Q. So James, could you tell us a bit about this Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā weekend? I’m intrigued and was wondering what it’s all about.
A: Sure, when I first started getting into yoga and discovering how practical its teachings were, I was also struck by how much ‘yoga’ there was in so many poems and songs that were already dear to me, and this included many songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Q. Could you give an example?
A. Sure, with Bob’s music the yogic messages keep on coming throughout the course of his albums, and they are there, very strong, right from the beginning. The great, opening song of the Wailers’ first album ‘Burnin’, is ‘Get Up Stand Up’. And ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ is one of the very first instructions in the Bhagavad Gītā. In the Gītā, the student, Arjuna, is torn. He’s on the floor, doesn’t know what to do. The rules he has previously lived by are no longer robust or inclusive enough to guide him through this challenging situation he now finds himself in. And what does his teacher, Kṛṣṇa, tell him? Kṛṣṇa first asks Arjuna how he has let this meagre, faint-heartedness come over him at this, the crucial moment, then tells him that this pathetic attitude does not suit him, is not worthy of him and will do him no good now or hereafter, so he should rise up like the great hero he really is. In other words, Kṛṣṇa urges Arjuna to Get up, stand up! Stand up for your rights, Arjuna, like the great hero you really are!

As Kṛṣṇa’s teaching continues, he urges Arjuna to claim sovereignty for his own experience, in other words, to get up and stand up, and claim responsibility for his own life. In a course I took with one of my Indian teachers, Bharath Raj Naga Kumar, he reminded us: ‘remember, your problem is always smaller than you are! It exists in your awareness, so it’s smaller than you.’ Everything is experienced in the realm of our awareness. As soon as we notice, we are empowered to shift the way we are engaging with reality and perhaps shift the quality of our experience. In yoga, a challenge or difficulty is thus recast as an opportunity in disguise.

Yoga is about coming home to the fullness we really are, coming out of partiality and re-membering our innate wholeness. As Bob says, in ‘Coming in from the Cold’ at the start of the magnificent Uprising album: ‘In this life, in this life, in this life, in this, oh sweet life, we’re coming in from the cold, coming in from the cold.’ And this reminds us of this yogic message that every experience in life is an opportunity to learn more about who we are, to come out of the ‘cold’ of fragmentation, into the warm light of centred, cohesive, integrated awareness.

One beautiful and striking feature of yogic texts of instruction such as the Bhagavad Gītā and Yoga Sūtra is the lack and total absence of negative instruction. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra which encodes in distilled sūtra form essential practical teachings of Yoga, there are no negative instructions. Patañjali does not deal in ‘don’ts’. Yoga recognises that if we want to move in constructive, new directions, we need to channel our energy there, rather than dwelling on, dissecting and analyzing what is wrong. Yoga instead encourages us to take great care with the quality of our thoughs, words and actions, so we can actively invite the type of cohesion and experience we really want. And this too is reiterated by Bob Marley, for example in ‘Positive Vibration’ which opens the Rastaman Vibration album:

‘If you get down and you quarrel every day, you’re saying prayers to the devils I say! / Why not help one another on the way, make it much easier… … make way for the positive day, are you pickin’ up now?’

‘Are you pickin’ up now?’ In other words, what waves are you choosing to catch in your day to day? What vibes are you allowing yourself to cultivate with the quality of your thoughts, words and actions? So here again, we get a strong yogic message as Bob’s lyrics remind us that the quality of our experience is our responsibility, and always involves a significant element of choice. And we can choose to cultivate the ‘positive day’, the ‘positive vibration’ that is conducive to learning and evolution.

