Demystifying Yoga Introducing a Series Meant to Study Yoga

atha yoganuśānam

“Let us study yoga together.” 

 

The Sanskrit word in Patanjali’s first Yogasutra that tells us what we are going to do here is anuśāna, which means, to study and to study together.  Yoga will be our subject, more about that later.  But properly speaking this is a śastra, a text formulated as an argument that should be taken seriously and for which a case must be made.  No matter how Patanjali resorts to personal experience to validate his claims, his treatise is the shareable, serious argument.

 

“He is not a serious person.”  I doubt this statement from our current Vice President and candidate for the American Presidency changed one vote.  In fact, I don’t think most folks gave it a second thought and, I could be wrong, but I don’t think she was even understood.  The opposite of “serious” here might include frivolous, senseless, pointless, foolish, idiotic but I think she also meant dangerous and inept.  Given Vice President Harris’s target, all of these meanings apply.

 

“Serious” too often means grim, severe, it is rarely welcomed in any sentence.  Coming to terms with being serious may be a requirement of adulthood but it’s usually one we can postpone, ignore, avoid, or neglect until we have to.

 

Serious can be seriously unfunny and who wants that?  It will also require thinking; dare we say thinking for yourself and engaging with understanding and the responsibility to create meaning rather than merely adopt it or say things.  None of these matters should be confused with happy though they not necessarily opposed.  No one in their right mind can oppose happiness though I might suggest we too often substitute it for meaning or resort to it so that we don’t have to cope with more.  None of these invitations to our learning to be human are either simple or natural.  Serious is a complexity, and we don’t won’t by that without learning to think, which is hardly natural.

 

Thinking for yourself is not easy; to do it well we must learn what it means to think critically because that’s not the same as caviling, disparaging, much less insulting or being depreciative.  We can be more astute and develop greater sensitivity to the complexities of experience.  It can be hard to express our thoughts, our seriousness without seeming to be on the attack, ad hominem, making it personal.  But that’s why it’s hard to learn and important to do.  (n.b., that might be yet another definition of yoga.)

 

Yoga traditions considered “argument” an essential skill except when they were too busy trying not to think, as if thiswere the problem, or surrendering their autonomy to a supernatural force, some or another “blessed one” who somehow mysteriously knows better. 

 

There are plenty of yogas and other spiritual traditions (Can we just call them religions? Please?) that dismiss, dissociate, or decry thinking, much less thinking critically and learning how to be serious about it all.  Let’s not be too much the downer.  But I’m going to let those who insist silence be their teacher and the sole guardian of truth be left to their quietist desires.  Silence is the space between the notes, so it too is music but without the notes, well, it’s just silence.  Carry on.

 

Traditions also maintained that thinking can and indeed must be taught if we’re to gain greater skill-in-yoga.  As the Gita (2.5) puts it, yoga karmasu kausalyam, that is, yoga is efficacy in actions.   There is no spiritual practice more humanizing than learning to cultivate our cognitive abilities in the service of a more complete sense of embodied existence.

If you’re interested in becoming more than merely human, say, “enlightened,” or “perfected” in some way that obviates human conditions and limitations, there are yogas that purport to bring you to those states or realizations.  Good luck with that.  Blame it on karma or maybe your next rebirth but we’re going to get on with being just human.

It’s only cynical to dismiss such “perfection” claims if you think they are not by definition dehumanizing.  Humans cannot not make mistakes; we remain incomplete and unfinished at our best; and if that is apostasy to certain yoga traditions---and it is to nearly all if you have studied them seriously---there’s still no good reason to think otherwise.

 

We may want there to be a perfect being, place our faith in an ideal, a purported achievement, or some other claimed possibility, but such a belief is a religious assertion, and there’s nothing about such a claim that retains shared humanity.  Why do we want there to be such perfection?  That strikes me as the far better question than if there is perfection.

This is not a call to reduce our experience to only the rational.  We are as much non-rational beings whose feelings, impressions, intuitions are human and warrant our respect.  I’m sure my teacher was more clearly aiming at the true alternative, the irrational where claims or beliefs reduce to the personal and cannot reach across the boundary to shareable, dare we say, demonstrable or even provable truths.  Resorting to the irrational is serious only insofar as it is to claim there is more we want from human life than to be human.

