“The ego flies on one wing, the spirit on two.” Anonymous
There exists today a kind of Yoga Fundamentalism which has two wings, that we will call Literalism and Relativism. They masquerade in many forms with many doctrines and techniques. They stain the work of both traditional and concocted methods of practice and they produce more in the way of politics, self-righteousness and avoidance than they do happiness. There also exists a resolution to this Fundamentalism. It is a Middle Path that moves between Fundamentalism’s Two Wings. However, it is not a system, a doctrine or a technique. It is more practically a magic ingredient that refines a system or technique, so that we are able to perform its methods skillfully (even artistically) and then step out of them, free and unbiased.
Before diving into defining and redefining the two wings, let’s look at Fundamentalism’s potential effects on yoga. Rather than a direct experience of reality, an unconditional love and freedom, Fundamentalism often causes us to mistake the processes and symbols of yoga for the actual thing. This separates us from immediate experience of the openness of being and our yoga ironically becomes an escape from life, an avoidance of the present moment. Many have even adopted yoga as an obligatory set of self punishments, dutifully done in order to achieve a picture of virtue laid out in our or somebody else’s mind. Other have made it a self indulgence used to conceal a lack of love and relationship, a badge of difference, for an isolated, insecure ego. Sometimes yoga creates competition, envy, loneliness and self righteous feelings. Many of us have found in yoga an exotic religion, a Shangri-la in which to escape unaware. Others still have used hard practice in an attempt to create the physiology of ecstatic trance, to bypass the heart of insight and love where the real ecstacy is. In the social realm differences of technique between schools can bring out anger, fear and competition between yogins. Even within the same school, slight differences in technique and interpretation between practitioners brings on painful jealousy and conflict. This not to say that all our yoga world is so bleak. But when we find suffering, clinging, closing of the mind and heart, we must ask, “why”?
The contention here is that yoga fundamentalism is alive and well, and though it is an unavoidable part of our mental structure, there is a beautiful solution to it. Fundamentalism though capable of much mischief, has our freedom locked in its mysterious roots. We must examine those roots face on. Facing the roots of the fear that underlies many of our belief systems, gives insight into how the mind structures our viewpoints, and how we end up trapped by identifying with and clinging to them. Freedom in yoga is not a single experience or a belief, or even the giving up of a belief: it is the ability to enter and to release theories and experiences to find direct experience of the living process. This freedom of the awareness appears as a Middle Path between our mental processes of mapping out reality and then leaving those maps. This Middle Path is hard to define, subtly serpentine, and it is where yoga systems meet their perfection. It frees us from politics without making us apolitical. It frees us from religion without making us irreligious. It frees us from thought without making us thoughtless. It has been called love, but it’s not what you think. For the present moment, we should keep on looking, avoiding jumping to conclusions.
The Middle Path is easiest to define by defining the two wings or extremes between which it oscillates: Literalism and Relativism. The wings don’t like each other at all, yet they depend on each other, like the front and back sides of a coin. Literalism sets up a an idol. Relativism sees the mistake and topples the idol. When the interdependence of these wings is understood, a new path, a middle way between the extremes, manifests. That path is always being defined and redefined in a living, ceaseless movement into its source and its goal. If we call it love, or grace, what images come to mind? Do those images embody the whole process of love? Not quite. So those images are released, like offerings and later others images come to meet the same fate. Metaphorically the middle path is like a stream between the banks of idol-making and idol-breaking. If the (our) stream is temporarily blocked, a little more clarity of definition and then release is called for.
Literalism, the finger for the moon
Literalism is easy to understand even in ourselves. All minds function symbolically: assigning a symbol to the particulars of experience and then interrelating those symbols to form patterns of thought. In itself, this is wonderful! Thoughts allow incredible freedoms and powers. They are the tools of knowledge and action. They are the categories, the universals that can be manipulated at light speed into patterns of connection, division, desire, anger and inspiration. If given a little space to unfold, thought patterns are truly awesome. Thought works through assigning symbols (signs, universals) to particulars (actual unique things, events, phenomena). Symbols are easily manipulated, transported, communicated and stored (as in data communication, blueprints, etc.) They do wonders. They reveal casual relationships in the world. They allow for knowledge and therefore for efficient action. They are the sacred power of language, called Logos in the west and Vac in the east.