And talking of evolution, as Bob reminds us in Revolution, at the closing climax of the majestic Natty Dread album: ‘It takes a revolution, to make a solution.’ One of the ways I understand this lyric is that when we are coming to terms with the extent of our own self-sabotage, when we are working with our own fissures and fragmentary patterns, and as we move in the direction of greater cohesion and integration, it takes a whole go-round of the cycle of our experience for the new ways we are inviting to really gain traction, because the old patterns have inertia. As we make the heartful, sincere effort to shift our patterns in new directions of greater cohesion, this will not be an overnight, one weekend, or even one year affair. Practice, as it is defined in the Yoga Sūtra, is the long-term, continued, whole-hearted effort to foster steadiness, attended to with dedication and commitment, then it becomes robust and well-rooted. In other words, when we persist, diligently, through the natural cycles of our experience, we can come to greater self-mastery and integration, but this requires attentive presence through the whole cycle of our experience.

And this careful, attentive, wholehearted presence is what yoga practice is all about. These days, we hear much more frequently than only a few years ago about consciousness, but we don’t hear quite so much about conscience, and this is perhaps why the spread of yoga has yet to have the revolutionary, positive evolutionary impact that is its innate capacity. But Bob Marley and the Wailers knew that spiritual practice is really all about how we live. As is said in Rebel Music (3 O’ Clock Road Block) on the Natty Dread album: ‘check my life, if I am in doubt. But coming back to the Wailers’ Burnin’ album and Pass It On:

‘What your hands do, it is your own eyes that have seen, so won’t you judge your actions to make sure the results are clean?/ It’s your own conscience that is going to remind you that it’s your heart and nobody else’s that is going to judge…’

What a beautiful summary of the key teaching in yoga that it is up to us to claim sovereignty for our actions and experiences and work honestly with the miraculous gifts of our incarnations as human beings blessed with self-reflexive awareness and the gifts of conscience!

So, in summary:
Get Up, Stand Up!
Your life, your experience, your action, is your responsibility, yours and nobody else’s, so rise up, you have great power, great capacity and this life is a great opportunity, so as Bob says: Wake up and Live NOW, wake up and live!

Yoga is about working with the gifts of conscience, working skilfully with the reality of the human condition. I love the inclusivity of the yoga tradition, how the teachings are offered in so many different, yet wonderfully complementary forms: the ultra-distilled Yoga Sūtra, with the sūtra-s basically like mnemonics: concise keys to vast bodies of practical teachings, practical teachings that are further illustrated by the dramatic dialogue of the Bhagavad Gītā, the flavourful, symbolic literature of the Purāṇa-s and epics. And I would add to this the spiritual teachings that have come through mystics, visionaries and artists who have been conduits for spirit on every continent. And Bob Marley, in my opinion, is one of these. Let us not impoverish ourselves by turning away from the wisdom that is all around. Yoga is an all-inclusive practice and it recognises that the way to One Love, One Heart, to true at-one-ment embraces the whole of life and allows all we experience to be a Redemption Song, all we express to be a song of freedom!

See James speaking about Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIQfz5iW1yU

At school, I was taught many things that I have since come to consider as being highly inaccurate, misleading, or mistaken. One of these was the idea that Hinduism is a polytheistic religion, because it believes in many gods.

There are a number of problems with this statement. One is the word Hinduism itself, because it is hard to pinpoint what it means. Of course, this is true for many words, people can use the same term understanding it in very different ways, however this word is a rather extreme case. To illustrate, I have been at conferences on the Indian Intellectual Tradition at which learned and venerated Sanskṛt pundits admit readily that no one really agrees what this means. The term itself only came into being when the colonising British wanted a way to refer to the vast body of religious practice which they encountered in the lands south of the River Indus. This vast body of religious practice was to the colonising agents most confounding. As colonisers intent on plundering the riches of the subjugated lands, they were, as colonisers usually are, operating in the divide and rule game. And to divide and rule, limiting names that split people and deter them from their common humanity and retreat into cliquish, schismatic identifications are helpful. Further, as colonisers, names that differentiate the subjugated people, that accentuate somehow their otherness, can make it all the easier to treat them as less than human, and so ‘Hinduism’ was born.

