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The Incomplete Guide to Yoga
The Incomplete Guide to Yoga
The Incomplete Guide to Yoga
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The Incomplete Guide to Yoga

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Whether you are completely new to yoga, a more advanced practitioner who feels they can't see the wood for the trees or simply someone who would like to know what all these people who seem to go on about yoga are actually talking about, this is the first book you need to read. The Incomplete Guide to Yoga is a comprehensive introduction and guide to yoga, covering everything from the philosophical background and history to the nuts and bolts of how to practice - and pretty much everything in between. There are hundreds of books about yoga, covering hundreds of topics and viewpoints, many conflicting with each other. If you have ever stood in a bookshop and thought I AM JUST A NORMAL PERSON WHO WANTS TO KNOW WHAT YOGA IS AND WHAT ON EARTH I AM SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT, then reading this book will do the job nicely. The Incomplete Guide to Yoga is a unique synthesis of the many aspects of yoga, and its relationship with modern thinking. It provides clear, unbiased explanations and will leave you with your own coherent picture of yoga and how it will work for you.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 27, 2012
ISBN9781780993454
The Incomplete Guide to Yoga

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    The Incomplete Guide to Yoga - Charlotte Carnegie

    in-laws.

    Preface

    What qualifies me to write this book?

    Nothing and everything, depending on which way you look at it.

    I am not a well-known or especially experienced yoga teacher.

    I am not a respected academic who has spent years studying the finer points of philosophy.

    I am certainly not a spiritual master.

    I am an ordinary person, with an ordinary yoga practice and an ordinary life, full of ordinary cock-ups. My views on yoga are no more worth hearing than anyone else’s – and indeed are considerably less worth hearing than those of many other people. Whilst yoga has been my passion for fifteen years, I have not spent that time living in an ashram immersed in the teachings. I have, during that period, worked eighteen hour days in an office and had two children, for a start – which as you can imagine, is not particularly conducive to a life of contemplation. And this is what qualifies me to write this book for you. We are (unless you actually are a spiritual master, in which case, well done you) coming from the same place. I do not offer you my own views in this book. I do not offer you my own experience. You are perfectly capable of forming your own views and having your own experience. What I can offer you is the result of my years of study. I can offer you the basics of the views and approaches of those people who are worth listening to, set out in a logical and accessible way. I can offer you the book I wish someone had already written when I came to yoga, so that I didn’t have to go to all the trouble of writing this one myself.

    I have tried my utmost to make this book completely unbiased. I accept that this is in fact impossible, and that just by choosing which words to write and what to include I am already introducing bias. I have tied myself in metaphorical knots trying to make sure that nobody finds anything in it offensive or critical of their beliefs. Yoga is not about imposing beliefs or criticising the beliefs of others. Yoga says, Try. Discover for yourself, through your own experience. However, by its very nature, an unbiased book will offend some people. If you have a strong belief in one system and believe it is the only system that is correct, the suggestion of other paths, naturally, will offend you. So as you read this book, please take it in the spirit in which it is intended – an open and well-meant offering of the teachings of yoga as I have understood them thus far. Any bias or criticism is entirely unintended, and if I have put my foot in it at any point and said something which could have been more sensitively phrased, then I offer my sincere apologies.

    I would also like to point out that the title of this book is meant literally. It is so far from being complete I cannot begin to tell you. In the interest of keeping things concise and accessible, I have a pretty long list of things that I know aren’t in here – so one can only imagine how long the list of things I don’t know aren’t in here is. Not only is it incomplete in its content, you may be rather frustrated to learn that it is also incomplete in its conclusions. I am not here to offer you conclusions. To attempt to do so would be arrogance and delusion in the extreme. My hope is that this book raises more questions than it answers, so that you and anybody else who cares to consider them can form your own conclusions.

    As a guide to other people’s teachings, and other people’s interpretations of those teachings, the vast majority of this book is not something I have just made up myself. Luckily for you. At the end of the book you will find a References section where I have listed all the books and sources I have consulted in order to write this one. Where I have referred in the text to a model or concept which has been specifically outlined by one person, I have included reference to that person’s work and an endnote telling you where and when they said it. I make no claim as to the originality of most of the ideas and explanations you will find here, and am indebted to the writers and thinkers who have made the contributions to knowledge referred to in this book. Whilst I’ve made every effort to include appropriate references and credits, if I have missed any out or included anything that has already been elaborated in similar terms by someone else, it is entirely unintentional. I have tried to strike a balance between including appropriate references and peppering every page willy-nilly with footnotes and cross-references. There is one thing I am particularly terrified of in releasing this book into the wild. My brain may be sorely inadequate in many areas, but it is a sponge as far as words are concerned. Give me half a line of a lyric from a pop song written in 1982 and I will blurt out the rest without so much as a by-your-leave. Put a crossword in front of me and I will fill in the blanks before I’ve noticed. Whilst writing this book, at one point I lost half a chapter. After a degree of swearing and kicking things, I sat down and wrote it again. When I found the missing pages a couple of days later, I discovered that the new version was almost word for word the same as the original one. This is the thing I am terrified of. It is entirely possible that there is a sentence in this book that I think I’ve made up but is actually something I read somewhere else five years ago and just don’t remember. I have scoured this book from front to back and not found any of these, but that’s not to say there aren’t any in here. If any of the slippery blighters have found their way in, you can rest assured that I am duly mortified.

