Applied Yoga

The ancient sages believed that thinking was at least as important as Downward-Facing Dog in reaching our full human potential.

By Douglas Brooks

Becoming more free to live with ourselves confers on us a greater sense of empowerment and joy. Our actions become more meaningful because we know their true purpose. "Freedom to" gives perspective and depth, the feeling that what we do does matter. The world's everyday indignities bother us less, and from our more grounded experience we naturally act more decisively and compassionately. In a complementary way, as we unravel or attenuate the causes of negative experiences, we will feel free from them because we understand more deeply how our experience has evolved. To give a simple example, we learn from experience that touching a hot stove will cause a painful burn, and so thus we learn from understanding the cause how to avoid the effect. "Freedom from" gives us a clear sense of the relationship between past experience and what we might expect in the future. Yogis strive to become free to live life from true equanimity and free from the causes we know will bring us suffering. Our experience of freedom is not "irrational" or anti-rational but rather is rooted in more deeply understanding our relationships: with others, the world, nature, and ourselves. Over time, what is logically true becomes experientially true for us, and each type of experience complements the other.

The Role of Intellect
Even among the many schools of yoga that pay homage to Patanjali, however, there are somewhat different views on the role of logic in yoga. In the view of Classical Yoga, which claims to be Patanjali's rightful heir, we become as free to experience our joy as we are free from the limitations of our bodily and mental nature. The ultimate Self is beyond all logic yet cannot be experienced without it. The immortal Purusha, or Spirit, pervades reality, but we confuse this with our mortal psychophysical Prakriti, or material nature. Logic fills an important role in sorting out the immortal Spirit from the limited material self. Put simply, Classical Yoga treats having a body and a mind as a problem to be solved. For Classical yogis, the challenge is to isolate the Self of pure Spirit. The true Self, Classical Yoga proclaims, was never truly tainted by our material nature or the causes of negativity, which can only belong to limited matter. Recognizing these facts about our material and spiritual natures depends as much on our logical understanding as it does on forms of experiential learning. As we clearly see and become free from the causes of negative experience, the Classical yogi says, we become free to revel in our spiritual nature.

The strength of Classical Yoga's vision is the way it leads us to consider a deeper level of reality, beyond material forms, while it affirms that the experiences we have as limited, embodied beings are real. Logic belongs to our limited, material nature, but like our bodies it is useful in the process of distinguishing Spirit from matter. Indeed some critics of the Classical view have questioned the coherence of severing Self so completely from the experiential self; to them, it seems ironic and even puzzling that we are asked to get into our body, mind, and heart so that we might transcend them for a Self that has no qualities at all. On a practical level, since this Self is not our bodies or minds, it becomes a kind of abstraction until (and unless) we experience it directly as pure Spirit. In the important and influential tradition of Advaita (nondualist) Vedanta, all of yoga is for the sake of becoming free to experience the Self as Oneness. Samadhi reveals that we are, and always have been, only the one true Self that abides in all beings. We need not cultivate the experience of the Self, as in Classical Yoga, but rather open up to its being the sole reality, the All, the One. At the deepest level, we are already free from the negativities; in truth, these are only forms of ignorance. Advaita Vedanta teaches that these forms of ignorance are unreal in light of the true Self or, at best, only provisionally real experiences that evaporate with the knowledge of ultimate reality. Ignorance is like darkness that vanishes when the light of knowledge enters to take its place. Advaita Vedanta tells us that yoga's purpose is to realize Oneness and that all other experiences are ultimately rooted in error or illusion. As Advaita leads us out of the maze of worldliness and into the light of Oneness, it also leads us to believe that the world is itself an illusion based on a limited, flawed understanding.

Advaita Vedanta's critics have countered that it's hard to believe that the "I" who experiences a root canal isn't really in pain because distinctions are ultimately false. And on a pragmatic level, the Advaita position seems to imply the idea that there is nothing to achieve and therefore no need for yoga practice. As an activity, yoga can have no direct role in liberation—knowledge alone liberates, according to Advaita Vedanta. We may practice yoga for pleasure if we choose so, but it seems to have no higher purpose. While perhaps true on one level, this view can also leave seekers adrift and rudderless.

In the Tantric-based yoga that is my lineage, philosophers such as the great Abhinavagupta and those practitioners of the goddess-centered Srividya traditions maintained that all of reality is the Divine expressing itself. This Divinity includes all temporal and material realities, including anything we experience as negative. Yoga, according to the Tantric philosophers, empowers us to experience every facet of ourselves as a manifestation of the Divine. Our recognition that the self of ordinary experience is none other than the same true Self that is present as the infinite forms of the universe occurs at every level of our experience, from logic to emotion. This One Self appearing as the Many does not diminish the value of the material world nor does it make our emotional or intellectual experience irrelevant by dissolving it into pure Oneness, as Classical Yoga or Advaita Vedanta can seem to do. Rather, the Tantric position maintains that yoga means we are free to experience everything as Divine because we are free from the misconception that our mortal experience is a barrier to the immortal. Thus for the Tantric tradition, we are not so much bound by our limited experience as we are simply informed by it; this is the gift of experience as well as the insight that yoga provides. But, as the critics of Tantra have pointed out, its radical affirmation that the senses and the body are Divine can lead to overindulgence and abuse by those who have more interest in their own pleasure than in Divine joy.

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