Maya, Lifting the Veil, Part 3

The Illusory World

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: Why does the regime want to eliminate this symbol? It has been in use by nearly every civilization on every continent throughout history.

Here Be Dragons

I’ve had to meditate and think very hard to get started on this part. There’s a whirl of ideas in my head that make a coherent point but the challenge is putting this into words that form something that is readable, but I guess I’ll have to give it a go anyway.

I mentioned before that I had begun a yoga practice some years ago. What I actually ought to say is that I begun a practice of “asana”, that is “poses” or “postures” that one takes in the practice of yoga. I treated it merely as some exercise which helped build strength and flexibility, and it paid off. It made me physically stronger and much of the joint and back pain I had from being a sedentary office drone had melted away after some dedicated attendance. At the end of class, when I was sweaty and tired, the teacher would slowly descend us into deep stretching exercises and finally “savasana”, the corpse pose, where we were left lying on the floor with our eyes closed. I took this as an opportunity to “meditate”, to relax, to slow the mind down, and what I found happening, even though I never really “learned” to meditate, was this: the ceasing of the fluctuations or whirling of the mind.

My mind, the one that western medicine had diagnosed as having “attention deficiency disorder”, is often one of pure chaos. I am constantly in my own head. I am constantly filled with thoughts, worries, fears, hopes, random questions about science or money or politics or food or relationships or “what I want to achieve in life”. Lying there, in savasana, watching the breath, and trying to return to it when these thoughts starting to intrude, I felt a sort of peace and freeness while I was momentarily liberated from these thoughts.

Without even realizing it, I had found what I would later come to learn is the exact definition of what yoga practice is:

Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah

I did not learn what this was until very recently, when I had decided to attend a Yoga teacher course. In this course, we have lessons in philosophy, which requires a study of the Yoga Sutras written by Pattanjali. It’s not known exactly when the Sutras were written, but estimates place it in the first few centuries after Christ.

Forgive me but I feel like I’ll have to delve into some deep water into Eastern philosophy here for quite some time. It’s something ill-understood by much of the modern world and in writing this down I feel like it will help me deepen my understanding of it.

The Indian Perspective

Yoga is defined in the sutras as Yoga chitta vritti nirodhah in the original Sanskrit.

Chitta- “the mind”, but not the “mind” as in the brain, but the “mind” that is you

Vritti- the thoughts that surface in the mind. Pattanjali describes this as a “whirlpool”, thus “the whirling”.

Nirodha- the removal, or the cessation.

Even though Asana is but one of the limbs of yoga, my limited knowledge and limited practice allowed me to access, if only briefly, this feeling. Pattanjali argues that continuing in the eight limbs of yoga and pursuing this goal of mental clarity will lead to a state of samadhi: a sort of “transcendental meditation” if you will, where the illusion of the self is peeled back to reveal the true nature of the self. Ultimately this will free you from samsara, the cycle of rebirth in the imperfect world, and lead to nirvana, a liberation of this state and full recognition of the Divine self (what is called Purusha).

I’ll have to back up here, because we’re getting in deep water, but the main idea is that the “self” is not what you think it is: you were never born, and you will never die, the Sutras say. You are not a product of this World. You are celestial, in part Divine. You are Atman; a soul.

Pattanjali is not the first to come up with these concepts of samsara, nirvana, Atman, etc. These ideas existed within Indian tradition for up to 1,000 years before he authored the Sutras in the Vedic texts and in the Upanishads. The timeline of when the Bhagavad Gita was written is rather controversial, but from what I can tell there is some agreeance that it is within that time frame of a century BC or AD. (My refusal to use the “Common Era” newspeak is purposeful. You’ll also note that I use the term “man” and “men” when referring to mankind for the same reason).

So let me backtrack a bit here. Another reason I hesitated to write this chapter is because in some ways I feel that I was not ready to. The Bhagavad Gita sits on my nightstand at this moment. It was topped by the now dog-eared Mere Christianity until this morning when I had finished that book. It is the next thing on my list. My knowledge of Indian tradition, philosophy and wisdom is very sparse at this stage. I am still a novitiate yogi, and my fear is that I misrepresent this very large canon of work that would rightfully would take me over a decade to fully digest and study. Thankfully much of that digestion has been the life’s work of my philosophy instructor, and he has provided much insight in little time. I get it wrong, however, then I apologize.

