WHILE FOLLOWING THE curving trails alongside the Elbow River in Calgary, Alberta, I stop every few minutes to listen to the rippling sounds of moving water. As I walk along the edge of the shore, I see and hear the currents and undercurrents pulling the river alongside the eroding soil. Seeing and hearing seem one and the same; there is no physical boundary between either the eyes or the ears, the sight of water or its sound. I notice the large steel and copper bridge that crosses the river, and in relation to the movement of water, the bridge seems completely still. Immediately the mind creates two opposing categories: movement and stillness.
I turn right and follow the path up along the bridge that crosses the rushing waters, and I notice the braided copper cables shifting, the wooden planks creaking, and the twisting steel compressing and releasing below each step. In relationship to the water that I can now see between the wooden planks, the bridge is now moving and the waters are still. In relation to the land, the bridge is flowing. The bridge now has the quality of water, the characteristic of flow.
Once I cross the bridge and arrive on dry land, I follow the path that curves left and down toward the shore. I notice that the path is more like an unfinished trail created by humans and dogs and beavers that live in and along the riverbank. The trail itself is changing. From the bridge, the mind associates the trail with solid earth in opposition to the flowing water. When I look up at the bridge from the lower shoreline, it seems rigid and monumental. When I look at the trail from the bridge, it too looks solid and unmoving. But because the trail has been shaped by dogs and humans making their way down to the river, it is in motion; it too has the quality of flow. The river, the bridge, and the trail all flow.
I think about the yoga postures I practiced before the walk and realize that the back bend (bridge pose) also has the quality of water. Animated by the breath, the pose is never complete, as it shifts and moves and flows not just into other postures but also within itself. Likewise my thoughts about the bridge and water, like the movements of the breath, flow unceasingly through the field of awareness. If the mind does not dwell on or stick to any of these thoughts, awareness takes in this sensory experience without holding on to any one thing.
Everything has this quality of flow. Letters and words flow to form one another, and the meaning of these words as I write each one will flow into meaning for you, the reader. A beaver pokes her head out of the stream and then drops into the undercurrent of the river and swims upstream. Though the water rushes downward to the south, the beaver catches the opposite current, only one meter deep, and without effort floats upstream. Our ideas of stillness and movement, liquidity and solidity, appear to be the truth of how things are, but when we quiet the mind and look clearly, there is another truth below our conceptual thoughts, and it’s to this reality that yoga orients us.
One of the great delusions of human consciousness lies in the division of things into opposites, categories like “alive” and “dead,” for example. “One can see that flow,” Patañjali says in the Yoga-Sūtra, “is actually a series of discrete events, each corresponding to the merest instant of time in which one form becomes another.”1 Everything is alive, no matter its sophistication: discrete events seamlessly morphing into new forms. How does this happen? Patañjali describes change in this way: “Being delivered into a new form comes about when natural forces overflow.”2
The bridge, the breath, the trail, the mind—these are all seamless components of the flow we call yoga. In an earlier chapter, Patañjali describes noticing the quality of flow as a significant insight on the path of awakening:
Focusing with perfect discipline on the succession of moments in time yields insight born of discrimination.
This insight allows one to tell things apart which, through similarities of origin, feature, or position, had seemed continuous.3
Whether in terms of objects in space or moments in time, when we look (vidya) vividly, we gain insight (vicāra) into the flow of life, the way reality happens.
Each and every component that flows through awareness becomes a point of entry into this ancient and always available practice of impeccable attention. Focus the body on the moving waters, focus the belly on the breath, focus the ears on whispering pines—this is the context for practice; this is yoga. Similarly, one cannot separate the person, the culture, or the human mind from the landscape that supports its continuity. In an interview in The Guardian, writer Annie Proulx describes the relationship in terms of her writing and the characters that inhabit her stories: “For me, the story falls out of a place, its geology and climate, the flora, fauna, prevailing winds, the weather. I am not people-centric, and I’m appalled at what human beings have done to the planet.”4
THE YAMAS EVERYWHERE
When we settle into the rhythm of breathing and the clarity of sustained awareness, we can let the pernicious thought habits arise and subside. Yet we still need to think and act. The yamas become guidelines for actions where, in the reflective and calm space of the mind, we can discern what actions best express and reinforce the gradual awakening that the yoga path proposes. The purpose of the yamas is primarily social and ecological. The yamas are not necessary in a primal sense. This is a point of great confusion. The purpose of the yamas is to articulate actions that render a life that is flexible, sensitive, and responsible. The yamas are most necessary when we are in relationship with other people, animals, and earth. However, in a more enlightened mode of being, our basic nature is honest, nonviolent, and without the urge to steal or accumulate only for self-benefit. Thus, if we lived authentically, would creating rules of conduct be an absolute necessity? Psychologist James Hillman writes:
To be in a human world is to live in a world of humans, and in a sense what more occupies our lives than other people? From the beginning we emerge into awareness within a web of human connections that unceasingly engage us until death. It is not merely that man is a social being but that his nature as human implies a life of feeling and encounter with others. Work, art, nature and ideas may take us with them for a while, but soon we are back immersed in “real life”—and real life means simply the human being, ourselves and other people.5
Most of us do not spend the day sitting still in formal meditation, nor have we all awakened to our authentic nature. We spend our days in relationship with other people who are also in relationship, and for most of us our relationships have friction. Because we are unique people with sets of preferences and habits, we have to learn how to get along with other people and their preferred ways of being and living and acting. As such we need help being clear, honest, and open in our relationships. A society only gels when it is diverse, and diversity is only possible when we are flexible. How can we make ourselves at home? How and where shall we settle our life?
