This is Benjamin

A vacation from which we might never return

May 29th, 2009 | benjamin

Before I begin, I would like to emphasise that I have based the following on just over one week at the Sivananda Ashram in addition to a very light reading of material on Hinduism. What I say below reflects only this experience and should not be taken as an attack on Yoga as a whole, let alone Hinduism.

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We arrived at the Sivananda Ashram on an auspicious evening, the anniversary of the death of its founder, Swami Sivananda (or was it his birth? Surely I can be permitted some slippage) and after a brief meal we found ourselves locked in a chanting session, scattering rose petals and dust and uttering syllables that bore no meaning for us.
Returning to our room Monique declared that we would leave immediately. I on the other hand acknowledged that the place had its eccentricities, but suggested she was being too quick to judge. When this failed to alter her disposition, I sulked that I had always wanted to learn yoga and would never have such an opportunity again.
She agreed to give it three more days.
As we settled into our separate twin beds, we had to remind ourselves of why we had voluntarily submitted to the edicts of a religious compound. In fact this journey to the Keralan countryside had begun over a month previous, and many thousands of kilometres away at the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a popular trekking spot in south-western China. There we had met a charming English couple who enthused over the Ashram, and the virtuous yoga it promotes.
The Sivananda Ashram was founded many years ago by Swami Vishnu-devananda, a devotee of the Swami Sivananda, a well-known yogic authority who is revered by thousands today.
Swami Vishnudevananda and his followers articulated a particular form of yogic practice which they felt would be attractive in the West. Judging westerners to be obsessed with physical health, this Yoga emphasised its physical dimensions, that is, all the twisting, bending, holding, stretching that pops into the minds of most Westerners when they hear the word ‘Yoga’. Beneath the surface of this physical practice lies the barely discernible bones of a Hindu cosmology that only becomes visible the more one embraces the Sivananda institution.
Our English friends had advised that we undertake the ‘Yoga Vacation’ course, a title which is particularly nuanced. The Ashram is not a resort. If you wish to stay at the Ashram, then you need to commit to activities totalling more than ten hours per day, including four hours of chanting and meditation, four hours of physical yoga and two hours of lectures. On the second day we were told that ‘Yoga Vacation’ is a vacation from ourselves, from responsibility from ours own needs, from life’s patterns and routines, from being enmeshed in the worldliness that we must overcome to achieve Bliss in this lifetime.
To this end, we were required to attend a set of communal spiritual exercises called ‘Satsang’ first thing in the morning and last thing at night. These sessions consisted of half an hour of meditation followed by an hour or more of chanting and prayer.
Far from focusing my mind, I found these sessions arduous and above all rigidly conformist, as like most religious practices, they orbited around the authority of a single person, in this case the Swami, or teacher. As a consequence of this imposition, my mind rebelled. When I tried to follow the directive to meditate, my mind wandered freely to thoughts of Monique, food, family, friends, David Sylvian, The X Files, conversations I had years ago. When I managed to quell these moderately sensible thoughts, nonsensical ones would arise in their place. My favourite was a dog dressed in a military parade uniform that marched past my mind’s eye giving a salute.
I found that the chanting we endured in these sessions served to prepare our minds to receive a set of religious tautologies. Its true that chanting has benefits. It is relaxing. It does focus the mind and it can redirect you from thoughts that you would wish to escape. Yet the chants have such a powerful simplicity that they tend to occlude all thoughts except those which have been sanctioned by the centralised Ashram authority. What’s more the quality of the singing was quite poor, like a dirge sung by the tone deaf.
And as meditation and chanting cleared our minds of external thoughts the Ashram began a steady drip feed of indoctrination. The philosophical kernel of this proselytising ranged from the intellectually rigorous to the ridiculous. By and large the sermons during Satsang were general, vague and patronising. One morning, an apprentice-Swami took the session. She was a painfully withdrawn looking woman, with dark eyes, a tired body and haggard mouth and who spoke with a regional English accent. I imagined that she was the daughter of a Methodist minister who, ‘went off the rails’ and ended up imitating the mores of her parents in saffron garb. And, sure enough, she gave us a pep-talk on abstinence, her eyes periodically flashing a deep malaise.
One evening some days later we were joined in Satsang by a group of three hundred school children who were attending Yoga Camp 2009 at the Ashram. During meditation an intense, mass-hysterical coughing fit broke out among the children during meditation. This sallow woman took the microphone and wagging her finger advised the children, ‘Don’t cough, swallow.’
‘She has sex on the brain,’ I whispered to Monique.
The lectures were somewhat more substantial. In them the Sivanandan philosophy was only revealed partially and gradually, with the parts that are most palatable to idealistic backpackers given emphasis while the more unsettling and bizarre aspects were only slowly revealed.
After ten days, this is what I managed to piece together. At the heart of this Yogic practice is the idea that the world is an illusion, a mire, Samsara, that needs to be transcended through realising this illusory nature, and through this divine knowledge one becomes unified with god. One becomes God in effect.
From my very limited knowledge of Hinduism, this is because the world we perceive—a world characterised by the difference between its parts—is an illusion.