In the first part, I described this as a sort of autobiography. What it really is, or what it is turning out to be, is a sort of journal. Most people who write such things as this tend to speak from a pedestal of authority. I am not. I suppose what I am doing is documenting the process of soul-searching in real time. In fact I’ve come back to this several times (including this paragraph) to add or edit things after thought, or meditation, or reading. I will reiterate that this is not meant to be a persuasive essay. What I’m really doing is trying to get these thoughts down. To cement them before they are lost to memory. I know this probably makes this hard to read, but as I said before, it’s not really for any audience.

I know up until this point I had been framing much of what I am speaking within the context of the Christian worldview. I’m not all of a sudden going off the rails here. You’ll see this in a moment.

The Roots of Knowledge

The concept of “Indo-European language” has always intrigued me. Here you have two languages, two cultures, that are seemingly so distinct and alien from each other, that linguists and scholars have decided to lump together for some reason. As it turns out, Sanskrit and Latin, and consequently Hindi and English and French and German, all share similar linguistic roots. What we know of history; what we are taught in schools and in popular non-fiction books, and, importantly, in fictitious books(think of the numerous “based on a true story” or “inspired by a true story” works that exist in novel or cinematic form) is but a slice of our knowledge of the actual events.

Millenia of human activity have not been documented, and what is documented, very little of it reaches the common man, and what little of it reaches the common man, it is not certain that what is documented is true. Much of historian’s knowledge is gleaned from the writings of other historians (Tacitus comes to mind). Archaeology informs much, but metal rusts, flesh decays, wood rots.

All I’m saying here is that the depth of human knowledge, all human knowledge, is a deep well, and we know that man has travelled between the continents of this world for millennia before the first word or petroglyph was ever jotted down.

The way that cultures pass down their knowledge has traditionally been through myth and stories. Oral traditions. These stories are nearly impossible to trace throughout history.

So what I’m saying is when you look at, say, the Catholic practice of burning incense and compare that to the Hindu practice of burning incense, or the use of the rosary (malas), the depictions of angels and demons on buildings of worship, and find many similarities there, maybe that means something?

And if you were to look further, you might see even more similarity. Maybe it will even help inform us as to what Christ was trying to say when he gave his sermons. In fact, when I start to look at Hinduism, I see an attempt to rationally explain exactly the kinds of things Christ has spoken about.

To me, at least, the differences seem much like a technical manual versus a book of poetry. Hinduism says much about how the actual mechanics of the world play out, and I find it fascinating in a nerdy way, even though it’s very, very dense. I’ll not discount the poetic artistry of the Gita or the Vedic texts, but they seem to go into the systems involved in this “machine” of spirituality and illusions in much more detail.

Side note: I’m going to refer to “Hinduism” a lot to describe the philosophies here, but that’s an oversimplification. Buddhism and Yoga, for instance are not “Hinduism” but they are both rooted to the same philosophical principles that I am talking about.

As I said before, the Sutras were a set of actions and attitudes a student must take on to reach the state of samadhi. To make a long story short, the Sutras, and Hinduism at large, are concerned with discovering one’s eternal soul.

Reality, in the yogic/Hindu sense, is a much greater thing. It emanates from a singular consciousness, called Brahman, the highest universal principle. It is the first and the last. It is the pervasive, universal truth of all things. It is the one thing that does not change yet causes all changes.

Perhaps one could say that Brahman is the consciousness that speaks the world into existence. The world is the idea of Brahman. I cannot think of any way but to describe Brahman as what most people would think of when they think of God with a big G.

Does this at all sound familiar?

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

God speaks light into existence. He doesn’t wave his hands. He doesn’t create photons with a machine of some sort. He speaks, and it happens. This goes on through the first few sentences of Genesis until the world is created.

Before I go on, one thing I have to clear up: there is a misunderstanding among westerners that Hinduism is a polytheistic religion. It is not; Brahman stands above all. Hinduism may have Kali and Vishnu, but does not Christianity speak of St. Michael the archangel and Beelzebub?