Further, to my mind the very word is a problem, because, just like Bob Marley, I am ‘sick and tired of the ism-schism game’; like Satish Kumar, I think we need to make all ‘isms’ ‘wasms’ – things of the past, and move towards more inclusive and reconciliatory ways.

To my mind, this unification, this inclusive reconciliation is the whole aim of yoga.

Indeed, in my explorations of the yoga tradition, I have come to see that Bob and Satish, though they have coined beautiful and resonant phrases, are not expressing anything new, but the same feeling that has motivated many of the great sages, seers and visionaries of spiritual traditions from all around the world.

The reason I find the idea of Hinduism so misleading though, is that in Indian Philosophy, on which the religious practices that developed in the lands south of the River Indus are based, God is One. The Paths are Many but the Truth is One.

But wait a minute, someone brought up in an Abrahamic monotheist land might say, don’t ‘the Hindus’ have hundreds of gods?

Yes, they do, and that is actually the point.

Because God is One, God is beyond name and form. As soon as we name something we limit it. When we define, we confine and diminish. The idea is that God is in and beyond everything. The Supreme, the Ultimate, defies description, exceeds all boundaries and barriers. And this is why to my mind, any ‘religious’ thinking that limits God is flawed, any so-called religious idea that imposes barriers and boundaries, that works to divide and rule is not connecting us to God, to the Supreme, or to our innate highest potential, but to our fear, and is based on politics, not spirituality.

The point then, is that God cannot be named, cannot be represented by any particular form. In some traditions, this has led to the injunction that it is wrong to make any image or symbol of God: of that which is beyond symbol. In others, the emphasis is on seeing the Supreme in all living things, and cherishing and worshipping the rivers and the mountains, the sky, the rains, the fields and every living, pulsating thing, from the denser rocks and stones to the subtler water of life, the fire, air and the very space we depend on. Both of these tendencies can be found in various streams of Indian spiritual and religious practice: the first notably in certain streams of Advaita Vedānta in which the Supreme is considered primarily as nameless, formless; the second in certain Tantric streams which share much in common with animistic traditions, and which scorn the manmade temple as redundant. What blind man needs a temple, when the temple of the earth is all about him? However, one of the great beauties of the Indian tradition is the way that it reconciles and includes all these possibilities.

In some Tantric lineages for example, it is just as likely for the Supreme to be discussed in terms of the great Void, or the great wholeness, as through the lens of an archetype, such as Śiva, or a form of Mother Divine such as Tārā, Durgā or Kālī.

And it is this inclusivity of the Indian spiritual and to a significant degree religious tradition that I feel is most misrepresented by an ismatic-schismatic term.

It is very significant that on visiting a temple dedicated to a particular representation of the Divine in India, that one is highly likely to notice representations of other aspects of the Divine alongside the ‘main deity’. For example, one may go to a temple dedicated to Śiva, constructed by people that use Śiva as their preferred representation of the Supreme. At this temple, the ‘image’ or icon of Śiva as the Supreme is the liṅga.
However, also, within the temple, there may be representations not just of Śiva’s ‘family’: Gaṇeśa and Skanda, his ‘sons’, and of Mother Divine, his beloved, but also of images of and associated with Viṣṇu.

The idea is that the particular symbol is not it. ‘It’ goes beyond name and form. And so the idea of hundreds of gods, and of even one god having a thousand or more names or forms, is to remind us, overtly, that the name is not it, no particular form really represents it. The different names and forms are just means to usher us towards a direct experience that will defy description or representation. But yoga is practical, so symbols, forms, names and stories are used and admitted, because these can help us learn. They carry rich educational value and can help draw forth that which is already in us, inviting our awareness more fully in the direction of recognition - of the wholeness, the all-one-ness that we are really all part of.

 Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam – Starting with a song
In the Bhagavad Gītā, one of the most treasured texts of the yoga tradition, yoga is described as ‘samatva’ – ‘evenness’, or the integration of all the powers of our awareness; and as ‘karmasu kauśalam’, efficiency and skilfulness in the things we do. This skilfulness and efficiency is demonstrated by the way many yoga texts encapsulate the whole teaching at the very beginning and only then go on to elaborate it.

