This is a continuation of our series of posts on Volume III (pdf) of Swadharma.
The second article, “What Is Yoga and the Purpose of Yoga?” by Meena Modi is based in part on a combined lecture and yoga session the author offered at Harvard in April 2007 as part of Harvard Dharma’s Hinduism Awareness Week. To me, the most interesting part of the article consisted of the following two paragraphs:
The second aphorism of the Yoga Sutra defines yoga from the mental perspective yogaschitta vritti nirodha: yoga is the elimination of mental fluctuations. Patanjali then goes on to explain what this means, why it is important, and how to achieve this state. The late Mircea Eliade, who headed the department of religion at the University of Chicago, wrote in his classic book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom: ‘Instead of knowing through forms and mental states, as formerly, the yogin now contemplates the essence of all objects directly.’ Yogic techniques of pranayama, pratyahara, and dharana are developed to give a direct experience of Consciousness, the true nature of the individual self…
When the mental fluctuations are removed from the mind, they no longer cloud the mind. The mind becomes completely still and clear. It sees its true Self. This state of the mind is exceptionally aware and perceptive. It is incredibly focused, relaxed, balanced, and capable of great achievements [emphasis added]. Research being done here at Harvard, MIT, and various other universities on many different meditation techniques is showing a clear effect on the human brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex. That area of the brain is more developed in advanced meditation practitioners…
In a comment, I had mentioned that the best advice I ever received was to 1) define your goals and ensure that all action is consistent with the goal, and 2) “let the universe manifest itself”. The first part of this path is what the above two paragraphs are talking about: from one perspective, yoga is focused action. In fact, the article goes on to note: “Anything done with mindfulness, engaging the body and the mind as the portals to be in communion with the Self, is yoga.”
I found these ideas particularly interesting since I had essentially just seen them in school, through from a very different perspective. Last fall, I took a course in information theory, not so much for the math but more for the “way of thinking” I thought it might offer. While the course focused on coding theory (as expected), the course did in fact raise some interesting philosophical points. The one that relates most directly to this post comes from complexity theory. Loosely defined, one way to measure the complexity of an object is by the length of a computer program needed to generate that object.
Suppose our object is a binary string; i.e. a string of 0s and 1s. A gambler is given the opportunity to guess what the bits are. It turns out that if he follows the optimal betting strategy, the lower bound on the (base 2) logarithm of his wealth is the length of the string minus the Kolmogorov complexity of the string. In other words, the lower the complexity of the string, the higher your potential wealth.
How does this relate to yoga? Recall one definition of yoga the article noted: ”Anything done with mindfulness, engaging the body and the mind as the portals to be in communion with the Self, is yoga.” When we do things with mindfulness, we are decreasing the complexity of the situations we face, thereby increasing the potential gains from our actions. The only way to decrease the complexity of a situation is to define your goals clearly and ensure that everything you do is consistent with those goals — exactly what the first part of that advice I received is saying.
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