me” and “mine” and push away “not me” or “not mine.” We are constantly forced to shore up our position.
This device, this category of “I,” can occasionally give us a qualified sense of mastery over a circumscribed sphere, but it comes with a large price tag: it automatically creates an “other” which is outside our control. And this split becomes another source of affliction.
Says psychologist, author, and yoga scholar Swami Ajaya about this problem:
The very power and control that is acquired by drawing a boundary around oneself is gained through the creation of its complement: an overwhelming sense of helplessness and weakness. By defining itself in a very circumscribed and narrow way, the ego gains the leverage to master that small sphere called I. But at the same time the other side of the polarity manifests; one becomes very small and relatively weak and helpless before the vast world that exists outside of those narrow boundaries, outside of oneself as one thinks himself to be….This I is like a country surrounded by foreign powers: it may be overrun by any quality that it has defined as being outside its boundary. As a consequence of its extremely insecure ground, the ego devotes a great deal of its energy to bolstering its position.5
The act of creating a subject automatically creates the rest of the world as object. And now we are separate from it. This is precisely what Carl Jung saw: “All ego consciousness is isolated: because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars….Its essence is limitation.”6
So, we are stranded on an island of our own making. An imposter Bali Hai. We experience intense loneliness, isolation, and longing for what is outside the boundary. We seek to complete ourselves. We seek out those objects and conditions we have separated off. But these objects, as long as they are objects, remain incapable of truly creating wholeness. By definition we remain distinct and separate from the object. We have already seen that objects remain empty of the capacity to satisfy us. Now we have a further explanation of why this is so: There is no happiness in having (possessing) a self. There is happiness only in knowing the experience of being.
The illusory “I” brings in its wake the same three characteristics of suffering as the more gross afflictions of craving and aversion. Clinging to “I” creates disturbance, obscuration, and separation.
Disturbance The “I” introduces a subtle and ineffable new object of grasping and aversion. We cling to I, Me, and Mine, and we experience aversion to all that threatens them. In the Western psychological view, these subtle and often invisible forms of craving and aversion are treated as if they were built into the structure of the mind itself. Yogis found, however, that—as with all afflictions—they do not exist in the deepest parts of the mind.
Obscuration The clinging to I, Me, and Mine, leads to the overvaluation of a nonexistent entity, which is the deepest source of delusion. This self can either be overvalued or undervalued—seen as all good or all bad. Either way, these evaluations are delusive since they are a reaction to habits and patterns which are artifacts of causes and conditions—impersonal in nature and not under their own power.
Separation Finally, this “I” separates us from an experience of bare reality—of being itself. Just as clinging and grasping to possess any object paradoxically separates us from truly knowing the object, our delusion of self separates us from knowing life in its real fullness. We recognize this separation during the occasional moments of its temporary dissolution—on the yoga mat, the meditation cushion, while communing with nature, or in any spontaneous moment when the veil drops away. At these times, we know our profound oneness with the world.
Yogis found that all objects in the created world, including our illusory “I,” are compound in nature, arise because of causes and conditions, and have no inherent self. But having named them, and clung to them, we give them a power they don’t really possess. The world that is splendidly composed of patterns and processes—a river of energy and intelligence—is then seen in categories that make it appear more solid, more boundaried, more stuck in Time and Space than it actually is. We have become trapped in what yogis call “the world of name and form.”
“I’m not sure what to do with all of this,” said Kate. “I mean, really. So what?”
The storm had abated now, and the sky was clear. The terrace doors were open to a cool breeze, and occasionally a yellow leaf blew in. We would soon have to leave for our hike to the ridge if we were to make it up and back by sunset.
“I guess I just don’t understand the implications for my life,” she finished, somewhat defeated.
“OK,” said Rudi, leaning forward. “Here’s what you might try, Kate. See if this makes any sense at all.” I knew what was coming, because Rudi had once given me the same instructions in response to a similar question.
“Start noticing the most unacceptable parts of yourself. I mean the ones that you can barely stand to let out of the basement where you also keep your crazy aunt Sally. I mean the ones that are surrounded by shame and dread. The ones you wouldn’t dream of telling us about.”
