yoga logic, the way I perceived it then...

This is an extract of an email I sent to a good friend from Finland on the logic of 'yoga'. There probably is nothing 'logical' about it and even if there is, I am probably the least qualified to discuss it. But I think, for me, this was a good point to begin my personal, insignificant inquiry into the nature of reality. This was in response to her email asking me about my first kriya yoga class that I had attended...

It was good. Very tiring. The first day was a three hour orientation session, the next day was about 11 hours of discussions and teaching of a few yoga postures both physical and breathing. The last day was a marathon 13 hour session of putting together what we have learned. 

We used to start every day with the prayer:

Asatoma sadhgamaya,

tamasoma jyotirgamaya,

mrityorma amritamgamaya.

It means:

From untruth, take me to the truth,

From darkness, take me to light,

From death, take me to immortality.

I quite like the prayer as it is not to any specific third person and is so fundamental to what we all want but not selfish at the same time, since it is not asking for something that we do not already possess.

I cannot teach you the practice since you need to learn from a qualified source. But I can give you the underlying logic which will follow. I have added what I have learned from my study of scriptures earlier as the condensed version of the ast 27 hours will not give you a full picture.

The underlying truth espoused in Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedas is that everything that exists is made of a single matter (its called Akasha in the scriptures). In fact it asks the question “what is that by knowing which we can know everything?” and then goes on to answer it. The idea is that the same matter vibrating at different frequencies creates the world around us. In that, the world is considered to be false and the underlying matter is the one and only truth. This matter is the Creator in that sense, but is devoid of all attributes such as sex, emotion and even sin and virtue. Hence evil, as much as good, is its creation. That is the ultimate reality. Hence the duality between good and bad, night and day, this object and that object, even the difference you and me, for example, is falsehood and is referred to as “maya”.

By means of clarification (and not related to the current email), all the other Gods and saints whose worship is prevalent, are actually beings who have come closest to this realisation and thus exert a higher extent of command over the nature we see around us. This would be the equivalent of a Christ or a Ahura Mazda or Allah or Brahma or Vishnu or Mahesh. So prayers are addressed to these secondary beings as the real “God” is quality-less. So to ask it for money (e.g.) when no difference between rich and poor exists for it, is meaningless.

An interesting offshoot of this logic is that morality appears to be a cheap, unsophisticated substitute for consciousness. To explain, instead of one saying I should not hurt you or steal from you because its ‘bad’ or a higher being doesn’t want me to, does indeed appear unsophisticated in front of a much more elegant and yet simple logic: Do not hurt anyone else, because there is no “anyone else” it is all just you. Hence if you hurt someone else, you are actually hurting yourself…therein lies the law of karma. An action comes back upon you later or even in the next lifetime (or the next, or the next…) not through some mystical means but because you have inflicted it upon yourself. 

Yoga literally means anything that takes you to a higher plane of realisation. To take an extreme example, lets say you committed a sin…but the realisation of that sin took you to a higher plane of realisation, then that sin along with its realisation will be considered as yoga. In fact, in the Gita, a warrior (Arjun) refuses to fight on a battlefield overcome with grief that he would be killing his family members. To counter this, Krishna recites the Gita. While a warrior hesitating to battle is considered to be extremely sinful, Arjun’s reluctance is classified as yoga by the Gita itself. Since the reluctance led to the Gita and that led to Arjun seeing what reality is.

The course talked about how a layperson goes about realising the truth. The guru said, we have four things at our disposal: a body, a mind (intellect), emotions and prana (force that powers this body). My understanding of prana is ‘kinetic’ to put it in modern physical terms. The scriptures say that it is prana that modifies Akasha to create duality or this illusory world. It makes sense from logic…if there is matter, which when vibrated, leads to this creation…then obviously kinetic energy is involved here. So force acting on matter creates stuff.

With four things at our disposal, we can see the truth only with these. Hence the Gita prescribes four ways to achieve realisation: Karma yoga (yoga of work) for the body, Gyana yoga (yoga of intellect) for the brain (recommended for atheists), bhakti yoga (yoga of devotion) for emotions and kriya yoga (yoga of energy) to harness each persons ‘force’. Though, no one is all body or all brain hence everyone has a combination of two or more of these methods. I, for example, am not a man of faith hence I am naturally drawn to read the scriptures to see if they make any sense (gyana yoga). Along with this I have now learned kriya yoga. So a combination of atleast two yogas is seen here.

Now the course was on kriya yoga conducted by Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev who runs the Isha Yoga Centre (you can look it up it probably has a branch in UAE or Finland). The particular process he taught is Shambhavi Kriya (it literally means technique of the twilight).