Purusha and Prakriti

Maya, the title of this piece, is literally translated as “illusion”, or perhaps “magic”, but the kind of magic a magician would use. A ruse. In the Indian tradition, it is precisely the veil that hides reality from man. The word maya implies deception, and is also curiously similar to the language used by Christianity to describe their Enemy as well: The accuser. The deceiver. The Prince of Lies.

What does maya consist of? Well, it consists of almost everything a worldly man can imagine: matter itself, for one, and even a man’s thoughts and desires.

As to the exact origins of maya, it is left to speculation, but is largely attributed to Prakriti, probably best described as “the original or natural form or condition of anything” or “original or primary substance”. In other words, it is the very origin of nature, and the very origin of empiricism and what we would call “reality”. Prakriti is often described as “what is seen”.

Curiously enough, Prakriti is considered a “feminine” essence and is a maternal figure. Perhaps similar to how many refer to “Mother” Earth. It is opposed by Purusha, its opposite: the principle of pure consciousness. The thing that “you” actually “are”. Purusha is described as “the seer” or “the one that sees”.

Ask this question about yourself: what about you is the thing that does not change, has never changed and will never change? In that answer you have purusha. The things that change are prakriti. You will find that prakriti involves much, perhaps most and maybe even all of what you consider yourself to be. In fact every single cell in your body is recreated and replaced many times over by the time you die. Think of the Ship of Theseus: how many parts of a ship can you replace while still considering it the same ship?

So it appears that all the material aspects of you are not, in fact, you. Your cells are continually destroyed and replaced, your physical aspect changes, and thus the body is not you. It is not the Purusha.

What about your mind?

Is what you learn constant or does it change? How about your manner of speaking? Your attitudes? Your beliefs? Your morality? I think everyone can attest to nearly every aspect of what you think your “mind” is has shifted in one way or another throughout the course of their lives. Your “mind” is not immune from change. It too, at least the part of the mind most people think about, is part of Prakriti, it is not you. It is not purusha, or the atman. It is not the “Seer”. It is part of what is “Seen”.

Maybe the only thing you can think of that doesn’t change is that something called you exists and that it perceives things. Maybe it can even perceive things that do not seem to “exist”, such as dreams, visions, and imagination.

Maybe it means the real you is that which sees.

Hey! It looks like we are getting somewhere!

Emerging from Prakriti and Purusha is the Chitta, or the mind. The mind has several aspects:

Buddhi — the higher mind. This part of the mind is “awake”. It is not concerned with pleasure or pain. It is your intuition and intelligence.

Manas- the sensory mind (think of the five senses)

Ahamkara- the ego mind, or the thing that one usually thinks of when he thinks of “himself”. It is what makes decisions, assigns value, and controls behavior.

The problem with your worldly mind is that it attempts to measure, to quantify and to identify, aspects of the infinite. Every single thing we learn about the material world must be processed by our nervous systems. Thus we do not really encounter “reality” as it actually is, but through the veil of manas. It will be inaccurate, and thus it will be afflicted, according to Pattanjali. This is how the illusion perpetuates itself.

Pattanjali was a renunciate. A type of ascetic. He believed the way to let go of these delusions about the world and the afflictions it creates was to let them go. To stop “doing”; for participating in this world, all of its deceptions, meant to remain mired in the illusion and prevent the awakening. In other words, he advocated the hard road, and meant to purify, as if by fire.
Yoga is not about gaining. It is about shedding that which is false, even the things you think are most dear to you.

Let’s take a break here. How in the world does this compare to Christianity? What point am I getting at? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because it’s basically the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount:

19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

We find parables and instructions for how to shed your ego. How to shed that which you find important. How to shed your worry and your ambitions. How to rid yourself of illusory and deluded thinking. The entire time I was there, sat on the floor, listening to this man talk to me about the afflictions of the mind, the illusion of the self, the shedding of the material, I found myself, inescapably, hearing these words in my head.

I have not spent years studying the Bible. I hadn’t paid much attention to it for much of my life, but the words of Matthew 6:25 stuck out to me like a sore thumb, from somewhere deep in my memory, so much so that I had to write this next to the part in my textbook where it introduced “Yoga Citta Vritti Nirodha”. Re-reading the entire Sermon reinforced this idea further.

