The Society, the Individual and Yoga
By Sadhakas
Yoga and Total Health, May 1986
If we looked at ourselves from a certain distance as the ancient Greek LyKeus, who chose to live on a tower, asking ourselves: "Who are you, man, and what is your destiny?"; what answer would we arrive at? Considering our present society (it would not be fitting to speak of "culture") with all its problems, tensions, fears, disorientation and tendencies for disintegration, one would hardly think of any of the characterizations as given in the scriptures of the East or the West. These see man as made after the image of God or as containing a divine spark.
Taking some of the alarming facts that face us today and trying to put them into some order (ranging from the individual over the family to the society and environment) the following picture emerges: 60-70 per cent of diseases today are attributed to psychological causes. Drug, alcohol and addiction are present even among children. Revealingly, the term "stress" is not only used in connection with work but also with leisure time. Satisfaction is sought in consuming (shopping as a purpose of life) and a continuous exposure to entertainment and pleasure. Fear is an ever-present phantom showing up in the rigid, pinched and lifeless expressions on many faces. Cheerless-ness, tension, sleeplessness closes the vicious circle, which one would vainly try to break by resorting to distractions or drugs.
The Family
All this shows that the human mind is greatly upset. It is only logical that the individual misery is reflected in the breaking up of family ties. Divorce rates are on the increase. In the West, every third marriage ends in a divorce, and in many of those which do not, communication has completely dried up. Talk, exchange of thoughts and the discussion of mutual problems between husband and wife have been substituted by watching TV. "The family circle has become a half circle (before the TV set)", a social worker recently remarked. Just as the individual suffers, and the family - which according to the Greek philosopher Plato, is "the germ-cell of the state" - has degenerated to an unstable unit, the society at large is in a crisis. It is "an enormous number of armed camps, that by direct or indirect application force and fraud, try each to defeat the others. Relationships of employers and employees, bankers and labour unions, of social classes to one another, of rich and poor, of educated and non-educated, of privileged and underprivileged, of political parties, occupational group and finally, of nations, are at the present in an incessant war...".
No Values
The cause is that there is no purpose of life is generally accepted. This is ultimately result of our eating of the "poisonous fruit", which means that we have moved more and more away from True Reality and true, e.g. permanent, divine and immaterial, values towards material and sensate values. Only that it can be seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelt has come to be regarded and propagated as real. Supra-sensory revelations, mystic experiences or "the truth of faith began to be denied, as a valid truth, and a genuine value³).
Man as "bearer of the divine ray in the sensory world, as an incarnation of the charismatic grace" has outlived himself and is in the dust of the earth. This decline to material level can be seen in all spheres of be it art, philosophy, politics or science. Even the religious practice has become increasingly externalised. Instead of emphasizing the refinement of the human being and ritual experience, the Church today tries to do charitable work under the wrong assumption that it could control the cause of the evil, e.g. false morals and a merely worldly outlook, by treating symptoms and effecting some material corrections. Instead, it could be the application of the message given in the Sermon on the Mount that could affect a positive change.
In the field of science values have been explicitly given up. According to Humbold's ideal of education, the universities' research work were to be free of all values. This made science renounce its duty of serving the higher pose of refining man. Success in science means discovering the new. Whether the invention or discovery is beneficial or harmful to mankind is of no great importance. Meanwhile, the situation has escalated to a catastrophic degree. The world's weapons have an overkill capacity that is more than 25-fold, i.e. the 25th part of all available weapons would be enough to destroy humanity totally. The quality of our environment has deteriorated to a frightening degree, the presence of pesticides and insecticides is ever on the increase and we face an irreversible change in the ecological systems that will lead to the extinction of forests and the dying of rivers, lakes and oceans.
At last, the authorities have given up to simply deny the problem, and all Western governments are now trying to adopt counter-measures. But the problem is that the deplorable state of affairs is not tackled at its root cause but superficially treated in its symptoms. This is so because the outlook of those who are in power just as of the majority of society is purely material, sensate, hedonistic. This means that each kind of cure which would require some restraint or suffering is rejected. A view of life that puts the true, divine and immortal nature of man back into the center as the basis of all human actions is not (yet) accepted. The propagation of values such as humbleness, discipline, restraint, love of fellow men and wisdom (instead of intelligence only) cannot (yet) be tolerated by a misguided and blown-up ego. So human society can be likened to a giant who stumbling in the dark and bleeding out of many wounds shouts and strikes for his supposed enemy, not realizing in the dark that he is wounding himself.