Yoga techniques demonstrate this efficiency in the way that they encourage us, right away, to orient ourselves towards integration, and start taking practical steps to foster balance, skilfulness and efficiency.

This is one of the beauties of using song as a practice, or beginning a yoga practice with a song. Sound, being pervasive and penetrative, reaches the parts that other practices can’t always access. Further, when we sing, it can readily invite the various powers of which we are constituted into what we are doing. Singing is a physical and energetic act, but it also recruits subtle mental focus and full sensory engagement, and with the appropriate type of song, can equally summon our emotional body and intent. So starting with a song can really help us ‘do the yogic thing’: in the sense of being skilful and efficient, starting as we mean to go on, not falling into the conditioned idea that we will get ‘there’ around the next corner, or that we have to pursue a certain means for some imagined end. Rather, we invite whole system presence as best we can, here and now, recognising and embodying the reality that the means is the end. We get good at what we practice. So if we truly seek peacefulness, wholeness and integration, then peacefulness, wholeness and integration are the very qualities we need to stay attuned to through the gamut of the various practices which we may use to help rehabilitate different ‘members’ of the wonderful ‘gang’ of our being.

Bringing our gang into harmony
Following a recent program, one of the participants asked if I could send a few words about the meaning of the chant that we sung during the weekend to Gaṇeśa. The chant was:

Gaṇeśa Śaraṇaṁ Śaraṇaṁ Gaṇeśa
Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

There is a lot one could say about this, but here, trying to keep things relatively brief, I look at some of the key ideas that it represents for me when I sing and share it.

Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam
We take refuge in the inclusive, harmonising, reconciling power of yoga

This is a song to the energy of Gaṇeśa, but we can also say that this is a song to the energy of yoga, symbolised by Gaṇeśa.

Gaṇeśa can be taken to mean and represent many things but essentially, it can be seen as the energy of yoga: the energy that gathers, that brings together, that unifies and reconciles things which may even seem impossible to reconcile but nonetheless does reconcile them and includes them into a cohesive whole in which all the different parts can actually get along and perhaps even enjoy the mutually nourishing and complimentary potential of working as part of a reconciled whole.

Śaraṇaṁ means refuge, shelter, protection.

So when we sing Gaṇeśa Śaraṇaṁ we are basically saying we take shelter, we find refuge, in the inclusive, reconciling, harmonising energy of yoga. Or otherwise stated, we take refuge in our innate capacity as conscious beings to invite ourselves into deeper cohesion through the harmonising power of our acknowledged, channelled conscience.

Assembling a cohesive whole
At the immediate linguistic level, the name Gaṇeśa is constituted of two words: gaṇa + īśa.

Gaṇa means group, or member of a group. It is from the verb root ‘gan’, which means ‘to count’, ‘to enumerate’; so gaṇa is a part of a whole, it’s a member, something that can be gathered, brought together, assembled, counted, enumerated, brought into a whole.

Iśa is often translated as Lord. With this sense, Gaṇeśa is the Lord of the group. In other words, Gaṇeśa is the energy that can unify the group, that can bring all the different parts or members of the group together, that can include all the constituents, recognise all the elements, and reconcile them into a cohesive whole.

Iśa is the Lord in the sense of the one that can skilfully lead all the ‘gang members’ of our being in the direction of cohesion, unity, and the type of yogic integration which will allow us to recognise all of who we really are.

Gaṇeśa then can be seen to represent the innate capacity we have as conscious, sentient beings, endowed with self-reflexive awareness and conscience, to actually bring all of ourselves into alignment and presence.
When we sing Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam, we are invoking, calling on, rousing and encouraging our innate capacity to re-member our true selves and gather all we are into the present moment so we can make it its own completion and fulfilment.

