The Abode of Yoga

Like most bloggers, I utilize a service to let me know how much traffic my blog generates. The service I use -- Statcounter.com -- is great and free, but it doesn't tell me personal information about you, per se. It does tell me -- based on your IP address -- where in the world you (or your computer anyway) resides. And that's how the map above was produced. This type of map is nothing new to most of us who surf the net regularly, but it's still pretty cool to look at. Since most of my readers are current and former disciples (I suspect), the worldwide scope of my readership says more about the scope of Guru's reach when he was alive than it does about my popularity. In any event, it's inspired me to reach out to you all to solicit ideas about where the blog goes from here. What topic or topics do you think still need to be addressed? At the moment, the only remaining topic(s) I'm inspired to write about concern the role of women in the modern yoga movement an...

It's a horrible truth to face. The idea that all that time I was earnestly leading a celibate life, Guru himself was having sex with his female disciples. That when my innocent, sibling-like relationship with Jayanti was brought to his attention, Guru felt compelled to warn me about inappropriate conduct, while he himself was sleeping with his own spiritual daughters. In hindsight, it's not the sex that bothers me. It's the deceit. The sheer scale of the deceit is what leaves me reeling even now. With every new revelation -- and there are more to come -- the scope of Guru's gopi network becomes more apparent. Yet, I owe everything to Guru. Whatever else might be said about Guru's deception and misconduct, it didn't affect his ability to prime my spiritual life , to effect my occult transformation , or on a more mundane level to give me some much needed positive reinforcement. So, that's the conundrum I've been wrestling with. How to square the eviden...

It's all in your head. That's the idea I've been toying with for a while anyway -- that there's a neurological component to yoga, which thus far has not gotten the attention I think it deserves. I suspect that this is because so much of our metaphysical lexicon -- the vocabulary of yoga -- is rooted in the past. Adopting a scientific approach to understanding our yogic development might promise more precision. For example, if I told a room full of new agers that I'd developed some conscious control over my muladhara chakra , I suspect we'd have a room full of people all with very different takes on what I'd meant by that statement. The term is old and imprecise and not really susceptible to examination through evidence. But if I told a room full of people that I'd developed some conscious control over my amygdelae , they'd have a fairly uniform understanding of what I'd meant (or they would after first checking its definition on Wikipedia!). So...

Well, better grab yourself a cup of coffee -- I'm partial to the Americano these days -- because we're about to engage in some theoretical reasoning. (I'm sorry, chai or herbal tea won't do -- you're gonna need the hard stuff.) What is realization? Call it what you will -- God realization, self realization, liberation, moksha, enlightenment, Brahma jnana -- without an answer to this question, we cannot know whether the conventional wisdom expressed by so many is correct. And what is that conventional wisdom? The conventional wisdom is that realization and sexual misconduct cannot go together. That they are mutually exclusive personal attributes. That a realized person -- by definition -- cannot engage in immoral behavior. That an unethical person -- by definition -- cannot be realized. That's the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom makes intuitive sense and is hard to argue with, but is it right? If the state of realization is synonymous with moral re...

As I worried might happen, over the course of the last few posts I started losing sight of my larger point. If I'm losing sight of it, I worry that you -- my reader -- may also be losing sight of it. So, I think it best to slow down now and review. I think Guru both realized God and engaged in unethical behavior. It is this paradox that I'd like to explain. Actually, to be precise, I'm not trying to explain the paradox itself. Rather, I'm attempting to explain the reasons why I think such a paradox is possible. I'm suggesting an alternative view of Guru -- one that rejects each extreme end of the extant opinion spectrum. Unlike his most ardent supporters, I don't believe Guru was born into this world free from all human foibles. Unlike his most strident detractors, I don't believe Guru was a fraud. I'm suggesting a third way to think about Guru. The emphasis here should be on the word suggesting . I'm doing my best to articulate how I think about G...