The sangha of members that practice yoga together is not some throwback, holdover, or relic of a distant and ancient ritual, but a valid form of practice enjoyed together. When our habits and preferences get the better of us, our collective relations begin to erode and we retreat into ourselves with doors shut, blinds drawn, and senses numbed. So the yamas act as a kind of reminder by signaling us, through our lack of harmony with them, that we may be fixed to a particular viewpoint at the expense of good relations. Or they may shed light on the superficiality or imbalance in relationships themselves. The more my actions are motivated by kindness and sensitivity, the deeper these roots grow in my body and in the giant body of our culture. The yamas guide us toward the core issues that need to be engaged in ourselves and in the vast culture at large.
With deep awakening, described by Patañjali as samādhi, there is an inherent understanding of the interconnected nature of reality. Again, samādhi literally means “integration.” In samādhi we clearly see the nature of reality and live from that wisdom. However, no matter how cultivated our samādhi or how “big” our awakening, we still have to get along with others. If I wake up in a small town in northern India and then travel to Manhattan, I will have to work my awakening into the fabric of an entirely different cultural context. Perhaps women are treated differently in Manhattan than in my town in northern India. If so, I must put my energy into understanding the cultural background of the present situation. So the precepts are not “rights” and “wrongs” but guidelines for providing a light to see and respond to ever-changing and unpredictable situations. A spontaneous response to life cannot be rehearsed.
The yamas are not a means of deciding that one person is right and another wrong, or one culture chosen and another evil. What is important is maintaining harmony in our relationships as individuals and collectives. The larger our society and the more diverse, the more important the yamas become. Opening our eyes to intolerance, pollution, or racism is not a revelation once and for all. Our answers to life are always going to be human ones, and the value of truth and ethics does not have to come down to some absolute ideal placed high on a pedestal for all to abide by. We don’t worship the yamas; we are committed instead to this very moment and how we can authentically live life free from fixations and delusion. This means that sometimes we’ll be wrong and make mistakes. Even in the confusing and often conflicted life of each and every one of us, we need to stand up for what is important and move through the cynicism and relativism that dominates our ethical discourse.
Awakening to the true nature of our own mind does not presuppose that the yamas will fall neatly into place. I’ve had numerous sustained experiences of the samādhi articulated by Patañjali followed by periods of confusion and the continuation of unconscious habits. Freedom comes only when we follow our insights through into action. In my own experience I find that living life in accordance with meditative realization is not automatic; it requires continual practice and reflection. I feel like my practice has to do with finding the active edge between realization and action, otherwise the old habit energies continue beneath the surface. The eighth limb of yoga, samādhi, turns back into the first, the yamas. Why? Because awakening to one’s true nature does not necessarily give us the power to know what to do or how to understand the context of every situation in every culture. We are not outside culture, and therefore enlightenment is contextual. Our awakening is always set against the backdrop of the culture in which we are participating because culture cannot be erased from our day-to-day life.
So awakening and ethics work in two directions. Awakening refers to the inherent, interconnected matrix that is life, of which we are only playing one part without supreme importance. Awakening refers to waking up from a self-centered reality to a world much greater than self-reference. In that awakening process we come to realize the inherent nonseparation of self and other and thus discover in a practical and embodied way an authentic response to the great existential questions of being alive and having to die and then taking what we gain from such contemplation and putting it to work in the world. In the other direction, ethics act as a way to mature our practice by offering us guidelines for waking up. When we live in accord with principles like nonviolence, honesty, nonstealing, using energy wisely, and not accumulating more than we need, we become more closely aligned with others. Every day we wake up and face the world and in every moment we are asked to make ethical choices. What should we do? And, according to yoga, the only way to respond is to become the question, become the situation, resolve opposites by tending to what is. Every morning we wake up and come to see that we do not face the world, because the world is always waking up through us.