Although many practitioners of Yoga/Hindu philosophy have continued down the path of asceticism (this is why you’ll see emaciated old-school yogis in India today), not all have. There are many schools of Hindu thought, as in Christianity and Islam, and many are informed by the Bhagavad Gita and other works as well, which don’t renounce the Sutras but some might argue are an evolution or other aspect of it.

Much of Hindu philosophy does not eschew the material world completely, but teaches you to recognize it for what it is. The material world serves some purpose, and we need to interact with it to stay alive. The path it preaches seems not to be one of complete detachment but of temperance (also a Christian virtue). In other words, you may indulge in this world and in love and in life, but you must not become addicted to it.

It also so happens that many of these writings concern the legend of Krishna: a man who was miraculously conceived, was threatened with death by a wicked ruler, was a human incarnation of a God, was tempted by demons and who performed miracles. He predicted his own death and achieved transcendence after his death. Hmm.

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded.

Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.

C.S Lewis — Mere Christianity

The Afflictions

Pattanjali lists the afflictions, the mistaken perceptions of the world, that are destructive and obscure our true self. These are the kleshas.

1. Avidya (lit “not knowledge”): Ignorance

2. Asmita: Identification with the Ego

3. Raga: Attachment

4. Dvesha: Repulsion

5. Abhinivesha: The will to live, or in other words, the fear of death.

If you dig in to these kleshas, you start to see that they are not very far from the concept of sin. In fact, sin, as it appears in the Bible, comes from the Greek “Hamartia”, and the Hebrew “Hata”. These words do not necessarily mean “to commit some evil”. They mean “to miss the mark”, or “flawed”.
This implies that the ultimate victim of sin is the sinner (and perhaps, God himself; these two concepts may not be so dissimilar, but let’s not go there yet). The one who misses the mark is one who misses his goal.

The kleshas are very similar in this regard. Let’s examine them:

Avidya is “ignorance”, but not just a “lack of knowledge”. It is described as “taking that which is non-eternal, impure, painful, and non-self for the eternal, pure, happy, Atman (self)”. In other words, you have the wrong goal. You are mistaking the material for the divine. What you think are virtues or good attitudes do not serve your spiritual self.

Think about the inordinate amount of time and effort spent by people in matters which do not contribute to their spiritual growth, but to service their own delusions of the “self”. This could be vanity, ego, Pride (of course). This could also simply be the mistake that hedonists make- that pleasure (lust, gluttony, and all the rest) is the end all, be all of existence.

16 Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Here Jesus describes a man who fasts because he thinks it is good for him, yet the manner in which he fasts is not. He is not advancing his spiritual growth because he is missing the whole point of fasting. Fasting to show your supposed virtue is not fasting. Fasting to genuinely want to learn how to release yourself from your attachment to food and drink is the correct goal.

Asmita is identification with the ego. When I hear the word “ego”, and its illusory properties, I am brought back to Jung. Jung had observed that man often claims that he knows what he’s doing, how he’s feeling, that he and he himself is the one steering the bus and making the choices, but with little realization that these things are not steered consciously by him.

Ultimately many of man’s thoughts and actions and fears and desires are aspects of parts of his mind that are unknown to him. Pattanjali would agree, and I think the partitioning of the mind in the yogic sense correlates very closely to what Jung is talking about here.

You’ll often hear of people talking about “their passion” in life. These are the things that “give me great fulfillment”. How do they know? Most people do not realize the influence the subconscious plays in their lives, for better and for worse.

The thing that says “I am this” is not a whole picture of a man, but usually only the things the ego thinks is correlated to himself.
In other words, don’t be so sure of yourself. I thought I had myself figured out years ago, and now here I am speaking of things I would have written off completely back then. There is much, much more to your mind than what you think it is.

27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

The ego can convince you to not sleep with a woman that is not your wife because you have learned that is bad, but to be transcendent, you have to be free from the toxic desire itself. You have to root it out from the darkest depths of your being that you are not conscious of. You cannot do this without purification. It must be burned out of you, and you cannot do this yourself.

You need the assistance of the Divine and thus you must come to recognize it for what it is. In order to shed Asmita, you must also shed your Avidya. This is the Pride I have been talking about. The identification of yourself with that which you are not, and thinking it greater than what you actually are, or at least thinking that the other thing does not exist.

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.

What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils.

Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else.

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.

CS Lewis — Mere Christianity

Raga is attachment. It is all of the venal sins. It is what makes us gluttonous and lustful and greedy and wrathful. When we, through our ignorance and following our mistaken desires fed by our ego, are drawn to the things that are not Divine. We find ourselves addicted to them. We find pleasure in food and eat far beyond that which we need for nourishment. We engage in promiscuity and shed chastity. We hoard money to buy shit we don’t need.

It is important to understand that Raga goes beyond the material pleasures as well, and extends to thoughts and feelings. We might become so attached to praise that we do “good” not to further our cause but to bathe in admiration. We might become so attached to our children that we shower them with so much affection that we spoil them, or that we identify so strongly with “being a parent” that we lose sight of the Divine nature of ourselves, and in doing so set our children back from this important knowledge as well.

You may have such a strong dedication to your idea of justice that you are willing to sacrifice your soul and commit atrocities in the name of that “justice”. Exercise can become raga: you are so obsessed with physical perfection that you eschew the spiritual.

And lastly, religion, spirituality and the desire for liberation or heaven can itself be raga. You might be so concerned with worry and fear about missing out of heaven that you lose your sense of trust God. You lack faith and hope, two of the Christian virtues. Once you ask, and truly ask, earnestly for direction, the Divine will start to work within you:

7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?

10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?

11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Dvesha is repulsion, aversion and hate. It is slothfulness. It is depression. It is nihilism and cowardice. It is fear and avoidance. Dvesha is when children refuse to eat broccoli despite its nutrients. It is why a coward refuses to pick up his sword and charge at the dragon. If one is so indolent as to not leave their comfort zone, they will find themselves to be tormented by bedsores. If one is so afraid to withdraw so that they always need a “safe space”, they will find in it a prison. If someone avoids a trauma from their past, they will never grow or learn from it.

Dvesha, I think, is one of the prime evils that is luring humanity into darkness. In the obsessive way that modern man seeks to avoid anything displeasurable or “unsafe” or “triggering”, they are becoming perpetual children.

It’s why I feel the cult of “safety” is so cowardly. Why censorship of controversial viewpoints disgusting. Every hero in every good story heeds the call to adventure. The miserable wretch hides in his shack.

13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Abhinivesha, purely translated, is the “will to live”. Now, you might think this sounds odd. Aren’t we supposed to have joie de vivre? A lust for life? To put it another way, abhinivesha is better understood to mean “the fear of death”. This idea is not foreign to Christianity, as Jesus himself describes in John 12 :25

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

This is the sum of all of the kleshas. It belies an ignorance of the true self. You identify so much with this “life” that you disregard the true one. You are attached to all of the things and your friends and your family and your ideas and ideals and hopes and dreams. You fear the unknown and you fear death. All of these things make you slaves to this life. Slaves to the illusion, the maya, that this is all you are and all you ever will be. You need to see past it, through it. Understand that this is not all there is.

Go on, there are other worlds than these

• Jake, The Dark Tower #1: The Gunslinger

How One Should Go

What is important to understand is that Pattanjali does not advocate for detachment, but for the aim of non-attachment. This is a subtle, but important point. After all, we must live in the world in order to further our purification. We cannot just sit by and do absolutely nothing. We must act. So what must we be doing in the meantime? How one should go is explained in two main concepts:

Abhyasa — this is the cultivating of a strong conviction. It means you must make a persistent and dedicated effort in regulating your actions, speech and thoughts with the goal of nirodha- the ceasing of the whirling of the mind. In short, there is no half-assing it. It takes high quality effort.

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked — the whole outfit.

I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.” Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross” — in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.” He means both. And one can just see why both are true.

CS Lewis — Mere Christianity

Vairagya — means “dispassion”. We tend to think of “passion” as a positive thing. Here’s something you probably didn’t know: the word “passion” is derived from the Latin “pati”, meaning “to suffer”. It is the root of “patient”, which is what you are: a sick person. A suffering person. Don’t feel bad about it, it’s how we all come into this world. (The concept of Original Sin comes to mind, does it not?)

Vairagya is the practicing of acts which do not cause attachment and suffering. What actions are those? That is Yoga, comprised of eight limbs:
1. Yama — The “outward observances”. Adherence to a code of morality and principles.

