Yoga - The Biggest 'Spiritual' Myth Today
Questioner: Good afternoon. It’s my pleasure, and privilege to welcome Acharya Prashant to this BW (Business World) dialogue on Yoga Day, 21st June 2022. Acharya Prashant Ji doesn’t need an introduction, he is a spiritual leader, he is a seeker and a guru and he is now the author of multiple books which are being read by millions of people to seek the right path.
Acharya Prashant ji, we celebrate Yoga Day every year. We go back to our lives, sometimes we don’t incorporate Yoga into our daily lives. Why should one incorporate Yoga in one’s daily living?
Acharya Prashant: Because one is not as okay as one is. Had we been perfectly alright there was no need to change anything, bring something new, or exclude something. And it is not really the body that is not alright, given the advancements in technology, medical science, and the prosperity we have today; our bodies are probably better placed, and we are healthier than we were ever at any point in history. You look at the average age of the human being today, in some countries in Europe, it is going closer to ninety years now. Even in countries like India, it’s shifting towards the eighty-year mark. We have eradicated so many diseases, we are quite in control of much that is physical.
The problem is the mind. Therefore, when we talk of Yoga today, it must be Yoga of the mind. That which we think of and talk of as Yoga popularly, are just physical exercises; much of that does not deserve to be called even the first step of Yoga. Yoga has to do with the mind because that is where our problems are, that is where our sufferings are. Is that not true? Are we problemed, troubled because our knees are aching and we have a stiff back, is that really a problem? And if that is a problem, then medical science has answers for that. Our real problems; I am not denying that people do have sore knees, but our real problems lie somewhere else.
Nobody commits suicide because the knee is bad. Nobody would say that his life has been destroyed by his stiff back, but we all, if we are to really account for the thing that is severely degrading our quality of life, it would be our mental condition. So real Yoga has to do with — how the mind is placed. Unfortunately too little emphasis, in fact, negligible emphasis is being put on that. So, probably Yoga Day is a good opportunity to shift the focus on the right thing.
Questioner: Absolutely, a lot of us are depressed which we not show up in physical symptoms. And you know, young people are dying. Today morning I lost a forty-year-old young friend. He was absolutely physically healthy. He had a heart attack. We lost singer KK. We don’t even know what is happening to our body, or what is happening to our mind; really Yoga is needed.
There are lots of myths about Yoga. Can you tell us what these myths are, and while you talk about them, also bust them? Because as you rightly said, “We think of Yoga as a bodily thing but it’s not. It’s about bringing the mind into an equilibrium.” Give us a sense of why Yoga is even more important and how can busy executives incorporate Yoga into their daily lives.
Acharya Prashant: You see, the fundamental myth is that Yoga has a lot to do with the body. In fact, that myth is the biggest obstacle in the way of real Yoga. You look at the way Yoga has assumed an imagination in popular culture, the entire iconography around it. And immediately what comes to mind is a fit person in a particular Asana or Mudrā; that’s good to look at, but that’s not Yoga, that’s just not Yoga.
As someone who loves the Bhagavad Gita and has been teaching the beautiful scripture for long; you look at Gita, chapters: two, four, six, ten. Shri Krishna has very unequivocally explained what Yoga is. When the mind is adhering steadfastly to ‘what is right’ that is the state of Yoga.
You have to know ‘who you are’ and you have to ‘act accordingly.’ You have to be one in unison with that which really matters and that union is called Yoga. Yoga is not, as they say, the coming together of body, heart and mind, soul, and a few other things as well. And there is just so much meaningless poetry around it, that sounds flowery but amounts to nothing.
Yoga is simply about the mind remaining constantly riveted to, hinged to — ‘what is right’. And this union that does not allow the mind to go astray is Yoga. It’s just that, since a lot of our troubles are psychosomatic, when the mind is right, the body is bound to be right. When you know what is worthy to be done in life, then you will know that the body is important. Because you will not want the body to take away much of your time and attention, and you want to preserve your body and keep it right and healthy as a great vehicle that can take you towards your destination. The body will then become a resource for the mind and the body will consequently be kept alright. So, the health of the body is something that is a by-product of Yoga. It is secondary, it is not the central thing, the central thing is that you should live rightly.