We are all already God, insofar as everything comes from god, but we are completely ensconced in this world of illusion called Samsara. So we need to transcend our worldliness. This can be achieved through meditation, physical exercise, and the performance of one’s duty.
We ought to pursue these acts in such a way that we do not to enjoy their fruits. We must live our lives without becoming passionately attached to the objects or people we encounter while living in the world, and without expecting any kind of reward or gain from the things that we do. The act is performed simply to serve God.
This excludes all forms of love, even those which we might cherish, such as the love of family and the joy in friendship. I became aware that a youngish woman attending the program had recently suffered the loss of her children through an Islamic divorce. I wondered what she would make of such a principle.
What I particularly dislike about this philosophy is that it degrades the world and the human self. It is a doctrine in which the world is shit, human relations are shit, love and hatred are sensations that create pain and illusion and must therefore be transcended.
I also reject the claim to absolute knowledge made by the practitioners of Sivananda Yoga make. According to the Swami, Yoga is not a religion. It is a ‘subjective Science’. Unlike the objective science which seeks to understand the nature of things through studying objects, this subjective science seeks to understand the nature of things through a set of practices that, through internal observation, are observed to confirm the truth of God.
Following Popper, we would say that if Yoga is a science, then there must be a means through which this so-called experiment can be falsified.
If Yoga permits that it is possible to be mistaken in one’s perception of the world, to imagine it to be real when it is an illusion, then I do not see why it is not possible for one to be mistaken in one’s perception of oneself. In which case, what means would a practitioner of this ‘subjective science’ have to tell the experience of Bliss from the experience of indoctrination?
Yet despite these doubts, I grew increasingly adamant that we should remain for the duration of the course. Looking back, it is hard to relate to this impulse, but then again, the physical yoga at the Sivananda Ashram is incredible. The body opens up like, if you will forgive a terrible metaphor, a lotus flower. As the body is the medium through which we experience the world, this body now experiences the world in new and exciting ways. Its hard to describe if you are not a practitioner, but it feels great.
Of course, its intentions are not only to tone the bodies of self-obsessed westerners. Each of the twelve basic asanas or postures that we learned are a means of disciplining the body for devotion to god. The butterfly loosens our hips for extended meditation and prayer and in the Salute to the Sun one prostrates oneself again and again in worship of the divine.
In any case, good yoga alone can’t completely explain my compulsion to remain.
About a week into the program, an American arrived, vaguely handsome with curly hair, his eyes seemed in a perpetual state of alarm. He joined us for one yoga class and promptly disappeared.
Why was he so disturbed while I was so relatively relaxed? I am sure you’ve heard about the experiment with a frog and a pot of boiling water. Apparently, if you put the frog near the pot when it is boiling it will immediately jump away. But if you place the frog in the pot of water and slowly raise the temperature until it boils, the frog will remain where it is and die.
We, like the frog in the pot of water, were so gradually ingratiated to the eccentricities of the Ashram that we scarcely noticed the profound shift in our milieux. For this American, however the experience would have been like stepping into another world, or a cult.
Also, I was determined to remain open minded for the duration of our stay and not present the kind of scornful atheism of Richard Dawkins and others. I attended every session, chanted along the names of deities, gave everything to the physical exercise of yoga. But there was a point where open-mindedness reaches its limits and I had to make a choice whether to proceed down the path offered by the Ashram, or violently diverge. My mind trembled on this point for a while and in retrospect, the Yoga Vacation might have been a vacation from myself from which I never returned had it not been for one dramatic affair.
During one of our classes, Monique had an attack of vertigo, something which she has experienced before but which occurs so rarely that neither of us anticipated for a moment that it might happen during our time here.
We were practising a set of very intense breathing exercises, the specific nature of which I won’t describe, but which are held to be extremely ‘purifying’ of bad energies as well as of toxins in our lungs.
Monique stopped in the middle of the exercise and rested her head in her hands. One of the junior instructors who was assisting the Swami and compelled her to continue with the exercise.
‘Its part of the process, its your body trying to release the toxins.’
‘I’m having an attack of vertigo’
‘Your cheating yourself by trying to leave and not experiencing this moment.’
This exchange continued for some time, all the while Monique was doing her best not to vomit or faint. Eventually, she began to cry and left the yoga hall with the junior instructor followed behind her. Some moments later the instructor came back inside.
‘Is she okay,’ I asked, at this stage not yet knowing what had happened.
‘The body is releasing its toxins, some people can have a bad experience but its important that you continue with the exercise to get the full benefits. Try to get her to come back inside.’
I stepped outside and was horrified when Monique explained what had taken place. Ambivalence was dispelled and I began to view the Ashram in an ominous light.
It was as though my mind, that disagreeable collective of thoughts, feelings and perceptions, kicked into a self-protective gear. I became actively disdainful towards the Ashram and loudly voiced my scepticism about the Ashram, particularly in ear shot of devotees.
I could not decide if such things were heroism or if I sacrificed some of my dignity in acting in such a self satisfying way. But then I am never as strong as I would like to be.