    It goes without saying that this book is written for your amusement and general edification. If you are going to start or change any yoga practice based on what is in it, please consult your health professional first. I do not take responsibility for any mischief you do to yourself as a result of using it.

    Introduction

    Don’t dedicate your life to yoga – yoga is about dedicating yourself to life.

    I am going to break with tradition and start a book about yoga without using the phrase "the word ‘yoga’ is derived from the word ‘yuj’ which means ‘to yoke’." In the course of researching this book, I have read that sentence precisely 97 times and I have no wish to read it ever again.

    As you may have guessed from the title, this book aims to explain what yoga is, and how you are supposed to go about doing it. You may be a newcomer to yoga and wondering whether you should go to a class for the first time, or you may be an advanced student or teacher looking for the big picture or trying to piece the strands of your knowledge together. You may have no interest in actually doing anything whatsoever but would simply quite like to know what everyone’s banging on about, if only for the purpose of arguing with irritating people at dinner parties from a position of authority. Whoever you are, the whole subject has a tendency to grow bigger and bigger and more and more complicated the more you look into it. In this book, hopefully we will unravel it together, looking at all the angles and creating a coherent picture – your coherent picture. That way you will know where you are and where you want to go, which frankly seems a pretty sensible approach to the start of a journey. Whether the information in this book is all new to you, or is re-visiting things you already know, it is my aim that you end up with all the tools you need, inspired to start (or indeed to decide not to start) your journey.

    The tone of this book may seem light-hearted or even irreverent at times. Does it matter? Why should it matter? The tone by no means indicates that I do not have deep respect for yoga and its teachings. I take it extremely seriously. Seriously enough to make it my life’s work in fact, and you don’t get much more serious than that. The method in my levity lies in the fact that traditionally, yoga was learnt from an early age, from one teacher. That teacher would have spent his life immersed in the teachings and experiencing them, having learnt them from his teacher, who learnt them from his teacher and... you get the picture. The way to learn was the same as it is now – examine the teachings, test them for yourself, make them real for you. But the student at that time would put himself in the hands of the teacher and have faith that what he was told to do was correct. Unless you are very unusual, you will probably not have come to yoga in that way. Today yoga is everywhere. You can go to classes of many different styles, taught by teachers of many different backgrounds and levels of experience. You can buy countless books and magazines. Whilst this ease of access to yoga is helpful in one way, it also makes things more complicated. The teacher you find might be very good or they might not. The book you read may be the right one to speak to you or it might not. All of this makes the concept that you must take responsibility for your own experience and test things for yourself more important than ever. Keep a clear head. There is no need to leave your brain at the door with your shoes when you go into a yoga class. Don’t feel you have to take anything for granted. That can be hard when you’re in the thick of it, swept up in enthusiasm, perhaps impressed by a teacher. It is for this reason that this book is written in a light-hearted, everyday tone. To help you keep your head. To help you take responsibility for your own journey. To keep reminding you that even though yoga is an amazingly powerful and valuable teaching, it is still just a teaching, a model. It is real and based on real people’s experiences. Try it, experience it for yourself, just as you would anything else. You’re reading this book with your thinking, rational mind and the only purpose of doing that is to put the information from the pages into your head. Once it’s in there, you can start the real work of integrating the messages into your whole self, in a way that is right for you. So I will talk to your everyday book-reading, crossword-solving, shopping-list-writing mind in everyday language and that way we’ll have no room for confusion.

    The truth is, yoga is beyond language and beyond description. It is beyond being learnt by the intellectual mind. But we have to start somewhere, so the intellectual mind is as good a place as any.

    If we start with the very basics, yoga doesn’t seem that complicated at all. Here they are:

    Yoga as we use the term today is a broad definition covering various schools of philosophy, together with practical exercises designed to help you experience what that philosophy has to say. The definition of yoga in common parlance is now so broad in fact that no one seems actually to be able to agree what is yoga and what is not yoga. Which does rather make writing this book a bit tricky. So from now on, when I use the word yoga I am making a naturally rather arbitrary categorisation of including the philosophies and practices that tend to be treated as yoga in the West today, even if from the purist’s perspective they are not necessarily part of the teachings.

    These philosophies evolved thousands of years ago on the Indian sub-continent and have been adapted and re-interpreted ever since. The practices that go with them tend to vary in terms of origin, from practices documented in the original texts, to practices that have been significantly modified, and even ones that have simply been invented much later on.

    All the approaches seek to explain how the universe and everything in it works (including us). Not at all ambitious then.

    All the approaches have the same aim – liberation, an end to suffering.

    Each approach offers different practical ways to get there.

    Well, that sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? In fact, that may well be all you wanted to know, in which case, do feel free to put this book down now and go and do something else instead.