Rudolf Otto, whose effort to describe religious experience he called das Helige, the Holy, was translated from the German as The Idea of the Holy.  Otto thought that the Holy was a numinous reality and that those who had not had such experiences could never understand it.   He thought the absence of such experiences disqualifying for the “true” meaning of religion or, as we might put it, the spiritual experience.  But this is nonsense or, at best, another assertion that a spiritual life demands some measure of supernormal, supernatural, supermundane experience and that reality is offering just such a thing.  Okay, if you say so.  But am I disqualified from a “spiritual life” if I don’t have or even want such experiences?

 

Thus “das Helige,” the Holy, includes any kind of superhuman being lest the spiritual life actually have to admit we are merely human.  If folks need those ideals, aspirations, or claims---and they cause no manifest harm to others---you’ll hear no further objection from me, but you may not want to read much further.

 

I would have to agree with Hitchens that most formulations of God---to which I would add Buddha, Siddha, etc.---create some degree of positive impediment to cultivating a more humane yoga, a deeper engagement with our selves.  Do we need a soporific salve to find deeper meaning and purpose?

What’s on offer?  I’ve studied yoga traditions formally for fifty years now.  Learned some of the many languages in which they have been recorded and travelled to experience and practice with scholars and believers.  I still have much to learn because that too is a requirement of a more humane yoga.  But I will say that only the rarest expressions of yoga (or other religions, call them spiritualities if “religion” rankles) resolve their claims to achievement with an entirely humancharacter. 

 

Many teach us to be more humane, to be gentle, capable, compassionate, dignified beings---and who could disagree that this is commendable when there is so much cruelty and worse in this world?  But virtually none of these spiritual paths are content with ideals that leave us with flawed, vulnerable, uncompleted humans and every last one of them claims morethan that limited degree or conditional quality of human potential.

 

I have two intentions for the essays that will follow in this series. 

 

First, I will take up specific sources, authors, and ideas from across yoga traditions, particularly from Hindu, Buddhist, and other comparable sources, explaining their positions and claims charitably.  Chartiably means I will take them seriously, give them every benefit of the doubt, attempt to imagine their experience with sympathy for their assumptions, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions.  I will consider their non-rational claims too.  In short, we need to understand the case and their theory of their case, that is, why they believe what they believe and why we think they believing.

 

Second, I mean to point out the value and goodness we might draw from their good-faith efforts and then point out the drawbacks, expenses, consequences, and even the damages done by assenting to such claims.  I don’t need our critique to claim any superiority but neither need we demur.  Just because people’s religious or spiritual claims are personal doesn’t mean they are exempt from understanding or from serious criticism.

 

True, people are tender and that makes the subject unlike others.  If you prefer softball to hardball then that’s okay.  But serious isn’t cruel, it’s just the opposite.  It's trying to keep it real and be honest and get folks to engage.  That’s the kind of yoga, I was taught but not all that I have studied.

 

Being “serious” can appear unfriendly, severe, unfriendly, even hostile but its critical purpose is to be revealing, candid, sober, human and humane.  Meaning is not happiness: it is the deeply human endeavor to find value, worth, dignity, significance in the face of our shared mortal existence.  This yoga thing isn’t just about feeling good or being “happy.” It’s about deciding to be serious when the world doesn’t often invite or value such prospects.

 

And it’s gonna be fun if you’re up for the ride.  Because while we might offend or touch tender feelings, being human requires humility.  After all, we’re unfinished and we’ll ask ourselves how we could be mistaken before we claim to be right.  We’re in it to learn so that we can think for ourselves rather than be indoctrinated or just believe.   We’ll not mistake positive thinking, aspiration, or potential for belief: instead, we’ll ask what is possible when all we have are our wits and each other.

 

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About Rajanaka: Our Definition and Boundaries

 This week I received an email from a former student. A brilliant, gifted, lovely soul. He knows quite a bit about Hindu worlds, having been born to it, being a fluent Tamil speaker, and he is a fine Sanskritist. He asked to study the Srividya with me. Here is my lengthy reply. I thought you folks might be interested because there is a fair bit of explanation of Rajanaka here too.

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The end of the semester unfortunately has delayed my reply. Apologies. This is also the third year we are not in India due to covid and truth to tell my heart aches for Nataraja’s darsan. Whatever else might be said about the situation in the temples, culturally, the commitment we see (and don't see), I can still walk into the courtyard of Nataraja and feel that feeling, know my way around, find the way inside.

