YOGA & INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. A BIO-CULTURAL DIAGNOSIS.

YOGA & INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. A BIO-CULTURAL DIAGNOSIS.

I. INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT

Consider the following facts about the spiritual landscape in the USA: contemplation is enjoying its biggest revival since the Reformation; science and spirituality are usually seen as allies and combined into ‘empirical spirituality’ or ‘evolutionary mysticism’; elements of Buddhism and Hinduism have become so mainstream that Newsweek declared in 2016 ‘we’re all Hindus now’; half of Americans claim to have had a mystical experience; “Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy” by Sadhguru became a ‘New York Bestseller’ two years ago; Yoga has become so prevalent that approximately 14.9 million Americans (most commonly women) are estimated to incorporate some form of this practice into their lives; and Yoga practitioners expend up to 5.7 billion dollars per annum on yoga classes, products, and retreats.

One would say that most people, though nominally adherents of an Abrahamic religion, actually embrace what Aldous Huxley named ‘Perennial Philosophy’: a type of Christian-Hindu syncretism which he used to offer as remedy against the ‘Brave New World’.

The trend is similar in the rest of the Western world. For example, 15.7 million Germans are currently practicing yoga or are at least interested in starting to practice; and Yoga Day, an international initiative of India enthusiastically supported by all EU governments, is celebrated in most European capitals since its inception in 2015.

The current embrace of eastern spirituality, the combination of science and religion, and the Yoga boom began in earnest with the Californian counter-culture. Aldous Huxley and a group of three other British expatriates played a key role in its development: Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard and Alan Watts. All four were public school-educated English gents, emerging from the remains of the British Empire.

It is significant that the latest Yoga fad had begun with the hippies and the Flower Power. On previous occasions, interest for Eastern mysticism has always coincided with moments of dejection or despondency in Europe.

Although it was during the sixteenth century that Europeans became aware of the existence of the old sacred books called ‘the Veda’, when Jesuit missionaries began to learn Sanskrit, the classical language of the Brahmans, it was not until the nineteenth century - once the curiosity of the learned world had been roused not only in England, but especially in Germany - that India became a ‘Paradise of Philosophers’ in the imagination of Western man.

After the disaster of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Schopenhauer was the first to transpose into Kantian language the metaphysics of the Upanishads, which he was wont to describe as ‘the consolation of my life’ (The World as Will and Representation).

Amid the carnage of I World War, Keyserling opposed in “Travel-journal of a Philosopher” the Hindu quest for inner perfection against the Western obsession with productivity and Romain Rolland thought to have found in Gandhi, Ramakhrisna and Vivekananda a universal gospel which would reveal, beyond any antagonism of race, ideology or religion, the ‘polyphonic unity of all men’. Herman Hesse, in “Siddhartha”, contrasted the spiritual values of the East with the utilitarian techniques of the West.

YOGA & INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. A BIO-CULTURAL DIAGNOSIS.

II. THE GRAMMAR OF INTELLECTUAL FRAUD

Although the Indian Subcontinent has produced a broad range of religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) and speculative philosophies, they are all linked by the textual resources, cosmology, concepts, rituals, and practices of Yoga.

The chronology of earliest texts describing yoga-practices is unclear, but Hatha Yoga texts emerged around the 11th century. The ‘Hatha Yoga Pradipika’, written in Sanskrit, is among the most influential surviving texts. It conflates folklore and myth, magic rituals, claims to medical knowledge, and psycho-physiological techniques. These practices and disciplines have remained unchanged for at least 1000 years and are still taught by the diverse gurus and more or less official institutes of Yoga which pullulate around the world.

Among them:
- Alcohol abstinence and fasting, non-violence, chastity and dietary restrictions;
- One-pointed focus and intent pursuit of one object (ekagrata);
- Static physical position to reduce physical exertion to a minimum (asana);
- A set of breathing techniques where the breath is intentionally altered (pranayama);
- Nosetip gazing (nasikagra drishti);
- Contraction of the perineum in order to facilitate the retention of semen during ejaculation (mula bandha);
- Chanting of magic syllables, words or phonemes (mantra).
According to its masters, the purposes of Yoga were: a/to heal mental and physical disease; b/ acquire magical powers (siddhis); and c/accomplish ‘the mystical union’ (samadhi).

