Why Is Yoga Becoming Such a Powerful Force Within our Society?
Interview with Sharon Gannon, co-founder of Jivamukti yoga, by Katie Silcox,
March 25, 2006

QUESTION: We talked about being in this age of Kali Yuga. Is this why yoga has become and is becoming, such a powerful force within our society?

I think we have to answer that by starting with an agreement about what yoga is. (laughs).
Yoga has one interest or aim, and that is Samadhi, or enlightenment, which are synonymous terms for the realization of the oneness of being. So, it follows that if you want to realize oneness, then you have to realize what obstacles are in your way. Of course, an obstacle to perceiving this oneness is that instead of oneness, we perceive a multiplicity of infinite beings and things and situations and so on.

And for the most part we feel, a total disconnection from what we see around us, that’s number one and secondly, we feel dis-empowered, meaning that we feel we do not have any real effect on what we see around us, the world and others

At the root of this disempowerment, of course, is the lack of true self-confidence; a disconnection which comes from an ignorance about who We are and who They are. They being everyone and everything, out there. (laughs) But really, there is no “out there, out there!”  I am quoting here from the physicist,  Fred Alan Wolfe.

I had the opportunity to have lunch with him and I realized that he actually knew a lot about yoga. He is a very exciting man, and I think, most physicists are. They live in another realm than most people, unless you are yogi. Yogis and physicists grasp, to some extent, that notion that reality isn’t always as it appears to be. There are deep causes, underlying causes, and the reality that we see on the surface is coming from a cause which is not always readily perceptible. Of course, the physicists are trying to find ‘The unified field theory’, which we yogis have also been searching for. We call it the Oneness of Being it is what unites, yokes, all as one. Yoga is a science as well.

But let’s go back to the original starting point, about disconnection. If others are in our way, then we have to do something about them, if we want to get to the realization of oneness. And it doesn’t take too much effort to look back in history or “her-story”, because she has a story too, haha, and see that for a very long time, human beings have relied on a method of action to get what we want. Normally, when someone or something is in your way, you annihilate it, blow it up, shoot it! Kill it, push it out of the way, bulldoze it, burn it, bomb it!!! And I think this is coming from a deep, primal discontent and a misunderstanding of who we are. This is called avidya

Avidya, a Sanskrit term which means ignorance, and you know ignorance is a buzzword that we throw around and it comes with certain connotations, but more specifically, in yogic terms ignorance means mis-knowing, but it really is a case of mistaken identity. We think we know who we are, and what that is out there, and because we think we know …we are able to objectify and to treat others in these horrific ways, and sometimes we even blame others for our suffering, discontent and disease.

Annilatating others is a violent egocentric way will not result in the realization of Oneness. There has to be a different way to approach the dilemma; a more efficient method of dissolving others who seem to be in our way. Yoga suggests a shift in perception. To see others in a different way.

And perhaps we are at a point on this planet that we have come to realize that “we can bomb the world to pieces but we can’t bomb it into peace.” That is a quote from one of Michael Franti’s songs. Violence is not the way, it hasn’t worked. We haven’t become any wiser or happier as a species. We certainly can’t describe our current world-condition as happy or peaceful.

Many of us equate happiness with consuming, with shopping. We buy what we think we need to be happy. I read that in America, something like 97 percent of all goods bought in shopping malls end up in landfills within ten days! We are a disposable culture.

We think these things will give us happiness, and actually they do! They give us happiness for one second. Like smoking…the person who smokes craves, desires a cigarette. They light up and for one second they are happy because they are free of that desire for the cigarette. The desire itself has been satisfied. And you know, we can substitute the cigarette for anything, that Gucci bag, a pair of Nikes, chocolate ice cream, an SUV, etc.

We think that happiness is the cigarette, or any other thing coming from the outside.

And so, this trains us to believe, that whatever is coming from the outside is giving us this happiness, and so we crave more and more. But the truth is, and we would know this if we would stop and deeply introspect (which is what yogis like to do), that the reason that you feel happiness with your cigarette, is that for that second you are free of desire, you are in a desire-less state, and this is the state of your true self. My guru, Shri Brahmananada Saraswati, said that yoga is the state where you are missing nothing. You are complete and whole.

Well, because I am a yogi I tend to be a very practical person. I like searching for causes.