I understand your frustrations with study both in India and beyond. To be honest, there hasn't been terribly honest or serious scholarship in years, which is not to say that there aren't competent scholars---but the ethos and purpose of study seems to have been...how shall we say? Forgotten? There is neither enough critical temperament nor care and concern for the depth of learning and evolution of the soul. After all, why would someone make this a course of study in this world? We need clear boundaries between our ability to think critically (as students of history and ideas) and our personal investments. "Religion" as a subject is too often not a subject of study.

Allow me also to address your curiosity and query about studying the tradition of Auspicious Wisdom or Śrīvidyā. I would take a broad and inclusive definition of Śrīvidyā. In addition to the focused work involving the goddess as Lālitā Tripūrasundari, the mantra, and śrīcakra, I would include virtually the entire study of Veda, Tantra, and the Hindus as the principal subject.

I have lived two lives with Śrīvidyā. One is to present the historical landscape of theory, practice, ideologies, the spectrum of materials in critical, academic formats. I think we need to understand what has been presented as we consider the development of the larger body of phenomena that might be classified under the term.

What is Śrīvidyā? That is still a matter of complexity in content and resources that remain largely understudied. (I am going to assume here that you understand the most basic identifiers of the goddess cult within Śākta Tantra. I would be happy to elaborate if need be.) In critical historical terms Śrīvidyā studies ar not much further along now, some 40+ years after I began. There is far more open practice and advocacy, more available work from within the traditions but there is still very little interesting or important scholarship. We might see more resource scholarship, more forensics of texts---and that has improved since the early era when there was virtually nothing available. (Frankly, I doubt we will see much devoted scholarship; the subject remains too inaccessible or obscure to most. Further, the skills in Sanskrit (and other languages) and the required special access knowledge required, since the work is so encoded and recondite, makes it unattractive.) But no one seems to have much to say, either as reportage (just describing the historical phenomena) much less what it means or could be about. We cannot expect more or better work anytime soon. There is simply not much incentive to produce such scholarship and fewer people than ever who have the interest or the skill to teach it. From inside the tradition there is no serious scholarship even though there are many skilled practitioners. This takes us to the next matter.

I am still a student of historical Śrīvidyā. While there are important differences amongst lineages and movements (the terminologies are imprecise: kula, mata, acara, sampradaya, mandali, etc) there is a certain body of resources and practices. In modern terms (let's call that from at least the last century or so), there are reasonably consistent religious goals, theories, practices, claims. I can happily explain those materials but they are not my practices, much less my beliefs. Śrīvidyā as a bhakti cult and as a transformational Tantric tradition involves religious claims that I continue to study but don’t reflect my personal my interests. (Honestly, I have no religious interests as such but that warrants further explanation.)

I say this to you because you are long past your undergraduate time with me. At University I would only treat the subject academically. We might study practices but ours is entirely a critical and historical agenda. There should be no religious teaching advocated in any college classroom. I don't reveal or talk about my personal practice or relationship with Śrīvidyā with undergraduates or indeed even within academia. But you have asked, so you would need to understand what it is the Rajanaka is about. Rajanaka is the name Appa gave to our tradition of practice.

My teacher was for appearances sake an orthoprax smarta Aiyar, a brahmin raised in Cidambaram, not only professor of Sanskrit (at Madurai) but also deeply immersed in his own circle (mandali). There were several terms and names used to describe that small circle (mandali) within the larger sampradaya (tradition). Suffice to say that the principal "larger" circle of the Śrīvidyā ethos that Rajanaka avows is the most straightforward commitmenst to moral responsibility and decency that excludes much of what is commonly referred to as vama(cara). Rajanaka has no use for the transgressive, abusive, or sexually oriented practices that are common in the Kaula Tantra and Kaula forms of Śrīvidyā. (Much of what the traditional Kashmir Śaivites teach would be ethically untenable to us since they advocate rituals involving sexual practices that are, in effect, non-consensual (such as kulayaga, etc.))

But Appa's brahminical concerns, such as diet, lifestyle, etc., were not beliefs that he insisted apply to everyone or everywhere. To wit, he was of a liberal, culturally open-minded, and non-dogmatic temperament. I don't know how he would have adapted or changed himself had he come to live in America (and that was our plan before his illness) but he had a very open sense of the phrase vyavahārika vaisnavah (lit., ‘for the everyday the worldly-Visnu dharma) meaning something like act normally about the everyday world and like "when in Rome be a Roman."

