CHAPTER TWO
RESTRAINT IN TIMES OF UNRESTRAINT
THE WORLD DOES not exist for us; the world just exists. To say that it is for us or not for us creates a fragmentation from the outset that obscures the deep continuity of all life-forms and gives us a false sense of separateness—an artificial division that yoga teachings try to break through. The inherent union of all life—what we have defined as “yoga”—is never beyond morality, because it’s up to each of us to express this union through all of our actions of body, speech, and mind. We don’t practice nonviolence as much as we are nonviolence; we don’t try to act compassionately—we actually become compassion. Whatever is happening in the hearts and mind of others is also happening to us. Whatever harm we cause to the rivers and rain clouds we also bring upon ourselves; or are we defining our “selves” too narrowly? Reverence for life begins when we realize that we are a microcosm of this vast continuity we call existence.
Human beings are not the most important life-form in the ecological matrix, but surely we have caused the most devastation to our known ecological world. The richest 20 percent of the world’s population now receives 150 times the income of the poorest 20 percent.1 The richest one-fifth of the world
Almost 800 million people—about one-sixth of the population of the world’s developing nations—are malnourished. Two hundred million of them are children.3 It is estimated that 880 million people lack access to basic health care and 1.3 billion lack access to safe drinking water. Seventeen million people die each year from curable diseases, including diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis. Five million of these people die due to water contamination.4
We live in times of unrestraint. Within a one-mile radius of my home in a Canadian city, I can purchase, even in the middle of a snowy winter, olives from Crete, organic spinach from California, garlic from China, a cashmere scarf from India, and a bottle of wine from just about anywhere; I can order products through the Internet or listen to radio on any international bandwidth. Our neighbors, refugees from Tibet, can hardly afford any of the aforementioned items, although their family dinner tonight, the gas that runs through their stove, the entertainment on the television that’s playing as they cook, and the bottled water on the table will not be sourced locally. It’s hard to wrap our minds around the way transportation patterns, digestion patterns, pollution, consumption, even the dinner table itself, impact the web we call life. Without attention to such connections, choices become life-destroying rather than life-affirming.
My bicycle was built in Sweden, our son’s toys in Germany, our maple kitchen counter in Michigan, and I have no idea where our cat was born. Although much of our contemporary progress and change offers us significant improvement in the quality of our lives, that progress also hides a shadow. Karma reveals that shadow: the effects of our actions internally and externally. We most often think of karma as personal or something “spiritual” and not of the “material.” Although the root kr of the word “karma” means “to do” or “to create,” karma is not something you do or try to manipulate—it is something you are in every mode of your being. You are the choices you make.
Our dominant philosophy is one of unlimited material growth in all its manifestations: economic, industrial, reproductive. Even personal forms of growth like self-improvement projects and self-help groups are manifestations of individual and collective discontent that seeks to find happiness in anthropocentric ways. In this context, restraint seems, on the surface anyway, illogical: If we can have whatever we want whenever we want, why would we contemplate or even investigate the notion of restraint?
If we can’t have what we want, we at least have the means to overproduce. We are a culture caught in a cycle of overconsumption and overproduction to meet our exponentially rising desire for more. If we don’t have enough electricity to meet our needs, we can build another power plant. In fact, since our family lives on the lower end of the income scale, our federal government recently sent us a check to cover the costs of rising electricity bills. Although we receive money to pay our bills, the government doesn’t ask us to restrain from using as much power as we do, nor do we hear from the government about limiting the ways we use electricity; instead we use the taxpayers’ money to maintain a lifestyle so rarely questioned. Yet the economy, the environment, the mind, and the family must all be healthy for the others to survive—there is no dichotomy in such an equation. If we only think in terms of economic growth and if we are always motivated by the insatiable ghosts of endless desire, how do we measure the end point?
The course of spiritual practice found in the nondualistic traditions of Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism offers us an understanding of and insight into the relational nature of reality and the interconnectedness of all things. Like many traditions, the Yoga tradition of Patañjali, a system known for its meditative practices, begins with a sophisticated understanding of relationship, interconnectedness, personal transformation, and ethics. Or, we might say the system is so very simple and basic to our nature. Even though the body is supported by and created of the natural world, the distracted and overly conceptual mind might be operating in an entirely different metaphor that is totally disembodied, heads and shoulders away from soil and rivers and rich night skies. In Patañjali’s Yoga-Sūtra, there seems little or no difference between personal and collective transformation; as one deeply penetrates the first step of practice, the yamas—ethical principles that help guide us in our actions of body, speech, and mind—we have some guidelines as to how we can gear our choices to be in line with the wisdom that everything is interwoven.
