The word “yoga” derives from the verb yuj: “to yoke” or “to bind together.” Its goal was to link the mind of the yogin with his Self and to tether all the powers and impulses of the mind, so that consciousness becomes unified in a way that is normally impossible for human beings. Our minds are easily distracted. It is often hard to concentrate on one thing for a long time. Thoughts and fantasies seem to rise unbidden to the surface of the mind, even at the most inappropriate moments. We appear to have little control over these unconscious impulses. A great deal of our mental activity is automatic: one image summons up another, forged together by associations that have long been forgotten and have retreated into oblivion. We rarely consider an object or an idea as it is in itself, because it comes saturated with personal associations that immediately distort it and make it impossible for us to consider it objectively. Some of these psychomental processes are filled with pain: they are characterized by ignorance, egotism, passion, disgust and an instinct for self-preservation. They are powerful because they are rooted in the subconscious activities (vasanas) that are difficult to control but that have a profound effect on our behavior. Long before Freud and Jung developed modern psychoanalysis, the yogins of India had discovered the unconscious mind and had, to a degree, learned to master it. Yoga was thus deeply in line with the Axial Age ethos-its attempt to make human beings more fully conscious of themselves and bring what had only been dimly intuited into the clear light of day. It enabled the practitioner to recognize these unruly vasanas and get rid of them, if they impeded his spiritual progress. This was a difficult process, and the yogin needed careful supervision at each step of the way by a teacher, just as the modern analysand needs the support of his or her analyst. To achieve this control of the unconscious, the yogin had to break all ties with the normal world. First, like any monk, he had to “Go Forth,” leaving society behind. Then he had to undergo an exacting regimen which took him, step by step, beyond ordinary behavior-patterns and habits of mind. He would, as it were, put his old self to death and, it was hoped, thus awaken his true Self, an entirely different mode of being.
All this will sound strange to some Western people who have had a very different experience of yoga. The sages and prophets of the Axial Age were gradually realizing that egotism was the greatest hindrance to an experience of the absolute and sacred reality they sought. A man or a woman had to lay aside the selfishness that seems so endemic to our humanity if he or she wished to apprehend the reality of God, brahman or Nibbana. The Chinese philosophers taught that people must submit their desires and behavior to the essential rhythms of life if they wanted to achieve enlightenment. The Hebrew prophets spoke of submission to the will of God. Later, Jesus would tell his disciples that the spiritual quest demanded a death to self: a grain of wheat had to fall into the ground and die before it attained its full potential and bore fruit. Muhammad would preach the importance of islam, an existential surrender of the entire being to God. The abandonment of selfishness and egotism would, as we shall see, become the linchpin of Gotama’s own dhamma, but the yogins of India had already appreciated the importance of this. Yoga can be described as the systematic dismantling of the egotism which distorts our view of the world and impedes our spiritual progress. Those who practice yoga in America and Europe today do not always have this objective. They often use the disciplines of yoga to improve their health. These exercises of concentration have been found to help people to relax or suppress excessive anxiety. Sometimes the techniques of visualization used by yogins to achieve spiritual ecstasy are employed by cancer sufferers: they try to imagine the diseased cells and to evoke subconscious forces to combat the progress of the illness. Certainly, the yogic exercises can enhance our control and induce a serenity if properly practiced, but the original yogins did not embark on this path in order to feel better and to live a more normal life. They wanted to abolish normality and wipe out their mundane selves.
Many of the monks of the Ganges plain had realized, as Gotama did, that they could not achieve the liberation they sought by contemplating a dhamma in a logical, discursive way. This rational manner of thinking employed only a small part of the mind, which, once they tried to focus exclusively on spiritual matters, proved to have an anarchic life of its own. They found that they were constantly struggling with a host of distractions and unhelpful associations that invaded their consciousness, however hard they tried to concentrate. Once they began to put the teachings of a dhamma into practice, they also discovered all kinds of resistance within themselves which seemed beyond their control. Some buried part of themselves still longed for forbidden things, however great their willpower. It seemed that there were latent tendencies in the psyche which fought perversely against enlightenment, forces which the Buddhist texts personify in the figure of Mara. Often these subconscious impulses were the result of past conditioning, implanted within the monks before they had attained the age of reason, or part of their genetic inheritance. The Ganges monks did not talk about genes, of course; they attributed this resistance to bad kamma in a previous life. But how could they get past this conditioning to the absolute Self, which, they were convinced, lay beyond this mental turmoil? How could they rescue the Self from this frenzied praktri?
The monks sought a freedom that is impossible for a normal consciousness and that is far more radical than the liberty pursued today in the West, which usually demands that we learn to come to terms with our limitations. The monks of India wanted to break free of the conditioning that characterized the human personality, and to cancel out the constraints of time and place that limit our perception. The freedom they sought was probably close to what St. Paul would later call “the freedom of the sons of God,” but they were not content to wait to experience this in the heavenly world. They would achieve it by their own efforts here and now. The disciplines of yoga were designed to destroy the unconscious impediments to enlightenment and to decondition the human personality. Once that had been done, the yogins believed that they would at last become one with their true Self, which was Unconditioned, Eternal and Absolute.
The Self was, therefore, the chief symbol of the sacred dimension of existence, performing the same function as God in monotheism, as brahman/atman in Hinduism, and as the Good in Platonic philosophy. When Gotama had tried to “dwell” in Alara Kalama’s dhamma, he had wanted to enter into and inhabit the type of peace and wholeness that, according to the book of Genesis, the first human beings had experienced in Eden. It was not enough to know this Edenic peace, this shalam, this Nibbana notionally; he wanted the kind of “direct knowledge” that would envelop him as completely as the physical atmosphere in which we live and breathe. He was convinced that he would discover this still sense of transcendent harmony in the depths of his psyche, and that it would transform him utterly: he would attain a new Self that was no longer vulnerable to the sufferings that flesh is heir to. In all the Axial countries, people were seeking more interior forms of spirituality, but few did this as thoroughly as the Indian yogins. One of the insights of the Axial Age was that the Sacred was not simply something that was “out there;” it was also immanent and present in the ground of each person’s being, a perception classically expressed in the Upanisadic vision of the identity of brahman and atman. Yet even though the Sacred was as close to us as our own selves, it proved to be extremely hard to find. The gates of Eden had closed. In the old days, it was thought that the Sacred had been easily accessible to humanity. The ancient religions had believed that the deities, human beings and all natural phenomena had been composed of the same divine substance: there was no ontological gulf between humanity and the gods. But part of the distress that precipitated the Axial Age was that this sacred or divine dimension had somehow retreated from the world and become in some sense alien to men and women.