The Sacred and the Mundane
I have a few classes each week with Prashant Iyengar, son of B.K.S. Iyengar. Prashant’s classes are very different from any other classes at the Institute, and from any other Iyengar yoga class I have taken anywhere. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely a matter of taste, but his classes always leave me with something to think about.
In a typical Iyengar yoga class, a lot of attention is paid to instruction on how to perform the postures, or asanas. Prashant continually exhorts us to go beyond this focus on doing and to instead focus on developing sensitivity: sensitivity to how body, breath, and mind are reciprocally interconnected; to how posture and breath control are connected to the subtler, internal practices of yoga.
In one of my classes with him, Prashant referred to our typical tending to the physical aspects of asana as tending to the mundane. The word stuck with me. Hadn’t I been feeling how the mundane had expanded to fill every aspect of life, every moment of time, and yet had left it feeling emptier. Our most celebrated pieces of technology help us perform mundane tasks like calling a taxi or re-ordering laundry detergent. Our tasks, reminders, and notifications; our products and experiences; our sharing of them and our reacting to other people’s sharing of theirs fill our days beyond their capacity. Prashant was asking us to slow down and put aside our to-do lists, to take time to breathe and pay attention.
In addition to the yoga, we also got to have the experience this month of going to our first Indian wedding. My friend and former coworker just happened to be getting married, in his hometown of Hyderabad, while we were here in India. During the weeks leading up to the wedding, we set out to find outfits and make other necessary arrangements. At first this was fun, but as it took more and more of our time, it began to wear on us. The mundane was creeping into what we had envisioned as a month of immersion in studying and practicing yoga, reading and writing, and generally slowing down.
In the end we found a place to rent really fantastic outfits, made all our arrangements, and had a fabulous time. The wedding and the reception were both over-the-top and beautiful; the food was abundant and delicious; I got to reconnect with some of my former colleagues; and Kate and I managed to find a bit of quiet time for rest and relaxation as well.
Once our clothing and arrangements were all set, the last thing I had to do was pick up a pair of shiny gold juttis (pointy-toed, slipper-like shoes) to match my wedding and reception outfits. This was relatively easy as there was only one pair of shoes in my size in the store, and luckily enough they were shiny and gold. I walked to the front of the store to pay, relieved to finally have completed my last mundane task. On the wall above the cashiers’ counter was a large shrine with a statue of Ganesh, photographs of gurus, flowers, and incense. In the midst of this chain menswear store, the sacred mingled freely with the mundane.
In yoga philosophy, existence is divided into two different realms: prakṛiti and puruṣa. Prakṛiti is the mundane: the everyday, material world that is available to perception. It contains not only all that we can perceive, but also all that we can think, believe, or feel. Prakṛiti is the domain of the ego, the self (denoted with a lower case ‘s’) through which we experience our day-to-day life.
Puruṣa is the domain of the soul, the true Self (denoted with a capital ‘s’), universal consciousness, ultimate truth, God, Ātman, Brahman: it goes by many names. Puruṣa is beyond our normal faculties of perception, reasoning, or description. Yoga is a set of practices through which we can experience puruṣa, with the ultimate goal of de-identifying ourselves with the ego and coming to dwell in the splendor of our true Selves. There are many different yogas, many different paths to the true Self. Yoga is a contemplative practice, with parallels in Buddhism, Daoism, and many other traditions, including mystical and contemplative traditions in Christianity and Islam.
From the birth of modernity to contemporary late capitalism, the West has seen a progressive diminshment of puruṣa and elevation of prakṛiti. As the individual strained against the (often oppressive) power structures put in place by the official gatekeepers of the spiritual realm, it found less and less use for what was beyond the gates. One of my neuroscience professors from graduate school explained his relationship with God like this: “He doesn’t believe in me, and I don’t believe in Him.” Individualism put the self at the center of the universe, and rationalism anointed science as the final arbiter of truth. The phenomenal accumulation of wealth and power that have come about as a result of technologies born of scientific progress have only reinforced the rationalist orthodoxy.
There is nothing wrong with rationality (quite the contrary!), or with science as a pragmatic pursuit of knowledge of prakṛiti, but rationalism and scientism are problematic. Quantum physics and the hard problem of consciousness highlight problems with the subjective nature of knowledge that have been well known since at least the time of Plato. From a more practical perspective, individuality and rationalism have left many of us feeling empty inside. Psychotherapy as practiced today in the West is rife with ideas based on Eastern traditions, and yoga continues to be immensely popular; though these traditions are overwhelmingly viewed and pursued from a health and wellness perspective.
It is quite clichéd for a Western writer to point out the presence and centrality of spirituality in everyday life in India. Rather than belabor the point, I will quote W. B. Yeats in his introduction to Rabrindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali:
We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics — all dull things in the doing — while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity.
Tagore is a towering artistic figure in India. A Bengali poet, songwriter, playwright, and polymath, he was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for Gitanjali, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in England in 1912. I think it would be fair to call it a collection of “love poems to God,” in the vein of Rumi or Rilke. One of my favorite poems from the collection is this:
Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.
O thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours.
There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth.
And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest.
But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word.
What can we in the rationalist West who are feeling this sense of emptiness learn from the everyday presence of spirituality in India, from the beauty of Tagore’s poetry? Certainly, delving deeply into non-Western traditions such as yoga philosophy, Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, or Native American spirituality can bring a new richness to our inner lives. I am immensely grateful to my yoga teachers, in particular Patricia Walden, for having introduced me to the study of the Yoga Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gita. But I think that we can also find incredible richness by delving deeply into our own authentic spiritual traditions: a process Esther De Waal, in her subtitle to The Celtic Way of Prayer, calls “the recovery of the religious imagination.”
The Celtic spirituality De Waal describes in the book is filled with a sense of the presence of God, which is marked by prayer, song, and poetry. The day begins with a prayer; another person is greeted with a prayer; the mundane tasks of daily life are accompanied by prayer. Prayers are oftentimes sung out loud, are sung throughout the day. She also notes that these practices fell away “as people became more talkative.” The Celtic Christians she describes spent their days in constant recognition of the presence of something beyond, and greater than, themselves. I thought of John O’Donohue speaking of “the invisible world,” and also of the importance of silence.
There is something fundamentally different about prayer than anything viewed or pursued from a health and wellness perspective. In the health and wellness paradigm, we are at the center. We are “doing the work” on our self. In prayer though, we must begin by making our self humble, we must submit our self to a higher power. The term in yoga philosophy is Īśvara praṇidhāna, typically translated as “surrender to God.” The term God can be problematic for many of us, entwined as it is with our own personal histories. But the concept of surrender is transformational: it is the antidote for individualism. We cannot transcend our identification with the ego without surrendering to something greater than ourselves.
So perhaps we can choose to what or whom we will surrender, be it God, Īśvara, the natural world, or universal consciousness. And perhaps we can find some silence and learn to know It, and in doing so come to know our Self. And perhaps we can find our voice and learn to praise It, with a poem, a prayer, or a song, and come to sing throughout the day, even while we are performing our mundane tasks. While we are finding the words to our song, let me offer a few more of Tagore’s:
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