A literal and purely “commandment” style of ethics alone is not enough to effect awakening. The yamas are an effective aid to practice, but clinging to them as rules can become a hindrance. The yamas are meant to serve the goal of waking up; they are not designed to be adhered to as absolute rules or commandments enforced by some untouchable god or deity. Though sometimes an important course of practice, following the yamas as rules can become another form of attachment, even dogma.
A single experience of samādhi does not mark the end of practice; it is only the beginning of waking up to the world around us, where spontaneous benevolence of the heart replaces self-centered action. With the understanding of the profound kinship we have with all of life, our spiritual life, our psychological and physical existence, and the choices we make create a seamless mode of being in and of the world. Ethics, psychology, and spirituality are seen to be ongoing, evolving, and interdependent, ensuring that our practice does not go stale.
Especially in retreat settings, we can enter into sustained periods of deep silence in which the citta vrttis settle and the clarity of pure awareness comes forth. When students have these very still samādhi experiences, which usually happen when all effort finally relaxes, I always follow through with questions about how they might consider putting their realization into everyday practice. It’s not that we need to do something with our insight, but we certainly need to connect the deep internal silence with the outward activities of our lives and the lives of everything else. “Follow this feeling,” I tell students. “Know in your bones and stomach and teeth just what letting go feels like. Act from this place.”
It’s also important not to hold on to profound experiences, either, by making them special or overidentifying with them. Moving beyond the idolatrous tendency in the mind has always been the motivating force of the great yogis of Indian myth because they realized that being stuck in one point of view prevents true flexibility.
In the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the wise and just King Yudhishthira is accompanied by a stray dog as he takes what is supposed to be a solitary walk into heaven. The King of the Gods stops him immediately and bars his entrance to heaven. Caste law regards dogs, who are considered scavengers, as unclean. They are the animal equivalent of the untouchables. In response to the king’s orders to turn around and release the dog, Yudhishthira refuses to enter unless the dog comes too. When he then takes a step forward with the dog, the dog is revealed to be none other than the god Dharma (who is also Yudhishthira’s father) in disguise.
Yudhishthira is praised for taking a stand of inclusivity, and the king too should be highly regarded by the reader for allowing the rules to be challenged by including the dog as part of the turning, interconnected cosmos. This story is not a story of one person’s stand against a culture but rather the collective awakening that happens when two or more people give up their cherished ways of doing things. Of course caste law continued (and continues) to influence almost every part of Indian life, not excluding matters of birth and rebirth. But this story points to the possibility in the human mind of seeing through fixed constructs of self and culture, fragmented divisions created out of insecurity. The story can also be interpreted intrapsychically in terms of letting the stray dogs of our own mind and bodies come into awareness with no repression or denial.
Perhaps the most significant expression of nondualism in contemporary Western thought is the movement of deep ecology. Deep ecology can be considered the spiritual dimension of the environmental movement. It asks hard questions about issues in an attempt to understand ecological challenges in terms of wider systems, psychology, and the ethical dimensions of various conflicts.
Deep ecology recognizes human beings as a single species in the integrity of the ecosystem or universe, along with all the other numerous species of plants and animals and their interrelationships. This deep ecological awareness is basically spiritual in nature; it recognizes that other forms of life (and thus their well-being) have intrinsic value and inherent worth, regardless of their “usefulness” for people. It further recognizes that human beings are only one particular strand in the web of life and calls for a paradigm shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric. The term “anthropocentric” refers to the way humans regard humanity as center of universe, and “ecocentric” points to the interconnected web we all find ourselves in.
The deep ecology movement calls for changing the way people think and act to include these new spiritual and ethical perspectives, including new attitudes and ways of relating to self, others, animals, and earth. Deep ecology, by definition, begins with causal connections that we’ve explored as karma; namely, our actions always have effects. The following statement is “The Deep Ecology Platform” by Arne Naess and George Sessions, two ecophilosophers:
(1) The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
(2) Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are values in themselves.
(3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
(4) Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
(5) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
(6) Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
(7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be profound awareness of the differences between big and small.