Adapt, adjust, follow your family traditions: our yoga does not involve giving up a culture, changing your religion, or even having a religion. Rajanaka is a conversation, it is about soulful living, and it's not a religion by any definition I have studied. Admittedly, we dally in religious worlds, we participate and engage in all sorts of religious events but for our own purposes. We mean to be respectful of those who are engaged for their own reasons too.
For conventions and customs sake Appa was not inclined to wear his religion or spirituality too much on his sleeve---he preferred a very private practice and as for his customs in food, dress, habit, I would say he was more than accommodating. He wanted us to love life, to enjoy our family traditions and customs, and to do the things that make us feel at home and healthy. Pretty simple. No dogmas, just decency and tolerance.

Appa more than once suggested (that is the optative for the imperative here) that I not make anything too out of the ordinary in any context. (if I happen to have done a puja or meditation and smeared a bit of vibhuti, I am mindful not to go into the world (here) wearing it.) It's not hiding so much as simply not wanting the slightest bit of attention and bringing no notice to one's self---and this extends not only to appearances but also to speech or revealing any participation whatsoever in the Vidya. We are more like undercover, long term spies but without any nefarious agenda but rather as a way to just keep our business, our interests personal and private. Why does the world need to know? Why would I want the world to know anything about my personal life? And the truth is, I don't.

But Appa's Rajanaka was much more than the specific sadhanas of Śrīvidyā or the Śāktas. Śrīvidyā was the core drawing itself into the larger picture but the resource/canon goes far beyond Śrīvidyā. (It extends far beyond matters belonging to India. Rajanaka involves the study of any resource in imaginative thinking (literature, art, etc) or science with the intention of being well-informed and incorporating those facts and understandings into our lives.)

Rajanaka begins with every bit of critical historical scholarship taken to heart and its interpretive tools at the ready. Never abandon reason or empirical learning. Always commit to human fact-finding and the powers of imagination to create symbolism and metaphor. Rajanaka is a clear-minded, cool and determined effort to uncover the facts as we know them. That must come first. It has no interest particularly in supporting, advocating, or believing much of anything. It is in this first sense true academics without the slightest tinge of religion.

Rajanaka is rooted in secular scholarship and never suspends those agendas and aims: we are after an accounting that studies claims, beliefs, and practices but has no belief in them. Appa used to say that belief is rarely an ally in the pursuit of facts or of the truth such as it is. I would add that I might be the least "mystical" person you might ever meet who has a deep and abiding interest in a spiritual life. I will appear as respectful when people make religious claims or talk about their spiritual experiences (in religious or mystical terms) but my critical heart and mind is rooted in earthly, rational, evidence-based, even more commonsensical understandings.

When Śrīvidyā talks for example about liberation or siddhis I take those ideas seriously enough to study and attempt to interpret what is being said. But I don't truck in the mystical or supernatural: I am interested in a spiritual life that deals entirely with mortal life well-examined and one that celebrates our limitations and conditions as individuals, as natural and socially constructed human beings. I have no personal interest in supernormal achievements, which of course makes Rajanaka a heresy from within the Śrīvidyā. This is the next matter to reveal more thoroughly.

Appa called Rajanaka a "Vaidika Śrīvidyā," not to claim puritanical behaviors or moralizing but to distinguish Vedic goals from the Śrīvidyā that is devised on Hindu terms. By "Vedic" he meant the basic claims of Vedic (not Hindu) "religion" as characterized in the phrase dehi me, dadami te, give to me, I give to you. (See Tait. Brah for this reference or read the Jamison and Witzel article.) To put this simply, we have, metaphorically speaking, merely come down as rain and evolved into the plants and animals, we transact this world of power, desire, interest, seeking advantage and success, and then, in the end, we go up as smo ke. And that’s that. We are here to live long and prosper.

Now how that journey through the gift of mortality can be done more deeply, curiously, richly is the matter at hand and that is what we call yoga. But there is no liberation, no moksa because there is no bondage. Instead, we must choose our bondage as far as that is possible and address the rest with a decent acceptance of the facts. The bandha/moksa paradigm (that is, bondage and liberation) is Hinduism but it is not the old gods ways of Vedism. Bandha-moksa models further imply the rest: determinative bondage by karma, samsara, life as a problem to be solved ultimately and finally by liberation. Rajanaka has no interest in that model.