    Yoga evolved in the East, where the cultural mindset was, and still is, very different from that of the modern West. The typical Westerner (including me) is not happy just to take simple instructions for granted and carry them out. He wants to know why, and on what basis, and is this basis definitely, absolutely, the best basis? He wants intellectual understanding almost more than experiential understanding. Or at least he wants that first. In the modern world, the intellect has become king. Our Mr. Average may keep hearing that yoga is not something you can understand with the intellect, but he feels lost without it. Coming from this viewpoint, yoga can be frustrating – in particular, getting started. Say I decide to go to a yoga class. I am faced with hundreds of choices and styles. How do I know which one is right? Finally, I make a random choice and go to a class. After a while, my interest deepens and I want to know more about it. So I buy a book, and it tells me some things and I’m happy – I’ve got it. But then, wait – someone tells me about this other amazing book I have to read, and I read it, and it mentions all these other things that weren’t even included in my first book. And some of the things it says seem to be completely contradictory to what I read in my first book. And this cycle continues, and all the while I’m hedging my bets, I’m not really doing anything because I’d really rather wait until I definitely have it figured out and know what I’m supposed to be doing.

    The problem with this approach is that if you examine just a selection of the huge body of literature and teachings about yoga, together with the constant developments in modern science and other fields which address the same issues, you reach two seemingly overwhelming conclusions.

    Firstly, the human body, influenced as it is by physiological processes and by the mind and emotions – which according to yoga are only certain facets of its existence, by no means the totality – is an object of such dazzling and mind-blowing complexity that we can be forgiven for thinking that we, as individuals, will never get to the bottom even of that.

    And that is just the physical body... Secondly, in considering the teachings that say we can understand and realise the nature of the universe itself, the nature of creation, why we are here and how everything works, we might begin to question whether that will ever be possible. Are we attempting to explain the equivalent of a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional cartoon character on a page, who has no simply conception of or faculty to process the idea of a third dimension? Does man from his current viewpoint on a rapidly spinning rock in the middle of space simply not have the ability to comprehend what the hell he’s doing standing there in the first place? It begins to seem as though we are trying to explain how a car works to an ant.

    It is therefore easy to get the feeling that it is fruitless trying to explain ourselves and our world, much less do anything to change it. We may as well just give up and get back to watching television or painting our nails. There are countless models which attempt to explain existence, from the traditional religious teachings of creationism, to cutting-edge physics. Certain thinkers propose that our universe could be one of many parallel universes, all created as computer models for some greater unknown purpose, with each model demonstrating a different set of parameters and situations. Why not? We all find it easy to laugh at and reject some or all of these theories but how many of us actually know the answer? I certainly don’t. Perhaps our existence and universe is actually an incredibly simple thing, made incomprehensible to us because of our perspective, just as the car is to an ant. Who knows?

    So why bother? Why yoga? Why the centuries’ old thirst for knowledge, for realisation? Is this just part of the ever-hopeful programming of the human mind, the drive towards evolution? Why not give up? We don’t give up because hope springs eternal. People find this hope in different places, and in different ways. Here’s just one thought to be going on with. So many philosophies and teachings stress the importance of changing yourself if you want to change the world. They say that as part of creation, we should take responsibility for making the small part of it that we are as good as possible – and if everyone does this, then the whole of creation will be great. Simple! We will still be living in the world as we do now, unrealised and un-liberated, but at least it will be the best world it can be. But there is another possibility. Going back to the ant and the car, I think everyone would agree it is impossible to teach an ant how a car works. Just teaching the ant English in order to be able to explain things to it would be fairly time-consuming I reckon. But I gather that a colony of termites has approximately the same collective intelligence as a human brain. And there are plenty of humans who understand how a car works. What if, collectively, we could understand what we are incapable of at the individual level? What if this is the message? By working on ourselves, changing ourselves, perhaps we will not just make the world a better place to be, perhaps we will in fact unlock the door to a new understanding, a realisation, of the universe and how it works. I have absolutely no idea whether this is the case or not, but this is the kind of question yoga seeks to answer. You can see why it all gets a bit complicated. Indeed the title of this book could just as well have been The Big Book of Questions. There are going to be questions flying all over the place, willy-nilly. This is important. Why should you swallow everything that a teacher or teaching has to say without confirming its validity for yourself? If there is one thing that will stand in the way of making progress, it’s doubt. Doubts will clutter up your mind and generally slow you down. So we will question unceasingly and bring to light as many doubts and ambiguities as we can, with the aim of clearing as many of them as possible out of your way.

    After many years of study, and hundreds of books and classes, I have come to realise what I feel rather stupid for not realising before. In the West, we tend to see yoga as a finite subject – a topic. We think we can learn about yoga intellectually in the same way we can learn French. It is not unreasonable at all to think that if we spent, say a couple of years, learning it, we could definitely understand how to speak French. And when we have done that, then we will be satisfied and happy to go ahead and move to France. But yoga is a vast and ancient collection of philosophies, together with countless re-interpretations and additions and changes. To decide to learn about and personally experience yoga and all the subjects that relate to it is akin to deciding to learn everything about Western literature from the earliest published manuscripts to date. Everything. Every book, fiction and non-fiction, ever written. I’m not saying that’s impossible, but I am saying it will take considerably longer than most of us have available. If we put off actually doing anything until we’ve done that, or keep chopping and changing while we make up our minds, I’m guessing we won’t have much time left to get anywhere at all. And in any event, yoga is developing all the time, and science is developing all the time, and we don’t know if we can really know the answer anyway...