Unifying the whole field of experience
Yoga means to connect, to join, to bring into unity. Being practical, yoga recognises that the only real, sustainable unity is one that includes all the parts. I mentioned above the idea of our being constituted of many different ‘gang members’. In its practicality, yoga also recognises that each of us is something like ‘a gang’. As incarnate human beings we are constituted of many different powers. We have different organs, different powers of body, sense, mind, intellect and emotion; each of which, we might say, is like a ‘gang member’ with its own particular ‘duty’, agenda and capacities, each of which has to take care of different things and in order to do so has to work in slightly different rhythm from other ‘gang members’ in the system, even though they are really all part of one bigger gang. This bringing the diverse and different parts of ourself into rhythm requires patient, sustained presence: this is yoga practice.

Tattva-s: the ‘ganglands’ of our being
One of the very practical models of reality that yoga uses, and in some schools build upon, is the basic Sāṅkhya model of reality.

Sāṅkhya is a system of Classical, Orthodox Indian Philosophy which most other systems of Indian Philosophy reference and/or work with/build upon/differentiate themselves from in some way. Sāṅkhya is also sometimes referred to as a sister school of Philosophy to Yoga because Yoga does use the Sāṅkhya model of reality and the evolutes of consciousness that I’m about to outline quite significantly.

There is a lot one can say about this, but for our purposes here: the Sāṅkhya model gives us a very practical map of the field of our being as conscious creatures (puruṣa/cit) living and experiencing within the realm of Nature (prakṛti/citta).

One way we can interpret or interface with the Sāṅkhya model from a yogic perspective is that as conscious beings, puruṣa-s, our essence is pure consciousness. However, the body-borne vehicle and its different powers through and with which we experience are constituted of prakṛti, the ever-changing stuff of Nature.
The Sāṅkhya model groups the constituents of our being into tattva-s, elements of ever-changing nature. The aim of yoga is to bring cohesion through the all these elements, in other words through the whole field of our being.

So what are these tattva-s?
 
Tat means ‘that’,
tva as a suffix means having the quality of, so a tattva is a ‘thatness’.
The term tattva then refers to aspects of ‘that’: ‘that’ being the reality of nature, and our experience as living beings.
 
In the basic Sāṅkhya model, there are 25 tattva-s: puruṣa, the seeing, conscious principle, and prakṛti, the seen realm of nature. Prakṛti then has 23 evolutes. Working back from gross to subtle, these are:
-the five great elements, the pañca mahābhūtāḥ: earth, water, fire, air and space;
-the five tanmātrāḥ: the realms of the senses and sense experience relating to these elements: fragrance, taste, form, touch and hearing;
-the five karmendriyāḥ: the miraculous divine powers of action that allow us to: speak and express; pick things up and put things down; move and locomote; excrete, digest, assimilate and expel; procreate and recreate;
-the five jñānendriyāḥ: the miraculous divine powers of our senses: smelling, tasting, seeing, feeling, hearing;
-and the three constituents of the antaḥ kāraṇa – the internal apparatus of our awareness: the manas which connects the indriyāh (karmendriyāḥ and jñānendriyāḥ) to the internal apparatus, the cognising and processing part of our awareness;
the ahaṁkāra, the part of awareness which relates our experiences to our idea of individuality and our sense of identity;
and the buddhi, the part of our awareness which discerns, judges, discriminates and makes decisions.
 
To reiterate, the idea in yoga is to bring cohesion, balance and integration through all these tattva-s, through all these powers, in the myriad ways they function and live within us.

These aspects of ourselves move at different rhythms and in different ways. They have different styles.
Perhaps you have experienced feeling torn: part of you wants to move in one direction, another part would prefer to move the opposite way, another part is demanding we go a different way entirely. It might be that one sense is pulling us one way, another sense another. It might be that our body and senses are screaming for us to move forwards, but our mind is hell-bent on holding us back, for example.

We might consider such a situation as gang warfare on the streets of the city of our being. Our task and challenge is to bring about a lasting peace, where the different gangs and gang members work together as an efficient and relaxed team, confident of each other’s support and capacities, faithful to their common aim and interest of sustainable wellbeing.