Seen from the Yoga viewpoint, society is in a state of Avidyā (ignorance) in which man takes the unreal (the impermanent) as the real (the eternal) and the impure as the pure. The result is that the main Kleša of Avidyā prepared the breeding ground for the other Klešas, namely of I, attachment, aversion or hatred and clinging to life which is connected with all kinds of fear. It is these Klesas that are the deepest cause of all human suffering. Whereever they are in operation and not checked, suffering is in store!
Matter
From the time of the European period of Enlightenment and the advent of natural science, the world turned more arid more towards matter, and more and more away from the spiritual and supra-sensory, only accepting what could be measured, weighed and counted. But at that time, matter itself was not yet sufficiently explored. The more it was recognized from the first third of this century that the basic building block of matter, the atom, is itself a very, mysterious, non-quantifiable something, the more the pillars crumbled, on which the materialistic view of the world rested. Similarly mysterious are our senses of which we were convinced that they conveyed the world to us as it is. Meanwhile science considers the whole process of seeing as something quite unexplored. If for instance we perceive a tree, the question might arise in what way the idea of this tree enters our consciousness. For the tree emits rays which are received by our eyes. But we cannot explain in what way our brain changes these electro-magnetic vibrations into an image because the fact is that our eyes see something different from what is reflected in our brain. So what is imagination and what is reality? Besides our senses are constructed in such a way that they can only perceive relatively near targets. Since our present time is so much sense-oriented, it is maybe not surprising that society is short-sighted and unable to pursue any long-term views.
Yoga takes a wider view of what it considers as matter, a view that is more meaningful and practicable to those who search for understanding and self-refinement. Everything that changes, that comes and goes and is not eternal, all this is considered as matter in Yoga, while the eternal, unchanging, the ever-steady entity behind all appearances is spirit. This means that our thoughts, feelings, sufferings also belong to matter and are thus impermanent. Only Purusa, the observing but utterly unaffected entity behind it all is spirit and eternal. Reverting to the Klešas, it can be said that only a person who maintains an awareness of the impermanence of things and who can see the eternal spirit behind the appearances can free himself from the ties of matter and thus of suffering. Only he can recognize truth. Our sick society can only be restored to health if the individuals that form this society are restored to health. Only if individuals try to tear the veil of ignorance and postulate and follow the right values, can eventually a vibration be produced, as in the case of an electric induction, that will ultimately reach the whole of society. Yoga practitioners can therefore contribute to change for the betterment of the whole society.
Unfortunately, Yoga is put into the service of matter and not of spirit, especially in the West. Many practice it because they aim at a handsome physique, as acrobatics or as something sensational. An evolution of consciousness. inner liberation or the quest for spiritual insights are no considerations for them. However, a commitment, a strong urge for self-development are the first step and most important requirement for progress in Yoga. This is expressed in the ancient prayer: "From the unreal, lead me to the real, from darkness lead me to light, from death lead me to immortality."
General Opinion
In the ancient times of the Upaniṣads there were many who had only one goal: reaching the highest, truth, God. And those who strove for this were revered and their presence sought. Today the situation is different.
The following Sufi story may illustrate this: There was a well in a certain village with tasty and healthy water, but one day the villagers thought of getting another kind of water supply. They installed a tank and filled up the well. Before they did this, an old man who liked the well water very much filled a few big cans and hid them in a cave. Every time he was thirsty, he went there to have a drink of that water. In the course of time, the old man observed that the villagers began to behave strangely. Their talking and acting was confused, diseases and fighting became frequent. But the villagers did not realize this and thought of themselves as normal. More and more often they said to the old man: "What a fool you are! What kind of nonsense you speak!" The old man became very sad because no one could understand him anymore. At last, he stopped going to his cave to drink from the well water. He began to drink of the new water as all the others did and soon, he resembled them and was not less confused than they were.
This little story shows that it is not easy to formulate and maintain a clear commitment if the society around believes in different values because one can get influenced and pulled along with the general opinion easily. But the story also shows that one will be the loser if one allows this to happen.
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