The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension.
—Jane Hirshfield
THERE IS NO BODY to speak of, just a flow of conditions, empty of an inherent identity; a yoga posture allows us to experience this energetically. But it requires focus and patience and the ability to see clearly and stay with the difficult moments that arise when the prāṇa meets deep holding patterns and we want to get away, become distracted, or be anywhere other than here. There is no way to escape. The fear of letting go into the reality of what is, is nothing other than giving up a fixed self-image; this kind of fear is the self running away from its inherent intimacy with all things, vast, unknowable, always changing. Li Po writes,
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.1
A yoga posture is not a self-enclosed static entity but an organic cycle—an open movement. The body and mind come alive when the senses converge in the world. It is through the engagement with what is not “me” that I participate in the world via body and mind. When mind and body are flexible and the sense organs less polluted, kuṇḍalinī, in the form of prāṇa, begins to flow uninterruptedly.
When we are fully in an action, the technique brings us to a point, like crossing a river in a raft, where we no longer need the technique; once we have crossed, we no longer need the vehicle. First the technique drops and then the conceptualizations drop and then feeling like a self falls away until there is movement and perception and sensation but one is so fully in the movement that there is nobody there. There is movement with no mover. There is a yoga pose, but there is nobody practicing. Like never-ending sky over endless mountains, being who you are in the most elegant sense tolerates even discursive thoughts and strong emotions but rejects nothing.
Pleasure and pain are such a major part of our perceptual lives. It’s almost a strange occurence in nature to be so focused on these two realms. Through the practice of yoga postures, we learn to move deeply within postures from the inside out so that our kinesthetic experience is dominant, not our modes of preference. We feel something so internally that we simply dissolve into movement and feeling, even with activity in the mind, but there is no sign of an agent. Then the internal dimension of yoga opens up.
This is the mystical side of yoga, which is nothing more than deep experience of the present conditions. If we cling to any of these wonderful moments, then the yoga practice returns us to the superficial level of a “me” that needs to “have” an experience. When we have profound experiences in yoga, such as direct contact with strong energies or clear insights, we have to also be vigilant that the mind does not overinterpret those experiences as special. It is easy to give such experiences authority, but this would also be a form of ego-clinging. Whether rare or regular, when energy moves, states of mind surface. If one could abide permanently in such deep states of being, it would imply great skill concentrating, but this is not liberation. Samādhi is not the goal of yoga.
In the last chapter of the Yoga-Sutra, Patañjali states that deep meditative concentration is a skill but not the goal, because there can still be clinging even to those states. What these states do offer, however, is a state of mind, body, and heart that is free from the strong pull of materialism, and this is most valuable in a mind, body, and culture that always have dangling the potential for grasping and reward.
Yoga postures have always been considered a Tantric practice, because working with the physical body brings you into direct contact with energy flow, the nervous system, the breath, and the visualizing mind. A yoga posture is an invitation into the kinesthetic sense of being everything and at the same time being nothing. It is the awakening from the illusion of a separate me, a separate body, and the feeling of fragmentation. We have talked about this from the perspective of mind and body. Nondual practice is the thread that weaves together sutra (psychological study) and Tantra (energetic movement in mind and body) to achieve the same goal: keeping mind and body alert and open to their own transformation.
We are not so different from trees and water and birds. We are of course humans and not other species, so we must ask, what does it mean to be essentially human? What occurs psychologically when we are finally free to be lost in the world without self-reference, without needing to treat our experiences in terms of a separate “me”? What does it mean to leave the other, be it person or world, untreated? This occurs not just by knowledge but through practice and connection, theory and engagement, so that one flows from the self across the magical bridge of sensitivity that leads out into the world and back again. What happens when we become the mirror behind us rather than checking ourselves endlessly in the mirror in front of us? What is it that obscures our basic nature?
What obstructs our basic nature, what Pattabhi Jois calls “the enemies in the heart,” is our habitual clinging to duality. This clinging is reinforced over and again, because it takes a fair amount of stillness and reflection to notice how the way that we experience life is limited by the conditioned grooves we call the saṁskāras. That is why yoga postures and meditation are so important—they show us how limiting these grooves are. Yoga postures train us to be free of clinging to duality. This begins by bringing together and essentially fusing the breath and the mind. When the mind and breath are brought together in an action, duality dissolves, disappears, vanishes! What remains is boundless and outside of time; Patañjali calls this śūnyatā (emptiness). Or it is called the paramātman (the selfless self of awareness). Patañjali also calls the experience of nonduality the puruṣa, which is empty of self-form (svarūpa śūnya). Patañjali gives this pure awareness a name, “puruṣa,” but the name itself is, of course, not “puruṣa.”