“OK,” said Kate, tentatively.
“Find those parts, and make them OK. Make room for them. Let go of judgments. Just watch them. Befriend them.”
Kate was perfectly still.
“Name them, like we’ve been doing today. Learn all you can about them. As if you were Maggie, writing a character in a novel. What triggers the pattern? How does it develop?
“Then, notice that just knowing the pattern automatically begins to interrupt it. Takes the air out of it.
“Most important, remember: none of these patterns is you. You are the part that knows the patterns. The Witness. The Seer of it all. And you are absolutely OK in spite of the fact that you’re running these old blueprints.”
“But that’s exactly what I can’t do, Rudi. And besides. Why should I? These parts of me are no good.”
Kate was reacting—flustered. This conversation had hit her central defensive structure: denial and delusion. Kate painted pictures on reality. We all knew it. Rudi was pushing her to be with bare reality.
“OK,” said Rudi, now scooting his chair closer to Kate’s. “Just stop. Notice how you’re feeling right now. Notice your reactivity to this conversation. To me. Just see if you can be with it for a minute. Can you make this OK, too?”
Kate sat back in her chair.
Rudi was teaching the central view of yoga: the antidote to duhkha is simple (but not easy): stop the War With Reality. The rest of the path tumbles out from there:
~ Interrupt the chain of reactivity at the earliest possible “link.”
~ If necessary, begin by interrupting the reactivity to the reactivity!
~ Then, as soon as the War With Reality is interrupted, consciousness begins to settle.
~ As consciousness settles, patterns come more clearly into the light of awareness and are exposed for what they are.
~ Now, slightly freed up from the war, we can begin to observe and interrupt the chain of reactivity at even earlier and earlier points.
~ Eventually, we can trace samskāra and vāsanā back to their roots.
~ In this way, samskāras are attenuated and “burned up.”
~ As samskāras are attenuated through exposure, consciousness becomes still.
~ In the stillness, Illumined Mind shines through, and catches a glimpse of itself in the mirror of Pure Awareness.
This sounds magical and mysterious. And it is, I think. But in practice, it is important not to have unrealistic expectations of the process. Our patterns continue to spin themselves out, even as we become more and more conscious—although their intensity is gradually abated. No matter how much investigation we do, the shadows of samskāra and vāsanā remain.
A classic yogic text called the Sāmkhya-Kārikā—written in the centuries just before the Yoga-Sūtra—describes it this way, using an analogy to a potter’s wheel: The potter is turning the wheel, working on a pot. Eventually, the pot is finished, and the potter stops turning the wheel. But even after the potter has stopped cranking the treadle with her foot, the wheel continues to spin—out of sheer momentum. Even after we’ve stopped putting energy into our patterns, they continue to play themselves out. The good news, though, is that the practice of witnessing also continues: just watch. See that the patterns are not “me.” See that these patterns are now only ghosts—shadows of their former selves.
Yogis discovered that through practicing in this way, something subtle but astonishing begins to happen: we stop taking these patterns personally. We stop naming them “I.” We stop identifying with them. We see that they are impersonal.
American writer Phillip Moffitt tells it in an essay about his practice of yoga and meditation:
The most profound change I’m aware of just now is a growing realization that life is not personal. This may seem a surprising or even strange view to those unfamiliar with Eastern spirituality, but it has powerful implications. It’s very freeing to see that events in my life are arising because of circumstances in which I’m involved, but that I’m not at the center of them in any particular way. They’re impersonal. They’re arising because of causes and conditions. They are not “me.” There is a profound freedom in this. It makes life much more peaceful and harmonious because I’m not in reaction to events all the time.7
Yogis suggest that we are too caught up in our own personal stories, and that these stories are, after all, just that—stories. Like the ongoing saga of Tweetie Bird and Sylvester.
When Swami Kripalu came to visit America in 1981, he went directly to Kripalu Ashram—then located in eastern Pennsylvania. Early on in his stay in this spiritual center, he had an introduction to our Western proclivity for overidentifying with our stories and dramas. Swami Kripalu overheard wailing, crying, and screaming coming from a nearby program room. “What is that?” he asked, alarmed. He was told that it was an Intensive, an opportunity for students to “cathart out” their pain—to scream, to cry, to vent anger on a pillow or other inanimate object.
