Peace, Patañjali & Social Change
What is the relationship of yoga, meaning meditation, and social action leading to nonviolence and peace?
Yoga practitioners are familiar with The Yoga Sutras, the classic spiritual text attributed to the great sage Patañjali. Estimated to be at least 4,000 years old, the Sutras offers one of the most penetrating journeys into meditation known in any literature. The second sutra, or aphorism, defines meditation in a terse Sanskrit formula worthy of an Einstein: yogaścittavṛttinirodha. Here is a rough translation of that: Meditation (yoga) is the suppression (nirodha) of thought-waves (vritti) in the mind (citta).
Meditation practices differ in how they attempt to master the suppression of the thoughts, feelings, ideas and memories that constantly crop up. Elsewhere you can read about focusing thoughts on the breath, for as Ramana Maharshi says, “Breath is the gross form of mind.” What we are going to present here is the technique of concentrating on the words of an inspirational passage, akin to the medieval practice of lectio divina, Latin for “divine reading.”
But first, what is the relationship of yoga, meaning meditation in this case, and social action leading to nonviolence and peace?
In the second book of the Yoga Sutras Patañjali lays out the yamas and niyamas, or self-restraints and fixed observances that constitute a spiritual practice. The first yama is ahiṃsā, nonviolence. In Sanskrit, nonviolence has a more robust meaning than it does in English, where we think of peace as the absence of war and nonviolence as the absence of violence. Ahiṃsā can be translated more richly as “the power that arises when all desire to harm is suppressed.” Does that not sound a bit like meditation as the suppression of thought waves? This is not a translation coincidence, as we’ll see shortly.
There are four more yamas, and they read like the observances Gandhi strongly recommended for nonviolent activists and enshrined as regular vows in his ashrams, or spiritual communities: truth, non-stealing (meaning living on minimal resources), abstinence (often primarily understood as control of sexual impulses) and non-acquisitiveness.
Needless to say, such observances would make one a less aggressive person. What may be less obvious is the yamas’ connection with meditation, which I’d like to illustrate through the technique of Passage Meditation.
Passage Meditation was developed by Sri Eknath Easwaran, while he was still a professor in India. He introduced it to the US in 1959, founding the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation a year or two later. He taught and lived at the Center’s ashram in Northern California until his passing into final samadhi,orabsorption into Reality, in 1999. Like Patañjali’s eight limbs of yoga, Easwaran’s system had eight parts: meditation, use of a mantram (or spiritual formula), slowing down, one-pointed attention, sense training, putting others first, spiritual reading and spiritual fellowship. Anyone familiar with the Indian spiritual tradition will recognize the system as the adaptation of the age-old classical technique for modern practitioners. Passage Meditation is simple enough to describe but extremely challenging to practice correctly. I heartily recommend visiting the Center’s website (easwaran.org) and/or reading Easwaran’s Passage Meditation for a real sense of what it can do for you.
Here’s how it works:
Pick out an inspirational passage that currently appeals to you and commit it to memory. You’ll want it to be a fairly lengthy passage like the prayer of St. Francis, which tens of thousands of beginning passage meditators chose to start with. Then:
1. Dedicate a space where you live for your practice. A quiet room is ideal, but who has a whole room to themselves these days? People have been known to begin in just a corner. You are going to meditate the first thing on arising (OK, maybe after that first coffee), for half an hour. Try not to go longer (as with everything powerful, meditation can be dangerous if mishandled). The key will be making your morning meditation a daily habit.
2. Sit on a floor cushion or on a straight-backed chair, keeping your back, head and neck straight. Your posture should be comfortable but steady, balanced and natural.
3. Close your eyes gently and slowly recite the passage in your mind, as slowly as you can without losing the thread. Don’t think about the words; just let them sink in. The more you concentrate your attention on the words, the more their meaning will register in your deeper consciousness. And the thought process itself will be slowing down. So you are doing two things at once: giving the mind positive content and slowing it down; and these two processes reinforce each other. Now comes the hard part.
4. Inevitably, something will pop into mind. Maybe you’ve only gotten to the second line of the passage (“Where there is hatred, let me sow love,” for example) and the next thing you know the mind chimes in with, “Wasn’t that guy full of hate at the demonstration last week!” Don’t get annoyed with yourself (then you’ll have two distractions). The minute you become aware of a distraction, just refocus your mind on the passage. Refocusing is an amazing discipline, and it’s where you’ll bear the fruits of the practice.
5. In time, you may notice a strange, quiet joy that steals over you when you recover from a distraction and put your mind back where you want it to go (it sure is nice to have joy around, but don’t dwell on that, either). This quiet feeling adds to our sense of security, giving us a sense of hope that there’s something other than this fleeting world to hold onto: something more to you.
With a consistent practice, you’ll begin to instantly recognize when anger, fear or some other negative state has arisen — and quickly recover. You have been “bookmarking” the positive and negative states as “passage” and “distraction.” Anger is, in fact, a distraction from our native state of love and unity. This is not to say that anger and fear are never appropriate; but what you do with them matters. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, we “express anger under discipline for maximum effect” [emphasis mine]. This discipline adds immeasurably to our effectiveness as peacemakers, not to mention our own well-being.
How far can you go with Passage Meditation? Gandhi once heard that a certain village headman had vowed to kill him on sight. He went straight to the headman’s home, knocked on his door and said, “I’m here to help you fulfill your vow.” The man throttled Gandhi — for a minute. Then he dropped his hands, fell at Gandhi’s feet and said, “This village is at your service.” We wouldn’t try to go that far after a few weeks of meditation — or maybe ever. But the more deeply we practice, the closer we get to the real principle of nonviolence, described by Patañjali as: “When you are established in ahimsa, enmity dissolves in your mere presence.”