2. Niyama— self-discipline and duties

3. Asana — Postures

4. Pranayama — Regulation of the Breath

5. Pratyahara — Withdrawal of the senses

6. Dharana — Focused concentration

7. Dhyana — Meditation

8. Samadhi — Enlightenment

Asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana are focused on the practice of yoga as you probably think of it: the postures and meditation and breath regulation. Essentially these disciplines are pathways to looking inward while ceasing the distracting thoughts of the ego. Samadhi is the goal. It is enlightenment, and a continuing effort to remain in a state of Grace, in the present, because “yoga happens now”. It’s not who you were or what you will be, but what you are. Time is immaterial to the Divine.

When comparing to Christianity, though, the Yamas and Niyamas are of particular interest.
The Yamas are somewhat akin to a moral code: principles the Yogi must carry:

1. Ahimsa (non-harming and non-violence)

2. Satya (truthfulness)

3. Asteya (non-stealing)

4. Brahmacharya (chastity)

5. Aparigraha (non-hoarding)

In these we can clearly see direct reflections in the Ten Commandments.

The Niyamas are the standards by which one should live:

1. Saucha (cleanliness). This isn’t limited to physical cleanliness, but to purity as well. It involves having pure thoughts to yourself and others

2. Santosha (contentment) This is the ability to be content with the way things are now. The abolition of attachment and greed and worry.

3. Tapas (heat) Heat is often used in yoga language to describe effort and pain. Yoga can be painful and require effort, but heat is that which purifies. Heat is also associated with the burning of fuel: fuel derived physically (such as from the digestion of food) and through force of will.

4. Svadhyaya (self-knowledge). This is the direct inquiry into the internal world. It is about exploring the self and its body to reveal its true nature. Often when people do the asana, they are thinking of how they look in relation to what the asana “should” look like. In reality, the asana is used to require self introspection. How does it feel to you? This is but one example of this type of self-inquiry.

5. Ishvarapranidhana (full surrender to the divine). You know how the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous is to 1: admit you have a problem and 2: surrender to a higher power? That’s this. It’s letting go. It’s putting faith in God. It’s an admonition to stop worrying and trying to control things and to just let go. God will take care of it but you have to put faith into it.

I’ve already written a quite lengthy comparison of the afflictions to what we would consider sin in the Christian world, so I won’t go too far here. I think you can see for yourself the similarities between the yoga prescriptions for attaining enlightenment and the Christian prescriptions for attaining enlightenment (virtues).

And maybe you will start to see that these proscriptions and prescriptions are not “arbitrary rules” for you to follow. It’s described as “Law” in the Bible, but not in the sense that you are to be “punished” for remitting them. Sure, the metaphor of the judge and the punishment is there, but what I’m trying to get at is that it is a “Law” in the sense that there exists a “Law of Gravity”. It just is that way. On this plane of existence, you can absolutely ignore the law of gravity. The gravity won’t mind. It won’t get offended. But ignoring it will absolutely destroy you.

Objections

So you might be wondering why I’ve delved this deep into Eastern tradition and attempted to marry it to Western tradition, specifically Christianity (which has informed much of Western tradition).

I should also note that I am annoyed by some of the more “New Age” type of people who espouse “Eastern” philosophies and medicine, because what they tend to do is what modern Christians tend to do: eschew the harsher sounding or more difficult aspects of the philosophy but keep the nice, warm fluffy parts. Perhaps this is why I focused on the “negative” or difficult side of both philosophies rather than the positive.

Many of these people also tend to write off Western philosophy, particularly Christianity, as “mere Western philosophy”, as if it is inferior or less enlightened than the Eastern. What I’ve tried to do here is illustrate that in no ways is this the case. I’ve often heard these people begin talking about Indian mythology by starting with “Unlike the Western world…” Bullshit. It’s all there, and many of these same kinds of concepts were explored by Plato, Aristotle, Christian apologists and Jesus himself.