He shook his head in disbelief, and thought a lot about this while he was in America. Later, he suggested that what American students need most is what he called the practice of “self-observation without judgment.” “The major principle in self-observation is that the observer remains neutral and objective. To whatever extent you are able to be objective in your self-observation, to that extent you will receive the light….Do not wrestle with a fault that you want to remove. Wrestling increases the disturbance of the mind and allows the excited fault to lift you up and slam you to the ground.”8
The genius of the yogic strategy is the understanding that resistance and reactivity to patterns just create more problems: the Tar Baby Effect. The more we push and pull and resist, the more deeply we become enmeshed in grasping, aversion, and afflicted mind. And afflicted mind can only take us deeper into suffering.
All wisdom traditions eventually discover the practice of self-observation without judgment. As Swami Kripalu noted, effective observation cannot take place in the context of reactivity. So radical acceptance is required. Accept everything, said the swami—those things we label good and those things we label bad. All sramanic traditions lead beyond these so-called pairs of opposites—beyond pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, wish and fear. This is where psychoanalysis leads, as well. It is where science leads. It is where mystical Christianity leads (the Christianity of William Blake and Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross).
One of Carl Jung’s longtime patients wrote to Jung describing this same relationship between radical self-acceptance and self-knowledge:
By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality—taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be—by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things, they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to.9
“I have one small argument with all this,” said Susan, with some hesitation, furrowing her brow. “In fact, maybe it’s not so small.
“My twelve-step program taught me that I’m powerless over these patterns. And I really think it’s true. I have no power over them whatsoever. Acknowledging this was the first step in my recovery from compulsive eating.”
Jake rolled his eyes.
“Jake, stop it. I know what I’m talking about here. As soon as you try to control the patterns, you’re screwed. You’re Brer Rabbit, as Steve would say.”
There was wisdom in Susan’s declaration. In fact, yogi-sramanas came to an identical conclusion: ordinary mind cannot transcend pattern. Even the mind that is occasionally capable of seeing, “Oh, I’m stuck in pattern,” is not capable of transcending that pattern. As we have seen, ordinary mind is inherently afflicted, disturbed, obscured, separate.
Of course, we have momentary freedom from striving, and these moments are tremendously powerful: Jake in the shower, Maggie at her writing desk, Rudi, Maggie, and me in mantra practice. They give us a taste of a new way of Being: Happiness with Being Itself. And they bring glimpses of Illumined Mind. But these awakenings are fragile. They collapse under the tremendous power of the self-representation—I, Me, and Mine—and the chain of longing, clinging, craving, and duhkha begins all over again. Even the mind that seems to break free does not and cannot finally break free of samskāra and vāsanā.
The power of affliction, of rāga and dvesha, is so great that when combined with asmitā, samskāra, and vāsanā, it simply cannot be deconstructed by the unaided human will.
We’re caught. We’re Brer Rabbit, hopelessly stuck to Tar Baby. Is real freedom a possibility?
The answer is, happily, a qualified yes. Freedom is a possibility. Sramanas discovered an escape from the bind of karma. A narrow door. They discovered that, indeed, all actions are motivated by latent impressions, and most of these actions lead to further bondage. These actions are called klishta, or “actions resulting in bondage.” Brer Rabbit actions. There are, however, certain kinds of actions which lead to the attenuation of affliction, and to the resurgence of true self, subtle mind, Illumined Mind. These actions are called aklishta—“actions not resulting in bondage.” Actions which are aklishta are those actions which quiet the crazy puppy; actions which help us familiarize ourselves with pattern; actions which help us attune to the wisdom of Illumined Mind; actions which promote self-observation without judgment.
Here’s an interesting twist: these actions still create patterns—because the human psycho-mental structure is built on samskāra and vāsanā. But actions which are aklishta create patterns which finally set us free from pattern—which have no Tar Baby Effect.