    So this is the book I wish someone had written to satisfy my Western need-to-know mind. It lays out in front of you much (and how I wish I could say all) of the background and theory of yoga philosophy, with no particular bias. It also includes the practical side of how to practice, and lots of other things that are relevant and would otherwise annoy you by cropping up when you least expect them. My aim is that having read this book you will know where you are starting from and where you want to go. In yoga, it’s easy to feel as though you can’t see the wood for the trees. Well, I am going to show you as many of the trees as I can and do my best to point out the wood for you.

    When you look at all the subjects and questions in this book, you would be forgiven for thinking that yoga is extremely complicated. We like to make things extremely complicated. At its heart, it’s actually something very simple explained in lots of different ways. I am reminded of a quote from Michael Winner who said he was going to publish a diet book which consisted of one page with Eat Less written on it in large letters. With yoga, the same would be possible. It would just say Wake up! Unfortunately we have so many preconceptions and so little connection with what it is we actually need to do, that we have to go all the way to the end of everything in our way before we realise that all the action was going on right where we started from.

    Speaking of complexity, there is a bandwagon of epic, Airbus 380, proportions chugging its way merrily through the field of yoga at the moment. That bandwagon is the appropriation of a selective combination of quantum and theoretical physics, molecular biology and neuroscience (amongst other things) to substantiate and add to the claims of yoga. Given the length of time it takes to gain proficiency in any one of those subjects, it seems likely that not many of the bandwagon’s passengers are well-versed in all of them. Call me cynical, but I’m guessing it’s entirely possible that some of the passengers are not even slightly-versed in any of them. And neither am I.

    I am presented with a quandary, reader. The quandary is that, without direct knowledge, I must resort to the books and learning that are available to the lay reader, with the sorry addition of the basics I didn’t really listen to enough at school. Even taking into account only those books or scientists that have nothing at all to say about yoga or related fields - those that aim at the popular science market with no self-improvement message - I find remarkable similarities to the teachings of yoga. However even with these narrow criteria I am in no position to assess the merit of the views expressed in those works and am in even less of a position to make links between them and what yoga tells us. It would therefore be entirely appropriate for me to stand resolutely at the bandwagon-stop and let it chug its way merrily by.

    But what would be the use of that? I would really like to know if the correlations that seem to be apparent are plausible and I’m sure you would too. Moreover my desire to know is much greater than any insult my intellectual pride will suffer when I receive scathing criticisms from angry physicists. I already know I’m rubbish at science. So if you are up for it reader, we will indeed jump on the bandwagon as and when appropriate, and hope that asking the questions prompts people to answer them. Just don’t take my word for anything even vaguely science-related. You have been warned.

    Ultimately, there is so much yoga and so many teachings, and so much practice to do, and it is so exhausting and counter-productive to run in circles trying to understand everything with your intellect, that I will save you a lot of time in reading this book and just use the words of Sri Pattabhi Jois, a world renowned teacher:

    Practice. All is coming....

    Honestly, this is the best advice there is when it comes to yoga. Read this book to give that Western mind a nice cosy sense of security and then just shut up and get on with changing yourself and your little piece of the world. (And maybe use this book as a handy doorstop or paperweight.)

    PART ONE

    WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

    Chapter 1

    Where are we trying to go?

    The aim of yoga is, essentially, to be Keanu Reeves.

    Bet you didn’t see that coming.

    This doesn’t, you may be pleased to learn, literally mean Keanu Reeves, Hollywood actor. The relative merits and demerits of a world populated by Keanu Reeves clones is a whole other topic and one on which I’m sure you have your own views. I’m referring instead to his best-known character, Neo, the lead role in the block-buster film, The Matrix.

    In that film, the lead character realises the true nature of the world around him, which in this case is a computer simulation called the Matrix. He understands that the way he saw the world, what he took to be truth, was actually taking place by virtue of his mind. He wakes up from that misconception and is able to see the world around him, the Matrix, for what it really is – a unified field of computer code, energy, formatted in different ways using different binary combinations to create a very real-looking world. Being able to see through the outer appearance, and understand the true nature of the Matrix, he is able to control it and his reactions to it. He is able to live within the Matrix, and to live outside it. He is able to do seemingly impossible things. He gets it. And having got it, he wants to help everybody else to be able to get it too. He is, in religious or spiritual terms, enlightened.

    Now I am by no means saying that the world we live in is a computer programme, so please don’t look in confusion at the cover of this book and wonder if you wandered into the conspiracy-theory section of the bookshop by mistake. But the analogy is a useful one, as you will see when we look more deeply into yoga’s view of the world around us.

    This is the aim of yoga. Waking up. Actually realising, in the sense of making real, the true nature of the universe. It is the ability to see things as they really are, not as we would like them to be. It is the end of suffering, the end of the war within us and consequently of the wars we see around us. But with fewer robots. (Sunglasses, full-length leather coat and attractive sidekick are entirely optional.)

    This is such an ambitious and extraordinary aim that it bears repeating in case you missed it. The teachings of yoga tell us that each of us has the potential and the responsibility to realise our true nature and our place in the universe. It is an aim that goes far beyond our usual ways of thinking. Yoga says that we are aiming too low and living lives that are far inferior to the way things could be. The ultimate goal of yoga is to understand at an experiential level how time, space, the universe and all those other mysterious science-type things actually work and how we fit into them. This is the only way we can truly be who we are and fulfil our place in the overall scheme of things. The aim is to replace our usual level of consciousness with a completely different kind of consciousness altogether.