A common question along these lines becomes: Why not just pay attention to our activities on the meditation cushion? Won’t that bring about necessary changes? If I find stillness in my mind, doesn’t that offer a positive contribution to the world at large? A good question to be certain, but such formal activities are only a part of practice, because eventually you will have to defecate, change your socks, source buckwheat for that little cushion, and the cushion may not help when you need to find firewood. Yoga is always a practice that takes place in the world, and so it makes no sense to deny your activities in the world, because that is the fabric of practice, the warp and weave of your life.
This valid and challenging question is actually a reminder that we need to meditate on the effect of our actions both individually and collectively and on the psychology behind our intentions and habits. While it’s certainly true that intentions can be preconceptions that might be distracting at times, intentions are a tool we use to reorient the mind when we are caught in distracted or greedy states of mind. No matter, there is no escape from decision making and action. No book, system, or theory is ever going to offer us a specific guideline for what to do or how to live that will magically cut through the complexity of our unique situations. As I write these words from a deck in Los Angeles, I overhear news reports describing how the city water supply is full of pharmaceuticals that treatment plants have no way of breaking down. Viagra, Prozac, and numerous antibiotics do not break down after being evacuated from the human body. These chemicals and microorganisms move through the waterways with effects researchers are only beginning to study. All water comes together.
What kind of actions should one take in this situation? Obviously these kinds of decisions, which lie at the heart of our ideas about ourselves and nature, cannot be explored simply with Ten Commandments. Nor can any theory claim to be a universal canopy that covers all of the different norms and values across cultures, because doing good is always relative. Intentions and precepts, like any vow or commitment, can be broken a thousand times a day, but if you didn’t set them out in the first place, you would never be able to imagine the better world they imply. While we cannot create an everlasting, universal theory of action or ethics, what we can do is offer an outline of the psychology of ethics. This is not to say that there is one universal psychology—because of course psychology always includes culture—but rather to begin to understand how most of our personal, ecological, and cultural ills are, at the base, problems of perception. The wise elder Bhisma instructs his younger nephew Yudhishthira on how to become peace:
Even the gods are bewildered at the path
Of the one who seeks the abode of no abode,
Who sees all beings
With the being of oneself
And the being of oneself
as that of all beings
From not holding to the other
As opposite from oneself
There is the essence of dharma5
One of the homework practices I often offer to students is to try and refrain from creating opposites for one week. If you’re walking down the road, try not to categorize “short” as opposite from “tall,” “black” as opposite from “white,” “female” as opposite from “male,” or “friend” as opposite from “enemy.” By not defining things as opposite from other things, we begin to look closely at gradients and nuances and take ourselves out of the illusory role of objective witnesses somehow at a remove from contact with life. Instead we begin to participate in a reality where we don’t set ourselves apart from the flux of what we are perceiving. Just like when, during our practice of deep yoga postures, we enter completely into the realm of clarity and feeling, or when we watch the breath until we dissolve into breathing itself, we refrain from making opposites only to find that the witness that so dominates our moment-to-moment perceptions dissolves and we become one with that of which we are aware. We become the other as we see how the origin and completion of nonviolent practices begin through clarity of attention in this moment, free from the need to make everything into oppositional categories that we believe to be real.
The term “dharma” that completes the passage above describes yoga teachings as a description of how things actually are. “Dharma” is not so much an anthropocentric truth but a natural law of the material world, observable, just as change is, in everything.
PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS
Psychology is the organization of experience. We cannot take in the world through any means other than our sense organs and the mind. In fact, the body and mind might be the largest part of the world we can ever know, simply by the fact that mind, body, and world are inseparable. You cannot read these words without eyes or think about this text without mind or feel the book you are holding without skin, bones, and physiology. We perceive body and mind via body and mind; and the sense organs organize sense data in a process we call psychology, which by definition is always psychosomatic.
Since we all organize our experience differently, especially since we all have sense organs and minds uniquely conditioned and habituated, it is important to remember that we cannot approach ethics without taking subjectivity into account. Subjectivity means that we are always dealing with our unique perceptual viewpoints determined by our bodies and minds, which are in turn conditioned by culture.
Taking this a step further, we may wonder if human subjectivity should be the primary measurement for ecological decision making. I cannot know what a fish feels when caught by a net or hook, nor can I know what my students feel as they sit with turbulent thoughts or emotions. Our decisions as human beings, because of our subjectivity, tend to revolve around what we need, or rather, what we think other living beings need.