(8) Those who prescribe to the following points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in attempts to implement the necessary changes.6
Both yoga and deep ecology have ecocentric, spiritual, and nondualistic approaches; they both define problems created by ignorance and greed and solve such problems by moving from an anthropocentric orientation to a spiritually based ecocentric approach.7 Both systems are basically concerned with change and use values and perspectives that are based on spiritual and holistic principles for positive change in paradigms (or worldviews), attitudes, and practices for environmental, forest, and wildlife protection.
One of the reasons that yoga and deep ecology can be so symbiotic is not only their nondual roots or ethical precepts, but that they are both concerned with action and its aftereffects. As we are taught in the Bhagavad Gita, not taking action in times of crisis is a form of violence:
Not by renunciation of action does a person achieve his/her spiritual goals.
For no one, indeed, can ever remain, even for one single moment, unengaged in activity, since everyone is to a certain extent powerless—always forced to act by the constant changes in the basic patterns of nature.
Do your allotted work, for action is better than nonaction. Even the normal functioning of your body cannot continue without action . . . A person doing work without clinging attains the highest goals. This world would fall into ruin if I did not do my work.8
MEDITATION
The practice of meditation returns us to this present moment. As we return to the feeling of the breath, the feeling of a body sitting firmly on the ground, as we tune in to the simple sensation of inhaling and exhaling, the mind begins to settle. The power of our objects of fixation begins to settle in with the breath. While the mind may still jump around, it begins to see options of attention that are alternatives to fixation and desire. Instead of being caught by each and every sensation, I can notice the arising and falling away of what appears in awareness.
When I can begin to watch the conditioned patterns of the mind, I make the first step into engagement with the reality of what is right now. If yoga reminds us that spiritual practice is not a system of externally imposed rules and that life is not a ready-made system into which every experience fits neatly, we begin to tune in to life as it presents itself all around us rather than expecting redemption from above. Replacing transcendence with a sense of immanence, everything becomes sacred including all natural phenomena moving through the senses and mind. The waves of conditioning come over me with force, but I am not pulled in their direction. I swivel around on the breath and watch the waves of thought come and go and the stories of myself, like bubbles on waves, rise up and fall back again.
To meditate is not to achieve some perfect state of calm, although that is certainly required in higher states of samādhi. It’s also not an attempt to leave the body and mind. Patañjali describes this clearly: “What awareness regards, namely the phenomenal world, embodies the quality of luminosity, activity and inertia; it includes oneself, composed of both elements and the senses; and it is the ground for both sensual experience and liberation.”9
Sensual experience always occurs through this very body and mind. To interrupt the addictions most of us find ourselves in the midst of, we need begin only by paying attention to something in the present moment other than habit. It could be the breath or the body or even sound. The object is not of crucial importance as long as it is simple. Since the body is always present and likewise the breath, they make perfect objects of meditation. The important point here is that we use sensual experience to cultivate awareness of intimacy, to wake up, to gain insight, to refine wisdom, to act, to be engaged. We are not trying to leave this sensual domain.
The rate at which the world moves through my senses may not slow down, but my reaction to what moves in through the sense doors can be controlled. I cannot change the sounds in the street, but I can relate to them in new ways. I can relate to sound as disturbing, grating, or irritating, or I can follow pleasurable sounds. I do neither. Instead I listen to all sounds with equanimity, allowing them to show up in the wide open field of awareness and also allowing them to pass away. They keep changing; but in the midst of that change I am not pushing nor pulling. I allow sound to be sound without turning it into anything else. If your attention span is agitated, the breath will be agitated; if the mind is agitated, the body is agitated; if your eyes are shifting here and there, the universe will be out of balance. Balance and imbalance depend on you—realize this with your whole body, heart, and mind, and your responsibility to practice will become clear.
Saṁāra is a kind of meaninglessness that occurs when we are so swept away in attachment and aversion that we are lost to the true nature of things and our own true nature as well. We are out of contact, off-line, dissociated. With the mind and body’s reactivity temporarily suspended, I’m free to relate to each moment with clarity. Old assumptions and chronic misconceptions fall away; though they may not fall away forever, they begin to appear less and less in a mind trained to keep contact with this moment, this experience, at this time, in this body.
From this moment of nonjudgmental attention, the world opens up as a fresh possibility. The world did not literally open, but rather my perception of it transfigured the world. The sheer presence of clear awareness makes room for possibility. And the possibilities are endless. This is the beginning of intimacy. Enlightenment is the lightening up of habit to make room for experience untainted by unconsciousness. Enlightenment is finally seeing what has been here the whole time—whatever that may be—and then within that space, love breaks through.
