An Ancient Remedy for Modern Ills
There is an ancient story about a warrior who was pierced by a poisoned arrow. His companions immediately wanted to fetch a physician from a nearby village. The victim would not hear of it. Instead, he obliged his concerned comrades, before permitting medical aid or the removal of the arrow, to inquire about the archer’s name, his residence, and family circumstances. Next, the victim instructed them to find out the type of bow-construction and the precise materials used in the arrow. Furthermore, he….but then death ensued.
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A similar plight, according to yoga Masters, afflicts modern society.
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Most people know that they are alive, but not alive with optimum life. However successful by society’s standard, something seems amiss. Like wounded stags escaping through the woods, many career people chase through life aimlessly. Meanwhile, like our storied victim, their invisible wound festers. Perhaps a few breaks in this incongruous world and my restlessness will subside. It seems so reasonable: a little more money, a little more recognition, a little better social programs, a little more something. The presumption of the mind’s anticipated satisfaction with extraneous solutions belies its deficit thinking. One resorts wholly to externalizing reason for political solutions to life’s dilemmas. Yet reason’s concoctions eventually show their wear and tear. Recovery eludes. Rational man “merely sees the diversity of things, with their divisions and limitations. He has incomplete knowledge.”[1] Man only fools himself into arguing that it must be some professional authority’s exclusive prerogative to find the ultimate solution to life’s challenges and treat society’s ills.
Another Tact
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For thousands of years yoga has supplied a program for upgrading reason, not for the sake of speculation, but precisely to reconcile man with the vexing world. A summary brief, involving coherent ideas to appease the intellect? No. Yoga feels that man’s unpredictable anxieties will hardly be resolved through careful rationalizing alone.
For society’s sake, yoga poses a critique of culture. Whenever people become complacent or discouraged with their current level of civilization, yoga quietly insists upon an overlooked feature of the human struggle. In spite of his empirical accomplishments in technology and business along with its attending anxieties and tribulations, yoga reminds our career minded individuals that they could be much more than their body, mind, and pension plan. For one possesses a reservoir of practical wisdom within that makes oneself wider than personal history and its vicissitudes. And in working from that wider vantage, a lot of the vexing issues could be better viewed for resolution. In other words, yoga proposes using a forgotten assumption that enables wounded man to recover inherent resources and remedy his affliction. No matter how bogged down or overwhelmed with his involvement with society, yoga persists with a preposterous proposal: recover the vantage of your spirit and regain an operative sense that one possesses a transcendental nature.
"There is a bridge between time and eternity; and this bridge is Atman, the spirit of man. Neither day nor night crosses that bridge, nor old age, nor death nor sorrow.”[2]
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Yoga gets down to earth and sees man embroiled in a world of ineluctable change and unavoidable limitations. Starting from this inescapable condition, yoga refuses to be abstract about the perplexing issue. Five-year renovation plans are short lived. Instead of anesthetizing the patient as Physicians do with most ailments, yoga crafts a radical approach: an applied philosophy of life, one that only reveals its significance in the act of performance. Through self-enacting its principles, one apprehends its practical truth. More, a scrutiny of human consciousness whereby consciousness uses as its chief tool living awareness itself; self-probing self, an inner alchemy of spirit. It’s also guaranteed and cheat-proof: you always get back what you invest.
“It is this spirit that we must find and know; man must find his own soul. He who has found and knows his soul has found all the worlds, has achieved all his desires.”[3]
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Yoga views man’s aggravation with life as stemming from a profound, self-imposed ignorance, whence his constant questioning about the value of life. He finds himself so compounded with confusion and error that man innocently feels at times he has entered a nightmare existence. Some years back, the French existential writers, Sartre and Camus, captured this repulsive sense of “no exit” about the insignificance of life in the wake of World War II. For those sincere and courteous individuals who are too polite to admit the facts, recall that the twentieth century harbored the bloodiest and most unjust exchanges in recorded history.
In reply to this universal discouragement, Yoga traces the root problem of life to man’s painful ignorance about the truth of his spirit.
Life’s afflictions can have an ironic impact: suffering goads a desperate search for a remedy. Pain can spur emancipation. Addressing man as a patient too long in the hospital who finally gets sick of being sick, yoga entices that irrepressible appetite in man for freedom on all fronts, moksha, as the ancients called it.Man’s sense of bondage beckons this ancient visitor to make his rounds and dispense his remedies.