    You may be surprised to hear this. It is after all, a fairly impressive claim. (You may also be wondering why it is necessary to wear unflattering leotard-based clothing and tie yourself in knots while an earnest woman with a mild wind-chime fixation exhorts you to breathe into your left earlobe. On that count, you would be correct, it is entirely unnecessary.) Some people would of course say that to assert that humans can ever experience everything there is to experience all at once, or even truly understand themselves in the context of the universe, is a completely insane idea. Humans are just one type of creature and are subject to the limitations inherent in being that type of creature in terms of their ability to perceive things. Dogs can smell cocaine inside suitcases and I can’t. To say that humans are somehow capable of transcending the usual rules of nature might look a teeny bit arrogant. Nonetheless, if we were to agree with this view right now, this would be a very short book, so we’d better reserve that judgement for the time being.

    In case you are thinking, I don’t need that, I’m perfectly fine as I am, here is a small checklist:

    Are you always completely content, no matter what is happening?

    Can you say that you honestly never wish things were different from the way they are, even when your boyfriend dumps you or you get salmonella or an unfortunate incident with a photocopier causes you to lose your job?

    Are your mind and your thoughts always completely under your control and not the other way round?

    Do you really understand how it is that you are able to notice your own thoughts and who it is that does the noticing?

    Is it true that you never spend your time reacting to other people and worrying about what they think?

    Do you understand from experience, do you know, that you are, at a fundamental level, no different from the chair you are sitting on, or that annoying man down the road?

    Can you see everything that there is, at all levels, all at the same time?

    If you answered yes to all the questions, congratulations! You are enlightened! (Or lying.)

    If you answered no, then I am sorry to inform you that you are not enlightened. Or, in other words, according to yoga, you are suffering. You suffer when things don’t go your way, and you suffer when they do because you’re scared they won’t next time. Even if you are the luckiest person on earth and nothing bad ever happens to you, you suffer in the end because you die and you can’t take anything with you. You have two choices. Firstly, you can say, I don’t care, I’m not interested. Fair enough. Secondly, you can decide that you’d really quite like to understand how everything works and what the whole point is, and look for a way to do this. You would, in this case, be one of the millions of people throughout history who have felt this way. It’s part of human nature, the drive towards understanding, progress, and evolution. All science, religion and philosophy are based on this drive to understand, to evolve, to create an authentic explanation of how everything works and what we are doing here. Our shared desire for this sense of purpose usually remains lurking around in the background whilst we merrily eat biscuits and buy new shoes. There are many different names to represent working towards this understanding, with many different models and routes to get there – from the major religions to mainstream science. Yoga is one of those names, and is also beyond any of them.

    Yoga can be seen as beyond names and systems, because at its heart, it describes the goal, the result, and is not prescriptive about the way to get there. Yoga tells us that understanding, realisation, is possible and inspires us to work towards it. Whilst the various schools of thought in yoga (which we will look at in detail later) all suggest different things we might find helpful along the way, these are suggestions, not dogma. From the perspective of yoga, anyone who is doing anything with the aim of working towards a complete and experiential understanding of creation, consciousness and the world around them is doing yoga – whether they call it quantum physics or Christianity.

    I often meet people who are disillusioned with life and asking, What’s the point? What’s the purpose of life? They feel envious of others who have a vocation. They feel they are just existing in a mundane and ultimately meaningless cycle – growing up, getting a job, having children, getting old, dying. I have heard people say so many times, We’re only here to pass on our genes, what’s the point in that? as they gaze with resignation into a pint of lager. So many people in modern life feel this way – or would feel this way if they weren’t able to fill their lives up with frantic activity and distraction twenty-four hours a day. According to yoga – and probably according to you, if you really think about it – they are missing the point. Just existing? Isn’t the fact that we exist at all, in such a complex and breath-taking form, pretty amazing on its own? Isn’t the fact that we started off as tiny blobs of sludge in the primordial soup and now we have cool stuff like arms and legs and iPhones pretty amazing too? That is evolution. That is the unstoppable path of the ongoing and endless act of creation. (I should make it clear for the creationists among you that while most schools of yoga offer views of cosmology and therefore creation, these are by no means required. Yoga does not seek to impose any belief system. From a creationist perspective, the same sense of wonder at creation will no doubt already exist so do feel free to skip a few paragraphs.)

    Many philosophies end up tying themselves into knots with their own theories. They make a lovely model of how everything they want to explain works and then they get so carried away that they forget that the model is just a model. It’s a two-dimensional picture of the thing they are trying to describe. This is like confusing the diagram in the manual for your television with your television itself. The danger in this approach is that if your actual television doesn’t match the diagram, you might end up taking a hammer to it to try to make it look the same, which is not the most constructive way to go about things. Even if you don’t have such violent tendencies towards electrical goods, at some level, creating a model will always lead to this result. There is a whole universe out there as one big thing. To analyse it, you need to break it down into bits, which means choosing which bits you are going to pick. Even if you choose all the bits, you still have a pile of bits and not a whole undivided thing. Yoga accepts that its teachings are just a diagram, and that it is important for you to go to try for yourself and see what everything looks like to you. Maybe you would have drawn a different diagram. The only way to know is to take the practical approach and see for yourself. No amount of looking at diagrams is going to help you receive the latest series of House in high-definition in the comfort of your own living room.