Its like John Nash and that movie, Beautiful Mind. He is one of my favorite people, and I think the movie did a disservice to him by placing so much emphasis on his schizophrenia, not on his scientific breakthrough about happiness! What his scientific discovery revealed was a very yogic message about the attainment of happiness. It could be equated with Patanjali´s 46th sutra, Chapter two (sthira sukham asanamYSII.46)

How? Well, before John Nash, the concept accepted at least by the scientific community was that if you wanted the members of a group to be happy, then each individual should be allowed to pursue their own happiness. And that if each member is allowed their own pursuit, then collectively all would be happy. Everyone would be happy. But Dr. Nash came along, and said, “Yes, ok…but the idea  is incomplete. Each individual should pursue their own happiness but (laughs), only if that pursuit doesn’t cause unhappiness to any other member of the group. Wow, that’s radical….meaning it is getting close to the root; the root of the problem of unhappiness.

This ‘original idea’, which is referred to as Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium Theory, inaugurated a slow revolution in scientific fields as diverse as economics, political science, mathematics, sociology and biology. In 1994, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for this contribution.
But was Dr. Nash’s idea really an‘original idea’? I don’t think so.
To relate this to yoga, let’s go back to the Sutra I mentioned and look at the word “asana.”

Asana, the Sanskrit word, means seat, andwe can go deeper and translate what seat means. It means a connection to the earth, and what does ‘earth’ mean? Here we have the idea of ‘Other’ presented.  Earth is made up of a collective of others…a vast multiplicity of being. This includes all human beings, animal beings, plant beings, water beings, air beings; all of life. This, to the yogi is looked upon as the Goddess, and the great goddess is synonymous with the earth. We even have that term, “Mother Nature”, in our culture. Patanjali says for those who want yoga, their relationship to the earth (to life itself to all others) should be mutually beneficial. It should be based on sthiram and sukham, which means: Steadiness and Joy.

But of course, most of us are operating off the old paradigm, pre-John Nash; the one that says “I have to look out for number one. I want what makes me happy. Who cares about anyone else? I want that fur coat, the suffering of the fox is not important. I want to eat that hamburger. Why should I care about the suffering of the cow, it’s only an animal.

But it’s not just the suffering of one cow; ultimately it is the suffering of everyone. The degradation of the cow is causing the pollution of the water we all rely on. The air we breathe is the air we all are sharing. We all breathe the same air. The molecules of air in your lungs were once in the lungs of everyone who has ever lived. We are truly breathing each other and that is a biological fact. Global warming can be traced to how we are treating that one cow as well as billions like her.

So, this condition that we find our selves in; is a condition of such disconnect, a denial of the interconnectedness of all being, that it results in the individual feeling worthless. We feel separate and we feel that our actions don’t make a difference to the whole. When we feel that way it is easy to ignore the results of our actions, not to notice the effects that those actions may have upon others or upon the world.

By definition the yogi is that member of society who is striving to find a way to live harmoniously with Mother Nature; to live in a way that would enhance the lives of all others.

To live harmoniously, we must live in way that is mutually beneficial, and when we are in a relationship which is mutually beneficial it tends to be sustainable. One sided relationships are never sustainable for either party. And so, we as the human species has relationships with all other species based on exploitation: Our relationship with others is one of exploitation. Through this relationship with others we are bound in the wheel of samsara; of suffering and we go around and around taking turns being slaves and masters.

We treat all animals are slaves. We think of them as slaves. We talk about them as slaves. We abuse them in horrific ways and we rationalize it by saying, well, it is benefiting us as a species. But violence only brings more violence; it can never bring about any positive benefit.
And of course there are very obvious ways that we can track our abusive relationship to Mother Nature and the side effects of that, like, pollution of water and the pollution of the soil, because the animals that are raised for us to eat are fed food that is heavily saturated with pesticides and herbicides, which are poisons that go into the soil and find their way to every life form on the planet. Every life form, includes those who live on land, in the sea or air, to the point where the toxic content of human mother´s milk is in question.

So, when we poison the animals, the plants, the soil, the water, air, we poison…ourselves. We are ultimately, poisoning ourselves. So, its not a matter of being kind for the sake of, “its kinder to be nice to dog than to be abusive, because the dog will be happier.” That’s only a very small part of the picture. Ultimately, your kindness to the dog or the cat or the cow or the chicken is linked up to your own happiness and the happiness of the whole planet. So, I think that explains how connected we are with all of the earth, with all others, in a way that everyone can understand.