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Highly optimistic, with centuries of practitioners to embody its claim, yoga insists that man’s normal state is healthful, free, serene and, amazingly, beyond all suffering. Hence, the key to his recovery, as well as the lessening of society’s turmoil, lies in his ability to restore through experience the healing vision of his spirit. Resorting to pious organizations or brandishing aphorisms of Sages won’t get himself there. He must do it to himself; embark upon a spiritual praxis of integrating his inner world of consciousness on all its levels as he goes about making his mark in the world. Familiarity with the world alone may profit him surface knowledge and temporal success; yet combined with a systematic self-exploration he can develop tranquil confidence that leaves him undisturbed amidst the flux of culture. Time and eternity, like every antithesis in life, find their crossroads in him. The meaning for their conjunction, and their enjoyment, dawns past the boundaries of history’s eras.
To understand his place in the flux of history and the cosmos, man must perceive himself as more than the purveyor of new enterprises and social schemes. For he is a complete microcosm, whose potential is reflected in the creativity of nature. All the principles of matter and energy, the archetypes of creation, are contained within his own humane evolution. These facts in evidence he must experience not by the route of academic proficiency, but as a comprehensor, evamvit—one who verifies in his person.
This epiphany of himself as the inner center of the universe is discoverable through the methodology of non-discursive conscious awareness---meditation, dhyana. Like a concentrated spaceship plunging above earth’s gravitational pull, one moves past the attractions of mind and body, expanding into the silent inner space of the universe to sight hidden galaxies of liberating knowledge.
“When the vision of reason is clear, and in steadiness the soul is in harmony; when the world of sound and other senses is gone, and the spirit has risen above passion and hate…”[4]
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An unlearning process emerges, wherein one leaves aside conventual thoughts, images and fancies. Not to disdain nor stop employing them but simply the recognition of their inherent inability to satisfy his soul. A quite natural process allowing a gradual paradox to take shape; the more one recedes inward, the more one encompasses the world at large--without opposition. Through this inner journey, the epigenic unfolding of matter and form, body and soul, the individual and society, the past as well as the future, even life and death—every apparent contradiction and dichotomy resolves into a unifying experience. The person of samadhi knows this oneness in the diversity by consciously absorbing it.
“When one dwells in the solitude of silence, and meditation and contemplation are ever with him; when too much food does not disturb his health, and his thoughts and words and body are in peace; when freedom from passion is his constant will…and his selfishness and violence and pride are gone; when lust and anger and greediness are no more, and one is free from the thought “this is mine”; then this person has risen on the mountain of the highest: he is worthy to be one with God.”[5]
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Without fear at last, he lives in unalloyed bliss and peace, a peace that the world neither gives nor understands. No longer baffled by any event of existence, the realized person now walks among the still conflicted inviting by his presence the possibility of achieving undiminished freedom. Rational man attempts world peace without first preparing himself to experience the truth of peace within himself. Modern psychology can attest to the observation that people reflect in their outer lives the interior world of their self-understanding. A world without peace is people living out of interior distress. The rational mode is only a small function of self-consciousness. Important and useful for dealing with empirical reality in the space-time continuum, it shows its inadequacy as a means to discovering the full significance of human nature and its destiny. Cultural consciousness will not begin to resolve its recurring universal dilemmas until people recognize that their problems, from disease to loneliness, start and end with their limited awareness of themselves.
In summary then, as long as man believes his ultimate realization resides in the phenomenal world, his spirit endures ennui and antagonism. And as long as the future of human culture waters the tree of its life only from its discursive font, people will remain unquenched. Our enquiry into Western consciousness suggests a complimentary route. The exact nature of its horizon before embarking can only be hinted at by reason. For interested citizens, yoga offers an injunctive invitation to foster the peaceful transformation of themselves while renewing society.
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[1] Bhagavad Gita. 18,21. The “song of the Lord” is a series of 18 chapters taken from the longest epic extant, the “Mahabharata.” These chapters reveal a dialogue between two characters, Arjuna-the aspiring one, and Krishna-the Lord of the Universe. The ensuing story has an everyman quality and may be interpreted on many levels. Arjuna is the struggle of the human soul perplexed with incongruous problems and unexpected reverses.
[2] Chandogya Upanishad, 18:51.
[3] Ibid., 8.7.
[4] Bhagavad Gita. 18.51.
[5] Ibid., 18. 52-53.