Integrating ethics, psychology, and spirituality has a long but often forgotten history. To provide a basis for rethinking ethical action, we are using the Yoga-Sūtra attributed to Patañjali. Not only have I been studying and teaching this text for many years, I have been practicing the ethics and meditative techniques described in its short and dense volume, continually oscillating between ethics as a set of guidelines and ethics as a visceral expression of nonduality. In addition to teaching yoga postures, philosophy, meditation, and breathing practices, I am also a psychotherapist. One of the biggest differences between Western psychotherapy and Yoga teachings is that Yoga begins with ethics. In Western psychology we talk a great deal about professional ethics and how to speak with patients clearly and where the boundaries lie in our clinical work. But for a profession that perhaps more than any other profession helps people decide how to take action, therapists are not required to study, practice, or express their personal ethical guidelines. Perhaps ethics is one of the most neglected topics in our contemporary culture. I have tried to address this lacuna in a yearlong course designed for clinicians interested in integrating contemplative practice in their clinical work. Our focus is using ethics as a means for self-study. We meet together in small groups to check in about the way that our mental state affects our ethical choices throughout the week. Every week the participants speak with one another and describe actions that are skillful and actions that have been unskillful. This approach helps them integrate conversations about ethics in their work with their clients, because they see the way that motivation determines the kind of world we perceive.
I am also a father. Wearing the hats of householder, parent, teacher, therapist, and yoga practitioner provides me not only with a transdisciplinary perspective but also with a motivation to tie together these seemingly diverse perspectives in order to see their inherent union. Yoga is a householder practice. If yoga does not support the quality of our family relationships, the health of our community, the way we source and eat our food, the way we feel in mind and body, how is it beneficial? Ramana Maharishi described ethical action and union with the world as one and the same. He compares the yogi with a bucket in well: It is water with water all around.6 Unfortunately, spiritual practices have a long history of being mixed up with political ideologies where the elites ratchet up the goals of practice in such a way that the householders feel they can’t practice until after their family commitments are over. This leads to a split where the monastic and lay communities are told that their possibilities of awakening are not equal. This leaves many lay practitioners feeling that family life is not a valid form of yoga. Mothering, breast-feeding, laundry—these are valid forms of yoga practice because they are expressions of intimacy in action. Again, yoga is a householder practice.
Like love at first sight, the immediate feeling of reverence and togetherness, even in the midst of parenting, brings about the will to take action. When we stop in a moment of fury and take a deep breath, that immediate and physical pause stops our reactive instinct and turns us not just inward but also forward toward a clear comprehension of what is occurring. The great historian and scholar of yoga Mircea Eliade, having served his spiritual apprenticeship in the holy city of Rishikesh, decided after his meditative experiences to replace the word “ecstacy” (extase) with “instacy” (entase), because “ectasy” seemed too marked by exteriority. We are not trying to achieve something that is outside of us. Eliade felt that intacy better describes the way that sitting still and noticing what moves through awareness brings about an indwelling attention that does not just stop inside oneself but serves to connect us with the pulse of life. In other words we don’t rely on the external; instead we turn inward only to find that the pause of turning inward leads us outward again but outward in a whole different sense. We find that through a process of stilling the elaborations of the mind, the external and internal become one and the same and all opposites come to an end.
Described either as a circle with internal spokes relating one part of the circle with another, or as a net in which every strand is intimately tied to every other, the way we perceive and take action ripples through all systems, creating a seamless and circular mandala. The family is a mandala, farmers and cities are spokes in the mandala, and community and water form the flow.
We study our mental states in order to settle them and finally move with grace and attunement. Moving beyond our likes and dislikes opens us up to the relational matrix of life. In fact we can define healthy relationship as the ability to take in someone or something without superimposing our biases and expectations on them.
THE BOTTOMLESS MIND
The meditative experiences articulated by Patañjali in the Yoga-Sūtra, and most especially his teachings on samādhi (integration) and svarupa shunya (emptiness of self-image), have made me realize that what passes for “normal” in today’s mental-health vocabulary and criteria is a low-grade form of illness. I have come across this stance before, especially in the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, R. D. Laing and many others, but sitting still and seeing the reactive and highly conditioned nature of my own busy mind and body made me realize that I’ve hardly been present much in my short time on earth. This is not an overstatement. Most of us are so caught up in the conceptual mind, juggling ideas, making plans, keeping things together, that we’ve never really looked into the nature of our own minds and bodies and most especially what it means to be a self or to have a self. Even our bodies are sleeping. We are living in an attention-deficit society caught between passive laxity on one hand and hyperactivity on the other. We need some technique so that we can reestablish attention in our daily lives and bring this attentiveness to bear on the important matters we all face personally and collectively.
We practice yoga postures to move deeply into the workings of the body, which are none other than the simple workings of the universe, and also to prepare the body not for something in the future but to take in what is occurring here and now.