Where does winter get its snow? Where does spring arrive from? The Buddhists are always challenging the Hindus on whether there is a true self (ātman) or nothing one can call self (anātman). Patañjali stakes the middle ground between these two systems, and in doing so he creates a paradox that many traditions have tried to resolve through convenient interpretation. For example, when one looks through the innumerable English translation of the Yoga-Sutra, almost no one translates the word śūnyatā. But when we look into what the Indian tradition calls “self,” it is the selfless self that is no self at all! Here is an excerpt from a lecture Robert Thurman gave at a yoga studio in Manhattan:
Student: Isn’t the traditional Indian teaching of the self in direct opposition to the Buddhist teaching of emptiness?
Thurman: That is superficial. Opposing those systems in that way makes no inroads into what they are actually about. What is the self?
Student: Well, it’s the opposite of emptiness.
Thurman: No, no, no, the Indians would say. Neti, neti (it’s not that, it’s not that). The self is not your body, not your eye, not your mind, not your thoughts, not your perception, it’s not you or any “thing” for that matter. No, no, no.2
All traditions use words to answer and describe, with varied effectiveness, this experience of stillness and oneness with the nature of things. Puruṣa is a way of being without becoming, like being a form of life rather than a somebody.
In this book I have focused on the way śūnyatā has been used by Patañ-jali to point out a paradox, namely that from the point of view of the practitioner, pure awareness (śūnyatā) is the felt experience of nonduality (samādhi). However, as soon as we use words, we find ourselves caught up in dualistic language. Great Buddhist teachers such as Nāgārjuna, and especially those in the Mahayana traditions, have been able to turn language inside out and on its head until we no longer get stuck using concepts to describe the meditative state of complete integration. Patañjali gives the state a name—puruṣa—and in so doing creates a paradox that scholars have argued about ever since. Yet from the perspective of the yoga practitioner, the experience of samādhi is identical to the Buddhist notion of śūnyatā, and Patañjali uses both terms in the Yoga-Sutra and creates a kind of artificial fence upon which he rests. He does not think puruṣa is an entity, as the dualistic tradition of Sāṅkhya Yoga claims, and he does not deconstruct the language used to describe puruṣa in the way the Buddha might have. Nevertheless, from the internal perspective of the yogi, he is describing the same experience. Perhaps the term puruṣa is the only thing that keeps the Yoga-Sutra from becoming a Buddhist text!
To be liberated is to be free from clinging, even to concepts. When we begin yoga posture practice, it feels as though there is a solid “me” practicing with this solid body. But over time, the sense of “I” shifts, and we notice that. The body is pliable and not static, and we notice that too. In fact the “I” is not dependent on the body, and the body is not dependent on the “I.” Yoga postures allow us to dismantle our fixation on the permanence of what we experience. We usually cling to the content of our experience as being that—not just as something that is being experienced but as something with solidity that is real, solid, permanent. But when we look honestly, especially from a place of stillness, we see that experience is simply experience, and it is not made of anything solid whatsoever. Experience is simply an empty cognition.
When the saṁskāras are seen for what they are—conditioned patterns or potentials that influence clinging and misapprehension—then they can be seen through. This is what is meant by śūnyatā (emptiness). When we are with experience as experience, the heart opens and is bottomless; when the subject disappears, so does the object and vice versa. This is simply one heart, one mind, immediate awareness. The heart opens when there is no clinging in mind and body.
One of the most famous passages from the Upaniṣads, in which Yājñavalka speaks to his wife, Maitreyi, describes the way in which the nature of a moment, when seen for what it is, reveals the boundlessness of reality. Notice the paradoxical language and Yājñavalka (or the author’s) way of pushing past definitions: “Arising out of the elements (bhūta), into them also one vanishes away. After death there is no consciousness (ne pretya samjna sti).”3
Shocked by this, Maitreyi asks him to continue:
“For where there is a duality, as it were, there one sees another. . . . But when, verily, everything has become just one’s own self, then what could one see and through what? . . . Through what could one know that owing to which all this is known? So, through what could one understand the understander? This Self . . . . is imperceptible, for it is never perceived.”4
How can we name something “self” if it is impossible to perceive, and is therefore no “thing” at all? What Yājñavalka is saying here is that when one realizes nonduality, dualistic consciousness dissolves. When the self dissolves, so too does the object. “Self” in this case refers to the boundlessness of reality, the empty nature of things as they are.