A/ HEALING
- Western medicine has been in progress since the times of Avicenna, who was a contemporary of the author/s of ‘Hatha Yoga Pradipika’. Is it unfair to compare the steady increase of life expectancy around the world, driven in not a small part by the advance of modern medicine, with the therapeutic results obtained by Ayurveda, the traditional yogic medicine?
Bringing to mind the Aristotelian distinction between doing wrong by omission and by commission, Australian philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu reminds us in “Medical Ethics and Law”: ‘To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of 100.000 people, even if you never see them’.
For example, when Gandhi's wife was stricken with pneumonia, British doctors told her husband that a shot of penicillin would heal her; nevertheless, Gandhi refused to have alien medicine injected into her body, and she died.
- Many studies have tried to determine the effectiveness of Yoga as a complementary intervention for cancer, schizophrenia, asthma, and heart disease. The results of these studies have been at best inconclusive.
- According to the latest reports, meditation is no better than watching TV.
- Veganism may be described as ‘postmodern nutrition’. It is often pure ideology, biased activism, and almost always not supported by medical facts (limited nutrients during pregnancy and growth). Looking between the lines at vegan arguments, one finds a pathological attempt to avoid any kind of suffering: the pacification of all life. The fact is that we simply would not be here as a species if we had not eaten meat. Our brains would never have grown to the size they are unless we had access to the protein which meat provides.

B/ POWER
‘Siddhis’ are spiritual, paranormal, supernatural, or otherwise magical powers, abilities, and attainments such as knowing past lifes, knowing the minds of others, reducing or expanding one's body at will, teleportation, levitation by counteracting the pull of gravity, or walking on water. As the reader of these lines can imagine, none of these phenomena has ever been empirically verified.

It is true though that some gurus manage to regulate their sympathetic nervous system in astonishing ways, which could indicate the absence of a clear line of demarcation between the voluntary and involuntary functions of the nervous system. A team of scientist from the University of Cambridge found in 2014 that half of Western Australia's indigenous population has a genetic mutation that helps them control their body temperature. This genetic mutation might have spread across the Indian Subcontinent, carried by ancestral Austro-Asiatic populations, and might be behind many of these yogic feats.

C/ LIBERATION
But the ultimate goal of Yoga is to reach ‘samadhi’, associated with liberation from sorrow, suffering and ‘samsara’ (birth-rebirth cycle). It is described alternatively as a trance or ecstatic state, as ‘deep dream in which there is no dreaming’ (i.e. a lethargic state) or as ‘super-consciousness, a non-dualistic state in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object’.

A state of pure consciousness in which there is neither subject to experience nor object to provide content is a good example of what Bertrand Russell used to characterize as ‘metaphysical nonsense’. The experience of ‘samadhi’ resembles rather a state of unconsciousness, spiritual hibernation.

YOGA & INDIAN PHILOSOPHY. A BIO-CULTURAL DIAGNOSIS.

III. MIND THE BOLLOCKS

It may be argued that many people in the West just take Yoga classes because they are good for their body and decrease their stress level.

But is it possible to cherry-pick the physical exercises and discard the rest, remain immune to a philosophy which teaches to be satisfied with not understanding the world as a great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence?
The only measure of a world-view is the economic conditions of the population which created it.

Central to Hindu philosophy and Yoga is the idea that the divine exists in all beings, that all human beings can achieve union with this "innate divinity", and that seeing this divine as the essence of others will further love and social harmony.

A short visit to India is enough to destroy any romantic illusions about gentleness and brotherly love. Beggars and street people spread throughout the streets of Calcutta and many other cities. In Mumbai, one cannot but be shocked by the aerial view on the world’s biggest slums.

Belief in karma assumes that everyone is rewarded or punished for things they did in their previous life. The traditional division in castes, social rank, economic wealth, social success or state of health are justified because predetermined by the laws of karma. Hence there is hardly any support for reform.

Any notion about the harmlessness of Yoga can be dispelled by this bizarre report of “India Today”: ‘Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, an Indian pop-star and tele preacher with a reported wealth of more than $50 million, is being investigated after he allegedly manipulated around 400 men to get their testicles removed. The victims were told that only those who get castrated will be able to meet God.’