When all of the fluctuations of the mind settle and the reactive patterning is suspended, one wakes up to samādhi, which is the end of the construction of a separate self, even momentarily. The word samādhi is not an esoteric or utopian dream, but rather a description of what it means to be so fully present that there is experience unfolding in which you are participating without separation. You are so fully in what you are doing that you disappear. It’s not that you don’t exist, but that when you are completely present you are not creating a separate “me.” You will no doubt have had this kind of experience in your life; where you have been so fully engaged in present experience—making art, making love, meditation, conversation—that the sense of being a self dissolves. This is hard to describe in words. In meditative realization you begin to see that you don’t practice to achieve enlightenment; instead, practice is simply a manifestation of enlightenment. Though the yamas may appear to be a path to samādhi, they are also a creative expression of samādhi.
BEYOND THE FAMILIAR
We can no longer live a spiritual life and pursue a path of awakening divorced from the stark realities of ecological disaster and personal alienation. In fact, these stark realities—personal, social, economic, and ecological duḥkha—give rise to spiritual practice in the first place. (Duḥkha is a Sanskrit term that can be translated as “suffering, discontent, lack, or unsatisfactoriness.” Considered by both Yogic and Buddhist schools to be a characteristic of life, the psychological meaning of duḥkha is even though it may seem that suffering is something that comes from outside oneself—for example, from the government, or childhood, or one’s body—suffering is actually self-generated.) When we see suffering, we want to know how to deal with it because in our heart of hearts we cannot bear continuous affliction. The economic systems we all share may always provide uneven distribution of security, but even so, there is a much deeper security that we all desire. The forests need security; the fish need security; the mind needs security. We all find ourselves bereft of answers in the face of the kind of limited means and ends we all face now with the convergence of species extinction, deforestation, poverty, climate change, and war. The primary life systems of this planet—its veins and arteries and lungs and waterways—are slowly shutting down. Our ethical traditions certainly know how to deal with one issue at a time, and we also have knowledge bases that can deal with suicide and homicide, but we as of now have no strong approach in dealing with biocide—the devastating and irreversible collapse of the major living systems of this planet.
This very body is the earth itself; the earth is our body. The Shiva Samhita describes this interplay of macrocosm and microcosm:
Within this body exists Mount Meru, the seven continents, lakes, oceans, mountains, plains, and the protector of these plains . . . all the stars and planets, the sacred river crossings and pilgrimage centers . . . the whirl of the sun and the moon, which are the causes of creation and annihilation. Likewise it contains ether, air, fire, water and earth. He who knows all this is a yogi. There is no doubt about that.7
We usually use the term ethics to mean humans and their relationships to each other. This is called interhuman ethics. According to yoga, however, we see ethics as human beings in relationship in a more general sense, without determining relational limits. Thinking of relationship as one “thing” in relationship to another discrete “thing” is dualistic psychology based on binary perception and is exactly what yoga aims to see through.
When we say that everything is connected, we still see that from human eyes, don’t we? How do we operate as the natural world?
One particle reveals another set of building blocks under which lie another set and another set, ad infinitum. Nowhere is there an inadequacy of relations. To think we are not always in relationship is only a mind in duḥkha. We are suffering from skewed vision. Can we announce that yoga is a political word as much as a spiritual one? Can we not say that yoga stands against division in all its manifestations, psychological, racial, and economic. Yoga is the fact and flesh of interconnectivity.
YOGA DESCRIBES THE inherent unity of all relations as a priori, and the splitting of the world into “me” and “that” as a secondary human action. In other words, before we fragment things into subject and object—a “me” and a world outside of me, or a mind inside a body inside a world—everything is already yoked as it is. One of the clearest descriptions of this attitude comes from the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska in her poem “View with a Grain of Sand”:
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of the lake,
but the view doesn’t see itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular or plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
His news inhuman.8
If what moves through the sense organs is “inhuman,” it is so because we haven’t got hold of it yet. When data moves through the sense organs, it gets sculpted, formed, and manipulated and changes from mere “data” to “information.”
Our sense organs are organs of selection, never mind what we do with experience when we attempt to categorize what has been received and put it into words. The kind of action we take in relation to the natural world, to each other, and to ourselves determines the kind of world we perceive; the way we perceive in turn influences the way we organize our experiences, our decisions to act, and ultimately the kind of world we live in. Action and perception create an infinite feedback loop we call karma. Social and ecological engagement, psychology, and spiritual practice are not separate paths. At base, the yamas describe responsiveness born of realization. From this perspective, social or ecological action is actually what and who you are.
A theme that emerges throughout yoga teachings and praxis is not mastery over the body or language or the mind but rather a retuning that returns us to the wild ecology that is our true home. This does not mean that we need to leave cities and move into forests or claim some piece of the earth as an absolute utopia. We need to reattune to the complex interdependence of the air and earth and mind and heart so that we can return to our animated ecological mind and reactivate this wisdom in contemporary times because these are our times, and without increased wisdom and attentiveness, they’ll pass us by.