A story from Indian mythology illustrates this principle:
Once upon a time, Ganesh (the elephant headed god) and his elder brother Karttikeya (the god of war) were sitting at the feet of Shiva and Parvati, their parents. Shiva suggested a contest between the two brothers. Whoever could go around the world first would get certain delectable sweets which were right at hand. Karttikeya, who was physically powerful as well as fast, jumped up and took off for the great circumambulation, which in those once-upon-a- days was an enormous distance, if not the same as the thirty thousands miles it is today. Ganesh, who was more rotund and less inclined for trouble than his brother, stood up, circumambulated his parents, and then sat down in front of them. He of course got the sweets days before his brother even returned.
Yes, Ganesh knew the efficiency of hierarchical representation! Especially considering who Shiva and Parvati are! So, if mind is so amazing, what has happened to make our own minds such miserable if not slightly less than joyous abodes? A slight twist, a literalism about who we really are, has given birth to a conceptual self. What is deeply true, the essential core of Being, has been superimposed onto symbols or representations. Though this misidentification produces suffering, it is not evil. The infamous conceptual self or ego is a product of the symbolic way that the mind works. It should be examined as it is. One of its two faces is called literalism: the taking of the name for the thing named, the symbol for the symbolized, and then being afraid or unable to de-name, to decode, the symbol.
The world of description and thought can never embody that which it is attempting to describe. The map is not the territory. I’ve often mused at what a complete map might look like. It would have all details, angles, viewpoints, functions, potentials and even textures of the original. Such a fine map would be either a complete reproduction of the territory or the territory itself, not easily folded to fit into your glove box. Literalism is when the map is held to be the territory, when the image in the mirror is held to be us. Remember poor Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. We so easily reduce ourselves and others to our theories. We fight for the flag, rather than the (less conceivable) whole of our nation. We cling to an alignment principles out of its context, resting on our beliefs and codes, rather than looking for ourselves with fresh unbiased eyes. We even reduce our yoga postures, our bodies to theories and techniques, and are then afraid to expose those theories to a natural process of refinement. Real yoga, real relationship, consciousness are lost in this idolatry. Images, mirrors, theories and methods are essential (occasionally precise) tools of the yoga art. But none of them can embody fully the thing-in-itself. Every technique, every spiral is an incomplete description, calling out for a context and a complementary counter-description.
We align ourselves with a doctrine or a school or a myth, because it is efficient to do so, and because it is difficult to bear in mind what the whole school or myth is supposedly teaching. Yet, in yoga the whole teaching is vitally important: the de-coding of the signs and symbols back into the present moment, into our original inspiration. The flag, the name of the school, becomes essential for us. After all, it is only the sign that can be pinned on our ego like a badge, while the whole of the teaching exposes the ego function. A Yoga school stained with literalism naturally dislikes both the critical, secular world and other yoga schools. To avoid their own internal transformation such a school or individual creates stereotyped images of the others. When we are about to grow in insight we have to sacrifice both our present self image and the images to which we have reduced others.
Back in the myth of Ganesh, we find there is a problematic side to hierarchical representation, when it is taken too literally.
Long before the race around the world, when Ganesh was a young man and even before he got his elephant head, Shiva was about to go on a journey. He asked Ganesh not to allow anyone to come into the house in his absence. This was because Ganesh’s mother, the beautiful Parvati was there and needed protection. Shiva left and through many devices tested Ganesh’s ability to follow instructions. Ganesh did beautifully and barred entrance to many characters during his fathers absence. When Shiva returned, happy to be home after a long journey and happy to see his wife and child, Ganesh jumped into the doorway of the house and blocked his fathers entry. He shouted, “My father told me that no one is to enter this house, that would include you!” This was a mistake. Shiva, famed for his short temper and his skill at destroying entire universes, got mad and instantly cut off Ganesh’s head. Shiva, who is even kinder than he is short tempered, and Parvati, who had just appeared at this tragic scene, were both distraught. Shiva procured the head of a young nearby elephant and fit it onto his son. That is how Ganesh got an elephant head and how he also became the Lord of the Buddhi (intelligence). He never took things as literally from then on. He could understand the meaning and the intention behind instructions, teachings, metaphors and myths.
Relativism the flip side of the coin Seeing through literalism doesn’t solve the problem of fundamentalism. Literalism is of course seen more easily in the absurdities of others’ myths and idols, than in our own. Stepping back from personal investment in them, we see that forms are relative. They depend on assumptions and rules that are often arbitrary or cultural. Exposure to a variety of images, beliefs and myths, brings us to the point of seeing through religious symbols. Form is then understood as a temporary, relative construction. With a sense of a profound insight being close at hand, the mind chooses to reject form. It is still the same deep mental frame, the same idolater, that erected the idols that now sees religious practice as an attempt to achieve an ideal, and that this process makes us ignore the present situation. By rejecting form, the mind capitulates into the flip side of literalism, and wraps itself in the religious robes of a naive and self righteous idealism, called relativism. Its doctrine is “Everything is relative, thinking gets you nowhere and nothing really needs to be done.”. The ego has undergone a rapid inflation into an iconoclast stance, choosing a formula of formlessness, as ineffective in the world as the zealot is destructive. While literalism is based on a fear that if reality cannot be reduced to a single formula and remains mysterious and free then I am in grave danger - relativism is the pessimistic doctrine that all meaning is based entirely on relative contexts and that there is nothing universal or common.