How will we do this?

The yogic recipe is to expose all the parts, all the members, to the experience of coherence, of cohesion; to invite each part, all of them, into the lived, experiential understanding that they are better off as part of a collaborative whole than eking out their own survival and trying to find true satisfaction by seeking only their own short term interests. This coherence or balanced integration is also called Samādhi: the state in which the whole being experiences togetherness, wholeness, evenness; it’s also called kaivalya, alone-ness, in the sense of all-one-ness: where no part feels lonely or left out, where all the gang members are seen, acknowledged and warmed by the hearth of centred awareness, brought out of the shadowlands by the light of centred awareness.

This is the Gaṇeśa energy, the energy that includes, unifies and by so doing, steadily trains the different parts, with all their idiosyncrasies and particularities, in the art of being part of one great whole. And as we learn, as we invite all our parts, all the members of the gang of our being to come into deeper, subtler harmony, steadily we and they learn to be part of a glorious, majestic symphony. This is Śrī Gaṇeśa, the glorious energy of yoga, of gathering, of unifying, reconciling and harmonising.

The chant continues with Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

So we have already sung: Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam –
I take refuge in my capacity as a conscious, sentient human being to actually work with the manifold gifts of consciousness to foster greater harmony within the reality of what I experience. I take shelter in my innate capacity to bring myself into a slightly more cohesive, slightly more coherent, slightly more integrated place. And this is the practice of yoga. Wherever we are we, whatever situation we are in, we invite ourselves to be a little bit more fully present, we invite more of ourselves to be included.  Extending this invitation to all parts of ourselves may require presence and courage. And so, we deepen the affirmative, encouraging power of the initial chant with Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

Namaḥ means prostration, from the root ‘nam’, meaning to bow/prostrate/offer oneself to.

Gaṇapataye is the dative singular form of Gaṇapati a synonym of Gaṇeśa, so it means to Gaṇapati, to the Lord/Leader of the Group, to the one that can bring all the gang members into powerful, sustaining and harmonious cohesion.

Gaṁ is a seed mantra for this Gaṇeśa/Gaṇapati energy, affirming and accentuating the idea and intent of unification, harmonisation, inclusion and reconciliation.

Auṁ means: everything/all.

So, in other words: we offer all of ourselves, everything we are, to that innate capacity we are endowed with as conscious, sentient beings, that can bring things into greater togetherness.

When sung, because of the euphonic combination of sounds in Sanskṛt, (the way sounds alter to make them easier to pronounce) the Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ sounds quite like ‘ong gang gaṇapataye namaḥ’

Basically, we are asking and  inviting all the members of the gang that make up the field of my being, all the different gang members that inhabit the territory of my awareness: may they all work together, may they all offer themselves willingly to that part of myself that can unify, in other words may they all align with my conscience,  may they all be illumined by the light of my conscience and may I have the courage, the presence, and the awareness, to allow all parts of myself to serve that deeper longing, to serve that guiding light which pulsates in the core of my being.

Or, otherwise stated, may I bring myself into ‘samatva’- evenness and integration, so I may access ‘karmasu kauśalam’, greater skilfulness and efficiency in all I do.
…
So, those are a few words about Gaṇeśa  Śaraṇam. If you are interested in hearing more about the archetype of Gaṇeśa, I recommend checking out The Mythology Show on Yoga Anytime. This series includes episodes on Gaṇeśa that say a little more about the rich symbolism of this yogic archetype and what the Gaṇeśa energy represents practically. This includes stories of how Gaṇeśa got his name, and why when we take recourse to archetype and symbol in the Indian tradition, Gaṇeśa is the one that is always invoked and worshipped first. There are also series on Mother Divine and on Hanuman, also exploring the symbolism of these archetypes, what they can mean at a practical level and how we can work with them in our daily lives. If you use my name James Boag, you can get 30 days free access to yogaanytime's now extensive programs.
 
