What yoga is not:

There’s this tendency in the West to approach yoga and other spiritual practices within the framework of materialistic thinking.

By this I mean that there’s a tendency to see yoga as a tool to achieve external results. The West has lost its Christianity, and this event has permitted people to explore spirituality in so many different ways. It is not a surprise to me, for that reason, that we are attracted to the teachings of the Orient. Unfortunately, there’s a need to re-interpret these teachings, including yoga, within Western parameters of materialistic thinking (which is the new cult of the West), boxing it into science (to achieve physical and psychological health), fashion (to look cool, to look nice) or business (to make money).

In short:

• Yoga is not intended to make you more flexible, stronger, or even physically healthy. Yoga is not gymnastics, fitness or body-exercise.
• Yoga is not intended to make you feel relaxed, to make you release the good kind of dopamine, or even to “clear your mind,” whatever that means. Yoga is not therapy.
• Yoga is not intended to make you “fly in heaven,” to worship a deity or a guru. Yoga is not a religion.
• Lastly, yoga is not intended as a tool to make money, to network with other people. Yoga is not a business.

So, what is yoga for?

The root meaning of the word yoga is yuj: to joke, to tie in, to unite.

The goal of yoga is to achieve union, to unite.

Of course, you will see physical and psychological benefits from practicing yoga, but we use all of these benefits for the sake of one goal, that is, union. For this reason, I like to say that yoga is a method. A method to attain union. Like all methods, it has been tested, it has been systematized, and it has been proven to work… over and over again.

The book that describes this method, systematically, is the Yogasutra of Patanjali, written sometime around the 600 B.C. (yes, it’s that old). Since those ancient times, this method has worked for other people who have attained union (enlightenment), and so it can work for you too, if you’re ready for the challenge.

More than a mere “yoga” class where you practice some flexibility, maybe some breathing and some meditation, yoga is a lifestyle. Yoga permeates everything the practitioner does. It is, of course, deeper than it appears and as it is taught at the average “yoga” studio. In fact, before you even sit down to “do yoga,” you need to have been practicing the prescribed Namas and Niyamas (restrains and observances) required for this method. Then, we do stretches, breathing exercises, etc., for the goal of being able to simply sit, spine straight, in the same position for hours in meditation. That’s it. If you can accomplish this without tiring or being distracted, you may skip all the rest of the limbs (which means your body and mind are already strong, balanced and composed enough that you can meditate uninterruptedly). The goal of meditation is samadhi, which is the act of perceiving clearly “things” as they are. There are many types of samadhi, depending of the “thing” being observed. But once proper differentiation between Purusha, aka., the witness-consciousness, and the rest, aka., Prakriti (evolution) and its evolutes, is achieved, then, consciousness remains in its own eternal nature, and the body-mind complex simply dissolves, it disappears.

Let us not go into this rabbit hole (just yet). Let me conclude with this: this process of meditation, of course, rarely goes on a straight line. Instead, through discipline and non-attachment, the yogi increases his awareness one step at a time. We carry these insights gained from meditation into our lives until we can maintain samadhi even in this world, in our daily life, in which case, it is called moksha or spiritual enlightenment while we live. That is the method leading to the goal.

So, what’s there to unite exactly?

Well, if I say that the ego has to unite into the Self, or that you are dismembered and dispersed throughout the entire Kosmos, or that you are not complete as you are right now, or that you need to connect to Spirit, etc. If I say any of that, you may or may not believe me. After all, I’m dealing with abstract terms, with ideas that represent different things to different people.

Rather, let me go into another detour that will explain it, simply:

Given that the primary source of knowledge is the knowledge that comes from first-hand observation, from perception (simply as that), our goal consists in exercising that ability to observe and refining it.

Different philosophic schools include other ways to attain knowledge (epistemology). Some examples are injunction and precepts from sacred books or the expert authorities. However, these, in turn, are based on previous acts of observation, either as perceived by you or other people. As you can see, these secondary sources of knowledge have their flaws.

((In the West we say: science is never settled because new observations can come that disprove our previous assumptions or hypothesis. This is the right way to see science. But we also say: trust the experts, the authorities, the scientists and bureaucrats. We preach critical thinking just for the sake of dispelling Christianity with all its superstitions, and we submit easily to other people that may or may not really know, for their perception may be tainted, their inferences twisted, the real underlying motivations of their behavior and decisions unconscious to them and others (motivations like gaining more power to abuse you, to find pleasure and perpetuate other addictions, or even to destroy you and all life on the planet, etc.). There’s so much risk in this approach.))

This is the way I see it: if our perception of reality is twisted, meaning we don’t perceive it as it really is, then our injunctions will be twisted to a greater degree. If we fail at recognizing the truth in this way, we will also fail to recognize who has knowledge and who has not, and we are easy victims of people who really desire to abuse or destroy us. It is this simple.

To conclude this topic and to answer the initial question, what’s to be united is everything that you are not perceiving, that has been shun away, that has been split off from consciousness, that remains undifferentiated and form-less. And this is going to be quite a journey. You will have to venture through the contents of your memories, your dreams, your imagination, your personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, your thoughts, etc. All these will have to achieve a unified form, a realistic assessment of what the idea of “you” is, of the ego, and its relation to the Kosmos. Once this cognition is achieved, then, of everything, ego and non-ego, under the umbrella of consciousness that contains it, the goal of yoga is at hand.

For now, the message I want to come across is this: yoga is a method to achieve union via the expansion of consciousness.

Once you achieve union, is there anything more to achieve?

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