I don't actually believe in yoga. But I hope to pursue it every day.

Recently, I’ve been learning a lot about the roots of yoga. This pushes me to think about the ways I perfectly agree, and the ways I disagree but think the pursuit is useful. Yoga is full of great wisdom and most practitioners are drawn, at least in part, to the metaphysical lessons. I am no exception.

Growing up in a fiercely Christian home, my identity developed wrapped around metaphysics. I simply believe that truth exists and the duty of consciousness is to seek it out. Studying the Bible deeply was, and is, a major part of that pursuit in my life but I’ve always believed that God gave us this experience of life and consciousness and He uses it to teach us so I’m interested in seeking what He has to teach me personally through my life experiences as well as studying the truths He’s passed us through prophets and God-driven people. I’ve also always believed that no belief system has capital on truth. Christians seek Godliness, but so do Muslims, and Buddhists, and even Atheists. Christ tells us, “seek and you will find,” with no qualifier for how we seek. I’m a Christian because it matches the things God has taught me, but I also want to learn the lessons God taught others. As a result, I’ve read many religious texts and they’re fascinating. In high school, I read the Quran, and the Book of Mormon out of a drive to see how others view the search for truth, and later I read several other religious texts as well. Are these texts, and the Bible inspired by God*? That depends on perspective but I will definitely say that all of these are filled with really weird stuff. The common yogic text, the Bhagavad Gita, is generally less weird but also very different, and reading it requires more context than any other religious text I’ve encountered. This is to say that many religious texts are often straight forward (like the Sermon on the Mount found in Mathew 5-7), but the Bhagavad Gita is absolutely not. Like the book of Revelation, it makes little sense until you understand the purpose of the writer and the historical context.

Maharishi Patanjali wrote the Bhagavad Gita sometime near the couple centuries surrounding the life of Christ. However, there was a long tradition of thought and teaching that he was collecting. This is true of many religious texts. For example, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible but Genesis, the first book, is a collection of oral histories passed down through centuries. Patanjali was performing a similar task in gathering the ideas that defined “yoga” as he saw it and trying to describe them in the simplest way. His process actually feels a lot like the process of Euclid in writing Euclid’s Elements, the most famous math text and one of the more famous books of all time. We don’t actually know if Euclid produced much mathematics himself, but he worked tirelessly to gather all mathematical thoughts in the world so that he could gather them in a single series of texts, beginning with the most basic postulates that we accept as true and using those accepted truths to prove other truths, all the while removing everything that’s unnecessary to move his point forward. We follow his style of writing in math to this day and this is why math texts read very slowly and feel very dense. Patanjali aimed at performing a similar task with yoga, with a few marked differences. Euclid began with the absolute most basic ideas and built from there so that a novice or a skeptic could pick up the Elements and work through the arguments logically. Patanjali assumed that his audience was already a scholar. Because of this, the Bhagavad Gita is not easily digestible by modern readers as we’re not first and second century Indian yoga scholars so most yogis read commentaries on it, with the most notable commentary being Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by BKS Iyengar.

When Patanjali wrote the Bhagavad Gita, he displayed some beliefs that were a sign of the times in India. The west has followed, for a long time now, the idea of fundamental particles. The Greeks talked about water, wind, fire, earth, and ether. Much later, we developed the ideas of elements and atoms, and we’ve categorized these ideas. Indian scholars, contrastingly, believed in fundamental vibrations which seems foreign to us but the idea has gained some support in the modern pursuit of quantum physics. I don’t want to dive much here but quantum physics deals with very small particles extremely well by following the idea that we don’t know exactly where an electron, for instance, is located but we can make a probability map. This feels, in some ways, a lot like vibration. Yoga is associated with the chanting of “Om,” which, to yogis, is the primordial sound of the universe. If it seems strange that they believed in fundamental waves, then sit, close your eyes, and observe your body for 60 seconds and I think you will agree that very little feels still. Mostly, you will be overcome with waves and waves of breath, heartbeat, and more subtle movements as well. Other methods of seeking Godliness in India also center around repeated sounds or mantras, the most famous, thanks to the Beatles, is the Maha Mantra of the Krishnas.

The idea of fundamental waves is not the only useful context of the times relating to the writing of Patanjali. Many yogis also believed the world was made of two fundamental types of waves, which is notable in its difference from previous schools of thought that believed in one type of fundamental wave. According to Patanjali, those fundamental waves are Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is divine energy, and prakriti is mundane energy. He believed that everything that exists is made of prakriti, including the intangible. I mean that matter is, obviously, made of prakriti but so are emotions and thoughts and other intangible effects of consciousness. Basically, if you can name it, then it’s probably prakriti. Below all of that mundane energy, all of creation has divine energy or purusha. Your purusha is your true self underneath the conditioning of the world. Purusha, in general, is pure consciousness and it’s also the only source of all consciousness. Therefore, the goal of yoga is to reveal your purusha by moving your prakriti out of the way. One example, to highlight the difference occurs when you are hurt. You may have the response of saying, “ouch!” The thing that hurt you, the hurt itself, and your “ouch” response are all prakriti, but realizing that you said “ouch” is purusha. So the goal is to still everything outside and inside of you, except for the realization of who you are behind your responses.

These beliefs build to a picture of the world that I do not agree with, but I do find is both incredibly unique and extremely useful. Euclid used a basis of postulates to logically prove ideas of truth. Patanjali, contrastingly, gave an actionable pathway we can follow to experience truth for ourselves. Personally, I love the pathway and want to pursue it every day, but I do not agree with his desired result. His belief is that we need to quiet our prakriti completely so that we can see our purusha and our true nature. The practice of yoga asana, or poses, is meant to help us achieve steadiness and ease in our bodies so that we can still the vibrations in our prakriti. Then we still the body and take part in breath practices, or pranayama, so that we can work toward stilling the smaller vibrations in our prakriti. Eventually, we enter meditation with the goal of absolute stillness in order to merge our consciousness with our prakriti. However, his ideas were absolute… one might even say religiously so. I have no interest in stilling my breath, heart, or many other vibrations but I do find fulfillment in the pursuit of control of my autonomous bodily systems. Essentially, I absolutely want to pursue Patanjali’s path, but not with his end in mind. Personally, I want complete control over my body. I want the ability to slow my breath and heart rate at will, but I also want the ability to turn on my immune system at will, and I believe this is possible. Patanjali’s goal was absolute stillness. Mine is absolute agency. However, the path is the same.

Patanjali goes on to describe much more detail about the process and gives the very actionable and famous Eight Limbed Path. I have found incredible value in striving toward living the eight limbs but mostly it’s hard to describe, as it’s meant to be experienced. And that is why Patanjali gives us a process to enlightenment rather than a description of enlightenment. However, it’s helpful to realize that I do not share his goal. This is why I don’t really believe in yoga. Rather, I’ve reinvented the process of yoga to serve myself. This may seem like picking and choosing but I think that’s what Patanjali would have intended.

*Disclaimer: God has clearly shown me that the Bible is absolutely from Him. However, it has often been abused by the church and people. Some might claim the same is true for these other texts, and I have no way to refute that, but I’ll gladly voice my disagreement and would love to have that conversation with any interested. I also have no trouble with someone seeking truth by reading any text, religious scripture or not. Seek truth and you will find it, but beware any teaching that strays from the character of God that you have found to be true in your experience.