Indigestion of Action & Experience
Few western yoga schools pay a great attention to the study in detail of the Yoga Scriptures and the Vedic Culture. They also seem to ignore the importance that the tradition gives to these Scriptures as a means of knowledge to reveal the self. A means of knowledge , taken for granted to eliminate the fundamental problem we all face: the ignorance of the self.
The whole tradition is an oral tradition where the student sits and listen, inquire, contemplate and analyse the words of the teacher to dissipate the ignorance of the self. But now, in modern times, and with the inclusion of marketing in all aspects of our life, the most easy way is to sell “yoga” as an array of experiences that leads to some form of sensory, physical or organic pleasure that release us from body-mind pressures oand take us to new dimensions of “spirirtual” bliss and “eternal” freedom. Such “nice” words are now being used now and it seems that they carry any meaning. Not at all.
Few are those who pay enough attention to the study of the texts and to the teaching methodology that our teachers have passed on us. And what is most surprising is that due to a lack of information and investigation it is firmly believed that the listening, analysis and contemplation of the words in the Scriptures are just a “theoretical” knowledge that has nothing to do with the real knowledge that experience or certain states of mind can produce by themselves.
There is nothing as far from truth as that. This is a topic we should analyse and discuss since there is a lot of confusion here about what is the traditional teaching methodology.
There seems to exist confusion in what is considered knowledge and the different means for knowledge.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the differences between knowledge and experience.
Experience & Action Indigestion
In fact, there is indigestion and tergiversation on what experience can produce and a constant insistence in asserting that only through experiences more and more “intense” and ”ecstatic” and their consumption we can reach to a “state” where we can “reveal” the self, being the self already self-evident and self-existent and unable to be an object of our “consumption”. This notions always leads to think that we need to prolongate and search for these “blissful”, “eternal” , “spiritual” “ecstatic” (blank words that they don’t reveal anything) mind states that are somehow confused as the “real” goals of our study and practices.
Prashant Iyengar, BKS Iyengar’s son, constantly warns that we yoga adepts are hooked to the consumption of experiences that will not necessarily lead to knowledge.
Prashant Iyengar points out in many of his classes that we are insatiable consumers of these experiences, as action junkies. He warns us that this has little to do with the real meanings of the essential yoga practice and study. He insists once and again on the obsessive tendency of the so-called yoga adepts to go into action, into the culture of action, and their belief of what action can produce by itself, and their physiocratic work, and their determination of doing more and more and more of it, especially in the asana y pranayama practice.
We need to analyze this subject with much more detail to understand the limitations of each paradigm of work that is proposed by Prashant in his classes and books. This will clearly open our eyes to new dimensions that are unknown to many of us.
I hope I can write soon about Prashant Iyengar from notes and classes that I have taken and try to explain his basic methodology, which is for the yoga adept, a source of inspiration and revelation, a true exponent of the essential astanga yoga.