Ours is a spirituality of living in this world as a human being, with all of our foibles and inheritances of light and shadow. We are ever flawed, incomplete, vulnerable, and limited beings who must learn to live with ourselves by exploring as deeply as we how our physical, psychological, and cultural worlds inform our individual inheritance. The Vedic concern with svarga is at best a metaphor, for where is that heaven but within one's own mortal joys and tears? So we are at best Hindu heretics and far outside the usual definitions, norms, and claims of Śrīvidyā or any of the Tantra, Saiva or Sakta.

Rajanaka is what we might call a self-conscious misreading, a deliberate misinterpretation of the Tantra that emerges principally from the Saiva Sakta milieu of Tamil country. We appropriate all of the resources of text, history, temple life including darsan and tirthayatra, basically the entirety of Vedic and Hindu lore, imagery, and practice. But from our self-conscious, considered and calculated misrepresentation of traditional meanings, interpretations, and practices, we develop a revisionary relationship with tradition itself and mean to take matters forward into a secular, humanist life of purpose and meaning. To be clear, I didn't "invent" this approach or the Rajanaka interpretations, I learned them from a deeply learned traditionalist from south India. He and his conversationalists brought this revolution, this heresy into being. By nearly any standard it is heresy. In fact the Rajanaka reading has been called by critics "outside" the Tantra and not any longer "Hindu". I don't think I would agree (for reasons I would be happy to explain) but neither does any of this criticism matter to me. Why should it?

Learning to live is no small matter; learning to live with yourself is the deepest individual endeavor; making a life with others is what we must do to further our personal development. Again, that is our yoga.

Appa thought a great deal about and of Jungian analysis and I would say that Jung forms an important part of our interpretive matrix. Alas, Jung too came to claims of self-realization and fulfillment that strike us (me, Appa) as a bit more than is likely or even possible. We are journeying souls of memory, lost and found, collective and individual, and that project of interrogation and swerving, gaining, losing, and finding our way is a life of sadhana. Our tools are drawn from the Vedic/Hindu quiver, our Śrīvidyā with all its complexity is a vital resource of symbolism and initiative.

Rajanaka sadhana is a life that tries to uncover what lies within and address the world however it presents itself, for better and worse. We are creatures of light and shadow, there is joy inside this strange gift of life, there is the chance for love (if you get that chance) and if we are so fortunate then there is certainly only more grief and sorrow---real, unassailed and deep, we are creatures of love and grief, in a world of karma and lila. It is play of consciousness to which we are parties until...well, there is no point in discussing "afterlife" but to say that we are bits in living memories and join the collective unconscious in the ocean of memory---but I have nothing to say about immortality as a personal experience, much less a fact.

That is all far too much but you asked to study the Śrīvidyā. That is possible. But I teach the Śrīvdyā from within the Rajanaka and that is a worldview far outside the mainstreams of Hindu, Sakta Tantra, or other traditional interpretations. That is what you need to understand. You don't have to sign up for anything. You certainly would never owe me a thing, not loyalty, time, or money. Appa understood the word guru to mean the grace of your own critical understandings, the depth of your soulfulness, your love and respect for learning and sharing a "weighty" and serious seat for the examination of self, nature, society, life. So we have respect for teaching and teachers but we have no guru because there are no "superior" persons--only folks with learning and wisdom we can respect.

Think about this, think about what you want. When you're ready, let me know. It would be perfectly fine to say that this Rajanaka tradition is not for you. (You wouldn't be the first to search elsewhere and go with all my blessings, truly. Suit yourself, you should follow your heart.) Should you want to learn more, you are never obligated, you aren't signing up for anything, you are free to come and go, to step in and step out whenever it suits you. My promise to you is that I will offer what I know with as much honesty and presence as I can muster. There is at present a vast archive of learning---literally thousands of hours of courses, sessions, and work. Access to this only demands from you that you treat that work with respect, whether you agree or not, like it or not: you are on your honor to treat these resources as a friend would treat a true friend.

We mean to care for the soul by being caring, inclusive, and decent folk engaged in serious conversation. That's the offer. You might prefer other more mystical (or however one might describe) paths. There's is nothing about Rajanaka that demands any singular loyalties or commitments. What you will find in me is consistency in the message and the offering---that promise is evidenced in the last 20 years of offering the conversation to others.

Take care, write when you can, apologies again for the tardy reply,

as ever, profdbrk