 
 

Yoga – The Gathering

The human soul longs for the ‘real’ sensuous experience that we can only have in the gathering of live, shared interaction.

In our contemporary culture, we are repeatedly encouraged to live ‘boxed’ within a protective shield that numbs us to our deeper longings.

It is one of the sadnesses I feel around ‘modern yoga’ that ‘doing yoga’ has become another way of ‘fitting in’, something one can do in order to be accepted according to some artificial, externally dictated standard. I find this so sad because really, yoga is about accepting ourselves as the unique individual we really are. Accepting ourselves so wholly that we can meet and relate to the other openly and honestly, in a way that allows for mutually nourishing exchange, stimulation and growth.

I also find it sad that in the contemporary ‘yoga business’, it seems so much about the business and not so much about the yoga. Many studios seem to operate on a very ‘play it safe and sexy and fill the classes’ model, many ‘teachers’ seem hell-bent on ratcheting up the number of likes, hits and followers in the netherworlds of facebook and Instagram, when the real business of yoga is about connection, not through text messages or social media, but real meeting: with the parts of ourselves we might have held down or back, or have preferred to keep in the shadows; and having begun the work of reconciliation and recovery, which yoga practice is, then going out into the complex world of real time, real world interaction and relationship with greater compassion and humanity.

Our current human culture is in many ways diseased. Consumerism just eats everything up and on its current trajectory will lead to our auto-destruction. However, the sages of the wisdom traditions from every part of the world are also part of our common human heritage.

The problems of consumerism and the legacies of successive revolutions (agricultural, industrial, technological) which have severed us from so much of the support structure of tribal gathering and collective, practical wisdom are not problems of individual nation states or politicised economic groupings, but of us all.

When we practice yoga, real yoga, when we practice reconciliation with reality as it is, when we practice connecting with more of who we really are so we may connect more wholly in any encounter, this impacts all our relationships and can bring us to a place where the harmonising influence of our presence reaches much deeper and further than we may even dream.

But first, we must gather: ourselves and together. Because for the vast majority of human beings, the work of gathering one’s soul needs the support of the other, the catalysing, tempering and reflective agency of group support. In the collective wisdom of many traditional societies it is said that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Given the way we are plundering our environment, squandering so many of our resources and blithely ploughing a furrow of self-sabotage, we might equate humanity to a spoilt and unschooled infant. But the infant has great gifts and great potential. We just need the counsel and the wisdom of the elders, and we all carry some of this. So let us gather.
 
 

General Election
In May 2015, in the UK where I am a citizen, there was a ‘general election’, when the populace may vote for the national government. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the subject of the pending election dominated the mainstream media. The traditional ‘main parties’ and their very narrow perspectives dominate the debate. The protest parties and the so-called ‘minor parties’ also join the debate but are less dominant.

But in all this hullaballo, is the voice of the people really represented?

Many contend that it is not.

At election time, are we really ‘choosing’ or ‘electing’ anything more than a maintenance of the unsatisfactory and widely failing status quo? What type of ‘representative system’ is it when a leader of a party voted for by only a small minority of the population gets to form a ‘majority’ government and then ‘represent’ the country? At this last election in the UK, the government were voted for by less than a quarter of the electorate. The Conservative party received 36.9% of votes with turnout only 66.1% - the low turnout strongly suggesting many felt no party represented their views or that their vote for a non-major party would count for nothing. So despite the fact that 63% of those who did vote chose to vote for another party, and despite the fact that more than a third of the electorate chose not to vote, bafflingly, almost unbelievably, the Conservative party gets to form a ‘majority government’.

Clearly, this is not good enough, and I think we can do a lot better, but considering it, is this type of situation not also paralleled in what sometimes happens in our own internal realms: in the ‘country’ of our inner being?
When we make what we think of as choices, are we really choosing what we deeply want? Do our decisions represent the unified voice of our whole collective self? Or are our decisions dominated by the ‘main parties’ of, for instance, our social and family conditioning? Or of our fear-founded strategic mind and our short-term, self-serving interests? And all while our deeper longing and long-term interests go unheeded.
This type of situation is not only unrepresentative, it is almost tragicomically inefficient.

