More on Squirrels and Sanskrit

Here is a picture of Mamasita in her nest (outside our meditation room), just having pulled in a teddy bear for her babies!

(So I have to make a correction from yesterday's post. Actually it was my husband, Jeff, who first made friends with the squirrel!)

There's a confusion running rampant in Yoga circles about what Yoga means exactly. Because the philosophy of non-dualism (or Advaita Vedanta) became very popular in the West, many Yogis think that Yoga means union in the sense that two things don't exist. There is only one reality -- Brahman.

Strictly speaking -- Yoga philosophy is the practice part of the Samkhya school of Vedic philosophy. And in Samkhya there are always two eternal principles -- Purusha (Pure Consciousness) and Prakriti (Pure Materiality) -- and they are always separate.

Enlightenment, according to Samkhya, happens when the intellect (the buddhi) realizes that it is not that (Pure Consciousness).

I know that doesn't sound as sexy as the idea of enlightenment as being the eradication of all difference and separation. And that can be rather crushing to learn that Yoga is part of a dualistic philosophy. Yet in Yoga, two things come together -- but not in the sense that salt merges with water and the water becomes brackish as a result. It's more like when two horses are yoked together to pull a chariot. (In fact, the Sanskrit word "Yoga" and the English "Yoke" are intimately connected...) The horses are separate, yet work together.

When we investigate more into the meaning and feeling of "atha" -- the present moment -- we realize that two things exist together at the same time. A = eternity and Tha = temporality. The moment is at once permanent and fleeting. It is totally free (A) and bound by time and space (Tha). It is the marriage of the Big Mind (A) with the changeable intellect (Tha).

And when the buddhi (the intellect) wakes up sufficiently to the eternal nature of the present moment, it can only realize that it is not that. Yet without the intellect being able to discriminate between what it is from what it isn't -- the reality of Pure Consciousness dawns.

(See -- so much to learn from observing a squirrel! :)

We're getting ready for the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park next week where we're going to launch "Sanskrit for Yogis," my newly published self-study course to help Yogis learn Sanskrit. And Saturday is the first day of Navaratri -- the nine nights of the Goddess -- which I'll tell you more about next time...