This is a remarkable discovery, and one that Patanjali, had he been a more colorful writer, might have accompanied with bells, whistles, and trombones. The causes of affliction contain within themselves the possible vehicles of their own destruction. We can enlist the very tendency to habit and pattern as an aid to end habit and pattern. These techniques (aklishta!) seize the vehicles of affliction and subtly redirect them—like a mill which begins by grinding the coarse grain, but eventually grinds even itself into dust.
These kinds of actions are what Patanjali calls yoga kriyā—yogic actions, or actions that yoke us to the process of interiorization and introversion. Yoga-kriyā move us gradually toward a heightened attunement to Illumined Mind. They awaken the Witness.
Patanjali says simply:
When the components of yoga are practiced, impurities dwindle; then the light of understanding can shine forth, illuminating the way to discriminative awareness. (2.28)
Now, perhaps, we’re getting somewhere. And what, precisely, are these actions? Patanjali will go on to describe them in detail. In the next sūtra, he gives us the classic Eight-Limbed Path of yoga, or ashta-anga-yoga, literally “eight-limbed yoking.”
The eight components of yoga are external discipline, internal discipline, posture, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditative absorption, and integration. (2.29)
In this pivotal sūtra, Patanjali offers what is certainly one of the most simple and elegant plans for optimal living ever devised by the human mind—a non–Tar Baby plan for unwinding the patterns that keep us snared in duhkha. Eight-Limbed Yoga is not, of course, Patanjali’s own invention, but rather a stunningly concise summation of centuries of sramanic wisdom. It begins with what will be for us a radical reframe of ethical practice, moves through a careful description of attitudes about living, introduces a methodical program of concentration and meditation, and ends with a complete deconstruction of the architecture of ordinary mind. Who is not intrigued by a program that begins by challenging the most basic mischief of everyday life (lying, stealing) and takes us all the way to ecstasy?
From the moment I first met these Eight Limbs early on in my yoga career, I have remained fascinated by this developmental scheme. So simple—yet so psychologically sophisticated. It was my fascination with this practical psychology of liberation that kept me glued to those dusty old texts all those years. How does this program actually work? I wondered. And what kind of human beings does it create?
Most intriguing, I think, is the way Patanjali’s model of human development remains as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. It seems to uncover some archetypal inner structure—and keeps a finger on both the roots of suffering and the possibilities of happiness and fulfillment.
Patanjali’s exposition is at one and the same time a description of optimal human living, and a path to attain optimal human living. It succinctly describes both the path and the goal of yoga. All the practices of the Eight Limbs are potentially yoga-kriyā—aids to freedom. They lead to a gradual disidentification with afflicted mind, to attenuation of the kleshas and to the gradual revelation of Illumined Mind.
Here is the Eight-Limbed Yoga described by Patanjali:
yama: external disciplines and ethical practice
niyama: internal disciplines
āsana: posture for meditation
prānāyāma: breath regulation
pratyāhāra: withdrawal of the senses
dhāranā: concentration
dhyāna: meditative absorption
samādhi: oneness
The remainder of this book is organized around a systematic inquiry into these Eight Limbs.
Our afternoon at Maggie’s house ended with a hike up into the now-yellowed and denuded woods behind the cemetery. As we hiked single file through the cool forest, I thought back on the preceding months. It was now early November. Maggie, Jake, Susan, Kate, Rudi, and I had been together as an informal group since early May. It had been six months since Jake arrived from Boston—and a little more than two months since our picnic on the ridge.
This November afternoon marked the beginning of a new phase in our life together as a group. From this point on, over the course of the next two years, our work would take on a new intentionality—as the complexities of our lives prompted us to try on the various practices of yoga. We tried these practices not because we believed in them as one might believe in a religion, but because they were the tools we had, the tools that were in front of us.
Over the course of the next two years, our group would experiment with Patanjali’s aids to freedom. Each in our own way, we would conduct what Gandhi called “experiments in Truth,” both with ourselves, and with one another. In particular, we would each wrestle with some developmental task that was made easier by yoga practice. We would find that these practices required a new kind of effort. They stood aspects of Western psychological thinking on its head. And they led to surprising changes in every one of us.