At the societal level, many times the ‘democratic’ system is characterised by the main parties squandering vast amounts of money, resources and energy in trying to get elected and put down the other, its opponent. Further, when a party is elected, it knows it has just five years ‘on the throne’, and so to a significant degree, its strategies are fear-based, determined by short-termism and anxiety about being re-elected/holding on to power.
The inefficiencies of this woebegone system are further compounded by the way that when there is a change of government and policy changes are brought in, there is often quite a significant amount of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, in the sense that in trying to demonstrate its difference from and superiority over the previous main party, the new party of government sometimes nips in the bud the more positive fruits of policy that the previous government began.

Again though, is this not seen within our own selves? When stuck in a rut, how much energy can we waste blaming ourselves and others? How much do we deplete the energetic resources that could help us move into a new space of more mature harmony by scattering away energy complaining and criticizing? We may expend our resources thoroughly analysing how the old ways haven’t really served us, yet simultaneously deepen our entrenchment in the old ways of black and white thinking, so restricting ourselves to previously known ways of being: ways that we already know are not broad, robust or inclusive enough to really serve us.

The ‘system’ has clearly failed. In the UK, and the situation is similar in many other ‘democratic’ countries, the ‘main parties’, those who, under the current system are the only ones with a chance of forming a government, occupy a lot of very similar and very narrow ground. They do not offer much real choice to the electorate, just mild tweaks to the existing status quo. Many members of the electorate are frustrated that though millions of their fellows also voted for the same ‘minor parties’ as they did, their vote has next to no representation in the parliament. Many others feel that none of the parties ‘on offer’ are good enough: that they are all as bad/corrupt/deceitful as each other.

Many are calling for a change to the electoral system. I hope that positive, more inclusive change will come, change that allows the government to actually represent the long-term interests of the land and people it is supposed to safeguard and represent. I would favour a system of collaborative, consensual government with a house of representatives structured to represent both local concerns from different parts of the country, and the different views of the national population: a genuine proportional representation. Of course, such a system would mean that some things take a lot longer to get done, but it would also usher us away from the tragically adversarial, us and them, points-scoring parliament and towards real opportunities for the a more representative governing body to start serving the long-term interests of the whole population more efficiently.

This may sound like a faraway fantasy, but we can start powerfully with ourselves and consider how we make choices in our immediate lives.

We may notice that in challenging situations or when making decisions, our conditioning often blinkers us to ridiculously narrow appraisal of the situation: weighing up ‘both sides’ of the issue, as if an issue has just two sides! When there are always hundreds of ways to see a question. This closed-mind masquerading as ‘open’ because it has considered an alternative, and perhaps when we look more closely, only as a means to strengthen through refutation of a counter-position its pre-existing stance, is ridiculously limited.

Yoga teaches us that if we are to access and deepen harmony, we have to have the courage and resolve to take down the walls of our mind’s conditioning, not just open a little door so we can admit and then gnash to pieces a conventional counter argument. We have to learn a new language: one that is more inclusive than yes and no, us and them, right and left.

One way yoga could be described is as the place of the true centre, that connects all the parts, that leaves nothing out. This is why there is no denial and no exclusivity in yoga. If we want to feel oneness, the only way to sustainable wellbeing, we have to face, accept and work with all of our parts.

When we start to do this, it does start to change the collective. The external system may be rubbish, but from the yogic point of view, that is no reason not to do our own work, it’s just greater motivation to channel our energy where we really can make a difference: close in, nearby, in the reality of our own perceptions and behavioural patterns.

And so, when making choices, when electing what to do with the forces of our being, we may take inspiration from Lao Tzu, Taoist master, and as such one who has transcended all systems:
‘If you want to heal the world, then heal yourself. If you want peace in the world, then bring light [awareness] to all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.’