S4E1 Vivekananda

This episode focuses on Swami Vivekananda, a key figure who brought Yoga to the West. His political and spiritual leanings show a strong influence from British colonialism, including: Western (Greek) notions of rationality and more universalist interpretations of Christian doctrine. His legacy left us a  polarization between systems of yoga oriented by his definition of raja (“royal”, superior), and those oriented toward the more gross-physical  (in his estimation) concerns of the Hatha Yogins.  We see this value system at work today when, for instance, “gym yoga” is disparaged as “unspiritual”, or we hear “it’s not about the asana.” We should be careful with such ideas...

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome everyone. Let's give a quick recap of the last episode, last time, we were finishing our series on Siddha based practices and talking specifically about the subtle body, we looked at the chakras and the Kundalini and their place and function in the subtle body, and we really saw that there's a dizzying array of ideas and images surrounding those two subjects. So the goal really was not to present a definitive doctrine, but to recognize this dizzying diversity and to kind of situate what we think we know inside it, and to be affected by the relationship between what came to us and the fact that it had a wide, wide range of of meaning and application and understanding in its origin. Though, the Kundalini was particularly interesting in this investigation. The images surrounding the Kundalini are multivalent, and the functions the Kundalini performs are are wide, and this started to generate this paradox that we noted. So we saw that the Kundalini is the Giver and taker of life, both that when awakened, she is the medicine of liberation, but when asleep, she's the poison of death. And when asleep, she is expressed as our ignorance, but when awakened, she is expressed as our liberation, given to freedom in this particular life. Now, these paradoxes arise necessarily within the context of the Enlightenment Deborah. I think that's something I tried to suggest last time, that enlightenment Deborah can also be called self creation. Philosophically, the paradoxes of self creation, and this will become the focus of future episodes. We want to talk about those paradoxes and talk in a way that allows us to to use our imagination to interface with the images and so on that we glean from the traditions when we look at it. So we ended last time with a myth of what it means to live in a place, what it means to move and develop in a place where poison can indeed be medicine, and that was the myth of Shiva and the churning of the ocean. Remember that when the gods and the demons churned the ocean, they produced Amrita, or the nectar of non death, but they also produced the Holly, Holly, the poison that spilled out of the great serpent's mouth and threatened to destroy the entire universe. So the supreme Yogi Shiva comes, takes the poison in his mouth and begins to swoon, because he doesn't swallow it and he doesn't spit it out. He just holds it steady. And so he eventually transmutes that into nectar. And the nature of this process is alchemical. We know because it involves a color change in which his throat becomes blue and his name, one of His Names, becomes Nila Kunta. So if this is an image of what it means to develop in a place where poison is medicine, it's a place. It's an image that shows what inner work is. At the Shala, we call this kind of work, not repressing and not expressing, just like Shiva did, holding the Hala Holly or the poison in this middle space in the throat, in a way so repressing would be identifying and expressing would be identifying, and remember that we when we identify with something, when it comes to inner work, we don't feel it, and we need to generate feelings from our emotional reactions as the alchemical process that we're going through. So if we don't spit it out, and we don't swallow it, then we end up tasting it, and if we hold it for a long time gently, we end up cooking it, and we end up being what is cooked along the way. So it might feel hot doing inner work might feel like being churned like the ocean. It might feel like the mercury felt in the alchemist laboratory as he or she worked on it, it might even feel like being rubbed, bound, even killed in order to be resurrected. Just consider the possibility that the medicine might be the poison you. Now we're jumping forward in history. We have been spending most of our time in a 500 year period, which began in the sixth century of the Common Era and stretches to 11 to 12 105 or 600 years, those are the time that's the time when the city based practices the tantra Hatha and the indigenous Hindu alchemy are really flourishing and influencing things. For instance, the text I know, the Hatha Yoga, Pradipika and the Shiva Samhita, things like that that start to show the practice of posture and pranayama in the way that we really see it today, those flourished and show up between 811 100 CE. That's still not far enough forward in history to begin to talk about the modern influences that I have to to speak about in this episode. To do that, I have to get to the late 18th and early 19th century, and because we have to land there, we have to talk a little bit more about the British occupation because of its influence, and it is well underway by this time, the general story about the British occupation usually begins with something called the East India Company. This is a massive corporation with a massive fleet of ships that traveled between Europe and India, engaging in trade. And it, it's a it's a key player in the political events that that move in the direction of British hegemony. This company is formed in 1600 of the Common Era and begins to operate, and by 1615 it had acquired its first territory in Bombay. So from 1615 on, for about 170 years until 1792 the company operated and began to acquire more and