In the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in very broad terms, the human person is seen as needing repentance, divine forgiveness, and renewal. The Absolute, for these allied traditions, is an omnipotent, anthropomorphically envisioned, monotheistic godhead. In Buddhism, it is taught that the human person is experiencing suffering unnecessarily due to mistakenly perceiving himself or herself as an enduring, self-conscious entity. Liberation, in Buddhism, begins with the realization that there is no eternal self, but only momentary states that give the illusion of a permanent person. The final extinction of the human person in the form of nirvāna (literally “blowing out”) is thus the goal. This is quite similar to Patañjali’s description of nirodha. The Absolute, in Buddhist terms, is correlated with śūnya, boundlessness, emptiness. For Buddhism, there is no god per se, nor any other permanent metaphysical reality. For Hinduism, the human existential dilemma is caused by ignorance (avidyā) of our true state as permanent spiritual beings (ātman), and our illusion (maya) of separation from reality. Liberation (mokṣa) is achieved by transcending this illusion, and by realizing our inherent union (yoga) with reality. Speaking in the most general of terms, the absolute reality in Hinduism, and more specifically in Advaita Vedanta (advaita literally means “not two”) is termed “Brahman” even though Brahman is non-anthropormorphic, and certainly not a “thing.”
Each of these traditions holds a very different account of what constitutes our true spiritual nature; each has its own distinctive idea of what it means to realize our true nature; and each has a uniquely divergent idea of what is the ultimate nature of the Absolute. Yoga seems to move within all of these traditions quite comfortably since Patañjali, as an example, and also texts such as the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa and Hatha Yoga Pradīpika, use language purposely borrowed from other traditions in a way that asks the practitioner to move beyond the doctrine of systems in order to see what those systems are pointing toward. The yogi does not look toward her practices as metaphors of consolation, and in this sense we could call Patañjali’s approach toward reality an agnostic one. Standing on the threshold of imagination but firmly planted in present experience, the yogi is concerned with freeing the mind and responding to present circumstances without self-created entrapments. In an increasingly interconnected world, we come to see that yoga is everywhere and everything and that the human being is compassion.
I have chosen these three broad religious traditions (Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu) to illustrate the point that not only are there different religions but there are also different categorical types of religion. The point is that these may not be different systems talking about the same thing but rather different systems talking about different types of experience. What is so fascinating (and also difficult) about yoga is that it slides between these different traditions by pointing out the limits of having a system in the first place. Patañjali talks about emptiness and also about puruṣa, pure awareness, creating a paradox of sorts but also appealing to those who have no problem being in between systems. He teaches on the emptiness of self-form (svarūpa śūnya) and also on the tool of using a personal deity (īśvara-praṇidhānā) for meditation practice.
The shadow side of this is that there is no network of yoga temples or priests that determine who is and who isn’t practicing, who can and who can’t be a teacher. The benefit of such a nondualist, agnostic, and anarchic reading of this tradition is that many practitioners have to go deep into texts and practices in order to embody and realize the basic teachings of yoga, free from the constraint of overly rigid doctrine. The shadow of such a viewpoint is that since there is no systematized approach to teaching, and many people simply turn yoga into whatever they want, leading to a self-styled practice that does not avoid the ego’s tricks and games. Of course we are going to interpret tradition—that is how it comes alive in each and every one of us and becomes a dynamic cultural process rather than something imagined as timeless and developed in a cultural vacuum. Attending a yoga class at any popular studio is a fascinating and disconcerting study of the way in which people sculpt yoga into whatever they would like it to be. Many teachers use their certification as a modern “yoga teacher” to simply articulate their personal philosophy on life, sometimes without ever having had a teacher of their own. Yoga is a complex and intimate set of interrelated practices that inform every aspect of life, creating a coherent path toward liberation by understanding the causes of suffering and the path to freedom. Hopefully some of the ideas in this book will help practitioners in their approach to practice so that we can all be affected by yoga theory and practice without simply manipulating yoga so that it conveniently fits into our lifestyle. Yoga does not offer consolation or security through blind faith or elaborate theories of god, fantasies of a better afterlife or safety in the face of death. Rather, yoga teaches us to value our existential disorientation and to look into it deeply and without distraction.
In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Practicing in a way that supports our lifestyle and everything we already know is not a challenge to our basic patterns of conditioning in body, mind, and heart, because if feeling good is our goal, then as soon as we feel better, we will lose interest in what is true. Yoga is the union underneath good and bad, heaven and hell, self and no self; a set of practices aimed at the resolution of opposites. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing joy or bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if the desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience reality honestly, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is real while corrupting one’s deepest integrity. Yoga is the natural state of being with what is, and practice supports us in waking up to this natural state. The important point, though, is that we need practice, practical tools, and everyday skills that help us move outside of our conditioned patterns, and for this we need some kind of system. But the system is not the yoga, only the technology for waking us up to the inherent interpermeation of existence.