An example of the relativist is Dhritarashtra, the blind king, who allowed enormous evil to infect his kingdom, because he was unable to distinguish between the wisdom and good intentions of the rightful ruler of the kingdom, Yudhishthira, and the self serving cruelty of his own sons. This story becomes the background of the Bhagavad Geetaa, which deals with Arjuna’s dilemma between the path of literalism and the path of relativism, neither of which could help Arjuna with the complex situation he was in.
The relativist is like the anarchist, who out of fear of the problems of having a social order does not allow any order at all, and ironically makes such injustice and suffering that a tyrannical form of government is issued forth from the chaos.
Relativism refuses all formula, endeavor and exploration to any depth. It reflects a kind of pseudo enlightenment, which crosses a sour-grapes attitude and an anti-form monism to produce an ineffectual, sucrose spirituality. The unity that exists in the unfathomable depths of the spirit is brought up and superimposed on the realm of diversity in such slogans as: “All is one. We need not try. All yoga is good. All teachers are good. All paths are the same!” As sweet and open minded as this may sound, it is actually insidious and dangerous. Consider relativism in other fields: “All music is beautiful. All political leaders are good. All medicines are the same. There is no need to try to communicate with your loved ones.” Goethe’s Mephistopheles tempted Faust with two forms of corruption: to do evil or to do nothing at all. This relativism - taken to its’ extreme - denies translation and understanding between traditions, between world views (Eastern and Western), between men and women, between individuals even of the same persuasion. Internally it prevents self-reflection and self criticism. In fact, any shared, objective reality is ultimately denied by “create your own reality” relativism. It becomes the ultimate rationale, the trump card of cop-outs, allowing us to conveniently forget relationships, responsibilities, communication and any need to work or inquire into deep or difficult subjects.
Relativism leaves us practically unable to practice yoga, unable to do anything resembling deep thought or work. It has placed us in a pseudo enlightenment. In our yoga, relativism can be a detachment hiding under the cloak of non-attachment. It creates a lack of vitality, a lack of eager, radiant inquiry . Looking like an open mind, it is really an apathetic mind. Hidden beneath its almost calm surface are some deep disappointments (broken hearts and broken idols). Deep love, real devotion, skillful use of form, deep relationship, work and sacrifice are laid away in the cupboard of a dull sweet oneness.
A Middle Path, That’s Hard to Name
Literalism and Relativism have sprouted from the same principle of avoidance in the mind, the same confusion of a separate self, which needs to accept or reject form as either all or nothing. This mental mechanism is how the mind works. It happens many times a day for everyone usually when thinking about less consequential things. The symbol gets taken for the thing. When ego gets involved, awareness gets mistaken for some passing form. Rather than seeing that natural and simple mistake, the mind eventually capitulates into a relativistic stance. Our minds oscillate like this all of the time. We define a boundary: we erase a boundary. When the ego gets caught up in the process, be aware! Accepting or rejecting the mind-generated idols can take us out of the stream of the present moment.
When defining a middle path we need to be alert to the temptation to literalize the process. Could the middle path be a path at all? How do we describe that process of being fully awake? How do we describe the process of understanding that reality is a freedom beyond description? If we say it is love, do we define love with some rosy image in the mind, or with a particular formula of sacrifice? As long as we think, we are going to be making propositions about truth and hopefully seeing with loving eyes through them. Our path is a path between paths. It needs no conclusion, no certainty beyond its own intrinsic radiance. It creates an image as an offering and then lets it go into the fire of relationship, revealing a snake like movement between literalism and relativism.
In the present moment, between past and future is Bhakti, love, the winding, oscillating path between the extremes, between exclusive form and formlessness, between the paradoxes of our thoughts. It is the heart of yoga, the stream of true relationship, of honest natural human relationship. In the Bhagavad Geetaa Krishna proposed the path of Bhakti or love as the resolution of the dilemma of Arjuna. Rather than labeling ourselves with it, we must actually keep returning to the source of that path, moment by moment, or we fall off into either a formula for that path or a rejection of its process. The returning is freedom.