I began to contemplate whether the Ashram might rightly be called a cult. Firstly, because we were encouraged by the Ashram authorities and through the exercises we pursued to purge ourselves of our individuality. As has been described above, we were directed frequently to pursue our daily activities, physical yoga, Karma yoga, meditation in a way that excluded our egos. We were also told to be wary of our own intellects. Doubt and criticism go against the universalism preached at the Sivananda Ashram, because they are obstacles to unity with God and experiencing reality as it really is
Our movement was restricted in subtle ways. We were unable to leave the Ashram unless we received permission to do so.
If the Sivananda Ashram was acutely a cult, a we would not have been able to leave at all, or we would have been strenuously prevented from doing so. And yet the rigidly ordered day and the subtle indoctrination makes a person less likely to risk banishment from the Ashram by disobeying these ‘voluntary’ restrictions on our movement.
A singularly disturbing part of life at the Ashram was the way in which personal space was obliterated.
Those living in dorms had literally no space of their own.. Monique and I at least had a private room that we shared (although a stone desk was fixed to the floor to separate our single beds to prevent coitus).
Whether one had a private room or not made little difference, as the Ashram day was spent almost exclusively in public settings. I felt very much in the thrall of others when meditating, when practising the yoga postures, when eating. The net effect was that we all became exhausted, that the exercise of individuality became unnecessary, something in excess to that which was necessary to function productively in the life of the Ashram. As Monique articulated, even when we did have an hour or two of spare time, it became difficult, even impossible to decide how we would spend it. We were at a loss to exercise this most basic discrimination, and in its absence yet more work improving the body and purifying the mind became the only attractive proposition.
At the same time, I was hesitant to succumb to the temptation to label Sivananda as a cult. For just as the Swami claimed an absolute perspective when he spoke of the universal, by labelling Sivananda Ashram a cult, I was also claiming an absolute perspective over the activities and experiences of all of those engaged in spiritual practice there. The word ‘cult’ is a rhetorical device to exclude a spiritual practice from legitimacy by differentiating these practices from ‘legitimate religion’.
It became imperative to me that I uncover some other means to critique what I was learning and experiencing at the Ashram. This quest contained a supreme existential importance. I felt that something fundamental was at stake, that if I could not give expression to my concerns, then some of the ‘mud would stick’, as my friend Andreas put it.
So instead of claiming an absolute perspective, I decided to mount a critique using the set of values I had already acquired before attending the Ashram, without claiming that they possessed some universal significance. I acknowledged that I was sceptical, hostile even, towards authoritarian knowledge structures, ways of thinking that promote power relations that are virtually fixed and immutable, a relation of power-knowledge that approaches what Foucault calls ‘domination’.
I decided that the architecture that made one excessively visible, the regimented schedule, the chanting in unison, the rigidly enforced group meditation, the silent collective meals, the lectures and even the group exercise classes together constituted an authoritarian power structure, something to which for whatever reason I am hostile. You could call it ‘my faith’. On this basis I could extricate my mind and Ego from the week week long bombardment.
I was struck by the parallels between what I was experiencing and some elements of the film The Invasion that Monique and I caught on a hotel’s satellite television a few weeks earlier. If you haven’t seen the film, it is worth seeing, though it is by no means brilliant. Its the second remake of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original film was about communist indoctrination, the second about 80′s me-generation selfishness. This version film has more subtle ideas in its background. In the film, a virus from space spreads through the world’s population connecting them to a unity and freeing them of passionate attachments.
Nicole Kidman plays a psychoanalyst who tries to resist this universality and who has a sun who possesses a rare immunity to this virus.
When Nicole Kidman’s character asks one of the infected what will become of her son in the new universal human world, she is told that anything that cannot conform with the universal will have to be eliminated. In much the same way, the limits of the so-called universal of Sivananda Ashram are revealed when one looks at which it excludes, namely individuality, worldliness, passion and pleasure. So, in fact, universalism is not universal at all, but a most acute particularism.
Subsequent conversations confirmed that I was not alone in this thinking.
I learned from Rolf (not his real name), a forty-something German man who has been connected to the Ashram for many years, that the Ashram leadership, both past and present, compromised their own ascetic principles
‘Oh yeah, tell me about it, I mean, even these Swamis, they don’t deny themselves anything, I mean even the founders, like Swami Sivananda, he had his own private plane. He had a cheese addiction! He had a big belly out to here,’ he said gesturing with his arms.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, oh man there’s so much I could tell you. Excuse me, I need to release some gas,’ he said, taking a few steps away and fanning the air with his arms.
I agree with the Yogic insight that the self is an illusion. But perhaps the self is never more of an illusion when it imagines itself to be autonomous of the world. If we strive to be universal, we begin to pretend, falsely, that we are no longer under the persuasion of the world, of others, of and of knowledge. We fall into the trap of believing that through sheer will we can lift ourselves out of history, out of language, out of politics and out of ideology. Through this hubris we close ourselves off from becoming critical beings in the small, limited way that life affords us.
Is it possible to strive for a perception of the divine that does not occlude reason and doubt, and does not reside in a false and impossible universality? I am talking of a spiritual perception that one obtains from remaining open minded, from seeking, remaining critical, from engaging with the world and from failing our own divine aspirations.
If I am to have a spirituality then this is where its heart will lie.