more power and influence. In 1792 it was involved in the use of military force in a conflict with a group of people called the Marathas, and it defeated them. And in the process of doing that, it dethroned the Sultan of Mysore. So from 1792 to 1877 the East India company acquires more and more and more power, and eventually, in 1877 Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India. It's not until 1947 that India and Pakistan become self governing. So between that time when Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India, and 1947 it's a it's a very tumultuous set of years, two world wars pass in both of which Britain is key player in, and a lot of indigenous resistance to British rule has amassed in India. Now this is important for us, really, because yogis, and therefore the practice of yoga, as it's understood, are key figures in this British resistance. So if we sum all that up for 350 years, there is European presence and powerful influence. That's the influence through British common law, through the introduction of Western medicine, introductions of styles of Western education, and also Christianity comes through the missionaries and begins to influence things. So all of these things, British common law, Western medicine, Western style, education and the influence of Christianity that that really is a way to sum up the environment in which Swami Vivekananda, who is the focus of of this episode, that environment in which he would have been educated. Now here's what Robertson, Robert singleton says about Swami Vivekananda influence. It was Swami Vivekananda and those who followed him who represented the public face of the yoga Renaissance, perhaps more than any other single work. His Raja Yoga of 1886 was influential in giving shape to the cluster of methods and belief frameworks that make up modern yoga. So Raja Yoga indeed, is a very important book. We'll say a little bit more about it in a little bit, but the meat of the citation says the cluster of methods, that means the techniques and belief frameworks. That means why we're doing what we're doing, and the goals that are involved in it. The implementation of these techniques, those really the way they're understood and practiced in the modern world is deep. Influenced right by Vivekananda. But before he became Swami Vivekananda, his name is narendranath Datta, and he lived between 1863 and 1902 a pretty short life. We're going to start with his his higher education years. I have something here from a man named William Hastie, who is principal of Christian College in Calcutta, and that's where Narendra graduated. Here's what Hastie says. Quote, Narendra is really a genius. I have traveled far and wide, but I've never come across a lot of his talents and possibilities, even in German universities, among philosophical students, he is bound to make his mark in life. And so we see at an early age, he is academically gifted. Philosophy specifically is mentioned here. He's a very unique example of British education and Indian spirituality. We've mentioned already that he's the author of Raja Yoga. Raja Yoga is important because it it involves, or it contains translations of key concepts from the yoga sutra and other places that really help define the way that we understand yoga in the modern world. He also wrote three other books, each one on one of the three great yogas from the Bhagavad Gita. He wrote one about bhakti, one about karma, and one about Yana yoga. Vivekananda is active in his day in raising money and spiritual matters, and through a series of events, makes his way to America in 1893 and he visits the Chicago World's Fair, and he gives a speech at An event known as the Parliament of world religions. And this speech caused a real stir. It was, it was very influential, and often is the often is referred to as the time when yoga came to the west. Now, the SWAMI was very dashing, as we've already mentioned, highly educated. He had very sophisticated political views and and he understood and was able to discuss current scientific views, such as Darwin's theory of natural selection, which is a hot topic, of course, maybe at that time even, even as it is today. And so through this speech that he gave and the recognition that it garnered him, he was able to move in America and publish his book and speak at Harvard, give a series of lectures at Harvard. He moved with the with the intelligentsia of the time. I think I read that he knew and influenced William James, who was evidently very impressed with him. And so this tells you something a little bit about about who he started, or who he was. And I've mentioned he has sophisticated political views, and also one foot in in Indian spirituality. We'd like to drill down into that just a little bit now. So if we if we talk about politics, we have to talk about a group called the Brahmo Samaj, which is very influential on the young Narendra the Brahmo Samaj was a monotheistic reform movement of the Hindu religion that appeared during a time known as the Bengal Renaissance. And so its reformist ethos really could be called a fusion of Advaita Vedanta, which is the non dual Vedanta of Shankara and various strands of Western colonialism. Now, what does this include? The Samaj tended to emphasize belief in a formless God, and therefore they were suspicious or deprecating of what would have been called idolatry the India, the pagan idolatry of India, if you look at it from the outside, from a western view. So they offered instead a streamlined, rationalized, monotheistic theology that was strongly colored by a selective and modernist reading of the Upanishad and of the Vedanta. And so this package is streamlined, this package is rationalized, and this package is monotheistic in the sense that probably that they interpreted Brahman, which is the formless ultimate source of all things from the Upanishad, in a way that that seemed to jive with Western ideas of God as the ultimate. The founder. Of the Samaj