You know, the war in Middle East…we all know that it is a fight for oil. But, who is the biggest consumer of oil? Next to the US Military,  the meat and dairy industry consumes more oil than anyone else. The facts are awesome…something like 10 billion land animals are slaughtered for food in the U.S. in a year. There are only 6.4 billion humans on entire planet!!! And we are just talking about one country. And that 10 billion doesn’t include the sea creatures. The US slaughters 17 billion sea creatures every year for food. That’s many animals, many feeling, living beings,  many souls!!! The suffering, the degradation, the greed, the gluttony, the pollution…

Look at all the land used to raise the corn to feed to the cows, all those herbicides and pesticides, leaching poisons into the ground water and rivers and streams…AGH! Its very complicated, because everything is inter-connected. The truth is: We are One. This is not just an ‘absolute’ truth, it also is true in the relative sense. The interdependent origin of all phenomena. What we do to one we do to the whole. When we poison the air…we poison ourselves.

OK, so those are kind of obvious facts.

Bur the less obvious things are also very interesting to the yogi because yogis like to contemplate causes to it get closer to the root. Yogis tend to be radical. The word “radical” comes from “radish,” which means “root,” to strip away and get to the cause. That’s what a radical really is. So, a yogi realizes that everything that is appearing in ones life is appearing as it is because of  the actions that he/she has been taken in the past. The laws of Karma work that way. And that is the reason why you would want to not kick the dog or eat the cow. Space is curved. I think Einstein pointed that out to us. What you throw out there, in the form of thought, word or an outward physical action will eventually but inevitably find its way back to its source.

So, the concept of emptiness, which of course the Buddhists have made a whole beautiful philosophy out of , is this yogic concept that everything appears according to how you see it. And that how you are able to see something is coming from your past experiences and relationships, so if we want to know the truth about Who We Are: this oneness of being. And if we want to solve the great riddle and to understand who the other really is, then we have to know where the Other is coming from. We have to know where we come from, our concept of ourselves. How we treat others will determine how others treat us. And how others treat us will determine how we see ourselves, and how we see ourselves will determine Who We Are to us, and who else is there, really. (laughs)

So for our own sake it is better to be kind to others rather than unkind. There is a Sutra in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, which speaks about the result of treating others with kindness: ahimsa pratisthayam tat sannidhau vaira tyagah which translates as: When you are established in the practice of non-violence no one  will treat you violently.
Treating others with kindness is a big part of  yoga, and that the practical experience which comes from Hatha yoga helps us by giving us reason to be kind by giving us first hand experience with our karmas. This occurs because our bodies are the storehouse from everything we have ever thought, said or done.

So, you know, karma is hard for people to understand because you don’t feel or see the results of your action immediately. What John Lennon said about Instant Karma doesn’t really exist.

And you know, this is not just an idea without any scientific or observable basis. If you take an acorn and you plant it, it is not going to become a tree immediately. There is a lag time needed. All growth is a process. If karma didn’t have this lag time, anyone that sat down and ate a hamburger would drop over dead immediately. So, we have to live with these actions that we have done, and they start to accumulate, so much so that we become totally identified with these actions. It is very hard not to. And we begin to see ourselves according to those actions that are continuously accumulating. Most people don’t see where those actions are coming from, so they have no control over what they are becoming. So, we get up in the morning and look in the mirror and we scream “I don’t like what I see!” But usually, at that point it is too late to reverse the process and get immediate results.

The Bhagavad-Gita Gita deals with this issue specifically, as it starts out with this man, who could be anyone of us. His name is Arjuna and he is a soldier and is about to go to battle and has this great epiphany where he realizes that the enemy, the so-called enemy or opposing forces, are made up of people that he knows. They are his past friends, relatives, and teachers. This is a way of saying he is beginning to recognize himself in the Other, and he is beginning to have some form of compassion, empathy, reconnection (recognition) to something that was lost or separated. He reacts with despair and starts to freak out and wants to quit his job. He wants to quit right then and there. Sometimes in relationships or in a job we don’t like, we have these epiphanies and we say “I cant do this any longer.” We suddenly see our job or our relationships as incongruent to our hearts aspirations, and we want to quit.

But what we don’t realize is that we have God standing at our right hand. Arjuna had Krishna, and we all have the Divine Self to give us advice. But some of us are like Arjuna and we don’t see it. So, he wants to quit and Krishna says to him, “you have to go into battle.”

