The Yoga rules

By Grant Stevenson

We seem to live in an age of small souls, where greatness is equated with the thinnest pastiche of media representation and the ephemeral accumulation of tokens to bribe unfortunates doing tasks below our station. Occasionally we need to look back to take the measure of a man who recalls the standards to which we could aspire. Swami Vivekananda is one such figure, still revered by his followers globally, but less well known among the general populace.

Born 1863 in Calcutta, India, Swami Vivekananda travelled to America in 1893 for the World Parliament on Religions a few months after the Chicago World Fair. Vivekananda's goal in visiting America was teaching Americans the spiritual lessons of Hinduism to save them from the "sharp claws of the monster of materialism," while exporting a better understanding of America's technological and economic prowess to raise India's starving masses from their suffering.

Over one-hundred years later, it seems that Vivekananda's mission to raise India up, now one of the world's fastest growing economies, has been more successful than saving America from materialism. Unfortunately, the global recalibration of middle-class wage rates is driving many families in America away from any hope of materialism and straight into poverty.

Vivekananda always described himself as a common street beggar, although he was one of the first great yoga teachers to influence Americans on a mass scale and remains one of the strongest intellectual forces in the world of yoga as evidenced in the 9 volumes of his collected works. As "modern" consumers of Yoga we need to be careful that we do not confuse the intellectually rich Yoga originally brought to America with the dumbed-down, hyped-up hatha yoga now in vogue. We should keep in mind that the Yoga taught by Vivekananda is to Bikram Choudhrey's "hot" yoga as the spicy tofu at Buddakhan is to plastic chew toys.

One quote from the Gita, one quote from Choudhrey and one quote from Vivekananda should provide a material contrast. As the Bhagavad Gita, one of Yoga's ancient texts states the matter, "No matter what conditions you encounter in life, your right is only to the works--not to the fruits thereof." Compare the multi-multi-millionaire "inventor" of hot yoga's modern restatement of the Gita, "Bikram yoga is so big-this is a bathroom slipper you buy for $2 in Kmart. But you put 'Bikram' on it, it'll sell for $35 in a second." Now let's try on Swami Vivekananda for size, "Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would continue to exist even if all humanity forgot it, so do the laws that govern the spiritual world exist independently of our knowledge of them." Hhhhmmmm, do we sense the presence of greatness in one or two of these comments? Of have our sensibilities shrunk so far down into our shoes that worms look like giants to ants?

Let's enjoy one more comment from Vivekananda and raise our sights to meet his gaze, there may be a higher goal if we are able to imagine a more distant horizon. Speaking to a group that questioned the state of India's culture, Vivekananda tossed the question back to his interlocutors, "When we are fanatical, we torture ourselves, we throw ourselves under huge cars, we cut our throats, or lie on spiked beds; but when you are fanatical you cut other people's throats, you torture them by fire, and put them on spiked beds!"

Let us reconsider the possibility that self-interest can be redefined in our modern age to extend a few meters past the end of our loafers. We may find the path wider, longer, harder, but more to our liking; and the end of the journey a more welcome place to rest.

Copyright 2008, Lotus Pond Media

Mr. Stevenson works as a research assistant at Neural Genesis, LLC with responsibility for test marketing publications associated with emerging business segments. Mr. Stevenson also develops ersatz historical documents designed for examination in future settings to alter widely held, but apocryphal, views of the past. Prior to his work at Neural Genesis Mr. Stevenson worked as an author and illustrator of corporate presentations, technical manuals and children's books.