ramamohan Roy himself was influenced by Unitarianism, and he promoted a Universalist interpretation of Hinduism, specifically Hindu philosophy. He emphasized the the egalitarian nature of it, but paradoxically, he was also a Hindu exceptionalist. Now, what does that mean it? It means that he, he, number one, placed the philosophical and spiritual heritage of India above that of his conquerors. Number two, he seemed to feel that that native Indians themselves were were particularly constituted for meditation and for being have easy having easy access to states of absorption. Somehow they were superior in, in a way, to to Western people. And so you see this, this interesting mixture of being influenced by a particular set of ideas against which you are rebelling, and that shaping the form or flavor, right of your own rebellion. Now, Roy's ideas were taken and reshaped by another influential person named debendranath Tagore, who was described as a romantic, and that means a revolutionary of some sorts. He tended to question core Hindu beliefs like reincarnation in the law of karma. He also questioned the authority of the Vedas, which is a big deal, and instead, he focused his message on the power of personal experience. That says something else about his romanticism. If I think of the Romantics in the Western canon, like William Blake, Percy, Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor, Coleridge, John Keats, Jean, Jacques, Rousseau, the philosopher. All of them really valued the individual's experience over any institution of the time, and so we find a flavor of that here in the in the ideas in the Brahmo Samaj Keshab Chandra sin was another very influential person involved in the group, and he turns out to have been influenced by American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here we see again this, this idea of a Unitarian spirituality, strongly fueled by personal religious experience over something like philosophical or theological speculation, sin, advocated for an accessible, non renunciatory Every man type of spirituality. He introduced systematic spiritual practice for lay people. In other words, these ideas that he put forward really were the prototypes of the kind of yoga practices that Vivekananda eventually took to the west. Now if we speak of politics, we have to speak of spirituality, and to speak of the young swamis, or young Narendra spirituality, we have to talk about his guru, named Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna is also called the Great Swan, and he's one of the greatest mystics of all time. In my not so humble estimation, he lived between 1836 and 1886 another short life of 50 years. So Ramakrishna as a child, proved to be prone to visions of the Divine, and this tendency to fall into vision or swoon really continued throughout his life and was a key part of His teaching and His ministry to his followers. Ultimately, he was a mystical bhakti and an important religious figure in Bengal. He founded his own order. In fact, I wanted to give you something that sort of showed the essence of Ramakrishna teaching. He says, quote, If you must be mad, and I think he means crazy, be it not for the things of the world, be mad with the love of God. God is in all men, but all men are not in God, and that is why we suffer. And so it's interesting that this mystical bhakti is also giving off this Universalist type vibe that dovetails nicely with the Brahmo Samaj. And so we could see how Vivekananda could be, could feel at home, right in each of these places. Now, more on this Universalist tendency that comes out of this mystical bhakti teaching we learned our. Early on, that that Ramakrishna could experience absorption or mystical ecstasy when practicing any of the religions. We heard stories that he practiced not only Hindu Tantra, but that for a period of time he devoted himself to Christianity, in which time he had visions of the Virgin Mary, and for a period of time, devoted himself to Islam and things like Jainism, and was said to have have experienced absorption and ecstasy on each of these ways. And so he really is part of this flavor of the time that shows a an egalitarian universality like always, are going to lead home to the source. This universality is very influential on Vivekananda. So we've seen a political Vivekananda involved in resistance while colluding with the conquerors. And we've seen spiritual vivananda who sat at the feet of the great Swan and received teaching directly from something like vision and ecstasy. And that kind of gives us the idea that there were two vivekanandas, one that was more political and and westernized and scientific, and one that was was more attuned or open to something very mysterious, and possibly, if we say it from the western side, something that looks irrational, quote, unquote. So I want to talk about each of these vivekanandas, because I think we really got one of them more than we got the others. We could say there's Vivekananda the skeptic, and we can see this in his early behavior in relation to to Ramakrishna, the young narendranath initially rejected many of Ramakrishna central ideas and practices, ideas like Advaita Vedanta, the non dual Vedanta of Shankara, because it tends to look irrational to those who have been educated in a certain way, because it necessarily involves paradoxes, and he also probably would have been turned off by what appeared to be Ramakrishna idol worship in the form of Kali the mother. It said that he initially labeled the saints, ecstasies and visions as, quote, hallucinations. So they didn't have a they didn't hit it off in a certain way right away, even though Vivekananda kept coming back and was evidently deeply impressed, eventually, he took Ramakrishna as his guru, and through further and further encounters and more and more contemplation and practice, he grew ready genuinely to renounce everything in the pursuit of knowing God, which is What Ramakrishna advised. But even through