This is hard to grasp, because God actually encourages him to fight. But there is a deeper meaning, and this deeper meaning about how to change your destiny, can be grasped, I hope if you will kindly embrace what I am about to say: If you truly want to change a karmic tendency, a habit that you have actually programmed into yourself  and your whole physiology is operating from that program.  All of your systems are activated to move in that direction that you have been moving in for so many years. Hatha yoga affects us on glandular level, affecting our endocrine system, stimulating chemical releases, which in turn affect consciousness. The practices of Hatha Yoga, especially asana and pranayama, actively work to reroute the physiological system, to be able to reroute an experience of anger and the releasing of adrenaline, etc. Inside of our own bodies these chemicals are at work and they are very addictive We don’t have to drink alcohol or shoot heroin to feel the addictive effects of the chemicals that are being released in our own body.

So back to the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, says, to Arjuna “Now is not the time to make such life changing decisions because you are upset.” If you make life changing decisions when you are in negative emotional state, there may be a temporary change, but eventually you will find yourself back in a similar situation. If you are mad at a girlfriend or boyfriend and you leave that relationship under the influence of anger or jealousy for instance, its just a matter of time that another boyfriend or girlfriend will come along and you will come to that similar place again, and it is the same with your job.

Krishna said that if you really want to be free of this, if you really want to quit, if you really don’t want to be a soldier any more than you have to make your life changing descion from a place of calmness not despair or anger. Remember, Arjuna was a man born into a family of soldiers, his father, grandfather, uncles were so soldiers, and so that soldier karma was really heavy in him. He had been doing it for very long time.

Which is not dissimilar to any one of us. We have been treating the earth and each other this way for a very long time. It is culturally condoned. So, if any one of us decides “I want to be environmentalist or a vegan, it is very difficult to just make that change instantly. If we make it out of anger, anger at Bush, at the meat and dairy industry, or the whole system in general, it wont be a deep and lasting change because there will still be  an inner conflict with yourself. Anger only brings more anger, violence only results in more violence

What you have to do, and this is what Krishna said, he said, “I can help you. I can teach you yoga. I can teach you the method to unravel yourself from your past karmas.” And so starting there and unfolding in the chapters, which follow in the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna how to cultivate  a serene mind through the methods of yoga.

Its kind of like this…you are going down the freeway at 80 mph and suddenly you decide you don’t want to go in that direction, you want to go somewhere else. If you simply step on the break, there will be dire consequences. So what you have to do is put your hand on the gear shift and down shift and pull your foot off the gas pedal and get in control of car, slowing it down to where you can come to stop. This must occur in a good way, a calm way. So, when we want to make a change, we have to bring our mind to some level of calmness. Then we can make the change.

We definitely have to make a change, and I think that this is why yoga is so popular. Many environmentalists and animal rights people, once they become aware of the reality react with anger and blame. So many revolutionaries haven’t made lasting changes because they were acting out of blame and anger. We must take, each one of us, responsibility for the condition that the world is in. Each one of us!  We see things however we see things because they are inside of us. You can’t see an ugly thing unless you have ugly in you. If you want to see beauty and peace, it has to come from inside of you. You have to find a way to purify your relationship with others so otherness disappears, and it begins by compassion and that’s how Arjuna´s trip began.

That is the starting place, which will bring us to the realization of the Oneness of being, which is the goal of yoga. As yogis, (or wanna- be yogis) we must ask ourselves, “ What is in our way, what is keeping us from the goal?” It won’t take long for the answer to begin to dawn: It is those Others. All of the others in our life seem to be in our way, keeping us from happiness keeping us from ultimate liberation. The President, our parents, our employer, our husband, our girlfriend, our children, the weather, the boogie-man all seem to be conspiring to keep us as victims. While all the while we, ambitiously plot our revenge and long  to become masters.
If we wish to free ourselves from identifying exploitive relationship where there are winners and losers, then  all of our actions should address how to best resolve our problems with the others who appear in our lives.
We must learn to see Ourselves in the Other.

This means seeing or perceiving that the very existence of the ‘other’ in your life is coming from you.

So naturally you are going to be kind to them because your own happiness and freedom is totally dependant on it. To see Ourselves in others so deeply that Otherness disappears, and when Otherness disappears, what remains is Love, and Love will bring you to the  realization of the Oneness of being.

That is the yogic-scientific formula.

QUESTION: Is yoga the only path?

Kindness is the only path. Yoga can be helpful because it teaches us how and why kindness works. A person doesn’t have to be a professed yogi to be kind. Kindness creates the path, which leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment is the big connection; the realization of who we are, who they are and what all of this is about!

Katie Silcox, is a Behavior Scientist and head of group-consciousness research at  RavenPack International in Marbella, Spain and creator of Interviews with the Mirrors, a global survey of the human experience.

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