    You might still be wondering why you should bother looking at diagrams in the first place anyway. I get the feeling people sometimes forget that evolution isn’t finished. Which is a pretty odd idea, if you think about it. After all, we were fine when we crawled about in swamps as weird-looking reptiles. We were fine when we foraged for nuts and berries on all fours. We were fine before someone thought, Ooh, I wonder what happens if I rub these two sticks together really quickly? So why stop here? According to neuroscience, we’re not even sure how a massive proportion of our brain even works. What if we could know? Wouldn’t you like to know what it does? Wouldn’t it be cool if we evolved into people that used all of it? Now I have no idea if we will or we won’t but the point is, yes – we are here to pass on our genes. Evolution, change, will happen whether we choose to join in with it or not. Why not help things along? Why not pass on better genes? Why not work as best we can to further our understanding, our consciousness? That is yoga, and if you are looking for a purpose in life, that’s a pretty good one. Plus, it’s free of charge and doesn’t require a uniform.

    So what about all the other things we hear about as the goals or benefits of yoga?

    What about a perfect body, physical flexibility, lower blood pressure, reduced anxiety? And at the other end of the spectrum, what about those yogis we hear about in the newspapers or on TV who claim to be able to levitate or go without food and water indefinitely? What have they got to do with it?

    The answer is simple. They are side-effects. Granted, they are pretty nice side effects (especially the ability to levitate, that would be very handy in crowded cinemas) but at the level of the purist, they are not the point. I am not saying that they cannot be the point as far as you are concerned – there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be able to touch your toes – but since you are reading this book to find out what yoga is, I’m giving you the whole picture. It’s a bit like cordless power tools. The point of scientists spending hours and hours doing really clever stuff to invent cordless power tools was to put them on space shuttles so that we could fly to the moon and collect moon rocks. Space exploration is the point of cordless power tools. But it turns out, they’re also pretty useful if you use them to build a flat-pack wardrobe from IKEA. And that’s fine. I don’t feel I am misusing power tools every time I make a misshapen and poorly constructed item of furniture which through my own incompetence collapses as soon as I put a lone pair of socks in it. It’s the same with yoga – it’s fine to use yoga for whatever benefit you like. Just know that the ultimate aim is much more than that.

    So our ultimate goal is enlightenment. It is to understand, not at an intellectual level but at the level of experience, the way in which we are part of the fabric of the universe, the constant flow of creation. And by realising that, as part of that, we understand everything. Of course, this goal may be a little bit ambitious for many of us. Some teachers like to translate the goal into more everyday and achievable language and say that it is something along the lines of having awareness and clarity about what we are doing as much as possible during our lives. On this view, the goal is simply to be driving our metaphorical car with our eyes open and looking where we are going, instead of steering with one hand, holding a Big Mac with the other and looking out of the window at a cloud that looks a bit like George Clooney as we career at high speed down the wrong side of the road. To cater for all kinds of opinions and just so we are clear, I suggest that for the rest of this book we categorise the goal into three levels.

    A goal related to a specific material issue, like improving the state of your knee pain / insomnia / chocolate addiction.

    An intermediate level goal, which is the goal of our car-driving analogy above. Nothing fancy or unimaginable, just living according to our true nature and generally being a sorted and authentic human being. This goal is more than a life’s work on its own to be honest.

    The ultimate Keanu Reeves-based goal.

    Whichever goal we have in mind, yoga tells us that the key to achieving it is to realise that we are not separate and different from everything else, and that we are not just our physical body, our social identity or even our thoughts and emotions.

    This may be beginning to sound a bit far-fetched for you already. You may be thinking, Hang on, you said this was unbiased, that I didn’t need to believe in anything new-age or esoteric? You don’t. Science is already quite comfortable with the idea that everything is made of atoms, arranged in different shapes to make different things. Atoms are just atoms. Atoms don’t have blonde hair or know how to play chess or sprout leaves or spew molten lava into the sky. You are made of them, this book is made of them, the chair you are sitting on is made of them. At the atomic level, you are just a load of atoms which have a bit less space between them than the space between you and the next thing. You just don’t see it that way.

    And what about the fact that you are not your body, not your social identity and not your thoughts and emotions? That’s a bit of a far-fetched assertion isn’t it? Not really. If you can prove that you are in fact those things, I’m pretty sure you will need to stop reading this to go out and buy a new suit to wear to your Nobel prize presentation. Certainly, we are programmed to identify ourselves with those things. We will look at this in detail in a later chapter. But think about it. Your body renews itself all the time. Your cells die and are replaced. You change over time – you don’t look the same as you did when you were six. But you are still you. Your social identity changes too – for a while you might be an accountant and then you might decide to run away to join the circus. But you are still you. Your thoughts and emotions change constantly, minute by minute. One minute you are depressed because someone didn’t return your call, the next minute you are elated because you won the lottery. But you are still you. So what is you? Where did you come from and where will you go when your physical body gives up the ghost? Yoga maintains that it is possible to understand this. Mind-blowing, isn’t it? Aren’t you feeling just a little bit excited already?