If the true teacher is the present moment, everything is practice. However, we need some formal practice in order to learn the skills necessary to actually interrupt the momentum of distraction and wandering. That is why we have to practice yoga postures with great concentration, patience, grace, and subtlety. That is why we practice sitting meditation with pure acceptance and curious investigation. That is why we try always to refine our insight into impermanence, the contingency of self-image, the transience of all things, and the ways in which we create our own duḥkha. In the second chapter of the Yoga-Sutra, while discussing clinging as a case of mistaken fixation, Patañjali prescribes a complete reversal of perception as the necessary route out of ignorance: “Lacking this wisdom, one mistakes that which is impermanent, impure, distressing, or empty of self, for permanence, purity, happiness and self.”5
The present moment is very easy to talk about, and when someone can speak about it clearly, we get a taste of waking up. Many of us feel this way after reading books about yoga or attending workshops. We go on retreat and return home only to find that within a few days many of our deepest habits continue to surface. Habits always have momentum. That is why we need more than books or momentary insight. We need to embody the technology of waking up as more than a skill set and certainly as more than a new philosophy so that it becomes a way of being fully in life, and over time such an approach to practice will generate communities of practitioners and a culture focused on genuine freedom and care for one another.
Our insights need to be tested out over and over again in varying contexts. Practice and community are essential for this. Maybe some are born into a very awake existence, and Patañjali states that this is the case, but I know that, for me, the present is conceptual without the grounding of practice. “Practice, practice, practice,” says Pattabhi Jois, “and all is coming.”
I would add to Pattabhi Jois’s statement that when practice is grounded in theory and theory in practice, our insight becomes not just deep but wide. Over time, awareness touches everything, like crisscrossing lines stretched out over everything. When practice and theory go together seamlessly and our insights are continually tested out in real life, our waking up is practical and ongoing. This is called prajña (wisdom). Wisdom is the testing out, refinement, and maturation of insight. A practice that matures, both by working with the mind-body process but also through expression in community, leads to a life of wisdom. Marcel Proust sums up the cultivation of wisdom as follows:
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.6
Yoga is concerned with opening up our ways of regarding and acting in the world. Beginning in the body, yoga teaches us how to discover for ourselves the inherent unity of life. Free from doctrine and certainly from dogma, we are asked to wake up to the reality of being present in an ever-changing world without clinging to anything as “I, me, or mine.” This is the heart of practice. This is the heart of nonduality. An internal or psychological approach to yoga uses perception in this very moment as the path that leads toward waking up from the dualistic habits of clinging and repetitiveness. Practice that includes the psychological aspects of waking up teaches us how to interrupt the momentum of past conditioning in order to lead a life of ongoing awakening. Stephen Batchelor writes,
By paying mindful attention to the sensory immediacy of experience, we realize how we are created, moulded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that continually arise and vanish. On reflection, we see how we are formed from the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents, the firing of a hundred billion neurons in our brains, the cultural and historical conditioning of the twentieth century, the education and upbringing given us, all the experiences we have ever had and choices we have ever made. These processes conspire to configure the unrepeatable trajectory that culminates in this present moment. What is here now is the unique but shifting impression left by all of this, which I call “me.”
Moreover, this gradual dissolution of a transcendental basis for self nurtures an empathetic relationship with others. The grip of self not only leads to alienation but numbs one to the anguish of others. Heartfelt appreciation of our own contingency enables us to recognize our inter-relatedness with other equally contingent forms of life. We find that we are not isolated units but participants in the creation of an ongoing, shared reality.7
Our practice, like our lives, does not arrive fully unfolded. Our work is to practice in such a way that makes sense for our particular life but also challenges the stories of ourselves that enclose our lives in cycles of habit. With clarity, flexibility, and steadiness, yoga teaches us how to move responsively through the details of life. This is possible in every unfolding moment of reality. Adyanshanti writes,
To the extent that the fire of truth wipes out all fixated points of view, it wipes out inner contradictions as well, and we begin to move in a whole different way. The Way is the flow that comes from a place of non-contradiction—not from good and bad. Much less damage tends to be done from that place. Once we have reached the phase where there is no fixed self-concept, we tend to lead a selfless life. The only way to be selfless is to be self less—without a self. No matter what it does, a self isn’t going to be selfless. It can pretend. It can approximate selflessness, but a self is never going to be selfless because there is always an identified personal self at the root of it.8
Such an attitude creates in practitioners an ongoing evaluation of and commitment to our practice until the distinctions between formal and informal practice begin to dissolve, as do the frames that create any form of separation. Eventually we come to see that we penetrate the mysteries of being simply by letting go into the mystery itself. There is nothing more infinite than this very moment, which is exactly where yoga begins.