What does yoga philosophy say about . . . [fill in the blank].
Physical fitness? Mental health? Religion? Politics? The origins of the universe? The nature of consciousness?
What do the teachings of yoga have to say about . . . anything?
Well, actually, yoga philosophy has something to say about everything.
This may come as a surprise if you think staying focused on the ultimate goal of yoga — realization of the true nature of the self — would narrow the bandwidth of possible topics.
But self-realization is a really ambitious goal. To help us get there, the teachings of yoga offer perspectives on just about everything so that we can connect our experience of the world to the project of transcendence.
Now, here’s the really surprising truth about yoga philosophy: there is no such thing as “the teachings of yoga” in the sense of there being a singular set of precepts that all point to the same ultimate goal and explain our relationship to the world the same way.
What we commonly call “yoga philosophy” is actually a collection of diverse schools of thought—each with its own view of reality, different practices, and even different ideas about what the ultimate goal of yoga really is. Some are non-dualistic, others see distinction as essential. Some are theistic, some are not.
There are many different schools of thought under the big umbrella of yoga “teachings,” and each one has a different way of addressing the same problems or explaining the same phenomena.
For example, a Buddhist approach to mental health is very different from a Vedantic one—because Buddhism and Vedanta different philosophical ideas about the underlying causes of psychological effects.
And there isn’t just one school of Vedanta: there are five major schools, each with numerous philosophical tributaries.
One of the major schools proposes absolute non-dualism as the ultimate conclusion of knowledge. The other four major schools support various amounts, combinations, and interpretations of both dualism and non-dualism.
Which means the non-theistic philosophy of Absolute Non-dualism will give you a very different answer to the question “What is the origin of the universe” than the one you’ll get from a theistic philosophy of simultaneous duality and non-duality, which, in turn, will be different from what you’ll hear from a Buddhist perspective.
And we haven’t even gotten to Sankhya—the philosophy of enumeration—which is practically a pre-requisite for understanding the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
So the surprising truth about yoga philosophy is that it’s not one path with one map—it’s a whole landscape of traditions, each with its own compass.
And the truly wonderful thing is that these paths are not all mutually exclusive; there are plenty of places where the landscapes overlap, compliment, and support each other.
This is especially true for spiritual activism, where shared values across traditions create a lot of common ground.
The metaphysics of various schools of thought may differ, but all yoga traditions reject violence, encourage compassion, emphasize humility, promote non-attachment, and see spiritual practice as inseparable from ethical life and social responsibility.
This is one of the ways to understand the meaning of “yoga” as “union:” the synthesis of spiritual knowledge and social action that enables us to engage with the world without getting tangled up in the world.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k