    At this point in proceedings, we should clear one thing up so it doesn’t sit there at the back of your mind annoying you as you read this book. That thing is God. Or consciousness. Or universal energy. Or spirit. Or any other name you choose to call it, or very definitely don’t want to call it. Pretty much every model of how things work, whether religious or scientific, has come to the conclusion that there is something (or things) which creates the universe, allows or causes things to happen within it, and generally fills in all the spaces between the stuff we can actually see and measure. Models vary wildly as to what that might be and whether it is one thing or separate things. Religions use the concept of God (and sometimes Holy Spirit). Different religions place different emphasis on the extent to which God causes things to happen (the white-haired-manin-sandals-on-a-cloud scenario) or whether God simply happens to be there when things do happen (rather like Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote). Religions also personalise this thing or things, with deities and symbolism. At the other end of the spectrum, scientists also acknowledge its existence but with an approach more akin to politicians’ press statements – There must be this thing, but we don’t actually know what it is or how to look at it. They are pretty convinced it’s there though – convinced enough to build a massive Scalextrics track under Switzerland to try to find it. All I am saying is that if you believe that you exist, and that your house and your dog and your car exist, something caused or allowed that to happen. That’s all. You can use whichever word you like to describe that. You can call it God, or Spirit, or Energy, or Nature, or The Thing They’re Trying To Find Under Switzerland. Or indeed, Alan. For the purposes of this book, since it is a traditional English translation from a yogic viewpoint, we will call it consciousness. We will look at the question of religion in Chapter 5, but for now I think we are safe in saying that yoga does not seek to impose religious or cultural views, or require you to change your current belief system. You can practise yoga whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Greek Orthodox (or indeed any other religion you care to name. Though whether you are prepared to call it yoga is indeed another question.)

    While we’re in the business of clarifying things, we should also note that the word yoga refers to two different things. It can be used as a verb, to talk about things you do with the intention of realising your goal. It can also be used to describe the state that results from realising the goal.

    So. We know that yoga aims for enlightenment. We know what enlightenment is supposed to be. Well, kind of. It’s impossible really to appreciate the ultimate aim of yoga without experience of it. It’s a bit like trying to describe a painting you haven’t painted yet. There is not much point trying to define the state of liberation - the definition will be different for each person as they will relate to their experiences and explain them in different ways. That hasn’t stopped people from trying though, as we will see. We have chosen a name for the underlying reality that we are trying to uncover and realise. We know that yoga says enlightenment is possible. There’s just one tiny catch. We don’t know how or when it’s possible and how long it’s going to take. On this point, we find that we already have to begin to follow the winding branches of the different schools of thought within yoga. We will look at those in detail later, but for now, we should simply note that there are two main approaches. In the first approach, enlightenment or liberation is not possible whilst we are alive and inhabiting a physical body. Instead, we do all the groundwork, as it were, and assuming (and it is a pretty big assumption) we have done everything we need to, we become liberated when we leave the body. (Or to be more precise, when we become liberated, we leave the body.) In the second approach – which has become more prevalent – living liberation is possible. We can realise our true nature and still be alive and wandering around, popping into Starbucks and generally doing normal things. We will also be able to tell jokes like, "I used to be an atheist, until I realised I was God"¹, which would be fairly amusing.

    Which of these you choose to believe, if any, is entirely up to you. This book is intended to be food for thought - or rather, food for experience. We’ll have a look now at who said what, and where they were coming from, to help you form your view.

    Chapter 2

    Where are we now?

    Sanskrit is coming

    Look, before we start, I should warn you that there is going to be some Sanskrit. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I could of course have left the Sanskrit out, and just used English approximations of words, but that would have meant that this book did not do what it said on the tin. If you don’t end up being at least vaguely familiar with some of the Sanskrit terms then you won’t be in the best position to further your knowledge about yoga through reading other books, as most of those use the Sanskrit terms too. And that is not to mention being able to follow conversations about yoga with people who will insist on tossing bits of Sanskrit in here, there and everywhere, for what is presumably dramatic effect.

    In case you are wondering whether Sanskrit is a breed of designer dog, it is not. It is the language in which most of the traditional texts of yoga were written. It is a member of Indo-European family of languages to which most of the languages of Europe (including English) belong. More specifically, it is part of the Indo-Iranian branch of language which evolved out of this. Which gives it the same kind of roots as Persian. All these languages evolved from a single language (or rather, group of dialects) spoken a very long time ago. (I could include dates, but how much do you care?) There are various forms of Sanskrit, just as there are various forms of English, like British English and American English. The two main forms are Classical Sanskrit and Vedic Sanskrit. The differences between the forms are something you can very much live without knowing about unless you are planning to read the texts in the original. Classical Sanskrit is usually taken to mean the Sanskrit language as codified by someone called Panini, who I was disappointed to learn did not also invent the toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Sanskrit is a slightly strange kind of language in that it is not a living language like English that is actually spoken by people in conversation, but for centuries it was not a dead language like Latin either. It was a language that was in contemporary use but not as a native tongue. It had to be learned deliberately. The closest example I can think of is the past historic tense in French, which is used in writing but never in conversation.