Love, in the form of clear, unmediated intimacy, breaks through our life like a sprout pushing through an urban sidewalk. The habits of saṃsāra are the only things that constrain our experience. Over time, the dynamic flow of experience begins to erode the places where clinging dominates. The dynamic flow of life is selfless. Intimacy, in the form of complete interdependence, gives us the sense of being whole and being part of the whole. No separation. Through the aperture of samādhi I am called to move into the world as I continue flowing with the ongoing reciprocity of the natural world without end. When I become aware of my projections rather than being motivated by them, I can distinguish my ideas about experience from the heartbeat of experience itself.
Meditation in light of the yamas gives us a clear direction of what our practice is working toward. Meditation offers a genuine platform for mental health, while the yamas contribute to the social and ecological components of wider well-being. Though terms like “welfare for all beings” do not exist in yoga teachings to the extent that they do in Mahayana literature, the synthesis of meditation and ethics offers the yogin an identical set of practices and, hopefully, outcomes.
The outcome of a solid, responsive, and mature yoga practice is deep intimacy. No amount of psychological ego strengthening can compare with the effect of a self that has seen through its samsaric workings and yields to the groundless grounding of life’s pulse. Instantly the body’s impermanence has less significance, for life lived in the present moment there is no death. Wittgenstein captures this clearly: “Death is not an event in life, one does not experience death. Our life is endless in the same way our vision is boundless.”10 Every habit, every thought, and each and every feeling comes to be and falls away of its own accord. Every barking dog, when included in awareness and not excluded through the unconscious processes of repression or aversion, finds a brief home in awareness and then morphs into something else just moments later. Each life, even the lives of thoughts and feelings, is so provisional. If life and death are not present in this very inhale and exhalation, we project death into the future. But death, like new life, is an ongoing process of flow happening each and every moment; when we become this flow, we become the intimacy that we call yoga.
ORDINARY SENSITIVITY
Hoping to free ourselves from the difficulties of securing dwindling resources from nature, modern societies tend to overlook the fact that we too are nature. Both self-awareness (which obviously expands the notion of “self” to include our place in the ecosphere) as well as the karmic understanding that our actions always have consequences help form a reorientation in our ways of approaching contemporary forms of duḥkha. Returning to an understanding that human beings are nature in every sense means that we must cultivate more small-scale, egalitarian, self-organizing communities in which there is a recognition that the well-being of the human organism is inextricably bound up with the well-being of the natural world upon which and in which we survive.
It’s time to recognize that if major shifts do not take place in the authoritarian economic and political systems we continually reinforce, a major ecological catastrophe is unavoidable. Aparigrahā, nonacquisitiveness, reminds us that our rampant consumerism does not bring us happiness, nor does it encourage holistic perception. Consumerism shows us clearly that we are not meeting our basic needs. Through our existential hunger we try, and fail, to satisfy our deepest longings. As substitute satisfactions for existential connectedness and basic community, shopping habits remind us all too clearly that a higher material living standard does not equate with contentment (santoṣa) or a better quality of life.
Talk of population control or reestablishing large segments of the world’s populations in new territories so as to maintain some of the planet as wild is rightly criticized by ecofeminists for being racist and misunderstanding the interdependence of the third world and industrialized world. Reading the Vedas or any indigenous mythology reminds us that social and ecological balance is tied up with local geography and sustainable agriculture practices. Without a living earth with healthy water and biodiversity, any other social issue becomes irrelevant. Obviously there is no way to seamlessly integrate the vast and complex issues in one overarching manner. But we can begin to see how major social and ecological changes must begin with inner change. If we can’t recognize the way our activities and viewpoints support greed and accumulation, it’s impossible to respect the nonhuman viewpoint. Unless we act both internally and culturally, no new changes in our ecological viewpoint will last very long.
Human beings need wild nature for balance, respite, and healthy self-reflection. In his description of deep ecology and its inspiration, Arne Naess describes an experience he had as a young boy watching the helpless suffering of an insect where he felt that although the insect was different than him, it was not “radically other”:
Such experiences are enough. No definite Buddhist or other cultural phenomena are strictly necessary to start developing the basic attitude expressed, among other ways, by the term the greater Self, and the norm “Self-realization!” This is only to fight the idea that there is something extraordinary and culturally sophisticated involved. Just the ordinary sensitivity of a loving child.11
It is in Central Park for Arne Naess, or any other park in any neighborhood, that an urban child can meet the eyes of a squirrel or the patterned movement of a butterfly. The wild can unexpectedly enter the most urban of cities when we have the time and attention to take it in. Of course such attentiveness is only possible when the mind is at ease and creative awareness replaces states of greed and outward desire.