Now you said, “How do we incorporate Yoga into our daily lives?” Now that’s not at all the point of Yoga. Yoga is not something that you can just somehow fit into your usual daily pattern of life. Yoga has to be the center of your life. Yoga is not something that you bring in from outside and somehow give a place. ‘What is Yoga’, I repeat, Yoga is — one’s determination to live rightly. Yoga is not something that you use to keep the body fit so that you can continue with your absurd ways, you know? I might be living a very mistaken, a very deluded kind of life and still I might want to have a fit body, because a fit body allows pleasures of all kinds and keeps away pains of many kinds, and also given that most of us are terribly body-identified, there is an added incentive to be physically fit.
Now that’s a gross misuse of Yoga. I am into a job or business that is soul-sapping absolutely, or I am into some business that involves a very meaningless kind of display of body, let’s say. But because I want to be alright, because I want to do well in my profession, therefore I use or rather misuse or misappropriate Yoga, to serve my purposes. I’ll give you an example.
Long back I had read that there was this bunch of extremists and when they were to launch an attack on one of the destinations, one of the targets they had set, they were actually trained in breath control and some techniques of so-called physical Yoga, so that they could more effectively, more efficiently achieve their targets.
Now, Is that what we want to use Yoga for? We say we have our own targets in life and let Yoga be utilized so that we can reach our targets in a more efficient way; no that’s not at all the purpose of Yoga.
Yoga has to be the center of your life and what do I mean by that? Yoga has to set the target. Yoga cannot be at the service of your self-appointed target. Otherwise, it’s a strange situation, the ego appoints the target and uses Yoga to reach the target. That’s like you know, using the greatest kind of weapon for the lowest kind of purpose. The greatest kind of resource, the greatest kind of knowledge for the lowest kind of purpose. Yoga could have been something that potentially redeemed us, instead, it has become something that is, you know, grossly misused.
I said once, you might find it interesting that if Yoga is about physical fitness, then Arjun was probably one of the fittest persons on the battlefield already. It is in fact possible that physically Arjun was better off than even Krishna because he was the mightiest warrior and the archer of the times. So why did then Krishna have to teach him eighteen kinds of Yoga? Obviously, it was not for the sake of Arjun’s physical health, physical health was already alright. Now we are all Arjun in the sense that physically we are more or less already alright.
We should again revisit the physical health data that we have. We are living longer lives and in fact, we are taller now, the average weight of the world has increased, and deaths due to malnutrition are lower today than at other points in history. So physically we are doing almost okay. In fact, the physical problems that we have today, a lot of them are attributable to our mental bankruptcy. The problems that we face, for example, due to pollution and all the lifestyle diseases, are not really physical problems, they are coming because of the mind.
So, we are like Arjun in the sense that there is not much purely physical trouble, there is not much purely physical trouble, yet there is a lot of trouble. And that trouble is coming from the mind and that’s why Yoga is needed just as Arjun needed the eighteen chapters, the eighteen kinds of Yoga that Krishna taught him.
So, this myth has to be busted, this misconception has to be totally negated. Otherwise, on Yoga Day, you will again have leaders and politicians and everybody who wants to have his share of the limelight coming in front of the camera and displaying a few physical poses and passing that off as Yoga, which is not at all Yoga. That’s a stretching exercise or that could be a strength exercise without using external weights. You go to the Gym, you use iron weights or you could do the same exercises using body weight. Now stretching and strength building is not at all Yoga; I am not denying the importance of this. Everybody should have a flexible body, stretching is great, and we all must have powerful muscles. So having a very toned and strong body is again great, but please that is not Yoga, that is not Yoga; let’s not corrupt the very concept itself.
And if you go closely into the psychological aspects of it, the ego has a vested interest in limiting Yoga, in actually caging Yoga within the concept of physicality. Because if Yoga is not arrested within the bodily walls of physicality, then Yoga will attack the ego itself and the ego does not want that. So, the ego has played a clever dirty trick. It has said, ‘Yoga is wonderful, Yoga is great and Yoga is physical.’ Now the moment you liberate Yoga from these artificial and unwise physical constraints, Yoga becomes such a powerful force of life transformation. Then you have to read, then you have to understand, and then you have to go into what Patanjali and Shri Krishna actually meant. Now that is something, we do not want to go into, but we are very happy with having a slim body because it helps in doing whatever we want to do. And that’s the evil in it, ‘whatever we want to do.’ Why do you want to do whatever? Why don’t you do what is right. Yoga is about that itself, doing what is right; not doing whatever.