all of these changes, he retained his strongly skeptical rational streak, and it's it's this flavor of his personality, this skeptical flavor, that is part of the reason that he was named Vivekananda by Ramakrishna. Viveka really means something like discernment. And so Ramakrishna was charmed by this quality, and evidently thought it very important by giving the the new, newly minted Swami a name that reflected that character. And remember, we're talking about Ramakrishna chosen successor, Vivekananda, really was deeply impressed by the sciences from the West, and he wanted to place the spiritual and philosophical heritage of India on the same level as his overlords. He wanted to insist that India was the birthplace of all that is holy and rational. He wanted to rescue India from the image painted of her by the first European settlers as a backward widow burning superstitious nation badly in need of modernization, and he marshaled his skeptical in philosophical intellect in all of those endeavors. This is very interesting, because Vivekananda is one of the main sources for knowledge of the life of Ramakrishna. He communicated to max Mueller, who wrote, I think one of the first biographies of Ramakrishna. He communicated many details of the of the Guru's life to Mueller, but he tended to omit the details of his teacher's ecstasies, and he also tended to omit the overtly tantric. Elements that were certainly present. And so this skepticism was very dominant, and it created a stream of information that came out of Vivekananda, around Ramakrishna that is truncated in in terms of the of the picture of what was actually going on. So if there's Vivekananda, the skeptic, then there's also the Vivekananda who deeply fell in love with Ramakrishna and and was open to that kind of absorption and quote, unquote, irrational practice that looks like idolatry, possibly, and looks like ecstasy and swooning, which are not again, rational, according to that view of that was brought by the West. I wanted to give you something of this covertly mystical Vivekananda. This is a poem he wrote to Kali, the mother who was definitely Ramakrishna, chosen deity the place where he wanted to lay his head and lay his heart and the space in which he wanted to be absorbed at all times, so much so that his students had to call him out of his reveries and feed him, because he evidently would have stayed forever in bliss if they had led him so. A poem from the covertly mystical Swami to the Divine Mother. The stars are blotted out. The clouds are covering clouds the darkness vibrant sonnet in the whirling, roaring wind are the souls of a million lunatics just loosed from the prison house, wrenching trees by the roots, sweeping off from the path. The sea is joined the fray and swirls up mountain waves to reach the pitchy sky. The Flash of lurid light reveals on every side 1000 shades of death be grimmed and black, scattering plagues and sorrows, dancing mad with joy. Come. Mother Come for terror is thy name. Death is thy breath, and every shaking step destroys a world forever, thou, time, thee. All destroyer, Come, O Mother, come who dares misery, love and hug the form of death, dance and destructions dance to him, the mother comes. So I can promise you that this is not the Vivekananda that was presented at the World's Fair in the at the parliament of world religions. And nor was it the Vivekananda who sat and spoke about psychology and the latest theories of the unconscious with William James or the one who spoke at Harvard. This is the one who who he felt had to be hidden in some way, and this tendency in him to leave out a deep part of the story, right of who he was is inside his evaluation of Yoga, particularly his his disparagement of Hatha Yoga, that actually is our nearest ancestor, and so ultimately, it seems like that the skeptic Vivekananda won out. And here's something from him that's quoted in Robert Singleton's book yoga body that shows that the skeptic did indeed win and thereby gave us what we know of yoga. Quote, anything that is secret and mysterious in these systems of Yoga should be at once rejected on the grounds that the mystery mongering they involve weakens the brain. So if the skeptic winning out, in a sense, affected modern yoga directly, we need to say a little bit about how that is the case. We can we can see Viva Can on his attitude toward the Hatha yogis, our nearest ancestors, in his book Raja Yoga, which we've already said was so influential. So in that book, he adamantly rejects the quote, entirely physical practices of Hatha. He says we have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult and cannot be learned in a day, and after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth. He further says that the chief aim of the Hatha yogis is to quote, make men live long and. To endow them with perfect health, an inferior goal for the seeker after spiritual attainment. And so if we think back on the sin of practices that we've been we've been reviewing, and they're really fantastic, literally nature, we could see here that the Swami is deeply suspicious of something of that. So evidently, the only thing that that they cared about was to live long. And we did see that it that the sinners wanted to transmute the physical body into the adamantine body that would defy death and also acquire transmutation abilities on its own. So, you know, in a sense, he's right. He associates that here strongly with being involved with the physical body in a way that is going to not lead to spiritual growth. Like he doesn't really trust this physicality. He says that the proper goals of spiritual life, therefore are non physical goals. Speaking of a Hatha yogi who was reported to have lived 500 years, Vivekananda said, quote, what of that I would not want to live so long. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And by the way that comes from the New Testament. Matthew 634, one, little body, with all its delusions and limitations, is enough. And so we really see the influence of the asceticism, in a way, in his public statements about yoga, the asceticism that comes from the Upanishad, I should say, remember that renunciate way, the way that it may not have denigrated necessarily the body, but it certainly didn't see it as as the ultimate locus of activity in in spiritual practice, because it would have been a part of Maya. It would have been a part of the impermanence that is contrasted over and against the Atman. Now, that flavor is here in his evaluations of of Hatha. So it seems to be a denigration of the body again. But I wanted to point out here that Vivekananda is quoting the gospel in order to critique some of the products right of his own country Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I think we can clearly see right where he's coming from. And so this disparaging attitude toward our nearest ancestor, we, we can see in the Swamis teaching, in his public comments, we, Robert singleton sums this up nicely for us. He says, quote, The New English language, yoga is divides by Vivekananda and others. Emerged in a climate of opinion that was highly suspicious of the yogin, especially the Hatha Yoga. So, on the one hand, Vivekananda is part of this, this massive yoga revival that carries him to America, and he introduces it to America, and becomes wildly successful here, and is able to found his own order. So there's a yoga Renaissance happening right in his day, but because of the way that he tended to speak about Hatha, in particular, that certain interpretations of sit practice like their aims and how their techniques are to be done and so on, certain of those are excluded from the initial stages of this popular yoga revival. Now I find that very interesting, if we wanted to kind of sum up the influence of these two vivekanandas and the fact that the skeptic won out, we we could call his legacy a split, a certain split. So here's what singleton says, Vivekananda would forge a vision of yoga in which a polarization between Raja and Hatha practice would become permanently reified and in which his respective gurus would be rewritten to fit this modern orientation. So Vivekananda forged this vision of yoga that prioritized what he called Raja Yoga, or the royal path, which looks systematized, streamlined and and rational. He polarized that over against Hatha, which is only about the physical body, only about living a long time, possibly only about power, something like that. And and Singleton is saying. That that polarization really has stayed with us. Now, there's a scholar in this regard. In 1976 that singleton actually mentions, and I read in a footnote, and this would be from yoga body, a scholar named Bharati argued actually that prior to modern times, there was always a considerable Hatha component in practical yoga, but that since the turn of the century, we find a clear polarization in Dhyana or meditation oriented systems and Hatha or Asana oriented practitioners, and so I we don't have to assume, along with Vivekananda, that that goals that are related or mediated, specifically by the body, are sub spiritual. Evidently, according to Bharati, this scholar, before the modern era, there was always a practical Hatha component in yoga. And so we see how things have been shaped in a certain way, still denigrating the body on one hand from Vivekananda perspective, but now finding out that there's, there's evidence that that wasn't the case actually, before, before modern times, and before him, that there was always an element that dealt with physicality in a certain way. So I find that really interesting. We might ask the question here at the end, is it the case that we still see a polarization between meditative oriented systems and physical oriented systems. I think we can see that, but let's give a summary first before we mention that. So the city based practices flourished between the sixth and 12th centuries of the Common Era, leading to what eventually we're going to call the transnational consensus that is the Hatha Yoga of the late 18th and early 19th century. And this Yoga is a watered down version, a streamlined, more monotheistic, rationalized version of the early Siddhas aims and methods. Swami Vivekananda is a key figure influencing yoga in the West. His political and spiritual leanings show a strong influence from British colonialism. We could say that influence is shown in western which would be Greek notions of rationality as the primary force that should organize knowledge and determine what is real. We could also see those influences in the more liberal, Universalist interpretations right of the Christian doctrine. So his legacy left us a polarization between systems of yoga oriented by his definition of Raja Yoga and those oriented more toward more gross physical practices like the Hatha yogas. And we asked just a minute ago, did do we see this division, you know, happening now? I think we do. I think we see this same kind of value system at work when, for instance, quote gym, yoga is disparaged as unspiritual, or when we hear phrases like Yoga is not about the asana. It's not really, it's not really about the body. We, on the one hand, are involved in a practice that is deeply somatic in a certain way, and where the physical is marshaled in the service of higher ends in a certain sense, but we still really feel like we need to be able to distinguish from vulgar concerns that are only about the asana I know you've probably heard or possibly even disparaged Twitter yogis, so be careful with these notions. Because remember, according to Bharati, prior to the modern era, there was always a practical physical Hatha element in larger systems that were practiced. So we should be careful with our value judgments. I hope this has been interesting. I hope it's helpful in some way to look through these influences that have come to us. We sure appreciate your listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.