    Owing to its long and convoluted development, Sanskrit is a rich but quite confusing language. Lots of words and concepts can have multiple meanings and translations along a similar theme. This is why you can read translations of texts which seem to differ wildly from one another. Sanskrit is actually written in a script called Devanagari, not in the English alphabet. When you see Sanskrit terms used in books written in English, they are usually transliterated, that is, spelled out phonetically. It is for this reason that you will often see different spellings of the same word, depending on how phonetic the writer wishes to be (and how advanced his word processing software is). There are various systems of transliteration, all of which involve putting dots and lines and other such fancy things on top of and underneath letters, in order to convey the way they are supposed to be pronounced. In this book, I will just use the normal alphabet without transliteration marks to keep things simple. If you are going to be saying the words out loud to other humans you will need to look at a transliterated version of the words with a pronunciation guide in order to avoid embarrassing faux pas. I feel I am assaulting you with enough new information already without adding pages of dots and wiggles as well. I should add that I’m not even going to be consistent. This is not through laziness (though I am very lazy). It is to reflect the ways in which you are most likely to see the words spelled when you come across them in other books. For example, in transliterated Sanskrit, an s with an acute accent on top of it is pronounced sh. An r with a dot on top of it is pronounced ri. Without the accent or the dot, you therefore have a choice of writing "klesa or klesha and vrtti or vritti. Most people seem to choose the former so that is what we are going to do. But to be consistent, we would then have to refer to the deity of many of the traditions we are going to look at as Siva. But it is much more usual to write this as Shiva". So basically, what I am saying is, if you want accurate transliterated Sanskrit, look in a more fancy book than this one. I have deliberately flouted logic here in order to make this book accessible and readable.

    Very few teachers have sufficient knowledge of Sanskrit to have read the texts in the original and come to their own translations. Most people have either read them in English, or in Sanskrit based on their own teacher’s specific translation of words. You may be one of those people who goes to dinner parties and says, "Yes, but of course darling, I read War and Peace in the original Russian, so much more meaningful". If you are then firstly, I am surprised people still invite you, and secondly, well done. Of course reading a text in its original language is the best way to understand what the author meant. Something is always lost in translation, however unbiased the translator appears to be. But unless and until we all have time to go off and learn Sanskrit ourselves, we will have to make do with other people’s translations.

    So having cleared that up, let’s begin.

    Models

    As will become more and more evident as we begin to look at what yoga has to say, it’s a fairly arbitrary exercise to draw a line and say this is yoga and that is not yoga. Of course, I will have to do that to some extent just so that I can decide what to write in the rest of this book, but it’s important to remember that the lines we draw and the criteria we use for drawing them can differ widely. The choice of perspective may influence the conclusions we draw about all kinds of important issues.

    What we now call yoga has evolved from lots of different sources. This is why it can be hard for us to work out exactly what yoga has to say. We call it all yoga but what we are actually doing is using one word to describe many different teachings based on the fact that they have common goals. We also tend to see yoga as one subject because, although the philosophies of the various teachings differ from each other in many respects, they are all so far removed from the traditional Western approach and moreover, removed in the same general direction, that we clump them all together under one heading. The challenge for us, if we are to attempt a synthesis suited to modern use in a Western context, is to find the elements which are common to all schools. (We will consider later whether attempting a synthesis is even a valid exercise.) If we are going to insist on using one word to describe lots of different things, then the best we can do is to make sure that at least we know which things are definitely included within that word. That is what we are going to do.

    Taking a broad overview (and believe me, what we are about to do is broad in the extreme), we can look at the teachings which together we call yoga as having developed within four main schools of thought. Rather frustratingly for someone trying to write a clear and logical book, these four schools of thought do not agree with each other on everything, and even disagree amongst themselves about many things. It is even difficult to put many of the traditional schools of yoga squarely within one box or another, however carefully you design the boxes. A helpful way to look at the models is to think about cakes. (This may of course be just because I tend to enjoy thinking about cakes in general.) Imagine two hundred people are shown into a room which contains various ingredients to be used for making cakes – all kinds of flavours, decorations and toppings. The ingredients here are the building blocks of philosophy that we will look at below and all the different ways of using them that we will explore in the next chapter. Everyone is told to make a cake using whichever ingredients they like. You can imagine that there will be lots of different cakes at the end of it, and lots of room for people to criticise each other’s cakes. The cakes at the end are the various schools that we call yoga. They are all cakes and are all made out of the ingredients on offer, but they are not all the same. Maybe one of them is ultimately the best or maybe not. Some will be better than others perhaps. The proof can only be in the eating based on the tastes of the person who eats them.

    The approaches that we will look at are all just models. They represent summaries of people’s best efforts to explain something that fundamentally is impossible to explain and can only be proven by experience. Or, perhaps in the long run, science. They are not necessarily more right or more wrong than any other models. In fact, they may be a bit right, and a bit wrong. Or neither. Or both. No one is asking you to believe them. The models are simply a frame of reference for practice. Some people need a model to have an idea about where they are going and some people don’t. Please bear in mind as you consider them that to explain all the approaches in yoga that are covered in this chapter in detail and with precision would fill a book three times the size of this one. Whilst I am going to cite the approaches as examples of particular schools of thought, it is inevitably going to be a sweeping generalisation. My aim is to introduce you to the broad categories so that when you come across the specifics of a particular school you will at least have a basis for furthering your understanding.

    What I am being liberated from anyway?

    Righty-ho, let’s get on with it then. We know that the goal of yoga is liberation, and that sounds quite nice as a general concept.

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