You have ample gurus who come over and say, “You know, you do this and then you can do whatever you want to do.” Now the moment you hear this kind of philosophy that Yoga will help you do better whatever you want to do, I suppose one must run away. Because that’s exactly antithetical to Yoga. Yoga is not about doing whatever you want to do; it’s the ego that says that, not the dedicated, devoted, wise mind. That does not come from there.
It’s amazing, the ways of the inner mischief maker. We can take the greatest gift given to us and turn it into something that we want to use as almost as an intoxicant, like youngsters, who take cough syrups to get inebriated. There is no medicine that cannot be used as a narcotic drug and that’s what we are doing to Yoga as well. It’s a medicine… yes please..
Questioner: You know, you are saying that we have to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right path, having the right aspect, having the right thought, having the right action, having balanced pursuit of economic benefits to the worldly goals, using the right means to achieve the right ends; they are equally important.
We are so identified by name, body, and where we come from. We don’t identify a soul, we don’t identify the soul in the body. Let me ask you another question, today on World Yoga Day, is there a mantra, you already said, do the right thing for the right reason? You already said don’t abuse your body, don’t abuse your mind, and mind comes from right practice, doing the right things, balance in life, in whatever you do, whatever you do, there is the right thing to do. They say when your mind and your actions are in sync — what you say, what you do, what you believe; if all three are in sync then you have a healthy mind, healthy living, harmonious living.
What is this fixation with perfection? I am a Hindu, and I only believe in the perfect person, Lord Shiva, only Lord Shiva. How to live a life, you know, while doing conversation on Yoga, you brought a larger connotation to “doing Yoga in what context, doing Yoga for what purpose?
Acharya Prashant: You see, that exactly is the point. If you take Shiva as perfection then there has to be a certain love for perfection. And life has to be a relentless, unending pursuit of that perfection. That which might be unattainable and the scriptures clearly say so, that it is something that you will never really get to hold or come to touch or really meet in the normal sense of the word. But still, if you just remain devoted to it and pursue it, life will become worth living. Not the attainment, even the pursuit, even the pursuit is sufficient. And that pursuit is something that would anyway happen if your respect for that, which you’re calling perfection or Shiva, is genuine. What kind of person am I if I venerate Krishna and have nothing to do with what he’s teaching?
So that is not really a policy or an option or a smart trick to play to oneself. You see the mind is fed up with its follies. The mind is a constant thirst. The mind is always stuck, always challenged, always bemused. Seeks more, is not satisfied with what it has, and does not even know what it really seeks. So going towards that which you are calling perfection, somebody could call contentment, somebody could call it Shiva or Krishna, is anyway the only option that you have. Because without that pursuit you will anyway never feel any kind of repose or contentment or rest. One would constantly be agitated, one would constantly be dissatisfied with life and that’s not how we want to spend our life.
This is not just theory or ideology, this is the fact of who we are. We are born discontented and because there is just so much agitation within and darkness within, therefore there is no option but to spend life in pursuit of light. That same light that you could call perfection or Ātman or Brahman or Truth or Shiva or Krishna or Ram. The name is your choice. But that’s an inevitability with anybody who has some sense and self-love. Why do you want to destroy your years, that’s a question we must ask. One is already not alright and one is acting in ways that would only further the inner sense of injury and disquiet. Why does one want to do that? There can be no sensible, possible reason.
So, spirituality therefore is not something that one gets into; spirituality has to be the only way of life if one is not adamant on self-destruction.
Questioner: Absolutely. I think on this day, World Yoga Day, 21st June 2022. We thank Acharya Prashant for making us think about what we are doing, examining our beliefs, and taking the right path. As he rightly said, “Spirituality is the way of living. It has to be reflected in the choices we make, and the means we take and he rightly said that sometimes the mind doesn’t know what it seeks. And just being in the moment, being mindful is possibly one way to then get to that path.”
So we are grateful to you Acharya Prashant ji for doing this conversation which is a benefit to our viewers and readers on World Yoga Day. And again, now look at Yoga in a holistic way, in a deeper way, and not just in a superficial exercise or stretching activity. Thank you so much. We are grateful to you and we look forward to having more conversation. Thank you so much.