I did get around to reading the Gita, and so far have only made it past the Introduction. This introduction was written by the translator, Eknath Easwaran, and is dense. It’s possibly the longest introduction I’ve read in a book, but it serves its purpose. Namely, Easwaran knows he is translating a text for Western audiences who may not be familiar with the Upanishads and the rest of the deep lore of Indian philosophy. In rectifying this, he ties it together with many Christian and Western philosophers to include David Hume, Arthur Eddington, GK Chesterfield, Ruysbroeck (who actually uses the Sanskrit word turiya in his medieval writings) to illustrates that this “Perennial Philosophy” is not limited to “the East”. In fact, I felt quite vindicated reading this introduction, and was impressed at how well Easwaran weaves the importance of this philosophy through every man’s life rather than try to claim it as a purely “cultural” thing “owned” by Indians.

Regardless, I anticipate some objections. One is “You’re overlooking a LOT of differences between Eastern and Western”. Sure. You can also say that Catholics and Baptists worship in very different days. You can call me a heretic for even entertaining these ideas and similarities. What you can’t deny, however, is that there is a clear similarity between these philosophies, and they are not limited to the Hindu tradition and the Christian one. Most mythologies and religions and philosophies tie these ideas in.

The core, central tenet of them will invariably tie in to the key core concepts of A: There is more to this world than people think and B: People ought to act differently because of it and C: Here are some rules they should follow.

Note: An update to the above, after reading the introduction to the Gita, I’ve learned that this concept had been brought up by Huxley, following Leibnitz, with a slight variation. He argues that this “Perennial Philosophy” appears in every age and every civilization, and includes:

1: There is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change

2: This same reality lies at the core of every human personality

3: The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is, to realize God while here on Earth.

I don’t seem to be too far off.

I do not think God had hidden himself from different times and different peoples throughout our history. I think he has revealed himself and the secrets of our nature to many, if not all, humans at one time. I also think that the Enemy, the maya, or whatever we call the root of “untruth” has also swayed many to his/its cause, and is actively resisting this message from getting out. Mankind, in all our pride and arrogance, have probably corrupted this message throughout the entire world and throughout all time, but what is amazing is how the most profound elements seem to survive.

I even consider the seeming rift between Hinduism and Buddhism to be relatively pedantic: the Hindus will argue for the individual soul, the Atman, while Buddha said there IS no self. Well, if returning to God means returning to God, then I don’t see what the difference is. If we are aspects of the Unitary consciousness, or God, or whatever you want to call it, then it matters not to me whether “I” survive the transition. I’d be where I’d want to be.

You might say “It seems like you’re leaning towards Christianity. Why that, specifically and not Hinduism and Buddhism?” Well, for one, I haven’t taken that massive leap of faith yet. I feel myself edging closer and closer to it, but I’m getting there. Secondly, though we have myths of Krishna and Horus and all of these other heroic stories going through a very similar scenario that Christ has went through, it’s not apparent that any of them were real, living human beings. I know that the historicity of Christ has been debated hotly, but there’s more evidence of him actually being a real man that was executed by another man named Pontius Pilate who appears to have been the Governor of Judea at the time.

There may have been many divinely-inspired stories of the perfect man from God himself, but to me it looks like it actually happened, and that’s nothing to just brush off. If God were really made flesh, then we better entertain what he has to say.

And there’s no middle ground here. I don’t agree that he can be considered a “wise prophet” but not the Son of God. If you think Christ existed there is no way you can reasonably think that he was anything other than A: What he said he was or B: A raving lunatic. He did not leave any room for debate on that issue. He made bold claims about who He was to the extent that He was executed for them. If Jesus actually walked the Earth and said the things that he said, then he was either the real deal or a villain.

If I turn out to be wrong about the historicity of Jesus, then at the very least he is one of a Pantheon of myths about this very type of thing, and the pertinent things he has to say are the most important things that the other myths say. Again, I find this to be pedantry.

“Why do you believe in the illusion at all? How are you certain there is more to human life than what we have before us now? Isn’t this all feel good fairy tales to make us comforted at the thought of non-existence?”

Now that is a very good question, and was the one I kept asking when I was an atheist. I’ve hinted the reasons for it before but I think I’m going to just lay it out best I can in the next part. It’s not an easy question to answer, and one by which you will probably not be entirely convinced. You can lead a horse to water but can’t make them drink, so they say. Some of this stuff comes through intuition. I think it’s apparent that our sense of logic can lead us astray, and can’t answer questions that we have. I’ll get to it, I promise.