The Hindu faith, recognizing that different people processes information—including “spiritual” information—differently, recognize four different yogas (jnana, bhakti, karma, raja) for the four different types of people (reflective, heart centered, work centered, and body centered) *Please note, we return to two services this week, at 9:00 & 11:00 a.m.*
“Four Paths, Four Yogas, One Church”
September 22, 2019
This morning I want to talk about yoga. Yoga is associated
with the religion of Hinduism. If we think of Hinduism as a philosophy, then yoga is its practice. The word “yoga” has the same
root as the word “yoke” and carries connotations of both uniting (yoking together) and of placing under discipline (take my
yoke upon you). In short: yoga is a method of training promising spiritual
enlightenment, which is further understood as integration and union.
“The aim of life,” wrote the Unitarian Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is to get as far as possible from imperfection.” This
is what the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing
meant by self-culture: the continual effort to improve oneself, to grow.
And from Emerson and Channing on through today, our movement has always
affirmed this idea: the great value of evolving and growing ethically and
psycho-emotionally or spiritually; indeed, it’s what most Unitarian Universalists
think religion should be all about. And on this the Hindus agree. In fact, they
go even further. Hindus believe that
overcoming human limitations is the one and only goal of life. And,
moreover: they believe, that it’s possible to transcend human limitations
completely.
* * *
Hindu anthropology maintains that underlying the human
personality, and animating it, is a reservoir of being that never dies and is
never exhausted. They believe, too, that if one goes deep enough into their
heart of hearts, known as Atman, what is discovered there is none other
than Brahman, the great creator of the Universe: God Itself.
Westerners sometimes find these ideas astonishing, but
they’re not all that different from some
Western ideas. Most of us are familiar in a general sort of way with the
theories of Sigmund Freud. Writing about 100 years ago, Freud was the first
Western, scientifically trained physician to propose the idea of unconscious motivation; that people’s behavior is
often determined by repressed and unconscious factors, buried deeply within
their psyche. As Freud understood it, the human mind was two-tiered: one’s
conscious mind (their ego), and beneath that, one’s Unconscious mind. Carl
Jung, an early disciple of Freud’s, theorized a three-tiered model of the mind. Like Freud, his earlier mentor,
Jung believed that beneath the ego was the personal
unconscious. But he also believed that beneath the personal unconscious laid
the Collective Unconscious. According
to Jung individual personalities are like islands: all connected under the sea.
We’re interconnected so extensively, help Jung, that we can never extract
ourselves; indeed, the Universe and the psyche, according to Carl Jung, are
actually two sides of the same coin, one viewed from within and one from
outside. It’s kind of like reality is a cosmic four, five—who knows how many dimensional
Mobius strip running up and down your, and everyone’s, spinal column. Psyche
and Universe are one: inextricable reflections one of the other, Atman equaling
Brahman. But my point is: here we have two languages—one Western and empirical,
the other Eastern and mystical—both describing humanity’s intimate internal
connection to the forces that create and uphold life. Right here and right now.
Hindu literature is replete with images depicting this state
of affairs: that w
